Making and Unmaking Modern Japan E-Book

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 509

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The papers assembled here share the dual conviction that (1) understanding the lineaments of Japanese modernity entails an appreciation of the specific forms of distinctions, discriminations and exclusions constitutive of it; (2) that the socio-economic-political fractures increasingly visible under conditions of late modernity reveal the precarious nature of the making of modernity in Japan. Bringing together a group of critical intellectuals, mostly based in Japan with long-standing political commitments to groups emblematic of modern Japan’s constitutive outside - inorities, migrants, foreigners, victims of the Fukushima disaster, welfare recipients among others this collection of essays aims to draw attention to processes of ‘making and unmaking’ that constellate Japanese modernity. Unlike previous attempts, however, devoted to destabilizing positivist/culturalist approaches to a post-war ‘miracle’ Japan via a critical post-structural theoretical vocabulary and episteme, the essays gathered here aim principally to examine traces of the making of modern Japan in the fissures and displacements visible at sites of modernity’s unmaking. Deploying a range of theoretical approaches, rather than a commitment to any single framework, the essays that follow aim to locate contemporary Japan and the ravages of its modernity within a wider critical discourse of modernity.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Making and Un-Making Japanese Modernity: An Introduction

Ritu Vij

P

ART

I

T

HE

V

ICISSITUDES OF

J

APANESE

M

ODERNITY

Naturalized Modernity and the Resistance it Evokes: Sociological Theory Meets Murakami Haruki

Carl Cassegard

Ethno-politics in Contemporary Japan: The Mutual-Occlusion of Orientalism and Occidentalism

Kinhide Mushakoji

P

ART

II

C

ITIZENSHIP

, M

IGRANTS AND

W

ELFARE IN

M

ODERN

J

APAN

A Dilemma in Modern Japan? Migrant Workers and the (Self-)Illusion of Homogeneity

Hironori Onuki

Pretended Citizenship: Rewriting the Meaning of Il-/Legality

Reiko Shindo

What Japan Has Left Behind in the Course of Establishing a Welfare State

Reiko Gotoh

P

ART

III

R

ISK

, R

ECIPROCITY

,

AND

E

THNO

-

NATIONALISM

: R

EFLECTIONS ON THE

F

UKUSHIMA

D

ISASTER

The Failed Nuclear Risk Governance: Reflections on the Boundary between Misfortune and Injustice in the case of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster

Hiroyuki Tosa

Ganbarō Nippon:

Tabunka Kyōsei and Human (In)Security Post 3–11

Giorgio Shani

Reciprocity: Nuclear Risk and Responsibility

Paul Dumouchel

O

N

C

ONTEMPORARY

P

HILOSOPHY AND

S

OCIOLOGY

Civil Religion in Greece:

A Study in the Theory of Multiple Modernities

Manussos Marangudakis

Underdetermination and Theory-Ladenness Against Impartiality.

A Defence of Value-Free Science and Value-Laden Technology

Nicla Vassallo and M. Cristina Amoretti

The Challenge of Creativity: a Diagnosis of our Times

Celso Sánchez Capdequí

Contributors

Impressum

Books on Demand

On ProtoSociology

Digital Volumes available

Bookpublications of the Project

MAKING AND UN-MAKING JAPANESE MODERNITY: AN INTRODUCTION

Ritu Vij

The papers assembled here share the dual conviction that (1) understanding the lineaments of Japanese modernity entails an appreciation of the specific forms of distinctions, discriminations and exclusions constitutive of it; (2) that the socio-economic-political fractures increasingly visible under conditions of late modernity reveal the precarious nature of the making of modernity in Japan. Bringing together a group of critical intellectuals, mostly based in Japan with long-standing political commitments to groups emblematic of modern Japan’s constitutive outside—minorities, migrants, foreigners, victims of the Fukushima disaster, welfare recipients among others—this collection of essays aims to draw attention to processes of ‘making and un-making’ (Sassen 2011) that constellate Japanese modernity. Unlike previous attempts, however, devoted to de-stabilizing positivist/culturalist approaches to a post-war ‘miracle’ Japan via a critical post-structural theoretical vocabulary and episteme (Yoda and Harootunian 2006), the essays gathered here aim principally to examine traces of the making of modern Japan in the fissures and displacements visible at sites of modernity’s unmaking. Deploying a range of theoretical approaches, rather than a commitment to any single framework, the essays that follow aim to locate contemporary Japan and the ravages of its modernity within a wider critical discourse of modernity.

Long-standing debates about how Japan’s passage from centralized feudalism in the mid-19th century to the ‘capital-nation-state’ (Karatani 2008) in the 20th century can best be recuperated have centered on a few dominant approaches. It is worth briefly noting a few so as to set the stage for the discussions that follow. Chief among these are: (1) Japan as an exemplar case of modernization in which the universal progressive transformation of societies via a process of rationalization produces broadly convergent societies (industrialized, literate, secular, individualized), a view widely embraced by the post-war generation of historians of Japan (Edwin Reischauer, Marius Jansen at the outset, and later, with greater attention to different pathways, Tetsuo Najita, Carol Gluck, Sheldon Garon, Andrew Gordon among others); (2) as an instance of ‘multiple modernities’ in which the persistence of cultural and civilizational forces over the long durée (Eisenstadt 1996; 2000), enable the pursuit of a cultural program of modernity that is distinctive in the institutional constellations that it develops, challenging the homogenizing and hegemonic assumptions of western modernity; (3) as a case of ‘alternative modernity’ (Clammer 1995, Arnason 1997; 2000; Gaonkar 2003) characterized by institutional and cultural forms that are different to the modular forms of western modernity but that nonetheless testify to the indigenization of modernity; (4) as a singular attempt to ‘overcome modernity’ (Kyoto School; Calichman 2008) and the consequent passage to a condition of post-modernity enabled by it, by-passing altogether the problem of subjectivity that Takeuchi Yoshimi, one of Japan’s foremost philosophers, described as coterminous with modernity. Maruyama Masao’s influential claim about the weakness of personal autonomy in Japan (the classical liberal self) serves also to ground claims about Japan’s unmediated passage from pre to post-modernity; (5) and finally, as an embodiment, no more no less, of uneven capitalist development, its specificity contained in the simultaneity of non-contemporaneous but coeval times contained in the everyday (Harootunian 2000).

If modernity, however, following Foucault’s reading of Kant (1984), should not be seen as an epoch but rather as an attitude, one that conjoins the spirit of critique with an understanding of the individual as an autonomous subject within a historical mode of being, the question of the specificity of Japan’s modernity entails attention to on-going processes of its making and un-making that serve therefore as the focus of the deliberations here. Rather than read modernity off a set of objective indicators, or take a binary view of modernity’s presence or absence, the claim that modernity is an ongoing political-economic project in which political struggles and practices by social agents can contest, disrupt, transform or re-inscribe its core elements must be made central to analysis

With this brief comment on the parameters of debates about Japanese modernity in mind, the essays that follow are organized in three sections. The first examines the vicissitudes of Japanese modernity; the second interrogates the ground of citizenship, migrants and welfare in the construction of modern Japan; the third reflects on the inversions/reinscription of categories of Japan’s modernity in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster of March 2011.

