The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia

Jie Yang

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415709705
• eBook ISBN: 9781134634644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

When thinking about the culture and economy of East Asia, many attribute to the region a range of dispositions, including a preference for consensus and social harmony, loyalty and respect towards superiors and government, family values, collectivism, and communitarianism. Affect is central to these concepts, and yet the role of affect and its animated or imagined potentialities in the political economy of East Asia has not been systematically studied. The book examines the affective dimensions of power and economy in East Asia. It illuminates the dynamics of contemporary governance, and ways of overcoming common Western assumptions about East Asian societies. Here, affect is defined as felt quality that gives meaning and imagination to social, political, and economic processes, and as this book demonstrates, it can provide an analytical tool for a nuanced and enriched analysis of social, political, and economic transformations in East Asia.

Through ethnographic and media analyses, this book provides a framework for analyzing emerging phenomena in East Asia, such as happiness promotion, therapeutic governance, the psychologization of social issues, the rise of self-help genres, transnational labor migration, new ideologies of gender and the family, and mass-mediated affective communities. Through the lens of affect theory, the contributors explore changing political configurations, economic engagements, modes of belonging, and forms of subjectivity in East Asia, and use ethnographic research and discourse analysis to illustrate the affective dimensions of state and economic power and the way affect informs and inspires action.

This interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, anthropology, sociology, media studies, history, cultural studies, and gender and women's studies.

Part I

Introduction

The politics of affect and emotion

Imagination, potentiality and anticipation in East Asia

Jie Yang

The study of East Asian economic growth has ranged from research that emphasizes context-neutral economic policies (cf. Stiglitz and Yusuf 2001; Pomfret 2011) to cultural analysis (cf. Tai 1989; Yao 2002; Yasushi and McConnell 2008).¹ In their book Culture and Economy: The Shaping of Capitalism in Eastern Asia, Timothy Brook and Hy Van Luong (1997) unite these two approaches by examining how culture as both a meaning system and a historically situated ideology is shaped by, and shapes, the political economy of Eastern Asia. At the end of the book, they invite social scientists to “think anew about the unanticipated reconfigurations of economic and political power … in Eastern Asia and about the strategies that ordinary people will develop to survive in the presence of that power” (Brook and Luong 1997: 20). This volume takes a first step toward answering that call. However, instead of focusing on culture as an analytical framework, we address affect as both an analytical tool and a force for reconfiguring power and achieving political and economic objectives in East Asia (including China, Japan, South Korea and North Korea).

When thinking about the culture and economy of East Asia, many people attribute to the region a range of dispositions, including a preference for consensus and social harmony, loyalty and respect toward superiors and government, family values, collectivism and communitarianism. These emotionally grounded perceptions also underlie research and writings about East Asia and have shaped notions such as “Asian values,” “soft power,” “Confucian capitalism,” or “guanxi capitalism.” Many of these qualities are affective registers at which emotional bonds are animated, cultivated and valorized. Such affective dynamics closely shape the material and ideological processes of everyday life. Though key to the concepts mentioned above, the role of affect and its animated or imagined potentialities in the political economy of East Asia have not been systematically examined. The concepts of Asian values, soft power and Confucian capitalism emerge largely from the West to be used locally in Asia by those in power. Scholars have criticized the ways in which these concepts have been mobilized by politicians and governments in Asian countries to help legitimate (repressive) policies and practices (Bell 2008; Chin-Dahler 2010). By engaging the affective dimensions of power and economy in East Asia through ethnographic and media analyses, we intend this book to help readers better understand the dynamics of contemporary governance in East Asia and to distinguish these processes from common Western assumptions about East Asian societies.

Affect, Asian values and soft power

Scholars have noted the role of emotion in shaping nationalities and economies in East Asia. Masahiko Fujiwara, for example, in his 2006 Japanese bestseller, The Dignity of a State, criticizes the emphasis on Western logic in Japanese society and calls for a return to ancient Japanese virtues. He argues that Japan overemphasizes logic, reason and rationality—Western constructs that have brought social ruin to Japan—and the Japanese meaning of nationhood has been lost amidst the forces of Americanization and internationalization. He sees globalism as a strategy of the United States for seeking world domination and the market economy as a system that destroys the country’s egalitarianism and divides the society into a minority of winners and a majority of losers. He claims that Japan and the Japanese are unique; Japan is the only civilization of emotion in the world. Fujiwara states that Japanese do not have a religion such as Christianity or Islam, but need something else: deep emotion. Although this analysis not only simplifies the “West” but also essentializes emotions as something unique to Japan, his claim might be useful if interpreted as calling for a return to indigenous emotional registers and concepts to develop local models of democracy and ways of living.

