Representation, Reality Culture, and Global Capitalism in Japan

To examine the cultural meanings and effects of the Japanese economic recession is the task at hand. Yet between the moment our workshop was conceived (fall 1997) and the moment it was held (fall 1999) a recovery was invoked. ¹ Moreover, given the manic quality of global capitalism the chance of a subsequent downturn by the time this volume is published is not entirely unlikely. This seeming unpredictability of the global economic system might suggest that any attempt to theorize the relation between aesthetics and political economy (between culture and capital) is destined to fail, destined to return to the drawing board after every economic update. For some this marks the final come-from-behind victory of an autonomous cultural analysis, those close textual readings that refuse to consider the way the sociohistorical context might upset the machinery of the critic’s elaborate mousetrap. But if there has ever been a moment to push aesthetics and political economy into the same idea—to put back on the table the relation between forms of cultural production and forms of capitalist production—it is now. For both realms have recently come together over one of the most significant problems of our contemporary moment: the problem of representation.

Representation is considered here in both its political-economic and aesthetic-semiotic dimensions. There is the political-economic category in which local and national representatives mediate the relations between the individual and the state (in which elected representatives effectively stand in for other citizens) or when money mediates the relation between labor and commodities. Then there is the aesthetic category in which textual elements mediate the relations between the artwork and the world (in which things stand in for other things). At the present moment both categories are facing radical challenges.

First there is the breakdown in national representation (such as parliamentary democracies and national economies) as the world system reconfigures and globalizing processes strengthen. On this score the summer of 1997 was most telling. At that time, at the height of the Japanese recession, Prime Minister Hashimoto Ryutaro, contrite and bowing deeply, faced the nation and took responsibility for the current economic crisis. It was due to his own incompetence, he explained, and to a certain identity crisis he felt as a politician and Japanese at the close of the millennium. As with most utopian gestures the country seemed to roll its eyes collectively as if to say, “Prime Minister Hashimoto, don’t overestimate yourself.” Despite the fact that the prime minister heroically blamed himself, most observers recognized that Hashimoto’s failures were less about his competence and more about the ever-decreasing power of national and local representatives. The power of the national representative now seems to pale in comparison with the transnational representative; thus no matter what policy Hashimoto would have chosen, no matter how much harder he might have worked, there are new formal limitations to his power in shaping both the Japanese and global financial systems. ²

What are the North American Free Trade Agreement, Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and World Trade Organization if not responses to the new demands of capitalism, demands that cannot be managed by national politicians who must tolerate, however begrudgingly, the needs of local constituencies, not to mention the welfare state? This de facto world government is simply more effective at managing the world economy. When the IMF grants loans to Mexico, Indonesia, or Russia, the economists of the funds come off as heroes. How far away is Japan or even the United States from the moment when local citizens will entrust, indeed eagerly hope for and solicit, a representative from a transnational institution to work for their particular interests? I view this political and economic crisis in national representation as one of the great social issues of the new millennium.

As for the aesthetic realm, this breakdown in representation is best expressed...