Focussing on the naturalization of modernity and its effects in contemporary Japan, and the inter-play of knowledge and power that interpellates Japanese modernity in terms that are at once occidentalist and orientalist at different times, the first section provides a different angle on the specificity of Japanese modernity seen from the vantage point of the precarisation of life that has followed in the aftermath of three disasters that define 21st century Japan: the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble in the early 1990s and the two decades of lost growth (ushinawareta nijuen) that followed, the Fukushima Daiichi disaster of 3/11, and the rise of ethno-nationalism/militarism represented by the present government of Abe Shinzo.

The opening essay by Carl Cassegard offers a novel theorization of the contemporary conjuncture in Japan—and arguably elsewhere—in reference to what he conceives of as naturalized modernity. Against classical accounts of capitalist modernity in terms of ruptures, shocks, or disasters, Cassegard develops an argument about the “taken-for-grantedness” (naturalization) of insecurity, solitude and the destruction of social relations under conditions of late modernity. Unlike Walter Benjamin’s account of the destruction of aura or disenchantment as the reason for the enervation of social ties that generates a heightened consciousness, a “protective shield” in defense against processes of atomization that “splinter” libidinal ties by virtue of the system of contractual exchange characteristic of capitalist social relations, Cassegard foregrounds privatization as the condition that generates a withdrawal from social ties. Privatization,—the redirection of libidinal investments away from relations between people to the safer non-social domain (of consumer objects)—renders insecurity and solitude the new order of things in which obscurity, incomprehensibility and complexity is tolerated, if not enjoyed. Exemplified in Murakami Haruki’s fictional characters, Cassegard’s account of “the embrace of self-imposed isolation and solitude” in contemporary Japan’s social landscape offers a powerful heuristic that renders explicable a range of social phenomena including that of the hikikomori (shut-ins) or social withdrawal, manga and anime obsessed otaku sub-culture, sekkusu shinai shokogun (celibacy syndrome) that registers a flight from human intimacy in Japan. More generally, however, Cassegard’s account of the melancholic turn away from social relatedness consequent on the normalization of insecurity renders Japan’s naturalized modernity emblematic of a larger socio-economic-affective transformation discernible in much of the advanced industrialized western world today.

Kinhide Mushakoji’s essay departs from the straightjacket of academic writing to offer an uncharacteristically personal account of the occlusions that have shaped the making of modern Japan. Building on his long experience as one of Japan’s best known intellectuals and a vocal critic of the government’s embrace of liberal imperialism, especially in relation to its Asian neighbours, Mushakoji offers a counter-intuitive account of the ethno-politics of contemporary Japan. In distinction to both Orientalist and Occidentalist west-centric versions of Japanese modernity, the essay draws attention to the invidious return of notions of ethnic supremacy in Abe Shinzo’s contemporary state project and the occlusion of a long-standing tradition in Japan of pluralistic co-existence among diverse communities. In drawing attention to the occlusions shaped by the entanglements of Japanese colonialism and state-building with American hegemony, Mushakoji attempts to locate practices of exclusion within Japan (and vis-à-vis its Asian neighbors) in an account of what he contends is a civilizational project, best thought of as “Smart Occidentalism”, dominant in contemporary Japan.

In the first of three essays in the section on Citizenship, Migrants and Welfare in Modern Japan, Hironori Ohnuki examines the long durée of transborder migration in Japan to uncover the contradictions between Japan’s deployment of labour-importing strategies to ensure a continued supply of workers, and the myth of ethnic homogeneity that grounds practices of othering at best, and xenophobic hysteria at worst, vis-a-vis migrant workers. Uncovering state practices of making and un-making migrants as acceptable or dangerous, given the state’s ‘developmental’ agenda since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Ohnuki traces the production of the ‘self-illusion’ of ethnic homogeneity (minzoku) and its deployment in the criminalization of migrants today to the tension at the core of Japan’s modernity: its historical reliance on “trans-border labour importing means to ensure the continued supply of the workforce,” and the myth of monoethnicity that grounds the claim of haigai shugi (nativism) central to the making of Japan’s nation-state imaginary. Maintaining this delicate balance between the economic need for and cultural repudiation of migrant workers, is, Ohnuki suggests, key to the current program of late modernity in neoliberal Japan. Strategically pursuing strategies aimed at the flexibilzation of the labour force (both domestic and foreign), programs of ‘cosmetic multiculturalism’ since the mid-1990s have simultaneously expanded the acceptance of unskilled migrant workers but on a strictly temporary basis, while leaving intact the “(self)-illusion of ethnic homogeneity.” As Giorgio Shani’s paper in the third section demonstrates, by viewing migrants primarily through the prism of cultural difference (at the local level), and as Ohnuki clearly shows here, recognition of the contribution of migrants to the economic security of Japan is suppressed. Ohnuki’s contribution clearly identifies key moments in Japan’s past and present in the making and re-making of this constitutive tension of Japan’s modernity.

Next, Reiko Shindo examines the paradox of ‘Pretended Citizenship’ in the practices of legal migrants (specifically interns and trainees), to advance a claim about the re-making of ‘resistance’ and political subjects in contemporary Japan. Going against the grain of much contemporary scholarship on citizenship, including by those critical of a state-centric discourse that aligns citizenship with legality, rights, and above all sovereignty, and its related regime of mobility control that draws lines of distinction between legal and illegal border crossings, Shindo directs attention to the border itself as a site of control and resistance by those who, as she puts it, ‘inhabit’ the border. Taking issue with critical citizenship studies whose focus on irregular or illegal migrants’ struggle for legal status reinscribes state control of mobility and the inside/outside logic that is constitutive of it, Shindo turns her attention to how legal migrants, authorized to enter Japan as trainees and interns, subvert the statist logic of inclusion/exclusion by becoming workers, albeit low-waged, in an economy with a chronic shortage of labour. Legitimate in terms of their legal status, trainees and interns, are recognised as being indispensable to the labour force and “are thus treated as de facto workers.” Their legal status notwithstanding, trainees and inters enter the terrain of illegality as workers, together with ‘irregular’ workers subject to the depredations of low pay, harsh working conditions and the threat of deportation by employers given any overt challenge to the terms of their employment. By inverting the meanings of legality/illegality, legal migrants, Shindo suggests, offer an alternative context-specific understanding of the making of citizenship that enables a shift away from the state’s putative control over mobility as the axiomatic focus of critical citizenship studies. In the context of Japan especially, Shindo’s argument gestures towards an alternative political praxis in which legal migrants, with the support of local groups, can catalyse changes in employment law and practices. Shindo’s paper clearly illustrates the making/un-making and re-making lines of distinction between legal and illegal migrants, central to maintaining the order of things in late modern Japan.

