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Regimes on
newness:
an essay of
compaRative
physiognomy
By Masato Fukushima
Suggested citation:
Masato Fukushima, Regimes on newness: an essay of comparative physiognomy. Interface Critique Journal 2 (2019), pp. 105–122.
DOI: 10.11588/ic.2019.2.66986
This article is released under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).
“In this observation, we may think that the art regime, in reality, exhi-
bits an intriguing case of being a specic interface consisting of dif-
ferent sub-regimes that demonstrate different criteria for newness.”
106
The concept of interface obviously
presupposes at least two entities that are,
to a certain degree, mutually indepen-
dent but interacting with each other. By
denition, such entities can be either in-
dividual or collective. In fact, the idea of
interface should be extended to the ma-
cro-sociological realms, to the interface
between, say, the economic and political
domains, but with the precondition that
these domains are stipulated as mutu-
ally exclusive.
The social system theory of Niklas
Luhmann1, among other candidates,
seems a good t for initiating our re-
ection on such a macro-sociological
interface, largely because of his neat
formulation of modern society as an ag-
glomeration of mutually exclusive sub-
systems, such as law, politics, and eco-
nomy. For characterizing these domains,
Luhmann adopted the biological auto-
poiesis theory2 — namely, the claim that
any biological system is characterized
by a self-referential loop of reproduction
that is closed to the outside world. This
attempt made his description of such
subsystems highly independent and ex-
clusive from each other: for instance, the
legal system concerns itself only with
law and nothing else. In other words, the
legal system does not care about aesthe-
tic or market values, which is the job of
the other social subsystems.
This neat formulation—in a highly ab-
stract manner as social theory—provides
1 Niklas Luhmann, Social systems (Redwood City, CA 1995).
2 Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and
cognition: the realization of the living (Dordrecht 1980).
a unique opportunity for reecting upon
the potential of the macro-sociological
interface as a proper topic, as well as
on its limits. Following Luhmann’s for-
mulation, each subsystem sings its own
song (speaking metaphorically) without
listening to any others. The potential in-
terface between these subsystems is for-
mulated either as
resonance
or as
struc-
tural coupling
in his theoretical corpus.
In discussing ecological communication,
which Luhmann3 denes as the relation
between any social subsystem and its
environment, he describes the way each
subsystem resonates with the others,
each singing its song in response to the
others’ songs, in a mutually independent
manner. Hence, what we eventually hear
is a cacophony of the different songs that
any subsystem sings, as we are living in
the era of social differentiation.
In such an interface, also, the subsys-
tems can be somewhat more steadily
bridged for collaboration: this is called
structural coupling
4. This is exemplied,
say, by the inevitable need of securing
economic transactions by legal measu-
res like property law.
This brief summary of sociological in-
terface, à la Luhmann’s system theory,
reveals both its advantage of theoretical
clarity and its shortcomings. The merit
of Luhmann’s theory is his focus on the
highly differentiated characteristics of
our modern society, in which there is no
3 Niklas Luhmann, Ecological communication (Chicago 1989).
4 Luhmann, Social systems; Humberto Maturana and Francisco
Varela, The tree of knowledge: the biological roots of human
understanding (Boston 1987).
FUKUSHIMA / REGIMES ON NEWNESS
INTERFACE CRITIQUE JOURNAL – VOL. 2 – 2019
107
privileged center of gravity; but what is
missing is the formulation of a more u-
id form of interface not represented in
such neat descriptions of differentiated
subsystems. To be fair to his own intenti-
on, it is not his goal to describe the inter-
facial or interstitial phenomena between
these different subsystems; however, his
own conviction is that once such diffe-
rentiation is completed, there would be
no further development in the branches
of such subsystems5. This theoretical as-
sumption—wherein each subsystem is
assumed to be so tightly accomplished
that there is no way of subtle interface,
even within such a domain itself—seems
to be too narrow.
In this article, I pursue the possibility
of observing an interface even within the
specic domain of society that Luhmann
calls subsystems. In fact, quite a few to-
pics may spill over from this framework.
For instance, although the core operation
of a market economy is buying and sel-
ling, as Luhmann6 simplies, at the bor-
der of those very market mechanisms lie
hybrid practices that mingle monetary
and non-monetary exchanges. Luhmann
may have thought of these as related to
classic anthropology and relevant only
in pre-modern societies. Or such a uni-
tary description of any subsystems that
are reduced to a core element of binary
oppositions—like legal/illegal in the law
and true/false in science—may raise em-
pirical doubts as to a more empirically re-
5 Luhmann, Social systems.
6 Niklas Luhmann, Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt/
Main 1990).
alistic way of describing their workings.
