What do I mean by 'shutai (主体)'?
THE CONCEPT
Shutai is a Japanese term combining the kanji 主 (shu or nushi), which conveys ownership or primacy, and 体 (tai or karada), which refers to the body. While its meaning has evolved, it generally emphasizes the primacy of corporeal, embodied, and performative aspects of reality. Shutai is distinct from shukan (主観), which also includes the kanji 主 but pairs it with 観 (kan or miru), referring to the eye that gauges a visual object and the internal conversations and images the eye (I) generates in relation to the object seen. My working definition of shutai is an everyday practice that mediates social change by becoming the mediator of change. Shutai is therefore a pre-discursive activity that embodies the turbulent storm before it finds the clarity of vision, understanding, and discourse of what it is that it’s doing. Shutai is by nature historical and historicizing – bringing continuity to disruptions, stagnations, and uncertain conditions.
SHUTAI IN MODERN JAPANESE HISTORY
Shutai evolved both ontologically and epistemologically throughout modern Japanese history. As an ontology, shutai existed even before it was explicitly named. My research demonstrates this through early female Physical Education scholar-teachers who pioneered this academic field and school subject. I show how each scholar-teacher developed her scholarship from a reflective questioning and critique of her teachers’ mode of being and teaching that no longer served her generation. In a field that emerged from a “Big Bang” or a clash between two male scholar-teachers who held irreconcilable socio-ideological positions, each generation of female P.E. scholar-teachers mediated while refining some aspect of the theories and practices put forth and accepted by earlier generations.
Epistemologically, shutai developed along a different trajectory from its ontological practices and processes. One of its earliest public appearances as a concept was at the 1942 Overcoming Modernity symposium, where Kyoto School philosopher Nishitani Keiji introduced the term shutai-teki mu—with mu meaning absence, void, or nothingness. Nishitani used this term to describe an excess that is ‘neither a physical object nor “mind,” that is, the conscious self generally called “self”‘ (Calichmann 2008, 5). By 1946, however, the shutai-sei debate had reshaped its meaning, igniting discussions in literary and philosophical circles. This postwar debate also influenced how shutai was later used to interpret the series of 1960s student protests. The next big metabolic moment of shutai was when artists moved away from its Marxist discourse and began to experiment in ways that turned shutai into everyday practice.
The artist collective Mono-ha (‘School of Things’), including artist Hikosaka Naoki’s critique of the collective, is a poignant example of the artistic experiments by which shutai became an embodiment of the ’60s~’70s turbulent changes. Their work which resisted representation in order to draw out the ‘thingness’ in things did not emerge out of nowhere but its seeds were sowed by the Mono-ha artists’ university advisor Saitō Yoshishige (1904-2001). Saitō’s work reflects his rich life experience spanning the ideological flip-flop between the liberal Taisho era (1912-1926), militarism of the early Showa era (1926-1989), World War II and the nation’s defeat. The mediating practice of shutai‘s body became extended to art, or more specifically non-representational art that aimed to reveal the metabolic cycles and changes in things.
Shutai is now an established concept in Japanese education discourse. It is a key term in the phrase ‘active, interactive, and deep learning’ (shutai-teki, taiwa-teki de fukai manabi), included in the K-12 Curriculum Standard issued by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT). While scholars and educators interpret and apply shutai-sei education in various ways, I see 21st century shutai as a harbinger who mediates the change of not only ideas and practices, but also one’s environment by reflexively changing while adapting to it. I illustrate this with a pilot study of FirstARETE – a physical activity and wellness-based, body-brain integrated learning methodology and curriculum developed by the American Sports Institute – among students from two public elementary schools in Tokyo.
What do I mean by 'Metabolic Sociology'?
Metabolic sociology has three conceptual roots: 1) “Social metabolism” used by Marxist scholars and Environmental Sociologists; 2) “Active synthesis (dōteki chōwa)” coined by Japanese education scholar Ueda Kaoru; and 3) “Metabolism” as discussed by German philosopher Hans Jonas.