Echoing the theme of difference and its occlusion that appears through many of the essays here (Mushakoji, Shani, Ohnuki, Shindo), albeit re-conceived here in terms of the differentials of disadvantages, Reiko Gotoh’s essay draws attention to the limits of the principle of universal liberalism and consumption security that characterizes post-war Japan’s welfare state. Arguing against an income-based approach to welfare that remains singularly ill-equipped to deliver the range of goods deemed central to well-being on a variety of registers, Gotoh urges a more expansive vision of welfare, better attuned to “disadvantage differentials”. In light of qualitatively distinct disadvantages among recipients (a disabled person vs. a single mother), the normative basis of welfare as the provision of well-being is better served, Gotoh suggests, if grounded in Amartaya Sen’s capabilities approach to enable the ‘doings and beings’ of differently disadvantaged recipients. In bringing an economist’s perspective to the question of difference in the context of contemporary Japan, Gotoh’s argument militates against a merely cultural reading of difference, and urges a re-making of Japanese welfare provision consistent with the ideal of “equality of differences”.

The third section offers a set of counter-intuitive readings of the 3/11 Fukushima Daiichi disaster and its aftermath. Inverting traditional Japanese approaches to natural phenomena, including the arrival of foreigners, as tantamount to the negligence of the ruling class, (since social order is presumably based on nature), the three articles included in this section refuse the nature/culture binary central to western modernity and claims about its isomorphism in Japanese modernity. Focussing rather on the making of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster as a nature-culture ‘hybrid monster’ (Hiroyuki Tosa), as a traumatic site for re-imagining ethnic homogeneity, a central pillar of the making of Japan’s ‘capital-nation-state’(Giorgio Shani), and generative in the re/creation of a ‘community of destiny’ within Japan (Paul Dumouchel), the three essays considered together offer insight into Fukushima as emblematic of the making of the abyss of modernity, and the fatalities unleashed by the failure of techno-scientific attempts to master the modern order of things. Fukushima, as interpreted here, represents both the series of crises, disasters and contingencies without cataclysmic end or transcendence equated with modernity, and an occasion for re-stabilizing a social order rendered increasingly precarious under conditions of late modernity. Echoing Naomi Klein’s notion of ‘Disaster capitalism’ in The Shock Doctrine, (where disasters enable a strident re-making of structures of wealth distribution in favour of the 1 percent), albeit on a different register here, the shock of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster occasions a re-making of citizens into resilient subjects, the re-making/re-imagining of a multi-cultural society into an ethnically homogenized one, and the re-making of the divisions between the real victims of the disaster and those who contributed to it (the political-technocratic-bureaucratic-corporate elites), into a shared ‘ community of destiny’ that is the polity itself. Fukushima as traumatic event re-makes Japan qua Japan here. Inasmuch as the Japanese modern is contained within the ‘borromean rings’ of its capital-nation-state (Karatani 2008), the essays in this section testify to the remaking of two of the three rings of Japanese modernity, namely the nation and the state, but do not address its third, arguably more vexed, element: capital.

Hiroyuki Tosa’s essay, ‘The Failed Nuclear Risk Governance,’ deploys Bruno Latour’s conception of modernity as a dual process of purification (the nature/culture binary) and hybridization (the mix of nature and culture) to interpret the Fukushima Daiichi disaster as a ‘hybrid monster’ produced as the conjoined effects of nature, technology, and political judgements about the tradeoff between the benefits of nuclear expansion and the risk of climate change and human safety. Detailing the politics of the development of Japan’s nuclear programme, including the lasting influence of President Eisenhower’s advocacy of nuclear energy as ‘atoms of peace,’ Tosa draws attention to the social/political construction of ‘risk,’ and the bio-political re-making of citizens as subjects of resilience in instances where the misfortune of putatively ‘black swan events’ like Fukushima (rendered an accident of nature and therefore beyond technological or regulatory control) elides the role of politics in making populations potentially vulnerable to nuclear accidents. By re-politicizing the depoliticized space of modern science and technology in Japan, Tosa locates the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in ongoing attempts to create technologies of governance that are increasingly bio-political, directed at the creation of subjects of resilience in a world of endless uncertainties. Late modernity in Japan, on Tosa’s reading, offers little hope for the reinscription of zones of comfort or sociality conventionally associated with Japanese modernity (family, kaisha (corporation), even kokka [state]) but rather pits the population of Japan alongside others elsewhere subject to similar processes of bio-political re-making.

Advancing a somewhat different claim, Giorgio Shani’s essay explores the re-inscription of ethno-nationalism and its subtle deployment in post-3/11 Japan. Drawing on bio-political divisions between racialized others—objects of Human Security discourse in the Global South- and their reproduction within Japan in zones of abjection and exclusion created by the triple disaster of 3/11 (earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident), Shani shows how 3/11, presented as a traumatic event mobilizes a discourse of Ganbarō Nippon (Do your best Japan!)—a discursive re-making of a nationalist myth of ethnicity, even as the state effectively abandons the victims of the disaster, reduced now to the status of ‘bare life’ or internal others. Echoing Tosa’s theme of the re-making of citizens, (particularly the residents of the Tohoku region, the immediate victims of 3/11), into resilient subjects, Shani’s discussion of the re-inscription of the ethnic/national imaginary occasioned by the disaster provides a clear instance of the making of the nation as an ongoing political practice.

A second move in the paper, however, draws attention to the occlusions upon which this re-making of an ethnic imaginary depends. Critically examining a new discourse of tabunka kyōsei (multicultural co-existence) that privileges cultural difference between zainichi Koreans and Chinese and migrants from China, South and South-East Asia, and the ethnically Japanese, the discourse of multiculturalism not only re-inscribes notions of minzoku (ethnie) in the nationalist imaginary, but also occludes a long history of ethnic pluralism within Japan. By limiting the reach of policy-shifts in recognition of tabunka kyōsei exclusively to the local level, however, practices of local coexistence (chiiki kyōsei) extending denizen rights to migrants at the municipality or ward level, contain the potentially subversive effects on notions of ethnic homogeneity at the national level, and forestall the un-making of a nationalist imaginary of an ethnic community. Considered together, the twin discourses of Ganbarō Nippon and tabunka kyōsei entail a set of practices that contribute to the re-making of a nationalist imaginary and the (re)production of internal others who serve as the constitutive outside of late modernity in contemporary Japan.

Finally, Paul Dumouchel’s ‘Reciprocity: Nuclear Risk and Responsibility’ offers a counter-intuitive reading of the normative/political role played by those hit by the Fukushima Daiichi disaster: those who died, those who were displaced, and those whose health has been permanently jeopardized by radiation unleashed by the nuclear meltdown are not hapless victims of natural/technical/political disaster, but rather agents whose contribution to building a ‘community of destiny’—a future in which such disasters cannot happen again—should be seen as a form of reciprocity for the help extended to them at the time of the disaster. Deploying Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s concept of time inversion (in which the present is evaluated from the standpoint of the future such that it simultaneously transforms the past), Dumouchel makes a persuasive case showing how victims of the Fukushima disaster ‘by virtue of having being the victims of this accident’ authorize an anti-nuclear discourse that gains legitimacy and generates action (citizen protests, policy-recommendations at the local and national level), that calls into being a shared sense of risk. Inverting the pedagogical function of the ‘other’ in naturalizing hierarchies in a given order, however, Dumouchel’s re-conceptualization of Fukushima Daiichi victims as reciprocal agents, serves to constellate the safety of the future of the Japanese community as one in which, paradoxically, the institutionalization of governance structures in which risks are made permanent also creates a community in which damage is permanent (i.e. never irrevocably eliminated). Fukushima’s allegorical function here is deeply political.

