Technologies of Sin & Salvatation:
Capital & Technologies of Meaning in the Age of the Perpetual Innovation Economy
Chapter
Three
MEANING
BEYOND REASON
In
the earliest age of the gods, existence was born of
non-existence.
The Rg Veda
Is the quiet eye of the storm not the very source
of all creativity?
Daisetsu Suzuki
WITHIN
THE PERPETUAL INNOVATION ECONOMY, the more advanced our technologies of reproduction
become, the more capital's value is maintained through
the production of new meaning through figurative transformation.
Understanding this contemporary context is crucial
because the critical work prefiguring and enabling
such creative valorization lies in dissolving or "releasing"
schematic barriers to this essential human labor,
which is the primary function of contemporary information
and communications technologies within all institutions
seeking competitive advantage in today's political
economy. These schematic barriers appear throughout
an integral, multi-dimensional network of infrastructure,
cognitive processes and data, as well as the increasingly
crucial dimension of embodied human affect (Andrews
1994). Among these dimensions, the last has traditionally
proven to be the most complex and inaccessible to
Western epistemologies and methods of analysis, limited
as they are to the ways of reason. This study argues,
however, that the convention of separating reason
from affect, mind from body, the world of "being"
from the world of "becoming," is no longer
tenable in the emergent "Affect Economy."
But what is the alternative to this venerable dialectic?
With Western thought torn as we saw in the previous
chapter for over two thousand years between objectivism
and subjectivism, empiricism and rationalism, where
are we to find direction in deconstructing these polarities
and in extruding our traditional plane of reason-bound
theory and method?
____In
addressing such questions, we return again to the
core issue of the interdependency of humanity and
technology. In his analysis of the technological aesthetics
in the 20th century and into the future, Rutsky sees
an ongoing transformation in this very symbiosis accompanying
the current mutational processes of both the global
political economy and what he describes as humankind's
"techno-cultural unconscious:"
The position of human beings in relation to this
techno-cultural unconscious cannot, therefore, be
that of the analyst (or theorist) who, standing outside
this space, presumes to know or control it. It must
instead be a relation of connection to, of interactions
with, that which has been seen as "other,"
including the unsettling processes of techno-culture
itself. To accept this relation is to let go of part
of what it has meant to be human … and to allow
ourselves to change, to mutate, to become alien, cyborg,
posthuman. It is … a matter of unsecuring the
subject, of acknowledging the relations and mutational
processes that constitute it. A posthuman subject
would … acknowledge the otherness that is part
of us. It would involve opening the boundaries of
individual and collective identity, changing the relations
that have distinguished between subject and object,
self and other, us and them. (1999)
____And here, though
he himself does not draw the parallel, Rutsky has
put forward an uncanny description of a fundamental
feature of much of Eastern thought, and Zen Buddhism
in particular. Though Zen scholars and practitioners
would not define such a form of human subjectivity
as "alien, cyborg or posthuman" as Rutsky
does, Mahayana Buddhism has in fact been evolving
the eco-cognitive technologies for effecting such
a transformation in consciousness and experience for
many hundreds of years. And so it is to the epistemologies
and ontologies of the East that we now turn to see
that such a conception of humanity is in fact deeply
rooted in these cultures' rigorous and subtle inquiry
into what it means to be fully human. In seeking to
better understand the West's progression toward a
"posthuman," "cyborg," "alien"
or other futuristic notion of humanity's relationship
with technology, it would be foolish not to first
carefully examine the extraordinary efforts made by
other peoples in other times to address related ontological
and teleological challenges. For we can learn much
from the pre-scientific eco-cognitive technologies
developed by the peoples of ancient India, China and
Japan as the individuals of other ages and cultures
sought to free themselves from perceptual error, hypostasized
metaphorical constructs, which they identified as
causing the cognitive barriers between their own particular
ontological - or cosmological - dimensions.
.
. .
Beyond
the sensing body lies the knowing mind;
Beyond the knowing mind lies the intuitive mind;
Beyond the intuitive mind lies the Cosmic Mind;
Beyond the Cosmic Mind lies Unmanifest Reality;
Beyond Unmanifest Reality lies the Supreme Self.
