Cognitive Resonance

Bibliographic Data: Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Main Argument:

This circulation of media content--across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders--depends heavily on consumers' active participation. I will argue here against the idea that convergence should be understood primarily as a technological process bringing together multiple media functions within the same devices. Instead, convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content. This book is about the work--and play--spectators perform in the new media system. (3)

( Convergence culture )
Critical assessment: Damn, this book is full of dudes. Also, it's super trippy reading this book now because Jenkins was so right that everything he says in here feels so self-evident as to be axiomatic. There are critiques that could be made--see the entries by Steinberg and by myself in the "Further Reading" section--but by and large Jenkins deserves his position as the prophet of convergence culture, in my opinion. That said, a look at the problems "the Wikipedia" has developed as it has matured shows that new media are not arising in a new environment, but rather are, to some extent, shaped by preexisting structures of oppression and control even as they challenge them. Ah, the post-post-Fordist post-postmodern dilemma.

Further reading: Marc Steinberg, Anime's Media Mix; Alex Leavitt and Andrea Horbinski, "Even a Monkey Can Understand Fan Activism"; Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New; Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters; Andrea Horbinski, "After Henry Jenkins: Transmedia Fandom"

Meta notes: Convergence and divergence are two sides of the same coin.

Bibliographic Data: Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005.

Main Argument: Moretti is arguing for a literary history that is based on "distance reading," "where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge" (1), and in which one moves from texts to models so as to get a sense of the interconnectedness of general elements. Rather than high theory, he draws on the natural sciences as an inspiration.

( Graphs, Maps, Trees )

Critical assessment: Give me a lever long enough and I'll move the world; the lever need not be particularly long if it is a book. It's sort of hard to critique a revolutionary text, and so it is with this one. One can only take what it says to heart in whichever way one pleases.

Further reading: Anne Burdic et al., Digital_Humanities; Stephen Ramsay, Reading Machines; Patrik Svensson, "The Landscape of Digital Humanities"

Meta notes: Don't miss the forest for the trees.

Bibliographic Data: Jongman, Willem M. “The Early Roman Empire: Consumption.” In The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, ed. Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard Saller, 592-618. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

( Consumption )

Bibliographic Data: Kehoe, Dennis P. “The Early Roman Empire: Production.” In The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, ed. Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard Saller, 543-69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

( Production )

Bibliographic Data: Lo Cascio, Elio. “The Early Roman Empire: The State and the Economy.” In The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, ed. Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard Saller, 619-50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

( The State and the Economy )

Bibliographic Data: Morley, Neville. “The Early Roman Empire: Distribution.” In The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, ed. Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard Saller, 570-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

( Distribution )

Critical assessment: I am highly suspicious of Kehoe's overall argument, but the rest of these articles seem pretty solid. (See future posts for caveats about the generally optimistic tone of being able to know the Roman imperial economy in toto, however.)

Meta notes: It's the economy, stupid.

Bibliographic Data: Lurie, David B. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011.

Main Argument: "This study is, first and foremost, a history of writing in early Japan, but as the subtitle suggests, it also aims to rethink the wider history of writing in general" (2). "By insisting on the multilingual nature of the 'Chinese' script, which crossed and complicated language boundaries in real time as well as over long periods, this book presents an unfamiliar picture of writing in Japan and the wider region around it. Attention to the history of reading, and to the varied ways in which writing has been linked to language, shows that there are overlaps and intersections between uses of writing that have traditionally been separated into categories like foreign and native or Sinitic and vernacular" (vii).

Historiographical Engagement: History and theory of writing and history of writing in Japan.

Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples "Deeper understanding of early Japanese inscription will transform comparative discussions of literacy and reading practices, and remake our sense of the wider patterns of the world history of writing systems" (1). Lurie discusses the difficulty of defining what it means to say that writing ever "begins," and he argues that the explosion of writing in Japan in the 7thC, although obviously connected to accelerating state formation, is in fact quite varied: "Rather than a uniform transition from orality to literacy, these materials reveal different modes of writing appearing around the same time and coexisting in a variety of configurations. …different social groups are simultaneously using texts in radically different ways" (4). Lurie also criticizes the implicit "alphabetism" of scholars of writing, who, he says, "should do more to avoid teleological assumptions about progress towards photography, assumptions that are often implicitly linked to claims about the (Greek) alphabet as a guarantor of cultural superiority" (5). He argues, moreover, that the process of kundoku, "reading by gloss," "dominated all modes of literacy in early Japan, from at least the mid-seventh century on. This means that we cannot describe texts arranged in accordance with Chinese vocabulary and syntax as being written 'in Chinese' (no matter what their origins, a conclusion that has profound implications for Japanese cultural history, which has been framed by a linguistic opposition between Chinese and Japanese" (ibid). Moreover, considering Chinese writing as the "East Asian writing system," for example, and early Japanese reading and writing systems, "threatens widely held assumptions about the place of phonographic adaptation in the world history of writing" (6). The history of these questions assumptions about the "historical development of inscription and also more technical discussions of the relations between script and language" (7).

( Literacies and writing systems )

But the broader point remains: in terms of their functioning in society and development over time, it is difficult to find deep, qualitative differences across various systems of writing. As visually and structurally distinctive as many features of Japanese writing are, it seems that they neither produced, nor were determined by, sharp cultural or social differences. In a sense, this means that although writing in Japan (and to some extent, writing in general) does not work quite in the way that has often been assumed, that difference itself turns out to be less consequential than might be expected. Many scholars and theorists have taken an integral developmental logic of writing to be a key to the history of humanity; but such a logic may not even be a key to the history of writing itself. … Writing's connection to natural language and its catalytic effect on so many other historical developments make it seem to be a special case. Perhaps it is. But in its multifariousness and malleability, it is as resistant as any other human practice to monocausal, deterministic explanation. (363-64)

Critical assessment: This is a really excellent book that I am sure these notes have not fully captured. I need to think about everything that Lurie says some more, but I think a lot of his arguments could be profitably applied to technologies other than writing in Japan, such as states. And of course, there's the arguments about the history of writing, which seem to me, from what I know about it (I did some research on the development of the Greek alphabet for a while once, so I know some things; in fact, when it comes to the Greek alphabet, I actually know many things), to be right on the money.

Further reading: Tom Lamarre, Uncovering Heian Japan; Tomiko Yoda, Gender and National Literature

Meta notes: Techno-determinism is as much at work in how we think about writing as it is in how we think about computers.

Bibliographic Data: Sato, Elizabeth. “The Early Development of the Shōen.” In Medieval Japan: Essays in Institutional History, ed. John W. Hall and Jeffrey P. Mass. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988 [1974]: 91-108.

Main Argument: Shôen emerged beginning in the 8thC CE; most early shôen, however, came from the ritsuryo category of "land available for reclamation," in which the reclaimer's nominal right of proprietorship for two to three generations was granted in perpetuity. Although they emerged at the same time as the ritsuryo government began to revert to patrimonial power and extra-legal customs began to supersede the state's laws on paper, shôen were not initially part of this process. Those early shôen that did become later shôen did so through the commendatory process, in which original proprietors commended the estate to a central proprietor so as to avoid encroachment from the state's provincial officers.

Argument, Sources, Examples Two factors are crucial in analysis of the shôen: when they were developed and the land itself. "Although in later times rights to income from land became more important than the land itself, in the early stages of shôen development, the reverse was true: in order to produce income, land first had to be developed" (95). The early shôen, moreover, was "a relatively compact unity that could be handled by a simple administrative structure" (96). Finally, "tax immunity, then, was not necessarily a defining characteristic of the early shôen, although most entities that were called such by their holders eventually received at least a partial exemption from taxation. Those that did not simply failed to survive" (ibid). The point, however, is that "lands were granted for reclamation before they received tax immunity" (ibid). Beginning in the early ninth century, however, as landholding rights on the ground changed, shôen emerged as an institution for proprietary control over the land, which became complete when an estate's proprietor acquired not only tax immunity but also immunity to entry by government officials. The shôen survived as an institutional form because it offered a great deal of flexibility--different rights and privileges could be granted to different members at all levels (shômin-shôke-ryôke-honke) based on their particular circumstances, and "it was possible for changes to take place at one level without substantially affecting the other levels" (107). Moreover, "it was possible for the income of the shôen to be widely distributed. Shiki [income rights] could change hands through sale, inheritance, or donation without disturbing the function of the shôen as an economic unit" (ibid). This flexibility was reciprocal, in that cultivators and proprietors could change without disturbing the others without threat to the shôen itself: "as an economic system, the shôen offered advantages to all of its constituents" (108).

