The city and the stars

Having recently read Arthur Clarke's The City and the Stars, I can't help but reflect on the strangeness of the world Clarke lets us inhabit in his books. Isn't it always a world on the verge of a great discovery? I'm thinking not only of this book, but also works like, say, Rama or 2001: A Space Odyssey. There's a sweet and thrilling sense of possibility that the universe just might take us on a fantastic voyage towards previously unimaginable power and knowledge, a sense of humanity just being about to pass a threshold that will unlock some marvellous evolution or possibility of limitless expanse. What we have here, I think, is a very peculiar atmosphere, one that needs to be understood in the context of the lingering belief in progress characteristic of the 20th century before the onset of postmodernism. At the same time, this is no ordinary trust in progress. It is, I would say, distinguished by two peculiarities that probably also need to be understood historically.

Firstly, another "strange" trait of Clarke's universe is that it lacks conflict. There are protagonists but not really any antagonists. HAL in 2001 might be terrifying, but is just a dysfunctioning machine with no malicious purpose. In the end it proves to be but a minor stumbling block on Bowman's triumphant evolutionary journey. Alien intelligences are never hostile. If anything, they are benevolent and ready to guide humanity to greater evolutionary heights. To evolve, however, human beings need to overcome their limitations in the form of superstitions and fears. If we just venture forth with courage, we'll discover how unfounded our fears are. In The City and the Stars, the protagonist Alvin discovers that the “invaders” are a myth, a false memory hindering humankind from venturing outside their isolation on earth and used to justify their fear of the universe. In 2001 humankind even gets the paternalistic guidance of these higher beings to steer itself onwards in evolution. What's so peculiar here is that Clarke's narrative, despite the absence of antagonists, still works as literature. Even without conflict, he somehow manages to make the reader want to go on reading.

Secondly, these books all circle around what can be termed the problem of unbalanced progress. Crudely put, it goes like this: while humanity has made enormous technological progress, it still lags behind morally and spiritually. This has resulted in the horrors of totalitarianism and the world wars and the madness of the cold war, and to survive on this planet we need to achieve spiritual development to restore balance. This is a lament that was very much in the air in the mid-20th century. It may very well have been the dominant idiom in which the criticism of technology was expressed in the decades before the onset of postmodernism. It seems to pop up almost simultaneously in a series of writers from the Frankfurt School to Lewis Mumford. In science fiction, we can see it in Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, where the "first" foundation with its technological mastery needs to unite with the mysterious and psychologically advanced "second" foundation in order to end the centuries of barbary. Unbalanced progress is also a dominant motif in Clarke. It is powerfully present in 2001, which quite explicitly presents a philosophy of history organized around humanity's two successive evolutionary leaps - each one triggered by a black monolith left behind by benevolent aliens - the fist of which triggers technological progress and second of which triggers a kind of spiritual evolution. In The City and the Stars, humanity only exists on two spots on earth: on the one hand the technologically superior Diaspar which is ruled by a computer and on the other hand the low-tech but spiritually evolved Lys where human beings communicate telepathically. The role of Alvin, the protagonist, is to be the mediator who brings them together.

Now, I'm going to leave this motif of unbalanced progress aside - I think it's quite evident in what ways it is rooted in a particular historical moment - and return to the curious lack of antagonism in Clarke's books. Combined with the belief in progress and the strange benevolence of aliens this yields what is easy to criticize as a highly ideological world view. What we see here is in fact the very same kind of ideology that imperialism used to justify itself. Imperialism has always described itself as benevolent, as bringing the blessings of a superior civilization to primitive peoples, as in fact lacking antagonism. In a way, the aliens of Clarke's 2001 and to a great extent also the extra-terrestrial empire of The City and Stars behaves exactly like the imperialist powers did according to their own ideological self-description. They didn't oppress or exploit anyone, they simply shared knowledge and guided those willing to learn onwards. In the same way, oppression and exploitation are missing in Clarke's universe. To use Karl Wittfogel's categories, we might say that the earth's position in relation to the advanced alien civilizations is like that of a "submargin" rather than a "margin". According to Wittfogel, the margin was the barbarous borderland of the empire and was often politically dominated by the latter, while the submargin was beyond the reach of the empire's might but still close enough to receive small glimpses of its civilization and learn from it if it chose to do so. In Clarke's novels, the earth is clearly a submargin - almost always a backwater, seemingly to insignificant for alien civilizations to actually bother much about.