From
the Rig Veda
Four
to five thousand years ago, the ancient people of
the Ganges Valley began to evolve a vision of reality
and human experience, the essence of which is recorded
in the Rig Vedic text above. These cosmological dimensions
effectively framed this people's core existential
question: how to correctly perceive and reintegrate
these ontological categories for a more complete identification
with this reality and a more fully realized human
experience? To vastly simplify a process spanning
several millennia, and a discipline which has undergone
countless iterations in its many manifestations, one
might say that Yoga (Sanskrit for union) was evolved
within the early Hindu culture as a pre-scientific,
integrative eco-cognitive technology. Its central
purpose was (and remains) to progressively dissolve
whatever barriers may exist to the individual's perception
of these nested dimensions of reality and to open
this newly integral space to enhanced experience and
meaning (Podgorski 1984).
____In Hatha Yoga, abhimana
(ego-pride) is seen as the greatest barrier to the
perception of unity between all dimensions of experience.
In this tradition, abhimana has long been seen not
only as an impediment to proper Self-consciousness,
but also as a form of primordial cognition which wills
itself into the form of what I describe as alienating
technologies, for which I give a postmodern case study
below, and with which one must then struggle again
to overcome in order to achieve unobstructed, optimal
experience (Podgorski, 174-180).
____Mihalyi Csikszentmihalya,
who has conducted research and written for several
decades on the psychology of optimal experience, which
he describes as "flow," suggests, "It
is not unreasonable to regard yoga as one of the oldest
and most systematic methods of producing the flow
experience." He describes as "superficial"
the common perception that the yogic aim of ego-transcendence
runs counter to the modern Western ideal of self-actualization
(1991, 106-107). In fact, in the practice of yoga,
embodied individualization is viewed as a natural
process whereby the union of matter and consciousness
may first come to be recognized. Here, embodied existence
is seen to create the instruments and tools through
which the drama of salvation is then played out. Yet
there is also an explicit recognition of the danger
that these same tools, meant to be instruments of
liberation in life, might rather become obstacles
impeding the practitioner's search for identification
with the supreme reality. These are the khyativada,
or "perceptual errors," which have been
the intense focus of Indian thought for several thousand
years through to the present day (Rao 1998).
____In his text, Perceptual
Error, Srinivasa Rao has done a great service to students
of Eastern thought in distilling several thousand
years of epistemological development and inquiry into
the problem of human cognitive error, documenting
nine distinct branches of thought regarding this phenomenon.
Though Rao's analysis is at times constrained by its
emphasis on historical documentation and lack of theoretical
perspective, it does clearly reveal the remarkably
persistent and subtle attention to human experience-and
the core cognitive constructions of the human self
and its world-given to these issues in the millennial
evolution of Indian philosophy. Particularly relevant
here is the Atmakhyati theory of perceptual error,
attributed to the Vijnanavada school of Buddhism.
This theory holds fundamental perceptual error to
be found in "The erroneous [perception] by an
internal cognition of itself as an external object"
(Rao 1998, 144). That is, an internal cognitive schema
itself is perceived as if it were an external reality.
Rao traces this account of perceptual error back to
the 2nd century writings of the Buddhist sage Nagarjuna,
where all entities are characterized by momentariness
and dependent co-origination. As Nagarjuna states
unequivocally, "There is no existence of any
kind, anywhere at any time which is non-dependently
originated; therefore there is nothing nowhere at
no time that is eternal."
. . .
The
Buddhist sage Nagarjuna is credited by most scholars
of Buddhism as the first patriarch of the Mahayana
Madhyamika tradition, a school of thought characterized
by its adherence to the notion of sunyata, or emptiness,
and its fierce refutation of dualistic oppositions.
This concept, which would become essential over time
to the evolution of Zen thought and method, was in
fact an elegant fortuitous blend of previous Buddhist
thought with the notion of "zero." After
Nagarjuna, the Buddhists would frame the sphere of
inquiry in a unique manner which, over the centuries,
enabled them to evolve a distinct form of their own
eco-cognitive technology.
