Journal Week #3

Karatani Kōjin, “Nationalism and Écriture,” Surfaces 201 (1995): 5-25.

-Phonocentrism: the belief that speech is a superior form of commination to written language. Kōjin asserts that this is not just a Western phenomenon and that it is usually tied to processes of the formation of the modern state. This paper discusses the historical use and “confrontatnion between Kana and Kanji. (4).

-There was an effort to abolish Chinese characters in China during the Meiji period- this was probably due to the efforts to Westernize in Japan during this time. Nationalism in Japan prior to the Meiji period was tied to écriture. (5-6).

-Modern nations seek to unify spoken and written language. Chinese characters were given different pronunciations in Asian countries that had been in the Chinese cultural sphere. Since modern nations attempt to construct differentiation from other states, phonocentrism is closely linked to the formation of the nation. (7).

-“The fact that a certain language has survived in the form of writing means that it existed as a fixed civilization/ state. Such being the case, although one speaks of speech, in fact one is only dealing with the écriture of those races that possessed a certain level of state-form.” (8). – Although there is at times controversy surrounding state and language, there are many modern examples of minority language groups that are not fading away (Catalan in Iberia, French in Canada, Switzerland, many languages spoken in South Asia, etc). This fact seems to complicate this point.

-“language merely reflects the growth and decline of a civilization or state. For instance, the idea that Latin was succeeded by French is merely a projection onto language of the inheritance of culture/ civilization.” (9). –But, once again, historically there have been many states which do not have specific languages and vice versa.

-Saussure- language highly political in that the existence of different languages implied the designation of separate “races.” (11- 12).

-“The ideology of phonocentrism brings into existence ethnicities and races which were heretofore mutually unrelated and therefore nonexistent. In other words, by eliminating écriture/ civilization, phonocentrism eliminates ‘history.’” (13) - This is an interesting point given the fact that there are many peoples who have placed greater prestige upon the spoken word. Memory and recitation were perceived as more prestigious and permanent then the written word.

- “The phonocentrism of Japan’s eighteenth-century nativist scholars contains within it a political struggle against the domination of Chinese ‘cultural,’ or bourgeois critique of the samurai system since Chinese philosophy was the official ideology of the Tokugawa shogunate.” (17).

-Japan was one of the only East Asian countries to adopt Chinese (phonetic) characters. Japanese écriture is the use of Chinese characters and kana syllabary. (18).

-“When Tokieda severed Japanese from race and state, he was conscious of a situation in which Japanese would spread throughout “Greater East Asia” as the dominant standard language. That in itself is a political consciousness.” (24).

James Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton UP, 1997), 1-37; 231-244.

-“There is, in the thinking that guided the erection of the park [Toman Mini], a timeless state, the ‘past’ of Indonesians, which means not the events of the past but their ‘heritage’ that somehow indicates who they have been, and the revolution that made them a nation and continues that heritage into the present.” (4).

- “Finding, that is, in language something that seems to provoke a flood of referents and sometimes breaks through the limitation put on identity by social hierarchy and sometimes is used to reinforce social identity.” (5- 6).

-Indonesian governmental authority is in part based upon the colonial model, but the postcolonial hierarchy of authority is differentiated by the fact that it is accessible to the individual (6-7) – This point does not seem entirely clear. Does this “accessibility” to political authority imply that one is able to gather authority, merely allowed to communicate with the government, voice opinions contrary to that of the state (despite a lack of governmental tolerance for this action), or have one’s community acknowledged by the state?

-“This history [of recognition of the individual ‘tribe’ or community by the Indonesian government] is indissociable from the history of ‘communication’…that began to connect the segments of the plural society toward the end of the nineteenth century.” (7)

-The development of a national language in Indonesia (derived from Melayu): “We see the restrictions that it imposes on itself and the freedom it sometimes offers. We find in particular the source of the desire for recognition that the Indonesian nation has monopolized for itself today.” (8). – But Melayu was not the majority language of Indonesia, and there were at least 800 other local languages spoken throughout the archipelago. (13).

- Dutch colonial governance played a large part in the formation of Melayu as the lingua franca of Indonesia. (14-15).