References

Arnason, J.P.1997. Social Theory and Japanese Experience: The Dual Civilization. London & New York: Routledge.

Arnason, J.P. 2000. “Communism and Modernity.” Daedalus 129 (1): 61–90.

Calichman, R. 2004. Takeuchi Yoshimi: Displacing the West. Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Program. Calichman, R. 2008. Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan, edited and translated. New York: Columbia University Press.

Eisenstadt, S.N. 1996. Japanese Civilization:A Comparative View. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eisenstadt. S.N. 2000. “Multiple Modernities.” Daedalus 129(1): 1–29.

Foucault, M. 1984 “What is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, pp. 32–50. New York: Pantheon Books

Gaonkar, D.P.ed. 2003. Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Harootunian, H. 2000. Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton: Columbia University Press.

Karatani, K. 2008. “Beyond Capital-Nation-State”. Rethinking Marxism 20 (4): 569–595.

Klein, N. 2008. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Penguin Books.

Maruyama, M. 1969. Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, edited by Ivan Morris. London: Oxford University Press.

Sassen, S. 2011. “The Global Street: Making the Political.” Globalizations 8 (5): 573–579.

Yoda, T. and Harootunian, H. 2006. Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life after the Recessionary 1990s to the Present. Durham: Duke University Press.

Part I

The Vicissitudes of Japanese Modernity

NATURALIZED MODERNITY AND THE RESISTANCE IT EVOKES: SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY MEETS MURAKAMI HARUKI

Carl Cassegard

Abstract

Shock has often been viewed as emblematic of modernity. Paradigmatic in this respect are the theories of Benjamin and Simmel. However, an equally important experience in modern societies is that of naturalization. This article attempts to investigate the implications of this experience for the theory of modernity through a discussion of contemporary Japanese literature, in particular the works of Murakami Haruki. I argue that just as the focus on shock enabled Benjamin and Simmel to illuminate the interconnectedness of a particular constellation of themes—the heightened consciousness or intellectualism of modernity, the destruction of aura or disenchantment, and the resulting spleen or Blasiertheit—so the focus on naturalization will contribute to an understanding of how themes such as the sense of complexity or ‘obscurity’, the phenomenon of ‘re-enchantment’ or ‘post-secularity’, and the increasing role of ‘non-social’ spheres in late modernity are interrelated.

What is the defining formative experience of modernity?1 Walter Benjamin provides a famous answer in Some Motifs in Baudelaire (1939), where he claims that the price for ‘the sensation of modernity’ is ‘the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock’ (Benjamin 1997, 154). He arrived at this formula through his interpretation of the shocks experienced in the Parisian crowd as a key experience in the poetry of Baudelaire, for whom these shocks were not simply menacing, but also a source of intoxication and inexhaustible novelty. At the time of the second empire, Benjamin writes, the Parisian flâneurs obtained ‘the unfailing remedy’ for their boredom in the crowd. ‘Anyone who is capable of being bored in a crowd is a blockhead. I repeat: a blockhead, and a contemptible one’, he quotes Constantin Guy, a painter and friend of Baudelaire (ibid. 1997, 37). Benjamin is not alone in elevating the shock-sensation to a central feature of modernity. The portrayal of modernity in virtually all classics of sociology—Simmel, Tönnies, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—resonates with a pervasive feeling of upheaval and crisis, and with an unsettling awareness of contingency and insecurity.2 In a sense, shock has become emblematic of modernity.

However, since its inception modernity has also been haunted by another experience: the gradual subsiding of shock and the return of the sensation of the ‘natural’ or the everyday. Let me take another example of how the crowd can be experienced, this time from Tokyo in the late 1980s. In Okazaki Kyôko’s 1989 manga-collection I Love Boredom (Taikutsu ga daisuki) the figure of the flâneuse reappears in one of the bustling and trendy shopping areas of Shibuya. But the crowd, which Baudelaire portrayed as a source of shock and fascination, is now the backdrop of solitary reveries.

To cast sidelong glances at the princes and princesses who stroll along the Shibuya streets, the piquant blue sky as I accidentally raise my eyes. That’s boredom for me […]. Doesn’t it make you feel cool and refreshed to walk around town like that—without dreading boredom? (Okazaki 1989, 142)

No shocking encounters interrupt the flâneuse in her meditations. Rather than offering the fascination of the new, the city has become the locus of pleasant boredom. What Okazaki seems to express is the return of the semblance of the natural. While no one ‘could be less inclined to view the big city as something ordinary, natural, acceptable’ than Baudelaire (Benjamin 1999, 386), this is exactly how Okazaki’s flâneuse perceives it.

I will refer to Baudelaire’s crowd as ‘shocking’ and to Okazaki’s as ‘naturalized’. By nature I mean the appearance of taken-for-grantedness in a given order of things. A natural order appears to coincide with the concepts representing it, in the sense that changes are perceived to occur within the limits of the known and established. Even when changes are unforeseen, they are felt to be in accord with the world. Shock is a disruption of this natural order that palpably reveals what Adorno calls the ‘non-identity’ of concept and object. Shock can be experienced as a painful destruction of certainty and trust, but also as a liberation from the mythic nature of taken-for-granted beliefs. As Marx and Engels put it in a rather optimistic formulation, the ‘everlasting uncertainty and agitation’ and the ‘constant disruption of all social relations’ in capitalism would force men ‘to face with sober senses that real conditions of their lives’ (Marx and Engels 1992, 6).

Naturalization occurs when things that were once shocking sink back into the familiar and take on the appearance of self-evidence. A city that was perceived in a truly naturalized way appears as an indifferent background, a natural environment as self-evident as mountains or rivers. Just as shock, naturalization is an ambivalent phenomenon. Environments that have ceased to shock also lose the power to arouse that sense of liberation that a glimpse of non-identity may bring. As I will demonstrate, a naturalized world harbours dilemmas of its own, which give rise to struggles and conflicts no less severe than those typical of an environment in which shocks are rampant, although the issues and lines of conflict are different.

Baudelaire and Okazaki serve well as departure points for analysing two modes of experiencing modernity—as a ‘shock modernity’ or as a ‘naturalized modernity’.3 Although shock and nature are surely present in all societies, I will suggest that just as the former model served Benjamin and other classical thinkers well in capturing what they saw as the most pressing and relevant features of modernity, the model of a naturalized modernity is becoming increasingly indispensible for grasping many of the pressing issues in today’s world. As will become evident in the course of my argument, my claim is not that we are seeing a necessary historical evolution from one mode of experiencing modernity to another, but rather that both models are needed to grasp how modernity can be experienced today.