____In 326 BC, Aristotle's
most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, had extended
his westward march to what was then known as Punjab
in the northwestern corner of the Indian subcontinent
in his pursuit to enlarge his empire. He brought with
him a technology which had originated with the Babylonians
and which the Greeks had found to be useful in levying
taxes and calculating trade transactions. This technology
was, of course, the numeral "zero." As previously
noted, Seife has documented the likely circulation
of this seemingly benign technology from ancient Babylonia
and into what was then the Greek empire, where it
met with tremendous and even violent resistance from
the epistemological powers that be of the day. As
Seife explains it, it quickly became clear that zero
threw Greek geometry into such dangerous disarray
that the concept was proclaimed taboo by Platonic
and Aristotelian scholars. As we have seen, so intertwined
were Greek philosophy and mathematics that to throw
the divine geometry into disarray would be to cast
doubt on the very principles underpinning the veracity
of the Platonic and Aristotelian theories of meaning.
Zero, in revealing the limitations of thinking in
terms of geometric forms, revealed the limitations
of what had been established by Plato as the ideal
a priori forms, to which all dialectical knowledge
aspired. Beyond this, Aristotle's entire cosmology
was altogether contingent on his refutation of the
existence of infinity and the void. If zero and the
absence of the a priori prime mover were accepted
as possibilities, the grand metaphorical foundation
for dialectical reason could not stand for long. Because
zero was so fundamentally incompatible with Greek
order, the idea was considered anathema and never
incorporated into the dualistic epistemologies which
would come to form the foundation of Western thought.
____The situation was
altogether different in the Asian subcontinent which
Alexander and his army entered in 326 BC. In the Ganges
Valley of the 3rd century BC, the concept of zero-sunya-found
fertile soil. Though the peoples of the Punjab had
developed their own mathematical systems, Pythagorean
geometry was not among them. Neither were their epistemologies
based on such mathematical metaphors. As Charles Seife
notes,
Unlike
the Greeks, Indians did not see squares in square
numbers or the areas of rectangles … Instead
they saw the interplay of numerals-numbers stripped
of their geometric significance. This was the birth
of what we now know as algebra. Though this mind-set
prevented the Indians from contributing much to geometry,
it had another, unexpected effect. If freed the Indians
from the shortcomings of the Greek system of thought-and
their rejection of zero (2000, 70).
____And so, at the time
Alexander's mathematicians passed their techniques
on to the peoples of Punjab, the concept of zero appears
to have been accepted, readily implemented, and would
likely have eventually traveled throughout the region
and permeated into other aspects of the peoples' social
interactions. According to the Buddhist tradition
itself as well as to scholarship, the concept of sunya,
the Indian word for zero, and the teaching of sunyata,
or emptiness, began to appear in the Prajnaparamita
and other texts approximately 500 years after the
Buddha's death.
Buddhist tradition and scholarship also agree that,
by the first half of the 2nd century AD, when the
Indian sage Nagarjuna composed the poetic stanzas
which come to comprise the basis of the Madhyamika
(Middle School) Buddhist school of thought, "zero"
would have been in broad circulation on the subcontinent
for over five centuries. And it was Nagarjuna who
first placed sunyata, the notion of emptiness, at
the core of Mahayana Buddhism (the form which spread
to China, Korea and Japan). This was a theory of meaning
which persistently argued against the notion of a
priori subjects or objects of any kind, proposing
instead a middle way between existence and nonexistence,
permanence and impermanence, identity and difference.
It was, in this very important sense, a mode of thought
which refused to place itself on a fixed metaphorical
basis beyond what is alternately rendered as groundlessness
or contingency. For again, as Coyne has argued, metaphor
itself implies this dualism of identity and difference.
Thus Nagarjuna and those who followed his approach
were assiduous in deconstructing not only the notion
of an independently existing self or subject, but
also the independent existence of the object. This
was a meticulously articulated epistemology of what
Varela et al have termed "codependent arising."
It was a notion which had never been explicitly developed
in Buddhist thought up until this point in time. Nagarjuna's
proposal that at the heart of Buddha-mind lay sunyata
signaled a revolutionary transformation in both Buddhist
thought. This epistemological revolution would lead
to the development of pre-scientific technologies
developed by subsequent generations of Mahayana Buddhist
scholars, students and the peoples of the regions
touched by this powerful and highly sophisticated
articulation of a universe absent a prioris. And these
remarkable, enduring technologies would be committed
to dissolving the perceptual and cognitive barriers
to the human freedoms Nagarjuna's stunning epistemological
figuration implied. Perhaps most remarkable of all
is that there would be nothing like this in the pantheon
of Western thought until the 20th century.
