if one disrupts, or is unable to incorporate oneself into the wa, it is tantamount to death. among the many things that are distorted by the wa, people’s concept of death seems the most affected. within a context where karoshi and kodukoshi are part of everyday reality, suicide seems almost trivial. but that’s the dark irony– death has become banal. and as a direct consequence of this, so has life. we’ve now ventured even further into the black hole.
Read More“there’s a japanese word called ‘wa’. no one wants to disrupt this wa regardless of if it’s in the family, in a community, at work, or anywhere else in japan. it means harmony, not status quo…wa technically is good thing, it has a positive connotation, but the way that it works is so bad. this concept of wa is inherent to japanese people because they’re raised in this culture. and they can’t function without it. it’s so against their nature to break that wa. if you break the wa then you’re probably worse than a foreigner, you become something other than japanese.”
Read Morethis post attempts to explain how we understand ‘binary’. through the course of this explanation we complexify and challenge preconceived notions of concepts like language and identity.
when we refer to ‘binary’ here on mxdflz, we use it pejoratively. it’s a concept we lament and resist. we lament the binary because it induces– and is simultaneously amplified by– identity politics, which expresses the default state of human relations today. binary influence is found wherever there exists territorial divisions– oppositions and competition– based on dominant identity categories. these have their origin in the fundamentally structural distinction between self and other, which is a consequence of man’s disjunction from and displacement within nature.
beware, this post gets a bit academic, and is very much philosophical and psychoanalytic.
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