Jottings related to Japanese culture

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Revision as of 08:23, 26 January 2011

Japanese Culture and Seminology

A few years ago, at the Asian Association of Social Psychology, Steven Cousins was talking to Steven Heine (both of whom are famous social psychologists, by my reconing). The former was saying how he was not infavour of the computational model of the mind and that in order to capture Japanese cultural psychology it would be necessary to use a seminological approach.

At the time I was still into my occular-centristic interpretation of Japanese culture which had or has it that Japanese people are more likely to use imaginative reflection to represent themselves and understand situations, as opposed to using linguistic reflection and self-narrative. So when Dr. Cousins said that one needed to use seminology to describe Japanese culture, I thought "Oh boy, another logocentrist." After all Rolan Barthes came to Japan, holding the belief that is only through phonetic language that things that can have meaning, and so concluded that Japanese was Empire of the Signs *with empty centres,* signs that appear to mean nothing at all. But lately, after reading Bachnik - who uses the Piercian categorisation of the "index" - it seems to me that seminology is the way to go.

It seems to me now that the Japanese are using a different kind of sign, or using signs, in different ways. That does not say a lot but I think that it can say more, more precisely, than suggesting that the Japanese are into using imagination and vision. That is not it. As Kitayama and Ishii have demonstrated the Japanese are also paying a lot of attention to tone of voice. There are all sorts of sirens that go off around the countryside calling the Japanese back to their homes. There are all those announcements that Nakashima Yoshimichi talks about, and the shoutings of baseball players. There are of course Haiku and some of the oldest, most prolific literature in the world. There is lots of language, lots of sounds and no particular concentration on vision.

All the same I have not been barking completely up the wrong tree. There is something visual going on. There is a way in which Japan destroys language, makes theory fall appart, turns it all into so much sand, or the bark of dogs. In the past I have said that Japan, with its name cards, and New Year's cards and calligraphy attempts to turn words into pictures. But that is not it either. Picture is not the right word. Barthe's emperial signs, Levi Strauss' totems, Boy De Menthe's Kata, Bachnik's Indexes...what is going down is something on these lines.

So I have been looking at Culler Barthes and I may look at Peirce. I think that Maruyama Masao's diagram looks really cool.

How do you connect the world to the sign? Does it float over the abyss? Are there points of caption? What sort of socius is involved in keeping the signs attached to...whatever it is that they are attached to? And are they part of the world? Are there one to one relations?

I have no idea, and I will probably never know but at the moment, I am interested in typologies of signs.

And then it might be nice to be able to operationalise them.