Observers

Islands of escape in the works of Roland Barthes and Byung-chul Han. Placefulness in Lafcadio Hearn's writings and a charming new documentary from Sweden

In 1983, a translation of Roland Barthes’ L’Empire des signes (1970) was released in English as Empire of Signs. The translation was by Richard Howard, a Nobel prize-winning poet and translator of French literary talents such as Baudelaire, Camus, and Giraudoux, and also, the post-structuralist philosophical historian, Michel Foucault.

Empire of Signs is a series of short and thought-provoking meditations on aspects of Japanese culture, society, language, architecture, and customs. And his tone is authoritative, Barthes never claims any special knowledge or insight about Japan that is not readily accessible to common experience. In fact, in Empire of Signs Barthes only reports what he interprets from his very subjective experience of Japan.

The book’s essays don’t seem to be organized in any particular order, except for the first one entitled “Faraway.” This serves as an introduction where Barthes explains his concept:

If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object, create a new Garabagne, so as to compromise no real country by my fantasy (though it is then that fantasy itself I compromise by the signs of literature).

I’d never heard of a “Garabagne,” but learned that it’s a literary device, allowing authors to create a completely fictional setting without directly referencing or potentially misrepresenting any real country or culture. Interesting.

Barthes reveals that his subject, the object of his gaze, is in fact, his own very particular conception of this place called Japan, not the place itself. He continues:

I can also—though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse)—isolate some where in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed by linguists), and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan.

The most apt metaphor for how Barthes envisioned his project is that of the camera of which he was fond (his later book, Camera Lucida expands upon this metaphor). But contrary to intuition, in the camera analogy Barthes is not photographing Japan (this would be a Western, analytical mode). Rather, as he states, Japan is “turning its flashbulb” on the author. It does this by situating him—and thus the reader—in a unique position: “This situation is the very one in which a certain disturbance of the person occurs, a subversion of earlier readings, a shock of meaning lacerated, extenuated to the point of its irreplaceable void, without the objects ever ceasing to be significant, desirable.” In the act of writing, Barthes thus seeks only to record his own expression at the time of exposure to the “difference” that is Japan. In the photography metaphor, this would be like meditating on the instance of being photographed, and in Barthes’ case, recording the moment with words.

It is also in his brief introduction that Barthes goes to great lengths to define what his work is not. He assures readers that his is not an orientalist project: “To me the Orient is a matter of indifference, merely providing a reserve of features whose manipulation—whose invented interplay—allows me to “entertain” the idea of an unheard-of symbolic language, one altogether detached from our own.” Barthes claims that his only interested is “différence.” How very French!

Further, Barthes insists that his work does not:

1. describe Japan

2. represent or analyze the “reality” of Japan

3. compare Japan to the West by “lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence”

What Barthes does try to do is use Japan as a paradigm for deconstructing his (and the West’s) most basic symbolic structures vis-à-vis the perceived ‘other’ which is represented by the Orient. Barthes claims he is trying—with Japan as a vehicle—to search out “the very fissure of the symbolic.”

Despite his creative manipulation of language and paradigm, sign and signified, Barthes’ “subject,” is unquestionably Japan, or at least a dilettante flaneur’s subjective impressions of Japan. And, in some ways, despite Barthes’ own deft protests, at least the tenor of his look at Japan is orientalist in that Empire of Signs essentializes a Japan of a Western mind’s making. The fact that he is self-conscious and unapologetic for this is a rather inadequate excuse for providing a view of Japan that is conventionally orientalist, highly subjective, and largely unverifiable. Which is not to say that the book doesn’t have great value.

This may all just sound like highfalutin’ French intellectualism, and I guess it is. But it could also be characterized as something we all engage in at times, something I’ll call call “outsider aestheticism.” In an unknown land, the traveler’s mind is enticed by unimagined sights and sounds, flights of fancy, and all that’s unknown. Anyone who has travelled to a foreign place knows this feeling.

The camera memorializes moments in traveler time for the mind’s eye, and later we try to make meaning from all we’ve seen, heard, smelled, touched and tasted. After we return, we begin framing the rhapsody of travel with our own words: we recount these snapshots and try to convey that childlike sense of wonder we felt when all was foreign.

Empire of Signs is thus just the outsider aesthetic of a creative, sensitive and heady intellectual trying to make sense of Japan. It is Roland Barthes’ framings of life in Japan, as he—the Frenchman he was at the time—encountered it. Nothing more and nothing less. It’s an art project that the publishers of his manuscript must have estimated would attract a large enough audience to justify publication costs.