____By around 1100 AD,
the Indian and Chinese Buddhists had begun to develop
well-articulated means of reconstituting human cognition
in order to overcome the barriers to perceiving reality
in its unity, beyond what the Madhyamika School held
to be the false dualisms and perceptual biases human
cognition. Question and answer sessions between Buddhist
masters and their students, initially termed mondo
(literally, question and answer), were later formalized
by Japanese Zen Buddhists into a pre-scientific integrative
technology called the koan (literally, public document).
Though much has been written about the use of the
koan through the past one thousand years to the present,
it may be said that the practice was effectively evolved
as a widely-used aesthetic techne for the specific
purpose of overcoming ego-consciousness and its illusory
projection of a dualistic reality, and to enable the
Zen practitioner to again experience reality in its
truest and most deeply satisfying nature (Fromm, Suzuki,
Martino 1960).
____Even in the more
formalized Japanese tradition, Suzuki describes that
Zen monks were given by their teachers explicit koans
appropriate to specific cognitive obstacles they were
facing in their psycho-spiritual development. The
work of the practitioner was then to begin the strenuous
task of absorbing the text within their being so that
it no longer existed as an external object upon which
to focus cognitive attention, but as a fully internalized
instrument doing its work on the extreme reaches of
the unconscious. The koans varied in content and complexity,
ranging from the nonsensical "Mu!" to the
infamous, "Let me hear the sound of one hand
clapping," to far more involved cognitive puzzles.
____In the Zen discipline,
the intellect is viewed as useful primarily in identifying,
however vaguely, where the obstacles to integrative
human experience lay. Yet the lived experience of
reality may only be entered into when the intellect
quits its claim on it. For this to become possible
the intellect must first be understood for what it
is; one ontological category nested within the infinitely
more expansive world beyond mere knowing. As Suzuki
notes, "May we not call this unknown the Cosmic
Unconscious, or the source of infinite creativity
whereby not only artists of every description nourish
their inspiration, but even we ordinary human beings
are enabled, each according to his natural endowments,
to turn his life into something of genuine art?"
(1960, 17).
The discipline of haiku presents a concentrated lesson
in Zen reconstructive art. The poem becomes an opportunity
to reimagine experience in this new terrain outlying
the familiar dualisms and dialectics of common cognition.
Alexander, who has written extensively on Dewey's
analysis of the role of art and aesthetics in propelling
creative innovation and generating "consummatory
experience," notes that, "The haiku strives
to reveal, through its concrete but suggestively minimalist
technique, the immediate vitality of the moment"
He cites the following haiku by Tantan (1674-1761)
as a case in point:
On the rock
Waves can't reach,
Fresh snow.
____This micro-narrative,
the very antithesis of theory and macro-narrative,
articulates the lived experience which Zen seeks to
reveal first through the discipline of the koan, and
finally through the immediacy and transience of its
reconstructive art forms, such as haiku, calligraphy
and painting. In Zen, the goal is always that experience
and expression are one. Zen language expresses the
most concrete experience. Suzuki notes that the purpose
of the koan or the haiku is not concerned to elucidate
verbal "riddles" but to reach the mind beyond
language, which "exudes or secretes" creative
expression "as naturally, as inevitably, as the
clouds rise from the mountain peaks" (1959, 7).
In rejecting abstract syllogisms and conceptualizations,
the Zen practitioner seeks to avoid "dead words"
which no longer connect directly and concretely and
intimately with the experience itself. For, as Suzuki
observes, dead words are understood to be "conceptualized,
they are cut off from the living roots. They have
ceased, then, to stir up my being from within, from
itself" (8). Zen language, like all of its art
forms, seeks its realization in imminent, living experience.
In this way, the Zen aesthetic directly reflects the
merging of subject and object in one absolute emptiness,
sunyata. This point is crucial to the Zen approach
to unbinding the creative powers of the human individual
and of finding the beauty which lies beyond reason.
As Suzuki puts it,
The
oppositions and limitations which confront every movement
of ours, physical and psychological, put a stop also
to the free flow of our aesthetic feeling toward its
objects. Beauty is felt when there is freedom in motion
and freedom in expression. Beauty is not in form but
in the meaning it expresses, and this meaning is felt
when the observing subject throws his whole being
into the bearer of the meaning and moves along with
it … Aestheticism now merges into religion (1959,
355).
