in Japan
著者
David Kennedy
雑誌名
dialogos
号
15
ページ
49-71
発行年
2015-02-28
URL
http://id.nii.ac.jp/1060/00007601/
Hypomnesic milieus and the future of ‘EFL’ in Japan
David KennedyAbstract
This paper explores the potential psychic and social effects of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on conceptions of distance, or ‘foreign-ness’, in the learning of English in Japan. The focus here is on the particularities of Japan’s sociocultural landscape, where English language learning remains a significant industry with considerable social presence, yet often with a tenuous connection to sustained and meaningful semiosic (meaning-making) discourse. Drawing upon SLA, social theory, and media theory – and in particular Bernard Stiegler’s work –, I suggest that the central issue for communication in general is memory: a tension between anamnesis (embodied memory and experience) and hypomnesis (exteriorized memory and experience). The paper argues that technology plays a fundamental role in mediating between these two dynamics, and, more specifically, that future research in EFL will need to evaluate how digital ICTs impact language learners’ semiotic agency, communicative participation both proximally and virtually, and transindividuation (psychic and collective becoming), leading ultimately to a critical rethinking of in what senses English language learning in Japan can continue to be called ‘foreign’.
Keywords：communication, Japan, EFL, ICTs, anamnesis, hypomnesis, mnemotechnologies, mediation, semiotics, attention, transindividuation, Stiegler
1 Introduction: the ghost in communication
To communicate, to live socially, is to continuously overcome semiotic hurdles. These barriers may be geographical, temporal, technological, sociocultural, perceptual, experiential, or linguistic. Whatever theory one accepts regarding the origins of early human communication, it can safely be concluded that it took millions of years for humans to develop a cohesive grammaticized language capable of producing intelligible semiotic interchange. Even once such a system was established, individuals and social entities created meaning in contexts that were – relative to modern societies – localized, temporally limited, and experientially homogeneous. Compared to the technical capabilities of our more place- and time-bound ancestors, current information and communications technologies (ICTs) have greatly expanded our semiotic worlds into the ethereal, into the province of instant messaging, tweets, posts, likes, emoji, and a plethora of extralinguistic forms of expression. At the same time, these technologies have raised new questions about what communication and community mean in the realm of the virtual, in domains that disorient our consciousness of place and time (Stiegler, 2008).
It can be argued that these concerns were already raised in Plato’s Phaedrus more than two millennia ago (see Galloway, 2012; Peters, 1999). Since that time, philosophers, linguists, media theorists, biological anthropologists, among others, have struggled in their own particular milieus to account for how – specifically, materially – one embodied mind is able to communicate with another, absent a direct synaptic interface. In Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), the media theorist John Durham Peters asserts that the enigma at the center of discourse about communication has always revolved around “the deprivation of presence”, or “disembodiment”. Hegel, for one, dealt with this conundrum by placing the idea of Geist, or ‘spirit’, at the center
of a phenomenology that connects the situated individual to the wider and less tangible forces of society and history. This is by no means mere superstition or philosophical abstraction. Rather, suggests Peters, Geist represents a relational
dynamic that emerges between “the material inscriptions of culture and … the embodied community of interpreters” (p. 116). In other words, the seeming ‘ghostliness’ of communication can be accounted for as an ecology of physical mediations taking place across the spatial-temporal distances that separate the component materialities of experience. The ghost is truly in the machine; that is, in the unsettled network of relations between humans, technologies, and signs. The purpose of this paper is to reexamine this question of distance (both real and imagined) in relation to English as a foreign language (EFL) in Japan, specifically how the digital age of information and communications technologies (ICTs) mediates between the local and the global, between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’, or between what Plato called anamnesis (embodied memory and experience) and hypomnesis (exteriorized memory and experience). I suggest that the current hypomnesic milieus require a critical reevaluation of Japanese learners’ semiotic agency, communicative involvement, and self-determination vis-à-vis ‘foreign’ language learning.
