The individual, kata and the arts: semiotic considerations on cultural identity

Abstract This article is a semiotics-based attempt to explain artistic creativity of traditional East Asia and the Romantic West. Invoking the Greimas-Tarasti model, in which the modalities of “will,” “must,” “can,” and “know” are considered as a semiotic system, the author tries to examine how these modalities are manifested in discourses that define artistic subjectivities and actions. The concepts of the sublime and yūgen, authenticity and kokoro, formal communicational standards and kata, conventional beauty and hana are discussed side by side from a comparative perspective. However, the article tries to reveal cultural creative patterns not so much in terms of qualitative difference as in terms of a particular configuration of a universal system. In the subject–object conjunction-oriented metaphysics of Buddhism and Confucianism, the immanent subjectivity is treated as constituted through the body and social mediation. For this reason, as we will see from the analysis of Nō theater performance principles, individual kokoro can hardly be distinguished from impersonal kata. In the Romantic paradigm, longing for an initial (or final) subject–object conjunction is expressed in the ideal of organic synthesis, and artistic creation is considered as the best manifestation of such synthesis. However, this conjunction functions in most cases as an immanent aesthetic vision, and symbols can hardly become the “complete representation of true spiritual life.”