-“…uncertainty about language itself set in motion ‘a search for a new identity.’ It took the form not of defining relationships, as searchers for relationships usually do, but of a ‘staggering polyphony and heterogeneity in printed materials.” (17).

-“We conveniently keep the identities of the different ‘I’s separate. But it takes a convention and the strength to maintain it to define these identities and to keep them apart. Before convention is settled, ‘I,’ the word belongs to language, which is the say language and speech are not distinguished.” (24).

-The Dutch colonial authorities promoted Melayu as the lingua franca, but there was much concern by the administrators that so many Indonesians did not understand the language. Although the use of this language was intended to cement the colonial social hierarchy, but the fact that it was not truly a common language resulted in its use taking on many unintended political and social meanings. (26).

- “Neither party, neither the speaker nor the listener, has the lingua franca as his first language. And it is not a ‘real’ language; that is, a language which a culture attached so that one can be both intimidated by its authority and try also to take that authority for oneself. The ‘I’ of the lingua franca is not fully inhabited by its speaker.” (31).

-Melayu existed between identities since the colonizer did not speak it and the majority of the colonized did not either. (33, 36) Therefore, this language served as a means of establishing a language which designated the identity and social status of the colonized peoples.

Jing Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Harvard 2010), 1-48.

-“This book investigates the different conventions about the modern Chinese language in the literature of its diasporic communities around the world. Its focus is the ways in which writers, readers, critics, language policies, bilingualism, technologies of orthography, and the materiality of writing come to facilitate a global process that I call ‘literary governance.” (2).

- Linguistic nativity is an essential element of literary governance. “With this central feature, networks of normalization operate both within and outside of monolingual national traditions, motivating writers and readers to observe a common currency of language.” (3).

- The division between the use of traditional and simplified Chinese characters reflects a social and political rift between China and Taiwan. (4).

- “…a greater underlying problem of taking linguistic nativity as a constitutive ‘feeling’ for any national idiom and…its corresponding national-language literature.” (8).

- Literary governance “means less a control from the top down than the ways in which linguistic alliances and literary production organize themselves around incentives of recognition and power. The conflicting dimensions of language standardization and reform, native speakers and mother tongues, and national literature and diasporic writing all meet, trade, and thereby enlarge this network of mutual gains and losses.” (12).

- “This opens up other possibilities for analyzing identity itself- along with all its attendant concepts of nativism, nostalgia, nationalism, and “Chineseness” – as a situational proxy for manipulating linguistic capital.” (13).

-The use of Chinese does not necessarily tie diaspora communities to East Asia. In fact, the use of Chinese by geographically distant peoples can sever such ties by calling into question what constitutes “Chineseness” as well as identity derived from the social context of diasporic groups. (13). – This is intertwined with the processes of forming cultural capital in the literary world. (14).

-In the 19^th century traditional characters were intended to be replaced by phonetic scripts- efforts by a series of reformers. (14, 18, 21, 25).

-“The most celebrated Chinese bilingual Anglophone writer, Lin Yutang, stood at the new intersection between national standardization and internationalization with his invention of a Chinese-language typewriter.” (15).

-“Through the lens of each of these locales, Sinophone writing does not appear to belong to a particular space or national language. Its individuation ultimately depends on the intersection between location and language in constructing a sense of nativity that can be as powerful as it is dividing.” (17).

-“Despite these original individual efforts, the phoneticization movement was cut short by the political turmoil of the falling dynasty and the rise of nationalism.” (39).

-“The consolidation of regional tongues toward standardization perhaps tells a more familiar national rather than specifically Chinese tale, as linguistic unification, under the influence of German romantic ideology, is one of the basic projects of modern nationalism regardless of context.” (46).

Three essays from the New Culture / May Fourth period: all in Kirk Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945 (Stanford UP, 1996), 123-150.

-May Forth Movement = a cultural revolution against Chinese tradition. This name is derived from the 1919 protest of China’s signing of the Versailles Treaty, which would have handed control of Shandong province over to Japan. This movement, which may be the origin of the communist movement in China, was in essence protesting Japanese imperialism as well as apparent Chinese weakness.- A movement for modernizing through a sharp break with tradition. (113- 4, 125). – Confucianism seen as an oppressive, backward system. And classical literary forms were seen as tied to this outdated philosophy. (114). – Linguistic & literary reforms were commonly associated with social revolutions in China. (115).