What I'm suggesting here is that Clarke's novels - with their conspicuous foregrounding of the idea of progress and their strange lack of conflict - present us with a reconfiguration of motifs familiar to readers through the experience of imperialism. On the one hand, his novels assume the position of the imperialist: the air of being on the cusp of great discoveries, the sense of adventure and the drive to explore - all of this can well be read as an attempt to evoke the sense of wonder and novelty believed to have animated European colonialist ventures and conquests in early modernity. But on the other hand, it is as if Clarke cannot quite allow himself to affirm this ethos. After all, imperialism is bad, a continuation of the lopsided and catastrophic kind of progress we've seen in modernity so far. And so he effects a replacement: what awaits us out there among the stars is not primitive peoples for us to enslave and exploit, but - on the contrary - higher beings, far more wise and powerful than we, who can help us evolve further in a better and more balanced way, and with this latter move, he paradoxically places us in the position, not of the conquering imperialist, but of the primitives gazing with wonder and awe at the imperial civilization and learning to take its first tottering steps on the road of genuine progress.

Naturally, the motif of the empire is also central to Asimov, and I suppose an interesting comparison could be made here between him and Clarke, but I think I'll stop here. The point I want to make is simply that there seems to be a cluster of motifs related to empire, technology and unbalanced progress that recurs in much of the science fiction of the early postwar decades and that - perhaps - feels somewhat unfamiliar and strange to readers today.

The poet laureate of rock n' roll

We live in a fallen world. That's a sentence that makes sense even if you're not religious. Religious language is sometimes needed to express truth, even if truth is not what religion says it is. Few people have expressed this particular way of apprehending the world as well as Bob Dylan. Here are some of his most pregnant and memorable formulations:

I hear the ancient footsteps...
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there.
Other times it’s only me.

The cards are no good that you’re holding, unless they’re from another world.

There’s no exit in any direction, ’cept the one you can’t see with your eyes.

One of the things that make Dylan an unforgettable experience is his meanness, his roughness or toughness, which is also a loneliness - the loneliness of a person trying to live in a fallen world without being swept away by depravity, without following others, without asking anyone else's opinion. This is also meanness towards oneself, an impatience with admirers, with recognition and with honors. His skill in giving voice to this meanness in his text is enough to make him one of the greatest poets I know. Here are a few more sentences, which I'll leave as they are, without context. Some are from his songs, others from interviews. They seem to work well that way, conveying the loneliness of their author, standing on their own, without help from others.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie. 

I think that this world is just a passing through place and that the dead have eyes and that even the unborn can see and I don’t care who knows it.

You always got to be prepared, but you never know for what.

Be kind because everyone you’ll ever meet is fighting a hard battle.

One more thing before I end. Many people seem to think he shouldn't have been awarded the Nobel Prize. Maybe they're right. But not because he doesn't deserve it. What would he do with the prize? He probably won't appreciate it. He'll always respect "the hearts and the hands of the men who come with the dust and are gone with the wind" far more than he respects the Swedish Academy. But even without the prize, he would be a hero of literature. He connects up with the roots of literature. If we think Francois Villon is a great poet, Dylan should be thought of as one as well.

Who is the "Other" in The War of the Worlds?

It just struck me, but the "Other" of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds is not the Martian invaders. The Martians are a rather pale presence in the book. This might seem a curious thing to say considering that practically the entire book is taken up with gruesome descriptions of the destruction they bring. Yet despite this destruction, and the hideous details of their appearance, there's something about them that makes me think that Wells is uninterested in them. Unlike contemporaries like Jules Verne, Wells is also not very interested in space or the technical possibilities opened up by scientific progress; his concern seems rather to be with the moral state of humankind.

In fact, the most memorable scene of horror in the book is not any of the plentiful descriptions of destruction or suffering. It's surely the narrator's meeting with "the man on Putney Hill", a former artilleryman who appears to be the sole survivor in a vast, apocalyptic landscape of charred earth and strange Martian weeds near London. The artilleryman barely manages to scrape along, keeping himself alive in a shelter. "We're beat", he asserts with absolute conviction:

"It's all over," he said. "They've lost one - just one. And they've made their footing good and crippled the greatest power in the world. They've walked over us. (Wells 2005: 254)

"This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war; any more than there's a war between men and ants." (ibid. 254)   

"Cities, nations, civilization, progress - it's all over. That game's up. We're beat" (ibid. 257)