____Zen contends that,
as long as the individual is captive to the cognitive
errors arising from the separation of subject and
object and holds these dualistic constructs to represent
some sort of teleological finality, the true "transparency"
and fluidity of the self is destroyed, and experience
contaminated with illusion and sophistry. Zen does
not necessarily stand against the use of language
or other technologies of meaning, but does seek to
develop in the practitioner the awareness that these
technologies are always tending to detach themselves
from imminent realities and become dead conceptions.
And it is this technological alienation which Zen
works against, seeking to discover the "intrinsic
meaning" in the moment of creative coorigination,
rather than to allow life and creation to stagnate
and deaden in a virtual space of cognitive abstractions.
____In The Embodied Mind:
Cognitive Science and Human Experience, the authors
find in Mahayana Buddhist epistemology and practice
an alternative to the dichotomous extremes left to
us by Western thought. The authors devote the first
half of their text to explaining how seemingly conclusive
findings in cognitive science argue for the "selfless
mind." That is, that the human subject as contingent,
dynamic and open process as opposed to a static ego
entity. In other words, a notion of the self remarkably
in line with the human subject which Rutsky describes
as most fully congruent with the emerging "aesthetic"
relationship of humanity and technology.
The range of responses available to such a qualitative
human transformation available to traditional Western
theories of meaning would seem to be either fundamentalism
on one hand or nihilism on the other. The fundamentalist
argument would be that the self, if unobservable to
science, must exist as a transcendent truth, a virtual
soul. The Western nihilist is alternatively left with
an epistemology and ontology devoid of human will
and agency. Even Minsky and Jackendoff seem paralyzed,
torn between these poles. Though these scholars are
fully aware that the findings of contemporary cognitive
science argue for the need to re-envision the human
subject beyond the notion of possessing "an Ego,
Self, or Final Center of Control," they seem
incapable of themselves moving beyond to a new formulation.
In Society of Mind, for example, Minsky closes his
important treatise as follows:
No
matter that the physical world provides no room for
freedom of the will: the concept is essential to our
model for the mental realm. Too much of our psychology
is based on it for us to ever give it up. We're virtually
forced to maintain that belief, even though we know
it's false-except, of course when we're inspired to
find the flaws in all our beliefs, whatever may be
the consequences to cheerfulness and mental peace.
(Varela, Thompson & Rosch 2000, 128)
____Varela, Thompson
and Rosch, however, propose the Buddhist middle path
and "codependent arising" as the more appropriate
and viable alternative. They note that the very heart
of the Buddhist tradition is to examine such issues
in human experience: "Virtually the entire Buddhist
path has to do with going beyond emotional grasping
to ego." They correctly note that meditative
techniques, traditions of study and contemplation,
social action, and the organization of entire communities
have been harnessed toward this end. "The result,"
they add, "in this world view, is that real freedom
comes not from the decisions of an ego-self's 'will'
but from action without any Self whatsoever."
This, of course, also goes to the heart of Suzuki's
analyses outlined earlier.
____Lakoff and Johnson,
in elucidating the "primary metaphors" upon
which modern cognitive science suggests human consciousness
is constructed, provides further compelling support
for these views. In his introduction to Philosophy
in the Flesh, Lakoff puts forward three majors findings
of cognitive science: "The mind is inherently
embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract
concepts are largely metaphorical." He asserts
that, "Because of these discoveries, [Western]
philosophy can never be the same again" (1999,
3). Lakoff contends that the primary metaphors, which
underpin human cognition and experience, are learned
in earliest infancy through our embodied interaction
with our environment. At this point, it should be
immediately apparent how these 'discoveries' map on
to the issues outlined thus far.
To take just one example, the primary metaphor, "Physical
force equals cause," has been shown to serve
as one cornerstone of the human cognitive edifice.
