Tokyo, the Proud

Flix Guattari

Introduction
Flix Guattari visited Japan on a number of occasions during the 1980s. These visits consisted of invited lectures and a series of conversations and collaborations with Japanese intellectuals, artists, and architects. His collaborative writings with Deleuze, particularly the Kafka and Rhizome books, began to appear in Japanese translation in the late 1970s. By the mid-eighties, however, Anti-Oedipus was available for Japanese readers.1 The year 1985 saw the publication of Guattaris conversations and co-authored papers with Japanese dancer Min Tanaka collected under the title of Velocity of Light, Fire of Zen: Assemblage 1985. This was followed in 1986 with the translation of Guattaris jointly authored volume with Antonio Negri, Les nouveaux espaces de libert. In the same year, the colourful volume Tokyo Theatre: Guattari in Tokyo appeared. This volume includes the present translation. It also contains multiple contributions by leading Japanese intellectuals, especially neo-academicist types like Akira Asada who were inspired by Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy in the rst two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.2 A distinction needs to be made between the translations of French publications and the original Japanese editions of writings by, about and with Ferikkusu Gatari. Guattaris main translator, Masaaki Sugimura from Ryuukoku University in Kyoto, is less-well known within the global Deleuzian scene in comparison to Kuniichi Uno from the University of Tokyo who was lead translator of Deleuze and Guattaris Mille Plateaux.3 Some of the Japanese Guattari books are cobbled together collections of short papers, interviews, translations of older materials, similar to the Semiotext(e) style of presentation of fragments, out of chronological order, thematically linked, but decontextualized.

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Turning to the early years of 198081, Tetsuo Kogawa (who served during this period as an international editorial associate of the USbased critical theory journal Telos, and would later publish on the free radio movement and media in Japan, eventually landing at Tokyo Keizai University) and the aforementioned Sugimara, collaborated on a book of dialogues with Guattari titled From Politics to Signs, which was undertaken in the fall of 1980 and the spring of 1981; this work was less informal than those largely unedited dialogues published in Portuguese with Suely Rolnick on the occasion of Guattaris visit to Brazil in the early 1980s.4 Guattaris early 1980s visits to Japan were largely ignored by orthodox scholars and mainstream media, neither of which had any interest in Guattaris efforts to bring together activism and theory. But this changed over the course of the decade as the bubble economy created a seemingly insatiable hunger for prestige goods, including ideas. Japans bubble economy arguably extended from the mid-eighties to the early nineties. It was driven by a large number of integrated economic factors, but primarily formed around: real estate speculation, overpriced stocks especially bank stocks - a soaring Nikkei, and a wild credit spiral. Guattaris work was well received during the asset bubble because it spoke directly to the problem of how to characterize, in both specic and general terms, capitalisms powers of deterritorialisation. It was as a decoder of capitals mutations that Guattari gained widespread intellectual celebrity in Japan. Throughout his career, beginning in the early 1980s, Guattari developed historically-based typologies of capitalism that mapped reorderings of its constituent features (state, market, production) towards a nascent theory of globalization and the rise of a networked world economy, called Integrated World Capitalism. In an age in which information is a factor of production and labour becomes immaterial, the playful life-cycle of capitalism proposed by Guattari, and recalled by Asada, was attached to economic and historical blocs: elderly or early mercantile capitalism (Italy and France are supported by the transcendental signier Catholicism); adult or industrial capitalism (England and the US and the self-policing, oedipalised, individual); infantile, postindustrial capitalism (Japan and neither transcendental nor inneroriented persons, but those of a purely relative, child-like wonder and passion, perfectly adapted to a placeless electronic space). In Tokyo, the Proud, Guattari provides specic negative examples of capitalistic infantilism in popular culture. There is a strong machinic eros in Japanese culture that is deeply repetitive and productive of

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Figure 1. Tetsuo Kogawa with Flix Guattari, Tokyo, May 1981.

a subjectivity invested in getting high on machines. The problem, for Guattari, is whether a machinic buzz connects with a productive social outlet, like business, sending it in new directions, or vegetates stupidly in addiction to video games, or even implodes into suicide.5 All three are evident in Japan. For Guattari, Japan is the prototypical model of new capitalist subjectivities6 that has produced within the high-tech miracle ambiguous results, careening wildly from the extraordinarily creative to the hyper-alienated. Guattari returned to Japan in November 1989 and participated in a rather conservative event in Nagoya, sponsored by The Japan Institute of Architects, that included city planners, architecture critics, urban designers, and philosophers.7 Guattaris dialogue with Japanese New Wave architects (a label used reticently by him) found a foothold in the establishment with this event, and the results were impressive: Guattaris conversation with Shin Takamatsu was published; others, such as Hiromi Fujii sought to account for Guattaris ideas in the construction of a psychiatric clinic. This inuential event in Nagoya was still, according to Kogawa, strange because of the sight of Guattari among the suits from big corporations and city ofces - a symptom of bubble economy-style impossible planning. However, Kogawa was careful to note that it wasnt Guattari who was co-opted, but rather, a kind of counter-cooptation took place as well.

