When Linear and Non-Linear Worlds Dissolve
If, right now, you are feeling a sense of agitation—as if no matter how fast you run, you cannot catch up to the future—or a vertigo as if the world itself is liquefying, it is not because your senses have gone mad. It is proof that the very OS of the civilization you depend on is shrieking in agony. In response to this current spacetime, which feels hermetically sealed with no means of escape, I propose a concept dormant within Japanese culture—not as a cliché, but in a form that overturns conventional wisdom. That concept is Ma (Interstice/Space).
At first glance, the concept of Ma may seem hackneyed. However, it has almost exclusively been discussed through its aesthetic attributes, and aesthetic Ma is not the essence of this concept. In its aesthetic element, it can be examined through the concept known in Japan as Kobi-hetsurai (Flattery/Fawning), which is used negatively. This is because the bilateral relationship between the West—the driving force behind what we call the modern world—and Japan has already failed in this regard. The serious issue is that this shallow disguise of a relationship continues today in various forms, proliferating as “mutual understanding.” It is easy to criticize this, but when we consider the horizon that appears when we negate it, a new possibility comes into view.
Certainly, it is possible to appreciate Ma from an aesthetic perspective, and indeed, the Ma frequently discussed in the arts has emphasized this tendency. That is not incorrect in the context of a tourist guide, and the majority of people will be satisfied with that. However, those who truly intend to reach beyond this world are likely exhausted by a reality filled only with such attitudes. I say this because the primary example of such exhaustion is myself. If we continue with this attitude, we will never touch the “quintessence” held by this concept. Ma is not a technique of emotional spatial staging that can be easily verbalized and presented. In other words, the moment one thinks Ma is calculable like a stage effect, one fundamentally fails to understand the concept.
Therefore, this time, I will present the path to where the concept of Ma should have been positioned and understood from the beginning.
First, there is a premise we must contemplate. That is the fact that the OS driving modern civilization contains one fundamental, fatal bug from its very inception. That bug is the blind faith in “Linear Time”—the idea that time flows in a straight line from the past to the future, accumulating along the way. No matter how much we criticize this linear time, we are inevitably imprisoned, unconsciously, in the curse that time is something that accumulates from the past and continues to grow: “today over yesterday,” “tomorrow over today,” “20s over 10s, 30s over 20s.” Strangely, even though spacetime is pluralistic, the code that spawns this mode of thought has been deployed continuously on a human scale.
Moreover, within this fictional dogma of “growth,” we are exhausted by chasing a “Next” that will never be fulfilled. The structural systemic fatigue of the modern, deadlocked world system manifests as extreme mental fatigue in people, becoming a major issue. Yet, those incorporated into the system have lost their escape routes, driven to the point where they are forced to overuse the concept of “Post-.” “Post-Capitalism,” “Post-Truth,” “Post-Human”—these hackneyed phrases seem to say something but say nothing. In fact, they are evidence of an intellectual devastation so profound that one cannot even pretend to depict the future without decorating it with the word “Post-.” This is not an intellectual activity; it is a state of delusional window-dressing, and by no means a healthy condition. Why? Because the people dancing to these phrases repeat a litany of disillusionment and only become more lost. In short, these discourses contribute nothing to people. They are merely the play of so-called intellectuals.
Ironically, the more “Post-” words are mass-produced—granting a decorative quality that makes it appear as if a new perspective has been acquired—the more the recognition of the linear world, where “time is a straight line from past to future,” is actually reinforced, causing a reverse effect where departure becomes difficult. Capitalism, which is fiercely criticized; the obsession with anti-aging; dopamine-driven pleasure consumption—all of these operate on the premise of this “Linear Vector.”