2 Semiotic agency and ‘foreign-ness’
The field of second language teaching, naturally, seeks to narrow linguistic and social distances in an effort to afford language learners greater participation in discourses that will expand their possibilities of engagement and creative expression. This has been understandably more challenging in so-called ‘foreign language’ contexts, as learners are geographically, experientially, and therefore psychologically further removed from and less invested in what is imagined to be a target language community. With discussions over the implications of
globalization and multiculturalism deepening over the past few decades, SLA research (in both cognitive and social camps) has been affected by a broader evolution in theories of semiotics and semiotic agency, particularly regarding questions about what language is and what role language users play in it. Digital technologies have no doubt also played a significant role in accelerating such a conceptual change.
These changes should prove particularly significant, if not challenging, for Japan, where, as Seargeant (2009) notes, discourse about the role of the English language has generally positioned it as something “brought from outside” (p. 49). He argues that “in the history of Japan . . . [English] is associated at every stage with a very specific chronology of foreign contact, political coercion and even invasion” (p. 50, emphasis mine). Although one may cite a variety of reasons for the genesis of this prevailing conceptualization – e.g. geographical isolation, the sakoku (‘chained nation’) policy of Edo Japan, or the relative scarcity of foreign residents –, Seargeant contends that it is the symbolic value placed on Japanese and English that perpetuates the contrast between native and foreign. Language is seen as a cultural property, a container of national identity, and a hereditary artifact to be protected.
Notions such as these are to some extent propagated by a lucrative consumer market that exoticizes ‘foreign-ness’ while simultaneously underscoring the uniqueness of ‘Japanese-ness’. But they are also promulgated throughout the nation’s education system by decisions made at the upper echelons of government. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has in recent years made more ambitious moves toward ‘internationalization’ (kokusaika), most notably during two separate administrations led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (2006 to 2007, and 2012 to present). The oft-stated motivation behind these initiatives has been to make
Japan more competitive on the international stage. Take, for example, the prime minister’s policy speech to the diet early in 2014, in which twice he states the specific goal of education reforms being the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (Policy Speech by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the 186th Session of the Diet, 2014). It is interesting, however, that the changes to English education made during Mr. Abe’s tenure – e.g. introducing English education in elementary school, emphasizing communicative ability over grammatical correctness, and establishing a grant to boost the international profile of Japanese universities by attracting more foreign students and professors (the Project for Promotion of Global Human Resource Development, or Global 30) – have paralleled a resurgence in statements and policies on moral education, history, Japanese culture, foreign policy, and defense that are markedly more revisionist and nationalistic in character. This juxtaposition of internationalism and nationalism, while seemingly odd, has ample precedent. In Japan these contradictory forces have tended to manifest themselves as two sides of the same ambivalent sense of cultural identity. There is abundant historical evidence that this has been an ongoing political dynamic at least since the Meiji Restoration (see the volume edited by Seargeant, 2011, and Seargeant, 2009).
Byram (2008) notes that the Japanese government’s official line on stressing the need for communicative English is focused on economic and social benefits, but not on ‘internationalization’ per se, nor with the attributes of tolerance and open-mindedness that go with it. This differs greatly from policy documents of other industrialized countries, particularly Scandinavian ones, where “internationalization policies spring […] not from economic analysis but from analysis of the relationship of one country with others, of the ideal of mutual understanding, and of the social responsibility of rich countries toward poor countries” (p. 29). Likewise, Yamagami and Tollefson (2011), in their study of
official government statements and Japanese universities’ websites that advertise their international programs, argue that the role of English has been reserved primarily for the educated and professional elite, who can utilize English for the nation’s economic benefit, while maintaining a cultural distance from genuine internationalization or globalization. For example, Toshiaki Endo, head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s educational reform panel, has explicitly stated that the objective of reforming English education in Japan is to ensure that Japan can adapt and compete in a global environment (Yoshida, 2013). Endo has also decried the “excessive egalitarianism” at schools, in which emphasis is placed on basic English proficiency for the entire student body.
