The Virtual Time Garden

Speech at International Conference on Aesthetics in Lahti,Finland 1995

The Aesthetics of Cultural Theory -- The Role of Art in the Age of Post-ColdWar

      A question both old and new is arising again; "what is Culture? ".

 

     In the world after the Cold War, the previous framework of East/West or South/North, have almost completely lost their validity. The political and economical Globalization has been accelerated rapidly and we are confronting the big wave of homogenizaton and standardization everywhere. The world is now networked to every corner by the satellites , making a single market and the Global Society, whose parts are very closely connected and related, is spreading out. Capitalism and electronic media have finally unified all of the world, and there appears the Global Village as a huge tribal society once Marshall McLuhan described.

 

     On the other hand, however, we cannot overlook that there also appears the numerous of the heterogeneous or heterological movements in the weakening of the western modernity and the validity of its universalistic ideas. We can find there not only many micro-politics of regionalism such as revival of the ghosts of narrow nationalism or ethnicism, but also various kinds of traversing or translocal organizations such as the trial of EU, political or economical blockage and the appearance of various type of NGO groups, etc.. Adding to this, the increase of emigrants or refugees we can find everywhere of the world is accelerating cultural hybridization day by day. This seems to be totally different from previous "internationalization", which depends on the presupposed identities of plural nation-states.

 

      The postmodern philosophy once explained about the decline of the Grand Narratives which western modernity had organized. However, we are now living in the flood of partial and local narratives. That is concerned with not only the decline of the Grand Narratives of European modernity or the fall of its hegemony, but the crisis of universalistic thought in general which it has diffused. Every kind of "organization of discourse" in universities and journalism has fallen into this crisis and lost their foundations.

 

      How should we think against such a decline of universalistic thought or the totality of knowledge?

 

     It is no use to say that European modernity posed itself as one and only universal and rationalistic civilization and situated others on savage and uncivilized local-knowledge lacking of universality. That has made the overwhelming priority of western rationalism in the world at last mainly by its economical, political and military success. On the other hand, Non-European civilizations are snatched away their own (local) narratives, and compelled to accept the domination of the narrative of western modernity and to learn representing themselves through it. That is, Non-European civilizations, Japan at least, were forced to represent themselves by the western viewpoint and through the imported narrative. And, there has been produced such intellectuals as who are brought up by Rock music and Hollywood films rather than their traditional culture, who grew up with Paul Verlaine's and Arthur Rimbaud's poem, or who dedicate their whole lives to the study of contemporary French philosophy, and so on.

 

      However, this process, which is called "westernization" in general, is not so simple though its appearance. Because westernization doesn't mean that Japanese for example becomes to get the same identifiable subject as European, but it produces a kind of "hybrid" and unstable subject belonging to none of them. This hybrid subject is recognized only inside of western modernistic narrative. Therefore, every kind of ethnocentric, nationalistic or traditionalistic mode of thinking which derives from it, is not possible but only in recursion and it is nothing but a inverted retrospection made after the possession of modernistic view and its narrative.

 

      The encounter with the modern western culture brought each local cultures so to speak a kind of Lacanic irreversible "mirror stage", and after it, we cannot but put borderline between the Self and the Other by the narrative of western modernity. We cannot return before this amputation. Even the resistance or anti-colonialistic struggles themselves against the domination of the West cannot be possible without the western narrative by intellectuals who have experienced studying in the western countries. So, the Orientalism, in the meaning of Edward Said, has been working on even in the inside of Non-European cultures: even the internal tradition must be represented by the outer eyes there.

 

      The trends of the twentieth century's philosophy have been trying to break down and make relative such a belief to the universal rationality of the West. There has been criticized such a tradition for example as a metaphysics or the philosophy of representation, or which to be "deconstructed" as the logocentrism. But such movements of self-criticism or self-destruction themselves also constructed the new version of normative narratives to imitate for non-European intellectuals. For example, we have been talking about "Japanese postmodenity", trying to deconstruct logocentric features in Japanese intellectual discourses or investigating the transformation of "epistemes" in Japanese modernity in the same gesture when we imported Sartre before. Shortly, those have not changed anything and in this sense, Descartes and Derrida are been equivalent to us.

 

     By the way, the characteristic of contemporary post-colonialism is that it contains not only political or economical anti-colonialism but also more comprehensive one of discourses and narratives. It is discourses above all which have been exploited. And the nation states, intellectuals as identifiable subjects and discourses in university or journalism -- all of these cannot be possible without the effect of colonizaions of narratives.

 

      It is not a better strategy to share the standpoint of "anti-" so much -- for example, anti-West, anti-USA, anti-modernity or anti-universalism -- that we fall more and more imprisoned by the modernistic composition. It is neither sufficient to bring such standpoint as localism or regionalism against universalism. Because that is to accept the narrative of western modernity as criteria at last. The movements of political/cultural organization brought by such option which is both irrational and ahistorical, are nothing but a hysteric spasm derived from unstability when one has lost one's own normative narrative.

