Bruce R. Caron,
Department of Anthropology University of California, Santa Barbara
DRAFT for comment only
Article to appear in the Kyoto Journal 1996.
Turn ons? Turn offs? Tourniquets?
My own first encounter with a popularized "blood-type knowledge" was in 1983, at a Roppongi oldies livehouse (a Tokyo bar with a live band playing '50s rock and roll) called "Lollipop". The matchbooks they gave away were printed on the inside cover with blank spaces to be filled in so that you could hand this to a prospective new lover. The spaces were labeled something like: "name," "age," "occupation," "telephone," "turn-ons," and... "blood type." This last line was a curious, if somewhat morbid, non-sequitur to the others. Blood, I figured, was not very high up on the list of bodily fluids one might hope to exchange after an evening of dancing "At the Hop." Besides, I wasn't even sure what blood type I had.Although its sanguinary precursors (those various meanings that "blood" has long held for emperors, vampires, marriage brokers, and physicians) are very, very old, ABO blood-typing is really quite new: before the start of the 20th century nobody knew what blood type they had, as this was only discovered in 1901. Blood-type knowledge began as one of those seriously lame-brained scientific ideas (seen as such from the lofty vantage point of hind-sight) at the beginning of our century: the marriage of the--even then increasingly irrelevant--notion of "race" to the idea of a "national" character type. This discourse led to speculation on the different emotional natures of various tribes and nations, ideas which persist as national stereotypes in jokes that begin like this: "A German, and Englishman, an Italian and a Frenchman were riding in an airplane..." Then, through the efforts of a few dedicated European theorists in the 1920s, this race-nation/emotion-notion became linked to indexes of (ABO) blood types calculated for individuals who lived within the boundaries of various nation-states. Of course, these national boundaries were often no more than a decade or two old, but already, state institutions were cementing themselves a gene pool that supposedly stretched back into prehistory. Finally the prescriptive role of blood type was sharpened to fit the individual personality (Furukawa, 1927).
This idea was published, and tossed around in parlors and seminars, but it rapidly became one of those flash-in-the-pan (or fusion in the bottle) notions that had its fifteen minutes of scientific fame before everyone (who was anyone) in medicine and psychology echoed a simultaneous "NOT!," a pronouncement intended to flush this notion right down the discursive drain where abandoned ideas (such as "the Earth is the center of the universe," or "atoms are the smallest possible bits of matter") are supposed to fade into obscurity. So then, how come they were printing matchbooks in Tokyo in the 1980s asking people to fill in their blood-type?
This question leads us to wonder about the unintended consequences of modern science, and to a concern about the overall effects of scientific knowledges upon the general population. The unintended consequences of scientific discoveries are a large part of global modern-day risks. However most of the current talk about the dangers of modern science centers on how new technologies open up arenas of moral uncertainty (such as cloning) or political/environmental risk (new weapons or toxins). These concerns are real ones, and I do not want to ignore these when I bring up still another concern. What blood-type knowledge shows us is a wholly different type of scientific risk, the risk of "run-away" information. Born as an unintended after-effect of other knowledges--a nasty little hangover from the new wines of modernity--blood-type knowledge provides a fine example of the kind of toxic verbal leakage that the scientific community has so far not bothered itself with, but it also opens up a window to the investigation of the discursive effects of modern science.
New and Improved
In early modernity, say, in the long eighteenth century, most of what we now call "science" was comprised of individual researchers using experimental techniques to clear out long-held "common-sense" notions on everything from how meat rots to where water goes when it boils. In this process, not only were the contents of existing notions challenged, but the very idea that new notions were valuable--that new knowledge was often better than old--became a feature of everyday life. The emerging arena for new-fangled ideas opened up an expectation of ever-newer knowledges, and created a venue for "the new," which is very much at the heart of the enterprise of "modernity."But later on, particularly once the twentieth century got underway, most of the new ideas of science were not proposed against residual "common-sense" notions but rather against the very ideas that science had itself proposed in previous centuries, or decades, or years (or just last month). Science now seems to be continually undoing itself even as it outdoes itself. And the worst "heresies" in science are not those lingering premodern so-called superstitions (flat-earth theories, demons and witches), but rather the malingering bits of yesterday's theoretical-triumph-turned-flotsam that clog up the vision of where science is going. And as the knowledge-future arrives at ever greater speed, it is becoming even more important to clear away the discarded tomorrows that now obscure the present state-of-the-art.