The future direction of English language education in Japan, however, will not simply be contingent on the role of English in a globalized economy in which Japan is a major player, nor on the limited number of top-level learners who can achieve high TOEFL scores. More crucially, it will depend on whether and how a greater number of Japanese learners of English – not merely the elite few – will claim increased semiotic agency in a language which is still largely considered ‘foreign’. To what degree Japan comes to exert a more authoritative semiotic role in English, and to what degree information and communication technologies bring about such a transformation, are issues that have already started to become more prominent among language teaching professionals. These issues, however, are complicated by the fact that the prevailing discourse about language and subjectivity in Japan (as outlined above) has not kept pace with global developments in sociolinguistics and language pedagogy. In particular, the inside/outside paradigm that has so strongly influenced language policy in Japan largely ignores questions of mediation: between the individual, the collective, and technology.
3 Mediation: language and the place of the subject
The following three models of language and subjectivity (outlined in Kramsch, 2009, after Graddol, 1994) will help us to frame issues of distance, communication, and semiotic involvement as they pertain to Japanese learners of English in the digital age. It should be kept in mind that although there has been a general evolution from structural to post-structural over the past century, the older frameworks have not necessarily been replaced; they continue to exercise considerable influence, evolve, and sometimes blend with more contemporary ideas.
The first model pertinent to this discussion springs from a structuralist perspective that dominated social sciences for much of the 20th century, and has arguably held on much longer in SLA. In this view, meaning (in the conventional, fixed sense) is encoded in written or spoken texts, which are then sent, received, or exchanged, and subsequently decoded. Language users are by and large tabulae rasae; they learn the code imposed by cultural affiliation, educational institutions, and established standards of correctness. Although research in this tradition has presented detailed descriptions of the modular elements that comprise communication (in short: messages, media, codes, and cognitive processing) there has been little explanation of how these supposedly discrete elements meet up across the gaps in order to generate communication. A social turn in SLA subsequently emerged in reaction to structuralism’s ahistorical reductionism and its relative disinterest in human dynamics and unpredictability, i.e. language in use. This model starts from the observation that all communication and language are dialogic; they emerge socially. Language users are therefore active participants in determining their own linguistic possibilities and constraints. Communication serves human purposes. It is also inextricably bound up with media as “extensions of man” (as McLuhan put it),
instrumental in social construction, and instrumental in getting jobs done. The most recently expounded model takes an even more ecological position, describing language and communication as systems of relation. Because of its consistent refusal to ascribe fixed authorship, meaning, or process to communicative events, this position can be called ‘postmodern’ in addition to ‘post-structural’. Meaning is the unending byproduct of signs (in the broadest sense of the word) interacting with other signs; discourses are combinations of semiotic systems. A useful way to visualize the breadth of such a semiotic ecosystem is Lotman’s (1990) term semiosphere, which he defined as a “semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages” (p. 123). Importantly, these semiotic ‘spaces’ include not only the codes and signs that are conventionally thought of as conveying meaning, but also incorporate both the technologies by which meaning disseminates as well as the complex subjectivities of the participants.
A good century before Lotman, the pioneering semiotician C.S. Peirce demonstrated how humans themselves are acted upon as unfinished signs in the ongoing process of meaning-making, or what he termed semiosis. Peirce’s ‘decentering’ of the human subject profoundly influenced much later trends in semiotics, social theory, and media theory – from the emphasis on the ‘medium’ in the 1960s (e.g. Derrida and McLuhan) to the ‘posthumanist’ supremacy of technology and systems in the 1990s and beyond (e.g. Friedrich Kittler and Niklas Luhmann). Luhmann’s positioning of human agency in the semiotic ecology is clearly articulated, thought-provoking, and highly contentious: “Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate” (2002, p. 169).
kind of ‘postmodern’ – that is, ecological or relational – model of language and communication is plainly most constructive in dealing with the effects of ICTs on EFL learners: how they are physiologically reconfiguring the brains of EFL learners and thereby also their semiotic roles in English communication. The prevalence of digital media necessitate a reexamination of how presence and distance are perceived in these milieus, particularly in the consciousnesses of the many learners of English in Japan who find themselves struggling to find a toehold in a quasi-alien semiosphere, one that is not quite here and not quite there.
