New book on social movements in Japan

 

So now it's out, my new book on social movements in Japan. I do like it. It's a bit expensive but I do wish it bon voyage. Thanks to everyone who helped me finish it - above all everyone who agreed to be interviewed, and everyone who gave me criticism or comments. Thanks also to Sekine Masayuki-san, who let me use his photo of the 246 Conference of Expressive Artists for the cover!

Cassegard, Carl (2013) Youth Movements, Trauma, and Alternative Space in Contemporary Japan, Leiden: Global Oriental
http://www.brill.com/youth-movements-trauma-and-alternative-space-contemporary-japan

The volume provides a detailed study and assessment of social movements among young Japanese from the late 1980s until the present day. Discussing anti-war mobilizations, freeter unions, artists in the homeless movement, campus protest, anti-nuclear protest and activists engaged in support for social withdrawers, the author documents how new forms of activism developed hand-in-hand with experiments in using alternative spaces outside mainstream public areas and a struggle with the traumatic legacy of the failure of earlier protest movements. Despite the relative absence of open protest during much of the 1990s, the author demonstrates that this was an important preparatory period, full of experimentation, in which the foundations for today’s protest movements were laid. This book will be welcomed by students of sociological theory relating to Japan as well as those studying the trends and dynamics of contemporary ‘post-Bubble’ Japanese society.

Table of contents: 

Preface
Introduction

1. Trauma, empowerment and alternative space
- Collective trauma
- Empowerment and the role of alternative space in social movements

2. Japan’s lost decade and two recoveries
- The end of the bubble and the arrival of precarity
- The sense of closure and the legacy of previous protest
- Lost decade, regained activism?

3. The new cultural movements
- The storm of autumn
- The league of good-for-nothings
- Anti-war protests and the prehistory of sound-demos

4. The rise of movements against precarity
- The General Freeter Union and the ‘precariat’
- ‘Life’ and ‘survival’ in the precarity movement

5. Space, art and homelessness
- Public space, counter-space and no-man’s-land
- Art beyond the pleasure principle: The Shinjuku cardboard village
- Anti-poverty and Viva poverty
- “Waking up from the dream”: Nagai Park’s theatre of resistance
- Miyashita Park: Can a no-man’s-land be defended?

6. Alternative space, withdrawal and empowerment
- Support groups for social withdrawers and NEET
- Freeter Unions: narratives of recovery

7. Campus protest 

8. The recovery of activism
- Three innovations of freeter activism
- The importance of space – contestation and bracketing
- Fukushima and beyond

Making things public (according to Latour)

I'm not well read in Bruno Latour, so I write this not to assert any standpoint, but more, really, to clarify my impressions to myself and to test them against any criticism they might invite. 

I've just read “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: or How to Make Things Public”, Latour's introduction to an exhibition catalogue edited by himself and Peter Weibel (Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Karlsruhe: Center for Art and Media / Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2005). It's an intervention in political philosophy, written as an essay in the good old style - stimulating, well-written, erudite. He criticizes mainstream political philosophy – from Hobbes to Habermas – for neglecting "things" - and pleads instead for an "object-oriented democracy”, a Dingpolitik.

He points out that the old word ”Thing” originally designated a type of archaic assembly, as in Icelandic Althing (suitably located on a desolate site in the middle of a fault line). ”Thus, long before designating an object thrown out of the political sphere and standing there objectively and independently, the Ding or Thing has for many centuries meant the issue that brings people together because it divides them” (p13). The central idea is that what creates a public is not shared values or principles or any basic shared agreement, but the existence of a pressing concern that divides us: "we don’t assemble because we agree, look alike, feel good, are socially compatible or wish to fuse together but because we are brought by divisive matters of concern into some neutral, isolated place in order to come to some sort of provisional makeshift (dis)agreement” (p13).

So disagreement unites. As he points out, demos and demon share the same root, the Indo-European da-, to divide (p14).

At this point, one might ask if a public or a people are united only by disagreement, or if they also have something else in common. While the overall thrust of Latour's argument is certainly to stress the constitutive role of disagreement, he does add one more factor, which is crucial - the sharing of territory. ”Hence, the people, the demos, are made up of those who share the same space and are divided by the same contradictory worries” (p16).

Despite the concession to territory, Latour's conception of the public is thin, building on little but mutual disagreement. Rather than a unitary assembly, such politics would be an assembly of assemblies, by necessity constantly on the verge of dissolving into parts (an "assembly of disassembling"). As he points out, the difference between following the way of the "demon" - multiplying difference and disassembling - and that of the "demos" - multiplying occasions to agree, assemble and share - is thin as a knife (p30). One way to deal with the inconclusive nature of public deliberation is to be modest and acknowledge our insufficient cognitive capacities. ”The cognitive deficiency of participants has been hidden for a long time [...]. We were told that all of us – on entering this dome, this public sphere – had to leave aside in the cloakroom our own attachments, passions and weaknesses” (p20). Hence Latour's slogan: ”Disabled persons of all countries, unite!” (p19f).

A public tolerant of diversity needs to avoid the dream of unity and totality which he associates with "the phantasmagorical spheres, globes, common good and general will that the Leviathan was supposed to incarnate” (p24). Instead, he argues, it needs to be "phantom-like" (an expression derived from Lippman's "phantom public"). To illustrate what this might mean, he refers to an artwork, The Phantom, designed by Michel Jaffrennou and Thierry Coduys:

It’s activated by the movements of the visitors throughout the show so that each spectator is simultaneously an actor in the show and the only screen on which the whole spectacle is projected. By moving through the various exhibits, the visitors will trigger various captors that will be used as so many inputs to trigger outputs which will give a vague and uneasy feeling that “something happens” of which the bystanders are responsible but in a way that is not directly traceable. Politics will pass through you as a rather mysterious flow, just like a phantom. (p24)

If we compare to Jürgen Habermas, a striking trait of Latour's conception of the public is that it has no need for any underlying agreement, no shared language rules and no shared orienation to consensus. Apart from territory, it seems constituted by nothing by disagreement. This is at least formally a similarity to Jacques Rancière's conception of the public as a polemical place for the manifestation of disagreement. At the same time, the differences to Rancière are both striking and instructive.

Latour's demos or phantom public
would not be a "body politic" 

For instance, behind Latour's stress on disagreement one senses his concern with globalization, the global multitude of voices who no longer comprehend democracy ("Listen to the Japanese tradition... Listen to the Jivaros... Listen to the jihadists", p25). The global is what cannot be united under one roof. "Where would you assemble the global? Certainly not under golden domes and kitsch frescoes where heroic senators and half-naked Republics are crowned by laurels descending from clouds" (p20). Thus he discards the old metaphors for the public, the "spheres" or "domes". Yet, whether we like it or not, today the shared territory that brings people together is the global. Demonstrations against globalization show how a divisive issue brings people together, even if they wish to differ. The globe is where we all co-habitate: "we are all in the same boat" (p27).

To Rancière, by contrast, disagreement has nothing to do with global diversity. It springs from the injustice of the social order. This is why he, unlike Latour, presents the Ding, the cause of disagreement, as something that is visibilized only with the disruptive political act of those who have no part in the established order. Latour, by contrast, tends to present it as a pregiven and shared object of worry. This difference explains their radically different visions of politics. In Rancière the political event that constitutes the public is a rupture of the order. Latour, by contrast, presents dissent as constitutive of a new kind of phantom-like regular politics. Rancière's vantage-point is that of the excluded part, while Labour takes the perspective of the already, at least more or less, included, who only need to admit of their own weaknesses and insufficiences. Vantage-points are important. To theories too one should pose the question: cui bono?