For, in its rush for new knowledge, science regularly proposes a surplus of "bright ideas" many times the number of those very few ideas that eventually get accepted as being even possibly useful. Most of the soon-to-be rejected notions (which may, in fact, be very valuable in pointing out wrong turns) soon become appropriately obscure. But not all of them. And this, as it turns out, has unintended consequences for all of us who must live with the discursive waste of abstract systems. The bad news is this: not only have various institutions of modernity given us polluted air, water, and soil, but now it appears that they also left us with a morass of darkened pools of meanings and significance. These verbal Chernobyls continue to vex us decades after they were abandoned by those who first articulated them.
Modernity has its share of problems. Some can be seen as the lingering vestiges of longer-term problems, both social and natural. But more and more, modernity creates its own problems. And some of these can be traced to the unintended effects of modern "scientific" notions: ideas which, despite their lack of current significance among experts, retain a grasp on the popular imagination. Only some of these (such as alien invasions, dinosaur DNA, and penis envy) come from the "natural" sciences, which are, of course, where dangerous and useful new technologies bring us new hazards (bio-weapons, global warming, and nuclear accidents) and lifetyle add-ons (global travel, cable television, and the internet).
Many problematic notions (such as IQ tests and racial stereotypes) were first discursified in the "social sciences." In fact, the products of the social sciences are almost entirely discursive formations. Psychology (like anthropology) is a field that spans the natural and social sciences, a position from which even more mischief is possible. For example, blood-type knowledge is much more a psychology than serology.
Psycho-killer, qu'est-ce que c'est?
The medical use of ABO blood-type information, crucial for modern surgery, entered Japan soon after it was discovered in Europe. But what about the idea of "personality"--the other half of the blood-type knowledge equation? The measurement of personality, of one's hidden inclinations, dispositions, and potentials, is far less clear-cut than the simple clinical test of one's ABO blood type. And, while a critical history of personality measurement efforts is well beyond the scope of this article1, [NOTE 1: Gould (1981) offers a critical review of intelligence measurements and the scientific logic behind these. Many of his arguments (particularly on the problem of reification) would also apply to the history and use of personality measurements. Recent revivals of the IQ debate show us how the desire for this type of knowledge sustains its popular distribution even though a chorus of "experts" debunk its claims.] a few comments are in order.Blood-type knowledge depends on the idea of "personality" in the singular--on psychological theories that say that each of us has only one of these, and that it comes in a form at once individual and normalizeable, but mostly it is fixed, something we are born with and can do little about. This notion of personality, developed by Freud and others, has informed both psychological theory and popular conceptions of "the self" for a hundred years, and in many parts of the world.
One common type of test was developed early in this century in which individuals are given a long series of highly personal questions (similar to those a psychiatrist might ask). Their answers provided an inventory of self-reported dispositions. The pre-World War II Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) has 550 verbal items which are answered true or false. The interpretation of this confessional barrage includes ten clinical scales for such syndromes as paranoia, depression, and hypomania. The apparent utility of the initial personality tests led to broader measures of emotional and other characteristics. The use of scalar interpretations were broadened to include "psychodynamic processes such as repression, projection, and perceptual defense and vigilance; emotional maturity and control; social conformity, popularity, and leadership; political participation, religious affiliation, and occupational selection" (Dahlstrom 1968).
Personality profile tests informed the various personality stereotypes which were allocated to various blood types in the blood-type knowledge discourse. But blood typing became a one-step surrogate test which revealed the real personality, independent of one's current moods and perceptions. This knowledge allows the individual to act according to their deeper inclinations, while it told them precisely what these are. Blood-type knowledge tells people stories about themselves. Stories of their own natural personality, and their ethnic nationality. Stories also about their lover's real motives and their boss's fatal flaw. In Japan, these stories were first printed in millions of copies of hundreds of books, but now they are also being inscribed on millions of bodies and in millions of relationships. Today, from the perspective of science, this "heretical" knowledge is completely out of control.
"Junior! That's not how 'A' people behave!"