To a large extent this ‘naturalized modernity’ remains a terra incognita in social theory.4 By what concepts may we map it? What conflicts become central in it? By what strategies do people adapt to it, make the best out of it, or defy it? What implications does it have for the possibilities of critical theory if capitalism can no longer be counted on to shock people back to their ‘sober senses’? To find answers to these questions I will turn to the Japanese literary imagination of recent decades, in which this sense of the natural occupies a central position.5 While early modern Japanese writers powerfully conveyed a sense of modernity as shocking, Japan’s probably best known writer today, Murakami Haruki (1949–), stands out for his portrayal of modernity as naturalized. Using his works as a point of departure, I will use the sensation of the natural as a link that enables me to illuminate the interrelation between several features that have often been pointed out as characteristic of late modernity in recent sociological theory—the sense of ‘complexity’ or ‘obscurity’, the ‘post-secularity’ or ‘re-enchantment’ or modernity, and the privatization and the redirection of libido into ‘non-social’ areas with resulting new modes of self-imposed isolation and loneliness. Together with the works of another contemporary writer, Murakami Ryû (1952–), his works will also enable me to shed light on the strategies used to deal with naturalization, the struggle to regain contact or togetherness and to restore a sense of the ‘real’ even at the price of the return of shock or pain.6

Modernity and Shock in Benjamin

Benjamin tells us that in modernity, people tend to protect themselves against the raw force of shock by developing a ‘heightened degree of consciousness’, which is used as what he, borrowing a term from Freud, calls a ‘protective shield’ against excessive external stimuli. This heightening of consciousness affects perception by undermining the possibilities of an assimilated experience (Erfahrung)—in which new impressions are integrated with memories, dreams and ideas into a whole—and replacing them with superficial sensations (Erlebnisse) of fragmented moments. Benjamin treats this shift as equivalent to the disintegration of the ‘aura’, defined as what makes a thing such an a religious object or a human relationship appear unique and elevated above everyday life. Drained of aura, the world turns into a world of ‘spleen’, which is a state where external stimuli have lost their uniqueness and every sensation is merely a repetition of previous ones (Benjamin 1997, 111ff). Benjamin’s observations fit well with the concern in classical sociology—especially pronounced in the lineage going from Weber to critical theory—about the increasing prevalence in modern societies of instrumental rationality leading to a disenchantment of the world and a reification of the products of human action. Most closely, they echo Simmel’s well-known thesis that the ‘intensification of nerve-life’ in the modern metropolis brings about a dominance of the intellect over the emotions in spiritual life, something which in turn produces a blasé attitude (Blasiertheit), a state of bored indifference in which consciousness is fully developed and nothing is left which might be perceived as shocking since everything is considered to be equal and exchangeable (Simmel 1964). According to Benjamin as well as Simmel, modernity is characterized by a particular kind of boredom that arises through an excess of stimuli and which is fuelled by shock rather than by its absence. The incessant shock-sensations and frantic attempts by the intellect to master them constitute modernity as what Benjamin calls a ‘hell’ or ‘continuous catastrophe’, characterized by a ‘dialectic of the new and the ever-same’, an endless production of novelties which is at the same time mired down in monotonous repetition, each new shock collapsing back into the same (Benjamin 1999, 842f; 1977, 231).

The central dilemma in the modernity portrayed by Benjamin revolves around the shock-sensation. The more people protect themselves from the raw force of shock through a heightened consciousness, the more their world will turn into a disenchanted desert in which things and people lose their aura. A typical conflict will arise between those who affirm the ascendancy of reason and heightened consciousness under the banner of enlightenment and the liberation from myth and superstition, and those who will attempt to reverse, slow down or overcome these processes driven by nostalgia for the lost aura and the ‘promise of happiness’ (to use Stendhal’s expression) which they perceive in tradition. The conflict can be visualized as a Greimasian semiotic rectangle (Figure 1).7

Fig. 1: Contradictions in Benjamin’s modernity.

The rectangle clearly brings out the ambiguity of the aura as well as that of modern rationality. The aura seems to bring a promise of happiness but is also associated with mythical closure, with the deceptive semblance of a higher world elevated above and isolated from mundane social reality. Rationality may help us liberate ourselves from myth but also threatens us with disenchantment and a reified, shocking world ruled by cold, unfeeling efficiency. The ‘hellish’ aspect of modernity is produced when the worst elements of this brew are combined, when the shocks serve to perpetuate new myths, or—as Benjamin put it—when capitalism ceases to raise people’s awareness of its contradictions and instead produces ‘a new dream-filled sleep […] and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces’ (Benjamin 1999, 391). Hovering above this hell is the utopian mirror image of a possible redemption that salvages the best of the aura as well as of rationality—the idea of a playful, rather than shocking, liberation from myth that will be possible without sacrificing happiness.

Benjamin adapted to the ‘hell’ of modernity through a strategy of waiting, of getting used to the dream world of capitalism as a first step in order to dispel it. Paradoxically, this very ‘hell’ contains a redemptive potential, expressed in the partial realizations of what he calls ‘play’ and ‘porosity’, a potential that becomes accessible through a ‘tactile’ getting used to the catastrophe. This was a strategy, not of subjecting the dream to an external critique, but of groping one’s way inside it in search of a dialectics of ‘awakening’. Just as for the Jews ‘every second was a small gate through which Messiah might enter’, so for Benjamin every piece of ‘rags or refuse’ was a potential ‘dialectical image’ which might trigger the sudden flash of recognition, the involuntary memory, which would help dispel the nightmare (Benjamin 1977, 167, 261; 1999, 13, 388ff).

Modernity as Nature

I have discussed how Benjamin interrelates a number of themes that are central to the classical sociological accounts of modernity through the notions of shock and the disintegration of the aura: the disenchantment of the world, the prevalence of calculating intellectualism and rationality, the blasé attitude and the atomization of social relations. Having shown how central the notion of shock is as a nodal point connecting these themes, it will now be easier to grasp the full extent of the theoretical implications of the absence of shock in naturalized modernity.

Murakami Haruki’s writings challenge the very premise on which Benjamin’s framework is founded, namely the equation of modernity with shock. As the cultural anthropologist Aoki Tamotsu remarks, cosiness and ‘pleasant sentimentalism’ characterize modernity in Murakami’s novels (Aoki 1996). Even though his story lines do not lack dramatic and unexpected turns of event, the protagonists are rarely perturbed. The absence of shock even in the face of total disaster is well illustrated by the nightmarish plot of Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985, Sekai no owari to hâdoboirudo wandârando), in which the protagonist’s road towards his demise is gentle, rose-colored, and almost painted in an idyllic light despite the superficial kinship of this work to the genre of paranoid fiction. Not only has the prevalence of shock come to an end in his writings, the heightening of consciousness is, I will argue, replaced by a ‘lowering’ of consciousness, and the disenchantment of modernity by its re-enchantment.