Hence, admitting the irresistible al-
lure of the theoretical consistency of
Luhmann’s formulation of modern soci-
ety, I nonetheless depart here from his
too strict formulation of it, moving to
my own concern of the intrinsic hete-
rogeneity of these subsystems — which
can also be described as open-ended and
consisting of multiple principles when
closely examined. The specic concern
in this article is the internal dynamics of
the world of art, which I believe cannot
be reduced to a single code, like true/fal-
se or legal/illegal, such as Luhmann em-
ploys for describing these subsystems.7
Regimes
In discussing this topic as outlined abo-
ve, I leave aside Luhmann’s8 concern
with self-referentiality as the core of his
depiction of each subsystem, in which
the idea of its functional closedness do-
minates his theoretical focus. I am more
intrigued by the loosely hybrid and he-
terogeneous nature of such largely dif-
ferentiated social divisions as law or
economy, which touches on matters of
recent emphasis by scholars of science
7 Latour’s recent argument somewhat similarly employed a
certain version of differentiation theory, if given the fairly different
characterization of them as different modes of existence. In fact,
however, as each of these modes is given a distinct mode of
existence per se, there seems no proper way of to observe their
interface, even less so than is possible with Luhmann’s concepts
of resonance and structural coupling. See: Bruno Latour, An
inquiry into modes of existence: An anthropology of the moderns
(Cambridge, MA 2013).
8 Luhmann, Social systems.
108
and technology studies (STS). The loose
unity of these subdivisions of society is
henceforth referred to here as
regimes
.
A regime may be dened as a socio-
material entity that exerts substantial
inuence on the constitution of contem-
porary society.9 A regime is regarded as
a center-periphery structure wherein the
center is the institutionally dense part,
like the court in legal institutions, as well
as legislation, bureaucratic elements,
and so on. It is close to what psycholo-
gist Eleanor Rosch calls a “prototype”10,
the typical element that the regime re-
presents. Luhmann’s formulation seem
to be largely descriptive of the normati-
ve structure of such a prototypical cen-
ter in a regime. Peripheries, in contrast,
are more like everyday practices, which
can be hazy and even far from the strict
formulation in the prototypical center.
The meaning of heterogeneity relates to
these multi-faced aspects of sub-areas,
which constitute a regime as a historical
composite or montage of these heteroge-
neous elements.
9 For recent usage of the term “regime” in STS, see Stephen
Hilgartner, Reordering life: Knowledge and control in the genomics
revolution (Cambridge, MA 2017); and Masato Fukushima, Blade
runner and memory devices: Reconsidering the interrelations be-
tween the body, technology, and enhancement. East Asian Science,
Technology and Society 10 (2016), pp. 73–91, with a more limited
focus on the subject of application such as regime of international
sports and that of memory to compare the meaning of bodily en-
hancement by new technologies.
10 Eleanor Rosch et al. (eds.),Cognition and Categorization
(Hillsdale, NJ 1978).
The physiogno-
my of newness
Starting with this tentative denition of
regime, this article looks at the specic
regime of art as an intriguing example
for observing the phenomenon of multi-
ple interfaces within its realm. For high-
lighting this point, I rst provide a very
rough overview between different regi-
mes in regard to the idea of “newness” in
the manner of comparative (socio-anth-
ropological)
physiognomy
, borrowing the
term from Frankfurt-school sociologist
Theodor W. Adorno11. The reason for ta-
king up this specic topic relates to my
private uneasiness about the way artistic
newness is hailed in the art world. Cri-
tical comments on the innovative cha-
racter of this or that art work and related
new waves in the art scene are common
topics in major art journals. Supercially,
the phenomenon looks almost identical
with the way new material on, say, the
mysterious
dark matter
in the univer-
se is discussed in science or how a new
version of commodities in market pro-
duction is advertised. However, a closer
look at the meaning of newness in each
regime—here, science, the market, and
art—seems to reveal rather substantial
differences, which is what I intend to ex-
amine closely here.
11 Theodor W. Adorno, On the fetish character of music and the
regression of listening, in: Theodor W. Adorno, The culture industry:
Selected essays on mass culture (London 1991).
FUKUSHIMA / REGIMES ON NEWNESS
INTERFACE CRITIQUE JOURNAL – VOL. 2 – 2019
109
Scientic regime
To address this aspect, I will rst provide
a brief sketch of how newness is regar-
ded in the scientic regime. It probably
goes without saying that being new is
crucial to the scientic regime where re-
searchers like me belong. One of the sa-
distic joys of the peer reviewer’s role is to
comment that a submission to a relevant
journal has “nothing new” in it; it would
be surrealistic if someone deliberately
declared that the paper he presented pro-
vides an answer identical to that of a pre-
ceding paper. Meanwhile, there are natu-
rally different degrees in the rigor with
which newness is pursued in different
sectors of the same regime: I remember
reading a short essay by an amateur STS
scholar in Japan, also a biologist, who
half comically ridiculed the fact that
whereas biologists’ ordinary greeting is
“What’s new?” in every conversation, in
his snapshot view of the science-policy
world in STS, researchers repeated the
same questions again and again without
visible newness—at least to his eyes.
