Ikegami, Eiko, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture, Cambirdge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, 2005).
In Bonds of Civility, Eiko Ikegami, a Sociologist, is refreshingly unapologetic about finding in her archaeology of Japanese aesthetic culture the preconditions of modernity – of the Meiji state, and of Japanese political, national, and social consciousness within aesthetic culture of the Edo period.[1] In fact, I found a number of ideas in Ikegami’s work to be free of the heavy debate over the nature of Japanese “modernity” that so overwhelms historians on both sides of the 1868 line.
Rather than rehash this debate, Ikegami moves very quickly, and in a lucid, well-constructed way, to give recognition to the complications that her “pre-conditions” argument creates for her, to set up a more complex version of Modernization Theory which recognizes no break in 1868, but rather posits a continuum of change from the 17th through the 20th centuries. Ikegami here is clearly closely connected to Hegel and Habermas in the way she views history as progressive. In fact, she directly acknowledges Habermas’ idea of the “Public Sphere” in her claim that Japan is moving toward civility during the Tokugawa period.[2]
Still, one of the most interesting and useful streams of though in Ikegami’s book is the distinction she makes between the “civil society” which Habermas describes as developing in 18th and 19th century Europe, and the “civility” she claims developed in Japanese aesthetic culture over roughly the same period.[3] In Chapter One the subject is “Civility without Civil Society”, and Ikegami here focuses on the fact of the success of the warrior elite at maintaining privilege, social distinction and hierarchy, and the creation of a de-centralized state as evidence that civil society, as Habermas defines it, with a political dimension, could not exist, but that civility – horizontal relationships, could.[4]
For Ikegami, the development of civility in Tokugawa aesthetic and cultural practice is a part of her argument for the Tokugawa period as a time of development in the direction of the “Modernity” of Meiji. However, Ikegami, unlike the Modernization School historians, does not preclude the possibility of other modernities in Japanese development during and after the Tokugawa period. She does try to make the point that when the political, economic, and military centralization occurred after 1868, social structures for civil society were already in existence, in the form of highly developed civility, based on the horizontal relations of aesthetic and cultural associations. Ikegami in fact defines civility as,”the effective grammar of sociability [which] allowed Tokugawa individuals to interact safely and confidently with those individuals whose backgrounds were unknown or apparently different from their own.”[5] This sociability, and its independence from the ties of politics, land tenure, or economics, meant, in Ikegami’s mind, that individuals within Japan were prepared by the late Tokugawa period to see themselves as members of a nation greater than their own local ties, and potential participants in national activities, culture, and history. They were, then, as she puts it, modern “before modernization.”[6]
In Chapter Two, Ikegami moves from the historical to the theoretical in order to deal with one of the most crucial problems in cultural history: the question of agency in historical change. This thorny problem is in many ways akin to the question of whether one should vote if one lives in a democratic society, since one vote in the United States, for example, is only one in nearly 75 million eligible to vote, the key is whether that one small voice makes any difference. In the same way, Ikegami has to deal with agency in both the production and consumption of culture. Her affinity here with Marx, Habermas, and Hegel is clear. In order to define culture and cultural consumption as modern or approaching the “Modern”, Ikegami, in her introduction and first chapter invoked the idea of the Tokugawa period as “proto-industrial”.[7] This makes it necessary, and possible, for her to dissect culture in terms of consumption on a Marxist model, which posits that mass culture (i.e. “national culture”) is not possible until a large group of consumers of that culture appear. The Frankfurt school of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, among others, was admant in the idea that mass culture requires both mass production and mass consumption, and neither of these are possible without the appearance of a bourgeoisie and a proletariat. The public sphere of Habermas, which Ikegami invokes again in Chapter Two, is closely related to this idea, for it is in the bourgeoisie that Habermas locates the horizontal associations, existing within salons and coffee houses in Europe of the 19th century, which he wants to call the “Public Sphere”, and where free discussions of ideas in multiple areas can create changes in social thinking.[8]
Ikegami makes a direct connection between her own thinking and Habermas here in the process of making her case that a series of social/cultural webs intersect with individual agents and thus mass activity and individual agency are both possible. In section two, Ikegami sets out to demonstrate the way this intersection works by showing how aesthetic associations acted as essentially horizontal associations that cut across hierarchical status and economic distinctions to create societies within societies, where individual members were parts of separate hierarchies dependent upon their mastery of the aesthetic rather than their lineage, wealth, or political position within the greater community. Ikegami calls these associations Za, using the Japanese word to pinpoint a social formation whose definition is not easily accessible in English.[9]
In the second section of the book, Ikegami shows how these Za Arts originated with the early Japanese imperial court, where they were not only developed, but became a means of communicating power relations in the earliest of Japanese political systems. Thus, the context of the appreciation of beauty as a part of a web of social and political relations was established very early. This provided the background against which a truly proletarian, horizontal development of associations within which individuals could express themselves as equals in the appreciation and execution of aesthetic practice could develop.[10] The development of Za Arts from a formalized court-style ritual which conveyed political power to a set of associational cultural activities in which participation was broad across all levels of Japanese society, though, required several centuries of historical change. Ikegami begins with a discussion of the development of linked verse (renga) and the way in which its departure both from the locus and the formality of the imperial court in a period of declining court power (the 12th and 13th centuries), along with the rise of the Muromachi Shogunate and the interest in newly powerful samurai in both court and associational culture moved linked verse to a new cultural space – literally a public space – where the limits of power met the limits of social divisions.[11]
The development of za arts in a non-political way in these liminal spaces in medieval Japan made possible the creation of associations in the spirit of ikki – groups of individuals who shared aesthetic and cultural values on an equal footing, regardless of their social or political standing.[12] By the end of section two, Ikegami has shown this pattern of growth of politically and socially neutral cultural spaces to be true for renga, tea ceremony, and popular music in the Medieval period.