Let me move to a theoretically more central point. Does Latour present a tenable, persuasive account of how publics work? To me, he vastly overestimates the role of disagreement. Whenever we see people assemble or gather together, it is usually on the basis of the existence of shared norms. To use his own example of the Althing, among Icelanders this shared basis was provided by custom; there was implicit agreement about where to go and how to deal with divisive issues, where to seek allies, how to present one's cause and what compensations were reasonable to claim for damages. Iceland, then, does not at all illustrate how the existence of a pressing divisive concern is enough to force people together. Would more contemporary examples - like the climate crisis - be more persuasive? Hardly. A climate summit too procedes along certain formal, agreed upon rules. Disagreement alone is not what constitutes the gathering.

Latour acknowledges that there are matters of global concern that inspire actions not based on shared rules - as when fundamentalists resort to violence out of resentment at the injustice of existing forms of representation (p25). But here the question arises: why does the Ding sometimes bring us together to fight and sometimes to talk? Why do some people talk, rather than resort to violence? Surely, there are many more factors than mere disagreement that play in here and that make people constitute publics.

A final point of disagreement with Latour concerns the role of norms needed to create egalitarian forms of interaction. In classical conceptions of the public - e.g. in Habermas or Arendt - publics are arenas where people are able to interact on the basis of an "egalitarian semblance". In old Iceland, this semblance was vouchsafed by custom and by the fact that it was already a relatively egalitarian society, lacking both king and state, in which the "thingmen" were independent, wealthy peasants. In today’s more stratified societies, the semblance of equality is instead created by a systematic bracketing of real inequalities in status, wealth and power. People are expected to behave "as if" equal when engaging in public discussions, regardless of actual inequality. Latour says nothing about how his phantom publics would deal with inequality. To the extent that these too depend on an egalitarian semblance, I would argue that they too need to rely on shared norms for bracketing - and, if so, they cannot be constituted solely by disagreement. There has to be some normative common ground.

Of course, it's quite possible to conceive of publics without egalitarianism. Nancy Fraser, for instance, argues that "subaltern counter-publics" shouldn't opt for maintaining the semblance of equality, which in fact conceals real exclusions and hierarchies, but for a strategy of "unbracketing". Only in the disruptive effect such "unbracketing" has on the mainstream public sphere - effect similar to those of "politics" in Rancière's sense - do real chances appear for the empowerment of excluded groups. Latour's slogan about the disabled persons of the world and his argument that we all ought to be more open with the weaknesses, attachments and passions that we for so long have hidden away as ”private” suggests that he too conceives of the public as something that ought to dispense with bracketing. Formally, in terms of a typology of publics, he would belong with Fraser and Rancière. Unlike them, however, he does not conceive of unbracketing as provocative or aggressive. To him, unbracketing is not needed to challenge social injustice, but in order to direct attention to our own weaknesses. He never touches on the issue of injustice, the very reason why Fraser and Rancière focus on unbracketing. So how would a Latour-inspired public deal with injustice? How would aggressive forms of unbracketing that challenge the privilege of the included be viewed and managed in such a public? Can such calls be managed by an ethics of mutually respecting our disabilities? Or by letting them pass through us as a  "rather mysterious flow, just like a phantom”? What appears to me to be left out - or am I misreading him? - is the question of how people not only react to an issue, to a "thing", but take it upon themselves to make it an issue, into a "thing" which the general public can no longer afford to ignore. This act of creating the divisive issue seems to be the core of politics.

What is the relation between the public sphere and public space?

Right now I'm trying to put together a theoretical piece for a presentation next week. It's going to be about the relation between the public sphere and public space.

Here's a brief summary of part of what I'm going to say.

Many have suggested that the relation between the two concepts is insufficiently researched. Here I would like to 1) suggest two reasons why this might be so, 2) propose a rather simple model that might clarify the relation, and 3) briefly discuss some conclusions that might be drawn. In particular, since some theorists seem to be suggesting that the idea of public space is more suited to a radical politics open to the excluded or disadvantaged than that of the public sphere, I will try to evaluate that claim and indicate in what ways it might hold true.


1. Why the confusion?

To begin with, the public sphere is not at all an un-spatial concept. Habermas cannot be accused of neglecting the physical places or mediums in which the public sphere has developed - private homes, for instance, or coffeehouses, salons, assemblies, street, theatres, or newspapers. What is true is that the public sphere is not necessarily linked to any particular place or medium. It is also true that the relation to space has become further blurred by so-called globalization (and the growth of "diasporic public spheres", "transnational public spheres", "global public sphere moments" etc). The indeterminate relation to space is, I suggest, one important reason for the confusion regarding the relation between the concepts of the public sphere and public space.

To at least begin to clarify the confusion, I will argue as follows. Although not necessarily linked to any particular physical space, the public sphere can surely be described as a social space - a particular kind of social space characterized by political deliberation about common affairs. Using a concept of space that is socially rather than physically defined should be fine. As I will show, concepts of public space are in fact also usually socially defined.

A second reason for confusion is that there are two kinds of theories of public space. Both use the term "public space" but they do so in opposite ways.

On the one hand, there are theorists of urban sociability like Erwin Goffman, Georg Simmel, Richard Sennett, Lynn Lofland, or Jane Jacobs. What they have in common is that they all link ”publicness” to concrete urban space. But there is no real link to the public sphere, to politics. What matters is that people are visible to each other, not that they talk or discuss. What they research is how strangers behave when they share a space where they are mutually visible to each other. What sustains "publicness" is the system of norms that regulates this interaction. Goffman's "civil inattention" is a well-known example of this norm-guided behavoir. Jane Jacob's Hudson Street "ballet" is another example. The formal etiquette between strangers which Sennett sees as so crucial to the publicness of the ancient régime is a third.

On the other hand, there are scholars like Jacques Rancière, Don Mitchell or Bruce d'Arcus, whose main interest is in "dissent public space" (this is d'Arcus' term). I've already discussed their idea of public space in a previous blog entry ("Public Space and Public Sphere: Notes on Reading Don Mitchell"). Common to them is that they see publicness as arising through acts that manifest or visibilize dissent. If the theorists of urban sociability see publicness are maintained by an intricate system of norms, the theorists of dissent see it as erupting when the norms are disrupted.

The former group of scholars associate public space with norms of bracketing - or systematically disregarding - differences in status among people. Where all are strangers, there is no high or low. We refrain for inquiring to deeply into the background of the strangers we meet. By doing so, we maintain the semblance that everyone is equal. The second group of scholars, by contrast, associate publicness with un-bracketing, with the "uncivil" taking or occupation of place where injustice is visibilized. Rather than bracketing marginalization, oppression or status differences, they are brought out into the open.


2. Contention and bracketing: a model

A solution requires that we start, not from the dichotomy of "sphere" and "space", but by investigating two dimensions of "publicness" which I believe are more fundamental.

As I argue in "Public Space in Recent Japanese Political Thought and Activism: From the Rivers and Lakes to Miyashita Park" (forthcoming in Japanese Studies 31:3, December 2011), two dimensions are constitutive of the public in classical theorists like Habermas and Arendt: verbal contestation and the bracketing of dependencies and inequalities in wealth and status. Typically, deliberations in the public sphere rest on the presence of both of these two dimensions. Deliberation can be seen as a form of communication in which contestation is moderated by the norms of bracketing, which are necessary in order to create a semblance of equality among the participants. Bracketing is thus ambivalent: it is thanks to bracketing that egalitarian arenas can be created, but it also prevents real inequalities in wealth, status and power from being openly thematized and challenged.

To summarise, the public is not only a realm of free and open communication or debate, but also an arena in which important parts of social life are systematically bracketed in order to create a semblance of equality among participants. This means that the public – against the commonsensical view – must be viewed not only as an arena of debate and communication. It is also constituted by a certain silence, a ‘bracketing’ that is needed to prevent it from dissolving back into the ‘real’ world.

Interestingly, challenges to the exclusivity of the mainstream public sphere have come from two directions, one emphasizing more thoroughgoing forms of bracketing (Karatani Kôjin's defence, in Transcritique, of bracketing as crucial to a Kantian public can be seen as one version of this) and another emphasizing more unrestrained forms of contestation (here a good example is Nancy Fraser's subaltern counterpublics and her advocacy of "unbracketing").