However, this does not mean that policy
researchers had repeated their utteran-
ces, as in minimalist composer Steve
Reich’s early experimental music “It’s
gonna rain,” wherein this phrase is end-
lessly repeated; the main arguments of
the policy researchers seemed to the bio-
logist to be repetitious, unlike the more
dynamic changes in the topics of biolo-
gical research. In this sense, the natural
sciences seem to offer an ideal model for
dening the regime of newness, but its
applicability to the different realm of our
social life becomes an intriguing issue
that we may explore further.
Economic
regime
Supercially, the same principle of new-
ness appears to be applicable to the re-
alm of the contemporary market econo-
my; however, the reality seems to be a
little more complex than the pursuit of
newness in the scientic realm. Market
commodities appear to be similarly and
constantly driven to newness if we look
at the ubiquitous pressure for innovati-
on around us. In fact, during my eld re-
search in a biology lab, a molecular bio-
logist working there insisted that what
they were doing in the lab was exactly
the same as what workers in the small
factories of Ohta-District (an industrial
area of Tokyo) had been doing. In reality,
I found this identication amusingly odd:
such identication derives from the su-
percial similarity between the drives of
scientic innovation and of the market,
because factories, in the popular mind,
are thought to lead innovation so they
can survive in a competitive market. The
misconception here is this: it is consu-
mer demand that drives market innova-
tion, whereas the quest for newness in
science derives from a desire to impress
one’s peers.
In fact, there has been a tendency, in
intellectual reection on the history of
all these technologies and commodities,
110
to regard them only according to such
innovation; in other words, the prevai-
ling regime is producing constant new-
ness. Historian David Edgerton’s book
The Shock of the Old
12 is one of a few
attempts to reorient our too innovation-
centered way of reading the history of
technology toward looking at its his-
torical relation with users. Edgerton’s
counter-example of the far more com-
mon continuous use of everyday items,
from condom to oxcart, is a revelation
for readers. It challenges them to nd the
thick layers of materiality in a society
that moves far slower, or even remains
almost still, than does the ordinary his-
toriography of technology, which tends
to be based solely upon observations of
the rapid change that characterizes in-
novation. If we pay attention, we will
notice quite a few commodities that have
shown hardly any changes in style, whe-
ther in food or a specic type of shoe, to
name two examples. I have been using
the same brand of shoulder bag since I
was a high school student, despite the
largely unfavorable micro-modications
to some parts of its style. In terms of my
shoes, I eventually found a shop where
I could reliably purchase the same style
of shoes, which I have used for the last
two decades—in this case, without much
change of its style, except that the price
has risen. Even in other cases, the user
may resist changes that a given industry
tries to impose, as in the case of Windows
XP: its Japanese users have long stuck to
12 David Edgerton, The shock of the old: Technology and global
history since 1900 (London 2006).
its use, despite pressure from Microsoft
to make them buy its more updated ver-
sion. Common to these instances is that
once the consumer becomes deeply
adjusted to a certain temporal mode of
commodity, he does not want changes
that may disrupt this cozy equilibrium.
A technological infrastructure that af-
fords other activities that rely upon it gi-
ves rise to similar observable issues. Any
tools or infrastructure usually requires
user skills and understanding of how to
use it, and time is needed for mastering
it so that it becomes invisible or trans-
parent, at which point it becomes
infra
-
structure13. As an example, a characteris-
tic of traditional board games like chess
or
Go
is that the basic rules have not been
changed for a long time. This gives play-
ers the ability over time to accumulate
diverse strategies and tactics for play-
ing them. Somewhat similarly, any inf-
rastructural tools require a certain level
of mastery from users. This longitudinal
process of mastery presupposes a certain
level of stability in the object itself, hence
the trouble often seen in the constant
changes in the OS of computers where
upgrades can be a nuisance for users’
learning processes. In bio-informatics,
for instance, biologists, the so-called wet
part of it, very often complain of having
to adjust their skills constantly to the
changes that information engineers, the
13 Susan L. Star and Karen Ruhleder, Steps toward an ecology
of infrastructure: Design and access for large information
spaces. Information Systems Research 7/1 (1996), pp.
111–134; Masato Fukushima, Value oscillation in knowledge
infrastructure:Observing its dynamic in Japan’s drug discovery
pipeline. Science and Technology Studies 29/2 (2016), pp: 7–25.
FUKUSHIMA / REGIMES ON NEWNESS
INTERFACE CRITIQUE JOURNAL – VOL. 2 – 2019
111
dry part, have made in the eld.14 In ano-
ther instance, in a conference discussing
the role of databases for climate science,
one of the presenters described this in-
novating aspect of databases as a “risk”
for climate scientists that creates cons-
tant instability and uncertainty.15
If the production of newness is not al-
ways welcomed by users/consumers in
the world of commodities and tool use,
then why is there such a high level of
(technological) innovation in the eco-
nomic world? Japanese economic theo-
rist, Katsuto Iwai, succinctly exposes the
principle basic to the survival of capita-
lism: making use of “difference,” which
is systematically translated into prot.16
He summarizes three phases or types: in
commercial capitalism, the difference
relates to spatial distance. For example,
the East India Company from the Nether-
lands collected spices from the eastern
island of Indonesia and brought them
back to their homeland to sell at a high
price. Meanwhile, industrial capitalism
prots by maximizing the difference
between the cost of commodity produc-
tion and a cheap labor force. Finally, the
most recent phase of capitalism relies
on constantly creating technological dif-
ferences that are supposed to drive the
consumer to buy new commodities, one
after another. This last aspect of diffe-
14 Masato Fukushima, Constructing “failure” in big biology:The
Socio-technical anatomy of the Protein 3000 program in
Japan.Social Studies of Science46/1 (2016), pp. 7–33.