Bibliographic Data: Kiley, Cornelius J. “Provincial Administration and Land Tenure in Early Japan.” In The Cambridge History of Japan vol. 2, ed. Donald H. Shively and William H. McCullough. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 236-340.

Main Argument: Kiley traces the transition from, essentially, the ritsuryô to the shôen system from the 9th to 12thC. This transition can be roughly divided into three phases; in the first, in the 9th and 10thC, rural notables of a type that Kiley calls "petty gentry" inserted themselves into the ritsuryô state as, essentially, tax farmers, acting as intermediaries between official tax collectors and the tax renderers themselves [though communal rendering of tax goods was not new; see Yoshie]. In the second, in the 11thC, "provincial governments were, without permission from the capital, beginning to license certain holdings as the specially chartered possessions of their 'cultivators,' endowed with specific tax preferences" (243). In the third, in the 12thC, what are known as "mature shôen" began to emerge, partly through the administration of Shirakawa, who as retired emperor promulgated many edicts ostensibly registering and curbing shôen but in actuality mostly confirming their rights of immunities in toto (since at this point the imperial house too was trying to get in on the tax-immunity game).

Argument, Sources, Examples One important point to note in this story is the tenacious survival of the office of the provincial governments; although governors themselves did not much travel to their bailiwicks after the high Heian period, but instead entrusted the administration of their provinces to custodians known as zuryô, "the provincial governments themselves proved to be among the most durable of ritsuryô institutions, probably because from the beginning they served to integrate the interests of local elites, capital officials, and court nobility" (253). The fact that more and more authority was entrusted to resident officials meant that they assumed more and more autonomy from the capital, strengthening provincial governments in general. In the second phase, "a domainal landholding system evolved and, by about the year 1100, the subject populace had also been reorganized, bringing whole communities of cultivators under the patrimonial control of domainal lords or proprietary officeholders" (253). Through the process of commendation which led to the consolidation of mature shôen as three-level institutions--original local proprietors (geshi or azukaridokoro), the lord (ryôshu or ryôke) and the principal in the capital (honjo)--both territory and people were divided between the provincial domains and shôen in the third phase. It is important to note, however, that through this entire period and into the medieval era, what was actually important was not the land itself but rather shiki ("commission") rights to income from the land--whether in kind or in labor, both of which were tax goods by the third phase of this progression. However, the emergence and enforcement of shiki, by which de facto title to land was effectively consolidated, was also related to what Kiley calls "the rapid militarization of the 11thC rural elite" (245). These developments spelled the end of the zuryô system, which Kiley argues "had within it the seeds of its own destruction; increasingly, the newly consolidated (and militarized) local elites could deal with the capital nobility directly, without the governor as intermediary" (248). Remember that these militarized rural elites were the people who fought in, and in some senses caused, the Gempei Wars. But also, shôen were not the sole form through which land was held at this point: there still remained land that was designated kokugaryô in each province at this point, held by the state and administered by those working in the provincial government offices.

Critical assessment: I've had complaints about Kiley in other contexts, but this chapter seems very solid; it also fits well with what we know about the early shôen from Sato, whose analysis likewise seems quite solid. I don't envy either of these scholars combing through documents, or the scholarship, about the shôen; they are famously complicated and famously somewhat boring once you descend from any but the most general level.

Further reading: Nagahara, "Landownership under the Shôen-Kokugaryô System"; Mass, "Jitô Land Possession in the 13thC"; Kawai, "Shogun and Shugo"; Miyagawa, "From Shôen to Chigyô"; Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages

Meta notes: It is totally correct to call medieval Japan "feudal." The problem is that most people don't understand what that means.