An important point here, which I feel it is necessary to stress in order to grasp the function of bracketing more fully, is that there are multiple public with alternative norms of bracketing. Bracketing thus openates also in the subaltern counterpublics. There's a sociological classic, The Hobo (by Nels Anderson), that provides a wonderful insight into the camps (or "jungles") of the homeless people in early 20th century America. Just as the Simmelian salons or Habermasian coffeehouses, these were egalitarian and "democratic" arenas. People exchanged information and told stories over the fire. But they never inquired too deeply into a person's name or previous life. Just as in the salons and coffee houses, they bracketed each other's background.

Let us now try relating the various theories of public space and public sphere to these two dimension.

The "classical" theories of the "public sphere" (or "public realm") are found in the upper right quadrant, i.e. they are theories that stress both bracketing and contention. Grasped from its spatial aspect, we might call it "space for deliberation".

We can also observe that the most influential theories stressing "public space" fall into two distinct groups, which have very little in common.

So we see: the classical theories are not radically divorced from the theories of public space. They share the stress on dimensions such as bracketing or contestation. Hence the first difficulty of separating and counterposing "public sphere" and "public space" in a clearcut fashion.

The second difficulty stems from the fact that theories of public space are not uniform. "Public space" is a catchword for very heterogeneous conceptions. These tend to fall into two camps, which are mutually more opposed to each other than either are to the theories of the "public sphere".

To summarize: the reason that the relation between public sphere and public space is so hard to clarify is that the public sphere arises in the convergence of bracketing and contestation, i.e. that it requires a mixture of both elements. Conceptions of public space arrange themselves in two compartments on either side of this.


3. Some consequences

Theories of public sphere have been criticized for being exclusive, hierarchical, and too restrictive. Some - most explicitly Don Mitchell - seem to propose "public space" as a more radical notion, more open to the excluded. What conclusions can we draw?

Well, public space theory exists in two forms which both "radicalize" certain aspects of the "public sphere". Some point to spaces that provide refuge from "real" social status, others to spaces for contesting and renegotiating the order.

At whichever of these two senses of public space one looks, one finds a political significance geared to those excluded from or disadvantaged in the politics of the public sphere. Are we then entitled to conclude that "public space" is more suited to be the focal point of a radical politics than the "public sphere"? The correct way to put it is surely that public space is not inherently radical in itself, but rather a crucial and irreducible element in all politics. What goes beyond the regular politics of the public sphere is not space in itself, but rather acts that use space to unbracket or visibilize inequalities or to construct arenas based on alternative forms of bracketing.

Parrhesia: notes on the public sphere, power and death

Yesterday I reread Foucault's lectures on parrhesia (collected in Fearless Speech, a booklet published by semiotext(e) which is also available  here under the name "Discourse and Truth"). Rereading them I was struck by the penetrating light they throw on issues such as free speech, public speech and the public sphere in today's world.

Parrhesia means to tell the truth, or literally "to say everything". In particular, it means speaking truth in the face of power, even at the risk of your own life."Someone is said to use parrhesia and merits consideration as a parrhesiastes only if there is a risk or danger for him or her in telling the truth" (Foucault 2001:15f). Parrhesia usually comes from below and is directed to those above. In Hellenistic times the parrhesiastes, or truth-speaker, was  a person who spoke the truth to the sovereign. To be sure, the use of free speech in the agora of Athenian democracy was also referred to as parrhesia, but the imagery informing Foucault's discussion seems Hellenistic rather than Athenian. In any case, the Athenian agora was hardly a space where speeking was without risk. As Arendt states in In The Human Condition, it was a place where "courage and even boldness" was needed for public speech (Arendt 1958:186).

Speaking truth in the face of power – who can help thinking that this sounds so much like Foucault? Especially in its late, Hellenistic version, the parrhesiast is also someone who appears fundamentally alone, left to his own devices in the confines of the sovereign's court and without help from any well-intentioned public sphere prepared to listen to reason.

Using parrhesia as a model for public speech may sound outrageous. Aren't we all today - at least in so-called democracies - free to speak of whatever we like without having to fear reprisals? However, the attitude of speaking truth even when you risk your own life is not so divorced from our understanding of the public and of public speech as we might think at first. One implication of reading parrhesia as a model of public speech is that making something public would be tantamount to declaring: "I know that speaking here might get me killed. Therefore, I speak only because I have already put myself in the position of someone who is dead. I am dead to my status and to the norms and obligations that define my place in society and bind me to it. I therefore speak as a person who has left society, as an outsider, or as a ghost".

The public, I would suggest, arises when we speak from the vantage-point of the dead. We might even go a step further and risk a definition of the place or standpoint from which public speech becomes possible. This space is a liminal space or no-man's-land. We might also call it a sacred space, because sacrality has usually been considered a property of spaces where the voices of the dead can be heard. With Amino Yoshihiko we can say that it is characterized by muen since it is a place in which we must behave as if our relations with the secular world had been severed.

Foucault's parrhesiast par excellence is Socrates. Apart from him, perhaps the court jester is the most famous figure of the parrhesiast in western tradition. In Japan, a similar role was played by children, whose “truths” according to Amino were tolerated since they were considered apart from humanity, sacred or, in a sense, dead. Foucault is quite right in seeing parrhesia as an important line in the genealogy of criticism. In Christianity it is picked up not only in the form of confessions, but also in the idolization of martyrdom. In the self-immolation practices that have become an established protest method all over the world truth is again linked to death or the readiness to die.

Parrhesia? (H. C. Andersen, The Emperor's New Clothes, illustration by A. Rackham)

Just as truth is linked to death, it is also linked to ghosts. In literature, the fear of ghosts often seems to be linked to their ability of speaking the truth. Take the example of the ghosts visiting Richard III in Shakespeare's play: he fears them because they are the only ones who know the truth and can speak it.

In the Japanese Nô dramas, the standard pattern revolves around ghosts who tell the truth and by doing so finally become able to achieve liberation. Typically, a wanderer (the waki) encounters a strange person (the shite) who starts to tell a story about a tragic event ending in death. The shite then changes shape, becoming a terrifying demon who declares himself to be the story's tragic protagonist, now a ghost who is unable to leave earthy existence because of his lingering passions and desire for revenge. The film Seppuku (directed by Kobayashi Masaki, 1962) follows a basically similar pattern. The first half corresponds to the part of the Nô drama in which the background is recapitulated by the shite (here the hero played by Nakadai Tatsuya), who hasn't yet revealed his true nature. Then the crucial unmasking takes place and he transforms himself symbolically into the "ghost" of Motobe who confronts the assembled retainers with the truth, achieving a spectacular and bloody vengeance before finally succumbing to a "second" and final death. The film, by the way, is a masterpiece. The music is wonderful, composed for the biwa (or Japanese lute) by Takemitsu Tôru.

Nakadai Tatsuya in Seppuku (dir. Kobayashi Masaki 1962)

Perhaps it's not so strange that the early medieval "publics" in Japanese history were also places linked to death. The ikki (egalitarian leagues formed for military purposes) were formed by drinking "divine water" symbolizing the cutting of ties to the secular world. The rengakai (poetry gatherings), which were well-known for their egalitarian character, originated in poetry meetings held below blossoming cherry trees (hana no moto renga). Presided over by itinerant priests, these meetings would be attended by commoners as well as warriors or even retired emperors, all hiding or "bracketing" their secular identity behind straw hats or veils. These places, as the historian Matsuoka Shinpei points out, had the quality of muen. Cherry trees were thought to be passage-ways between the living and the dead, or even points of entry to the land of the dead which was thought to be located beneath them. Flower-viewing parties as well as these poetry gatherings in turn went back to the even older tradition of “Yasuraihana”, a celebration involving dancing and playing music that was a call for the flowers to stop falling and at the same time a pacification of dead souls that could bring disease.