15 These were drawn from the cases of conferences that I have
attended on the topic.
16 Katsuhito Iwai, Talking about capitalism (Tokyo 1997).
rence, which is generally called innova-
tion, is the reason we feel we are cons-
tantly driven by changes here and there
in the present system, very often against
our wishes. This kind of traditional cont-
rast between technoscience and the life-
world, after the thought of philosopher
Jurgen Habermas, may lie in the hete-
rogeneous constitution of the regime of
economy with the logic of capital and our
bodily logic of expertize.17
Art regime
Compared with the various regimes whe-
re the
raison d’être
of newness actually
seems to be difference—namely, in the
scientic regime, the newness is the
sine
qua non
of all evaluative efforts, whereas
in the market regime its status is more
delicately balanced with other concerns,
such as the usability of the commodi-
ties—the newness in the art regime is
something that has been puzzling to me
for decades. In the contemporary art re-
gime, the issue of newness is seemingly
divided into the different layers in which
the concerned art work is situated. This
is why the art regime is an intriguing
example for discussing the interface bet-
ween different sub-elements within the
same regime.
Some parts of the system seem to
have a vague kinship with the principle
of the scientic regime in the form of a
17 Jürgen Habermas, The theory of communicative
action,vol.2:Life-world and system: A Critique of functionalist
reason (Boston 1987).
112
quest for a quasi-academic newness
when the innovativeness of a particular
artwork is represented in, say, the dis-
course of the history of art types. The
major narrative of art history is replete
with a litany of new names that symbo-
lize a particular age or school or group.
Naturally, these series of names are sup-
posed to show the emerging newness
of such trends from the Renaissance to
relational arts. This convention of the
historiography of newness, however, has
a couple of anomalies about its signi-
cance.
First, unlike the scientic regime whe-
re the major audience for research outco-
mes, in principle, consists of sullen peers
within the specic sub-discipline, the art
regime is open to diversely different so-
cial realms that consist of academia, gal-
leries, curators, museums, and the public
at large.18 The inuence of such diverse
realms, which demand different levels of
newness each according to its own stan-
dard, makes the meaning of being new
far more complicated in the art regime
than in the scientic regime. A certain
segment of such multiplicity, namely the
mutual inltration between the art and
market regimes, is easier to comprehend,
because it is based upon the taste of con-
sumers. Just as Edgerton underscores
above, no doubt the very traditional land-
scape paintings or portraits of realist art
have very often been popular, even if the
works have hardly merited the notice of
18 Howard S. Becker, Art worlds (Oakland, CA 1982); Sarah
Thornton, Seven days in the art world (London 2009); Tetsuya
Ozaki, What is contemporary art? (Tokyo 2018).
academic discourse as something in the
context of newness.19 More complicated
are the more academic evaluations of
the newness of a particular artwork be-
cause they give the impression of being
a vague shadow of the scientic regime,
vague in the sense of the subtle differen-
ces between these two regimes.
New works,
new names
One of the major forces in the evaluati-
ve machinery of scientic newness is,
without doubt, the system of journals
and peer reviews. The recent proliferati-
on of academic journals is an indication
of how our knowledge system is both
diversied and segmented, so much so
that it is becoming more difcult to nd
the proper peers to evaluate the real no-
velty of the submitted papers. This is
counter-balanced with the scientic sys-
tem of disciplines that consists of cano-
nical textbooks, standardization, and so
on, a favorite topic in STS.20 STS itself,
as a newly emerging discipline, is also
a good example to observe reexively
this process of ongoing canonization
and systemization, with the examples of
mushrooming textbooks and handbooks
that dene what STS is to counter the
19 Edgerton, The shock of the old.
20 Thomas Kuhn, The structure of scientic revolutions (Chicago
1962); Martha Lampland and Susan L. Star (eds.), Standards and
their stories: how quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices
shape everyday life (Ithaca, NY 2009).
FUKUSHIMA / REGIMES ON NEWNESS
INTERFACE CRITIQUE JOURNAL – VOL. 2 – 2019
113
potential of evading such canonization.21
This process of standardization is pivotal
for measuring the newness of any given
products so that the peers supposedly
are able to render correct judgment about
the novelty of the concerned work. In re-
ality, however, such thorough standardi-
zation hardly takes place in the actual
process, so that a job that looks new from
one aspect may appear to be less so from
a slightly different angle. Hence, one
journal may condemn a job for its lack
of innovativeness, while the other may
praise its innovative potential.