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Finally, at least as far as Guattaris prole is concerned, there is the myth of a nal uncompleted work, a lm. According to his son Stephen, Flix was scheduled to shoot the lm in the fall of 1992 in Japan with photographer Keiichi Tahara (for whom he had written, in 1988, an essay on faciality in his photographs then on tour in France). The lm was tentatively titled Les Anges Noirs.8 Sadly, Flix Guattari passed away in August 1992. Readers of Guattari may sense in this little text on Tokyo some of the elegance of the original in the assembling of sentence fragments in paragraph form, stacked like oors of high-rises, rising proudly, just like the skyscrapers at which Guattari wondered. Gary Genosko Lakehead University

Tokyo, the Proud Flix Guattari

Luminous cubes9 on top of the skyscrapers. To blaze a trail across the sky? To interpellate the gods? Certainly, out of pride, like the medieval towers of Bologna. That inimitable attentiveness of your Japanese interlocutor who suddenly makes you feel worthy of consideration and induces you into the mimetic temptation irresistible, though hopeless of understanding the other from a viewpoint imbued with a new sensitivity. An imperceptible transgression is then followed by rejection and abandonment on the shores of a nal void. Pride, gentleness and violence mingle in the eeting exchange of glances [eur de regard]. Paradoxically, female and maternal values are omnipresent yet so rigorously circumscribed and inhibited; this makes their repression ostentatious. Three-tiered concrete highways span the mosaic city, legs wide apart like the heroes of the Kabuki theatre, crushing all in their path. Each day thousands of additional inhabitants and hundreds of conquering companies are parachuted in; the absurd lamination of the urban patrimony. I dont know how many mountaineers risk their lives climbing the most inaccessible peaks of the Himalayas each year, I only recall that more than half of them are Japanese. What is it that drives the Japanese? Is it the attraction of wealth and luxury, the consequences of the marked lack of iron affecting their memories?10 Or, perhaps it is primarily the desire to be in the thick of things [tre dans le coup], what I call machinic eros!

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Becoming child of Japan; becoming Japanese of our future childhoods. Certainly do not confuse these becomings with capitalistic infantilism and its vibrating zones of collective hysteria, such as the syndrome of puerile cute culture (kawaii), the reading-drug of Manga comics, or the intrusiveness of loukoum music; the latter is, to my taste, the worst kind of pollution.11 All the trends of the West have arrived on the shores of these islands without resistance. But never has the wave of Judeo-Christian guilt that feeds our spirit of capitalism managed to swamp them. Might Japanese capitalism be a mutation resulting from the monstrous crossing of animist powers inherited from feudalism during the Baku-han and the machinic powers of modernity to which it appears everything here must revert? Externalized interiorities and rebel exteriorities with univocal signifying reductions populate the surfaces and engender new depths of the sort where inside and outside no longer maintain the mutually exclusive relationship of opposition to which Westerners are accustomed. The signalizing [signaltiques] matters characteristic of the texture of subjectivity are found to be inextricably related to the energetico-spatio-temporal components of the urban fabric. Despite the cancerous tumours that threaten to suffocate it at any moment, Tokyo in many ways reveals its ancient existential territories and ancestral afnities between microcosm and macrocosm. This is apparent at the level of its primary congurations, whose admirable oneiric explorations have been presented to us by Kobo Abs novel The Ruined Map,12 as well as in the molecular behaviour of its crowds that appear to treat public spaces as so many private domains. Is it enough to say that the ancient surfaces of Yin and Yang, raw and cooked, analogical iconicity and digital discursivity, still manage to merge opposites? Or, further, that today the Japanese brain reconciles its right and left hemispheres according to specic modalities, or any other such unsound and harmful nonsense in which a number of anthropologists seem to delight? Different approaches that are less archaizing and less simplistic could perhaps lead us to a better understanding of the present form of this Japanese pride, a Manichean afrmation that everywhere shows through the reigning phallocratism in a will to thoroughly exploit, sometimes to the point of absurdity, and in the tyrannical power of shame associated with any infringement of the exterior signs of the dominant conformity. And what about this cult of the norm, this canonism that is cultivated like a ne art, and harbours a fundamental heterodoxy of secret

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dissidences? Is it merely the faade and medium in aid of imperceptible singularisations at the very least from Western viewpoints? The deterritorialised mandalas in intimate gestures of similitude; the unmentionable pleasures in the respect for etiquette, punctuality, and submission to rituals which dissipate vague yearnings, and circumscribe the wandering of fuzzy intentionalities . . . . Small differences from which proliferate far removed from egoic harmonies large-scale collective undertakings [projectualits]. But trap, just as well the molecular capitalistic machineries which, in order to temporarily divert Japanese elites from the territorialized hedonism of the historical bourgeoisie, threaten to sink them yet again, in a deathly will to power. At the invitation of the Aid and Mutual Action Committee of Sanya,13 I travelled to the place where the Yakuzas assassinated Mitsuo Sato,14 and paid homage to this progressive lmmaker who investigated the Japan of the disenfranchised, precarious and rebellious. Kobo Ab remarked on the fact that Sanya is perhaps less representative of an absolute misery than an irrevocable refusal of the existing order. He declared that he would like to be worthy of Sanya. Vertigo of another Japanese way: Tokyo relinquishes its status as the Eastern capital of Western capitalism in order to become the Northern capital of the emancipation of the Third World. [Dated and signed 2.1.86]