I follow the standpoint advocated by Mitchell, Hansen, et al. (2010) that communication is mediated, and indeed constituted, by “a three-way set of exchanges among the dimensions of individual subjectivity, collective activity, and technical capability” (p. xv, italics mine). As stated earlier, my concern is with how ICTs mediate between the ‘here’ and ‘there’ that characterize the EFL experience. The following section will examine how a posthuman era of digital and global communication, one that is seemingly less embodied and less spatially and temporally grounded, might impact Japanese EFL learners in terms of their agency in communication.
4 Technology: memory and dissemination in hypomnesic milieus
In 1936, the literary and social critic Walter Benjamin predicted that “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character” (1968, p. 232). This observation now seems oddly contemporary, as if Benjamin were referring to tweets, Facebook posts, or Instagram uploads. As discussed earlier, however, anxieties about the effects of new media on the nature of communication and subjectivity can be traced back as far as Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates laments the loss of presence that he witnesses in the shift from
the immediate, human, soul-to-soul meaningfulness of the spoken word to the distant, impersonal representation of speech held captive in writing. Ong (2002) argues that Socrates’ complaints about the evolution from orality to literacy are not unlike those voiced against the advent of the printing press in the 15th century and computers in the late 20th century.
The concern predominating critiques at the dawn of any new technological milieu has been with human agency, specifically regarding memory and dissemination. Jacques Derrida, Friedrich Kittler, and Bernard Stiegler, among others, have commented in depth about Plato’s contention that technology (in Plato’s case, writing) is a pharmakon, simultaneously a ‘remedy’ and a ‘poison’. While on the one hand technology records and disseminates thought, on the other it empties the same thought of its original situated authority, its essential logos, or truth. In short, technology is both beneficial and detrimental to memory, enhancing our capabilities to create wider worlds of meaning while at the same time, paradoxically, undermining our own authorship and ownership of that meaning (see Derrida, 1981; Stiegler, 2010).
This is the inevitable byproduct of human progress. As physiological memory is finite, societies have continuously developed new memory aids that record knowledge in order to expand capacities to create new worlds (economies, etc). These storage technologies have included, over the millennia, such ‘inscriptions’ as oral folk traditions, etchings on stone, relics, art, printed manuscripts, typewriters, gramophones, film, digital archives, tweets, and Facebook likes. Stiegler (e.g. 2010) refers to this exteriorization of memory as hypomnesis (though he is not the first to do so), and the technologies in which memory resides as mnemotechnologies.
The study of the exteriorization of human thought in technologies – i.e. mnemotechnologies – was brought to popular attention by the philosopher of
communication theory Marshall McLuhan (after the pioneering work of Harold Innis). In his widely influential Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1994 [published in 1964]), McLuhan proposes that people embrace new media as physiological prostheses, and unconsciously allow these technologies to change their behavior and experience. In his words, “Any invention or technology is an extension of self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body” (p. 45). What this means is most succinctly expressed in his noted contention that “the medium is the message” (p. 7). Not only do media carry the ‘content’ (i.e. the ‘message’) of thought, but they also shape the very processes by which these thoughts come into being. McLuhan argues that the technologies people invent are more than just tools. More significantly, they form the means by which people are themselves unwittingly re-invented. Hansen (2010) explains this as a technological form of epigenetic evolution, a technogenesis: “by changing the conditions for the production of experience, new media destabilize existing patterns of biological, psychical, and collective life even as they furnish new facilities” (p. 173). New technologies (such as speech, alphabets, printing presses, or computer interfaces) affect cognition, and this cognitive shift subsequently affects social organization.
