Perry visits Japan, contd
Black Ships
Scroll 2
“There was a crowd of people there, all stirred up and making guesses about the burning ships on the horizon. Then those ships came nearer and nearer, until the shape of them showed us they were not Japanese ships but foreign ones…”1 recalled an anonymous Japanese eyewitness. In 1854, Commodore Perry directed his small force of four steamers into the seas of Japan for the second time. As the ships drew nearer to the land and the fog lifted, the men of the expedition observed a number of Japanese villages set in between “deep ravines, green with rich verdure [that] opened into small expanses of alluvial land.”2 The sailors must have seen white forts along the water’s edge, undoubtedly outfitted for defense, but the Americans were not intimidated.
A fleet of Japanese boats tried to stop the squadron but Commodore Perry pushed on. Bayard Taylor, the New Yorker Tribune correspondent reported from the Susquehanna, “[that] the sight of our two immense steamers- the first that ever entered Japanese waters- dashing along at the rate of nine knots an hour, must have struck the natives with the utmost astonishment.”3
Near the city of Uraga on the western side, the squadron dropped their anchors. Not long after, the Japanese fired warning shots from the shore. The Japanese were hostile to any foreigners entering their waters and Japan maintained a strict policy of isolationism having negotiated stringent trade agreements with only the Dutch and Chinese. The Japanese kept close surveillance of the American vessels and approached the squadron for a second time.
This panel illustrated the first concrete contact made between the Americans and Japanese on the second expedition. The panel depicted the Japanese small sailing boats as they approached the formidable steamers. The American ships flew the American flag, symbolic of the young unified nation. The Japanese boats flew the Hinomaru, the flag of the rising sun. The Hinomaru was first used as a shrine flag but, in the sixteenth century, was designated as proper for Japanese vessels. In 1870, during the Mejii Restoration, the government ordered that every Japanese merchant ship should use Hinomaru as the national flag.
The Japanese called the American vessels the “Black Ships” because the hulls were black and the ships belched black smoke. The Americans’ described the Japanese vessels as “trimly built, of pinewood, without a touch of paint, propelled over the water with great swiftness by a numerous crew of boatmen, who, standing to their oars at stern, sculled instead of rowing, the boat.”4 Clearly there was a significant technological divide in shipbuilding between the two nations.
The artist seemed more familiar with the Japanese vessels than with the American steamers. While the American steamers appeared two dimensional and static, the Japanese boats were dynamic, full-bodied, and moving. The artist may not have understood the mechanics of the American vessels or this depiction could have been operating on an entirely different level, the artist portrayed the Americans as obstinate in their relations with Japanese and generally not fitting into the Japanese milieu.
References
- Oliver Statler, The Black Ship Scroll: an account of the Perry expedition at Shimoda in 1854 and the lively beginnings of people-to-people relations between Japan & American based on contemporary records. (Tokyo : Weatherhill, c1963), 8
- Robert Tomes, The Americans in Japan: An Abridgment of the Government Narrative of the U.S. Expedition
- Statler, 8.
- Tomes, 154.
Perry visits Japan
In the Spring 2003, I took a course taught by Professor Susan Smulyan entitled, “Perry to Pokemon: Japan in the United States, the United States in Japan.” Beginning with the American expedition to Japan under Commodore Matthew Perry, in 1853-4, the course traced all subsequent cultural exchanges between the two countries. The introduction to the course began with a visit to the John Hay library to study an anonymously painted Japanese scroll. The twelve panels bound in silk depicted various events that occurred among Commodore Perry, the American squadron, and Japanese officials.
Professor Smulyan and I received a grant from the University to continue researching the scroll and develop the website, Perry visits Japan. Over the summer of 2003 we reviewed all available resources on the Japan Expedition and worked with the Center for Digital Initiatives, Brown University Library, to produce the site. The website relies on the 12 panel painted scroll by an anonymous Japanese artist and 6 lithographs originally painted by Wilhelm Heine, the official American artist of the Expedition. Below is a narrative I wrote to accompany the first illustration on the scroll.
