media – The Duke Reader

The Faculty of Climate & Media Studies

25 Mar 202326 Mar 2023 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control, Yuriko Furuhata, Duke University Press, 2022.**

Climatic Media My Japanese alma mater, Keio University at Shonan Fujisawa, has a Faculty of Environment & Information. Next to it stands a Graduate School of Media & Governance. Putting two distant words together, like “environment” and “information” or “media” and governance”, creates new perspectives and innovative research questions while breaking boundaries between existing disciplines. Yuriko Furuhata uses the same approach in Climatic Media. What is climatic media? How did media become articulated with climate in the specific context of Japan? In what sense can we consider the climate, and atmospheric phenomena, as media? What new research questions arise when we put the two words “climate” and “media” together? Which disciplines are summoned, and how are they transformed by the combination of climate and media? How does climatic media relate to Watsuji Tetsurō’s concept of Fūdo, to take the title of his 1935 book translated as Climate and Culture? Can we use certain media to manage the climate, to predict and to control it? What is the genealogy of these technologies of atmospheric control, and can we trace them back to previous projects of territorial expansion and imperial hegemony? If we call “thermostatic desire” the desire to control both interior and exterior atmospheres, how does this desire “scale up” from air-conditioned rooms to smart buildings, district cooling systems, domed cities, geoengineering initiatives, orbital space colonies, and terraformed planets? In what sense can we say that air conditioning is people conditioning? These are some of the questions that Yuriko Furuhata raises in her book, which I found extremely stimulating. My review won’t provide a summary of the book’s chapters or an assessment of its contribution to the field of media studies, but will rather convey a personal journey made through Climatic Media and, indirectly, back to my formative years at Keio SFC.

The many meanings of media

One of the difficulty I had with the book, and also one of the lessons I learned from it, is the multiplicity of meanings associated with the term media. According to the burgeoning field of media studies, media can be many things. In its most widely accepted meaning, media are the communication tools used to store and deliver information or data: we may therefore speak of mass media, the print media, media broadcasting, digital media, or social media. In this limited sense, climatic media is what makes atmospheric variations visible and legible through the mediation of various instruments of data visualization: thermal imaging, photographs, charts, diagrams, computer simulations, etc. Putting the climate in media format can serve scientific, informational, political, or artistic purposes. In the arts, media designates the material and tools used by an artist, composer or designer to create a work of art. Climatic Media borrows many of its examples from the arts, and documents attempts by Japanese artists to use fog, fumes, mist, and air as a material for site-specific aerial sculptures or light projection. Architecture, in particular, can be identified as an art or a discipline deeply entangled in climatic media. In architecture, media is what mediates indoor and outdoor climate: a door or a wall can therefore be considered as media of atmospheric control. The meaning of media can also be expanded to include the materiality of elements that condition our milieu. Elemental media include the chemical components of air, indoor or outdoor air temperature and humidity, atmospheric pollution, extreme weather phenomena, the planetary atmosphere, and other natural elements of climate. In a more general meaning, media are a means toward an end. Climate can be manipulated to particular effect, which may be peaceful or war-related. Climate-controlled spheres or air-conditioned bubbles can be created, using technologies that mediate and shape what counts as a habitable environment. In this broadest sense, climatic media are technologies of government, securing a livable environment for certain populations while excluding others.

The author chooses to concentrate on architecture as climatic media, foregrounding the imperial roots and Cold War legacy of Japanese architecture through the work of Tange Lab architects, including those associated with the internationally renowned postwar architectural movement called Metabolism, with Kurokawa Kishō and Isozaki Arata as key figures. In the past decades, Japanese architects and buildings have achieved iconic status and became known to a wide public. Even casual visitors to Tokyo are familiar with the Yoyogi National Gymnasium built by Tange Kenzō for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, as well as the more recent National Art Center designed by Kurokawa Kishō in Roppongi. With Tange Lab as their training ground, Metabolist architects and designers believed that cities and buildings are not static entities, but are ever-changing organisms with a “metabolism.” Postwar structures that accommodated population growth were thought to have a limited lifespan and should be designed and built to be replaced. The greatest concentration of their work was to be found at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka where Tange was responsible for master-planning the whole site whilst Kurokawa and Isozaki designed pavilions. It was also Tange Lab and Metabolism architects (some of whom were ardent “futurologists”) who helped bring cybernetics and systems theory into urban design in Japan. After the 1973 oil crisis, the Metabolists turned their attention away from Japan and toward North Africa and the Middle East, which (if we follow Yuriko Furuhata) made them complicit with the oil economy that stands as the main threat to our planetary survival in the twenty-first century.