The media theorist Friedrich Kittler, while drawing heavily on McLuhan’s emphasis on technology’s influence over human consciousness, takes a more radically posthuman stance. Kittler strongly disagrees with McLuhan's reading of the media as "extensions of man", affording mnemotechnologies far more autonomy and power than mere prostheses, and humans far less free will in embracing or rejecting these technologies. For Kittler, these technologies program us. In an obvious play on McLuhan’s famed adage, Kittler (1999) starkly claims that “media determine our situation” (p. xxxix). These opening words
of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter have become the well-recognized face of his central claim that media technologies form the very infrastructure of experience and thought, configuring all of our understanding and discourse. Kittler’s media theory is a technomaterialism that merges the historically grounded discourse analysis of Foucault, the structuralist psychoanalysis of Lacan, and the media theory of McLuhan (see Winthrop-Young, 2011). In Kittler’s view, humans are caught between history, technology, and the susceptibilities of their own neural networks. As he puts it, “So-called Man is split up into physiology and information technology” (p. 16, emphasis mine).1
Kittler contends that technology in the 20th century (particularly the typewriter, the gramophone, and the typewriter) wrenched human consciousness away from the hegemony of the printed word and introduced it to the raw data of differentiated data flows (optical, acoustic, and written). In the Gutenberg Galaxy – i.e. the era of print dominance – “all data flows . . . had to pass through the bottleneck of the signifier. Alphabetic monopoly, grammatology” (1999, p. 4). That is to say, meaning and communication after the invention of the printing press was forced into a symbolic mediation, or, as Stiegler (2012) explains it, into a grammatization of “making the continuous discrete” (p. 5, italics original). At the end of the 19th century, however, new media technologies allowed for optical and acoustic data that had their own storage and communication channels, and that no longer relied on this authoritative mediation of print. Specifically, phonography, photography, and cinematography recorded and communicated
1 Kittler’s interest in technology also melded with his love of progressive rock, particularly Pink Floyd. In a famous example of his scholastic idiosyncrasies, Kittler analyzes the song “Brain Damage” from the group’s 1973 magnum opus Dark Side of the Moon as a “discourse on discourse channel conditions” (1982, p. 473, cited in Winthrop-Young, 2011, p. 54). The song’s lyric, “There’s someone in my head but it’s not me,” exemplifies for Kittler how technology programs thought.
the physical traces of real experience in the form of sound waves and light. The typewriter, meanwhile, separated the human hand from the production of the written word. Writing became a sequence of discrete mechanical signifiers on the page, reproducible – as Benjamin lamented about the production of art – by anyone. “Ears and eyes have become autonomous,” proclaims Kittler (1999, p. 3), freed from the tyranny of the signifying text.
Kittler, in short, dismantles the idea of media as software (i.e. an interface to a logos, a true reality under the surface) by claiming that there is only hardware. In the same way that ‘mind’ can be reduced to a firing of myriad neurons inside the brain, so can media ‘software’ be explained as no more than complex hardware operations.
These ideas are highly significant to EFL in Japan insofar as they deconstruct the supposed cultural wall (the ‘software’) that has typically rendered ‘foreign’ language learning impotent in the minds of many Japanese learners. At the same time Kittler’s promotion of technological media in determining how knowledge is stored and disseminated can arguably inform a liberation of EFL from the ‘tyranny’ of the traditional text-bound irrelevancies of English language education in Japan. However, if Kittler’s theories are taken to their logical end, the current digitization and globalization of media will lead – far, far down the road – to a technological confluence of the world’s communicative possibilities. For the EFL student in Japan, new media will blur the experience of ‘native’ and ‘foreign’, ‘proximity’ and ‘distance’, ‘presence’ and ‘absence’. More ominously, the dominance of English as an inscribed technological hardware medium will ultimately erode the familiarity of languages other than English. Mnemotechnologies will determine a global hegemony of English.