Despite this, the man has resolved to go on living: "for the sake of the breed. I tell you. I'm grim set on living" (ibid. 257). More specifically, he plans to live underground, even dreaming wildly about a future where humanity will be able to take revenge on the invaders:

I've been thinking about the drains. Of course those who don't know drains think horrible things; but under this London are miles and miles - hundreds of miles - and a few days' rain and London empty will leave them sweet and clean. The main drains are big enough and airy enough for anyone. Then there's cellars, vaults, stores, from which boltway passages may be made to the drains. And the railway tunnels and subways. Eh? You begin to see? And we form a band - able-bodied, clean-minded men. We're not going to pick up any rubbish that drifts in. Weaklings go out again. [...] Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race. (ibid. 262)

The importance of this passage is underlined by its placement in the book. It comes near the end, just before the chapter that describes how humanity is suddenly and miraculously saved. This "happy" ending does nothing to diminish the weight of the artillerist's brutal, feverish vision. The artillerist - Wells seems to imply - is still right, in the sense that he says the truth of what would have been humanity's future if it hadn't been for that unlikely, miraculous escape. He says what Wells wants his readers to reflect on. He's a prophet; in other words, he's delivering a warning.

But a warning of what kind? It turns out that this is a very moral warning. The proto-fascist artillerist himself is certainly not a very moral person. Yet he impersonates a moral warning. It is quite clear that what Wells fears above all is the prospect of humanity having to turn itself into brutes like him in order to survive. The artillerist is the prime image of horror in this book since he holds up a mirror to the reader, showing humanity the depths of brutality and barbary into which it may have to descend.

At the same time, there's no denying that Wells's horror is mixed with fascination, and even a dose of grim, masochistic pleasure - a pleasure in driving home the dreadful message of humanity's reversion into brutishness. As the artillerist says, life becomes "real" again when humanity is shorn of civilization, and a powerful message of Wells's book is certainly that this civilization is built on lies. The element of fascination can be felt even more clearly if we turn to the terrifying Morlocks of The Time Machine, a race of troglodytes who live underground, emerging to the surface only at night to carry off and eat the fairy-like Eloi. While the Morlocks are repulsive, they're also the necessary, logical outcome of present-day class-society - the Eloi having evolved from the upper classes, the Morlocks from the proletariat. With his brutality and his advocacy of a rat-like existence in the sewers, the artillerist is certainly an ancestor of the Morlocks - a Morlock in embryonic form.

To put it plainly: it's the artilleryman who's the "Other" of The War of the Worlds - or rather, it's him and the things that he stands for. If my association of him with the Morlocks is correct, these things include the proletariat. Class war was one of the great, compulsively recurring motifs of the 19th century. The proletariat was feared even as it was pitied for its brutish existence, a projection of many of the nightmarish fantasies that in today's developed world seem to be directed at asylum-seekers and other migrants. To the bourgeoisie, the revolution was not only an economic threat but also, to many, an imagined end to culture and civilization as such.

Yet the "Other" of The War of the Worlds includes more than the proletariat. The book is notable for its passages discussing colonialism and humanity's treatment of other species. It's in these passages that the book's moral message is clearest. Already in the first chapter, the narrator writes:

And before we judge of them [the Martians] too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. (ibid. 4f)

This passage is more than a condemnation of the ills of Britain's imperialist, capitalist and profoundly hypocritical "civilization". It can also be read as an abstract declaration of solidarity with everything oppressed and ravaged by this civilization, including colonized peoples and nature. Later, as the book progresses, the narrator's identification with nature grows progressively deeper, strengthened by the gradual loss of humanity among the people around him (such as the Curate). For instance, as he totters around alone in a landscape devastated beyond recognition, he thinks:

I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies, digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martial heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away. (ibid. 240)

It is precisely this life of lurking, hiding and running away that is practiced by the artilleryman (into whom the narrator soon runs and who, as we recall, himself compares the relation between Martians and humans to that between humans and ants). What lends the artilleryman his air of "authenticity" is his resolute affirmation of this animality and his readiness to jettison civilization, a step which the narrator himself hesitates to take. What unites them, however, is their clear recognition that humanity no longer is the master of nature; it has been "dethroned", as the narrator writes, and must henceforth consider itself simply as one animal among others.