To return to public speech, it goes without saying that holding up parrhesia as a model of public speech carries with it the risk of idealization. Foucault points out that, early on in Greek thought, doubts appeared concerning the negative aspects of parrhesia - is everybody entitled to use it, or should it be limited to people of a certain quality or education; and how about the possibility of parrhesiasts being mistaken about the truth (Foucault 2001:72)? Furthermore, parrhesia also poses the problem, from the parrhesiast's own point of view, of its limited efficacy. No matter how much the parrhesiast might hope that "dying" to the material circumstances that tie him or her down to a particular place in society will enable the voice to travel freely and reach the ears of everybody, in real life that voice may well be smothered. Nothing says that people will listen even if the parrhesiast forfeits his or her life. If you want a public, it’s not enough with courage and free speech. There must be people who can hear you, and who are willing to listen. And you must be willing to listen to them.

Using Habermas' expression, we could say that there can be no public speech without a public sphere. Still, Foucault does elucidate a fundamental dimension of that public sphere, namely the operation of bracketing. To participate in the public sphere you need to bracket your everyday dependencies, power-relations and status in real life. This is an aspect stressed by many of the theorists of the public sphere or public realm. Habermas points out how important it was for the formation of the early bourgeois public sphere that discussions could be conducted in the coffeehouses and salons without regard for rank or status. Arendt too stresses that bracketing, or "play-acting" is necessary in public in order to create arenas where all participants can participate as peers of equals. Speaking about the Greek isonomy (equality), she writes:

Isonomy guaranteed... equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature... not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which... would make them equal. Equality existed only in this specifically political realm, where men met one another as citizens and not as private persons. (Arendt 1977:21)

Bracketing is of course only a temporary operation. Once deliberation is over, the game of tolerance will end. What Foucault adds to the discussion of bracketing is again related to death and risk-taking: remember that when you leave the agora, you are back in the web of dependencies again, and then you might have to run for your life!  

For unlike isonomia (the equality of all citizens in front of the law) and isegoria (the legal right given to everyone to speak his or her own opinion), parrhesia was not clearly defined in institutional terms. There was no law, for example, protecting the parrhesiastes from potential retaliation or punishment for what he or she said. (Foucault 2001:72)

A striking image of the risks awaiting the parrhesiast once he or she has stopped speaking might be found in Zhang Yimou's film Hero (2002). This is a film that revolves around the dialogue between the emperor Shi Huang-di and the would-be assasin in which truth is finally disclosed. This dialogue, which takes place in the dark and totally empty courtroom of the emperor, can be seen as a compressed public sphere à deux in which deliberation drives the narrative forwards towards a gradual revelation of truth. Like all public spheres, it has the semblance of peace. Speech rather than violence becomes the centre of action, a fact epitomized by the assasin's decision not to kill the emperor. As he finally leaves the courtroom and descends the gigantic stairs down to the palace gate, he is outside the sacred circle of speech and ready to be sacrificed. The film ends with his death as he is nailed to the closed palace gate by a rain of arrows. What was bracketed is un-bracketed.

Public sphere (Hero, dir. Zhang Yimou, 2002)

That unbracketing must take place once speech is over has, of course, not been ignored in liberal political thought. Already Kant made the distinction between public speech, where one was free to make public use of one's reason, and activities in mundane life outside the public, where one had to "obey". What was needed to protect the speaker and facilitate the use of public speech was thus, firstly, the establishment of a "civil" public culture in which words would not be met by violence, and, secondly, to find institutional mechanisms for counteracting the unequal distribution of power (through checks and balances, procedures for anonymous voting, and so on). Already Athenian democracy came up with ways to prevent the centralization of power, such as lottery and anonymous voting (ostracism), that protected citizens from the danger of having to expose themselves publicly.

What distinguishes Foucault from liberal political thinking is his reluctance to rely on either on the presumed civility of modern publics or on institutionalized mechanisms for counteracting power. Like the parrhesiast, he clings to the "truth" carried forward by the word, by public criticism, even as he sees through the power relations operating through the public. His stance is therefore characterized by a very curious ambivalence in regard to public speech, which is on the one hand the carrier of explosive "truths", but on the other hand lacks the medium that would be required for these truths to be transmitted properly, namely a well-functioning public sphere. Lacking a medium in which truth can survive in disembodied form, it must take refuge in the body of the person who knows the truth. Parrhesia remains relevant to us today, because - as Foucault points out - that truth insists on being spoken, even at the cost of putting the body at risk. A paradoxical result of truth's embodiment is that the (potentially) dead body also becomes the logical position from which truth must be uttered.

Of course, I am not claiming that Foucault is trying to apply the idea of parrhesia directly to today's situation. What he claims is merely that it forms an important part of the roots of the "critical" tradition in Western philosophy - a tradition to which Foucault can surely be counted:

And I would say that the problematization of truth which characterizes both the end of Presocratic philosophy and the beginning of the kind of philosophy which is still ours today, this problematization of truth has two sides, two major aspects. One side is concerned with insuring that the process of reasoning is correct in determining whether a statement is true (or concern itself with our ability to gain access to the truth). And the other side is concerned with the question: what is the importance for the individual and for the society of telling the truth, of knowing the truth, of having people who tell the truth, as well as knowing how to recognize them. With that side which is concerned with determining how to insure that a statement is true we have the roots of the great tradition in Western philosophy which I would like to call the "analytics of truth". And on the other side, concerned with the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the "critical" tradition in the West. And here you will recognize one of my targets in this seminar, namely, to construct a genealogy of the critical attitude in the Western philosophy.

In addition, nothing stops us from trying to recognize parrhesia as a theme of continued centrality even in today's world. The best and most liberating kind of protest often has the quality of parrhesia. We find it in the gays or lesbians who decide to come out in public. We find it in social movements, especially in their early stages when people decide that they must speak up. We find it in writers and intellectuals too, at least in those who are ready to face unemployment and risk their social standing. We find it in Mrs Poyser, when she finally decides she's had enough and, after years of humiliation, erupts in protest and gives her landlord a piece of her mind (see the lovely description in Scott 1990:6ff). The public of such courageous, decent people is also a liminal space, a space in which they have no longer anything on which to rely but themselves.

Walter Benjamin describes how, in moments of revolutionary upheaval, the dead will come to join the struggle. No wonder, once you stop trying to survive, you can speak freely. Your companions are now the dead, the comrades of the past who have returned to join you again to help you build a better future.


References

Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, Hannah (1973) On Revolution, London: Faber and faber.

Foucault, Michel (2001) Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson, Los Angeles: semiotext(e).

Matsuoka, Shinpei (2004) Utage no shintai – Basara kara Zeami e (The Body of the Banquet: From Basara to Zeami), Iwanami shoten.

Scott, James (1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance, New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Ikegami Eiko and aesthetic publics in Tokugawa Japan

I've recently been writing a piece (forthcoming in Japanese Studies) on how the classical conceptions of a public sphere or public realm in Habermas and Arendt have been challenged by conceptions put forth by Amino Yoshihiko and other historians as well as by activists in the homeless movmement in Japan. Against those who claim that nothing corresponding to a "Western" notion of the public exists in Japanese history, these historians and activists argue that vigorous and powerful public realms existed in pre-modern Japan, especially in the medieval era before the establishment of the repressive Tokugawa shogunate. What enables them to put forth this argument is that they reconceptualize the idea of the public. Instead of emphasizing speech and deliberation as Habermas and Arendt, a central feature of their idea of the public is what Amino calls muen (no-relation) - a quality that enables people to suspend the status, identities and ties of the surrounding secular world and to create egalitarian arenas open to marginal groups.

These historians succeed in locating strong domestic "publics" in medieval Japan. Striking examples include the horizontal associations of the ikki leagues, the egalitarianism of renga gatherings, and the suspension of secular identities at places associated with the sacred. But they usually don't try to establish any continuity between them and contemporary publics. Instead they tend to portray the Tokugawa era (1600-1868) as an era in which these domestic roots of the public were repressed and whithered away.