-“The classical language is the language of the aristocracy, and the literary revolution…is part of a larger process of liberating the lower classes from oppression by the feudal aristocracy.” (116).

-“At the same time that May Fourth intellectuals turned their sights culturally inward in their attack on Confucianism, they eagerly reached out for knowledge and ideas beyond their own borders. Western ideas served both as a weapon in the attack on tradition and to fill the ideology vacuum left by that attack.” (117, 140-5).

-May 4^th writers = the liberation of women used as a symbol for liberation of all humanity from oppressive cultural traditions. – This was intertwined with the growing number of a number of female writers. (119- 20).

Journal Week #2 2/22/2012

Kim Brandt, “The Beauty of Sorrow”

-“Yanagi’s attachment to Korean art, and his gently stubborn acknowledgement of a separate and honorable Korean cultural identity, were key demonstrations of his unwavering opposition to the imperialist militarism of the wartime Japanese state.” (9).

- Yanagi along with other Japanese public intellectuals during this period utilized Western concepts, such as “the Orient,” but they attempted to illuminate the value of Asian culture through enthusiasm for “Eastern” forms of artwork. This functioned as a form of resistance to Western hegemony. (10).

-Yanagi’s appreciation for Korean ceramics was dissimilar to that of middle class intellectuals, whose tastes in pieces were defined by contemporary constructed notions of modern, cosmopolitan styles. The signifiers of modern design were based upon Western artistic forms and styles. - Therefore, traditional ceramics used in a tea ceremony symbolized the value of tradition, whereas tea sets which bore non-Asian aesthetic features represented the hegemony of the West. (13-4).

-The practice of the tea ceremony, a symbol of Asian tradition, underwent a number of changes during the early part of the twentieth century as a reflection of changing notions of modernity among middle class Japanese. – “Colonial Korea offered special opportunities to counter the hegemony…” of the West. (14- 5).

-“In successfully revising the canon of Japanese art ceramics, intellectuals and artists like Yanagi and Asakawa were able to wrest some of the leadership in the prestigious field of art ceramics from bourgeois economic elites, who were bidding for dominance from their new power position within the tea establishment.” (20). – Small investments of money in Chosŏn-period ceramics later yielded great financial returns as well as much cultural capital for early collectors. (20).

-The colonial process that allowed Korean art to become more appreciated in the Japanese imperial center also resulted in the preeminent extraction of art from the Korean peninsula. (20). Therefore, was this extraction of artistic manifestations of a “traditional” Asia a process which affected the manner in which Japanese identity was constructed? In other words, did colonization of Korea lead to a reevaluation of what actually constituted Japaense-ness? This would then seem to be a kind of Japanese modernity derived from the coexistence of a modernity derived from the Western model as well as a revival of what was understood as Asian tradition. Indeed, the fabrication and circumscription of the signifiers of earlier Asian culture were essential to the formation of a modern tradition.

-Following his death, Yanagi was recognized as an individual who resisted the imperialist Japanese state by championing Korean material culture. (23-6). – Art connoisseurship as a form of cultural activism.

-Yanagi argued that Korean art should gain global appreciation, yet he also wished for it to be taxonomized as “oriental art.” (27). – Indicated a complex relationship between colonizer and colonized, and it also indicated an acceptance of the European construction of “Eastern” and “Western” regions of the world. But was this done in order to champion the notion of Asian culture rather than accept the Western construction of the East as the Other? In other words, was this taxonomization embraces as a means of emphasizing the unique virtues of Korean and other Asian forms of art? I would argue that this was the case, yet Yanagi did not imply a homogenized view of the East. (29-31).

-“Yanagi suggested that by introducing Japanese to the magnificence of Orient art, he might remind them that the West was not the exclusive province of value…” (29).

-The concept of sorrow or melancholy as a key element of Korean culture and artistic productions was accepted by many Japanese collectors. (32).

