(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
regionalism is produced, as in the EU, the analysis of institutional, cultural, and ethical
governance in the following sections will proceed in the opposite direction. It will highlight how
East Asian regionalism takes shape through network power that spreads from the periphery
toward the centre in a way that calls into question Europeanization and the centre/periphery
model” (2007, 240). Callahan questions Europe’s centre/periphery model because most
geopolitical analysts perceived East Asian regionalization “as a failure when measured against
the EU’s success” (2007, 231). He argues that “this conclusion makes sense only in terms of a
logic of regionalization that depends on institutional governance. Moreover, this Eurocentric
view is part of EU’s campaign to export its model of governance to the world” (2007, 231). In
view of his explanation, Callahan’s critique stems from the fact that the EU regionalizes using a
top-down tactic, a centrifugal force the emphasis on which is geopolitical influence using
institutional power whereas Asia works with culture and ethics to engender a social networking
in a pull described as centripetal.
Although his argument gives resonances to this thesis which is predicated on the etymologies of
“centre”, the weakness in his argument can be found in the neat delineation of that which is
constituted centripetally and centrifugally. I shall demonstrate that these forces are not that
clearly defined in transnational interactions by reworking the cultural dimension of identity
politics based on the scientific trope of the double foci discovered to enable the dual earthly
revolutions around the sun, a centre splitting into two and embodying the East and the West,
arguably further divisive in its maneuverings, a concept aptly figured by the biogenetic theme of
Hideo Nakata’s films. The thesis starts by calling into question the above patterns of governance
in Callahan’s “Logic of Governance” with East Asia’s “colonization in reverse”, an analogy
attendant to internationally well-received East-West translated or collaborated films. This paper
works with the Ring series (1998-2005) and Death Note, L: Change the World (2008) by Hideo
Nakata, The Departed (2006) and Infernal Affairs (2002) in order to verify the thesis; they are
not only metaphors of the postmodern crises of values but also instances of how aesthetics can be
interpreted in two ways, denotatively and connotatively. The first gives us the literal meaning
bound to a referent, the filmic plot, which is then raised to a different level of signification. A
complex reading of the films’ symbolic is given when the aesthetic meanings of the abovementioned
movies lead to the second order of signification illustrating the underlying ideologies
in and through their apocalyptic anticipation. This political forecasting depends on the
disorientation and disassociation discovered at the so-called “source”, which I call the
“apocalyptic nexus”, rather than connection and alignment. But it is also this disorientation and
disassociation that gives to association and orientation. Thus what we have are beginnings
instead of a beginning, already enumerated in Callahan’s essay on the various governances found
in the world.
Etymologically, the word “centre” in Old French means “source”. Coincidentally, it includes the
Chinese root, which means “the middle point of an object”. Adding this meaning to its Greek
base, which means “goad, peg, stationary point of a pair of compasses”, the centre is the point of
orientation and alignment. The centre emits a centripetal force that “gather[s]” the elements in its
constitution of a configuration. Yet, scientifically speaking, inherent to the configurative pull is
the centrifugal propulsion because any backward motion entails a simultaneous elemental rush
forward, a push that Callahan uses to describe European constitutional politics. According to
Callahan, whereas Europe is constitutionally centrifugal, spreading its political dominance
outwards, East Asia is constitutionally centripetal: “The previous section argued that, rather than
101