Nominalism is a methodological necessity. One needs a name for the things whose 'mechanism [can be used] as a grid of intelligibility of the social order.' [But] if these lines of making sense of something are laid down in a certain way, then you are able to do only those things with that something which are possible within and by arrangement of those lines.
In The Enigma of Japanese Power, Karel van Wolferen gives an original analysis of the workings of Japan's political/industrial system.[2]
His analysis is build upon a phenomenon which is, according to Van Wolferen, unrepresented in Western thought but which is nevertheless part of our daily reality: "A pervasive phenomenon exists that is only sporadically noticed outide Japan because we have no good vocabulary for it, even though it has a big influence on our political and economic situations at home and on a global level."[3]
This phenomenon can be described in the form of a dichotomy between the contrasting terms tatemae amd Honne, where the first can be described as 'formal reality' and the second is described by Van Wolferen as 'knowable substantial reality'. "tatemae is what is generally accepted," he writes, it "is the reality shaped by political circumstances."[4]
With regard to the production of heavy-duty tatemae, the kind that determines how most people think about the way the world is put together, Japan remains far ahead of Europe and the united States. But the West is getting there, helped along through the deterioration of media commentary, by powerfull business interests, the take-over of newspapers by the entertianment industry, a gradual dispersion of political accountability and, not the least, 'postmodern' academic fashions of radical doubt and extreme relativism that have influenced popular culture. Anyone can now don a mantle of intellectual sophistication by denying that there is such a thing as 'reality' or 'truth'. All the more reason for giving the spreading phenomenon of fictitious reality a name – tatemae – so that its big manifestations can be properly identified while we speak and write about world events.[5]
While indeed it is appropriate to introduce a vocabulary in order to understand some of the recent developments that are pointed out in the quotation above, it seems strangely unproductive to put it in such stark contrast vis-a-vis postmodernism, which in its turn has, I believe, tried to cover much of the same ground as Van Wolferen is trying to illuminate with his dichotomy. By denying the insights of at least some branches of what I will in the remainder of this paper loosely denote as postmodern thought, an amalgam of poststructuralist, postmodern and deconstructive discourses, Van Wolferen runs the risk of designing a political conceptualisation which is ill-suited to resist the logic of, what I will here also loosely denote, capitalism in a postmodern age, or more specifically, the logic of the capitalist machine or axiomatic which, as an economic, political and, not the least, cultural formation, is produced and reproduced in the very way we think, feel, see and play, and not just in the ways we work and consume.[6]
It will not be my aim to 'correct' Van Wolferen's ideas and build upon his thought a new ontlogy of "hard-and-fast rule about the relationship between knowledge and power".[7]
I do not believe that such a 'rule' is possible, but that does not mean that I propose, as some have, to give up the search for the elusive and intangible, temporaly and spatialy unstable discursive patterns which accompagny this relationship, or proposing a suitable vocabulary for it. Rather, following Edward Said, I would say that each separate investigation should reformulate the nature of that connection in the specific context of the study, the subject matter, and its historical circumstances.[8]
By pointing out the problems and possible pitfalls which circle Van Wolferen's conceptualisation I do not mean to weaken his position. Rather I hope to strengthen it and to open it up to new lines of thinking, "to think beyond what is thinkable", as Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian describe it, thereby risking what they believe to be "the most dangerous forms of political inaction and abdicating even the possibility of resistance".[9]
But in a Foucauldian fashion, I do not think it is possible to say that one thing is of the order of political activity and the other of political inactvity. I would rather adhere to the dynamic picture that any idea can be liberating for one moment and repressive for the next. It is therefore all the more important to be very carefull in the formulation of the discursive patterns and to remain vigilant as to its applicability to a specific terrain of investigation or historical era under scrutinisation. It is to this task that I have set myself in this paper.
I
It seems that Foucault in the first volume of his History of Sexuality gives us a clear example of the nstitutionalised gap between formal and substantial reality.[10]
"For a long time," he writes, "we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today." (p. 3). At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Foucault explains, a certain frankness about sexual practices was still common. Soon afterwards, however, sexuality was carefully confined by the Victorian bourgeousie. Foucault describes this movement as a "repression operated as a sentence to disappear (…), as an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admision that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know.".[11]
While Van Wolferen is carefull not to valorize his conceptual bifurcation and thus not to link it to such burdened terms as repression, it appears that there are similarities between Foucault's genealogical method and Van Wolferens search for a knowable reality. The reality that is imposed by the Victorian bourgeosie is formal in that it is the only reality that can be referred to. There is, of course, sexuality, but that remains 'in the bedroom', in the private sphere, and thus cannot openly be reffered to. For as far as they have not been able to rid themselves of all 'illegitimate sexualities', they have succeeded in commodifying or pathologizing them into 'safely insularized forms of reality' within the brothel or the mental institution.