At this point, I think it's fruitful to connect up with the ideas of Mary Manjikian and Andrew Feenberg. Manjikian has argued that the "apocalyptic" fiction produced in Victorian Britain as well as in today's USA needs to be understood as products of the imperial status of these states in the respective periods. Apocalyptic stories, she suggests, are often indulged in when imperial nations appear to be at their most triumphant zenith. The imagined apocalypse is depicted as the outcome of arrogance and hubris. Interestingly, she argues that such stories have a critical function - they allow their readers to see and visit their own countries as a foreigner might, as if it were a foreign country. Thereby they allow us to “see” the other, to switch places with the other. Crucially, they often replicate conventions of colonial travelogues, offering a kind of inverted colonial gaze directed at the seat of imperial power itself (Manjikian 2012: 27, 228-238). This operation is exceptionally well illustrated by War of the Worlds, where Britain, the leading imperialist power of its time, becomes treated exactly as it itself treated Tasmania.

According to Feenberg, many Hollywood movies invert real life relations in a startling fashion. At the same time that the U.S. was busy fighting guerillas in Vietnam and elsewhere in the Third World, many of its movie heroes appeared to be mirror-images of the enemy: loners fighting impossible odds against enemies equipped with vastly superior high-technological weaponry.

The Enemy never employs the guerilla tactics of the Viet Cong; instead, it possesses an antlike army supplied with technologically advanced weapons, helicopters, and nuclear devices. The hero - a Westerner - is captured and, working from within, destroys the Enemy's technology with his bare hands. Here underdevelopment represents the power of machines over men, while the West is the haven of humanism. The viewers are encouraged to identify with James Bond in a guerilla war against Third World technocracy. (Feenberg 1995: 42f)

What is Rambo, if not a subliminal identification with the very enemies the U.S. had been fighting in Vietnam? The most glaring example of this curious reversal of roles is probably Independence Day, where the U.S. air force saves the earth from alien invasion by nothing less than a glorious kamikaze-attack, another tactic borrowed from an old enemy desperately trying to fight off an American invasion. These films seem to replay the role of apocalyptic fiction by directing an inverted colonial gaze at the U.S. itself. The tendential identification with the victims of imperialism or capitalism that we see in Wells is here extended to an actual role-shifting, whereby the hero becomes an anti-imperialist resistance fighter. Returning to Wells's artilleryman, it is quite striking to observe how his employment of the underground image - likely meant to evoke association with rats - is today one of the most popular metaphors for resistance. Complex underground systems figure as the last holdout of brave resistance fighters in an almost inexhaustible number of works of fiction.

In this light, the ambivalence in the portrayal of the artilleryman comes forward clearly. We see him in a double-exposure. He denies everything we think of as cultured and civilized, yet he's somehow disturbingly right in what he's doing - right in the sense that "our" civilization is built on lies and "deserves" to perish. It's of course easy to see this ambivalence as typical for the collective bad conscience of the milieu that Wells belonged to - Victorian writers with socialist sympathies and a bourgeois class-background. These writers were deeply unhappy about their own society and the culture in which they had been thoroughly socialized. They were open-minded enough to recognize all the things suffering oppression by this society - including the proletariat, the colonized peoples and nature. Yet since they were unfamiliar with these things, the latter had to appear in the imagination of these writers in abstract, monstruous form - as a mere negation of the culture and lifestyle that they did know. These are the "Other" in Wells's fiction, the troubling other, the one's whose existence was felt to be an existential threat towards their own culture and identity, and who therefore inspire fear as well as fascination.

This ambivalence is easy to recognize today - in regard to immigrants. The dehumanized image of masses of people from poor and wartorn regions welling into the rich countries of the North has helped right-extremist parties gain ground almost everywhere in these rich countries. Here a new "Other" is taking form which again risks becoming the object of projections of various sort.

This lends a certain actuality to Wells. The Martians, as mentioned, are not Wells's "Other". They are there as a literary device, to shine an artificial light on the world to reveal its crevices and fault lines, and probe its moral status. Today, they might well fufill a similar function, for when the Martians attack, who - except the dead - will not be a refugee?

Henrique Alvim Correa, 1906 illustration to War of the Worlds

References

Feenberg, Andrew (1995) Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press

Manjikian, Mary (2012) Apocalypse and Post-politics: The Romance of the End, Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books.

Wells, H. G. (2005[1898) The War of the Worlds, New York: Aladdin Classics.

Gripping or feeling? (Quote of the month)

This one's an old classic - the final line of Baudelaire's The Stranger:

- Well then! What do you love, unfathomable stranger? 

