The Dissolution of Meaning: Towards an Aesthetics of Non-Sense

Abstract

In this paper I will raise the issue of the relationship between text and interpretation in the case of texts whose ultimate purpose is utmost resistance to interpretation. Can a discipline such as hermeneutics, which has been traditionally associated with the analysis, construction, and interpretation of meaning, survive the challenges that postmodern art posits to the very notion of ”meaning”? The paper begins with a historical outline of efforts made by hermeneuticians from Johann Dannhauer (1603-1666) to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) to explicate the concept of ”meaning. ” The relevancy of the hermeneutical project to an understanding of Japanese letters will be established by analyzing the work of Haga Yaichi (1867-1927) based on August Boeckh's (1785-1867) minute classifications of the philological sciences in his Enzyclopadie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften (Encyclopedia and Methodology of the Philological Sciences, posthumous 1877). The paper, then, turns to critiques of hermeneutics on the part of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Susan Sontag (1933-2004), and the challenges that the field is currently experiencing in the American academia for having been associated with conservative, male-biased, homogeneously non-hybrid, homophobic, colonial, capitalistic enterprises. Hermeneutics is increasingly seen as the mummified ”ancient” in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. As an example of this quarrel I will discuss two Japanese poems composed by poets of the same generation, Aizu Yaichi (1881-1956) and Yamamura Bochō (1884-1924)-the first totally absorbed in the construction of meaning, the second devoted to its destruction. The question, then, arises, is there anything left for hermeneutics to do in an age in which the notion of ”meaning” as conceived within the frameworks of big narratives has been completely discredited? I will leave the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936) to answer this question by focusing on one of his first books - a book that is not very well known outside of Italy and which is not translated in English, Poesia e Ontologia (Poetry and Ontology, 1967). In this book, Vattimo calls for the need of an aesthetic of dis-identification - a disruption of the logic of continuity and identity brought about by the poetics of the 20th century. In other words, with modernity, and even more so in post-modernity, the artworks of the avant-gardes have dictated and inspired aesthetic/hermeneutical discourses, constantly forcing aesthetics and hermeneutics to re-think their basic premises. It seems to me that this need to redraw the maps of critical discourses is made urgent more than ever by contemporary trends in popular culture - trends that actually originate in Japan and East Asia. In the remainder of the paper I will examine works by the Taiwanese-American artist Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954), and the Japanese artists Yanagi Yukinori (b. 1959) and Nagasawa Nobuho. I will also look at the ”Superflat” project of Murakami Takashi (b. 1962) and the Japanese Neo Pop - a project that has been particularly successful in the United States since its inception in the year 2000. Aside from the reaction that one might have to otaku culture, it is undeniable that these popular trends force us at least to imagine what an aesthetics of the absence of meaning (or non-sense) could be. My conclusions will be very speculative - an appeal to recover at least some portions of contested meaning.