This Foucauldian perspective seems to be illustrated by the history of masturbation that Thomas Lacqueur's describes in Solitary Sex.[12]
This study places the inception of the repression and pathologization of onanism also in the late seventeenth century. This, Foucault would say, is no coincidence; rather it coincides with the development of capitalism. "Sex is so rigorously repressed," Foucault writes, "because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative. At a time when labor capacity was being systematically exploited, how could this capacity be allowed to dissipate itself in pleasurable pursuits, except in those – reduced to a minimum – that enabled it to reproduce itself."[13]
So we could say that there is a tatemae reality where there is no sexuality and in which masturbation is connected with a number of serious diseases which is explained by Lacqueur in the light of the change from a collective medieval society towards the individualisation in the still very religious world.[14]
Behind this official reality, however, lies the substantial reality that is 'uncovered' by Foucault, a reality that, according to Van Wolferen, can be known when we do our homework.
Foucault calls this substantial reality the 'repressive hypothesis' and, as soon as he does so, he raises serious doubts concerning this 'truth'. Is it truly an established historical fact? And: do the workings of power really belong to the category of repression? The most important doubt he raises, however, is the following: "Did the critical discourse that adresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it 'repression'? Was there really a historical rupture between the age of repression and the critical analysis of repression?"[15]
Van Wolferen is careful, as I said before, with respect to the second doubt. He acknowledges that power is a very elusive category. This nuance, however, is not mirrored in his recurrent use of the term 'powerholders' which, he claims, is not a reyification but a real empirical category. Foucault would not agree with him. "Power is not something (…) that one holds," he writes.[16] "[T]heir is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled […]. [N]either the caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a society." Rather we should see power as a multiplicity of force relations, and it is in this sphere of force relations that, according to Foucault, we must try to analyze the mechanisms of power. "In this way we will escape from the system of Law-and-Sovereign which has captivated political thought for such a long time."
This system of Law-and-Sovereign is an essentially modern concept of political organisation, argue Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.[17] And it is his use of the concept of the powerholder that betrays van Wolferen's view of politics as a modern one, one that hinges on, what Negri and Hardt describe as the paradigm of modern sovereignty, a political machine that rules on the basis of a transcendental power in the guise of democratic or popular forms of authority and is supported by the powers of capital.[18] But this, Negri and Hardt contest, is a historical formation, because we have entered a new paradigm of what they call 'empirical' sovereignty.
Here we should turn to the third, and in my view, most pertinent 'doubt' of Foucault with regard to the repressive synthesis: the historico-political question which could be reformulated in this case as follows: did the critical discourse that adresses itself to the modern concept of sovereignty come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had opperated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces? This question is two-fold as it probes both historical rupture and efficacy. Hardt and Negri are sensitive to the double sense of this question in their description of the passage from modernity to a 'new paradigm of power':
The end of colonialism and the declining powers of the nation are indicative of a general passage from the paradigm of modern sovereignty toward the paradigm of imperial sovereignty. The various postmodernist (…) theories that have emerged since the 1980s give us a first view of this passage (…) [T]he world of modern sovereignty is (…) divided by a series of binary oppositions that define Self and Other (…), ruler and ruled. Postmodernist thought challenges precisely this binary logic and in this respect provides important resources for those who are struggling to challenge modern discourses. [However] as the prefix 'post-' should indicate, postmodernist (…) theorists never tire of critiquing and seeking liberation from the past forms of rule and their legacies in the present (…) What if a new paradigm of power, a postmodern sovereignty, has come to replace the modern paradigm and rule through the differential hierarchies of the hybrid and fragmentary subjectivities that these theorists celebrate? In this case (…) postmodern (…) strategies that appear to be liberatory would not challenge but in fact coincide with and even unwittingly reinforce the new strategies of rule![19]
So, according to Negri and Hardt, the critical discourse of postmodernism, is not part of the same historical network as that which it denounces and it did indeed work as an effective roadblock to the old binary and hierarchical power mechanisms, but power has 'evacuated the bastion [that postmodernists] are attacking and has circled around to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference.[20]
Indeed this claim is substantiated by many historians, amongst which Thomas Frank, as he writes: 'Consumerism is no longer about "conformity" but about "difference".' And: 'This imperative of endless difference is today at the heart of American capitalism, an eternal fleeting from "sameness" that satiates our thirst for the New with such achievements of civilization as the infinite brands of identical cola, the myriad colors and irrepressible variety of the cigarette rack at 7-eleven.'[21] But whereas Frank is outspokenly critical of these present day phenomena, Hardt and Negri see them as side products of a paradigm-change which opens up possibilities for resistance and thus value it more positively as possibly productive.