This particular type of an evaluati-
on system for newness does not seem to
have equivalence in the art regime: First,
in art, it is not based on a particular closed
eld like scientic (sub)disciplines—such
as chemical biology, a newly emerging
hybrid eld that I studied,22 wherein its
major constituency is the peers—but is
open to diverse audience from art critics
to the public at large. Here the standard
of evaluation is based less on a narrowly
stipulated disciplinary matrix than on a
rather random choice of evaluators, who-
se backgrounds in art history can differ
signicantly from one another.
In terms of academic historiography,
the alleged newness of an artwork or
school is often expressed by giving it a
new collective, quasi-academic deno-
mination. Compared to the segmented
structure of evaluation in the scientic
21 Ulrike Felt et al. (eds), The Handbook of Science and
Technology Studies, Fourth Edition (Cambridge, MA 2016).
22 Masato Fukushima, Resilience in scientic research:
Understanding how natural product research rebounded in an
adverse situation. Science as Culture 25/2 (2016), pp. 167–192.
regime, the very threshold by which art-
work qualies to be academically accep-
ted as something new appears to be hazy
and very often contingent upon the con-
text where it is presented. Some Japa-
nese art journals, like
Bijutsu Techo
(Art
Notes), have long series of special issues
reviewing new trends in contemporary
art for the past few decades. A plethora
of new catchphrases for everything from
new paintings to bio-art—frequently bea-
ring the prex “new” or “neo”—have been
presented, as if calling it “new” is tanta-
mount to proving its novelty, like geno-
mics, post-genomics, epigenetics, and so
forth in the life sciences.
Yet, the way such collective categori-
zation is given a certain level of accredi-
tation in the art regime is accompanied
with a persisting sense of uncertainty
about its theoretical foundation. Shin-
ro Ohtake, who is probably one of the
most inuential artists in contempora-
ry Japan’s art scene, provides such a
case. The large scale retrospective of his
works,
Zen-kei
(Total View) in the Tokyo
Museum of Contemporary Art in 2006
was said to be phenomenally successful,
attracting large audiences23 (4). Among
the guests was Japan’s leading artist, Ta-
kashi Murakami, who once commented
that he has been deeply inuenced by
Ohtake’s pioneering activities.24 Along
with his fame for the diverse ways he
23 Action Committee, Shinro Ohtake, Zen–Kei: retrospective
1955-2006 (Tokyo 2007); see also the exhibition at MOT Art
Museum: http://www.mot-art-museum.jp/exhibition/22.html;
access: April 2, 2018.
24 Takashi Murakami, Takashi’s chronicle since 1962. Geijutsu-
Shincho 2012–5 (2012), pp. 45–49.
114
produces his art works, Ohtake is also
well-known as an essayist25 and author
of surrealistic picture books. The latter
includes a book titled
Jari Ojisan
(Unc-
le Jarry), which is taken from the name
of surrealist Alfred Jarry26 and which
has been translated into various foreign
languages. Yet, as Ohtake himself com-
plains, his has been largely dismissed
as part of what was called the ambi-
guous trend of “new paintings” in a trend
against the preceding fever on the con-
ceptual arts in 1970s, such as
Mono-ha
in
Japan.27 However, this category actually
reveals nothing about his whole range of
diverse works, which the
Zen-kei
Exhibi-
tion eloquently proved.28
Naturally, putting a single adequa-
te catch-phrase on works as diverse as
Ohtake’s is difcult, even for critics, as
has been proven by the relatively poor
reactions from foreign curators familiar
with his works. Quite a few of them re-
garded the collection of his work as not
particularly
Japanese
, the sales point
that these foreign curators seek in the
context of presenting exotic “Japane-
se” art work.29 At best, his enormously
25 e.g. Shinro Ohtake, Invisible sound, inaudible pictures (Tokyo
2008).
26 Shinro Ohtake, Uncle Jari (Tokyo 1994).
27 Masato Fukushima, On small devices of thought: Concepts,
etymologies, and the problem of translation, in: Making things
public: Atmospheres of democracy, eds. Bruno Latour et al.
(Cambridge, MA 2005), pp 58–63.
28 cf. Shinro Ohtake, Paste the world through!: Interview. Eureka
527/38–13 (2006), pp. 46–70.
29 Takashi Azumaya, Shinro Ohtake, in Uwajima-Island that
has already been there. Bijutsu-Techo 58/889 (2006), pp.100–
115.
voluminous collage works are some-
times likened to those of other artists
like Robert Rauschenberg, with vague
comments about sharing a similar spirit
but without further inquiry into what is
unique in Ohtake’s works.30
Newness and
repetition
This case may be interpreted as a sym-
ptom of the shaky ground upon which
rests the evaluation of alleged newness
in the art regime, where the newness
evaluation proves to be contingent upon
diverse contextual factors. What attracts
my attention further is the recent pro-
liferation of the prex of “new” or “neo-”
to an existing category of art collectives.
