Puissance and the Art of Worlding: Arts NPO and the Civic Coproduction of Yokohama City, Japan

Abstract

The social structures that organized Japan’s postwar ways of life are rapidly dissolving in post-recessionary Japan as neoliberalism pushes large numbers of youth into precarious employment conditions, forcing them to put off or give up having families and shifting the demographic ratio to an aging society. The City of Yokohama, the second largest municipality in the greater Tokyo metropolis, is implementing the Creative City policy since 2004 that promotes culture and the arts as a solution to this national crisis. In this dissertation, I study several Creative City programs and events coordinated by government-affiliated arts NPO Koganechō Area Management Center and BankART 1929. I also study a number of artists who have unintentionally produced civic spaces at the periphery of Yokohama city by adopting global signs and symbols to organize cultural events in new historical assemblages. This dissertation studies the Creative City programs and events in order to show how the municipal region’s solution to a national crisis is also a political strategy to constitute civic spaces as the ground from which to produce figures that support the cultural production of Yokohama city at a time when the relationship between cities and the state is undergoing change. This dissertation analyzes Creative City programs and events including the 2014 Yokohama Triennale, the Koganechō walking tours and a lifelong education course at the BankART School. I show how these programs and events organize volunteers into communities of practice where they learn the cultural literacy to performatively enact as figures of ‘the city’ that author and articulate puissance, defined as the self-organizing power of communities in crisis. In doing so, I argue that Creative City programs and events provide a stage for the volunteers to performatively enact their lives-in-the-city, through which volunteers manage the ontological reality of ‘the city’ as they also support the City of Yokohama respond to the political reality of neoliberal capitalism by bringing the City’s stories, sights and visions of ‘the city’ to life.