We have stumbled here upon a dialectic which I believe to be informative to expand upon for our purposes. It is an animosity between Marxism on the one hand and postmodernism on the other. While Negri and Hardt call themselves Marxists, they rather fit under the heading of post-Marxism, that branch of Marxism which tries to reconcile Marx with postmodernism. Instead of describing this dualism between the two '-isms' as dialectical entities working in complication toward the realisation of Hegel's Absolute Spirit – which might be fitting to the old-school Marxist belief in this realisation through revolution – I would propose a more postmodern conception of this divide in which the two positions are irreducible to a 'synthetic' unity.[22] Rather than being parts of a grand historical-messianistic scheme, they are perspectives that exist and develop in their own right, sometimes divergent, sometimes parallel, acting as each others limit—just as they in their terms illustrate the limits of liberalism. It is always a strained activity to try and unravel the different lines of thinking from the string full of knots that history is, but this is the strained but important task of nominalism, a pragmatic nominalism, as Hoy says, or in Spivak's words 'catacresis': 'catacrestic in the way that all names of processes not anchored in the intending subject must be: lines of knowing constituting ways of doing and not doing, the lines themselves irregular clinamens from subindividual atomic systems—fields of force, archives of uterance.'[23] It is what Van Wolferen is doing too: creating a vocabulary in order to, pragmatically, speak and think about certain phenomena that have not yet been fully adressed and might never be captured definitely in its finneses and its spatial and temporal de- and reterritorialisations—call it a strategic nominalism.
The inception of postmodern theory takes of from the dominant intellectual and political currents in post-war France, the double bind of extentialism and Marxism. In trying to formulate an alternative to this veritable theoretical-political horizon, a handful of intellectuals find recourse in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and a new branch of theoretical explanation was born, only to disseminate soon after its inception as a result of the criticism a group of thinkers around whom a line of affinity was drawn and whom were labeled as 'poststructuralists'. These thinkers, among which Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard, resisted the positivist belief in Enlightenment teleology and instead developed a radical sensitivity to difference. Drawing on the ideas of Freud and Nietzsche they decentred the subject as the locus of research and employed a perspectivist aproach, leading to a rejection of 'grand narratives' and an affirmation of multiplicity. This theoretical approach, born and nurtured within the philosophy and arts-departments in France, migrated to the US as a new interpetation-theory which was applied to the experimental movement in the arts which tried to break with the conventions of modernism called postmodernism, hence the name.
The new critical approach has been and remains to be contested by both conservative and radical critics for its ostensible extreme relativsm and nihilism. While indeed some brances of postmodernism have tended towards a nihilistic, intellectualistic, even 'politically correct' discourse, it makes no sense to reductively denounce the whole épistemè on this basis, not in the least because it is generally agreed to be sensitive to what Fredric Jameson describes as 'the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order [that] is often euphemistically called modernisation, postindustrial or consumer society, the society of the media or the spectacle or multinational capitalism.'[24] This new era, whose emergence is usually situated around the end of WWII and which, notwithstanding the lines of continuity, is seen as qualitatively different from the era that we call modernism, is itself also labelled postmodern. A new historical paradigm asks for a new epistemology in order to adequately make sense of the new realities that have emerged. We can, as Hardt and Negri do, question whether postmodern theory is fit to do this job, but I believe we cannot simply disregard it tout court without a closer analysis of the specific conceptualisations that might be of relevance to our object of study.
At first sight it might seem that postmodernism, with its alledged focuss on the cultural rather than the political, is not productive for our purposes. Where Marxism gives an economical-political analysis of reality, postmodernism supposedly deals primarily with what Jameson has called the 'cultural style of postindustrial society'. Jameson, as a Marxist, does relate this 'particular style or aesthetics' to the corresponding socio-economical order that has emerged around the same time, but he leaves open the question whether the style (amongst which he also gathers postmodern theory which he sees as qualitatively different from what he calls 'professional philosophy' from a generation ago) is able to resist the logic of period—a stance quite similar to Hardt and Negri, as we have seen.[25] At best, it seems in Jameson's account, postmodern theory becomes a means for describing epiphenomena in more detail, but they form a superstructure which is, in line with Marx's ideas, primarily contingent upon activity in the economic base.[26] In this sympathetic account, postmodernism is presented as an inadequate or at least questionable theory when it comes to politics. In less favourable accounts it is presented as a-political or even anti-political. Luuk van Middelaar, for instance, argues that most of the poststructuralist thinkers have made themselves guilty of 'politicide': "They all worked on the same hidden project, the 'elimination of politics'."[27] But Van Middelaars conception of politics is limited. "They were not intrested in politics as a historical proces but rather in politics as language and practice," he writes about the structuralists and poststructuralists. "They looked at reality not as a diachronic line, but as a synchronic plateau." The same critique could be turned around and be brought to bear upon himself, because Van Middelaar is not intrested in the turn to spectatorial cultural politics but only in actual and historical political organisation and decision-making.