This, of course, is nonsense, and it illustrates the fatal flaw in Kittler’s otherwise valuable line of argument. What Kittler minimizes is the social
dimension of human technogenesis. It is clear that technological media alone are insufficient to determine the variety of human expression and behaviors that comprise a semiosphere. As suggested earlier, the possibility of communication arises only through the intermediation of technology, embodied individual subjectivity, and collective activity (Mitchell, Hansen, et al.,2010). Regardless of the extent to which ICTs exteriorize the subject, compress time and space, flatten the picture of human experience, and so on, people remain at a fundamental level embodied and situated in irreproducibly personal environments. An EFL student in Japan still lives, breathes, eats, drinks, hangs out, bathes, window shops, and otherwise goes through a significant portion of his or her life in physical proximity with other humans – not entirely determined by the influence of an LCD screen. A spatially distant object will remain forever distant. Technology cannot completely erase the phenomenology of that reality. ICTs may mediate these experiences and behaviors to a certain extent, but they cannot overwhelmingly dictate them.
It is here that the work of Bernard Stiegler is particularly relevant to the dilemmas of transformation that mark the EFL experience in Japan. Stiegler (2011), while pessimistic about the effects of digital technology on human creativity, rejects a Kittlerian overdetermination of media. Rather, he sees a symbiosis between experience, society, and technology. Regarding the process of becoming a ‘self’, he states: “hypomnemata are technologies of individuation, such that individuation is psychic and collective, that is, social and political” (p. 77). Drawing upon Gilbert Simondon, Stiegler defines ‘individuation’ as the process of the psychic individual becoming differentiated from others. Paradoxically, this process occurs only in relationship to others. So while technologies do exert influence over the individual, they are also a site of social and political struggle, a nexus where identity, community, and determination are
forged.
However, Stiegler (2008) is greatly alarmed by the disorienting effects of what he calls ‘industrial temporal objects’, i.e. the forms by which experience is industrially reproduced and restructured. In an over-connected world, he argues, time and space are decimated to the extent that humans lose their bearings, unable to discern the temporalities of their own consciousnesses from those provided them by their own technologies. Stiegler argues that the intimacy with which modern societies cling to these digital hypomnemata should serve as a warning sign that they are rapidly expanding beyond human understanding and control.
The looming specter, according to Stiegler, is nothing less than an “obsolescence of the human” (a possibility certainly not mourned by Kittler) and that what is at stake is “a combat: a combat for the politics of memory and, more precisely, for the constitution of sustainable hypomnesic milieus” (Stiegler, 2010, pp. 68-69). These are social environments in which hypomnesis (exteriorized memory and experience) does not override anamnesis (embodied memory and experience). He is here advocating a vigilance against ‘culture industries’ and ‘control societies’ (theorized by Adorno and Horkheimer, and Deleuze, respectively), and more specifically against a “society of consumption” (p. 77). For Stiegler, consumer capitalism via an interconnected digital platform is the epitome of a dissociation between hypomnesis and anamnesis that characterizes digitized life in general: ICTs strengthen the machinery that exploits desire. The urge to browse endlessly for ‘what else is out there’ disconnects people from their inner selves to the point where consumption – not only of products, but of ideas, ideologies, identities, lifestyles, aspirations – is no longer liberating, but psychically immiserating.
role of ICTs in the EFL experience, especially in terms of how the disorientating nature of these ‘industrial temporal objects’ affect the commodity of the ‘other-ness’ that is often central to language learning from a distance. Does digital technology afford EFL learners greater self-determination, or less? Does it bring them into greater participation with the target-language community, or does it only provide more frequent, but also more trivial, intercultural exchanges? Does it give them a more powerful voice in the virtual community, or do learners become absorbed into an aggregate of clichéd ‘globalized’ discourses? These are issues in English language learning in Japan that must be addressed.