It is therefore interesting to find a work that focuses precisely on the Japanese "aesthetic publics" in the Tokugawa era and how they developed. Ikegami Eiko's work Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (2005) promises to fill in the gap between the medievalists' account of the premodern publics based on muen and the establishment of the modern nation-state Japan after the 1868 Meiji Restoration. The book is also interesting since it makes fruitful use of the pioneering work of Amino and other historians who have followed in his footsteps, such as Matsuoka Shinpei or Katsumata Shizuo, but without sharing their pessimistic outlook on Tokugawa period society.

While admitting that the Tokugawa shogunate was repressive, she argues that Tokugawa society  witnessed a "network revolution" that went hand in hand with a popularization of aesthetic knowledge and civility. It thereby created an equivalent to the horizontal civic associations in European societies. In opposition to those who lament the lack of a genuine public sphere in Japan, she argues that the proliferation of aesthetics publics in this era helped form arenas of freedom from state control where people of various background could associate on equal footing, engaging in free communication characterized by liveliness, sensuality and laughter. ”The stereotype of pre-modern Japanese as people as submissive doormats trodden beneath the heels of militaristic despots fails to convey the vitality of Japanese communicative activities in this period – not to mention modern Japanese cultural practices” (Ikegami 2005:12).

There is much to appreciate in Ikegami's book. Focusing on the relation between art and politics, she provides an interesting and engaging history of Japanese art and aesthetics that gives due attention to its social context. On the way she also delivers an original argument about the origins of the contemporary nationalism that takes pride in Japan as a land of refined beauty and politeness. Here I won’t say much about these matters, where I think she does an excellent job. Instead I will focus on what I think is the main theoretical argument of the book, namely her intervention into the debate of whether anything like the the ”public sphere” existed in Japanese history before Westernization. Unfortunately, it is here that I find the book to be weakest.

The main idea, if I understand Ikegami correctly, is that the proliferation of aesthetic publics shouldn't be viewed simply as an indication of a lack of freedom or of people's wish to escape the world of politics. While it is true that Tokugawa authorities didn't tolerate open challenges to their power, she shows that this picture needs to be balanced against the abundance of freedom in the non-political realm. Even though the "official" realm was structured around vertically or hierarchically organized relations, they coexisted with extensive non-political "inofficial" areas in which horizontal associations proliferated. While the "dominant public" - represented by the so-called kôgi of the shogunate - stressed the maintenance of existing hierarchical relations, ”wide enclaves of free discursive spheres” existed outside this public which authorities had neither the capabilities for nor much interest in controlling.


From medieval times to the Tokugawa era 

The best way to follow her argument is to start with medieval Japan, when the central government was weak and strong horizontal associations emerged in the realm of art as well as in politics. Relying on the research of historians like Amino or Matsuoka, she illustrates the vigor of these associations with za (seated) arts. For instance, linked verse (renga) gatherings under cherry blossoms (hana no moto renga) were liminal events thought to be linked to the netherworld. In accordance with the principle of muen, people from various social backgrounds - from commoners to retired emperors - could participate in these poetry sessions without regard for status. Secular ties were suspended in the felt proximity to the sacred. An illustration of the radical, wild and unbounded nature of this freedom from vertical orders was the popularity of frenzied dancing, thought to be animated by sacred madness (kuruu). This freedom also took political form, as in the horizontal ikki alliances proliferating in the latter half of the Middle Ages, alliances that were often linked socially to preexisting linked-poetry circles.

"Hanami takagari zu" (Unkoku Tôgan, late 16th century): Dance for quieting the blossoms (yasuraihana)

The structure of the field of publics changed drastically with the strengthening of central power during the Tokugawa shogunate. Vertical relations now came to dominate the official public realm. While artistic pursuits like jôruri, poetry, threatre, music, calligraphy, painting, ikebana, bonsai, tea, or fashion grew in popularity, they differed in many respects from their medieval predecessors, becoming more controlled, secular and less subjected to "the spirit of magic" (ibid 137f). The decisive difference was that art was now forced to remain in the non-political realm. ”The Tokugawa aesthetic publics were able to build on the remnants of the medieval za spirit only by confining themselves to the interior realm of watakushi (the private) and accepting the official boundaries set for them by the state” (ibid 127). Although horizontal associations continued to exist, they were now confined to the realm of the non-political aesthetic publics. Ikki become outlawed and the word takes on a new meaning, starting to signify peasant revolt.

Shijô kawara yûrakuzu (early 17th century)

Another striking difference compared to medieval times was the reliance of Tokugawa aesthetic publics on the market. The widespread enthusiasm for learning the arts was fuelled by commercialization. Performing artists and poets able to make a living as teachers rather than having to rely on feudal patrons. Paid agents were used to mobilize amateur artists and poets. Knowledge about the arts was spread through the commercial press, and poetry contests were held with thousands of people from all over the country sending in contributions. Economic development was also important, along with the spread of literacy, in attracting various teachers and masters to rural areas. Ikegami quotes a report by a critical official in the Kantô area from 1826:

Performing artists of various types go out from Edo to visit different areas in the Kantô and generally wander around. These people include masterless samurai, Confucian scholars, painters and calligraphers, haikai masters, ikebana teachers, and masters of igo or shôgi games. They organize meetings, get permits from the local village officials, and earn good money from wealthy people in the area, and encourage luxurious spending. As a result, the peasants get lazy and neglect farming because of their bad influece. (quoted in Ikegami 2005: 206)

While some aesthetic publics were structured hierarchically, as in those arts that relied on the monopoly of certified "houses" (the iemoto system), horizontal loose networks remained vigorous in arts such as haikai-circles. Ikegami discusses the example of Igarashi Hamomo, a woman poet who travelled around to participate in linked-verse gatherings, relying on the hospitality of local members of haikai networks, locating other women poets and helping them organize women-only groups. Referring to haikai as ”network poetry”, she characterizes it as marked by border-crossing, jokes, subversion, travel.

Aesthetic public: the audience of an early kabuki play including two foreigners (Kabuki zukan, ca 1605)

Although these aesthetic enclave publics differed from their medieval predecessors, Ikegami stills sees them as functioning along the lines of the principle of muen. They were enclaves where "people could temporarily suspend the application of feudal norms" and where connections could be formed between people from various social backgrounds (ibid 4). People engaged simply as poets or artists, having decoupled from preexisting identities in the ”official” order. Being relatively egalitarian, these publics included bohemian samurai, rich merchants, village chiefs, artisans, small shopkeepers, and she even mentions fishermen who read poetry in their boats.

With time, she argues, the shell of the formal identities in the Tokugawa order became even more hollow:

Once the aesthetic publics were accepted as important components of the private life in Tokugawa Japan, they quietly produced individuals who considered their aesthetic enclave identities to be more profoundly rooted to their true selves than were their feudal categorical identities. (ibid. 43)

Here Ikegami seems to suggest that the Tokugawa order with its multiplicity of enclaves led to the construction of apolitical or private man as the true man. She thus supplies the social background to an important fact in the history of ideas recorded by Maruyama Masao, namely that Tokugawa scholars like Ogyû Sorai for the first time in Japanese history started to distinguish between a public realm ruled by the Tokugawa order and a private realm where people were free to engage in self-cultivation.

The ostensibly non-political aesthetic publics were not entirely decoupled from political empowerment. One example discussed by Ikegami is Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841), a painter from a samurai family who recorded in his diary the political discussions he participated in during his travels. Travels like that, she writes, provided occasions for learning about political realities, ”an education in political awareness”. Aesthetic publics, then, clearly had the potential to be transformed into political publics:

The pattern of socialization described in the writings of Kazan challenges the prevailing notion that pre-modern non-Western societies such as Tokugawa Japan did not develop spheres of critical discourse regarding political matters. [...] [L]ate Tokugawa Japan began to produce larger numbers of people with a critical political consciousness. This consciousness in turn was supported by numerous spheres of voluntary socialization that made use of the established logic of aesthetic enclave publics. (ibid. 201).