Though poststructuralist/postmodern theory indeed concerns itself with cultural questions of representation and identities, I believe this is rather a pragmatic than principle matter and follows from its nurturing within literary theoretical discourses instead of political theory. I would say it nevertheless has a clear political dimension, depending on, indeed, your definition of 'politics'. When Alex Kruse writes that recent movies such as Fight Club and Starship Troopers, raise 'questions about whether the present stage of postmodern culture includes a return to politics', he refers to the explicit comment on social and economic issues—the issues generally considered to belong to the political realm—in these films.[28] When one, however, extends the analysis of political reality to the domain of the cultural—the use of language, images, representations, and identities—one will discover an ongoing engagement with ethico-political issues. While indeed there is a considerable level of abstraction, which does not provide easy answers, there is also a sensitivity to the subtle but highly effective concoctation of political and aesthetic representation which is overlooked or underestimated by many contemporary critics, including Jameson and Hardt and Negri, and that is, I would say, one of the more distinguishing, if not the distinguishing feature of the new epoch. While running the risk of being implicated in another yet unmentioned but nevertheless qualifying binary opposition, I would provisionally argue that this theoretical sensitivity is a prerequisite for any viable analysis of contemporary political practice. Thus I believe that at least this productive line of reasoning within postmodern theory—entangled as it is with other strands of its body of thought as with centrifugal lines of escape out of this body and centripital lines into it from other praxeologic and gnostic bodies—should be saved from the clutches of revisionist thinkers who by trying to get rid of the excesses of postmodernism throw away the baby with the bathwater.
I say provisionally because it is the strong influence of Marx that still reigns this dialectic—this time a real Hegelian one—between theory and practice in the common use of these words: a thesis and an antithesis which are, will be, and always have been, the complementary parts of the synthesis, and thus were never really different. Think only of Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach which holds that "Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt darauf an, sie zu verändern". This, obviously, is not so much a natural fact as it is an—admittedly important—opinion that is foundational for the politics of Marxism. It goes too far for this paper to engage too deeply in the extensive discussions on this matter, but as a counterweight I would like to consider the following quote from Foucault from his famous discussion with Deleuze:
Theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. (…) This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to 'awaken consciousness' that we struggle (…), but to sap power. (…) It is an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance.[29]
When Deleuze responds that a "theory is exactly like a box of tools", and that "there's only action—theoretical action and practical action", even Spivak, as a Marxist, has to admit that "an important point is being made here: the production of theory is also a practice; the opposition between abstract 'pure' theory and concrete 'aplied' practice is too quick and easy."[30] Postmodern theory might not, Spivak would say, be substantial enough to function as a foundation for a political programme, but should nevertheless be considered carefully. In another article she comments:
It is not just that deconstruction cannot found a politics, while other ways of thinking can. It is that deconstruction can make founded political programs more usefull by making their in-built problems more visible. To act is therefore not to ignore deconstruction, but actively to transgress it without giving it up.[31]
In a parallel move I would like to argue that we might not be able to build a fully-fledged political programme upon postmodern theory, but it is nevertheless political in that it points the way out of certain problems of those other ways of thinking upon which political programmes are being built.
