Since February 19th, 1996
Meteorology of Culture and Society
(At the 8th International Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies,Lyon, July,2004)
I.
Most of cultural theories in the 20th century have a tendency to understand culture and society as a construction-system or “structure”, that is, an organism as the whole, which has plural units or elements as its portion. They considered society and culture as the whole structures where some subsystems were unified each other.
For example, Let us consider the case of a house. A house is constituted by ceiling, pillar, beam, and window and so on. However, so called ceiling and pillar do not exist as themselves. Supposing they are simply put on the ground, they are neither ceiling nor pillar. They are only the lumps of a mere stone or wood in the case when they were separated from a house. Thus a construction-system or structure is the system by which the whole gives meanings to portions and portions constitute the whole reciprocally in this way.
There are reasons why such tendency has become dominant in the last century. The consideration about language by Ferdinand de Saussure was one of the origins of it. Saussure claimed that the Culture is structuralized in the same way as construction and it can be regarded as a system by which the whole and the element were connected closely. It is raised as methodology of synchronic research of the “langue”. However, Saussure himself understood enough that it is only a viewpoint that was adopted methodologically. It was only the temporary method provisionally selected as the synchronic analysis. It is widely known that so-called the late term Saussure came to turn his concern to temporal and fluid side of language. Therefore, Saussure himself was very conscious of that the viewpoint of “structure” was inadequate to understand language. After Saussure, Yuri Tynjanov and Jan Mukarovsky also elaborated the position in which literature and a language were regarded as a "bunch" of various structures. Such a position was called the functionalistic-structuralism or the "dynamic" structuralism. However, as Mikhail Bakhtin had also noticed, these concepts of structure and langue are only the fictions completed after and for the research. Even if they observe the "function" between two or more structures, they cannot catch the fluid and indefinite aspect of literature and language. And there are not so much thought or philosophy having focused on these fluid aspects which always escape from such "structure”. Aside from Henri Bergson and Fiedrich Nietzsche, it is developed by the philosophy of Poststructuralist especially by the “philosophy of intensity” of Gilles Deuleuze. But they are very rare examples and, otherwise, have hardly appeared. Moreover, the problem that it is developed only through a unique "style" observing this "mobility" or “fluidity” is also the cause to be hard to take into the academic discourse which is increasingly systemized and methodized.
By seeing as structure, language and culture surely become easier to describe. The works of Saussure or Claude Levi-Strauss proved it.
However, that is never the fact but only the “effect" which one viewpoint brings about. Culture and society are more fluid like the weather phenomena rather than the solid structure. It is same as that the life and body are dynamic and fluid rather than being solid systems. That is, there is no boundary and limit within them and no one can predict the next moment of these complex flows.
Therefore, it is better to see culture and society as the meteorological matter rather than “structure”. And this is my first argument. Or you may call it hydrodynamic matter.
That is, by emphasizing the fluid character of culture or society, we can observe the various cultural/social phenomena as if they are like the wind, clouds, hurricane or earthquake. There is neither break nor articulation in a weather phenomenon.
It is a movement which a complicated and many-sided phenomenon weaves without the knot, and it is the complex system which cannot be foreknown nor predicted, as known in the name of the butterfly effect. A weather report can make the observation data about the distribution of atmospheric pressure or wind, but it can never predict and only talk about the probability of what will happen in the next moment. Therefore, a weather report can only talk about the present or the very near future. A long-range forecast and a weekly forecast cannot be accurate. However, it is also clear that it is depending on regional difference about this. In the area which the weather is comparatively stable or has been changed periodically, the weather report should be watching only the phenomena like a typhoon or a tornado suddenly appearing.
What is making the weather? Gravity, Rotation and revolution of the earth, the relation between the sun and the moon, activity of subterranean magma, atmospheric movement and change of ecological environment are entangled intricately and have made the earth weather. Supposing resetting these into culture and society, what are those causal elements in the case of them? I want to also consider such issues here.
II.
Now we are living in the highly globalized world. Globalization does not mean that the world became a single "global village” or “global society” by removing barriers of time and space. Or it is not that we became the "cosmopolitan" with no boundaries, such as race, religion and civilization and all human beings own a unified sense of values. However, it is exactly that the capital of the multinational companies came to cover the whole earth by development of communication media, such as a computer network, or development of a means of transportation. After the end of a cold war, the world is turning into a single "world market" in the capitalistic economy centering on the United States of America, and no one can assert any value longer only by being reduced to the price and value in this market. A large amount of floating money is exchanged in the main stock market in the world, and by investing the amount of money far exceeding the usual national budget in this money game, it is affecting so much an ordinary life or fate of people in the world. It is also affecting even the educational system or the administration of each country, not only the economic field. The unitary management system that is going to evaluate everything by the same standard will be incorporated into the society, and they will put everything into the form registered in the database.
The dominant there is the complex flow of the monstrous capital which turned into the almost autonomous program and in this dominant and simple economic globalization, the social and cultural system of everywhere are being forced a big transformation. A jumble or fluid of culture itself is not a fundamental problem. It is true that various civilization and society were mixed mutually and have brought about various collisions and resonance and jumble. But, those facts are only the “effects" brought about by unitary rule of such economic game. Even if it can be observed, nobody can predict what collision and fusion take place in the following stage. Such changes bear a big resemblance to the problem faced when describing the "earth weather" exactly, and cannot be divided into any "element" or "structure". That is because it is only the "weather phenomenon" as a local jumble or a collision produced by "westerlies jet" called economical globalization.
We have to take care about that the "culture" and the "community" at this moment of collision having been no longer original "culture" nor “community."
