Aichi Triennale 2010, contemporary corporate circus?

Too much money in Aichi and so few venues where to show it off. This Japanese prefecture is home to car manufacture powerhouse Toyota Motor Corp and although the Japanese economy continues its programmed downfall, the prefecture has been growing steadily instead.

Well, prefecture officials have been busy formulating a plan to give culture depth to the prefecture's capital, Nagoya, sometimes dubbed Japan's Detroit. And Nagoya is a newly rich in the world's neighbourhood. Lots of money but no style. They organised the World Expo in 2005 but for all the money they spent--including building an international airport mostly with flights to international destinations like Tokyo--, they could not get a title of nobility. Nor the skyscrapers that populate the area near Nagoya Station can break away with the city's humble origin. Their bet this time: to gather artists from all over the world, especially from Asia and put together a Triennale. Besides, they could use art to educate the people of the prefecture by not only having them as public and somehow absorb knowledge but as producers of art.

They may have partially succeeded, if one is to judge the enterprise by the number of people cueing to get into the Triennale venue and all the projects the prefecture officials have organised at grass root community level, including primary and secondary school projects and the involvement of tertiary educational organisations engaged in arts education. But at the same time it was worrying to see that most of the public on Sunday--the second day of the Triennale--was on the streets of the city centre watching the typical Japanese end-of-summer parade, a waterdown carnival whose purpose seems to give the working class population of the city the opportunity to earn a few bucks by installing street stands and selling junk food, like in olden times. Besides, most of the participants march like a paramilitary army. No excesses are committed here. The parades work like Swiss wristwatches. Japan is not Rio de Janeiro.

Also worrying is the link established between artists and industry. Few Japanese artists enjoy wide recognition and celebrity status. One could expect a detached view of Japanese affairs from such an artist, especially when they can keep certain economic independence. It's troublesome that one of the few who does enjoy public recognition in Japan, Yayoi Kusama, designed together with Toyota the Polka-dot car. The artist, who defines herself as an 'avant-guard artist' in the welcoming message of the Aichi Triennale just made a joke of herself.

The question that rises here is precisely about this link between the corporate world and the arts at large. When the arts look more and more like the space where commodities are produced who are the artists who joined Kusama and made a joke of themselves? One would expect some sense of independence. At least a simile of independence (which would add value to the commodity by the way).

After a quick review of the exhibition entitled 'Arts and cities' one cannot help but start associating art with the awesome world of circus, the Roman entertainment designed to alienate the city population. Bread and circus, that was all what Romans cared about the city state of affairs. Few works from this exhibition actually have enough social depth to be instruments of reflection. It is not as if one would expect the artist and his or her work aligning with some sense of morality but what perspires here is the thought that many artists just made their works with a unique idea on mind: to entertain (and cheaply). True art reveals itself as well, no matter how well orchestrated is the intention to cast a screen of smoke in front of the public eye. But the uniformity of contemporary art grouped under the 'entertain or fail' motto is worrisome and profoundly boring (beautiful paradox). It's like seeing a thousand-time reproduction of the paycheck received by pop clown Andy Warhol reproduced thousand times.

Yet, art is measured by art's own measure. And there are a few sparks in Aichi Triennale 2010.

Japan's national catholicism

What can the interpretation of a text tell us about the society in which the process of interpretation takes place? That's seems to be the basic idea behind Heidegger's hermeneutic circle. What the hermeneutic circle can tell us of a society in which the original text is hidden from its members as it is the case with Japanese society?

Weber's comparison of the Protestant and Catholic faiths starts with the problem of interpreting "the text", the Bible, in this case. In the former, the text is interpreted directly by the members of the cult. In the latter, the text is mediated through the interpretation of the Church, especially through its Catechism. Thus, Weber correlates Protestant hermeneutics to a strong sense of entrepreneurship and pro-action condensed in the Protestant ethics; whereas Catholic hermeneutics has its correlate in a patriarchal situation where the member of the cult adopts a passive attitude towards the organisation of labour. Everything is received. Furthermore, everything is received in piecemeal fashion. There cannot be insightful appreciation of theoretical cohesiveness. The recipients of the readings cannot but have faith in the interpretation they are been given because the interpretation is fragmented.

These two ways of being have enormous implications in the concept of citizenship and organisation of civil society.

So let us take a quick look at Japan, where the school system systematically hides the original text. There is a complete lack of access to the manuscript, to the original work throughout the school experience. Pupils rarely face the original novel, work of History or essay. There is an abundance of cathechism and a lack of personal research and understanding. Texts are interpreted in textbooks in similar fashion to the interpretation of the Bible done by the Catholic Church in 18th and 19th Century Europe. A professor in a Japanese university told me once that it took a serious effort trying to bridge students' ability to read from the simple reading of second or third-hand interpretations to the ability to read a text in its original form.

If we look at the phenomenon from a Bernsteinian perspective, we can see that in the case where the original text is hidden, the possibilities for the recontextualisation of knowledge --a routine operation carried out by what Bernstein calls the pedagogic device-- are wider. However, in a society where the reading of the original text is virtue, the possibilities for recontextualisation are narrower. In the former case, the power lies with the mediational organisation (intrinsic power). In the latter, the power still lies with the mediational organisation but some power remains in the ideas offered in the original text (extrinsic power). The only way to check the mediators and their intentions is by having access to the original text. In a society where the original text is kept outside the public domain, it is impossible to check the accuracy and object of the mediation. You have to trust the mediation is sound. You ought to have faith in the authorities.