First Contact
Scroll 1
The first panel of this illustrated scroll by an anonymous Japanese artist provides the observer with a Japanese interpretation of the early relations between Japan and the United States and the separate histories that led up to “first contact.” During the European age of exploration, the Portuguese traveled westward to Japan. Jesuit missionaries accompanied Portuguese merchants because Christianity was an integral part of the Portuguese goal of contact with non-Western peoples. The missionaries thrived in Japan and acquired such a large following that soon the shoguns viewed the religion as a political threat. Consequently, during the seventeenth century, Christians and the practice of Christianity were prohibited. Moreover, in 1639, the Bakufu established a policy of isolation, or national seclusion. With the exception of the Dutch, Westerners were prohibited from interacting with Japan and Japanese were barred from leaving the country.
About two hundred years after the Japanese closed their doors, Americans began to look beyond their borders. The United States, motivated by the idea of manifest destiny, tried to expand their influence and wield more power in the world. The Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804, the annexation of Texas and Oregon, the Gadsden Purchase, joined in 1853 by the first expedition to Japan under Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry are all examples of this impulse.
In the panel, the American officer points his gun at the Japanese peasant and with the other hand points to a place beyond the panel. The Japanese artist probably considers the Americans as aggressors. The Japanese man appears prostrate with his arms outstretched towards the officer. The artist seems to believe that the Japanese pleas; the Japanese are not barbarians like the Americans and work for peaceful solutions. Commodore Perry led his expedition with the clear intent of standing up to the Japanese people. He wanted to demonstrate that the United States would not take “No” for an answer. His plan was “to drive by force.” Wilhelm Heine, the resident artist, in his own words explained Perry’s strategy was to “meet force with force.”1 And as commented in the official Narrative of the Expedition, “Perry’s attitude and action…gives indications of the compelling influence that the concept of manifest destiny had upon American foreign policy”2 On the 1853 voyage, Perry’s only concession was that the Americans would return the following spring, which according to him, would give the Japanese an adequate amount of time to discuss the issues.
The use of the color blue is striking, it stands out from the surrounding earth tones of brown and green. Unlike the colors red and purple, blue [made using indigo dye] was not forbidden by Japanese edict. The dark navy blue used in this panel, according to Kunio Fukuda, was employed most frequently. 3 Most likely the artist worked with Prussian blue, discovered in Western Europe and introduced to Japan in the eighteenth century. Fukuda conjectured that because blue was a familiar color to all Japanese it was popular among artisans. Moreover, blue was ubiquitous “possibly because the Japanese never worshiped an almighty god envisaged as dwelling in heaven, blue never became associated with lofty religious sentiments.” 4 The US naval officer and the mountain in the background are the only two objects to appear in blue. The mountain most likely is Mount Fuji, which is easily visible from Edo [Toyko] Bay. The inclusion of Mount Fuji in the panel is significant as it is a revered landmark of Japan. Sangku shinko, a belief held by many Japanese past and present, is that mountains are sacred. The gods are believed to live in the mountains. The mountains are also environmental assets, they provide for and protect the animals and produce the streams that give water to surrounding areas.
References
- Wilhelm Heine, With Perry to Japan, trans. and ed. Frederic Trautmann (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 3
- House Record, Narrative of the Expedition (1856): 626, quoted in Wilhelm Heine, With Perry to Japan
- Kunio Fukuda, The Colors of Japan. (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2000), 28.
- Fukuda, 28
Hobhouse and the Organic State
L.T. Hobhouse’s conception of the state as an organism is historically representative of a tendency to ascribe biological characteristics to non-biological entities, such as the State or Government. What simpler way to conceive of a society’s structure than through the discourse of the human body? A starting point would be the introduction into political rhetoric the phrase corpus politicum, or body politic. Today we discuss the actions of a country’s head of state or members of Parliament without questioning the etymological or hermeneutic functions. Furthermore, body implies a plurality. This plurality is desirous for Hobhouse who envisions an “ ideal society [that] is conceived as a whole which lives and flourishes by the harmonious growth of its parts, each of which in developing on its own lines and in accordance with its own nature tends on the whole to further the development of others.” [72] With the synthesis of biological and socio-political discourses, this essay will explore the function of the state as organism in Hobhouse’s Liberalism and his efforts to reconcile his Liberal project with organic and collectivist thought- all in the hope of instigating or calling to attention the need for social progress and change.