The potentially corrective side of the ICT pharmakon, according to Stiegler (2010), is that its participative and collaborative aspects (tweeting, posting, chatting, crowdsourcing, etc) potentially reestablish a stronger association between hypomnesis and anamnesis, between the disembodied and the embodied. This “associated technical milieu” has to a certain extent subverted industrial capitalism as it erases the opposition between producer and consumer, and between sender and receiver (p. 83). The consumer – and we may add here the language consumer – is now able to produce and disseminate, well beyond what Walter Benjamin could have imagined in 1936. That capability, while not to be met with undue optimism, illustrates nonetheless the possibilities of action: the milieu of industrial temporal objects is both poison and remedy.
As Mitchell and Hansen (2010) point out, what distinguishes Stiegler’s position from Kittler’s is that media do not simply determine our situation, but complement the phenomenology of human experience. In the same volume, Hansen (2010) suggests that although the vocation of new media is indeed novel (i.e. in that the desire for ever more connectivity has emerged as an end in itself), new media are not fundamentally any less embodied than their forerunners. He states that “mediation forms the very basis of human existence. Human beings
literally exist in the medium of the world, which is to say, in a medium that has always been technical” (p. 177). Above and beyond the technologies that accompany the human experience, our senses are the primary media by which we create meaning. Practically speaking, anything that is interpreted on an LCD screen is necessarily mediated by our sensory understanding of the physical world around us. Hayles (2012) shares this stance, arguing that all cognition is embodied, while acknowledging that cognitive networks extend beyond it, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside.
What we can conclude up to this point is that the era of ICTs has changed the way in which memory is stored and disseminated, a phenomenon that is having profound effects on industrialized societies everywhere. As memory has become increasingly exteriorized, and as the speed by which information can be disseminated has begun to outpace our anamnesic capacities, humanity now finds itself in a crisis of agency. How much are we in control? Stiegler (2011) warns that the speed of digital hypomnemata gradually erases the past from our anamnesic memory banks, as our physiological selves no longer have to remember it. This ahistorical environment affects how we see the present, and consequently destroys our “savoir-vivre” (in Stiegler’s sense of the word, our “possibilities of existence”) for the future (p. 105).
More specifically, for EFL learners in environments such as Japan, ICTs open a whole new world of possibilities of connectivity. ICTs allow for greater telepistemology (knowing and empathizing from afar) and even telepresence (being and acting from afar). Undoubtedly, the English language will come to seem increasingly less ‘foreign’ to Japanese students. Nonetheless, this extended cognition invites the danger of a dissociation between virtual and embodied experience. Increased participation in the digital semiosphere, paradoxically, may be accompanied by disorientation; a loss of spirit, purpose, meaning, and
creativity in embodied experience. This issue ultimately hinges on questions of identity, community, and transformation.
5 Conclusion: extended selfhood, transindividuation, and attention
Like cognition, identity is not fixed. Some identities are embodied; others mesh with the social and semiotic networks that extend beyond the body. ICTs provide a greater range of ways to interact in these networks of information and communication. At the same time, however, ICTs have set the conditions for shaping what people’s social needs will be. Rainie and Wellman (2012) describe this new social operating system as ‘networked individualism’. The defining characteristic of this social shift is that “people function more as connected individuals and less as embedded group members” (p. 12). Their exhaustive study details how, in networked societies, people have been able and willing to exploit relationships that are more physically and emotionally remote.
Rainie and Wellman’s research subverts conventional notions of culture and identity by providing strong evidence that people do not operate in “bounded, insulated, and homogeneous groups” (2012, p. 34), but rather in “fluid and changing networks” (p. 36). Therefore, although traditional discourses on affiliation and identity would lead us to believe otherwise, ‘being Japanese’ is no longer a particularly descriptive account of the networked realities of the people who live within this nation. The evolution and spread of digital technologies is bound to further erode ‘Japanese-ness’ as a marker of identity. As Rainie and Wellman predict, networked individuals “are likely to test partial membership in more milieus and rely less on permanent membership in settled groups” (p. 297). The digitalized future is one in which people will increasingly interact in social meaning making within loosely knit and spatially dispersed networks.
foreign language learning will undoubtedly become a significant research direction in SLA in the coming years. It will not be a simple endeavor. Kramsch (2009) characterizes the virtual online multilingual self as beset by paradoxes: both presence and the illusion of presence; both unique and irreversible acts and reversible performances; both historically and spatially bounded events and events in relational time-space; both embodied experience and simulation. In short, living as an extended self is “both exhilarating and anxiety-producing”. (p. 177). For EFL learners in Japan, whether this ambivalence exacerbates or mitigates the tension between internationalism (kokusai-ka) and nativism – including popular theories of ‘Japanese-ness’ (nihonjinron) – will remain an area of great debate in language policy and pedagogy.