And I admit that I was one of those readers who was enthralled by Barthes’ vision of Japan when I first encountered it two decades ago. I still think his project eloquently captured some of the true and beautiful cultural qualities of the cultural life in these islands, but I’ve also come to see that outsider narratives like his of exotic “others” in foreign lands always gloss over a lot. They portray a 2-D cultural world, missing inside jokes, strained interpersonal relations, counter-cultural forces and a whole lot more.

A New Gaze at the Empire of Signs

Roland Barthes’ shadow looms large over Byung-chul Han’s recent book, The disappearance of ritual. Han even has a chapter called Empire of Signs in which he expands directly upon some of the “Garabagne” of Japan that Barthes first explored. That Han is himself an outsider—a Korean-born philosopher living in Germany—may explain his affinity for Barthes’ perspective on Japan (and perhaps mine, as well). The outsider in society is—by definition—one who has come to find his or her place in an other place and his or her self in relation to distinctly other selves. And while enchantment with the sights and sounds of a foreign place might provide fuel for travel and exploration, this fuel cannot last forever. Eventually, the foreign becomes familiar and if one is not careful, the familiar can become bland and predictable once again. This must be the case for Han’s Germany, which enchanted him enough to emigrate there in his 20s but does not play a large role as a subject of his writings (though he writes in German and engages with the country’s rich philosophical heritage).

Han’s view of the “empire of signs” that is Japan is one overlain with a deep aesthetic appreciation for ritual, and also for play. He defines ritual as “symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world” and Han sees “strong play” as one such technique. Ritual politeness—which is still on display everywhere in Japan—is another. In Japan, socially agreed-upon rules create common forms that allow for a visible etiquette of interaction that appears to exist without the anxiety of self. “In the empire of signs,” Han writes, “the soul, psychology, is erased.”

But is it? From an outsider’s perspective, perhaps. But the longer one lives in any foreign place, including apparently exotic Japan, the more familiar it becomes, and the more one can tune-in to the soul and psychology of that place which is so blissfully invisible to visitors.

People living in places develop their own language and shared history. This applies to nations and family homes alike. For example, a family can charm guests they have over for dinner (to borrow a Western metaphor—we rarely do this in Japan), but these guests will likely learn very little about the real cultural life of the family: the little dramas, struggles, comic incidents, linguistic shorthands, and all the rest that emerge through life together in a specific place. The guests will leave with their own impressions to discuss on the way home, but really, what will they know?

The same is true of countries. Visiting allows one to bask in the charm of a foreign place, but it tells you very little about what is behind what is easily observed, and what is below the surface.

This is where what might be called the “inside outsider” perspective can be valuably revealing. Pioneering expatriate writers such as Lafcadio Hearn—whose excellent recent biography “Outsider,” by Steve Kemme, I am currently finishing—shared intimate views of Japan that could only be gained through careful long-term observation. Hearn’s writings were about the people, places, and cultural practices he came to know in Japan (and other places before), not some artistically aestheticized “Garabagne.”

Han is correct to point out that ritual and play are both important in Japanese society, but aren’t they in every society? I had the privilege of visiting the U.K. recently, and I attended a thing called . . . ah yes, a play! I saw the attendees shaking hands and chatting in their own particular ways: ritual greetings, social graces, quiet and applause at all the right times, etc. How is this any different? Han may be correct to point out that patterns of ritual and play appear to be breaking down in some places, but I also wonder if some of Han’s heady flaneur’s view of ritual and play—and the crisis of its disappearance—partly just speaks of his own isolation and the sense of isolation that so many netizens and global nomads feel today.

Despite living here in Japan for more than 20 years, I am myself still partly an “outsider,” and always will be to some degree, but I can say with confidence that Japan is certainly not devoid of soul and psychology. I would love for Han to turn his impressive intellect to the place he actually dwells, and to share some of what makes life tolerable and even joyful there. Japan seems to draw the dilettante, and so does the expatriate life in general, but I prefer the writings of those who commit to their adopted places in the world and write with empathy, color, and care about those places. After I finish reading The Outsider, I’ll be digging back into some of Hearn’s enchanting writings from the Japan of his day (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) . I first encountered these at a local library shortly after I arrived here, and I’m looking forward to exploring Hearn’s writings again.

I have a lot more thoughts on this topic, but this post is starting to ramble (“starting? you’ve already skated over the surface of 3 books!”). So I’ll just end by embedding a beautiful and “placeful” little mini-documentary recommended by my niece (and passed along by my mother—thanks mom!) who saw it in a traveling film festival. It is a charming little story about a couple that committed to a place amidst the steady technological dehumanization of our world. One of the main character’s final observation is a fitting end to this piece: “Live where you are and enjoy what’s there.”