- I love the clouds… the passing clouds … up there … up there … the marvelous clouds!

I recalled these lines this morning as I went to work. Or rather: I thought of the balance between grasping and letting go. I thought of the ambivalence of the hand, which is both sensory organ and grapple. Imagine a man, a sensitive person who wishes in secret for his hands to be transformed into feelers. A man who wishes that he could spend his life without ever having to grasp or hold on to anything. Would such a man be possible? The wish, at any rate, would be possible. It's there in Baudelaire's "stranger". In the flâneur, content to move through the swarming city that abounds in dreams, savouring the spectacle of things he will never be part of. This man never clutches. He never grabs hold of things. He lacks the desire to possess, and he never says: "this belongs to my life, without it I cannot live!". It's easy to despise such a man, I suppose, but at the same time there's something angelic about him.

Piotr Frolov, the pleasure of movement - and sakariba

Sometimes I feel like just using my blog to spread the news about delightful things. Today I will do just that. I recently came across the works of a young Russian painter, Piotr Frolov (1974-) and I'd like to show a few of his works and share some of my impressions.

So my impressions? Let me first of all admit that since I know nothing about the artist's life or background my reflexions will simply be a very subjective attempt to clarify to myself what it is in these works that I find appealing. What is it that makes them speak to me and make me appreciate them? As a tentative answer, I will throw out four words: profusion, flatness, wind-like movement and happiness.

"Profusion" is the first word that comes to mind. Most of the pictures depict a multitude of people - chiefly cheerful young women. There is also a plenitude of animals, strange hats, all kinds of vehicles, samovars, flags, brooms, tea kettles, soap bubbles, pumpkins and phonographs.

Another important word is "flatness". Depth plays very little role in these pictures. Instead of being drawn towards a vanishing point in the picture's centre, the gaze is made to move across the surface, sampling the profusion of things. As Murakami Takashi points out, the eye's movement over a flat surface generates a pleasant sensation. This observation is true also of Frolov's work, which in this respect is similar to the Murakami's "superflat" art.

Yet Frolov's works are different from Murakami's. How? This is where what I call the wind-like movement comes in. In several of Frolov's works the gaze tends to be pulled out of the picture, almost as if carried along by a wind. Looking at his pictures, one has the impression that all these people and things have been thrown up in the air and left to drift with the wind. People seem to be blowing - or even somersaulting - across the skies. The impression of wind is strong even when people are walking, skiing, bicycling or pulled along by strange vehicles.

Connected to the windlike movement is the following sensation: what you see is happening just now, in this very moment, and in a second the entire scenery will have changed entirely. Vehicles will have driven past, faces will have turned in another direction, some things will have fallen out of sight and others will be thrown up in the air in their stead. This is quite different from the sense of durability and heaviness generated in perspectival works of art that pull the gaze inwards, towards a centre (even when this art is characterized by much movement, like in Rubens) or that make the gaze oscillate back and forth across the picture's surface (as in much "superflat" art). It is also quite different from works that at first sight might be thought of as rather similar to Frolov's - I'm thinking of works like those by Hieronymus Bosch or, among contemporary artists, Sergey Tyukanov or Michael Hutter. In those works too we find a profusion of people and things and a "flat" structure. Their panoramic quality, however, give them a stability and heaviness that is lacking in Frolov's. In their works, the gaze takes in the entire scenery or landscape at once, and despite the profusion of moving beings, the scenery or landscape as such remains static. In Frolov's paintings, by contrast, there is a strong sense that the elements of that make up the picture will part from each other in an instant - much like in a snapshot of a city street.

Even in the more peaceful pictures among Frolov's works, there is a sense of ongoing movement. The dogs and birds, one feels, won’t be still for long, and the faces too appear to be reacting to something and will surely have shifted expression in a moment.

It is almost as if the paintings were offering a kind of pictorial or figurative representation of Lucretius' universe of falling atoms. In this universe, everything is volatile since it is made up of nothing but the temporary combinations of the falling atoms. At the same time, unpredictability enters this universe through the swirl - or clinamen - of these atoms, that make them deviate from their trajectories.

Finally, there's a fourth word that seems apt when describing these pictures: "happiness". People are smiling, and seem to radiate pleasure and self-confidence. There's an exuberant, joyful feel to these pictures that make them seem idyllic or utopian. One expression of this idyllic quality is that they all seem to depict a world of pleasant temperature, neither too hot or too cold - despite the fact that some of the depict snow. In all of them, a cool and refreshing spring breeze is blowing.

