Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan

Rating:
Summary: Modernity and Nostalgia
Review: In Marilyn Ivy's Discourses of the Vanishing, the author explores various different ways in which a longing for the premodern is articulated in Japanese society. Her main argument is that while many have claimed that tradition is merely invented, in Japan tradition is not so much invented as it is preserved in phantasmagoric images. In order for modernity to persist "modernist nostalgia must preserve, in many senses, the sense of absence that motivates its desires" (10). Ivy explores ways in which the objects of nostalgic desire are preserved, demonstrating how "elements of a revivified past operate as the amplified elements of the stylishly novel" (57). She argues that Japan represents an aspect of what Jameson has called the retro mode: "the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the idea of the `generation'" (57).
Many have noted that Ivy's text, while very theoretically dense and reliant on Lacanian psychoanalysis, is very useful for a variety of other contemporary phenomena; there seem to numerous examples of persons "longing for pre-modernity, a time before the West, before the catastrophic imprint of westernization. Yet the very search to find authentic survivals of pre-modern, prewestern Japanese authenticity is inescapably a modern endeavor, essentially unfolded within the historical condition that it would seek to escape" (241).
In examining this longing in Japan, Ivy presents the oral as both creating and fulfilling the desires for those objects of desire which are perceived as vanishing but not yet vanished. In discourses about the production of knowledge as both local and oral (18), she argues that a "double inscription-as both superfluous and essential, marginal and traditional-is necessary for loss to emerge as recoverable" (25). Through this process, the Japanese homeland becomes a place one was supposed to discover, as "Japan beckoned as something strangely familiar: the native remote" (47). In the face of the changes following the opening of Japan and the rapid industrialization, the sense of nostalgia for the Tokugawa period gave rise to a situation in which the "surviving numinous became the romantic object of those caught up in the disenchantment of the world" (73).
Ivy argues that furusato is the concept that unites these two desires arising out of the experience of modernity merge: "the desire to encounter the unexpected, the peripheral unknown, even (and even especially) the frightening" and "a countervailing desire, pushed by an opposite longing, to return to that stable point of origin, to discover an authentically Japanese Japan that is disappearing yet still present" (105). The modern longing for something new and exotic, by means of which Japan has itself been reinscribed as worthy of (re)discovery, is merged with the nostalgic longing to return to the way things once were, a longing that can only be experienced through their loss. Ivy notes, however, that even in "authentic" rituals of mushi matsuri, "exemplify the modern desire to keep the uncanny at bay-to evoke the real without allowing its irruption into everyday life" (140). Whereas these rituals are seen to represent authentic Japan, that which was and remains Japanese despite the loss experienced elsewhere as the onslaught of an otherwise welcomed modernity, they are in fact reshaped according to the cultural logic which renders the loss bearable by asserting its return to its place of origin. Ivy asserts that this represents "the duplicity of `tradition' itself: a transmission that always contains the possibility of betrayal, of an arbitrary selection from the past" (187). The irony is that in searching for an authentic, essential, immutable past a selective forgetting, remembering, and reshaping takes place.
This loss, however, is necessary to assert the permanence of such traditions. Ivy argues that "only from the position of loss can one assert that nothing has been lost; only when the seamless, unquestioned transmission of custom has been interrupted, does `tradition' emerge. The realization of loss is forestalled, denied, by an insistence that nothing is lost. It is denied by an idealization, a memorialization of place, a bracketing of practices, an assertion of continuity" (188-190). This very process is taking elsewhere. Only by having experienced the loss of that for which they create a longing can many come to argue that that for which they long has never been lost. Asserting that nothing has changed and that their institutions have weathered modernity without swaying course is the trope in which those who have experienced loss deny this loss. Such desire, both in Japan and elsewhere, "sustains vanishing (but not yet vanished) forms of modernity" (237). Just as taishu engeki and the trances at Mount Osore "exist as ghostly reminders, as potentially scandalous presences that, by all rights, should not be there-yet which must be there, vanishing, to act as constitutive reminders of modernity's losses" (243, emphasis original), so too do many of those who express a displaced nostalgia serve as a reminder of the losses incurred through modernity. The worry, however, is that in ignoring the changes taking place about them, many who daily embody the type of nostalgia about which Ivy writes may follow the same path as those in postmodern Japan: "not only has the imagined object of loss vanished, but even the sense of loss itself. All voices and forms of language seem equally present, equally homogenous. Within this mass-mediated space, the very possibility of complex dialectical images is thus foreclosed" (246). Ivy provides a language through which one may issue a warning to those who would simply cling to practices of an era gone by and likewise to those who would rather forget what we have lost in coming to modernity; a dialectic is necessary, a dialectic that recognizes both the future orientation of modernity and the nostalgic longing for tradition verified through dead ancestors. It must not be forgotten, however, that both of these longing are the product of the experience of modernity.