For an example we might look at the Marxist notion of 'false consciousness'. "it is not to 'awaken consciousness' that we struggle", said Foucault. In a postmodern frame of mind consciousness, the myth of self-knowledge of the centred subject is no longer a tennable category, nor is truth or falsehood. There may be certain truth-effects produced by various signifying systems or discourses, but there are no external standards by which to judge them (as postmodernism denies any metaphysiscal or overarching authority). As they are, consequently, 'produced' by humans, they are denied any objective status.[32] Just as différence denotes the illusory effect of meaning produced by negation, but this effect is perpetually deffered because it can never come to actual presence, 'truth' is perpetually deffered because it is produced by a subject-effect, which is itself also an illusory effect that can never come to actual presence because it is in its turn produced by a 'truth'-effect. Thus we are caught in a strange circular argument. "Ideology is not simply a 'false consciousness', an illusory representation of reality," writes Slavoj Zizek, "it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as 'ideological'—'ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence (…). 'Ideological' is not the 'false consciousness' of a social being but this being in so far as it is supported by 'false consciousness'."[33]
The dialectic between the real and the deceptive, or 'being' and 'being deceived' is bound up with the dichotomy between the exploiters and the exploited, the powerholders and the powerless in that the ruling classes apparently are capable of gaining acces to reality and at the same time prodigiously effective in shielding this reality from the masses. In some cases there is of course empirical evidence of creation of a smokescreen created by (political) powerholders. Giorgio Agamben contends that "the intentional creation of a permanent state of emergency has become one of the most important measures of contemporary States, democracies included."[34] This state of emergency, he continues, creates space for an effective ordering of reality. Agamben does not mean that a state of emergency is declared in the technical sense of the word, but rather reffers to a 'fictious or political' state of emergency. As an example he points towards the national security messures taken by the US in the wake of the september 11, which included a decree by president Bush which subjected non-citizens suspected of terrorist activity to special jurisdiction that would include 'indefinite detention'. It is within this 'fictious state of emergency', I believe, that the people are, as Dennis Wrong observes, "inescapably subject to a will to believe in the ultimate benevolence of the power holder."[35] This attitude, however, does not hold sway in less anxious times.
While Agamben claims that "in the face of the continuous progression of something that could be defined as a 'global civil war'" the state of emergency tends to become the rule rather then the exception, his examples do not substantiate this. His most important and extended case concerns the Nazi death camps. And even the 'war on terror' that for a while secured the almost sovereign power of the American president is steadily losing its momentum. The 'management of reality' that for some time seemed to be, at least in the US, exceptionally effective due to, amongst others, the unprecedented self-censorship of the American press, has given way to a more sceptical stance of the press and the general public. In this light it is problematic to uphold that ruling classes can create a permanent 'false consciousness' that decieves the masses.
Again, while there may indeed be empirical examples of this claim, also of less spectacular and thus possibly more long-lived sorts than the one dealt with above, the dichotomy between those who 'know' and those who are being deceived is, in the end, just as untenable as the division of people into a bourgeousie and a proletariat. Even apart from the theoretical reservations I have made above, it has, in actual practice, with the rise of the 'middle-classes' in the West, become increasingly difficult, if it was ever possible, to actually make this division. What follows from this is the question 'Who can know?' When Hawkes denounces postmodernism as "nothing more than the ideology of consumer capitalism"—and although he does not use these stark terms, Van Wolferen more or less claims the same—he dismisses a large portion of serious cultural and political critics as being tricked by the 'false consciousness' produced by the postindustrial capitalist system that they have tried to study.[36] When these thinkers, who are generally seen, when it comes to dividing, as well-established on the bourgeousie-side of the divide, often being influential in relation to powerholders, if not powerholders themselves, are fooled, we can wonder whether there is anyone that can distinguish truth from falsity. When these thinkers are implicated within the ideology that they supposedly consciously produced, is it not valid to question whether not everyone that suposedly creates false consciousness is automatically implicated within a more fundamental system of ideology that distorts reality, leading ultimately to an infinite regression of ideologies up to the point where ideology itself ceases to have any explanatory function. It seems to me that the practical question 'Who can know?' provides the answer for the theoretical question 'Can we know?', and that this answer can only be negative. It seems to me, thus, as Žižec pointed out, that the very idea of false consciousness implies the non-knowledge of ultimate reality.
It is exactly this problem that reappears in Van Wolferen's rendering of the phenomenon of deception, which he denotes as tatemae. "tatemae is the reality shaped by political circumstances. The now rarely used term 'false consciousness' covers it to some extent, but does not express the same shades or depth of meaning."[37] tatemae reality is 'created' or 'managed' by what Van Wolferen calls 'the System' by which he denotes the bureaucracy-business partnership which effectively rules Japan. We see here the similarities between the basic structure of Van Wolferen's conceptualisations and the classical Marxist considerations regarding a more or less similar problematic. Consequently the same built-in problems—made visible by deconstruction—which invallidate the Marxist interpretation expose the structural weakness of Van Wolferen's rendition.
This is not to say that Van Wolferen's conceptualisations are not useful, on the contrary. It is here that my epigraph becomes self-evident. Nominalism is a methodological necessity, but we should always be very carefull to evade the possible hampering that this nominalism might cause. Denouncing the radical consequenses of postmodernism do not fit this essential sensitivity. Postmodernism, I would say, helps to loosen the 'lines of making sense' to the extent that they are no longer fixed, restrictive lines but rather 'lines of flight' which make possible new kinds of thought. In order to respond to the ever changing landscape of (political) reality around us we cannot afford to hold on to preconcieved grids of intelligibility but have to actively transgress them without giving them up.