As mentioned above, there have been
dozens of such neos, comparable to neo-
Marxism, nouveau philosophes, or the
recent new materialism in the world of
social theory and philosophy. Ironically
enough, the rhetorical emphasis on new-
ness has reduced its impact through oft
repetition. Perhaps this phenomenon
constitutes a kind of satirical allusion to
Marx’s
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Napoleon
,31 where the repeated second
protagonists are described as farce. At
least, it is unavoidable that the nuan-
ces of innovation will be conned to a
30 Dorian Chong, An essay on Shinro Ohtake. Bijutu-techo
65/993 (2013), pp. 71–80.
31 Karl Marx, The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
(Crows Nest, New South Wales 1926).
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115
certain incremental level, which in fact
thoroughly frustrated Ohtake at being
pigeonholed in the rather hazy category
of
new
paintings, as described above. A
Japanese curator, Yuko Hasegawa, has
simply condemned this proliferation of
neo-prexes as a sign of saturation and
of a void in real innovation.32
However, as I see it, those who are
granted these repetitive “neos” are still
lucky because at least they are assig-
ned to a quasi-academic category. A
huge number of artworks are simply
dismissed by the critics so that no coll-
ective name whatsoever is given to their
existence; this situation applies to the
mounting popularity of realist paintings
in Japan and elsewhere. Some art jour-
nals that are devoted less to the avant-
garde and more to works that are popu-
lar among collectors have indicated that
such realist artwork is always in curren-
cy and that its popularity even seems to
be gaining momentum, as seen in the es-
tablishment of a museum specialized for
collecting such realist art.33 Meanwhile,
even in the critical journals that notice
it, the trend in realism seems not to have
garnered a particular name, such as “new
realism.”
32 Yuko Hasegawa, An imperfect mapping: On the art from
1980s to 2000s. Bijutsu-techo 62/933 (2010), pp. 171–175.
33 see Hoki Museum, https://www.hoki-museum.jp/; access:
March 23, 2018.
Internal diversity
of art regime
The hiatus between the popularity in pu-
blic and the silence of the art critics whe-
re the kind of the art regime on producing
newness is intriguing, as this could be
the sort of open experiment for directly
observing the principal differences bet-
ween the function of the scientic and/
or market regime and their mutual ent-
anglement in the existing art regime. On
this point, a close observation of the cri-
tical silence may be similarly intriguing
by observing their explicit discursive
practices. Despite the general critical ac-
ceptance of pop art, for instance, as a ma-
jor trend in the contemporary art scene,
I have seen hardly any serious critical
comment on, say, Hiro Yamagata’s work
in the contemporary art journals. Ano-
ther intriguing case is that of Christian
Riese Lassen, who has been popular in
Japan and elsewhere, though thorough-
ly neglected by the critical circle. Recent
publication of academic criticism on his
works34 has attracted attention, as this
was the rst book in Japan that straight-
forwardly discussed the artistic value
of Lassen’s work and looked at why his
works have been collectively neglected.
Some argue that behind such neglect lies
antipathy to his almost unscrupulous
way of selling his artwork to the public,
along with the general antipathy toward
34 Yuki Harada et al. (eds.), What was Lassen? Beyond
consumption and art (Tokyo 2013).
116
the subject of his paintings as simply
kitsch.
In this case, the radical hiatus between
public popularity and critical disregard
is fundamental; there are, however, ca-
ses in which the subtle threshold that
divides those who are critically accep-
ted and those who are not can be more
minutely contrasted. such a case is de-
picted in the movie
Big Eyes
, a 2014 lm
from director Tim Burton on the real life
story of Americans Walter and Marga-
ret Keane and their immensely popular
paintings of girls with disproportionally
big eyes in the 1960s.35 The movie focu-
ses on the real authorship of these pain-
tings, as Margaret’s works were falsied
by her husband Walter. However, what
attracted my attention was the reaction
on the Web relating to the similarity bet-
ween these paintings of big-eyed girls
and a series of paintings on a young girl
by Yoshitomo Nara. Nara is one of the
most inuential contemporary artists
in Japan with an international reputati-
on whose works have been successful-
ly collected by a couple of prestigious
museums, along with those of Takashi
Murakami and others.36 One lm critic
even audaciously asserted that Nara is a
follower of Margaret Keane’s legacy.37 Yet
from my perspective, the gap between
35 see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1126590/; access: August
24, 2019.
36 see http://www.artnet.com/artists/yoshitomo-nara/; and for
instance: http://zatta.sub.jp/doc/content.php?mode=bigeyes as
well as: http://serendipitydiary.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2015/02/
post-765a.html; access: March 6, 2018, 10:00 am.
37 https://miyearnzzlabo.com/archives/21539; access: June 15,
2018, 10:00 am.
them in terms of academic credibility is
unbridgeable. I have heard hardly any
collective appraisal from mainstream
critics of Margaret Keane’s works as the
original pop-art. The Wikipedia article on
her works bluntly states that “she has ne-
ver been a critical success”.38 Nara’s case
is a radical contrast: his work is not only
remarkable popular with the public but
also highly acclaimed in academic cir-
cles, having garnered numerous prizes.
