shutai vs. shutaisei ?

[jesty at uchicago.edu]

Hi Mathieu

I struggled with this question a lot myself and am happy to
share my own thoughts. It's a complex period though, so I
these answers aren't authoritative of final in any way. Also,
I'm sure you know this but Mark Nornes has also written about
Matsumoto in “The Postwar Documentary Trace: Groping in the
Dark,” positions: east asia, culture, critique 10, no. 1
(Spring 2002)

I think you're right that the "'Haisen' to 'sengo' no fuzai"
essay is an important document for understanding Matsumoto's
break with an older generation of filmmakers, on grounds that
were both political and aesthetic. I've always thought of
Matsumoto as _the_ primary representative of this break, which
occurs in the fields of literature and art in the same period
(late 1950s). (In literature I think Yoshimoto Takaaki is the
generally recognized leader, while art has a few people like
Nakamura Hiroshi, Katsuragawa Hiroshi and some others.) Were
there other people in film? It would be nice to get a sense
for the whole field ... Matsumoto might have been particularly
close to it because he was working in documentary which was
necessarily closer to union/socialist party/communist party
funding issues.

The break between younger and older generations had been
brewing for a few years I think, but really came to a head in
1955, the year the communist party (JCP) renounced their
strategy of armed struggle, reunited, and reconstituted itself
as a regular political party. This was the trigger for a huge
backlash against the organized left among the younger
generation of artists and activists (particularly students). 

What happened around this meeting (called 6-zenkyo) is still
mostly a mystery to me, but the problem people like Yoshimoto
Takaaki and Matsumoto Toshio constantly hammer the party for
after this, is their failure to take any public responsibility
for their previous failed policy of underground armed
struggle. During that period (51-55), many young people
sacrificed for the cause (many by being expelled from school,
some by dying), but in 1955 none of the party leaders
acknowledged this, nor took any responsibility for it. It is
in this pattern of youth sacrificing themselves, while leaders
take no responsibility, that leads people to start comparing
the leadership failure and consequent disaster, with the
leadership failure and disaster of the war. The comparison can
sometimes run to the ridiculous, but it seems to be a pretty
well accepted rhetorical pattern in the late 1950s. 

There's somewhere in that essay where Matsumoto mentions the
danger of a "third failure." I think this is the issue he's
getting at: one failure was the war itself (in which people
who later said they didn't support the war actually did
support it in their actions), the second was the failure of
the organized left in the postwar (again, marked by a
disconnect between what they said and what they did). The
second failure is sometimes designated by the term "postwar
responsiblity" (as opposed to war responsibility). Matsumoto's
point here is that if people don't get it right this time it's
all going to go sour again, and this is why the quest for
finding a subject that is adequate to the demands of history
becomes so important for him.

The question of what is different between "shutai" and
"shutaisei" is something I found in his essay “Zenei kiroku
eiga no hōhō ni tsuite". I hope you'll excuse the shift in
diction, but I wrote a short paper about this a while ago, and
this is what I took shutai to be:

"Matsumoto situates his conception of shutai in opposition to
a classical account of human being, according to which the
subject and the object remain separated, hermetically sealed
off from one other. The construction of a subject that can
observe the object from a safe distance underwrites a
superficial and conventional harmony between the subject and
object and saves the self (自己) from ever experiencing the
instability of the actual relation between shutai and outside
world. Realism of the 1950s, and going further back,
naturalism in the prewar, both failed to recognize the true
nature of shutai and therefore failed to represent the reality
of either subject or object.  The root of their failure lies
in their, “stereotyped vision of the ideas and emotions of a
self, their failure to attain a robust shutai consciousness
whose actual material reality constantly undermines the stable
self, and their failure to find a way to author a
representation which would grasp the world in its totality, as
an oppositional unity of outer and inner reality.”  By
contrast, the new documentary practice would trace the
shutai-as-process with a “constant dialectical going back and
forth from the outside to the inside and from the inside to
the outside.” It is precisely this movement that “makes
possible an expression of a subjective reality and guarantees
the reality of the work.” 