In November of 1991, a mainstream Japanese science magazine, Kagaku Asahi (Kimoto 1991), reported on findings disclosed at the 32nd Conference of the Japan Social Psychology Association, held in October of 1991 at Tokyo Gakkei University. The findings were as improbable as they were unsettling. Two researchers, Yamazaki Kenji and Sakamoto Akira, reported the results of a survey of various studies done in Japan to measure the correlation between ABO blood type and personality traits. As before, the studies2 [NOTE 2: For two decades, Japanese cultural observers, in and out of the main medical/academic organizations, have monitored the waxing and waning of overt popularity for blood-type knowledge in Japan. The number of books and articles about blood-type knowledge in Japanese from 1978 to 1982 shows both the productivity and the controversy of this knowledge. A recent (May 1993) compendium of blood-type research (Shirasa and Iguchi) provides a bibliography of sources compiled from Japanese language databases searched using keywords of "blood type" (ketsuekigata) and "personality" (seikaku), or "temperament" (kishitsu). In the above period, more than 350 books and 150 articles were published in Japan about blood-type knowledge. Most of the books were produced for the consumer market for this information.] they studied could not establish a significant positive correlation. However, their survey showed a significant trend in Japan towards a positive correlation between specific blood types (A and B in particular) and certain scalar values determined by well-established personality tests (c.f., Yamazaki and Sakamoto, 291: Fig. 8).Yamazaki and Sakamoto reported that, over the period of 1978-1988, measurements of the correlation between blood-type and personality-type have converged on the threshold of statistical significance. If this trend continues, social psychological studies will, in a few years, serve to "prove" precisely the claim that blood type is statistically related to personality type. At that point, from the purview of global science, the Japanese could become the first population to actually act their blood type.
While many people who use blood-type knowledge do so in a playful way (much like dabbling in astrology), at its potential limit, blood-type knowledge is not an innocent discourse. It authorizes a normalizing identity that stops the process of individual imagination. And applied across a population, it carries the same type of arbitrary force as other major social forms of discrimination. In many ways, blood-type knowledge is serological equivalent to skin-color racism (and it has been used to naturalize the difference between national populations), in other ways, blood-type knowledge resembles sexism (dividing people into naturalized "A" and "B" types), and then it also carries overtones of classism (does anyone ask the Emperor's blood type?). And so we might ask, is there any way to stop this knowledge from embedding itself into people's lives?
To argue that blood-type knowledge is succeeding as a "self-fulfilling" prophesy fueled by the media (the hypothesis given by Yamazaki and Sakamoto) is not nearly sufficient to explain this effect, and is even less useful in helping us to reverse it. And the irony is that once blood-type knowledge becomes a reliable psychological indicator, institutions may decide to use this as an official tool, say, for selecting new employees, further embedding the knowledge into social practices. We could be witnessing the birth of a new social-ideological formation.
"What is your blood type?"
Many, if not most, people in Japan, I would guess--apart from the Emperor--have, at some point, been asked this question. It may be offered up in an innocent, friendly manner, as a small curiosity on the part of the other person, rather like being asked "What is your (astrological) sign?" But then its answer may be received with a knowing look as if a missing piece of some crucial puzzle suddenly fell into place. "TB'-gata... soo da nee!" ["TB'-type, really...!"] This is how the discourse of blood-type knowledge is reproduced. Science and discourseMichel Foucault (1926-1984), a recent post-structuralist French scholar, focused his work on the study of "discourse:" that is, on the way that the institutional use of language integrally connects knowledge and power and applies these to people, to their bodies and their imaginations. From Foucault's work, we can acquire the notion of "discursification." This tells of the moment when a new idea enters into a field of language/practice. Discursification describes how a concept, like a verbal virus, expands through the population of other concepts, and is carried along by a combination of institutional and personal desires as it (or rather, the people who use it) creates a new "economy" for its use.
A good example of "discursification" happens when a previously un-connected cluster of human medical symptoms gets named as a new disease. Discursify a new disease and look what happens next: people can contract it, doctors will diagnose it, drugs can be marketed to treat it, and, most importantly, insurance companies will pay for this treatment. Note also how each of these practices is localized into bodies and medical offices and laboratories. Discursification describes the transforming of a new idea into an accepted and familiar code of knowledge. Its traces a chain of events that bring a concept into use by many different people. And this use enables and displays its use-fullness, which promotes its use. In other words, it is a process that moves towards its potential limit. But there is a aspect of this process that has not been very well explored: how do we stop it?