Hobhouse’s political project does not concentrate on the individual or the head as much as the society as a whole. In his essay, he defines society as consisting wholly of persons. [68] Society has a unique collective life and character and has no distinct personality separate from and superior to those of its members. [68] Liberalism does not want to produce an atomistic society. Citizens are heterogeneous but together form an organic whole. The collective life and character originates from common language, common history, and nationalism, etc. There is fundamental difference between individual well-being and social well-being T.H. Green argues “since God is manifest in human political institutions, one can serve Him by working to improve society. And since every individual is a part and a product of the society in which he lives, social work can also be a means of serving oneself.” [Rose 18]
This collectivism, according to Hobhouse, is necessarily organic. He defines organic as “A thing… made up of parts which are quite distinct from one another, but which are destroyed or vitally altered when they are removed from the whole.” [67] The individual is nothing without society. He takes up a case of sort-of Robinson Crusoe and the imminent destruction of one’s mind without interaction with a community. The relation of the individual to community cannot be comprised; it fosters growth.
In examining Hobhouse’s new Liberalism it is important to consider the various influences: classic Liberalism, Conservatism, the crisis of traditional religion, and Hegel in the British milieu. The tenets of classic Liberalism maintain the sanctity of the individual, and privilege an individual’s freedom and autonomy within society. Classic Liberalists believed that all authority by the state must be resisted [speaking specifically to the despotic nature of the monarchy and centralized bureaucracy]. Furthermore, classic Liberalists were concerned with contractual relations, and the use of rational or empirical thinking. By the late nineteenth century, the sudden transformation of society and everyday living produced by a new mass consumer culture proved classic Liberalism anachronistic.
Edmund Burke, often referred to as the founding father of Conservative thought, oddly enough is influential in Hobhouse’s project and organic thought. Burke asserts that, “politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.” [13] Burke laid the foundation for organic theories by introducing time into deliberations of social change and shifting the focus of political thought from the historical ideas of contract to the society in which men presently lived. Working in the present tense, Hobhouse hoped to take the rights of men and extend them to the limits of society. This inclusivity of every man is central to an organic theorization of society. Furthermore, a linear conception of social change created space for positivism and Liberalism.
What is not readily apparent in Hobhouse’s analysis and configuration of a new Liberalism are the influences of the secular religious movement, and in that a fervent moral passion. In the late nineteenth century there was a crisis in traditional religion due largely to advances in science and technology. In his essay, “Edwardian Temperament,” Jonathan Rose explains how an upheaval in religious beliefs was diverted into other areas of thought- the emergence of Darwinist biology and the application of historical criticism to the study of the Bible and Christian truths. Both these projects corroded pre-existing bases of faith.
The pervasiveness of materialist life however left the individual searching for a non-material and non-rational spiritual outlet. What came about then, is referred to as secular religion. Individuals could find transcendental and spiritual ideas immanent in the social body- there is no need for God. One of the purposes of secular faith was to abolish the distinction between the spiritual and the mundane. Secular religion was then based on the notion of a universal interconnectedness, a great chain of being. “Unity, oneness, wholeness, bonds, synthesis, relation, and connection” were not only the cardinal values of Edwardian literature as Rose writes, but on a grander scale, the cardinal values of late nineteenth century social, political, and intellectual thought. Herein lie the first echoes of an organic state. As Hobhouse writes, “the sense of ultimate oneness, is the real meaning of equality, as it is the foundation of social solidarity and the bond which, if genuinely experienced, resists the disruptive force of all conflict, intellectual, religious, and ethical.” [65]
Liberal politics attempts to quench the thirsty soul of humankind. Citizenship subsequently operates with moral and religious attributes. Editors of the Hibbert Journal, a theological quarterly wrote, “Truth is to be found not in the conclusions to which any single line of thought may lead but in the totality of conclusions to which all lines have led, and are still leading, the instructed Reason of man. Though separate members of this Totality may appear discordant as between themselves, we imagine that in the vast combination they become elements of some final harmony… The thoughts of men, though separated at the beginning, an on their own level, by every degree of intellectual difference, have yet a common End, raised by infinity above all human levels, to which as to a focal point, they inevitably converge.” [Rose 9]
The themes of collectivism, organicism, and moralism characterize Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel purported that the state is a moral entity in which the individual subordinates self-interest for the common good. Hobhouse’s political project is characterized partially by a sort of Hegelian hope for synthesis. To achieve this synthesis, the starting point or thesis is the right of the individual. The rights of the individual are then problematized between the poles of personal freedom and social control. The synthesis produced relies on regarding “liberty as primarily a matter of social interest.” [67] An organic conception of the relation between the individual and society provides the space for “continuous advance in those regions of truth and of ethics which constitute the maters of highest social concern,” including the destablization of private and public and the almost-equalness of men across classes.[67]
The core of the biology of the social organism is, to reiterate, growth. Hobhouse writes, “achievements that have been won by certain definite processes of individual or collective effort, human personality is that within which lives and grows, which can be destroyed but cannot be made, which cannot be taken to pieces and repaired, but can be placed under conditions in which it will flourish and expand, or, if it is diseased, under conditions in which it will heal itself by its own recuperative powers. The foundation of liberty is the idea of growth.” [66] The core of liberty then, like the social organism, is growth. At this point, it is important to note as well that the use of biological terms and organic theory was a response to the specter of science that seemed to haunt all corridors of then present thought. Hobhouse may have been trying to also legitimize his work by using scientific terms.