Such travels also contributed to the establishment of networks between villages, traditionally the most powerful base for popular protest. Regions with a high density of haikai networks also had a high level of grassroots participation in political mobilization around the Meiji Restoration (ibid 207). The spread of kokugaku, yonaoshi movements and the ”freedom and people’s rights” movement all benefitted from the networks of the haikai circles (ibid 213-218). Ikegami suggests that those networks also laid the groundwork to such remarkable local initiatives as the 1881 "Itsukaichi constitution" draft. An even more striking example is the 1884 Chichibu Rebellion (also known as the Konmintô Rebellion or Poor People’s Party Rebellion) which also sprung from local haikai circles. Fascinating material discovered by the historian Moriyama Gunjirô shows how the uprising had been preceded by poetry sessions dedicated to Sakura Sôgorô in Nagaru village.

Apparently, just as the medieval ikki horizontal alliances often had linked-verse sessions before their military actions, peasants in this community had two poetry-making sessions to solidify their dedication to their project of protest. (ibid. 219)

She also suggest that prayers to Sakura would have been understood as prayers to cherry blossoms (sakura), the old symbol of the sphere of muen (ibid 219).

"Eejanaika" dancing on the eve of the Meiji Restoration

The definition of publics

My first critical comment concerns Ikegami's definition of the word "public". She defines publics as ”communicative sites that emerge at the points of connection among social and/or cognitive networks” (Ikegami 2005:7). What I find noteworthy here is that she defines the public in terms of a relation between "networks" - publics are where networks "meet and intersect" (ibid 24), or where ”the actions of switching/connecting and decoupling of networks take place” (ibid 48). Networks are thus central to her definition. Problematically, however, I cannot see that she really clarifies what a network is. In her discussion of the concept of network she states simply that they consist not only of concrete interpersonal ties but also cognitive associational maps perceived in the form of narrative stories, and that the term network might be preferable as a substitute to more limited terms like social relations, social structure and values and norms (ibid 46f). This amounts, in my view, to saying that anything in society or culture can be a network. Using a wide concept of network is not bad per se, but an unfortunate consequence is that any social or cultural meeting-point can viewed as a "public" according to her definition, which strikes me as far too wide and imprecise.

This lack of precision is problematical in relation to the following issues:

1) It becomes hard to see how she delineates what she calls the "aesthetic publics". Are these publics not themselves better understood as networks of people with shared interests, rather than as spheres where networks "intersect"? Her accounts of these various publics suggest very clearly, I think, that the former option is correct. If she denies this, seeing them as nothing but spheres for the intersection of networks, then where is the substance that might justify labelling them as "aesthetic"? One might of course also try claiming that both options can be correct at the same time, but then the distinction between public and network collapses.

2) A second problem concerns the old problem of the relation between the public and community. It has long been claimed - by people like Arendt, Richard Sennett, Lyn Lofland, Karatani Kôjin and many more - that publics are social spaces where one "meets the stranger", i.e. a person who is not part of one's own community. By contrast, Ikegami appears to be claiming that publics are rather where one meets a person who is not part of one's own network. But what is the additional benefit introduced by replacing the word community by the word network? Presumably, a network is more open and not as tightly structured as a community. But if networks are per definition open, then the entire idea of speaking of connections between separate networks starts to look shaky. If a network has a connection to another, won't they be part of the same network? And if that is so, then how do we locate the sphere where networks "intersect"?

3) A third problem with the definition is that networks can be connected in secret. If that is so, does it really make sense to define that meeting as ”public”?

4) A final problem appears when she writes that ”identity, culture , and meanings as such are ’emergent properties’ arising from the interplay of human subjectivity in actors involved in network relationships at the communicative sites of publics” (Ikegami 2005:5). This is a very strong claim, because it implies that culture, identity etc cannot arise within networks, or in, say, local or bounded communities. Is that really true?


Japanese aesthetic publics and the Western "public sphere"

She repeatedly contrasts her own approach to that of Habermas. However, she does so in a curiously careless way, almost as if she hadn’t read him. This is a pity, because the result is that she constructs an artificial wall between the aesthetic publics of Tokugawa Japan and the bourgeois public sphere described by him, and that she fails to see the many similarities between the two conceptions.

Let us look at some of the criticism she directs against Habermas. Firstly, she claims that the public is necessarily plural, while he defines it as ”an integrated and unified realm”. This seems unfair, since Habermas is quite explicit in his book that he is not going to treat all public spheres, only the bourgeois one. Secondly, against the "normative" views of the public in Habermas and Nancy Fraser, she emphasizes that ”the field of multiple publics is always charged with the dynamic of power” (ibid. 58).

The efficacy of the message that flows from communicative actions is also influenced by the way in which that public is positioned in the field of multiple publics. Consequently, the concept of the multiplicity of publics brings us to another important question: If publics are necessarily multiple, what are the interrelations between them? [...] Habermas’ historically informed analysis of the public sphere in the West is in fact a case study of this hegemonic process in which one category of the liberal bouregois public sphere gained normative authority in the West. (ibid. 59)

This is a reasonable statement, but surely it is ludicrous to state that Habermas or Fraser are neglecting power relations between the various publics. Habermas himself would quite willingly agree to the fact that his analysis is a case study how the bourgois public sphere was shaped and reshaped by historical struggles in Europe (see his own comment in The Structural Transformation, 1989:xvii.).

What I find perhaps most regrettable is Ikegami's refusal to engage with the bourgeois "literary publics" (literarische Öffentlichkeiten), which Habermas sees as the seedbeds of the openly political bourgeois public sphere that later developed. Referring to the aesthetic publics of Tokugawa Japan, she writes:

Publics of this nature – popular, decentralized, and intuitive – constitute the diametrical opposite of Habermas’ model of the unitary, bourgeois, and rational public sphere of late eighteenth century Europe. (ibid. 381)

They might have been the opposite of the political bourgeois public sphere, but where they really so different from the literary publics? Just as she neglects the literary publics, she also neglects Reinhart Koselleck's discussion of the role of the masonic lodges in the 18th century – despite the fact that here we have a situation in Europe which is strikingly similar to the situation in Tokugawa Japan. In both cases repression meant that publics could only take the form of enclaves since open political dissent was not tolerated within the dominant public.

The difference might be that the enclaves in Europe - whether in the shape of literary salons or masonic lodges - permitted a budding political discourse, which later entered the wider public and helped spark revolutions. But as Ikegami herself notes, this is only a difference in degree, not in kind. The critical discourses recorded by Kazan during his poetic journey, the spread of kokugaku ideology or the formation of rebellions on the basis of haikai networks testify that the transformation of aesthetic publics into political one was well on its way by the late Tokugawa period. She traces the development of the aesthetic publics in Japan up to a point where they seem about to take the leap and reclaim the revolutionary energies they once possessed in medieval times. Unfortunately, her theoretical framework - which posits a rather sterile opposition between the Japanese and European trajectories - is a hindrance in order to understand the dynamics of that process. Rather than simply contrasting Japanese aesthetic publics to the "Western" or Habermasian political public sphere, it would surely have been interesting and fruitful to look also for similarities, especially through a comparison between the aesthetic publics in Japan and the literary publics in Europe.


The question of power

Ikegami makes an important point when she writes that ”the structure of the institutional field of publics in a society is profoundly influenced by the organizational structure of the state” (Ikegami 2005:63). However, I wonder if she goes far enough in clarifying the role of the state.

She makes it perfectly clear that the fact that the Tokugawa state was a repressive state intolerant of political dissent was a crucial factor behind the shape the Tokugawa aesthetic publics assumed. State power was decisive in curtailing the freedom of the earlier medieval publics which had often been very political and oppositional in relation to various powerholders.

