Notes: Week #4 - Japan

Harry Harootunian, History's Disquiet, cha. 3

-Modernity in every social matrix is always “a doubling that imprinted the difference between the demands of capitalism and the force of received forms of history and culture…in the space of everyday life.” (111). – But modernity cannot create a unified modernity in all contexts since it is by definition a break with a particular past. So the processes and forms of this break necessarily create differing modernities across different milieus.

-Some Japanese Marxists during the interwar period argued that since Japan underwent a process of modernization according to the Western model much later than many other regions of the world, it would always lag behind the West in the construction of what constituted the modern. (112).

-“Capitalist modernization in Japan, as elsewhere, projected the image of an uneven terrain of development between the cities and the countryside, the home and the colonies.” (114-5).

-“Cultural living” – a program that emphasized efficiency and the other signifiers of modernity while also cautioning people to not become too caught up in consumer culture despite the fact that materiality and consumption were becoming increasingly associated with individual as well as group identity. (117-9).

-“One of the responses to this growing concern with the social disequilibrium caused by the commodity culture (and imperialism) was to mitigate its effects by appealing to the priority of a culture often resembling Heidegger’s primordial everydayness, removed from the differentiations of modern society, a culture of depth that has left its traces in the present.” (123).

-“Contemporary everydayness is the receptacle of the ‘relic’ and ‘ruin’ for modern studies. These fragments of life being lived, like the surviving traces treasured by native ethnologists, were capable of disclosing the interior life of contemporaries by locating the social meaning they invested in them.” (131).

-“The materiality of the commonplace, in which practices are repeated is never completed, always constitutes a partial historicization, and stands in opposition to the lofts and the profound world beyond custom that is premised on fullness and completion.” (147).

Takeuchi Yoshimi, "What is Modernity?"

-“…Oriental modernity is derived from European coercion, or something derived from that result.” (53). – Is this implying that Eastern modernity is necessarily derived from the rupture of the end of colonialism? In other words, is modernity in the East, therefore, inextricably interwoven with processes of postcolonialism? If so, then this indicates that modernity is reactionary in the various social matrixes of Asia.

-European contact yielded the existence of many institutions and phenomena that had previously not existed in Asia. (54). – Therefore, this was not necessarily just through colonial processes; rather, mere contact and cultural exchange can account for the formations of modernity.

-“Modernity is the self-recognition of Europe as seen within history, that regarding of itself from the feudal.” (54) – “The notion of progress, and hence the idea of historicism, first came into being in modern Europe.” (55). – Europe could only exist as a defined region by constructing an “other” by means of colonialism (55).

-“Regardless of how Europe has interpreted it, Oriental resistance has continued, and it is through this resistance that the Orient has modernized itself.” (57). – “Defeat takes place only when there is resistance; but even when there is resistance, the sense of defeat is recognized only when the resistance is continued.” (57).

-“…Europe is Europe only in the advance that exists within the equivalence between European advance and Oriental retreat.” (58). – East and West constructed as antitheses (59).

- “there was something resembling spirit that existed prior to modernity, as for example Confucianism and Buddhism, but this was not the spirit in the European sense of development.” (61).

-A notion of simultaneous advance and decadence during Japan’s quick capitalist development. (63).

-Japanese culture has come to generally equate the “new” with correctness as well as modernity. (66). – It is a competitive culture that is “structurally an honor student culture.” (67).

-“Japanese culture is superior: this is absolutely true. It was built by superior champions and so must be superior.” (68). – “In the superior culture of Japan, one either falls into decadence as an honor student or falls into defeat by rejecting decadence.” (74).

-“I suspect that Japanese culture lacks within its traditions the experience of independence, and that as a result independence is not perceived as an actual feeling. Japan has never received things from the outside as pain, it has never received them in its resistance to them.” (79).

Ming Tiampo, Gutai, cha. 1

-Gutai artists placed much emphasis upon originality in their modes of composition as well as the final products. (11-14, 21- 4)–But was this just mere novelty or “weird for the sake of weird,” or were their unconventional styles actually appreciated as true contributions to the advancement of modern art?

- Japan- perceived as a cultural matrix of “inspiration, not innovation” for Western artists. –“Europe imported the raw materials of inspiration from japan and exported to Japan the cultural products of modern European technology- modernism.” –“Europeans borrowing from Japan are seen as inspired, whereas Japanese borrowing from Europe are seen as derivative.” (16-7).

-Japanese artists who wished to be seen as original, therefore, distanced themselves from European forms and modes of production of artwork. (19).