Interestingly, the tranquillity of Murakami’s protagonists does not depend on a high degree of consciousness. There is no sign of the nervous attitude of being on one’s guard. If anything, they show a low level of awareness of their surroundings. They lack interest in much of contemporary reality, whose workings they largely accept without the pretension of being able to look through them. ‘I wouldn’t know’ and ‘maybe so’ are their favourite expressions (cf. Murakami H. 1993, 357). The clearest idealization of this ‘low consciousness’ is perhaps found in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle 1994–5, Nejimakidori kuronikuru), whose protagonist—Okada Tôru—personifies the belief that as long as you stick with your gut feeling and do the little things, like vacuum cleaning, you contribute to the harmony of the world and ‘wind up its springs’. The difference between this kind of tranquillity and what Benjamin calls ‘spleen’ is that the former arises from an acceptance of incomprehensibility while the latter designates the state of mind in which the intellect has seemingly mastered its environment. While Benjamin depicts modernity as an age in which the fear of shock spurs the intellect towards an ever more watertight grip on its environment, Murakami’s protagonists appear to feel at home in the ‘new obscurity’ and ‘complexity’ that is said to be characteristic of late modernity (Habermas 1985). The incomprehensible is tolerated since it is no longer felt as threatening. Since the inexplicable has become commonplace, the protective shield of the intellect is less necessary.

Generally, Murakami’s stories have the calm of fairy tales in which fantastic events come forward as natural. As the hard, thing-like world governed by system-imperatives takes on the soft and gentle appearance of natural ecology, the process of ‘disenchantment’ which Weber saw as an inherent attribute of modernity and which Benjamin traced back to the destruction of the aura loses momentum. In line with the ‘post-secularism’ and ‘religious boom’ discussed in recent times, many of Murakami’s protagonists believe in fate. Others encounter ghostlike or supernatural beings while still others able to talk with animals or travel to spiritual other worlds.8

This return of the fantastic in the mode of perception leads to a change in the character of reification, which can be seen in the way people appear in Murakami’s fiction. His early works had a tendency to reduce people to objectified attributes, instead of referring to them by proper names. Thus for example the narrator’s girlfriend in A Wild Sheep Chase (1982, Hitsuji o meguru bôken) is casually reduced to ‘the girlfriend with the beautiful ears’. Although critics like Iwamoto Yoshio (1993) have complained that the characters of this novel are presented as depthless objects deprived of subjectivity, the reduction is drastic enough to be parodical. Like a small peephole in a wall, the reifying epithet never pretends to reveal everything. When she suddenly decides to leave the narrator, the act brings out how little either he or the reader knows about her. Since the epithet appears as a sign of what is untold, it turns her into a riddle rather than demystifying her. Like a gravestone, it refers to an absence in a manner that might be seen as respectful, as the expression of a wish not to sully a too painful memory. Unlike the categories of reified thinking, Murakami’s epithets do not subsume the other, but rather emphasize her unknowability and re-enchant what they keep hidden.

Non-sociality

I have presented the fading away of shock, the lowering of consciousness and the fusion of reification with re-enchantment as three aspects of the naturalized modernity in Murakami’s fiction. What makes this reversal at point after point of Benjamin’s framework possible? The key, I believe, can be found in the way social relations come forward in this fiction—these lack the hostile character characteristic of contractual relations (Gesellschaft), but neither can they be described in terms of the warmth or intimacy of community (Gemeinschaft). The waning of shock has not lead to any restored auratic human relationships, but rather to self-imposed isolation and solitude. The reason for this, I suggest, is that naturalization is made possible by privatization, the redirection of libidinal investments away from relations between people.9 The term privatization must be clearly distinguished from the so-called atomization of social relations. Atomization is the ‘objective’ process whereby system-imperatives (such as the labour market or bureaucratic regulations) splinter relations based on libidinal ties, while privatization is the ‘subjective’ withdrawal of libidinal investment from society. Thanks to privatization, atomization ceases to be experienced as painful and shocking. Naturalization, in other words, is not the result of a reversal of atomization, but comes into being when atomization is complemented by privatization. Privatization does not mean that actual human interaction decreases, but that such interaction becomes less important as a source of gratification for individuals. It is a process whereby individuals get used to solitude, or—to be more precise—their instinctual needs and fundamental impulses become channelled in such a way that their gratification is made less dependent on relations to other people.

A clear theoretical grasp of the process of privatization can be gained by turning to Freud’s theory of the interiorization of libido in On Narcissism (1914) and The Ego and the Id (1923). This state bears a strong resemblance to the ‘pleasant’ loneliness of Murakami’s heroes. Their immunity against shock and indifference seem to make them prototypes of what Freud calls fully developed ‘characters’ with a high degree of interiorized libido. Two examples are the sudden disappearance of the girlfriend in A Wild Sheep Chase and of the wife in The Wind-up Bird. The protagonists’ equanimity in both cases is all the more striking, since love between the sexes is the locus classicus of shock. In the fiction of older Japanese writers, like Abe or Kawabata, the loss of a beloved woman never fails to be shocking (Cassegard 2007). In Murakami, by contrast, the vulnerability necessary in order to be shocked is replaced by a masochistically tinged resignation which borders on indifference. Peace of mind is paid for by loneliness. ‘We no longer connect, but at least I don’t bother you and you don’t bother me’, as Putnam writes in a well-known work on contemporary loneliness and isolation (2000, 354).

While Benjamin or Simmel assume that the subject will react to the prevalence of shock by becoming more conscious about the risks facing it in the dangerous world of human relations where it has to seek libidinal gratification, Freud’s theory, by contrast, suggests that the ego might react to loss by redirecting libidinal investment from external relations to safer ‘non-social’ areas. Rather than arming itself with a heightened degree of consciousness when venturing into external relations, the subject will abandon them and turn to new areas of gratification inside the self. To this, one might add that today ‘non-social’ areas are increasingly opened up not only by the interiorization of libido, but also by the redirection of libido towards consumer objects. Common to both is that they cushion the shocks that have become emblematic of modern human relationships. Both locate the object of desire outside social life, which is increasingly avoided as a source of gratification since it remains an arena of antagonism.

What are the new dilemmas that take form in naturalized modernity? Freud provides an important hint in his association of the interiorization of libido with melancholia and in suggesting that the clearest examples of such interiorization can be found in cases of traumatic loss that prevent the ego from investing any libido in external objects until recovery is achieved (Freud 1991, 245–269). If Benjamin could describe modernity as a hell of relentless shocks serving to perpetuate spleen, Murakami’s fiction is more akin to Hades, a melancholic world of the dead without either happiness or pain. While the prime cultural contradiction according to Benjamin’s model is the conflict between the aura and the predominance of the intellect, in Murakami’s modernity a new contradiction takes form which centres on the conflict between painless solitude and the struggle to maintain or regain human contact. Below I schematize this dilemma in the form of a semiotic square (Figure 2):

Fig. 2: Contradictions in Murakami’s modernity.

