Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

and the New Left in Japan. We are interested not only in the transgression of technology but also in the technology of transgression. The shift from pop to popular is a shift from style to social movement. Metaphor The term brings to light the notion of trope and narrativity and the hermeneutic i mag ination bearing on the body, feeling , and emotion : metaphor, agai n , is not just representation but aesthetic. Justi niani presents the Jeepney as a cultural icon whose iconography has been in a great sense codified by the State and the art world. In the Martial Law regime of Ferdi nand Marcos, the Jeepney was made to embody Philippine identity in world exhibitions in New York, West Asia, and London . I n this administration, the Jeepney was made a prominent symbol in such high-profile tourism initiatives as Philippine Week in Paris last year and the 1 994 Ms. Universe Beauty Pageant held in Manila. The world , in other words, has seen the travelling Jeepney and construed it as Philippine culture. Th is is where most of the problems are bred . The metaphor of the Jeepney articulated as State icon may blunt the edge of Justiniani's valorisation of the Jeepney as 'a blazing chariot of fantasies. ' Moreover, how the loaded terms of modern and postmodem , and the anthropology of the Filipino based on assertions of typicality and averageness a re implicated prompt us to question the ideolog ical efficacy of the Jeepney as visual idiom through which the complexities of contemporary culture which the artist sharply points out are revealed . The Jeepney's troping of conveyance and agil ity i n manoeuvri ng through the intricate cartographies of The Philippines, for i nstance , leads Jameson to view it as 'an omnibus and omnipurpose object that ferries its way back and forth between First and Th ird Worlds with dignified hilarity.' (Jameson 1 992, 2 1 1 ) But when transcoded i nto a text of the art world , the Jeepney loses its potency as a representation of overdetermi ned social spaces. Justi niani's re-examination of the Jeepney may allow him to explore the tension between tradition and modernity, scheme and surprise, continuity and contrad iction as these underlie, for instance, the Miss Go-To-Japan or Juice from Saudi signs which i nduce the conflict between the 'dream' and the 'struggle to keep body and soul together' to fester. But sti l l , the constitution of the 'referent' within the parameters of the art world has to be made problematic in light of the political interests of the institutions of art-maki ng and identity-formation . Murakami's concept of technology and media as l ingua franca of contemporary life inquires into how people make sense of technology's aesthetic: how a computer game supplements the 'ultimate object of desire with local exploits and constant arousal without reaching a climax' and how 'icons of Japanese popular cu ltu re' reflect 'the psycho-erotic obsessions of the Japanese post-postwar generations that have come of age at the height of late capital ist prosperity. ' Murakami, by i nvoki ng technology as social apparatus, teeters dangerously on the contradictory idea that 'a technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself . . . the coercive nature of society alienated from itself, (Horkheimer and Adorno 1 944 , 1 21 ) and that the body transcodes itself into the aesthetic of technology in the vacuum of erotic exchange and beyond the constraints of a libidinal economy. But technology as artefact is artifice as much as it is social relations. As Jonathan Crary would argue: 'One of the most difficult tasks facing us today is to imagine strategies of living and acting that may wel l be within the terrain of the image and i nformation market place but that are discern i ng and mobile enough to identify and elude its ever changing consumerist and productivist imperatives'. (Crary 1 994, 1 03) Change The term does not only deal with change as event, but change as agenda. In this time of rapid capital ist expansion and the erosion of the nation-state as category of political economy, questions of what must coordinate resistance agai nst the arrogance of capital and the tenacious antagonisms brought about by the archaic traditions of patriarchy , feudalism , and colonialism have been raised . I n the face of such dilemma, academe has proposed various theories of change. The most cogent come to grips with the local/global problematic and the politics of translocal ity emerging agai nst the global ethnoscape . Central to these 1 31