From Japanese Empire to Osaka Expo ’70

Many of the architectural and artistic experiments described in Climatic Media are grounded in the work of the physicist Nakaya Ukichirō, known as the inventor of the world’s first artificial snow crystal. Nakaya spent his whole life studying ice, snow, and frost formations. The Institute of Low Temperature Science he established at Hokkaidō University in the 1930s helped advance research on cryospheric and atmospheric science. It was also deeply entangled in the Japanese Empire’s territorial conquests and war effort. Nakaya and his students collaborated with the research division of the South Manchurian Railway Company (“Japan’s first think tank”) in studying causes and mechanisms of frost heaving that damaged the railroad every winter in Manchuria. They helped Japanese agrarian settlers to build houses adapted to the extreme cold climate of the region, and designed ways to operate landing runways and military airplanes in frosty conditions. Nakaya Ukichirō’s ideas were later mobilized in a Cold War context, when polar regions and extreme atmospheric conditions became at stake in the geopolitical confrontation between the United States and its allies on one side and the Communist bloc on the other. Plans to weaponize the climate included battleground weather modifications such as creating hurricanes or heavy rain through cloud seeding and other chemical interventions, as well as the direct use of atmospheric weapons such as tear gas and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. The expert knowledge of cold climates and atmospheric conditions accumulated at the Hokkaidō Institute also found civilian applications. They helped Asada Takashi, an architect at Tange Lab, to design a proto-capsule housing for the Japanese explorers and researchers at the Shōwa Station in the Antarctic in the 1950s. Tange Kenzō himself, who had aligned with the expansionist agenda of the Japanese Empire in his youth, helped design The Arctic City in 1971, a futurist proposal by Frei Otto and Ewald Bubner to house 40,000 people under a two kilometer dome in the Arctic Circle. Capsule housing and domed cities were also nurtured by dreams of extra-orbital stations and space conquest that survived the Cold War era. More down to earth, the idea of recycling snow as a source of refrigeration is now attracting investors and tech companies to build data centers in frosty regions such as Iceland or the northern provinces of Canada.

There was an even more direct connection between the physicist Nakaya Ukichirō and the architects and artists who gathered at Expo ’70 in Osaka. His daughter, Nakaya Fujiko, was a pioneer in atmospheric art and fog sculpture. She was the Tokyo representative of the American art collective Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), and was invited by Billy Klüver to create the world’s first water-based artificial fog sculpture for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70. Yuriko Furuhata argues that father and daughter were not bound solely by blood ties and a shared interest in meteorological phenomena: it is the practice of atmospheric control that binds the scientist and the artist. Nakaya Ukichirō himself was no stranger to artistic creation: he was an accomplished sumi-e artist, and documented his studies of summer fog or winter snow with ink paintings, close-up photographs, and educational films. In turn, his daughter incorporated science into her creative process, and sought advice of former students of her father to create the fog sculpture displayed at Osaka’s exposition. Nakaya Fujiko’s fog sculpture therefore sits at the point of convergence between two genealogical threads which, together, define what is at stake in climatic media: visualizing climate and engineering the atmosphere. Enveloping Pepsi Pavilion’s dome with artificial fog was meant to turn the pavilion into an interactive “living responsive environment” responding to ambient factors such as wind, temperature, humidity, and light. The machines used to make artificial fog found practical applications beyond the realm of art. Engineers use the same technology today to cool down data centers and cloud computing service infrastructure. Artificial mist is also a familiar sight in urban centers on hot summer days, where small drops of water are projected to create an artificial fog that cools down the air. Expo ’70 also served as testing ground for other urban innovations. Futurologists and technocrats paired with architects and engineers to produce a cybernetic model of the late-twentieth-century city, with its network of data-capturing sensors and its control room filled with state-of-the-art Japanese computers. This techno-utopian vision of connectivity that was put on display at Japan’s World Exposition in 1970 can be seen as a precursor of modern “smart cities” and their networked systems of urban surveillance and social conditioning. Today, many of these technologies of mass surveillance have become mundane and prevalent, but when they first entered the streets of metropoles in the late 1960s they were seen as the creative experiments of artists, architects, and futurologists.

Genealogies of the present

Instead of presenting a linear history of climatic media or splitting her subject into neatly divided themes, Yuriko Furuhata follows a genealogical method of investigation and presentation, which “reads the past as the historical a priori of the present we live in.” She starts each chapter with a modern example of atmospheric control and then goes back and forth in time to find antecedents of the same “thermostatic desire” to control the atmosphere, with Expo ’70 as a point of concentration and the Japanese Empire as a concealed Urtext. In chapter one, city sidewalks refreshed by mist-spraying devices and data centers cooled by similar technologies lead the author to describe the fog sculpture of Nakaya Fujiko at the Pepsi Pavilion and to trace her connexion with the work of her father during wartime, which in turn found direct applications in the futurist works of architects gathered at Tange Lab. In chapter two, the rise of hyperlocalized weather predictions using artificial intelligence and smart air-conditioning systems that individually curate air flows are connected to early attempts to numerically predict the weather and to the history of futurology in Japan, with early visions of the networked society that materialized in the computerized control center of the world’s fair. Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle and its CEO’s dream of colonizing space in chapter three’s opening echo former greenhouse architectures and imperial projects of a “living sphere” (Lebensraum), with Tange Lab as a source of innovative design that connects Japan’s imperial past to modern urban planning and to utopian dome cities in the Arctic or in outer space. In chapter four, the author takes the Metabolist architects at their own word, reading their defining metaphor of metabolism through the lenses of the product life cycle and the Marxist concept of the “metabolic rift” between humans and the natural environment. Kurokawa Kishō’s holistic vision of renewable capsule housing and his early engagement with systems theory are contradicted by his use of plastics as a nonrecyclable material and by his taste for the expression “Spaceship Earth,” which foregrounds modern plans to geoengineer the Earth’s climate through technological interventions. In chapter five, modern methods of atmospheric control, from tear gas to cloud computing and smart objects, are tributary to a genealogy of urban surveillance that shows the dual use of technologies of social control, turning artistic experiments into dystopian futures.