What do we have if we put these words together - "profusion", "flatness", "wind-like movement" and "happiness"? I think they suggest a certain kind of utopia. A utopia connected with qualities like profusion or movement rather than a stable order. To describe it, we might use the word "carnivaleque". The strange outfits, the balloons and the bubbles all suggest a festive occasion, removed from the everyday. Some of the women seem to be witches, suggesting that the carnival in question might be Walpurgisnacht or some other witches' sabbath. But perhaps there is an even better word we might use - the Japanese word sakariba. 


Coda: the sakariba

The word carnival suggests something quite interesting, namely the roots of this utopia in a particular view of the sacred.

The sacred, however, is not usually associated with motion, profusion and flatness. To understand how these things hang together we can turn to the word sakariba - a common Japanese word for amusement quarters that is also used in a wider sense as the generally busiest and liveliest parts of town (as a synonym to hankagai), or in other words parts of town that prosper through their ability to attract large crowds. In the sakariba we find the same qualities that we identified in Frolov's pictures: a profusion of people and things, a pleasurable  flatness (similar to what Simmel called sociability, a "play-form" of society in which one abstracts away real problems in personal life or society), a centre-less windlike movement, and happiness. My reason for mentioning this similarity is not that I want to dismiss the world of these pictures as a mere reflection of capitalism or consumerism. Rather, I'm interested in elucidating how the sakariba - like Frolov's pictures - are connected to the sacred.

In the Edo Period, sakariba were places of refuge in times of fire such as broad roads (hirokôji) or river banks (kawara). In ordinary times these places were used by various people to offer attractions that drew the masses. Another origin of the modern sakariba were the amusement quarters next to religious centers in temple towns, such as Asakusa (for this background history, see Linhart 1998). What's interesting here is that these places - riverbanks, temples and markets - were places of what the historian Amino Yoshihiko (1996) calls muen, a quality with roots in medieval religiosity that could be found wherever people were lifted out of the ordinary and liberated from the hierarchies regulating life in the profane world. People were made equal by virtue of being present in a "sacred" setting ("in the eyes of the Gods and the Buddhas") where they, freed from profane hierarchies, could associate across class boundaries.

In modern Japan, the sakariba of course simply function as part of capitalist society. Despite this, the religious connotations of these places haven't disappeared entirely. Many visitors to Japan have, I'm sure, been struck with a certain similarity between religious festivals (matsuri) on the one hand and shopping arcades and supermarkets on the other. One can think, for instance, of the white-red colours (kôhaku) that sometimes adorn supermarkets and which are also used as auspicious colours in Shintô rituals. The mood evoked both by festivals and and large shops or commercial streets is that of hare - a peculiar notion of the sacred associated with purity, vitality and productivity. As many anthropologists have pointed out, hare is a quality that recurs cyclically, regenerating the community after a period of decay and dissolution (e.g. Sakurai 1985). It is associated with the auspicious visit of gods who should be celebrated and who will, in turn, bring blessings and prosperity. Something of the quality of hare still seem to cling to the idea of the sakariba. Linhart, for instance, refers to the sociologist Ikei Nozomu with the following words: “For him, people who go to a sakariba enjoy an almost religious feeling among the crowd there, comparable to a traditional festival” (Linhart 1998: 232). We can also note that like most religious festivals (and many Shintô shrines) sakariba invariably have a colorful, exuberant and "reddish" feel that contrasts sharply with the usually very subdued, plain and quiet quality of the profane spaces used in Japan for work or living.

Kôhaku

Why is this interesting? Not only the notion of hare but also the idea of religious rituals have often been associated with the regeneration of community (here I think not only of Sakurai's theory of hare but also of the more general theories of Durkheim and Randall Collins). However, the sakariba is a "sacred" space that depends on the amassment of strangers who never coalesce into a community. People walking through a sakariba partake of the extraordinary atmosphere yet remain strangers. This is similar to the quality of space Amino associated with muen, where people are cut off from community and their status in the profane world and where thereby a space is created where strangers can associate on an equal footing. The quality of anonymity is also stressed by Linhart who quotes the expression “disappearing in the sakariba”. He describes it as a “zone of liberty” where people interact as strangers on a voyage: “When a man is visiting a modern sakariba, he is on a journey, and for the Japanese ‘on a journey shame can be thrown away!’” (Linhart 1998: 238). He also states that if they would happen to meet acquaintances in the sakariba, they can become very bashful (ibid. 239). Here it is very clear that the sakariba is antithetical to community – it thrives on being a place for strangers.