However, at the same time she repeatedly emphasizes how the Tokugawa state relied on ”indirect rule”, which in practice meant that it delegated control. This, in combination with the ”Tokugawa network revolution”, which occurred as communicative networks expanded in scale, density and complexity, meant that the state was unable to survey or control the myriad of publics very efficiently.

The resulting picture of the Tokugawa state is not as clear as one could have wished. If the complexity of the networks meant that the state lost control, why were the aesthetic publics so afraid of venturing into the realm of politics? Why was the state able to retain efficient control in the realm of the political public sphere despite its inability to control the proliferating networks? Was there anything that forced the aesthetic publics to be more careful about political speech than enclave publics in Europe, such as the masonic lodges? Although Ikegami's text contains some clues to these questions - spies and the risk for detection, the fear of gruesome punishments, and processes of identity formation that lead to the idea of the non-political human being as the "true" human being - the picture still contains many blanks. Fear of detection and punishment has existed in many societies. Surely, there must have been ways of discussing politics in furtive ways in the networks of the aesthetic publics. How else could rebellions suddenly spring from them? Without clarifying that, the mapping of communication in these publics remains incomplete.



The public as muen or as political deliberation?

As I mentioned in the beginning, I am interested in how the classical formulations of the "public" in Habermas and Arendt are challenged by alternative conceptions of the public in which muen is central. Ikegami's book must surely be seen as a contribution belonging to the latter camp. At the same time, she clearly sees the "aesthetic publics" of the Tokugawa era as operating in a different fashion from the medieval publics analyzed by Amino. She also appears to see important lines of continuity between the Tokugawa publics and present-day Japan - for instance, the preference for tacit modes of communication, the ideology of "Japan" as a country of beauty and politeness, and perhaps also the reluctance to engage in explicit political discourse. Although her book doesn't deal with modern Japan, surely many readers will find it remarkably much like today’s Japan when she writes that in the Tokugawa era "an intensely controlled and hierarchically ordered formal society” coexisted with ”the relaxed and sensual dimension of popular culture” (Ikegami 2005:130).

Does this mean that she views muen as central to the way publics operate in contemporary Japan as well? This question is not so easy to answer. In fact, I believe her book can be read in two quite different ways.

On the one hand, many passages suggest that she sees a long-lived tradition of public life centered on muen as something distinctly Japanese. Such a conception of history appears to lie behind her repeatedly stated contrast betwen the Japanese and European trajectories, with the former being characterized by aesthetic publics operating with sensual and tacit modes of communication and the latter by rational, bourgeois publics of the Habermasian kind.

But on the other hand, her book can also be read as a story of discontinuities. The principle of muen barely managed to survive in the Tokugawa era by being confined to aesthetic "enclave publics", where it was "civilized" and lost its political function. As the Tokugawa order started to crack up and totter, these enclave publics again took on a political role, becoming the birthbed of open rebellion. As I have suggested, this reading foregrounds the similarities to the European patterns - especially to the "literary publics" and their politicization - rather than the differences. Although the principle of muen might still have animated these rebellions, we now see much more of rational political deliberation - for instance in the fervor of the "movement for freedom and people's rights" with their many speeches and pamphlets, the organization of political parties and the drafting of constitutions in villages.

I myself prefer the latter reading, for reasons I've stated above. A consequence of that, however, is that it becomes problematical to suggest any unbroken continuities between the Tokugawa era and today. Japan today is certainly to a great extent apolitical and consumerist - a land of play, shopping, amusement, aesthetics and subcultures. But rather than seeing this as a legacy of Tokugawa society, it is better to view it as a product of shifting historical circumstances in which important factors have been the ability of elites to placate social unrest through economic development and the fact that attempts to challenge power - through the "movement for freedom and people's rights" and the plethora of other movements in prewar and postwar Japan - have repeatedly run aground and produced a sense of defeat.

To summarize, I believe Ikegami vacillates between two standpoints. On the one hand, she claims that Tokugawa aesthetic publics were fundamentally different from the Western political, deliberative publics. On the other hand, her account suggests that they potentially represent something similar to the Western public, since political dissent and opposition actually grew out of the renga and haikai networks, thus following a similar development as the one Habermas traces from the literary to the political publics. This defence, however, tends to erase or weaken her argument that there is something fundamentally different between Japanese and Western notions of the public.


Final words

My criticism is not meant to imply any rejection of the book, which I read with much pleasure. Neither do I think that enclave publics are irrelevant today. They partake of the ambiguity that Adorno and Marcuse detected in the "affirmative character" of art, namely that art both prefigures utopia and sanctifies the status quo. By creating enclaves of substitute freedom, aesthetic publics genuinely help people lead happier lives, sustain their sense of self-worth and fulfillment, and to endure a situation in which they have been made politically powerless.

But does this mean that there is no need for protest or politics, as long as we have enclaves to which we can escape? Near the end Ikegami acknowledges ”certain disquieting features of this proto-modern heritage”, namely the unsolved problem of political discourse. The problem, she states, appears ”when the traditional Japanese non-discursive modes of communication are used outside their proper domains” in which case ”they may serve as a pretext to discourage the linguistic articulation of critical discourse” (Ikegami 2005:381). Rather than reading her simplistically as a defender of the freedom of the aesthetic publics, it makes more sense to read her as saying that they fulfill a legitimate and important role next to the political ones. There are times when we need to save what can be saved and take shelter, but there are also times when we become impatient and desire to venture outside to see the blue sky, and even times when we are forced out of the shelters since they are under attack and about to collapse. Isn't what is happening today, in an increasingly harsh economic climate and increasing concern with surveillance and security, that governments far stronger than the Tokugawa shogunate are destroying the enclaves of the apolitical aesthetes, except for the rich and powerful? How long can the subculture otaku, or the fashion-conscious freeter boys and girls, react to this destruction by gliding away to the next enclave, hoping to find his or her true self there, pretending that protest and the political public don’t matter?

Finally, let me add that there might be something misleading about the opposition between aesthetic and political publics. Nothing says one must abandon art to express oneself politically. There is critical potential in art. But it blossoms only when it leaves the realm of pure art, and allows itself to express whatever it wants to express, including politics.


Ikegami, Eiko (2005) Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Did the public sphere develop out of free space? Notes on Hetherington and Koselleck

A few notes about Kevin Hetherington's 1997 book The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering and Reinhart Koselleck's old classic Critique and Crisis: The Pathogenesis of the Enlightenment (published in German already in 1959) - two books that both treat the Enlightenment and the emerging public sphere in relation to space. 

The central concept of Hetherington's book is that of heterotopia. This is defined as "spaces of alternate ordering". He explains the term by referring to Louis Marin’s concept of utopia. ”Marin’s concern is not with utopia as such, imaginary perfect societies, but with the spatial play that is involved in imagining and trying to create these perfect worlds” (Hetherington 1997:viii). Hetherington’s interest is in this spatial play, or ”utopics”, which takes place in the spaces of modern society, not separated from it or beyond it. Such places are what he calls heterotopias. As examples, he focuses on the Palais Royale, masonic lodges, and early factories.

Shops in the galerie du Palais Royale 1640 (Abraham Bosse)

In particular, his discussion of the Palais Royale is a wonderful example, which vividly conveys the sense of heterotopia with its markets, bazaars, shops, gardens, arcades, bookstores, brothels and coffee-houses. It combined the socially central with the socially marginal; respectability coexisted with the amoral or subversive. Although in itself hardly a model of a new society, it expressed a simultaneously hedonistic and political "utopics" which Hetherington sums up in three words: liberty, equality, and fraternity (ibid 19). Based on this discussion, he criticizes Richard Sennett and Jürgen Habermas, and their "public sphere based on the utopia of reason and civility". The public sphere was never just a républic des lettres, as he claims that Habermas depicts it. What one finds in the Palais Royale is ”not only the mobilization of reason... but also the mobilization of emotion and desire, of the more expressive aspects of social life that have to do with personal freedom, from the clandestinely sexual to the overtly political” (ibid. 13). Hetherington seems to be using the idea of heterotopia here to redefine the public sphere in a manner somewhat similar to what Paul Gilroy does with his idea of the "Black Atlantic". Both focus on in-between spaces in order to detect partially hidden public spheres that break with the model of textuality and emphasize bodily or sensual aspects - as in black music with its "saying, screaming, shouting and singing", as Gilroy puts it.