What can be seen here is that recovery, in the full sense of a restoration of the ability to live fully in the present without either loneliness or shock, plays the role of a wish-image or ideological mirage—the Greimasian ‘complex term’ in which the dilemma is to be ideally resolved. On the left-hand side we find the world of sociality, characterized by togetherness and shock. On the right side is non-sociality, in which freedom from shocks is bought at the price of loneliness. At the bottom, the experience of traumatic loss brings together shock and loneliness, the worst aspects of sociality and non-sociality.

It should be kept in mind that the ‘return to society’ celebrated in many works of fiction is not per se a solution to the problem of the solitude and loneliness of non-social space. To ‘return’ to the social—or, to use Freud’s formula, to be able once again to libidinal investment in real people or things—means to make oneself vulnerable to shock. All too often, the attempt to ‘return to society’ in today’s world is frustrated by the unrelenting process of atomization, the individualization and colonization of human relations by ever more powerful system-mechanisms. In such an environment, the vulnerability to shock is in itself an invitation to shock. Here the benjaminesque proposition holds true that lowering one’s guard will mean inviting pain. The absence of any neat solution to this contradiction tells us that we are here in contact with one of the defining and structural dilemmas of naturalized modernity.

Not only increasing isolation, but also the frantic vigour with which this isolation is denied, the desperation of the search for belonging, is characteristic of societies today, as evinced in the resurgence of nationalism, ethnic struggles and religious fundamentalism. The resurgence of ethnic and other struggles today also seem to be driven by a search for belonging and testify to the price for which the attempt to renew the aura in the realm of human relations is to be had: the return of shock and terror. This confirms the argument that privatization is a precondition for naturalization. If privatization is negated, the sensation of shock is likely to return. Naturalization thus does not mark any irreversible transition away from the ‘shock-modernity’ of Benjamin. Rather it opens up a corridor away from it, which might be traveled both ways. The decisive difference compared to Benjamin is that shock-modernity is no longer defining for modernity as such, but only one alternative.

Strategies of Waiting and Revolt

At least in his early fiction until the late 1980s, Murakami Haruki appears to stoically immerse himself in naturalized modernity. These early works all tend to portray protagonists who accept loneliness as a sad but sentimentally sweet fate. Later novels—beginning with Norwegian Wood (1987, Noruei no mori) and Dance dance dance (1988, Dansu dansu dansu)—depict protagonists who start to combat the trend towards privatization by committing themselves to other human beings. By their struggle, however, they find themselves having to deny naturalization as well, at least to a certain extent. Shock returns to their world, and even where mutual communication is achieved it tends to be painful, casting doubt on the success of their struggle. While the earlier novels present the clearest and most unblemished picture of a wholly naturalized and privatized world, the later novels show that Murakami is unwilling to affirm this world wholeheartedly.

This is especially evident in The Wind-up Bird, a typical work of Murakami’s later period. Although Okada Tôru is still a fundamentally solitary hero, his quest to retrieve his lost wife marks a significant shift in Murakami’s output. For the first time a protagonist appears who refuses to let go of another person. What occupies Okada in much of the novel is the restoration of destroyed communication with his wife. In order to achieve this he has to ‘remember’ her name. The volte-face of Murakami’s previous nonchalance towards proper names is striking. While the reliance on epithets in earlier novels in an—albeit parodical—way made their bearers exchangeable, the insistence on proper names in this work must be seen as an attempt to combat this exchangeability and attempt to hold fast her uniqueness or ‘aura’. The Wind-up Bird also brings out the difficulty of combating privatization. In this novel shock and pain return. The unpleasant conjugal quarrels and the violent hatred which Okada feels towards his enemy Wataya Noboru are only the reverse side of his new sense of responsibility. As the attempt to restore his marriage ends up in the affirmation of violence, this marks the failure of the dream to restore the aura without at the same time inviting shock.

Let me now turn to Murakami Ryû, a writer well known for his ‘sensational’ or ‘scandalous’ style who chooses a different strategy for dealing with the dilemma of naturalized modernity. His works will be a useful prism for bringing into view another aspect of the discontent generated by naturalization, namely boredom.10 The boredom of naturalized modernity differs from what Simmel calls Blasiertheit or what Benjamin calls spleen, notions that both presuppose an environment in which shocks or stimuli are abundant. In contemporary Japanese literature and popular culture there are at least two other varieties of boredom. A fundamental gesture in much contemporary literature is that of accepting or even celebrating boredom. As mentioned, Okazaki Kyôko depicts her flânerie in the bustling Shibuya crowd as the epitome of pleasant boredom. Taikutsu ga daisuki, the title of her manga-collection, literally means ‘I love boredom’.

A second kind of boredom can be found in Murakami Ryû, who, as Shimada Masahiko has observed, ‘wages war on boredom’ (1998, 25). This war is itself nourished by a distinct kind of boredom, conveniently captured in Japanese by the word unzari—being ‘fed up’ or ‘bored to death’. Its source is resentment rather than indifference. It is well illustrated in a passage in Coin Locker Babies (1980, Koinrokkâ beibîzu), in which Anemone visits her older friend Sachiko in hospital. While Sachiko chatters away about parties, jewels and lovers, Anemone looks out through the window at the Shinjuku skyscrapers, feeling pity and contempt for her friend. She has seen through her talk: ‘all Sachiko’s trips and lovers and ‘experiences’ amounted to the same thing: boredom’ (Murakami R. 1998, 129f). Meanwhile, she daydreams about the destruction of Tokyo—a daydream which is recapitulated later in the novel when Kiku, her boyfriend, hallucinates in his hotel room that Tokyo extends endlessly in all directions—an enormous, dead city—and is gripped by an urge to level it with the ground. ‘Kill them all! Smash everything! Wipe this cesspool off the face of the earth!’ (ibid. 85). As these daydreams and hallucinations suggests, the feeling of ‘being fed up’ involves a longing for shock. Here it is easy to associate to Aum Shinrikyô, the sect responsible for the gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. What apocalyptic sects like Aum revolted against, according to the sociologist Miyadai Shinji, was not the dramatic upheavals of society, but on the contrary the lack of stimuli and appearance of standstill. It was the ennui of the ‘endless everyday’ they found unbearable (Miyadai 1995). It should be observed that this feeling of ‘being fed up’ is based on the presupposition that modernity no longer contains any surprises, novelties or shocks. The important problem is not how to deal with shock but how to deal with its absence.

What Slavoj Zizek calls the desire for the ‘real’, however painful it may be, becomes a recurring theme in the fiction of naturalized modernity, in both Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryû. The philosopher Nakazawa Shin’ichi describes this as a desire to strip oneself of illusions and to ‘touch and caress naked reality with one’s bare hands’ (Nakazawa 1997, 11). Nakazawa points out that the desire to be in touch with ‘reality’ usually ends up in disappointment and frustration, in the vague feeling that: ‘This wasn’t what we really wanted’ (ibid. 14). This vague apprehension of the futility of ‘waging war’ on boredom can be sensed in Murakami Ryû. His Almost Transparent Blue (1976, Kagirinaku tômei ni chikai burû) contains endless, repetitive descriptions of details calculated to be shocking and revolting, but ironically, by being repeated, the shocks become naturalized and sink back into harmless monotony. What his protagonists are nostalgic for is not premodernity, but the kind of modernity that Benjamin portrayed, when it was still possible to be shocked. His fiction demonstrates that when experience changes, the content of nostalgia changes too. It offers not a nostalgia for the aura but a nostalgia for its destruction, not an ideology of peace but one of shock and intensity.

