Immateriality and Absence in the Search for Self

Paul Roquet is assistant professor of Japanese studies at MIT, following doctoral study at UC Berkeley and time spent as a postdoctoral researcher at Brown. His research, as exemplified in this fine monograph, explores the use of media as a form of mood regulation, with case studies taken from music, video art, film, and literature. In Ambient Media, Roquet presents an examination of how ambiance was used in post-1970s Japan to create a culture of security and well-being, creating a nationalist aesthetic that was to become central to a gradually emerging industry of Japanese physical therapy.

The book’s first half presents a politicized reading of these aesthetic concerns. We are introduced to the concept of ambient subjectivation, grounded in the theories of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault (specifically Foucault’s notions of techniques of the self and governmentality), to investigate how the neoliberal self might use ambient media as a technique of self-care and preservation. Central to this investigation are several beautiful case studies that explore the interplay between ambience and atmosphere in the emergence of audiovisual media: from the ambient music of Brian Eno in the 1960s and 1970s to a more recent therapeutic emphasis on healing and relaxation in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These studies are used to question the accepted discourse of cultural objects as commercially driven tools for the pacification of the masses, instead showing some of the ways in which ambient media affords the potential for individual transformation, self-meditation, and healing.

This process of reframing is most evident in the book’s second half (particularly in chapters 5 and 6), which elucidates and expands Roquet’s central concerns through the lens of writers Haruki Murakami and Yuki Kurita and the power of their works both to offer an ambient space to reflect and as a metacritique of the aesthetic and mechanistic tools they have presented to create this space. In doing so, Roquet notes a desire to avoid “drawing any easy comparisons to earlier moments in Japanese aesthetics … to avoid courting false imitations of an unchanging national character” (20), yet it seems almost impossible to avoid tracing the work of these writers back to traditional Japanese philosophies of stillness and balance. In particular, Jun’ichirM Tanizaki’s seminal 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows is called to mind, with its notions of Japanese culture finding beauty in shadows and subdued forms (see the traditional Japanese concept of sabi), in contrast to the West’s striving for progress, light, and clarity. However, a viewpoint gradually emerges of this ambient culture not as a reflection of this history and tradition but as a response to the sociopolitical effects of a new postindustrial hypercapitalism and the need for self-disciplining that this internalized.

At its core, then, this book is really a study in the tension played out through the dialectic space between immateriality and absence, between tranquility as a positive healing phenomenon and “simply coping mechanisms for life under neoliberal capitalism” (21). In many ways this offers us echoes of the work of the late Mark Fisher, drawing out a subtle interplay between neoliberalism as a structure of feeling and as a mechanism for hegemonic ideology, one with a complex self-effacing relationship with its own historicity. In particular, Fisher’s (2009: 14) discussion (pace Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek) of dangers of capitalist realism is brought to mind: the numbing approach to political engagement that creates “a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”

If there is one criticism of this book, it is that Roquet has a proclivity to drift back to the positive aspects of these situations all too often, avoiding a much-needed engagement with some of these darker areas of selfhood and ambience. Roquet...