Admittedly, there was once a tangible sense that such a vector was moving society forward. However, as a result of the speed in the digital world accelerating to the limit over the last 30 years, and the boundary between online and offline beginning to vanish, we are starting to feel an intense discomfort—physiologically bordering on nausea—toward conventional linear spacetime sensations. And the cold, hard fact is that no matter how much people pretend with decorations, if one calmly observes from “outside” the system, the OS of the linear world itself has not budged an inch. In other words, nothing has changed. Why, then, is such a delusion continuously and calmly camouflaged?
First, it is conceivable that because the accumulation speed of information within the enclosed interior has become ultra-high-speed and high-capacity, people have deluded themselves into thinking they have already escaped existing time and space, or they have become able to hold the false sensation that they are advancing toward “Post-.” To begin with, even the sensation of advancing or retreating is proof that the “Linear Rules” have not collapsed. The real problem is that the ground itself has not been shaken; they are merely frolicking on the surface. Perhaps, due to the rapid progression of an era of excessive speed and capacity, the brains of intellectuals—who were adapted to the conventional world—discussed the conditions of the new era without being updated at all, resulting in this chaos. In short, the core of the problem lies in the fact that people who should have been weeded out remain un-weeded.
To follow up a bit further, one could say that on the foundation of the linear world, a “liquefaction” phenomenon is currently occurring. Because compressed time writhes within people’s daily lives second by second, the real image has become completely invisible. A typical example is the loss of “seeing people,” a point I frequently argue in Shitsurae. Having lost themselves, people who can no longer see others are panicking and pushing all the causes onto society, the government, or the world; that is the present. Why does no one look at themselves first?
Therefore, even though it is not darkness, it is affirmatively rampant for people to disguise it as darkness and act in confusion, hallucinating due to the flood of high-capacity information overload. With such deep-rooted problems, unless one questions the root itself and considers replacing the foundation, one will only continue to run at full speed over a crumbling suspension bridge while clinging to the old linear model. There is no “Post-” ahead of that path. In the first place, a future processed merely by the brains of intellectuals is of little consequence. So, what exactly is waiting there?
This relates to the Buddhist concept planned for future articles: Kyomu (Nihility/Void).
However, the understanding of this Kyomu can hardly be said to have advanced. This is because, while the perspective of “God” in Western religious and world views is the domination of a “Point” that instructs and illuminates the world from a single spot in the heavens, in Japan, such a “Point” as an absolute coordinate does not exist.
What the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro argued in his logic of “Place” is that existence in Japan is not a “Point,” but lies in the Basho (Place) that envelops it. And importantly, this Basho is not a “Field.” In the dualistic world structure where the Western “Subject” and “Object” oppose each other, it is impossible to escape the perspective where the “Point” of God or Self is established. However, Japanese linguistic structure and thought exist in a state of “Non-separation” (Hi-bunri), which fundamentally does not possess a state where subject and object are separated, and recognizes Basho itself as the basis of cognition.
Of course, neither this “Basho/Philosophy of Place” nor “Hi-bunri/Non-separation” can be understood overnight; these are themes profound enough to fill several books. I will defer the details to another occasion, but if the reader were to imagine it at this stage: if the West is a world where a spotlight (Point) illuminates a single point in the darkness, Japan might be described as a Waka (poetry) -like world where the whole (Basho) faintly emerges in the pale moonlight. Within it, the boundaries between the protagonist and the supporting roles melt together.
However, it is here that there is meaning in questioning again. It is to acknowledge the historical blunder in the relationship between the West and Japan, and to create a new dimension of how to “understand” bi-directionally. Until now, the transmission of Japanese culture was not actually presented by the Japanese side about Japan; it was always fixed on a perspective that pandered to the gaze from the West—so-called “Orientalism.” Against the images of “mysterious,” “quiet,” and “exotic” that the West (or rather Europe) held toward Japan, Japan should have firmly denied that the dimension of mutual understanding should be so banal and empty, and should have presented the essential Japan with the intent of a collision. Instead, the Japanese side also catered to the Japan seen from the West (the desire of Orientalism), packaged culture with proposals matching that, and committed the childish act of providing it as “healing.” Moreover, it is a miserable state of affairs where Japanese people themselves now believe this Orientalist-type Japanese culture is the true Japanese culture.
