Un-learning and Re-learning
Psychologist Jerome Bruner argued that humans enter into meaning by constructing narratives, but meaning does not pre-exist our ability to make sense and we only do so, as Karl Marx once said, under circumstances which we did not choose, but in which we were born. After a linguistically mediated constitution of one’s environment and a pedagogical intervention to arrive at key perceptual experiences, an unlearning must take place to reconstitute new, learned experiences to produce a new narrative, a new shutai and a new socio-historical reality.
The following sections outline three modes of becoming shutai based on my historical research from the 1920s to 50s spanning across the Asia-Pacific War; 1960s and 70s when a nationwide movement of student protests took place; and from the 1990s into the 2000s when Japan’s bubble economy had burst, followed by the 2008 World Economic Crisis. These catastrophic moments in history provide the backdrop to the successive generations of shutai whose underlaboring work scaffolds the next generation’s capacity to exercise agency.
MOVING INTO PRESENCE
Moving into presence is how ‘practical consciousness’ (Giddens 1979) is environmentally constituted as an embodied experience of self-awareness.
For example, female Physical Education teacher-scholars who pioneered the field of women’s Physical Education from the pre- to post-war periods developed a dance curriculum that turned mundance movements into self-aware and self-directed motion. They saw this as a practice that helped her students to be present in her movements, thus cultivating their shutai-sei by unlearning how to move by learning how to dance.
Although the curriculum changed, sometimes drastically due to the war, teachers fought to keep dance in the curriculum. The practice of making movements self-aware maintained consistency in and integrity of the curriculum and in education more generally throughout the pre- and post-war periods. In other words, the practice remained as a tried and true ground of shutai-sei education that can help all learners regardless of the reigning ideological system, the amount of budget and resources available, or the different pedagogical approaches and trends in dance education.
PRESENTING PRESENCE
Presenting the presence of things was how the artists who later became associated with Mono-ha or ‘School of Things’ decided to do art.
They critiqued the representational function of art as artists who spent their formative years participating in the 1960s student protests. When the artists of Mono-ha entered university, the movement was fizzing out with the realization that the decade-long protests ended in the students’ defeat.
This experience led them to question the role of art in constituting substances as sozai while realizing that intentions do not teleologically guide us towards intended goals. The artists of Mono-ha turned to their experiences of defeat as a source of creativity in jouissance which is not oriented towards a goal, but more closely affiliated with the life force that animates nature, including human existence. Mono-ha sought to capture this pre-symbolic life force in mono or ‘things.’
We can see this in one of the iconic works of Mono-ha that also marked the beginning of its movement – Sekine Nobuo’s work Phase – Mother Earth (1968). Sekine and a few others dug up the ground of a park where the exhibit was to take place. Then, next to the hole where the soil had been removed, the removed soil was dumped and compacted into a tall, cylindrical mold. The result was a caved earth next to a protruded earth. The soil was returned to the caved part of the ground at the end of the exhibit, leaving no trace of the art ever having existed.
PRESENTING ABSENCE
Coming soon
ABSENTING ABSENCE
Coming soon