Metabolic sociology is different from ‘social metabolism,’ an idea that social evolution is interdependent with, and may be analogically associated to, biological evolution (Molina and Toledo 2014). Like social metabolism, metabolic sociology rests on the understanding that human life and social existence are constitutive of the natural ecosystem. However, metabolic sociology goes beyond the ‘scientific’ observation of social metabolism that studies the exchange of energy, materials, and information between human societies and the natural world by asking questions about human becoming and our own role as humans in the metabolic cycles and changes of life on earth.
Karl Marx critiqued capitalism for creating a ‘metabolic rift’—a disruption of humanity’s relationship with nature through exploitation, pollution, and ecological degradation. This rift, however, is not only a material consequence of capitalism’s exploitation of natural resources. It constitutes a much deeper, philosophical question that is universal to all human beings. According to French philosopher Renaud Barabaras, this is a sense of ‘being off-kilter’ or ‘being out-of-sync’ between life as a lived phenomenon (as disucssed by Jonas) and the phenomenological knowledge of life. Barbaras takes up the latter as his project by turning this lived sense of metabolic rift, of ‘being off-kilter’ or ‘being out-of-sync’ into a question: ‘whether this “being off-kilter” or this kind of “balancing act” of thought over life results from the fact of thought or from the fact of life itself’ (2022, 4).
Half a century before Barbaras raised this question and just after Jonas published his Phenomenon of Life in 1966, a Japanese education scholar named Ueda Kaoru coined the concepts zure which may be translated as ‘being off-kilter’ or ‘out-of-sync,’ and dōteki chōwa or ‘active synthesis,’ to address the problematic that Barbaras presented, but from a pedagogical standpoint. Ueda also happens to be a grandson of the famous Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitaro. In Ueda’s concepts we see Nishida’s philosophy distilled and refined as a pedagogical technique to help learners become not just self-aware but actively and continuously so to transform selves and their worlds as a shutai.
Ueda’s answer to Barbaras’ question – is the rift a result of ‘being off-kilter’ in life despite thought or achieving a kind of ‘balancing act’ of thought over life – is not one or the other, but both. Learning happens with and through one’s sense of ‘being off-kilter’ or zure from the world, but also articulating this sense of being off-kilter in a ‘balancing act’ or what Ueda calls a dynamic synthesis or dōteki chōwa. Ueda argues that learning never happens according to an intricately laid out plan or by following a logical path of least resistance. As long as learning is done by humans in our own flesh and blood, we are bound to come out short of our hoped-for plans and deviate, even in our best interests, from what should be our logical next step.
Metabolic Sociology constitutes reflexive learning and becoming into its own framework, thus keeping its structure open to the potential for transformative change at multiple levels of reality. To do this, it is imperative to recognize our own ‘off-kiltered-ness’ as individuals and societies, so we may encounter others not as reified identities representing an imagined community but uniquely and historically off-kiltered as we are. Metabolic Sociology suggests that we turn our ‘being off-kilter’ as our unique learning experience-cum-environment so that it may facilitate collaboration and cooperation rather than trigger our anxiety by leaving us in fight-or-flight mode. Thus, Metabolic Sociology’s primary difference between modern sociological frameworks such as Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory and Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach is that the latter problematize, while the former cultivates agency and co-agency to realize transformative change and becoming.
Metabolic sociology is ‘metabolic’ because ontological realities are never fixed, but they change along with our bodies that interact, interpret, and represent our existence in the world. Most of the time these changes are subtle and they occur gradually or incrementally. However, once in a while these changes burst out of what seems like nowhere, as spontaneous social upheavals and collective actions. For example, Michel de Certeau (1970) analyzed the 1634 case of Ursuline nuns in Loudun, France, who were said to be ‘possessed’ by demons. Similarly, Oguma Eiji (2009) examined the discourse surrounding student protests in 1960s Japan but ultimately concluded that the essence of these movements remains elusive. Every society has accounts of entire generations or groups acting in what is often described as a ‘hysterical’ frenzy—whether spiritual, political, or both.
This view of the world where forces of life, rather than reason and logic, govern the ebb and flow of the universe is common among the beliefs of many Indigenous cultures. It is a perspective that is lost when we see life only for its material and economic value. One way to decolonize the Social Sciences from the latter perspective is to respect these Indigenous perspectives and practices as adaptive intelligence (Sternberg 2021) or an inspirational intelligence (tennen chinō) (Gunji 2019).