DISSERTATION Final

UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Building Japan: Technology as a problem-space for Veridiction, Jurisdiction, and Subjectivation. Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2075z5gr Author Herman, Stanley Bruce Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Building Japan: Technology as a problem-space for Veridiction, Jurisdiction, and Subjectivation. By Stanley Bruce Herman A dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Paul Rabinow, Chair Professor Xin Liu Professor David Winickoff Fall 2012 Abstract Building Japan: Technology as a problem-space for Veridiction, Jurisdiction, and Subjectivation. By Stanley Bruce Herman Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Professor Paul Rabinow, Chair This research is an attempt to examine elements in the classic relations of state actors to the agency of the individual through the medium of technology development and deployment. The chapters analyze discourses surrounding the notions of ‘the state’ and ‘technology’ as fields for exploration of the Foucaultian problematizations of veridiction, jurisdiction, and subjectivation. Specifically, how have these two poles interacted in practices of ‘truth telling’, governance, and the formation of citizen and ethnic identities. In particular, the task at hand is to think about the deployment of technology in the configuration of affect in relation to an identity, ‘the Japanese’. Japan had started as a place of liminality in the research: the non-West modern, that didn’t quite fit the mold of so many classical narratives of modernity. But as my inquiry continued the questions turned more sharply towards an investigation of practices of affect and subjectivity. ‘What part did technology play in the development of a Japanese state identity?’ gradually transformed into a montage of narratives in which the technical simply met the subjective, and the questions emerged from this meeting. For example, what is the force exerted by a practice of memory of the atomic bomb upon an idea of peace? And, in the representation of a national disaster what narrative tropes are invoked and hazarded in the contest of the ‘national experience’? I select a series of technological developments spanning three centuries of Japanese history and utilize the historical narrative as a space for raising these questions as they emerge and are articulated/argued about by the actors involved, as well as by the ‘second- order observers’: the historians and social philosophers that mark and delimit the field of ‘Japanese history’. 1 For Noriyo Who has always been there Introduction I remember well when it all fell apart. It was in the winter of 2007, during one sultry evening in Bangkok. I was on the outskirts of the city, beyond the half- complete skeletons of skyscrapers abandoned after the real estate bubble, and the legion of concrete, cinder-block like, three story apartment/office/merchant structures, that in their ubiquity seem to signify the life-force qua urbanization of the modern, city-nation-polis-ethnic-state in Asia. Past the verdant green golf courses, rich in tropical flora and well-dressed visitors meandering about in cart or on foot, at one of those sprawling luxury compounds: part hotel, part administrative center, part Versailles’ thematic of opulence. I was there to attend a conference sponsored by an association of Japanese and Thai NGOs. The actual topic of the conference now eludes memory; though it was important – at least one ambassador was invited, and the audience hall was festooned with assorted levels of politicos and PhDs garnered from around the globe, all crowding the upholstery in a cross- cultural testimony to ‘business formal’. The academics and ministers listened politely (or resolutely) to a bevy of speakers as they clambered up on stage, stood behind the podium, and uttered about topics of interest to the ‘development community’. As I was an invited member of this consortium, but one lacking in function other than ‘audience’, I gradually grew bored and began to wander. Outside the conference hall was a large entry foyer. It had been filled with canvas and plywood stalls decorated with descriptions of numerous projects. Many of the stalls were occupied by the participants of the projects; or at least a representative ‘sample’ of the participants, which turned out to be predominately female, at either end of the life arc, garnered from various ‘ethnic groups’ of the northern regions of Thailand. At the start of the talks the girls and matrons had been there to show (and sell) native craft, so each stall was somewhat burdened by a pile of baskets, textiles, and cases with jewelry. They had stood beside monitors demonstrating smiling Japanese and Bangkok youths eagerly teaching, building, and/or medicating the ‘people’ of the community, while either hocking their wares, or sitting, stoically, in the fabrication of same: a living performance of manufacture of the cultural craft, and one would assume, ‘tradition’. But now, as the prospective audience cum customers had relocated into the next room, they were at repose, sitting chatting, eating, drinking tea and sodas. A few of the younger ones fiddled with their cell phones. I should have been in heaven. This. This was the ostensible reason for my presence here, so far from home and countrymen. As an anthropologist in larval form, I had been dispatched with minimal ceremony to the once ‘Far East’ to study ‘technology transfer’. And here it was! Those pre-teen ‘ethnics’ with their cell phones, or their grandmothers with their Tupperware, were a living embodiment of the capacity of the form and function that we denote as the technological, to get up and move, use and be used, in other milieus, worldviews, and ways of life. One of the stalls in particular had caught my attention earlier. It depicted a program by a Tokyo group to bring Internet service to one of the northern villages. In an array of 1 beautifully vivid photos, it showed Japanese carpenters building an ‘ergonomic’ school, and fitting it with wirelessly capable computers. And about the images, in Thai, Japanese, and English script, were accounts of the practice in passionate and imploring terms: the bringing of the computer and that thing beyond it - the world wide web - was more than a gift of a material, it was a gift of a world. A world of learning; a world of perspectives; a world in which that one little village of four hundred souls in the northern tropical hills, could join the global village in a capacity of speech (and again one would assume, though it was not stated, listening). The gift of the internet was expressed in no lesser terms than saying that it was a human right; and therefore, an abnegation of the gift act itself (Mauss be dammed!); instead the meeting of a need: without access to the internet, these people could not be fully human. They could not experience or express their rights to education. They could not participate in a global voice. They could not be made manifest in technique, nor engage in that which is ‘History’, a moving along in the exploration of form writ in a shared database. This was rich stuff, and again, seemingly all that I had come here to engage in, and at needs be, ‘deconstruct’. For that was my task: as an aspiring ‘anthropologist of technology’ I had borrowed heavily from the extant literature of technology as a subject, turning to the various schools of thought of Science Technology Studies or historians of technology. I had been taught that technology was a thing, but also a substance, and a form! No less than Thomas Hughes had stated as such, and Langdon Winner had vouchsafed as much, while dithering on the terminology (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987; Hughes 2004; Winner 1977). It was a font that drew from the diluted well of Marx and materialism, after it had run the canyons panned by Heidegger’s search for essence in Being. And the result was an object (quite distinct from its investigating subject) that was chimeric in its manifestation and expression. But I digress. For that night those ‘ethnic women’ being ‘developed’ had not (I presume) read Heidegger, and so were unaware of the potential alienation, or alienating of the human from alethia by way of the ‘standing-reserve’ of the technical apparatus.1 No, that was a concern of the literati. I, and my colleagues in the next room, partitioned off by education, class, and opportunity – the bevy of ‘life- chance’ so dutifully, and poignantly, noted by Weber – were the ones engaged with History. With the meaning of the ‘modern’, in all its epochal glory, under which an idea like ‘development’ can be accomplished…or failed. We had the busy task of representation of the human figure; that which was so eloquently and concisely labeled by Paul Rabinow as the anthropos. And we were serious in our earnestness, for nothing less than ‘salvation’ was at stake. Salvation of History. And salvation of its most peculiar subject, the human figure. Somewhere in my ruminations a key-note speaker took the podium in the next room. He was a man of some familiarity to myself: a lecturer at one of Japan’s most prestigious universities, as well as a founder and director of an influential NGO. He had been instrumental in calling and organizing this conference. As he 1 From the infinitely influential “The Question Concerning Technology” by Martin Heidegger (1977). 2 began to speak, the customary buzzing at the back of the hall ceased and a polite silence reigned in the other room (the chatting in my foyer continued unabated).

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