Acknowledgements
Tokyo lorgueilleuse. Fonds Flix Guattari ET02-12. 5 pps. Typescript (French). Published in Japanese in F. Guattari, Hira Gen, Asada Akira, Takeda Kenichi, Radio Homerun, et alia, Tokyo Gekijou: Gatari, Tokyo wo yuku, UPU, 1986. English translation by Gary Genosko and Tim Adams. Used with the kind permission of Enfants Guattari. Special thanks to Monsieur Jose Ruiz-Funes at Institut mmoires de ldition contemporaine, and to Barbara Godard (York University).

Notes
1. Rhizome, trans. K. Toyosaki (1977); Kafka, trans. A. Unami and K. Iwata (1978); Anti-Oedipus, trans. H. Ichikura (1986) and then Guattaris La rvolution molculaire, trans. M. Sugimura (1988). I am grateful for the assistance of Hiroshi Kobayashi for information concerning Japanese titles. 2. Guattari and co-author Min Tanaka, Kousoku to zen-en: agencement 85 (Shuukanbon [Weekly Book] #35 June 1985; Guattari and Negri, Jiyuu no

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3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

aratana kuukan: Tousou kikai, trans. T. Nibuya; Guattari et alia, Tokyo Gekijou: Gatari, Tokyo wo yuku, photos by H. Kaji. (1986). See Pierre-Maurice Aubry, Le Phnomne A.A., Magazine Littraire 216/17 (mars 1985): 4041. Sen no puratoo: Shihonshugi to bunretsusho, trans. K. Uno, A. Ozawa, T. Tanaka, et alia. (1994). These dialogues, From Politics to Signs, trans. M. Sugimura, with Kogawa and Sugimara would not appear until the year 2000. See also the discussions recorded in Brazil, Guattari and Rolnick, Micropoltica: Cartograas de Desejo (Petrpelis, 1986). See Guattari, Machinic Junkies, in Soft Subversions, New York: Semiotext(e), 1996, pp. 1023. Guattari, Regimes, Pathways, Subjects, in The Guattari Reader, G. Genosko (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, p. 105. Guattaris contribution to the seminar on urban design in the 21st century was Restoration of the Urban Landscape, in Proposal from Nagoya (Nagoya, 1989): 8595. I am grateful for the reections on this event by participant Tetsuo Kogawa (Letter from Kogawa-Genosko, January 23, 2003). Mentioned briey by Stephen Deadalus Guattari in the Pr-Texte to Ritournelles, La Nouvelles Revue Franaise 548 (jan 1999): 33839. The obvious, but misleading, reference is to Shin Takamatsus Kirin Plaza (1987) in Osaka. The luminous cubes are the four patterned rectangular lanterns that reach toward the sky from the four corners of the structure. This building is not in Tokyo; so, any of the dazzling neon towers of Shinjuku or Shibuya will sufce. One is struck by the image of Guattari wandering around the nocturnal city xated on the bright spectacle above his head. The same sense is found in his Ritournelles, this time with respect to the dense, hypermodern commercial district in Tokyo, Shinjuku: The buildings of Shinjuku traversed from top to bottom by parallel neon bars. (La Nouvelle Revue Franaise 549 Avril 1999: 337) Guattari exploits here the medical link between iron deciency and impaired memory [manque marque du fer dans les mmoires marked lack of iron affecting their memories] in a double entendre. Guattari appears to be complaining about a kind of electronic music, a species of techno known as loukoum in France and elsewhere. It is named after the sweet Turkish Delight. Kobo Ab, The Ruined Map, trans. E. Dale Saunders, New York: Vintage, 1997. Guattari was an avid reader of Ab novels and found the dream cartography of the aforementioned detective novel particularly evocative of a marginal Tokyo. Sanya is a district in Tokyo in which foreign and day labourers live. Many are homeless and live in makeshift shelters made of found materials. Elsewhere Guattari simply made the point that zones of disparity coexist in the great cities, no more in terms of centre and periphery relations, citing the concentrated wealth of Shinjuku and misery of Sanya as an example. See Space and Corporeity: Drawing/Cities/Nomads, in Semiotext(e) Architecture (1992): 11821; 12225. Sato Mitsuo was a Japanese documentary lm director known for his social activism. He was murdered during the making of his 1985 lm YAMA, the colloquial name for Sanya. The lm follows the struggles of the districts day labourers to organize. DOI: 10.3366/E1750224108000020