Based on our understanding of aesthetic techne we
might say that the work of the koan, "Let me
hear the sound of one hand clapping," is to problematize
this foundational "truth" and force the
cycle of inquiry into motion at this most profound
level. Similarly in Yoga, as body and mind realign
themselves to the cycle of inhalation and exhalation,
cause and effect in the classic body-mind relationship
soften and eventually melt away. No longer able to
rest and rely upon the primary metaphors, those foundational
elements of once sturdy construction, body, cognition
and unconscious are freed to flow in this newly fluid
and vital state of being.
____And so cognitive
science would clearly concur that our most resilient
cognitive schema consist of metaphorical constructs.
These schema range from the 'divine' geometry of the
ancient Greeks, to the transcendent status given modern
capital value, to our most fundamental notions of
the human self. As Rutsky has observed, these paradigmatic
shifts in humanity's built sociotechnical environment
provide a unique juncture in history to re-imagine
how the human subject might actually reconstitute
itself by drawing upon rather than denying the dimension
of embodied affect, by embracing rather than excluding
the potentialities which lie beyond the limited realm
of human cognition. For, as Rutsky, notes,
The
unconscious may itself be seen as technological, if
not in the instrumental sense, then in the sense that
it is an ongoing process of unsecuring … that
breaks images and other elements free of their previous
context and recombines them to generate new figures,
charged with both monstrosity and promise (1999, 21)
But,
before we grow too enchanted with this vision, we
had better also acknowledge those countless, familiar
cognitive-alienating technologies with which we contend
each day of our postmodern lives. Following is one
condensed case study (with which I am particularly
familiar), which I suggest may be seen as representing
the converse of the traditional Buddhist eco-cognitive
technique.
. . .
A
woman with stunning, East European features stands
at the edge of a dark, rolling sea. The sky is a stark
white, the mood portentous. A lone cello provides
a sonorous undercurrent of sound. The woman wears
a diaphanous white fabric beneath which the outline
of her body is discernible. A dark-haired man with
chiseled, brooding features approaches, riding bareback
on a large white horse. The man and woman acknowledge
one another with a steady gaze, though their faces
remain expressionless. He extends his hand. The scene
shifts to the woman now mounted on the horse, the
man riding behind her. The horse gains speed, now
galloping vigorously along the shore. The camera cuts
in, and we see only the undulating motion of the man
and woman, the woman's head thrown back, eyes closed,
the man holding her from behind. Cut to a close-up
of the woman's mouth and tongue taking in a spoonful
of white ice cream. Fade to white, and the text "Shall
We Haagen-Dazs?" appears on screen with male
narrative voice-over.
____The theme and slogan
of the advertising campaign of which the commercial
described above was a part, were created one afternoon
ten years ago when a Japanese colleague unexpectedly
stepped into my office at the advertising agency at
which we both worked. He suggested we brainstorm themes
for an upcoming pitch to Haagen-Dazs. Without a moment's
thought, I said, "Shall we Haagen-Dazs?"
He stood for a moment in silence. "Yes, that's
it," he eventually responded, thanked me and
left. The entire exchange lasted no more than a minute.
But in the years following, the words took on a resilient
and resonant life of their own, the campaign winning
several awards, securing a dominant market share for
the brand, and making "Shall We Haagen-Dazs?"
a household phrase in Japan for the past decade. I
believe it may aid in clarifying the nature of both
aesthetic and alienating technologies to look at the
details of this particular "advertising koan"
within the current postmodern cosmology of the nation
of Zen.
____Though a bowl of
ice cream can be nice, its transcendental, healing
powers may not immediately spring to mind at a time
when a nation is yearning for respite from massive
socioeconomic change and the collective shock of suddenly
finding itself cast in a leading role on the global
stage. Yet, during the late 1980s and early 1990s,
as Japan sought the where-with-all to respond to its
emergent role as a dominant economic power, and as
the West increasingly turned to Japan as a model of
political, social and economic success, the phrase
"Shall We Haagen-Dazs?" provided an unexpected
palliative to this moment of social crisis. On the
one hand was gaiatsu, the pressure from external forces
to open the nation more fully to international discourse
and trade, in addition to the genuine if conflicted
desire among Japanese themselves to connect with the
larger, outside world. On the other hand was the fear
of stepping from the comforting shadows of Japan's
ancient, circumscribed cultural context and into a
global drama of cacophonous, confusing dynamics, daunting
new complexities, confrontation and exposure.