The real problem is that not all newly discursified concepts turn out to be as useful or clever or even as nice as the first claims for them offered. The idea of "race" is prime example. Throughout decades of serious scientific attention (by anthropological and medical researchers) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the concept entered into the public sphere, where it became the currency of social mavens and politicians; and "race" continues today to colonize the popular imagination, long after nearly all anthropological and medical researchers have agreed that it is a scientifically questionable distinction. But how do we reverse a century of familiarity with the idea of "race", which has had such widespread unintended consequences? How do we undo the original speaking of this idea?
Auto-da-f
Knowledge management used to be a lot easier, or at least, a lot more certain. For millennia, professionals in various religions wielded near total institutional control over their religious teachings. Of course, back then (and also now, as Salmon Rushdie knows full well), heresies could be tied to the individual mouths that spoke them, and the mouths were conveniently connected to bodies (heretics), and the bodies could be bound to large heavy objects that could then be tossed into nearby lakes. Well, occasionally, new ideas were discursified, and then more widespread destruction was required. For centuries, genocidal wars against heretical groups bloodied many locations in Europe and elsewhere, all to preserve the true (authoritative) notion of what is what, and who gets to say this so.The move away from this sort of fatal "knowledge management" into an arena of "freely competing" ideas is one of the hallmarks of modernity (although, again someone would have to keep reminding Salmon Rushdie of this). Science was, and is, far less concerned with religion's manner of questioning (and answering) notions of metaphysical speculation, and adherence to particular beliefs (apart from an adherence to the scientific method as a mode of knowledge/belief). And scientists are far less interested than Bishops in "policing" their own knowledge products.
The truth is, there is very little that scientific organizations can do to control what happens to its products once they enter the public domain. And again, we should not be asking science to manage ideas "the old-fashioned" way. We certainly don't want a "science inquisition." Nor do we want to control the scientific imagination through some bureaucratic mechanism. But we can, at least, hold science to its own claims about qualities of scientific knowledge.
True science
What science tells us is this: Religious knowledge is always authenticated through claims on its special origin and transmission, but scientific knowledge should be judged on its own terms, on its "use-value," as warranted by its experimentally confirmed purchase on empirical reality. Origins do not matter, and some final purpose is not important, for what counts is the current inventory of available, and reproducible, information. This means that the current state of scientific knowledge should occupy the sole position from which the demonstrably best grasp on the contents and features of the known world can be demonstrated.There are several available critiques of the actual qualities of scientific knowledge, and scientific organizations are not above attempts at managing new knowledge for their own ends. But here I only wish to notice that science makes an epistemological claim (a claim about the accuracy and use-value of its information), whereas religion makes other (ontological and teleological) claims. The claims of religions can, and probably must be defended rigorously to maintain their integrity, but scientific information offers a presumably self-evident face-value as its main warrant. On its own terms, we can see that the better that science gets in its own methods, the better grasp it knowledge should achieve on its subject matter, and the less need there is for an institutional authorization for this knowledge. When the "proof is in the pudding" the name on the box becomes unimportant.
New global risks
This does not, however, release science from a moral responsibility to do what it can to acquire a better perspective on the social/environmental effects of new ideas and technologies. This should be a central aim of the ongoing critique of science. And it is not unreasonable to request that scientific communities do a better job of properly disposing of their abandoned concepts--of vigorously advertising its mistakes as mistakes--instead of letting them roam loose through the corridors of modernity. When it comes to pollution control we should expect no less of our academies than we do of the neighborhood fast-breeder reactor. But more than that, we must assume a larger responsibility as consumers of scientific products, including discursive knowledges.Asking science to do the whole job of knowledge control, as religions once did, credits scientific institutions the wrong kind (and too much) authority over the effects of their knowledge production. And it avoids a critique of the more widespread and powerful discursive practices where these knowledges are being learned and reproduced. One response to the problem is to try to make everyone a better scientist. Certainly science organizations (including universities) can spend more effort on the education of the populations that are subject to the knowledges these organizations create. But this response also avoids a more complex issue of knowledge reception, an issue that is clearly demonstrated by the popularization of blood-type knowledge in Japan (and elsewhere).
In large part, the mass reception of scientific knowledge is a consequence of modern population formation. Science, in the service of the nation-state, promotes population-monitoring measures that have the consequences of increasing the measurability of populations. This is due to what Anthony Giddens (1992) calls "institutional reflexivity." Through the use of mass media and public education and other agencies of the modern state (such as the military), populations are reflexively constructed in a manner that amplifies the effects of modern discursive formations. Populations are created as target-users of modern discourses, and through this use they begin to resemble the discourses they consume.