For the multilingual self, Kramsch (2009) is hopeful that through digital media, extended selfhood and hyperreality can “liberate communication from the social and cultural constraints imposed by the real world and facilitate the acquisition and use of another language through encounters in cyberspace” (p. 180). Stiegler (2012), while highly critical of the psychosocial dangers of a controlling hypomnesic milieu, nonetheless rejects absolutizing anamnesis (i.e. claiming embodied experience as the fundamental arbiter of meaning) in that hypomnesis – the extension of mind into social worlds through technology – is the “condition of possibility” for anamnesis (p. 10). Stiegler’s view is nuanced and complex; the embodied self is mediated by extension and interaction with the outside world. However, questions remain about the depth and width of the ICT-based interactions EFL learners engage in, and about how these interactions shape individual and collective identities.
Research in EFL will therefore also need to focus on the issue of attention. For Hayles (2012), the shift from deep attention to hyper attention in reading has profound neurological consequences on learning, but also forms a new
kind of technogenesis of human experience. While wary of the effects of new technologies, she takes a balanced approach, arguing that “hyper attention can be seen as a positive adaptation that makes young people better suited to live in the information-intensive environments that are becoming ever more pervasive” (p.99). At the same time, Hayles maintains that “certain complex tasks can be accomplished only with deep attention: it is a heritage we cannot afford to lose” (p. 99). In her view, hyper attention is neither panacea nor poison.
Beyond being merely a matter of cognitive processing, Stiegler (2012) stresses that how humans pay attention is intimately tied to psychic and social health. The development of individuals and civilizations is characterized by the ways in which they bestow attention (or ‘thoughtfulness’), which are conditioned by the material technologies that mediate their communication. Attention is the modus operandi of transindividuation, i.e. of psychic and collective becoming. Stiegler (2012) rightly worries that the digital network society (or the ‘networked individualism’ described by Rainie and Wellman) has produced “new attentional forms … [that] inaugurate a new process of psychic and collective individuation” (p. 5). He particularly criticizes enthusiasts of networked individualism who blindly trust that participation in (or attention to) the production of “collaborative metadata” is inherently democratic. In his words:
The problem is that the exploitation of collaborative metadata is not itself collaborative in any way, and it is never made the object of a critical scrutiny through which these collaboratively transindividuated knowledges would become precisely critical knowledges. That is, they are not coupled with the processes of psychosocial individuation through which deep attention is produced. (p. 14)
Here the issue raised by Walter Benjamin about the loss of distinction between author and public meets Stiegler’s concern about the dynamic between
anamnesis and hypomnesis – between the deep attention that is characteristic of the embodied and proximal and the hyper attention that marks the virtual and distant.
Stiegler’s comment also crucially highlights the importance of ‘critical knowledges’. With ICTs rapidly changing how EFL learners in Japan relate to the ‘foreign-ness’ of English, bringing them digitally ‘closer’ to participation in a wider world of meaning-making, educators must find ways to, as Stiegler (2012) puts it, “contribute to the conception of psycho-social techniques capable of supporting digital processes of critical transindividuation” (p. 15). This will require vigilance against the de-humanizing and controlling forces of connectivity/globalization for its own sake, a shallow populism, and an unrecognized but omnipresent consumerism that disrupt an embodied life of depth and self-determination. At the same time, educators need to see foreign language learning as yet another mediation that leads to psychic and cultural transindividuation, an expansion of the capacity to create meaning, community, and possibility.
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