Media Politics and Reified Nation: Japanese Culture and Politics under Information Capitalism

Abstract

This paper analyzes the significance of the emergence of media-led populism in contemporary Japan as exemplified in the so-called Koizumi phenomenon, the primary efficacy of which lies in the successful articulation and circulation of images of the popular leader, rather than the actual implementation of policies. By locating this form of politics in the immediate context of global capitalism led by advanced media technology, the paper problematizes the ways in which the national cultural space has been dehistoricized in past decades into one that merely hosts divided and alienated individuals, reduced to passive receptors of the boundless flow of information. In this media-permeated space, individuals are typically deprived of subjective status as autonomous and critical agents, and are instead constituted as objects of the omnipresent gaze of cyber-culture. What emerges in this cultural environment is a new idealist epistemology--what Julian Stallabrass calls 'hi-tech Hegelianism'--in which the dialectical distinction between appearance/image and content/meaning are transcended. Reflecting these penetrating changes at the level of subjectivity, cognitive parameters, and the ways in which national hegemony operates in this space, present Japanese society is plagued with a number of political difficulties, such as the erosion of the democratic subject and the weakening power of the law and democratic institutions under a climate of idealism that prioritizes mood and feelings over critical reason and ethics. The paper issues a warning that we may be witnessing the advent of something similar to what Hannah Arendt observed in the former USSR of the 1930s--the transformation of a democratic nation into one reconstituted by the abstract images represented by a popular leader. In the midst of advanced information technology redefining every facet of human life, a reification of phantom images of Japanese nation seems to be underway once again, eroding the content and processes of democratic polity, just as hi-tech Hegelianism displaces history with virtual reality. In view of the unparalleled misery which totalitarian regimes have meant to their people-- horror to many and unhappiness to all--it is painful to realize that they are always preceded by mass movements and that they 'command and rest upon mass support' up to the end. ( Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 301 )