Only certain types of populations are valued by modern state and market institutions. For example, "patriotism" and "consumer loyalty" are desired outcomes of well-constructed national populations. And these are outcomes that are very difficult to achieve if the population begins to fragment into counter-groups and skeptical individuals. The social sciences in particular have been instrumental in articulating and monitoring the population effects of modernity. But by discursifying modernity through its normalized populations, it ends up valorizing the processes of normalization.
Take Japan
Many of the people I spoke with in Japan were concerned that my attention to blood-type knowledge would, when published, only reconfirm the idea that Japan is not a "modern" state, but rather, that its population, however literate, is prone to a fascination with superstition. I would rather suggest that here Japan is showing itself to be a quintessentially modern state.Remember, blood-type knowledge is product of modernity, and the idea of applying this new concept tactically to one's life is an entirely modern behavior. That a population does this with statistical predictability means that the nation-state of Japan has managed the transition from a pre-modern populous (an assemblage of local groups) to a national population, a population trained to consume without question and en masse the discourses of modernity (from race, to gender, to nation, to blood-type). There may be no more modern a nation than Japan, if one were to judge by amount of "modernity" required for an entire nation to act its blood-types.
"Yes," and then, maybe, "No"
Since we cannot grant "science" the institutional wherewithal to control the use of the discourses it creates, we turn, instead, to the users. As was mentioned above, one way to increase the control over scientific knowledge within a population is to make everyone in the population a better scientist. Scientists are the first to toss aside information that no longer fits. But a second way is to make everyone a unique user for this knowledge, to help each individual to become become a person who no longer fits within a population. The first way responds to the epistemological claims of science, and the second to the discursive formations of modern populations. Because the problem is both a matter of production/consumption and discursive formation, both ways are needed. We can see that the first way involves giving everyone a healthy dose of scientific skepticism, perhaps by increasing the quality of science teaching in public schools. But how do we accomplish the second? How do we extract individuals from populations?There are small-scale tactics that are useful to remove a single person from the population modalities of modernity. These methods involve adding noise to the system. For example you can answer all survey questions "Yes" when it rains, and "No" when the sun is out. Or, start your own surveys that ask questions that interrogate the place of the subject in the population, such as, "When did you decide which gender you wanted to be?" But such tactics, however clever, are not enough to resist the population dynamics at play in the modern state. Much of what modernity has offered to us is so much less than what it can and must. But the failure is ours, and not science's, it lies in the limits of our imagination. The continuing effects of modernity's early discursive formations position us in a modernity that only seems to perform to its darkest potentials. And we will continue to dwell in a modernity that none of us asked for until enough of us ask for something better.
Something completely different
Recently, social critics have begun using novel discursifications to loosen the hold of knowledges that have colonized the cultural imagination. One effect of this, an entirely intentional one, is to rethink populations as complex aggregates of individuals and individuated desires, and then to spread this discourse of plurality into existing populations. Feminists and queer-theorists are using this technique to recode the discursive formations of "gender" and "family." The idea is to create multiple populations, and to use the very idea of heterogeneity, of difference, as a positive attribute to break up populations into small groups where internal critiques can further release individual members from population-generated notions of identity.For those, like myself, who find the very idea of blood-type knowledge to be a defeat of the uses we would make of our own imaginations, there are emerging signs of a new heresy--critiques not only of the notions spun from the abstract systems of science, but of the place of science in our lives, and of our position within any statistical population.
Heretics for life
We are "population heretics" who would choose our own blood-types, nation identifications, gender and age roles, and change our minds with unexpected regularity. And when asked "What type are you?" would reply, "This morning I decided to be a "Q" but now I think I'm probably something else." Our problem is that there are so few of us. However, our numbers are growing. Self-help literature, groups fighting various addictions, and organizations favoring social/environmental awareness: these are new cultural formations where alternative discourses are today assembled and deconstructed. And the internet could provide a new arena for counter-population discourses.And yet, until enough population heretics reside in Japan, the population (as a population) will remain subject to the discourses of modernity, and unable to resist being imagined by modernity instead of building a modernity from their own imaginations. And until enough population heretics reside in the world we can all plan on living in our own private "Japan."
So what blood type are you?
Sources Available upon request.
e-mail 6500caro@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu
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