RELATED TERMS: Mono No Aware and Ma; Sabi and Wabi-Sabi; World as Geoeconomics and Geopolitics [Snippets 10]
Preamble
In a post on David Lynch’s film set design in relation to the design of narrative environments (Narrative Environments – Lynchian Set Design), the significance of Tibet, meditation and yoga in Twin Peaks was seen to exhibit signs of intertextuality with late Victorian European and American encounters with Asian religions (Krug, 2017). A genealogy of the construction of the ‘supernatural’ in Twin Peaks can therefore be traced to this particular period in the Western encounter with Buddhist traditions.
Such an intertextual semiotics is valuable. It shows the links between literary data from South Asian literature dating from as early as the first millennium and a pop-cultural television phenomena addressed to an early 1990s television audience. If one relies upon this means alone, however, to explain the appearance and significance of the themes of Tibet, meditation and yoga in Twin Peaks, there is a risk that it becomes formal and ahistorical. In discussing what these signifiers mean, the issue is not simply where such tropes have come from, their borrowed meanings, but also why they are (re-)appearing at this particular historical moment, their contemporary significance.
Furthermore, too much emphasis on the borrowings and legacies from an earlier period may inadvertently reiterate understandings from that time, such as, for example, post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, the racist, Eurocentric social-evolutionary discourse that dominated European and American scholarship throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the kind of ‘mono-myth’ making which the field of Religious Studies has sought to undo since the late 20th century (Krug, 2017).
Here, Krug is raising a methodological point that is applicable to design practices generally and to the design of narrative environments more particularly. He is suggesting that, while it is important to acknowledge intertextual and intersemiotic genealogies, that is, the design, literary, theatrical or cinematic tropes that are employed and from whence they borrow or appropriate meaning, it is equally, if not more important, to consider why these specific tropes are effective as signifiers within the particular historical moment or moments in which they are being deployed or re-deployed. A formal, genealogical, semiotic creative intervention must be supplemented and complemented by a consideration of how the signifiers act situationally in the historical context. This opens the question of the complexity of understanding the situational conditionality, meaning and actantiality of designed entities, from artefacts to services to systems. Krug specifically highlights the correlation between pop-cultural phenomena and the geo-political and geo-economic contexts in which de facto they operate.
Therefore, Krug argues, even while a convincing case can be made that Twin Peaks did indeed draw upon a few well-engrained conceptions of Tibetan Buddhism, meditation and yoga that have survived since the 19th century in the USA and Europe, the global political-economic context should also be considered as a contribution to explaining the particular significance of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism as a pop-cultural phenomenon in the late 1980s and 1990s.
By extension, we may gain some insight into the emergence and persistence of (Zen and Tibetan) Buddhist themes in design phenomena, as indeed reflected in this Incomplete … website itself: what role do the signifiers incompleteness, imperfection and impermanence play in the situation of design in the early decades of the 21st century; and what of non-duality, in-betweenness and transformation?
Zen Buddhism and the early Cold War period
To understand the widespread popularity of Tibet in the 1990s and its relationship to US geopolitical interests, Krug (2017) argues that it is necessary to return to the early years of the Cold War. At that time, we find a different Buddhism and cultural aesthetic but configured to align with US geo-political and geo-economic ends in a way that is parallel to that of Tibetan Buddhism in the 1980s and 1990s[1].
Thus, in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, Zen Buddhism played an integral pop-cultural role in transforming public sentiment toward Japan and Japanese culture. The marketing of Japanese cultural aesthetics and religion in this period provides a precursor of the political and economic interests that were at stake in the construction of Tibetan Buddhism in the US pop-cultural imagination in the 1980s and 1990s.
This same post-World War Two, early Cold War period saw the gradual emergence of the dominance of visual imagery through photography, cinema and television, a media environment which permitted a popular engagement with Asian religious traditions. However, while such images were generally positive, they also tended to rely upon and reinforce certain racialised notions of Asianness and Asian religiosity which went relatively unnoticed and unchallenged at the time (Iwamura, 2010).
The shift in popular opinion toward Japanese culture during the early years of the Cold War can be correlated to a broader shift in US political and economic policy. This was motivated by the need to secure a foothold in Asia in order to counter the expansion of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. This shift can be traced through the changes in the cover of Time magazine. In 1941, one of its covers displayed menacing images of key figures in the Japanese navy and army. During the war period, Japan was represented as a modern political threat: disciplined, militaristic and humourless (Iwamura, 2010: 28). During the postwar period, however, images of Japanese men rarely appeared, replaced instead by their feminine counterparts. By 1955, the Time cover was showing pacific images of the Japanese Premier, Ichiro Hatoyama, against a backdrop of a traditional Japanese watercolour. The accompanying 1955 article concludes that Japan was to be the anchor of strong Anti-Communist policy in Asia.
Velde (2016) confirms this transformation of the image of Japan and highlights the role of ceramics in effecting it: “In the 1950s Japan’s image was transformed from an imperialist threat into a peaceful democratic ally of the US against communism. Ceramics were already a tool for soft power in the 19th century, but the ‘craze’ for Japanese ceramics and Zen philosophy increased after the Second World War and reached its zenith in the 1970s.”
The domestic side of this international economic and political policy strategy explains, to an extent, why a figure like D. T. Suzuki emerged from relative obscurity to become a well-known ambassador of Japanese culture through the vehicle of Zen Buddhism. The increasing fascination with Zen Buddhism and Asian religions more generally within the USA in the latter part of the 20th century becomes more readily understandable when the wider political and economic context is made explicit.
