Organizer: Kenneth Mark Anderson, McGill University
Chair: Kojin Karatani, Tokyo, Japan
Discussant: Yutaka Nagahara, Hosei University, Japan
Historically, there has been an association between conceptions of civilization, historical agency, and the faculty of imagination. Attempts to construct or discover a properly Japanese or Chinese body politic have consequently faced the task of translating philosophical conceptions of imagination so as to situate the social body in relation to national autonomy. This panel points to the faculty of imagination as a contested site for envisioning the propriety of the social body and the limits of social action in China and Japan. Peter Button addresses the conception of the image in the 1940s Chinese Marxist realism of Cai Yi and the debates surrounding it. Cai Yi held socialist realism to be compatible with Chinese cultural autonomy. Mark Anderson takes up the critical debates surrounding the work of the turn of the century Japanese novelist Ozaki Koyo and finds specific constructions of family, morality, and national community implicit in the various competing literary aesthetics. For one such critic, realism and social dissent were un-Japanese by definition. Katsuhiko Endo undertakes a comparative study of Maruyama Masao and the Japanese Marxists who participated in the Japanese capitalism debate. He suggests that Maruyama and the Marxists, though engaged in bitter polemic with one another, in fact share a nationalist conception of "modern" Japanese reality. Their understanding of Japanese "modernity" as particular is thus an inversion of an abstracted and universalized "West."
We are pleased to have as our discussant Professor Yutaka Nagahara of Hosei University. Professor Nagahara has written extensively on constructions of the rural Japanese village as implicated in the Emperor system. His unusual command of the history of Japanese Marxism should make his comments on all three presentations of particular interest.
Image and Imagination in Chinese Socialist Realist Aesthetic Theory
Peter Button, Cornell University
In 1943, the Chinese Marxist theorist Cai Yi published The Theory of the New Art, a work which represents one of the earliest and most comprehensive efforts to lay the foundations for a materialist theory of aesthetics in China. One of the central concepts that governed the theoretical edifice he sought to construct, both in The Theory of the New Art and in his later, more well-known work, New Aesthetics, was the notion of the image (xingxiang).
In my paper, I briefly trace the itinerary of the concept of the image from German Romantic thought as well as Russian and later, Soviet aesthetics. I then examine the role of the concept of the image in Cai's work in the formation of a theory of the faculties of the imagination, the understanding, and finally, reason. Second, I analyze the problems of the image and imagination in socialist realist theory as they serve to produce China as an historical subject. I then turn to the debates concerning "thinking in images" which Cai's early theoretical works facilitated. I claim that for Cai and others, the determination of the real and hence realism turned upon a particular construction of the status and role of imagination. In my discussion, I show that the conceptual elucidation of the faculty of the imagination in the work of Cai and other theorists of socialist realist aesthetics conditions the complex historical relation between intellectuals and the State in modern China.
Aesthetics, Morality, and Literary Legitimacy in the Prose Fiction of Ozaki Koyo
Kenneth Mark Anderson, McGill University
Between 1894 and his death in 1903, Ozaki Koyo was among the most recognizable and influential novelists in Japan. The first modern Japanese novelist to have an edition of his complete works published in the Meiji period (1868-1912), Koyo's example is said to have inspired Natsume Soseki in his decision to become a professional writer. I will briefly discuss the reception of Koyo as part of the struggle regarding the legitimacy of fiction writing as a possible vocation in a Japan in which the relative status of modernity, national community, and tradition were all hotly contested.
Koyo's Tajo Takon is acknowledged to have first successfully and convincingly instituted the dearu form of the copula which later became canonic for modern Japanese prose fiction. The second part of the presentation will take up the issue of language reform in an endeavor to refine previous categories of analysis. Contrary to previous scholarship, I will suggest that Koyo's return to Saikaku, while it was indeed a move away from genbunitchi, was nevertheless integral to the development of a modern and nationalized narrative position.
Lastly, I will take up issues of gender, morality, and social dissent in the body politic envisioned by the very distinct aesthetics with which Kitamura Tokoku and Takayama Chogyu criticized Koyo's work. I will discuss Koyo's final, and most popular work, The Gold Demon, in relation to these conflicting constructions of the image, national ideals and Japan's contemporary international situation.
The "Modernity" of Maruyama Masao and the Japanese Capitalism Debate
Katsuhiko Endo, New York University
Maruyama Masao, one of the most influential intellectuals in post-war Japan, was often held to be a modernizationist. Such modernization theory has been variously criticized as implying that the modern state developed in the West ought properly to be adopted in Japan. Through a comparative study of Maruyama's theory of the state and the Japanese capitalism debate (which took place from the late 1920s to the mid 1930s), my presentation endeavors to explicate the idea of a "Japanese modernity" which Maruyama and the Japanese Marxists shared. In this way, I aim to reveal that the particularity of "Japan" and nationalism is immanent to both the revolutionary strategy of the Japanese Marxists and the position of Maruyama.
Maruyama calls the fundamental logic from which the subject of action as modern subjectivity is deduced, "The mode of thought." In fact, it can be said that his own "mode of thought" is equivalent to that of the Japanese Marxists. The Marxists strove to overcome pre-modern Japanese subjectivity for the sake of establishing a revolutionary subject which could realize socialism in Japan. In this sense, the primary aim of both Maruyama and the Japanese Marxists was the acquisition of "true" modernity. I will suggest that underneath this unqualified presupposition common to both Maruyama and the Japanese Marxists lay an abstract and universalized "West"-and the knowledge that the "backwardness of Japanese modernity" was produced as a mirror image of the "West."