In his study of a Japanese bank in Tokyo, Rohlen (1974) demonstrates that work at the bank means more than contractual relations. It requires loyalty, trust, friendship and responsibility. More than a workplace, the bank is viewed by both employers and employees as a household and family. Rohlen suggests that economic development and modernization in East Asia should not be seen solely as the product of Westernization or economic modernization, but as shaped (particularly in Japan and China) by a long history of successful (Confucian) bureaucracies and their continued existence and transformations in contemporary organizations (ibid.: 60). Likewise in a study of the public sphere in Japan, Daniel White (Chapter 5, this volume) observes that tears saturate Japanese TV production and consumption. He then uses tears as a methodological tool to trace the moral economy of emotion in Japanese TV. By challenging the emphasis on reason and rationality in early Western literature on the public sphere, White examines how those invested in the possibilities of a public sphere in Japan argue for its legitimacy by appropriating, contextualizing and problematizing emotions.

As for Asian values, underlying the so-called authoritarianism or strong state presence in economic operations in East Asia is a bond between the state and the people, and between superiors and subordinates. This bond does not endure solely through coercive force. Other means are required: strategies that encourage people to accept policies due to positive feelings (i.e. hope, happiness), or other affective registers (i.e. anger, fear). For example, happiness is a corollary to the Chinese political project of building “a harmonious society” envisioned in 2004 by Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. Because of ubiquitous propaganda, the notion of happiness or social harmony in this project has become affective in centralizing people’s attention towards projects of sustaining symbolic, social and political stability.

Similarly, Rohlen (1974) illustrates in his ethnographic study of a Japanese bank that social concord is a highly valued quality expressed in the term wa. The bank’s motto is wa to chikara, meaning “harmony and strength.” However, Rohlen points out the difficulty in translating wa as it is neither a metaphor nor an abstract or logical part of a system of distinctions:

Rather it is a quality of relationship . and it refers to the cooperation, trust, sharing, warmth, morale, and hard work of efficient, pleasant, and purposeful fellowship … Thus wa is far from a concept of static harmony. It is a directly tangible thing that easily accommodates human frailties and differences as long as participants share a devotion to the success of the common effort and a respect for one another as partners in the enterprise.

(Rohlen 1974: 47)

Wa is a means to social improvement and, as a bond between individuals and their communities, it is an end in itself. Wa constitutes an affective vector that activates, enhances and expands the kind of family-like teamwork typical of a Japanese corporation.

Several chapters in this volume consider the family as an affective site and attend to shifts in the notion of family as new niche markets are created. For example, in Japan and South Korea where caring for the old was traditionally undertaken by family members, daughters and daughters-in-law, is now transforming as gender roles change and market competition allows women to go out to work, simultaneously opening new doors for domestic care of the elderly. In this context, both Japan and South Korea turn to international immigrant women for care labor. Toshiko Tsujimoto and Ayaka Yoshimizu both depict the emotional labor of immigrant care workers from the Philippines and Indonesia. In historically and culturally specific contexts where family members traditionally have been care givers, emotional labor is not always seen as a mode of exploitation (cf. Hochschild 1983), but rather as a gendered virtue that gives immigrant care workers market advantages, particularly in South Korea (see Chapter 8).

The notion of the family is also key to social imagination and nation building. In this volume, Craig MacKie (Chapter 11) examines the notion of the family—more precisely, the unified ethnic family (of Korea)—as a happy object of imagination and a source of pleasure and promises. In North Korea, the family is not only an affective site for constructing political subjects and generating political allegiance but also a mode of imagining the happy family state that might emerge by defeating South Korea (and its American ally) and uniting the two Koreas. Such family-rooted political imagination propels current governing from propaganda to military drills in North Korea. This notion of the family is also crucial in the governance shift in China. In her study of how a Chinese academic-turned-celebrity, Yu Dan, interprets and popularizes Confucius’s Analects, Yanhua Zhang argues that Yu’s maternal and emotive approach to Confucian narratives does not challenge the Chinese political imagination rooted in the Confucian family-centered tradition, but rather, Yu’s interpretation mediates (or dampens) people’s criticism by conflating the nation-state as polity with nation-culture as a symbolic and affective source of identity. Yu’s reading of Confucianism helps shift attention from the paternalistic moral order to maternal affective affinity; the government is thus not to be judged morally on obligations for providing for the people, but to be embraced as the object of love and loyalty, and the source of spiritual growth and psychological comfort.