An already nascent liberal inclusivism among American intellectuals, converts, and casual sympathisers with Asian religious ideas and cultures was harnessed in order to graft an appearance of tolerance and pluralism onto the United State’s otherwise narrower and more self-interested postwar political and economic aspirations in Asia.
Popular media images were matched by an exponential rise in the publication of print media on Zen Buddhism. This enabled a symbiotic relationship to emerge between the increasing interest in Zen Buddhism among American intellectuals, literary figures and popular media sources, on the one hand, and the US State Department’s explicitly stated geo-political goals in the early decades of the Cold War, on the other hand. The deployment of Japanese culture and Zen Buddhism to generate substantial domestic support for the USA’s post–World War Two role in East and South East Asia was considered largely a public relations success story.
Tibetan Buddhism and the post-Cold War period
Four decades after the end of World War Two, towards the end of the Cold War, a similar articulation of pop-cultural phenomena and US geopolitical strategy occurred, this time through the vehicle of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan culture. The Dalai Lama’s rise as a pop-cultural icon and the increased interest in Tibetan Buddhism and politics in the late 1980s can be correlated to late Cold War US economic and geopolitical interests.
American and European interest in Tibetan culture and Tibetan Buddhism has a long history that predates the Cold War. However, the rate at which the Dalai Lama and all things Tibetan began to appear in the popular media and in academic presses from the mid-1980s onward marked a particularly frenetic period in the US encounter with Tibet.
It was, in part, fuelled by the fear that China was emerging as a powerful economic and political adversary to the USA and its European allies, following the decline and eventual demise of the Soviet Union. In this context, Tibet took on a significant role in the emergence of a late-20th-century neoliberal progressive activism that sought to define the kind of global capitalism promoted by the USA as a moral force.
It is no accident that the 14th Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, four months after the Chinese government’s violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests. By offering temporary amnesty status to Chinese nationals resident in the USA, President George H. W. Bush sought to capitalise on this opportunity to claim the moral high ground on the global stage.
For American audiences in the early 1990s, the cause of Tibetan freedom operated as a signifier in a larger propaganda campaign that aligned ‘democracy’ and ’capitalism’ with the more abstract notion of ‘freedom’. It was this configuration of democracy-capitalism-freedom that was presented as a moral good, in contrast to a vision of communism and socialism that the same audiences understood to be essentially amoral and oppressive.
Thus, the deployment of Tibetan-related themes became signifiers of political resistance in the 1980s, reaching its height by the mid to late 1990s. As a movement, it consisted of an ill-assorted grouping of Tibetan religious leaders and political activists, European and American activists, sympathisers, converts, scholars, and pop culture personalities from the film and music industries. This meant that, paradoxically, the subculture of liberal activism in the USA, which was typically oriented against the global aspirations of the emerging neoliberal and neoconservative political elite, found themselves playing a role in a morality play designed to help solidify the USA’s global political and economic domination.
After the 1990s, Tibet faded into the background of the American pop-cultural imagination, even while the People’s Republic of China further tightened its control over ethnic Tibetans’ rights to free political and religious expression in response to a wave of Tibetan protests in the spring of 2008 prior to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. Thus, while nearly all of the factors that supported the emergence of a culture of progressive activism across Europe and America for which Tibet served as an important symbol in the 1990s remain in place, and perhaps have intensified, there was one exception: the political will in the USA to employ Tibet as a symbol with which to posture as morally superior to the Chinese government.
This is because, Krug (2017) argues, such a moral posturing is no longer within the political and economic interests of the United States and its European allies in the early 21st century. The legacy of the more romantic and esoteric trends in the American interpretation of Buddhism have been replaced by a more rationalist and pragmatic interpretation, accompanied by the movement away from any overtly political associations that Tibetan Buddhism might carry.
The neoliberal global economic policies that relied upon the deployment of Tibet and Tibetan culture as a signifier of moral leadership and human rights became largely obsolete in the wake of George W. Bush’s policy of ‘pre-emptive warfare’ and the USA trading in its critical role in supporting multi-lateral military peace-keeping operations through the United Nations for a largely unilateral war against a feeling, that of ‘terror.’
When viewed in this historical context, Krug (2017) concludes, the employment of Tibet, yoga, and meditation in Twin Peaks can be seen as players [actants], even if minor ones, in the political theatre of the United States’ moral posturing in the final decade and immediate aftermath of the Cold War. For a decade, against their better judgement, major pop-cultural icons, with Tibet as their symbol, essentially sold the idea of neoliberal globalisation as a new world order that was fundamentally moral.
Notes
[1] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discusses this efflorescence of interest in Zen Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism in her essay ‘Pedagogy of Buddhism’. She writes, “Over the past two decades, even as the long-standing presence of Buddhist elements in U.S. culture has become explosively visible, critical scholarship has explored the vast, systemic misunderstandings and cross-purposes that seem to underlie this trans-Pacific pedagogy. An ‘‘American Buddhist’’ reader of the critical scholarship might well be chastened to learn in how many, crucial, near invisible ways her access to the Asian texts, practices, and understandings has been compromised by the history of their transmission to the West.” (Sedgwick, 2003: 154-155)
References
Iwamura, J. N. (2011) Virtual Orientalism: Asian religions and American popular culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Krug, P. (2017) ‘“I’ll See You Again in Twenty-Five Years”’, in Hackett, P. G. (ed.) The Assimilation of yogic religions through pop culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Sedgwick, E. K. (2003) Pedagogy of Buddhism, in Touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 153–181.
Velde, R. te (2016) Design as “hard power”: Design diplomacy during the Cold War, Designgeschiedenis. Available at: https://www.designhistory.nl/2016/design-as-hard-power-design-diplomacy-during-the-cold-war/ (Accessed: 13 March 2025).
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