In other words, if we abandon the position regarding "culture" and “society” as "structure", we will realize that culture is never counted by the singular or plural number. The concept of "inter-culture" is not accurate. We cannot tell the culture by the frame called French culture, British culture or Japanese culture exactly. If we ask the “essence” of these “national culture” which has very short history, we cannot find anything. If we see them in the long range of thousands of years, we can realize that they are continuities, and various phenomena and occurrences arouse and disappeared in its multilayer. Therefore, not a "system theory", but”meteorology" of culture and society is now needed. And such a position will serve an important strategy towards a new understanding of culture.
Of course, we have to admit that the concept of the "weather" which we have proposed here is also exactly only a viewpoint like the concept of "structure" used by Saussure methodologically. Even if we take such a viewpoint, that is not for obtaining “truer” or “more accurate” recognition about culture or society. However, it is important by taking such a viewpoint that what was not caught, and having been overlooked in the view of "structure” become clear in a new aspect.
For example, in the 90s, the voice of the objection from the oppressed minorities has risen from various places. Those are the radical feminism, multiculturalism and gay theory or postcolonialism, etc. It should be notable that these voices have appeared as immanent criticism by the inner side of the dominant system of modern Western culture which has oppressed and governed them. In other words, they are not mere premodern or anti-modern hostile statements, but they revealed rules of Western modernization and the mechanism of oppression, prosecuting them from an inner side. Thus we can say that those movements presupposed the postmodernistic way of thinking.
At a first glance, the opinion of postcolonialism or multiculturalism seems to be right and not deniable.
However, if we look more carefully, we cannot overlook that these positions are logically belonging to the idea or ideal of Western modernization. That is, it is concerning with "after colonialism" or “rearrangement of colonialism” as long as bound by a single dominant culture, and also with “multi”culturalism as rebounding to oppression of culture. Thus those arguments are still belonging to the modernization inside. More correctly speaking, they are exactly the musical chairs (chair taking game) which is going to require again the appropriate right taken unfairly, and are going to gain its room in their social system. In order to realize musical chairs, the floor needs to be fixed in advance. And the number of the floors and chairs must be stable. That is, these arguments are presupposing an established social system. Is the number of chairs proper? Does a certain specific group's true representative sit on the chair? Do all human beings belong to the one of those groups? Those who assert minority politics will never answer to these questions.
Moreover, they premised the essentialistic view which sees "culture" as closed structure overlapping an area or an ethnic group exactly, and depended on so called "identity politics" which considers "culture" to be the ground of the "identity" of a people. It could be said that such positions as hybridization of culture or a Creolism are not enough. Originally, various cultures ride on wind or ocean currents, and have been transformed slowly melting together. If we take a long time span, they have been changing like in a melting pot, not like in a salad bowl (which is the multiculturalist’s favorite metaphor). National culture and traditional culture are only the fiction completed in a very shallow and short history of modernization. Why those ideas of national culture have been connected with the identity politics of culture? It is just because the speed of transportation of people and information rushed up by leaps and bounds. And it is exactly because an abundant number of cultural and religious frictions and confrontation have been made between a dominant group and the group who is not so without sufficient time to assimilate, by the so many wars and struggles produced by the economic necessities. In the way of thinking of hybrid or Creole and the position of multiculturalism, which claim the coexistence of plural cultures, still contain the tendency of taking culture and society as a fixed constructive system. However, the most important is to ask what the fundamental cause is making those arguments on fusion, integration in cultural changes. Then, we have to make an issue of economic globalization which is the huge earth weather phenomenon producing these phenomena in the first place. Why do the different traditions and cultures have to live together without interfering each other? Why do the dominant and subordinate cultures have to live together? It is because they think they will be possible to be regulated and adjusted if each culture accept and respect the same world market order which is shared by both of them.
In the ‘90s, British Cultural Studies by Stuart Hall and the various type of Media Studies appeared. This was basically a Marxist activities that want to rescue the revolutionary movements through intellectual discourses, by picking up the Lous Arthusser’s concept of “ideology” or Antonio Gramsi’s old concept of “hegemony". However, it is also a scramble of the chair inside the stabilized Western social order. In short, if they were seen from the meteorological viewpoint of culture, they were only the incomplete trials of deconstruction of the Western modernity.
Semiotics must be the ally of difference. And Multiculturalism, postcolonialism or minority politics seem to be the ally of diversity and difference, too. But, they were only concerned with the distribution of profits inside the dominant economic system in fact. Or probably, protection of the diversity and difference of them were still halfway. Because it was only the musical chairs inside a dominant system, against the September 11th incident which has upset the game board itself, everyone including the right, the left, the governing classes, and the minority were not able to do nothing but rushed into the hysteric retaliatory attack.
Furthermore, now the discourse of science itself is bound with such a monotonous system increasingly. By the programmed curriculum adjusted for distributing knowledge into the current social order and the global economy, the universities in the world are now going to change into the factory where the unified quality control and a standardized evaluation system produce the "academic achievements". The critic spirit or the sensitivity itself is not needed there. But they are to be distributed according to the special field of study. Intelligence and critical mind are confined and only the good moderate difference and the moderate diversity distributed adequately inside the system are recommended. We must say that such a situation is the most critical now.
We did not raise the concept of "meteorology of culture and society" in order to complete a new position and the research project by that. From such a viewpoint, I want to draw up the invisible side which has been failed to catch by the old theoretical devices and discourses. It is also reflecting upon the ability of the theoretical discourse or criticism again.
I believe that drawing up the weather chart in the present world from such a perspective is not meaningless and will open fruitful possibilities in the future.