There is a longstanding literature that sees social relations in Japan, Korea, and China as more rooted in (and articulated in terms of) affect and emotion than in the West. For example, the notion of “Confucian capitalism” or “guanxi capitalism” relies upon affective connections in contrast to contractual relations that supposedly characterize business and politics in the West. Existing literature emphasizes culture and emotional and ethical bonds (cf. Rohlen 1974; Yang 1984; Smart 1993; Allison 1994; Yan 1996; Kipnis 1997). The literature highlights the affective and ethical dimensions of social connections or guanxi in China in terms of renqing (Yang 1984; Yan 1996) and ganqing (Kipnis 1997), both roughly translated as “human feelings.” While Yang (1984) argues that guanxi is not only a historically specific cultural practice but also a ubiquitous discourse, Kipnis (1997) goes beyond the discursive dimension by demonstrating that guanxi can be articulated through non-representational ethics. By examining the affective-ethical dimension of guanxi practices, Kipnis suggests that subjects can be formed not merely in and through language but can be constructed more holistically, for example, through social relations and bodily feelings. In general, scholars on Asian social relations focus on the role of emotions in defining, limiting or expanding social, political and ethical boundaries. In this book contributors build on this attention to emotional bonds but diverge from the charting of relationships and boundaries to explore potential and imagination. We see affect as a felt quality that gives meanings and imaginative potential to political and economic transformations, and we focus on how affect triggers change, releases energy and imagination, and intensifies connectivity between objects, people and events.

Unlike affect explored in terms of guanxi, social ties and networks in China, where it operates as almost a separate system from bureaucratic power, supporting or subverting it, this volume pays particular attention to how state power works through affective modes of engagement or individual desires and feelings. As Hippler (2011) points out, according to Spinoza, power is twofold: on the one hand, there is physical power, the force of coercive strength that exists between one body and another, or between the state and the individual; on the other hand, power is imaginary and affective, relying on the manipulations of human passions. Hippler suggests that what we call “politics” is the collective agency of people’s imaginative power, because political power is based on the force of an imagined association between social life and affects, between a world of individuals and their collective imagination (ibid.: 71).

Another widely cited concept that is frequently applied to East Asia is the notion of soft power (cf. Nye 2004, 2008a, 2008b; Bell 2008; Yasushi and McConnell 2008). Joseph Nye (2004) introduces the notion of soft power into the study of international politics. It is “an agent-focused definition of power” and “the ability to influence others to obtain the outcomes one wants” (Nye 2008a: x).² Nye (2004: 5–6) writes that soft power is “leading by example and attracting others to do what you want.” This attractiveness, Nye argues, can be conveyed through various means, via a country’s popular and elite culture, its public diplomacy, its businesses’ actions abroad, international perceptions of its government’s policies, and the gravitational pull of a nation’s economic strength, among other factors. While Nye originally calls on the United States to apply soft power in its foreign affairs, the notion of soft power has now been widely used by analysts and politicians in international relationships. China’s growing soft power, for example, has been described as “charm offensive,” and as the most potent weapon in its foreign policy arsenal in recent years (Kurlantzick 2007: 5).³ To the extent that soft power concerns the ability to create desire for others, it is an affective apparatus. However, Nye sees soft power as twisting minds rather than twisting arms. He writes: “Power defined in behavioral terms is a relationship, and soft power depends more on the subject’s role in that relationship than does hard power. Attraction depends on what is happening in the mind of the subject” (Nye 2008a: xiii, emphasis added). With Nye’s emphasis on “minds,” soft power operates as a cognitive process; it can be exercised, for example, through “reasoned persuasion” (Nye 2008a: xiii). However, if soft power is about attraction, intersubjectivity, or interconnectivity, it can be captured more fully by including an analysis of its affective dimension that goes beyond reason: how that “softness” is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Asia's Transformations
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Happiness and psychologization
• Part III Body, affect and subjectivity
• Part IV Tears, media and affective articulation
• Part V Gender, affective labor and biopolitical economy
• Part VI Affect, modernity and empires
• Index