The phrase ‘Overcoming Modernity (kindai no chōkoku 近代の超克)’ refers, in a narrow sense, to a symposium organised by a journal Bungakukai, and circulates in a broader sense as a general term describing ideological attempts to transcend modernity brought about by capitalist modernisation in Japan since the Meiji Restoration. However, contrary to their intentions, the intellectual struggle by Japanese intellectuals in the interwar period to overcome modernity was indeed one of the products of abstraction and specialisation resulting from capitalist modernisation.
As Takeuchi Yoshimi described it as ‘one of the catchwords that took hold of the Japanese intellectuals during the war’ and ‘one of the magic words’,[1] ‘Overcoming Modernity’ was an ambiguous and comprehensive slogan with vague ideas of what modernity was and what was intended to be accomplished after modernity would have been transcended. In fact, the 13 intellectuals who participated in the symposium ‘Overcoming Modernity’ were not only philosophers, but also music, literary, and film critics, physicists, and other intellectuals from a variety of academic fields. This symposium, which brought together specialised intellectuals on the abstracted theme of ‘modernity’, is arguably the epitome of capitalist modernisation.
In Overcome by Modernity, Harry Harootunian states that the interwar Japanese history was the process of being overcome by the dynamics of modernity instead of the intellectuals overcoming modernity.[2] The intellectuals of the time sought to restrain the uneven development brought about by capitalism, which commodified everything in everyday life, and searched for something unchanging to transcend modernity. As a result, they proposed the concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘community’, but this was a form of commodification as well, labelling abstractions that had not been named before.[3] That is, what the intellectuals initially aimed to do was to overcome capitalist modernity through the pursuit of concepts with temporal invariance, but the result was a situation in which modernity was being overcome by modernity.
More precisely, however, they had been swallowed up by modernity, rather than overcome by it. They may have seriously sought to overcome modernity, but ‘modernity’, which was steadily constructed after the establishment of the new Meiji government in 1868, was already too abstract a concept at the time, and it would have been practically impossible to determine how much of the change in their circumstances resulted from modernisation and the capitalist economy.Furthermore, their perspectives on the arbitrary conception of ‘modernity’ were so varied and specialised that they ended up with different possible approaches to ‘overcoming’ it. Therefore, their intellectual endeavours were solely within the framework of capitalist modernity, and as such, no matter how much the thinkers searched for a way to overcome modernity, their methods and consequently the vision to ‘overcome modernity’ devised as a result were also products of capitalism and modernisation.
As such, the failure to formulate a systematic solution to overcome modernity lay in the fact that intellectuals in the interwar period struggled to confront the ‘modernity’ that surrounded them even though they themselves existed within the capitalised modern Japanese society. The discourse on ‘Overcoming Modernity’ demonstrates the difficulty for intellectuals to objectify the subject of their studies and propose new theses that would transcend its framework as long as they constitute the subject.
[1] Yoshimi Takeuchi, What Is Modernity?: Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi (New York, 2005), p. 103.
[2] Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, 2001), p. 94
[3] Ibid., p. xxiii