What ikegami really wants to get to, however, is the growth of these networks of cultural associations in the Tokugawa period. She does so in the third section of the work, by noting a few major qualitative changes.
The first of these changes was the rapid growth of four systems of communicative networks that encouraged growing social ties in the seventeenth century. Those four included the processes of state creation, market-oriented trade systems, commercial publishing, and the growth of aesthetic associational networks. All of these acted together to create a kind of gestalt in which communication and awareness of cultural, social, and political connections among people at every level of society was on the increase.[13]
The second major change involved the need for the Tokugawa Shogunate to recreate itself as a public organization rather than a private warrior clan. The creation of this state publicness by the Shogunate led to the development of multiple levels of “publicness” and the arrival of the idea of private space, which was the result of the fact that categorizing public space led to areas of life that were not categorized, in which non-public, unregulated activities could occur. This private space then became the site of associational groups’, based on aesthetic pursuits, activities and communications. This is the development of a public sphere ala Habermas, albeit without the overt political element.[14]
In discussing “The Rise of Aesthetic Civility,” and the development of Haikai, Ikegami then brings the reader to her full argument, which is that interest in aesthetic pursuits existed across class boundaries, and in every part of Tokugawa Japan. Since the interest was there, and such activities existed outside of the formal regulatory system for the most part, such associations tended to cross hierarchical boundaries set up in the political, economic, and social arenas, and made it possible for Japanese to experience each other as different individuals with similar interests.[15] In addition, the long history of aesthetics as important in Japanese politics and social circles tended to reinforce the image of aesthetic pursuits as something intertwined with Japanese identity, despite the de-centralized nature of the political state that the Tokugawa had crafted.
Ultimately, Ikegami wants to present her argument of aesthetic associations as public space a la Habermas for three reasons – first to show the development of a proto-modernity as discussed above. Second, to broaden the idea of the public sphere beyond the bourgeouis salons of post-Enlightenment Europe and suggest that such associational forms were available in non-European cultures as well, and third, to show that associational developments outside of standard or official spaces for the expression of wealth, power, or identity can exist, and that such spaces have value as challengers to the status quo.
[1] Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture, Cambirdge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, 2005), 9. Here Ikegami states: “The fact that a plane of commonality evolved primarily within the realm of the beautiful in Tokugawa society, which was otherwise decentralized and divided, holds some suggestive implications for the post-Tokugawa development of the modern Japanese nation-state.”
[2] Ibid., 12-18.
[3] Ibid., 14-15. Here Ikegami goes briefly into the difference she sees, focusing “on the notion of civility rather than civil society.”
[4] Ikegami, 19-43.
[5] Ibid., 4.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ikegami, 15.
[8] Ibid., 45.
[9] Ibd., 67-76.
[10] Ikegami, 82-83.
[11] Ibid., 90-91. Here, the terms Ikegami is interested in are kugai and mu’en – kugai denoted a “public (but not political) space in the sense of a publicly usable space in a temple, or a market. Mu’en denoted a kind of topographical/political neutrality, a liminal space where the crossing of borders made redefinition of reality possible.
[12] Ibid., 115.
[13] Ibid., 132.
[14] Ikegami, 134-139.
[15] Ibid., 140-153.