____Yet it would be less
than accurate to portray Japan as timidly waiting
in the wings, struggling to sum up the courage to
step into the fray of international exchange. At that
time, with the U.S. economy still mired in recession,
American cultural icons such as the Rockefeller Center,
Columbia Pictures, and Pebble Beach were newly vulnerable
to the lure of the yen and Japan's appetite for acquisition.
Indeed, the Japanese appetite for any and all foreign
prestige commodities had become quite infamous by
the early 1980s. Within Japan, too, the hunger for
international intercourse led to the highly selective
importing of desirable language, sex, and other workers
from designated regions of the world. For both Japanese
individuals and corporations, consumption had clearly
become a primary method through which one partook
in the global public sphere.
____It was within this
context that the Haagen-Dazs ad campaign first appeared,
and was, I believe, interpreted as reinforcing and
legitimizing this ideology of contact through consumption,
becoming a momentary, artificial means of ameliorating
the social tensions of that specific place and period.
____Though details of
the presentation varied, the underlying content and
structure of the advertising campaign media and presentation
remained remarkably consistent for nearly a decade.
One variation on the television and cinema commercial
described above, for instance, presented two lovers
converging beneath the white, silken sheets of an
expansive bed. The folds and undulations of the sheets
were visually blended with the flowing waves of white
liquid cream. This was followed by the close-up of
a mouth and tongue taking in the frozen cream. And,
as always, the only words spoken were "Shall
We Haagen-Dazs?" as narrative voice-over at the
end of the piece. The campaign's most successful print
ad borrowed this image of the two bodies beneath the
exquisite white sheets, with the phrase and logo the
only signifiers presented. Often, the phrase appeared
completely by itself, always against a field of white,
in print media such as menus and promotional materials.
____As with many advertising
slogans, the phrase itself contained an intensely
disorienting, koan-like set of internal contradictions.
The heightened language (the use of "Shall we"
rather than "Let's") would have been immediately
recognizable to any audience member who had been through
the mandatory primary and secondary school English
instruction. The brand name itself must have connoted
for some members of the audience a certain mythology
of Germanic grandeur and ascendancy from the not-so-distant-past.
Additionally, the consistent use of pure white light,
pristine white fabrics, white liquids (and white models),
combined with the virtual absence of language clearly
conveyed a heightened sensibility, sophistication
and purity of expression which lifted the intensely
sensual images to an otherworldly realm of transcendent,
elemental purity beyond or before law or language.
The refined, film-quality cinematography, the classical
score, the selection of the then reigning European
super model Tatania as the female lead, down to the
typefaces and extravagant use of white space, all
conveyed a quality and style viewers had perhaps seen
only in the cinema. And they were being invited to
step into this world, forget their inhibitions, and
"Haagen-Dazs" with the West.
____Yet the focused spoken
and typographic signification, the absence of facial
expressions in the models (in one appearance they
are completely covered by sheets), and the elemental
human actions depicted in the advertising, effectively
functioned to minimize the possibility of diverse
interpretations, and reinforced in the audience a
specific illusion of cultural transcendence through
innate human sensuality and unfettered immediacy.
As Edward Hall has argued, Japan's high-context culture
provides for extraordinarily accurate and consistent
constructions of shared meaning (1977). The socio-linguistic
fabric of the society being so finely woven over time
that gaps and inconsistencies in meaning are said
to occur less often and to a lesser degree than between
members of low-context cultures (such as the United
States), whose more loosely constructed cultural grid
might be more closely akin to a net than, say, silk.
____At the same time,
the absence of any Japanese language or Japanese characters
created in the advertising the internal tension necessary
to produce the transcendent quality of the audience
experience. The phrase is not Japanese, it is clearly
spoken by a gaijin (outsider), and yet there is no
mistaking the compelling intimacy of the moment. As
with Barthes' vision of the Parisian striptease, the
raw sensuality of these beautiful foreigners and the
open invitation to join in has the effect of signifying
"nakedness as a natural vesture of [man and]
woman, which amounts in the end to a perfectly chaste
state of the flesh" (1983, 87-88). Thus the audience,
too, was able to momentarily shed the "incongruous
and artificial" constrictions of inculcated shame,
to divest themselves of the isolating effects of their
Japaneseness for a brief romp.