As for the difference with shutaisei and the political
importance of it, this is what I wrote in the same essay:

"As stated above, Matsumoto’s shutai is always in a state of
flux as it is traversed and penetrated by the flow of matter
around it. Awareness of this thoroughgoing interpenetration of
the inner and the outer is something that Matsumoto invariably
links with pain. ...  For understandable reasons, people –
especially people who know the anguish of the embodied subject
from their experience in the prewar – want to cover over the
truth of this situation with various more comfortable
conventions. Some of these conventions include self (自己),
initiative (自発), even shutaisei. Usually shutai and
shutaisei were almost interchangeable, but Matsumoto wants to
insist that even a concept like shutaisei, because it is a
concept, is too far abstracted from the actual situation of
the shutai. Even shutaisei, then, is too stable to capture the
absolute contingency of the shutai and therefore deserves the
same suspicion as other avoidance strategies. ... Here one can
see that the plunge into the shutai is a political imperative,
one that is necessary to break the cycle of repetition that
the war and postwar have described. During the war, artists
and thinkers bent easily before the force of the state because
the imported ideas of realism and class struggle ignored the
importance of the shutai: they glossed over the problem of
bodily commitment and the threats to it, preferring to speak
only in the language of mental conventions and universally
applicable forms. In the postwar, these same people, released
from prison or reconstructed, took up the same tactics of
realism and class struggle and proceeded to commit exactly the
same mistakes."

That's about where I've come to ... 

Just two more things: in relation to the question of how
idiosyncratic Matsumoto's ideas are, I personally see him
drawing very heavily from avant-garde "new realist" theories
that begin to take shape in the late 1940s. Although Matsumoto
has added specific reference to psychoanalysis, his conception
of reality as a material process that precedes subject/object,
and the idea that art has to find a way to represent that, can
be found in Abe Kobo and Hanada Kiyoteru from the early 1950s. 

And finally, I wanted to make clear that this is not my own
view of the history of the 1950s, but an attempt at
representing Matsumoto Toshio's ideas. For my own part, I
think it's important to see other sides of the issue, and set
this narrative among others.

Anyway, for what it's worth!

Take care
Justin


---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 12:05:17 +0100
>From: Mathieu Capel <mathieucapel at gmail.com>  
>Subject: shutai vs. shutaisei ?  
>To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
>
>   Dear Kinejapaners,
>
>   I was a little bit puzzled lately as reading an
>   article written in 1959 by Matsumoto Toshio,
>   entitled "'Haisen' to 'sengo' no fuzai"
>   (「敗戦」と「戦後」の不在 = The absence
>   of "defeat" and "postwar" ? What could be the proper
>   translation in english ?), what can be read at the
>   end of his famous Eizô no hakken/Discovering images
>   (from p. 188 in the recent Seiryû edition).
>   Actually this text seems to me of prime significance
>   to understand what were the arguments of young
>   cinematographers belonging to the
>   Oshima/Yoshida/Matsumoto generation against the
>   former generation, especially regarding the subject
>   of victimization i.e. higaisha ishiki...
>
>   What puzzled me is the clear distinction Matsumoto
>   begins with, between "shutai" and "shutaisei", what
>   one may translate, very carefully, to "subject" and
>   "subjectivity". Strictly and philosophically
>   speaking, the difference between shutai and
>   shutaisei can easily be understood, I assume... But
>   the point here is that Matsumoto seems, one one
>   hand, to put forward "shutai", and on the other
>   hand, to despise the expression of "shutaisei"...
>   And indeed that's a fact that in Eizô no hakken we
>   always read "shutai", and not 'shutaisei" - what put
>   him aside from the likes of Oshima and Yoshida, who
>   use both terms.
>
>   Matsumoto actually refers to a former article,
>   described as "a critic of Hanamatsu" (花松批判),
>   but no title, no further reference... Considering
>   that this last article is not published in Eizô no
>   hakken (or did I miss it ?), could someone tell me
>   where I could find it, and what's its title ? Of
>   course, I'd be very grateful to anyone kind enough
>   to explain what Matsumot actually means with that
>   "shutai"/'shutaisei" distinction.
>   I understand it as a way to step aside from all the
>   shutaisei theories (Cf. J. Victor Koschmann's
>   Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan) that
>   flourished after the defeat, for Matsumoto's
>   cinematographic theories about "shutai" pretend to
>   be some kind of idiosyncratic and in no way indebted
>   to any recent Japanese thinker (except for Nakai
>   Masakazu, who he wrote about in 1964 ?). But what
>   were his arguments, reasons and motivations, that's
>   what I wouldn't know - except for some hints that
>   one can find in this "Absence of defeat and postwar"
>   piece of writing...
>   Many thanks,
>
>   Mathieu Capel
>   Paris