To return to Frolov - is the world he depicts a world of hare? A world suffused by the same sense of the supernatural or "sacred" as the sakariba? A sense that thrives not order, stability or community, but on movement and profusion and that is welcoming to strangers?


References

Amino, Yoshihiko (1996) Muen-Kugai-Raku: Nihon chūsei no jiyū to heiwa, Tokyo: Heibonsha.

Linhart, Sepp (1998) “Sakariba: Zone of ‘Evaporation’ between Work and Home?” in Joy Hendry, ed., Interpreting Japanese Society: Anthropological Approaches, London: Routledge.

Sakurai, Tokutarō (1985) Kesshū no genten – Kyōdōtai no hōkai to saisei, Tokyo: Kōbunsha.



Links to sites with Piotr Frolov's works:

The artist's homepage: http://www.ftart.com/en/

Artodyssey (entry introducing Frolov): http://artodyssey1.blogspot.se/2010/06/piotr-frolov-peter-frolov-piotr-frolov.html

I also recommend the "Virtual museum", an impressive site which contains several of Frolov's works: http://www.art7d.be/virtualmuseum.html
 

Quote of the month: Hemingway (and Murakami)

"Man is not made for defeat." This sentence - part of Santiago's train of thoughts near the end of The Old Man and the Sea (p. 80) - is a sentence that breathes both tiredness and a kind of stoicism. Man is not made for defeat, but he is defeated. Defeat is unavoidable if one lives long enough. Needless to say, "man" here is also woman.

I'm not sure Hemingway ever learned to accept defeat. Santiago is not defeated. He has his dignity, and nothing to be ashamed of, because he knows he has done well. And think of sentences like "Every thing is your own damned fault if you're any good" (from Green Hills of Africa, p. 202). These aren't things you say when you're defeated.

Let me follow up this by turning to Murakami Haruki, who writes in one of his short stories: "As Ernest Hemingway realized, the value of our lives is ultimately determined by how we lose, not by how we win" ("Kaeru-kun, Tokyo o sukuu", from Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru, p. 180). This sentence hangs together with and speaks to another of the short stories in the same collection ("Thailand"), where a woman, Satsuki, takes a vacation after a conference and receives a helpful piece of advice by her driver Nimit:

"You're a beautiful person. A doctor. Intelligent and strong. But you look as if you're dragging your heart behind you. The time has come for you to start preparing for the slow descent towards death. If, from now on, you devote all your power to living, you won't be able to die well. Little by little, you have to shift. To live and to die are in a sense equivalent, doctor!"
    "Nimit", Satsuki said while removing her sunglasses, leaning forward from the backrest.
    "What is it, doctor?"
    "Have you been able to prepare yourself to die well?"
    "I am already half dead, doctor", Nimit said as if stating something self-evident. (Murakami 2000:142)

That night Satsuki cries in her hotel bed. Her driver's words have helped her come alive again, because she too had in a sense been dead, in the sense of having lived for years suppressing her emotions and cutting herself off from her inner self. Paradoxically, he helped her release these emotions by urging her to prepare to die. There's something Heideggerian about his advice, and yet one doesn't have to be a follower of his philosophy to accept that Nimit might have a point. No-one lives for ever, just as economic growth or human civilization cannot last for ever. All things that have form must vanish. It is not to any authentic resolution he urges her to gradually turn, so much as towards a slow acceptance of death that also unhinges us from desire and hatred, and that ultimately implies a liberation from karma. It is a death that unchains us from everything we have told ourselves must be our fate. Maybe it's comparable to the "dropping off of body and mind" that Dôgen speaks off, a state where you are free to accept death since you are already dead. Or maybe it is more instructive to compare it to the ideal of the sufi: "to become a 'dead man walking': one whose body stays alive on the earth yet whose soul is already in Heaven” (Chatwin 1988: 179).

The idea about a mid-point in life where you need to start preparing yourself for death appeals quite strongly to me. The other day when I went to work, I thought about how long I had been able to tell myself that I had a future. For most of my life I've been a believer in my bright future. A future that was pleasantly blurry and appeared almost limitless. But now, I told myself as I walked, I'm already here, in the midst of this future. I liked those words and repeated them: I'm in the midst of my future. Yes, here I am, in the midst of this strange country: the future. The contours are clearer now. This is how it looks. The future too has a future, but it is shorter.
   