____In
these ways, the "Shall We Haagen-Dazs?"
invitation distilled a pervasive yearning among Japanese
to shed age-old cultural isolation, language barriers,
and anxiety about direct contact with outsiders for
the opportunity to momentarily enter Utopia. Better
yet, the gaiatsu (external pressure) Japanese sensed
from the West to become more fully engaged in the
new international cosmology became, however briefly,
a bewitching sexual overture. This was an offer the
audience was disinclined to refuse. The Haagen-Dazs
experience offered the promise of shedding the Japanese
self and its meticulously defined behavioral grid
by getting intimate. Beyond this, the advertising
koan itself may well have come to invoke and momentarily
legitimize the specious ideology of contact through
consumption when presented as an external invitation
to set aside social conscience. In it's message to
the collective unconscious, the phrase may have been
taken as license to strip away all conventions and
shame, climb beneath the sheets with the foreign other,
and become lost in the intense imminence and intimacy
of the commoditized sensuality.
____Here, as previously
noted, the producers themselves may have stumbled
upon the seed of the campaign in what Jung might have
termed a receptive burst of "unconscious Zeitgeist."
And the audience at that particular time, in that
particular social context, was fully prepared to allow
this deception, embrace the illusion, and accept this
utopian solution to the tension of that moment.
____As "Shall We
Haagen-Dazs?" became synonymous through the interpretive
act with this transcendent bridge into the pristine,
natural bliss of supra-cultural union, the producer
was thus able to momentarily co-opt the desire for
this unmediated experience of guiltless pleasure and
blissful unity with the gaijin world, the foreign
object. For the producer would, of course, provide
the audience with ready opportunity to relive that
initial moment of release and illusory transcendence.
Since the premium price of Haagen-Dazs ice cream would
require that the buyer overcome her cultural compulsion
to scrimp and save, to open wide the purse strings,
plunge breathlessly into Western bourgeois consumerism,
indulge in a moment of extravagant, alien sensuality,
and shamelessly embrace contact through consumption,
all within the protected isolation of her very own
home. The cognitive-alienating technology's work is
done when the obstacle becomes the final object of
desire.
. . .
Today's
borderless political economy reveals the conventional
geography of "East" and "West"
as one more duality no longer appropriate to our time.
The commodity object and the economic subject, virtual
capital value and imminent human worth, are global
realities and virtualities which are rapidly evolving
well beyond our capacities to encompass with conventional
Western theories of meaning. If we are to effectively
grasp the emerging realities and virtualities of our
day, we will need every resource available to us.
We will need to put into practice what Heidegger described
in The Question of Being as "planetary thinking."
We are obliged not
to give up the effort to practice planetary thinking
along a stretch of the road, be it ever so short.
Here too no prophetic talents and demeanor are needed
to realize that there are in store for planetary building
encounters for which the participants are by no means
equal today. This is equally true of the European
and of the East Asiatic languages and, above all,
for the areas of a possible conversation between them.
Neither one of the two is able by itself to open up
this area and to establish it (in Varela 2000, 241).
____The Japanese scholar
Nishitani Keiji, a student of Heidegger and raised
in the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism, argued that
such planetary thinking could only be achieved by
moving beyond the "field of consciousness"
which projected such dualisms as subject and object,
and East and West, in the first place. Failing to
do so, we are doomed to oscillating forever between
the polar extremes of absolutism and nihilism. Nishitani
saw much of postmodern Western thought, in its successful
critique of objectivism, trapped in nihilism. He saw
the challenge of contemporary thought as laying down
a path of theory and practice which would allow us
to release our grip on foundations without spiraling
downward into nihilistic despair on one hand, or of
grasping instinctively for new foundations on the
other. Nishitani argued that Western thought had been
incapable of moving beyond the limits of cognitive
reason, the "field of consciousness," precisely
because of its static definitions of transcendent
meanings in objectivism and subjectivism. These classical
Western theories of meaning had precluded the development
of any tradition of opening the human individual to
the possibilities for fulfillment in the ongoing enaction
of humanity through full, affective-embodied engagement
with its world - such as occurred in the millennial evolution
and art of Zen.
____But these Western
epistemological and ontological traditions would finally
be challenged and ultimately transformed in the wake
of the first Industrial Revolution.
|
