Theory in Forms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023. US$29.00, paper; US$108.00, cloth. ISBN 9781478025221
Harry Harootunian’s Archaism and Actuality: Japan and the Global Fascist Imaginary is a thought-provoking analysis of archaism, capitalism, and fascism in modern Japan and beyond. The work brings together many themes Harootunian has explored in works over the decades and, like these earlier achievements, it combines sophisticated theoretical discussion with analysis of some of the critical transitions in Japan’s modern history. A short review cannot do justice to the many sophisticated ideas Harootunian puts forward in the work, so I will limit myself to the ideas I found most interesting.
The Marxian concept of “uneven and combined development” in political economies seems to be important for Harootunian’s understanding of Japan’s modern history. Drawing on the thought of Antonio Gramsci, Harootunian argues that the Meiji Restoration was in fact a “passive revolution,” which meant that Japan’s transition to modernity witnessed the coexistence of residual, archaic forms (especially the emperor) alongside contemporary capitalist structures (1). Japan was not unique in this sense. Harootunian asserts that “all societies experience the status of unevenness the moment they embrace the capitalist agenda and remain permanently bound to it, even as the capitalist endowment may mature and advance” (xv). The imperial institution and its foundation in the archaic provided a particularly potent site for this phenomenon in Japan. Harootunian uses several concepts to describe the phenonmeon such as “synchronous nonsynchronicity” (16–17). The critical point seems to be that capitalism, rather than erasing the past as it triumphantly marches forward, actually appropriates and repurposes unevenness to sustain its expansion. In Japan’s case, Harootunian argues that the emperor and related myths of divine origins were mobilized for political ends at key historical moments such as the Meiji Restoration and in the 1930s. Political leaders such myths to unify disparate temporalities, handle societal tensions, and quash dissent.
Harootunian positions the Japanese experience within what he calls in the title “the global fascist imaginary.” Although this concept is not discussed in the text, it is clear that Harootunian sees parallels between Japanese fascism and that in Europe and elsewhere. He contends that Japan’s version of fascism—sometimes called “Japanism”—was deeply rooted in the mobilization of archaic myths and nationalistic ideologies to suppress class conflicts and justify imperial ambitions. Here we can see parallels with the ideological mechanisms employed by European fascist regimes, which also utilized fabricated histories and appeals to mythical pasts to build and strengthen their regimes.
But Harootunian does not present Japanese fascism as a simple copy of European versions; rather, he points to its own specific aspects like the imperial heritage and the impact of historical events such as the Meiji Restoration. Nonetheless, Japanese fascism shares a commonality with its counterparts in the past and the present in the way it served as a response to the various crises in capitalism, becoming a mechanism for dealing with the severe dislocations of modernity. In Japan, this mechanism for stabilizing a society in flux revolved around an ideology based on a constructed archaic past, epitomized by the emperor system and its appeal to nonhistorical myths.
Another fascinating aspect of the book for me was Harootunian’s critique of historical practice and its relationship to politics. Here Harootunian draws on the work of thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, and Ernst Bloch to suggest that traditional historiography with its unilinear arc of time does not capture the multitemporal dynamics of modernity—in other words the coexistence of unevenness. Rather than a linear sequence, Harootunian argues that history be understood as a multilayered field where past, present, and future collide. Here Harootunian takes aim at both Marxian and bourgeois historiographies for their adherence to linear narratives that tend to obscure the persistence of the past in shaping the present. He contrasts this approach with Benjamin’s concept of “actuality” (or jissai in Japanese), which I think he adopts to characterize the way historical practice represents a “political intervention into the present” (xiv). Could one upshot be that, by understanding the past as constructed and hence contemporary, historians have the power to disrupt the persistence of repressive configurations and perhaps even open possibilities for political transformation? If so, this perspective seems to resonate with Harootunian’s larger argument that the utilization of archaism in fascism is far more than a nostalgic longing for the past. It is a premeditated political strategy to shut down genuine revolutionary potential.
As the above suggests, Harootunian’s book is one with deep significance for our present historical moment as the contradictions of capitalism continue to produce populist leaders who invoke mythical pasts to build constituencies, stifle opposition, and seize control of and then attempt to destroy political institutions. To conclude, Harootunian’s Archaism and Actuality is a masterful exploration of the intersections of archaism, capitalism, and fascism in Japan’s modern history. The book’s theoretical rigor and perspectives on history make it an important contribution for both Japanese history and the broader examination of fascism and capitalist modernity.
Simon Avenell
Australian National University, Canberra