I was feeling tired. That might have been one reason for my ruminations. Defeat always seems near to a person who's tired. Tiredness is a good emotion. It makes you remember important things. It's also an emotion that often appears in Hemingway's novels. Here's a sentence from one of them, a good one that is full of tiredness, and that I agree with despite my tiredness:

“The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.” (For Whom the Bell Tolls, p. 499)


References

Chatwin, Bruce (1988) The Songlines, London: Penguin.

Hemingway, Ernest (1994) For Whom the Bell Tolls, London: Arrow Books.

- (1994) Green Hills of Africa, London: Arrow Books.

- (2004) The Old Man and the Sea, London: Arrow Books.

Murakami, Haruki (2002) Kami no ko wa minna odoru, Tokyo: Shinchō bunko

Quote of the month: Julius Caesar

If I would tell you, dear reader, that the quote of the month will be "veni, vidi, vici", I'm sure you'll react with exasperation. Isn't it the very epitome of a worn-out cliché? It certainly is. In addition, it's almost unbearably theatrical. But let me just ask you a single question: why the "vidi"? Why did Caesar stress that he "saw"?

Let me offer you one more quotation. Here is Caesar again, describing his victory in a sea battle over the Veneti:

After that it was a soldier's battle, in which the Romans easily proved superior, especially as it was fought under the eyes of Caesar and the whole army, so that any act of special bravery was bound to be noticed... (The Conquest of Gaul, Penguin, 1982: 80)

Similar passages stressing the inspiring effect that Caesar's gaze has on his troops abound in The Conquest of Gaul. Just to take one more example, here he describes how he manages to turn around a difficult situation during the battle against the Nervii simply by showing that he's looking at his soldiers: "His coming gave gave them fresh heart and hope; each man wanted to do his best under the eyes of his commander-in-chief, however desperate the peril" (ibid. 69).

We can also note that the ability to "see" can be delegated to commanders lower in rank. In one passage he recounts a speech that Labienus, one of his generals, held to his troops before a battle: "Fight as bravely under me as you often have under the commander-in-chief; imagine that he is here, watching the battle in person" (ibid. 137).

Passages like these show Caesar's awareness of the importance of his gaze. But why is the gaze important? Here it is easy to recall the so-called Hawthorne effect. It's well-known that this effect was discovered in the course of a series of observations conducted at a factory where the researchers experimented with changing one condition after the other (lengthening and shorting working hours, increasing and decreasing the number of breaks, increasing and decreasing pay etc) to see what the effect on worker productivity would be. To their consternation they discovered that productivity increased no matter what changes they introduced. The solution to the riddle, they realized, was that the productivity increase was an effect of being observed. It was the workers' response to the presence of the researchers and the attention the latters paid to them. As the sociologist Johan Asplund points out (in his book Det sociala livets elemäntära former), the workers were simply following their human nature in being socially responsive. It's simply natural to humans to respond to the presence of others and their actions. The inspiring and energizing effect that Caesar's gaze had on his soldiers seems to be of exactly the same kind as the effect that the gaze of the researchers had on the factory workers.

What Caesar directs our attention to is, furthermore, the relation between seeing and ruling. In the many passages where he emphasizes the importance of seeing, he seems, implicitly, to be saying that a central functions of the sovereign (or a place-holder of the sovereign, such as a general) is to be the one who sees. Why is this a central function of the sovereign? This, it seems to me, is related to the fact that the sovereign must also be the one of upholds and guarantees the "public" or "official" side of society. To impersonate the sovereign is to be the one who, by seeing, is capable of endowing an act with official recognition and making it public, thereby rescuing it from oblivion. Again and again, in passage after passage, Caesar rehearses this role. Being seen by Caesar, the act is lifted up from the anonymity of merely private existence and granted a kind of immortality. Why immortality? Since the sovereign, as Kantorowicz points out, has "two bodies" - one that human and mortal and another that is divine and immortal. Here we shouldn't let the language of the "sovereign" in singular mislead us. Even in democratic states lacking individual rulers, the "place" of the sovereign exists, as Lefort points out. Wherever we find anyone trying to monopolize the function of being the one who sees, we are witnessing someone aspiring to fill this empty place.