-“Orientalist strategies of appreciating Korean objects also assigned great creative power and authority to Japanese consciousness, however scarred or impure.” (35-6). – The Japanese were claiming cultural authority in Asia akin to that of the West. Therefore, the Japanese were attempting to assert hegemony over Korea in a similar fashion to other imperialist nations.

Peter Osborne, "Modernism as Translation"

-“The question of the status of the terms of a transnational cultural theory opens into the question of the status of the philosophical concepts in two ways: 1) as a question about the cultural-historical constitution and hence limits to universality of all thought and 2) as a question about the productive transcendence of thinking beyond both the conditions of its own possibility and the range of its currently empirically justifiable applications.” (54).

-“The concept of modernism is paradigmatic in this regard, as a Western cultural form subsequently generalized at a global level in a hotly disputed process suspended between the imperialism of an obliteration of social difference and the productivity of alternative, conter-hegemonic interpretations and conceptions.” (54).

-“…modernism is in certain respects directly akin to a traditional philosophical concept in designating the cultural affirmation of a particular phenomenological structure of time.” (54).

-“…the concept of modernism maintains a certain legitimate universality as a generic concept of a transnational cultural theory.” (54).

-Translation always involves “imperfect equivalences” of concepts. Therefore, meaning cannot ever be truly translated without some distortion between forms. (55). –Doubt can be applied to translated concepts since some meaning is lost or discounted when they are removed from their original context. Therefore, original forms are often presumed as being pure forms that are inherently different than any translation. But this view often serves to other the original form.

-“There is a dialectic of universal and particular- conceptual determination and empirical particularity- internal to all theoretical concepts as a consequence of their history. In this respect, the idea of translation at work in cultural theory…is less a metaphor than the metonymic register of the interpretive dimension of the process of social intercourse and exchange in general.” (57).

-“…modernism is the cultural condition of possibility of a particular, distinctively future-oriented series of forms of experience of history as temporal form.” (57).

-“…modernism in its most general sense is associated with a particular configuration of temporalizations of history or historizations of temporality.” (58).

-“The translatability of ‘modernism’- the power of modernism as a medium of transculturation, one might say,- indicates the extent to which the concept can be unified, ultimately, only at the level of pure temporal form.” (59).

-“the ‘national’ character of specific modernisms is often national in a dialectical sense only, as determinate negotiations of received national-cultural forms: internally oppositional cosmopolitan projections, only later put to homogenizing nationalistic use.” (60).

-“how the problematic of the modern, concretely applied, can help replace the problematic of ‘national cultures’, with a broader conception of the temporal-cultural dimensions of social relations – social relations through which ‘the nation’ is itself produced as a cultural-ideological effect of various forms of state power.” (61).

Introduction to translation of Yi T'aejun's Eastern Sentiments & Selections from Yi T'aejun's Eastern Sentiments

-Eastern sentiments serves as an exploration of Korea’s past and present during the period of Japanese colonialism. (1). –These essays illuminate how during the colonial period “partiality and fragmentation became modes for understanding historical experience.” (2).

- The anecdotal essay experienced a revival during a period in which there was much debate about literary representations of Japanese occupation. (4). – The novel was of great importance in many colonial contexts because it allowed diverse representations of colonial modernity. (4).

-Essays were popular because of their “fundamentally ironic way of connecting the past to the present and the contradictory space it created for the difficult elaboration of a bourgeois subject in colonial society.” (6).

-“Yi’s choice was to eschew the empirical and chronological narrative of linear history, which was itself a fairly new object of modern knowledge in Korea at the time.” (7).

-“This dilemma of how to relate to the past thus helps construct a division of social space in the present, whereby the realm of the everyday life of the artist is, through its association with the past, supposedly separated from the commercial sphere.” (10).

-“For Yi, being modern meant to have lived several lives and deaths as trend followed upon trend and the constant race to build a new order plunged people into instability.” (12).

-All of Yi’s essays perceive Korea through a Confucian analytical framework. (16).

-“In looking at Yi’s traditionalist practices, we cannot help but notice a certain synchronicity with traditionalisms in Japan, and this raises the question of his location in relation to imperialist discourse.” (19).