II
It is puzzling to me why Van Wolferen is so outspokenly critical of postmodern theory. It seems that there are many parallels to be drawn between his work and that of postmodernists. Van Wolferen's beilief that the insititutionalisation of the dichotomy between tatemae and Honne can increasingly be witnessed in the West is mirrored in the view of poststructuralism's trailblazer Alexandre Kojève who, after a visit to Japan in 1959, announces that the interaction between the West and Japan—as a result of the latter's allegedly exemplary role as society that for nearly three centuries experienced life at the 'end of History'—will not result in a 'vulgarisation' of the Japanese but rather in the 'Japanization' of the West.[38] "To grasp the essence of a political culture that does not recognise the possibility of transcendental truths demands an unusual intellectual effort for Westerners," writes Van Wolferen, "an effort that is rarely made even in serious assesments of Japan."[39] It is, however, exactly this ostensible anti-Platonism that several postmodern writers find so enticing about Japanese culture. Like Van Wolferen they percieve in Japan a crisis in representation, but where Van Wolferen focusses on this crisis in the realm of political representation, the postmodernists focuss mainly on this crisis within the realm of semiotic/aesthetic representation. Roland Barthes, for instance, has travelled to Japan and written Empire of the Signs on the experience. In it he describes how the logic that rules the West fails to grasp Japanese experience. As an example he reffers to Budhism: "Zen wages a complete war against the commodification of sense. As is well known, buddhism puts under erasure the fatal course of all positive (or negative) contentions with its suggestion never to get caught up by any of the following claims: that is A; that is not A; that is both A and not A; that is neither A nor not A. This fourfold of possibilities corresponds with the perfect paradigm that structural linguistics has constructed."[40]
Empire of the Signs finds itself at the beginning of the passage from structuralism to poststructuralism in Barthes' work, or, if you will, his change from semiology to semiotics. "This text is a departure from what I wrote before, because maybe for the first time I entered the signifier," commented Barthes himself.[41] And indeed he focusses not on what he calls "the capitalism of Japan", the 'code', or ideological sign system that 'governs' the signifiers or appearances that he describes. In the introduction he likens the 'visual reel', as he describes his experience of Japan, to the loss of the senses that is in Zen called Satori.[42] The whole book basically boils down to the realisation that there is no reality behind appearances which give meaning to them.[43] It seems as if he needed Japan to realise this point which, in the subsequent years leads to a complete transformation of his thought from a structuralist basis to his famous declararion of the 'death of the author'.
Besides Barthes also Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard and Foucault have reffered regularly to Japan. They alledgedly advance the Orient as the radical 'Other' of the Occident. At the same time, however, they seem to assimilate this 'Other' to the extent that they ostensibly see Japan as an exemplary postmodern country, not only with a lack of Plato's commanding distinction between essences and appearances and Christian transcendental monotheism, but also, apparently, with a lack of the autonomous individual as we know it in the West. This latter idea seems to be substantiated by anthropological studies of for instance Clifford Geertz who concludes that the "Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated, motivational and congintive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgement and action, organized into a distincitve whole and set contrastively against such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures."[44] This perspective certainly seems applicable to Japan. "There remain these complaints of a confusion of identity," writes Angela Carter about the Japanese, "the loss of a sense of self, rooted in a glorious past that everybody accepts as glorious."[45] Van Wolferen, however, writes that he believes that "the Japanese are individuals. (…) Not all may want to assert their individuality; most, having been so conditioned, do not."[46] It seems, thus, we are faced with a peculiar contradiction which at the same time points towards a similarity. Whereas the postmodern deconstruction of the primacy of the subject follows from a critique of the subjectivizing structures that present the subject as a sovereign individual first and a citizen afterwards, the Japanese subject, which is perceived alternatively as citizen first and individual second, is also born from a 'conditioning' structure. So what in the West is seen as a liberating 'ideology' promulgated by critical thinkers—a theoretical position which they apparently believe to be operative in Japan—is in fact percieved in Japan, by informed insiders as well as outsiders, as a constraining 'ideology' conceived by Japanese bureaucracy.[47] This paradox is in some ways parallel to the contradictory relationship postmodernism seems to have with the 'liberationist movements' of the 1960s, opening up discourse for such groups as feminism and ethnic minorities that are at the same time ill at ease with the loss of a subjecthood that they had never completely come to inhabit. While for instance Deleuze heralds the deterritorialisation of the subject through a 'becoming woman', some feminists have percieved this de-essentialisation as a constraining ideology with undesired but yet unmistakably misogynist characteristics.[48] It has been argued in this line of reasoning that the critique of the sovereign subject in fact inaugurates at another level a new Subject, that is a masculine subject and that thus the process of 'becoming women' has nothing to do with the empirical category of women. In a similar move we might say that the intrest in the Orient has nothing to do with the empirical Oriental 'Other' as such, but much more with the demarcation of the Occidental (effaced) 'self'.[49] In Derrida's words: "Occultation takes the form of an hyperbolic admiration. (…) Our age is not free from it; each time ethnocentrism is precipitately and ostentatiously reversed, some effort silently hides behind all the spectacular effects to consolidate an inside and to draw from it some domestic benefit." (quoted in Spivak)