As a result, the “structural transformative power” that Japanese culture originally possessed to rewrite the OS of modern civilization was eviscerated, reduced to a mere object of appreciation, and consumed in mass quantities to this day. In a sense, due to the ridiculous mutual pandering caused by the disguise of “mutual understanding” at that time, we lost the golden opportunity to surpass the modern world system with our own hands. This is Kobi-hetsurai. In other words, it is not a question of which side is the problem, but that they were in a complicit relationship; since modern “mutual understanding” is discussed on this premise, there is no relationship more untrustworthy than this.
If, after the Meiji era, we had realized these problems and sincerely updated bidirectional understanding in a different dimension, we would not have needed to stray this far on a global scale today, as the West meets its hegemonic end. The reason why mutual understanding between East and West remained superficial and an ineffable discomfort accumulated is that the “Function” (this is a practical function, assuming cultural capital) inherently possessed by this culture was swapped for “Sentiment” and disposed of entirely. Above all, the greatest problem is that both sides are still satisfied continuing the same attitude as the post-Meiji era in different forms. Unless we break away from this, it is moot to discuss how the West and East can create a single world.
In a “Post-” world where the first globalization has completed, we face many discourses stating that a predictable future exists nowhere. However, this also fails to question the Linear World itself; it is merely that the real image has become invisible because the liquefied, compressed state within the Linear World has become everyday life. Against this crisis situation—this sense of blockage that “there is no future as it stands”—the “Deceleration” or “Healing” advocated by intellectuals, or conversely “Acceleration,” offer no solution. The very idea of premising speed is merely a speed adjustment of the linear world and does not change the paradigm. Like before, this is the sophistry of the modern generation to postpone debt to future generations, an abdication of responsibility. This attitude is rampant on a human scale.
Here, the possibility opens up to redefine the Japanese wisdom of Ma and present it as a breakthrough. This is not a proposal for mere aesthetic space or rest. By gaining insight into the culture of Ma, a completely different world opens up; I wish to present the function possessed by Ma as the entrance to that.
In my interpretation, Ma is “a wormhole that allows the Linear World and the Non-Linear World to encounter one another.”
It is a circuit that short-circuits or connects two different worlds, but the crucial point is that the two worlds exist in a state that is not separated. That is the form of “Japanese Conceptual Non-separation” and the essence of Basho. In physics born from the Western world, a wormhole is understood to connect two distant points, but Ma does not point to an unexplained blank zone spreading there; it is in itself a realm of plenitude. In other words, there is no “Point” there.
It functions as a circuit that directly connects the “Current Self,” who continues to act while bound by causality, and the “Future Self,” who has nullified the time axis, within the Basho. Caution is required here: it is not “transcending the time axis,” but “nullifying the time axis.” This point remains mistaken even in the context of Japanese Zen; the moment the concept of “transcendence” is used, it is no longer Zen, yet shockingly, Zen monks themselves do not realize this. Here, time changes from something that “accumulates from the past” to something that “flows backward from the future,” though here too, it is not a “reverse flow” but a “forward flow.” Moreover, it is not a straight linear line, but a non-linear dynamism that writhes bidirectionally like a spiral structure.
It is not connected linearly as “Past Self” → “Current Self” → “Future Self”; rather, everything begins from the recognition that time is nullified within “Self,” and indeed, “linear connection” itself does not exist. Since this “Self” manifests in Basho, it can nullify spacetime. To rephrase it in modern terms, it is not the idea of “making an effort to win the future (Push),” but a paradigm shift to the idea that “the future self is drawing the current self with intense gravity (Pull).” This is the true nature of the mechanism `Confucius` anciently called Tenmei (Heaven’s Mandate). In other words, we are being pulled by “non-Newtonian gravity” from the start.