“Yi’s intellectual trajectory resonates profoundly with the theory of the evolution of the colonial intellectual proposed by Frantz Fanon. According to Fannon, the native intellectual first proves that he has ‘assimilated the culture of the occupying power’ before deciding ‘to remember what he is’ by immersing himself in the culture of his people.” (21).

Journal Week #1

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

-Electronic media has complicated the relationship between social/cultural center and periphery in that it allows for increased communication, contact, and availability of information in global spaces. Therefore, the individual is not merely a member of a local community or nation; rather electronic media has allowed for the formation of global imagined communities that are a key element in the relationship between globalization and modernity. (3-4, 6, 32, 37).

-“…consumption in the contemporary world is often a form of drudgery, part of the capitalist civilizing process. Nevertheless, where there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure, there is agency.” (7). = Mass media allows for the agency of the individual as well as the group.
-“…diasporic spheres…constitute one special diacritic of the global modern.” (11).

-“Cultural” characteristics= only pronounced differences in terms of practices that play an active role in the construction of group identity. (13-5). Identity has become much more problematic and complex as globalization and global connectivity have transformed the signifiers of identity.

-Diasporic public spheres connected through mass electronic media has resulted in the creation of heterogeneous imagined communities that have yielded a “postnational political order.” (21-3). In other words, the notions of community, nation, and nationalism have been redefined.

-Pastiche and nostalgia are essential components of cultural production and reception of electronic media. (30, 75- 8).

- “-Scapes” = five dimensions of global cultural flow (ethnoscames, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, & ideascapes). “These landscapes are the building blocks of what (extending Benedict Anderson) I would like to call imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe.” (32- 3). Results in a deterritorialization of imagined social life. (37, 49, 55).

-Video technology has greatly shaped the modern relationship between imagination and social life. (53).

-Consumption= A habitual and seasonal series of processes that revolve around the patterns of interdiction, sumptuary law, and fashion. (66- 71).

-“I view locality as primarily relational and contextual rather than as secular or spatial. I see it as a complex phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity, and the relativity of contexts.” (178).

Lamarre, Thomas. Introduction to Impacts of Modernities, edited by Thomas Lamarre and Kang Nae-hui, 1- 35. Aberdeen: University of Hong Kong Press, 2004.

-Modernity is a continuous process of change in which new modes of being are in a constant dialog with sets of “temporal relations and historical values.”(1).

-“…the neurosis of modernity diagnosed by Nietzsche: when the new or the modern becomes the dominant value for understanding history, the present no longer succeeds the past but breaks radically with it.” (2).

-“Modernity announces a seemingly indelible division between the West and the rest, and perpetually conflates modernization and Westernization.” (3).

-Discourses on modernity have served to construct totalizing notions of nation, locality, and a supposedly inherent division of East and West. Area studies in particular has served to “other” particular geographic regions through the use of analytical lenses that establish the West as the normative standard. (5).

-“…alternative modernities entail an opening of otherness within Western modernity, in the very process of repeating or reinscribing it.” This raises questions as to the origin of parallel modernities within or outside of the Western world. (11- 13).

-Stuart Hall claims that modernity is in actuality the “result” of a series of processes and histories. But how can modernity every be a “result” if it is always a continuous process composed of myriad factors and influences? (14, 33-4).

Seong-Tae, Hong. “From Mount Baekak to the Han River: A Road to Colonial Modernization,” in Impacts of Modernities, edited by Thomas Lamarre and Kang Nae-hui, 121-35. Aberdeen: University of Hong Kong Press, 2004.

-“While Modernity is a product of abstraction, modernization refers to the process of historical change. Modernity may well exist as an abstraction, yet, as a historical process, there must be plurality of modernizations.” (121).

-The modernity of the metropole and the colony greatly differ in that the processes of modernization in the colony are based upon a historical rupture due to colonization. (121).

-Postcolonial modernity in the Korean context is an intentional rupture with past colonial modernities as well as the modernity of the former imperial center. (127).

-The Japanese imperial annexation of Korea resulted in the forced transformation of roadways and Korean cityscapes. (123). –“Over the last hundred years, Korea has thus undergone a series of radical transformations, which were undertaken under the pretext of modernization yet entailed repressive colonial domination.” (134).