However, the only theoretical arguments
on the novelty of his work characterize
it as “micro-pop,” a vague umbrella term
applied to the general trend in a new ge-
neration of Japanese artists to portray
the everyday, minute details of the small
world in which they live.39 Nonetheless,
such a label does not seem to be radi-
cally different from the rather unsubs-
tantial labelling of “new paintings” that
immensely frustrated Ohtake. This case
causes us to think of what characteris-
tics might dene the workings of the
invisible threshold that tacitly divides
those who are critically hailed as new
and those who are not: in this case, for
example, the dividing line may be Nara’s
more authoritative educational back-
ground, which may grant him the aura of
the inner circle of academia, as opposed
to Keane who does not have it.
38 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Keane; access: June
15, 2018, 10:00 am.
39 Midori Matsui, The age of micropop: The new generation of
Japanese artists(Tokyo 2007).
FUKUSHIMA / REGIMES ON NEWNESS
INTERFACE CRITIQUE JOURNAL – VOL. 2 – 2019
117
Art regime as
interface
In this observation, we may think that
the art regime, in reality, exhibits an in-
triguing case of being a specic inter-
face consisting of different sub-regimes
that demonstrate different criteria for
newness. Divided into a diverse set of
sections, these may be roughly classi-
ed into a quasi-academic regime and a
specic type of market sub-regime. Each
has its own specicity. For the former, in
terms of the quest for newness, it is not
peer artists who evaluate the novelty
of a particular art work, as in the scien-
tic regime. Rather, it is critics, among
others, who are expected to evaluate the
specic newness of an artwork, prefe-
rably against a background of the entire
history of Western art, very often within
a large collectivity and in the context
of similar emerging trends. Metaphori-
cally speaking, such is closer to naming
a newly emerging eld in science as
such—for example, epigenetics—than to
evaluating the newness of a specic pa-
per for established journals in epigene-
tics. Further still, naming practices in the
art regime have been exible and open to
both critics and artist themselves, such
as the case of the critics coining the term
“micro-pop,” as noted above, or the artists
calling themselves
die blauen Reiter
or
Dadaists. Sometimes, such naming is but
a poor description of technological in-
novation, such as in media art or bio art.
This naming practice seems akin to an
aspect of classic social anthropology on
ethnic identity, wherein the name is clai-
med by either a group itself or external
observers.40
Given the lack of a regimented sys-
tem for evaluating newness, as in the sci-
entic regime, the role of critics in evalu-
ating the newness of a particular work
of art is almost tantamount to a mission
impossible, probably far above their ca-
pacity to do in the face of the inundation
of newly produced art works in recent
decades. This situation reminds me of
national border issues in the US and el-
sewhere, wherein the customs control
is lled with the huge number of immi-
grants, both legal and illegal. Critics are
like customs control, deciding which one
is in and which one out for the academi-
cally acceptable world of regime, but now
the border seems to work properly.41
Meanwhile, this very loose way of de-
ning newness by giving a collective
name to allegedly new trends actually ts
with the market aspect of the art regime,
which is, in essence, a one-of-a-kind
item market. Consumers like it when
the art work has a label for, say, its good
quality of coziness, as may be demonst-
rated by my own hobby of purchasing in-
expensive pastellist landscape paintings
à la the Barbizon school. It is even better
when it has brand value academically (in
this context, in art history); for instance, I
wish I could buy a real specimen of Vas-
40 cf. Machiko Aoyagi (ed.), What is “ethnic”? : Basic papers on
ethnicity (Tokyo 1996).
41 Ozaki even claims that art critics are an “endangered species,”
see chap. 3 in Ozaki, What is contemporary art?
118
sily Kandinsky’s later works or those of
Christian Boltanski, but doing so requires
a certain amount of wealth. These are
the stories related to public auctioning of
art works that occasionally has created
sensations.
Antiques
The art regime as an interface where the
different principles interact in determi-
ning the value of newness is probably
unique, as it is distinct from that of eit-
her the scientic regime or the market
regime for mass commodities. This said,
it is also tempting to think of the real
meaning of newness in the art regime by
considering the meaning of its opposite:
namely, the oldness.