 

      Of course it is very important to fight for one's own narrative in general. But it is also to be said too naive if one thought that he could regain the premodernistic narrative as his origin. And, it is not only simple or naive but even logically wrong. For such "origin" is the projected past from now and just a kind of perversion of perspective. In the first place, isn't it a romantic fantasy the idea of "one's own narrative" which can be found inside the presupposed national identities or its tradition ?

 

      In short, if we want to choose either of the dominating narrative or the suppressed narrative -- universalistic narrative or relativistic and local narrative -- we will be lost ourselves in a blind alley. The ideas of the Enlightenment in a broader sense, for example, such as fundamental thought which always intends to be general and universal and the tradition of thought which always doubt of its own foundations and ask critically or reflectively its possibilities, have been separated from their original context, grafted and implanted into the various cultures in the development of modernity. Without de-westernizing or de-contextualizing these ideas -- globlizing them -- rather than putting back them to their original context, there remains only localized and isolated narratives which is essentially partial. So in every sphere as politics, culture, arts and economy, most important thing is to share such ideas of Enlightenment as de-westernized and globlized and make possibilities of the diversity of narratives and their interference among them. They should be thought as fluid and hybrid process rather than identifiable fixed criteria.

In such situation, re-examination of the concept of "culture" itself is urgently needed. Of course, we also need to re-examine such concepts and principles having supported the modernity as "the transcendental subject", "indirect democracy" or "publicity", etc. However, in my view, culture and the so-called "cultural relativism" as its concerned ideology, seem to be most responsible about the difficulties of today.

 

      Culture is nothing but a problem of narrative. In other words, it is the organization of discourse which makes the borderline between inside and outside of community, and between the Self and the Not-Self. It is not factually existing but an effect of discourse. For example, we can say that there is no Japanese culture in itself. It was just collective cultures or at best a kind of local version of Chinese culture before the establishment of the state of Japan, and the latter constructed in the fantasy of proper culture based on the fiction of national spirit.

Culture has been conceived as the name designating the elite culture as Art and Literature or the list of intellectual and spiritual inheritance of mankind. It is also opposed to the savagery and barbarism. So it was a synonym of civilization and a singular noun at first. It was after Helder or Romanticism when it had become talked as appearance of certain national spirits and linked to the consciousness of ethnicity or race. There were constructed the national identities and worked the narratives which made the foundation of the nation states. Therefore, the modern concept of culture began with the recognition of the Self in contrast with the other cultures or the plurality of culture.

 

      The similar cases can be seen in the history of Japan. In the end of eighteenth century, Norinaga Motoori proposed the conception of "Kokugaku"(National Science), which based on the Japanese national sprit(Yamato Gokoro), against the dominant cultures of the ruling class in Japan, at that time which were mainly constructed by Buddhism from India and Confucianism from China.

 

      Assertion of proper culture which differs from other cultures always appears in certain identity crisis. The concept of culture once fixed with race, ethnicity, homeland, language or nation has been made a formation of of narratives as "culture as a fixed and identified system" in enlarging consciousness of distinction between the Self and the others in the age of empire from nineteenth to twentieth century.

 

      The dominant concept of culture began with Edward Tyler, an anthropologist in nineteenth century. According to him, culture is a complex whole which contains abilities and habits acquired by human as member of the society and there including all of knowledge, arts, morals,laws and customs, etc.. Such concept of culture has shifted to the understanding of "culture as system" in the cultural theory after Saussurian linguistics.

 

      Culture became to be thought same arbitrary system of difference as the language system. So different cultures are to be represented as incommensurable and untranslatable each other. Just as in the structuralist linguistics, synchronic and systematic features of culture are emphasized there, and there remains less regards to the historical mobility of it. The problem is, however, such view of the cultural relativism itself.

 

      The way of seeing culture as "fixed system" was coming out from the narrative of anthropology which objectify and try to describe it from the outer viewpoint. It was motivated by the desire to put a borderline between the Self and the Other and to make each of them belong to their properties.

 

      But the situation we are actually confronted is not the parallelism of plural cultures where each of them are clearly distinguished, but a kind of syncretistic fusion. Culture seen from inside -- not from ouside-- is always hybrid, heterogenious and have no distinct borderlines. Therefore, the important thing is to gain a viewpoint of seeing culture in its mobility rather than identity. That is to say, rather than "understanding" other cultures as the Others, it is more important to find the "hybrid self" as the field where the plurality of narratives is in constant motion like Brownian movement.

 

      Now it doesn't remain enough time to treat the problem of Art. But in the problematic like this, the role of the Art as an splicer of narratives might be very important. In short, it would be arts which are neither localistic, compromising nor relativistic but playing with changeable borderline between the Self and the Other, and at the same time, never lose sight of globalism. We are now walking from the cultural identities toward its constant mobility.