According to John Stuart Mill the ultimate goal of Liberalism is the flowering of an individual’s personality. Hobhouse continues that this cannot happen in a rational society but only in a moral and humanitarian setting. The stress on positive freedom and an insistence of moral rightness embedded the Liberal community in a moralized state,
Organicism is an essentially moral perception of oneness, at both the microcosmic level of the nation-state to the macrocosmic level of the universe. The oneness expressed concern for democracy and manhood suffrage. All individuals, including those in the lower classes, were citizens and should be incorporated into the State. This may appear to be an argument for equality, but Hobhouse uses theories of liberty to express his politic- equality is necessary for liberty.
The state as an organism is essential to Hobhouse’s political project because of growth. Hobhouse asserts on several different occasions that the sphere of liberty is the sphere of growth itself. [78] Hobhouse could not define his politic with the metaphor of the state as a mechanical structure. A human society was just that- composed of human individuals- and not a machine. A machine can be made to conform more or less to a plan. Machines may be altered, replaced, and exists relative only to the needs and purposes of the users. Humans are not to be used in this manner. He so eloquently expresses this by saying, “the heart of Liberalism is the understanding that progress is not a matter of mechanical contrivance, but of the liberation of living spiritual energy.” [73]
What were the immediate consequences of this new Liberal state? There was an increase in social activism and the eventual formation of the welfare state. All individuals were entitled to property, freedom, and wealth. And in a very socialist vein, Liberalism ought to be democratic as it emerges from the efforts of society as a whole to secure fuller measure of justice and better organization of mutual aid, makes it account with the individual. [91] Liberty does not rest solely on the actions of an individual, but in the efforts by the individual for the common good. Hobhouse asserts that the point of Liberal economics and politics lies in the “equation of social service and reward.” [107]
“Liberalism is the belief that society can safely be founded on this self-directing power of personality, that it is only on this foundation that a true community can be built, and that so established its foundations are so deep and so wide that there is no limit that we can place to the extent of the building. Liberty then becomes not so much a right of the individual as a necessity of society. It rests not on the claim of A to be let alone by B, but on the duty of B to treat A as a rational being.” [66] The task of late 19th century Liberalism in biological terms is the regeneration of Liberal politics after the destruction of old Liberalism. This is congruous to Hobhouse’s positing state as organism. In the beginning of his essay he asks, is Liberalism at bottom a constructive or only a destructive principle? The material of this essay should confirm that Liberalism is both constructive and destructive, as embodiment of the organism. The organism is in a continuous condition of growth and change, as should our politics remain in a dynamic state.
Wavelength and “The Imaginary Signifier”
What is necessary for the spectator to identify with cinema? In his essay, ”The Imaginary Signifier,” Christian Metz draws on the psychoanalytic theory of [Freud and] Lacan to present a specific cinematic identification that the spectator is offered. In Lacan, the site of primary identification is the mirror. With respect to the mirror, the secondary identification is with one’s own look. Working with Metz’s understanding of Lacan’s mirror stage theory and Metz’s own conception of identification in cinema, this essay will examine the spectator’s positioning and pleasure, specifically in relation to the camera in the Michael Snow film, Wavelength.