I am not saying that the abovementioned theorists are philosophical imperialists; most of them are, despite their 'hyperbolic admiration', very careful in their conclusions. Suggesting that they see Japan as a exemplary postmodern country is an oversimplification, just as women are not empirically more postmodern than men. These 'minorities' (Deleuze) or 'Other spaces' (Foucault) are rather seen as a limit. In Foucault's words: "In the universality of the Western ratio a limit is being formed by the East: (…) the East that lies open for the colonizing reason of the West, but remains endlessly unreachable, because it remains to be that limit.".[50]
In her article 'Can the Subaltern speak?' Spivak viciously attacks this position because it, she contends, indeed seems to refer to the consolidation of an inside, that is, the Western ratio. 'Some of the most radical ciricism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject,' she opens her article. (66) This concealed Subject, she continues, pretends it has 'no geo-plitical determinations', but this, she claims is just pretense. 'Ignoring the international division of labor; rendering 'Asia' (and on occasion 'Africa') transparent (unless the subject is ostensibly the 'Third World'); reestablishing the legal subject of socialized capital these are problems as common to much poststructuralist as to structuralist theory. Why should such occlusions be sanctioned in precisely those intellectuals who are our best prophets of heterogeneity and the Other?'. (67) [note: Spivak is drawn to analyse the article because the '~unmediated converstion offers a glimpse at the unconscious of the theorists~', but to denounce their complete projects, both very diverse especially after their break in 1976? [eribon], on this basis, while there is a widespread agreement among Foucault-scholars that the interviews and discussions produce some of the weakest, albeit most telling, statements and lack the precision of the written texts [cf. Paul Bové "The Foucault Phenomenon: the Poblematics of Style", foreword to the Englisch translation to Deleuze's Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and the remark of Rabinow and Dreyfus at the onset of Foucault's "On the Genealogy of Ethics", in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 253-280.]
Despite their apparent differences, Spivak's criticism of poststructuralist theory, especially the thought of Foucault and Deleuze, has several points of convergence to the criticism of Van Wolferen and these find their root, I believe, in their joint implication in a 'Marxist' program. Even Spivak's final repudiation of Deleuze and Guattari and subsequent embrace of Derrida could be seen in that light, for whereas the former criticize Marx as an 'important but dated figure' (in the text), Derrida lacks a critical stance towards, but also knowledge of and involvement with, Marx's thought (Spivak points at lack of Knowledge). I would say thus that one of Spivak's main points of critique, that Deleuze and Foucault "systematically ignore (…) their own implication in intellectual and economic history", could, at the very least, also be levied upon herself. (p. 66)
Marx clearly is an important, at some points even genious, thinker on the terrains of economics and what we today call sociology rather than politics. While Spivak only tags Marx's ideas on women as dated or a result of his specific historical context, I would—parallel to Deleuze and Foucault—also argue for a contextualisation of Marx's main lines of reasoning. Even Deleuze and Foucault, in their conversation 'Intellectuals and Power' are claiming, inconsistent with their own writings elsewhere—and thus Spivak is right to claim that their friendly exchange through the unguarded practice of conversation enables us to glimpse the track of 'ideology'—maintain that "power is exercised in the way it is in order to maintain capitalist exploitation." (216). So strong is the commanding voice of Marx. In their other writings however, I feel they give a more nuanced and flexible view than the sociological dogma of Marx that the proletariat is a force of 'change' while the bourgeiousie is using power in order to dominate. I would like to rephrase this thought as follows: in general we could say that the 'have-nots' strive towards what the 'haves' do have while the 'haves', affraid to lose what they have, strive towards a status quo. This is, obviously, a gross simplification. Much recent sociological research, think for instance of that of Bourdieu, has pointed out that these structures of 'desire' are much more complex, and of course the opposition between 'haves' and 'have-nots' already point towards an implication in a Marxist conceptualisation, but let us, for a while, take this schematic as the sociological dynamic 'underlying' political processes. I would say that it is problematic to translate this sociological 'base' directly to its political 'superstructure' as Marx seems to do. It is here that Deleuze's skepticism is helpful in reformulating Marx's 'dated' conceptions. Deleuze also establishes a dynamic oscillation between two poles, the nomadic and the monadic, respectively revolutionary, marginal, unbound or active forces as opposed to reactionary, dominant, static or reactionary forces. Instead of being opposites, these forces belong to capitalism as two sides to a coin. They are both opperative at the same time, explaining, for instance, how an originally revolutionary effort, like the Russian revolution, can suddenly turn fascist, or how a folklore can sometimes be charged with a revolutionary force. We encounter here a much more dynamic view of social determination then Marxism provides us with.