Concluding Remarks

The perception of modernity as shocking or naturalized determines what dilemmas are perceived as central. Benjamin depicts modernity as a ‘hell’ torn between the affirmation and negation of the experience of the disintegration of the aura in the shock-sensation. The dilemma of naturalized modernity, as glimpsed in Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryû, is of a different kind, centering on boredom and loneliness. As mentioned, Murakami Ryû negates naturalization by ‘waging war on boredom’. Although his fiction abounds in seemingly shocking or nauseating episodes, these shocks are never simply given as part of experience itself, as the shocks characteristic of the modernity depicted by Benjamin, but are consciously produced in order to resist naturalization. In Murakami Haruki’s early works, there is a diametrically opposed strategy resembling Benjamin’s attitude of immersing oneself in the experience of the present. Just like Benjamin, he appears to waiting for another reality to take form, although his waiting is passive. If Murakami Ryû represents a basic revolt against naturalization, then Murakami Haruki’s early works represents a basic acceptance of naturalization that still seems to be waiting for something new. The former offers a grim foreboding that he will get mired down in nature through his pursuit of shock, the latter a mute expectation that new shocks may arise through the affirmation of nature.

Behind the shift towards a ‘naturalized modernity’ in recent Japanese literature are larger processes that indicate a need to revise or supplement several classical sociological concepts. The society depicted in Murakami Haruki or Murakami Ryû fails to be captured by either of Tönnies’ classical concepts, Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft, since it is neither an organic community nor a cold hostile arena designated for contractual arrangements and rivalry. One reason for this is the increasing significance of what I have called ‘non-social’ areas in contemporary societies, areas outside social life, which is increasingly avoided as a source of libidinal gratification since it remains an arena of antagonism. These ‘non-social’ spheres play a crucial role for the spread of naturalization, since they create a medium for bypassing shocks and conflicts.

The loneliness created by these spheres seems entirely different from what is found in Benjamin or Simmel. Their loneliness stemmed from the ‘protective shield’ of reserve which they felt forced to adopt. The typical protagonist in Murakami Haruki, by contrast, is not lonely because he wants to shut out others. On the contrary, one feels that he would like nothing better than to reach out to them, yet that he for some reason is unable to do so. His loneliness does not spring from the suppression of social impulses or socially oriented libido. Rather, it is a nostalgia for such impulses or for such libido. This alters the meaning of loneliness itself. Loneliness of the former kind arises from the ‘protective shield’ of heightened consciousness whereas the latter kind of loneliness arises from privatization. As I have argued above, the mechanisms behind this latter kind of loneliness are hard to explain using the framework made classical by Simmel and Benjamin and better understood using a Freudian framework in which the interiorization of libido is linked to melancholia and loss.

As I have argued above, an important background to the shocks discussed by Benjamin was the atomization of social relationships through system imperatives inherent in capitalism or the modern bureaucratic state. The naturalized modernity in Murakami’s fiction becomes possible not because these processes have ended, but because they have become supplemented by privatization. As long as these underlying atomizing processes are in force, attempts to reject privatization are bound to invite renewed shocks. This suggests that combating system imperatives may be one of few viable ways forward for those who wish to break out of the cycle of shock and loneliness. Interestingly, since the 1990s both Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryû have been groping for ways to renew more political forms of commitment and engagement in society—the former grappling in non-fiction works with the doomsday sect Aum Shinrikyô’s terror attack on the Tokyo subway and turning to Japan’s wartime history in his novels, and the latter becoming engaged in the problems of Japanese youth and participating in discussions about youth unemployment and new social movements (see Cassegard, 2007:203–207).

This raises the question of the implications of naturalization for the possibility of a critical theory. To both Benjamin and Adorno, the sensation of shock was arguably an integral part of their critique of myth and ideology. To both, a mythical condition is a condition in which the historical construction or mediation of social life is forgotten, hidden behind a semblance of timelessness (Adorno 1994, 394). It is this mythical condition that is reproduced by what Adorno calls ‘identity-thinking’—thought that strives to repress or shut out the perception of non-identity and thus the awareness of the possibility that things can be otherwise, of qualitative change and history. To Benjamin, however, modernity is a state in which non-identity is not only repressed, but also at the same time clearly visible precisely in the sensation of shock whenever impulses, expectations or habitual ways of living are disrupted or frustrated. Inspired by surrealism and their method of the montage, he explicitly develops shock into a methodological tool aimed at shattering the conventional presuppositions of traditional hermeneutics. Similarly, Adorno’s negative dialectics seems to presuppose the continued presence of shocks, or at least the memory of such shocks, since it gains its incisiveness from sensitivity to pain, not from any pre-established standpoint. The impulse to such dialectics, he claims, is found in experiences of pain and vertigo, experiences that give rise to an apprehension that ‘there must be something else’ or that ‘something is missing’ (etwas fehlt—a phrase from Brecht’s Mahagonny) and hence to a questioning of the status quo (Adorno 1994, 43, 202, 355ff).

What happens to this critique when society is viewed as a naturalized modernity? As I tried to indicate in my discussion of reifying epithets in Murakami Haruki, the perception of non-identity may not so much have disappeared as changed character in naturalized modernity. As these epithets bring out, the very absence of pain and shock may stimulate the awareness of non-identity. Even though his modernity takes the form of a seemingly painless world of stillness, such a landscape gives rise to feelings of discomfort. His works are pervaded by an ill-defined feeling of loss or the sense that something is missing. His protagonists stoically accept the world in which they find themselves placed, but they do so with a feeling of disbelief, as if thinking: ‘This cannot be all there is’. A similar disbelief fuels Murakami Ryû’s revolt, where it is expressed as resentment and disgust precisely with the dull immobility of the world and its absence of shocks.

This is an important discovery, for this is precisely the Brechtian feeling that etwas fehlt, that something absolutely essential is missing, that Adorno saw as originating in the experience of pain. This means that the impulse for criticism in a naturalized modernity is no longer generated through shock or the disintegration of tradition. Instead, it is the very stability and semblance of identity in the world that arouses the feeling that ‘something is wrong’. Just as the disintegration of the aura is an ambivalent process, so the naturalization is ambivalent, encompassing destructive as well as liberating aspects. Naturalization does not mean that the possibilities for a critique of myth have vanished. Although such criticism can no longer take its point of departure in the sensation of shock, the collision between this longing and the seeming immobility of the naturalized order opens up the possibility of a renewed critique. This points to the necessity of developing new forms of critique, but also guarantees that such critique has an important function to fulfil.

References

Adorno, T. W. 1994. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.