To begin, a brief summation of Lacan’s mirror stage theory is necessary… Lacan concentrates on the formation of identity, the process of becoming or realizing oneself as a subject. He argues that the mirror stage is central to the subject’s identification, and thus developed subjectivity. In the mirror stage the subject first realizes the primordial desire for wholeness. On account of the nature of signification and subjectivity, along with the self-recognition that is found in the mirror stage, there are a series of losses and meconnaisances, or misrecognitions. These misrecognitions, part of ego verification, may be liable for such feeling as desire and need, and the resulting states of repression and manifestation. As a result the subject is forced to negotiate between polarities of desire for plentitude and the recognition of desire, lack. The desire for plentitude is key to the deconstruction of attraction to cinema because it is cinema that offers us fixed, unified worlds that suture over difference.
Metz begins with the notion that “the spectator has already known the experience of the mirror, and is thus able to constitute a world of objects without having first to recognize himself within it.” [251] The cinema appeals to the spectator’s imaginary by constructing an omnipotent position with unlimited access to a complete fictive world. This appeal is accomplished in three ways. First, it solicits regression. The spectator is in a darkened cocoon-like auditorium. Regression blurs the lines between the fictive and real, and the spectator suspends his belief in fictive nature of fiction. Second, cinema offers primary Identification. The primary identification with the camera places the spectator in a seeming pure state of perception and mastery. Third, cinema effaces the marks of production and enunciation, which-creates a pretension of seamlessness and naturalness.
The camera is producing, constructing, and controlling the film space. The spectator is completely absent from this action. In order to maintain a sense of control the spectator identifies with the camera and it’s positioning. If the position of the spectator in Wavelength could be interpreted as a sort of voyeur. The camera is positioned at a high angle, which is the position for a camera meant for surveillance. This high angle creates a sense of omniscience. This also supports Metz’s description of the spectator as all perceiving. He states, “The spectator is absent from the screen as perceived, but also present there and even ‘all-present’ as perceiver.” [257]
Michael Snow attempts to demonstrate how in the construction of a film space there is little to no need for narrative. The film space is restricted to a single room and does not pause for any introduction of narrative [the entry of two women, a man dying, a woman making a phone call]. The zoom of the camera is fixed-on an object, a picture, on the far wall of the room and is non-discriminatory in its movement, it does not stop for any narrative interruptions. This raises the question: Does the camera movement, make narrative superfluous? It may but, its overall effect is the de-centering of the spectator.
Is the spectator dissatisfied by the lack of narrative? Does the spectator cling to any semblance of narrative, i.e. the man dying, and wish that the camera had stopped? That may undermine Snow’s objectives. For the most part the film remains ambiguous in its fixation. The spectator is to some extent free to imagine [although it is restricted by first, the camera framing and second, the dimensions of the room] what the camera will focus on. It could be the yellow chair, or the telephone, or the group of pictures on the wall. It is only after the zoom reaches a certain point, where all that is left are several indistinct 2D images on the wall.
Was the de-centering of the spectator one of Snow’s goals? Nonetheless, he is only successful to a certain degree. He maintains the ambiguity of the look and the spectator’s dissatisfaction all the way up until the last segment. His failure is in the apparent inescapability of closure. The spectator sees the object, a picture of waves. In the last segment of Wavelength the camera is zooming in on a picture of waves and very slowly the picture assumes the entire frame. It is accompanied with cadenced sound waves. The entire effect is tantalizing. Snow then chooses to interrupt this complacent state with a superimposition of a past frame of the picture. What the spectator sees then is a picture within a picture of itself: the past in the present. Along these lines, Metz would read the spectator’s Identification with the movement of the camera is as transcendental, not empirical. It could be understood as transcendental if we return to the idea of mirrors and the presence of a multiplicity of mirrors, and thus misrecognitions. As a transcendental subject the “structure of disavowal and multiple belief’ is maintained in the infinite reduplications, redoublings and rearticulations [but as an empirical subject we would be able to decipher the classic techniques of cinema that "reel" us and gain no pleasure/fulfillment].
Whether the form is static [framing] or dynamic [camera movement] the principle is the same; the point is to gamble simultaneously on the excitation of desire and its non fulfillment.” [274] Our voyeuristic pleasure is bound to a single object and by substitution [because of our primary identification]; our pleasure is bound to the camera. And Metz concludes, “for the cinematic effects I am evoking [framing and its displacement], the properly fetishistic element seems to me to be… the edge of the screen, the separation between the seen and unseen, the ‘arrestation’ of the look.” [277] Ultimately, it is the cinematic equipment, the camera, that turns the imaginary into the symbolic and it is the camera that plays on our scopophilia and induces our Identification.