Hetherington argues that heterotopias are not to be romanticized as places of resistance, counter-hegemonic empowerment, transgression or freedom as he claims that Henri Lefebvre, Rob Shields, Mikhail Bakhtin and Victor Turner tend to do (ibid. 21-35). Heterotopias are no perfect societies or orders; they are themselves processes of ”social ordering”. They generate their own codes, rules and relations of power. They only differ from mainstream society by the fact that these ordering processes are felt to be ”other”, different or inconguous in relation to the socialy sanctioned.

Here I need to add a critical comment. Hetherington's concise definition of heterotopia as alternate ordering is convenient and suggestive, but reducing everything to ordering seems unhelpful. Even if each heterotopic instance represents its own ordering, it often makes sense to speak of a higher or lower degree of aggregate order or disorder (=freedom, openness) in a setting or space. Aggregate disorder increases with the number of separate orderings that such a space contains. At least tendentially, that would seem to be the case in those situations that have been described as liminoid or carnivalesque, where no order is allowed to become dominant. These are situations in which the usually dominant orders are disrupted, suspended or relativized, and that is what creates the experience of freedom. Hetherington's three examples are not situated on the same level: factories and lodges are alternative spaces in which a single principle has become dominant and where it is hard to detect any of utopian "play". The Palais Royale, by contrast, appears like a much freer and stimulating place, precisely because it contained a mixture of orderings. It represented a space with high aggregate disorder. Similarly, moments of what Turner calls communitas are hard to describe as being just as ordered as everyday routine in a factory. Hetherington's criticism of people like Bakhtin or Turner thus seems unfair.

He returns to criticize Habermas again in his discussion of masonic lodges. In his view, Habermas fails to explain how the bourgeois individual is created who steps out into the public realm (ibid. 81f). Hetherington argues that the lodges played a crucial role in this formation. In this, he basically follows Koselleck, to whose work I will now turn.

Camilles Desmoulins at the Palais Royale, urging the masses to storm the Bastille.

Koselleck’s subject is the genesis of the Enlightenment. He quite boldly steps forward as a reactionary thinker in this book - clearly enamored of Hobbes and Schmitt, and a great detester of the Enlightenment thinkers, whom he sees as hypocritical forerunners of the massacres and tragedies of the 20th century. Put simply, his thesis is that the seeds of the Enlightenment were planted by the religious and civil wars of the 16th and 17th centuries - wars that broke out because people believed they could follow their “conscience” in public. The Absolutist state restored order by relegating that conscience to the private sphere. That step - rather than the later Enlightenment critique of church and superstition - was the decisive step towards secularization in Europe. The result of this privatization of conscience, however, was that the absolutist state had to appear as immoral in the eyes of the “private” citizens, as nothing but a neutral and rational executor of raison d’état, operating "without conscience": "now it was the monarch who was guilty from the start, in the measure of the citizen's innocence" (Koselleck 1988:50). Absolutism worked fine as long as the memory of the horrors of the religious wars were still fresh. Unfortunately, these memories soon faded and conscience started to pop up into the public realm again, this time calling itself the Enlightenment. At first, it had to take shelter under ostensibly apolitical pursuits, often in private arenas such as the Masonic lodges, salons or literary societies – places where participants could be “in secret free” (ibid. 75). Koselleck focuses almost all his attention on the lodges, thus conjuring up a rather unflattering portrait of the Enlightenment thinkers as steeped in secrecy and mysticism. Behind their criticism of Absolutism he detects the hypocritical conscience of people free from having to deal with the complexities of the real world, which it arrogantly subjected to its judgements. Their criticism was not only irresponsible but also totalitarian in its impatience with unreason. Its emergence in public triggered a new wave of “civil war”, this time under the name of Revolution.

Freemason initiation - an alternative ordering?

Koselleck's argument is provocative and, naturelly, invites criticism. Was the Absolutist state really so neutral? Is it true, as he seems to imply, that reason or conscience is necessarily divisive and therefore must be kept out of politics and the dirty work of ruling left to machiavellian princes? Koselleck seems to suggest that the only choice is between a despotic Leviathan that is neutral in regard to divisive religious or moral issues, and an unrestricted idolization of ”conscience” in public affairs (whether by religious sectarians or revolutionary zealots) that leads to civil war. Habermas would of course object: there is also the alternative of a civic culture in which citizens learn to respect each others’ good arguments. They participate jointly in ruling the secular state, expressing their “conscience” or religious beliefs in public language, but refraining from superimposing them on others (see his “Religion in the Public Sphere”, European Journal of Philosophy 14:1, 2006).

However, there are also points of interest in Koselleck's argument. One is the suggestive and, I think, fruitful idea that absolutism is established not because people believe in it but because they internalize and privatize their beliefs. Here one might compare to Maruyama Masao's argument about the role of Ogyû Sorai's thinking in Tokugawa Japan, a philosophy which is marked by the near absolutism of Tokugawa rule and in which the idea of privacy as a sphere of freedom appears for the first time in Japanese political thinking.

Even more interesting is the account of how the Enlightenment "bourgeois  public sphere" was born out of what we today would probably call "free spaces". In Koselleck's account this public sphere started out as a kind of underground space in need of secrecy and protection. It survived its fledgling years only by outwardly portraying itself as unpolitical. A crucial part of his argument is that even activities that are not overtly political can have an immense political significance. For instance, by eschewing politics in order to focus on moral perfection, Freemasonry paved the way for a moral absolutism that indirectly put existing politics in question, subordinating it to a moral standard alien to it. It thus put a logic in motion that ended up producing political conflicts of the kind it had started out by turning its back to. This strikes me a being rather similar to how "free spaces" today can have political significance despite seemingly only providing space for apolitical pursuits. For instance, what orthodox political activist may criticize as "merely cultural" forms of activism aiming at nothing but "having fun" can be a political challenge to mainstream society by fashioning a standard by which the dreariness of the latter can be judged. As Matsumoto Hajime (of the Amateur Riot in Tokyo) says, what matters is not to sacrifice outselves for the revolution, but to actualize a post-revolutionary world here and now, and attracting others by showing them how fun it is. Sometimes the term "prefigurative policitics" is used for that kind of activism. Certainly, there are problems with that notion (which I will return to some other day), but what strikes me as interesting is that Koselleck has such a clear eye for the potential political import of such politics.“The Masons have nothing to do with politics directly, but they live by a law which – if it prevails – makes an upheaval superfluous” (Koselleck 1988:84). No matter how one evaluates such a politics, one has to admit that it sounds surprisingly similar to what people like Matsumoto Hajime are saying today. Koselleck also helps throw some suggestive light on the problem about whether prefigurative politics might function as a mere safety-valve, as a harmless substitute for protest. His view is clearly that even groups that claim not to be striving for any revolution and that merely pursue alternative lifestyles can be dangerously subversive. Prefigurative politics  cannot thus be dismissed as a mere substitute for protest, since it can also be a precursor or catalyst of protest.

And to conclude? Hetherington and Koselleck both discuss how space plays crucial roles in the development of the public sphere. Hetherington, I feel, subsumes a little too much under his concept of heterotopia, making it difficult to see how the impulse of resistance and protest might grow out of the spaces he describes, which in his hands become little more than instances of ordering. Koselleck is more helpful in tracing the dynamics whereby the ostensibly apolitical gets political, despite the unfairness and rigidity of his argument and despite his love for Leviathan.


References

Hetherington, Kevin (1997) The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, London & New York: Routledge.

Koselleck, Reinhart (1988 [1959]) Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.