It is in this light that Deleuze's statement that "we never desire against our intrests, because interest always follows and finds itself where desire has placed it" should be read (215). But Spivak, instead, calls this a "mechanical relationship between desire and interest" (68) "Because desire is tacitly defined on an orthodox model," she writes, "it is unitarily opposed to being deceived." (69) That she herself has to find recourse in the essentialist taxonomising of Guha in order to uphold that people do desire against their own interests is not adressed critically.
1. "More on Power/Knowledge", in The Spivak Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 143, 151.[back]
6. Daniel M. Bell, Jr. 'After the End of History: Latin American LiberationTheology in the wake of Capitalism's Triumph', Journal of Religion and Society, volume 2 (2000), http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2000/2000-7.html (all websites to which I reffer in this paper were on line in june 2003).[back]
7. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge, 1978), page refferences to Penguin 1995 ed., p. 15.[back]
9. Postmodernism and Japan, Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian (ed.), (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), p. xiv.[back]
10. Michel Foucault, La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1967); references are to The History of Sexuality 1: The Will To Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1998) tr. by Robert Hurley.[back]
12. J.J. Peereboom, 'Eenzaam aan de top', NRC-Handelsblad, may 16 2003, p. 27, a review of Lacqueur's Solitary Sex, A Cultural History of Masturbation.[back]
16. Ibid., p. 94, the following quotes are from pp. 94-97.[back]
17. Negri and Hardt, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), chapter 2: 'Passages of Sovereignty'.[back]
18. See: ibid., pp. 85-88 – This concept should not be misstaken with Foucault's concept of sovereignty, but corresponds more to his concept of governmentality.[back]
21. From 'Commodify Your Dissent', Quoted in Louis Proyect 'Hardt-Negri's “Emipre”: a Marxist critique', http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/hardt_negri.htm.[back]
22. It goes beyond the scope of this paper to detail the postmodern reactions toward Hegel. For an example I reffer to the first part of Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993), in which he analyses Deleuze's attempt to formulate a post-dialectical philosophy of difference.[back]
24. 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society' (1988), reprinted in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001), p.1962.[back]
26. Cf. Adam Barnhart, www.cfmc.com/adamb/writings/marxpost.htm.[back]
27. Politicide (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1999), p. 11. The following quotations are from p. 94.[back]
28. Cf. Alex Kruse www.users.bigpond.com/pbtoms/postmode.htm.[back]
29. 'Intellectuals and Power', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, D.F. Bouchard, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 208. The following quotes are form pp. 206-7.[back]
30. 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', in Discourse and Postcolonial Theory Reader, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, ed. (Nen York: Colombia University Press, 1994), p. 70.[back]
31. 'Feminism and Deconstruction, Again: Negotiations' in Outside The teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993)[back]
32. cf. David Hawkes, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 4, 161.[back]
33. quoted in Hawkes, p. 178, quotation modified.[back]
34. 'The State of Emergency', www.generations-online.org/p/pagambenschmitt.htm.[back]
35. Power: Its Norms and Bases (New York: Harper Row, 1979), p. 111.[back]
40. quoted in Henk Oosterling, 'Van schijnheiligheid naar
heiligheid van de schijn?', La Linea (Leiden, 1995), pp. 37-50, www.eur.nl/fw/cfk/oosterling/art-japschijn.html, 17 mei 2003, translation mine.[back]
41. quoted in Louis-Jean Calvet, Roland Barthes: een biografie (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1991), p. 182, translation mine.[back]
44. quoted in Edward E. Sampson, 'The Deconstruction of the Self', in: John Shotter and Kenneth J. Gergen (ed.) Texts of Identity (London: Sage, 1989), p. 1.[back]
45. 'Mishima's Toy Sword', in: Jenny Uglow (ed.) Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 242.[back]