Social consciousness in Japan

A Japanese writer tells a story about her being racially profiled by the police for being tall and having dark skin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/opinion/08iht-edkumiko.html

She believes there is no word in Japanese for "racial profiling". Two days ago I spent 10 minutes explaining the term "affirmative action". One of the missions of the Japanese education system seems to be to avoid such terms. I remember the Ministry of Education skimming an English textbook lesson based on gender issues in the film "The whale rider" so as not having students discussing the gender issues contained in the film. What kind of consciousness does have a Japanese person who can read western newspapers and engage in civil rights issues?

universal, particular, and singular

The decision to follow the lonely precedent provided by H. S. Macran, who translated the three "moments" of the Concept (Allgemeine, Besondere, Einzelne) as "universal, particular, and singular... p. xix

Inestability of thought and word

The general line of reasoning Vygotsky employed in this respect grew out of his critique of theorists who assumed that the relationship between word and thought remains constant. In contrast to this, he began with the assumption that signs first emerge in social and individual action without their users' full understanding of their meaning or functional role. What then follows is a process of coming to understand the meaning and functional significance of the sign forms that one has been using all along. In an important sense human use signs before understaning what they are doing, or demonstrate' performance before competence,' as Courtney Cazden (1981) succinctly and elegantly put it.

Wertsch, 2007, p. 186.

Why it takes longer to produce discourse under an elaborated code

An elaborated code will arise wherever the culture or subculture emphasizes the 'I' over the 'we'...Meanings which are discrete and local to the speaker must be cut so that they are intelligible to the listener, and this pressure forces upon the speaker to select both among syntactic alternatives and encourages differentiation of vocabulary.

Bernstein, 1971, p. 170.

Códigos elaborado y restringido y su relación con lo abstracto y lo concreto

...acerca de un par de cuestiones que mencioné en la charla en el CSIC: (a) sobre la diferencia del lexical probing entre conceptos cotidianos y conceptos científicos, referido a la charla de T. B. y en el simposio sobre (b) la cuestión de las emociones y el reconocimiento léxico, en la charla de G., en un estudio de Bernstein de 1962, llamado 'Linguistic codes, hesitation phenomena and intelligence', Bernstein prueba que en un sistema elaborado (por ejemplo el de cierto campo semántico de una disciplina en particular, supongamos teología, historia o física cuántica) "the speech system requires more complex planning than in the case of a restricted code" (por ejemplo, el que está relacionado con los conceptos cotidianos: casa, cuchara, tenedor, juguetes, ángel de la guarda). En otras palabras, si uno debe producir actos de habla en un código elaborado y no se está citando a sí mismo, tiende a dudar (hesitate) más que si uno está produciendo actos de habla en un código restringido. Mi conjetura es que no sólo habrá más duda al hablar sino al reconocer el léxico también, especialmente si el léxico va empotrado en un enunciado concreto.

Ahora bien, la distinción abstracto-concreto sigue pareciéndome poco apropiada por cuanto lo importante no es cuán abstracto o concreto un término es sino si éste ha sido aprendido en un código restringido o en uno elaborado o si el léxico es producido o no según tal o cual código. Yo puedo decir (a) "ayer le recé a mi ángel de la guarda en el dormitorio porque me dio miedo la oscuridad", lo cual es muy de código restringido, y puedo decir (b) "El primer Concilio Vaticano confirmó que los ángeles son mensajeros de Dios, sin referirse específica ni necesariamente a su origen", ejemplo de código elaborado. Bernstein probó que los hablantes tardan más tiempo en producir un enunciado tipo (b) que uno tipo (a). Es el ángel de (a) tan abstracto como los ángeles de (b), pues sí. Pero ese no es el punto. De partida, un enunciado del tipo (b) puede requerir una estructura sintáctica más compleja, más alejada del habla coloquial, que quizá sea más difícil de reconocer.

En el código restringido, el contexto es ampliamente compartido por los hablantes. En el código elaborado, el contexto no es tan claro. De hecho, un enunciado es mucho más impredecible sintácticamente, según lo prueba Bernstein. Por último está el factor de confounding. Si hago un probing con "ángel", me puedo ir al ángel de la guarda, al ángel caído o a Ángel, que es el nombre de mi padre. En cambio si pongo "iridio", que es un término concreto, pero que no se usa en el lenguaje coloquial sino que suele ser parte de un código elaborado, no tengo muchas opciones. Puedo decir que mi cama está hecha de iridio, pero no tiene mucho sentido. Iridio es un término concreto, pero que no va a ser parte de un enunciado regido por un código restringido. A grandes rasgos y con algunas excepciones, unas palabras remiten a la infancia, otras a la juventud, sobre todo escolar, otras a la edad madura, universitaria y profesional, por ejemplo. Todas etapas en que aprendimos a hablar, escribir, escuchar y escribir de manera distinta.