The constant pursuit of newness has
the somewhat ironical consequence of
a constant senescence in what has been
produced. Accelerated innovation en-
tails the accelerated mass production
of antiquatedness at the same time: the
fashion industry is a good example for
us to reect upon in this sense with its
rapidly alternating new trends, which
simultaneously and just as rapidly be-
come obsolete. In fact, this aspect of
pursuing fashion is not conned to the
fashion industry; some argue that even
in the scientic regime, the pursuit of fa-
shionable topics is inevitable under the
banner of the scientic bandwagon and
with proper socio-epistemological rea-
soning: namely, to avoid the risk of not
being able to produce outcome in a limi-
ted amount of time.42 Hence, quite a few
areas within science are ignored because
of their predictable non-doability,43 with
efforts tending to concentrate on specic
areas where progress is at least half-gua-
ranteed. Naturally, this does not exclude
the almost heroic efforts of the pioneers
to explore the
terra incognita
in science,
but the very risk of not being able to
produce anything can be enormous. Ex-
amples include looking for the solution
of Fermat’s theorem or a message from
extraterrestrials, as depicted in the mo-
vie
Contact
, where Jodie Foster played a
pioneering (mad) astronomer who spent
years looking for it.44
In the scientic regime, antiquity, both
in fact and in theory, seems to have little
survivability. This is why science has its
Janus faces, as Latour neatly describes:
one relates to established fact or theory
that looks to the future, and the other
looks toward the past trace of contro-
versies that are eventually forgotten.45
One possible exception wherein the old
matters for acting scientists, aside from
those that concern science historians, is
those instances in which an obsolete fact
or theory is rediscovered and reincarna-
ted as a premature pioneer of a cutting
edge topic. In such a case, it is not the
42 Joan H. Fujimura, Crafting science: a sociohistory of the quest
for the genetics of cancer (Cambridge, MA 1996).
43 Masato Fukushima, Resilience in scientic research:
Understanding how natural product research rebounded in an
adverse situation. Science as Culture 25/2 (2016), pp. 167–192.
44 see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/; access: August
24, 2019.
45 Bruno Latour, Science in action: how to follow scientists and
engineers through society (Cambridge, MA 1987).
FUKUSHIMA / REGIMES ON NEWNESS
INTERFACE CRITIQUE JOURNAL – VOL. 2 – 2019
119
oldness that matters but the forgotten
newness, which is rediscovered during
the existing pursuit of newness.46
This probably is quite different in the
case of the market regime where the
consumers’ preferences matter, and we
have distinctive cases related to what
we call “antiques.” In addition, the market
aspect of the art regime is different from,
say, that of pop-music because that com-
modity is reproducible in mass scale and
can be measured quantitatively by its sa-
les. As already briey noted, art consists
largely of one-of-a-kind items, whose va-
lue lies in their singular character as pro-
ducts. As a result, we experience a kind of
unique situation in the art regime: I em-
phasize that the production of newness
in the art regime anticipates the produc-
tion of a series of good antiques, which is
a specic outcome of the interface bet-
ween the quasi-academic sub-regime in
art, vaguely imitating that in the scien-
tic regime, and the market sub-regime,
which constantly seeks good commodi-
ties, especially antiques. In fact, Marcel
Duchamp, in a conversation with Richard
Hamilton, once insisted that the real im-
pact of newly born art works has a life of
approximately 20 years, and the rest of
the life of these artworks is consigned to
museums.47 This is where the concept of
46 eg. Ernest B. Hook (ed.), Prematurity in scientic discovery:
On resistance and neglect (Oakland, CA 2002); Masato Fukushima,
Before Laboratory Life: Perry, Sullivan and the missed encounter
between psychoanalysis and STS. BioSocieties (forthcoming
2019).
47 Marcel Duchamp, Interview from 1959, https://www.artspace.
com/magazine/art_101/qa/a-1959-interview-with-marcel-
duchamp-the-fallacy-of-art-history-and-the-death-of-art-55274;
access: August 24, 2019.
antiques matters. Market regime, in turn,
thinks much of antiques because of their
market value, as seen in those occasions
when old paintings (old in the sense of
not brand new) may demonstrate an al-
most astronomical value, from Leonardo
Da Vinci to Takashi Murakami. In terms
of the market aspect of the art regime,
however, diverse forms in the recent de-
velopment of art practices will demand a
new way to dene its purchasable form,
such as installation art, performing art
and so forth.
Closing words
At the beginning of this article, I referred
to Luhmann’s highly abstract social the-
ory as a way to begin reecting upon the
potential for a macro-sociological ver-
sion of interface. Though inheriting his
concern with the social differentiation
that characterizes contemporary soci-
ety, I have introduced the more exible
concept of regime, which consists of a
more diverse set of sub-elements than
Luhmann’s highly simplied way of de-
scribing these processes of differentiati-
on. And though I have described the in-
terface dynamics within the art regime
here, I admit that I have omitted any refe-
rence to the internal friction between in-
terfaces within both science and market
regimes, a topic to be pursued elsewhere.
In this sense, the art regime is an inte-
resting arena for observing the potential
of enlarging the concept of interface to
the macro-sociological domain—in this
case, between two different sub-regimes
120
that create a dynamic cacophony owing
to the rapidly expanding art market in
the age of the post-Duchamp era where
the issue is becoming rapidly global. It
is also a good occasion to ponder the re-
asons why we are so driven by the cult
of newness, along with the inherently
self-contradictory fact that the accele-
rated orientation of ever newer newness
simultaneously means the mass produc-
tion of obsolescence, where the concepts
of
modernus
(newness) and
antiquus
(oldness) meet face to face.
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