The expression “dual-use technologies” usually refers to technologies with applications in both the military and the civilian sectors. Here, they not only connect defense industries and peaceful usage, but also imperialist rule and artistic creation. Several words and expressions straddle the border between war-making and the arts: military strategists speak of theater, engagement, or war and peace without making direct reference to Shakespeare, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Leon Tolstoy. Similarly, the term “avant-garde” used by art critics derives from military vocabulary. Furuhata proposes to expand this list of dual-use terms to “site-specificity”, originally used for artworks created to exist in a certain place, and to “climatic media” in general, describing how projects to “weaponize the weather” found applications in civilian times or how avant-garde artistic experiments were the harbinger of modern security technologies. Climatic control also borrows some of its metaphors from agriculture: cloud seeding, harvesting the weather, cultivating rain, or building greenhouses point to underlying epistemic assumptions and cultural expectations associated with controlling the atmosphere. The “cloud” now used for computer data storage is not just a metaphor: cooling data centers involves the same air-conditioning nozzles and fog machines first used by artists at the Osaka fair. Computer network systems are atmospheric in the literal sense of being carried by radio waves in the air. The cybernetic model used to regulate a house’s temperature is applied to the fiction of controlling the planet’s imaginary thermostat through feedback loops. The technical operations carried out by climatic media are both material and symbolic. Urban infrastructures such as energy grids, fiber-optic cables, air ducts, water pipes, and computer systems all rely on technologies that regulate temperature and mitigate the effects of outdoor weather. In times of planetary-scale climate change caused by human activity, it is useful to remember that operations of climatic control at one scale all have consequences at another scale: the Earth is not a closed system, and climatic media are intrinsically connected with global issues of environmental pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste accumulation.

Back to SFC

Reading this book reminded me of the intellectual atmosphere I found at Keio University’s Shonan Fujisawa Campus (Keio SFC) when I first came to Japan as a teacher of French studies in the early 1990s, from 1992 to 1994. Established only two years before, SFC at that time was a hotbed of technological innovation and pedagogical breakthrough. Sometimes considered as the “birthplace of the Japanese internet,” it had chosen to equip its students and faculty with state-of-the-art technology. The ubiquitous classroom computers were not the familiar IBM PC or Apple Macintosh, but turbocharged Sun SPARCstations and NeXt computers. Learning to code was a requisite, even for students specializing in the humanities. We wrote all of our documents using LaTeX, were early users of email software, and surfed the web using the Mosaic web browser upon its release in 1993. But technology was only part of the equation. SFC’s ambition was to embark a young generation of Japanese students into a life-changing experience, and to equip them with the skills and mindset for navigating the information society and its lived environment. As a junior faculty member, I was also allowed to follow courses and seminars to improve my Japanese language skills and share the students’ experience. Expanding my French upbringing and undergraduate studies in economics, the seminars and writings of Takenaka Heizo, Usui Makoto, and Uno Kimio introduced me to emergent research topics, from industrial metabolism to green accounting and input-output tables of economic development. Due to lack of personal discipline, but also because of the interdisciplinary nature of these ideas, I failed to translate all these burgeoning ideas into a PhD after I left Japan. But the knowledge acquired at Keio SFC equipped me with life-long skills and interests, and I have lived since them off the intellectual capital accumulated throughout these two years of teaching and auditing classes. I haven’t learned anything really new since then. In my view, Keio SFC at that time conveyed the vibrancy, intellectual excitement, and creativity a former generation of Japanese architects and social scientists must have experienced at Tange Lab or through the planning of Osaka Expo’ 70. Whether Keio SFC succeeded in steering Japan into the direction it set for itself is another debate. In retrospect, I could have been more attentive to the dark clouds gathering on the horizon: the bubble economy had left Japan with piles of debt and nonperforming loans; the reduced birthrate meant there were less students for an increasing number of places available in new universities; parents were still making huge sacrifices for the education of their children; and attractiveness of foreign languages and foreign destinations for studying and working abroad tended to dwindle. Even in those early years after the creation of the campus, academic inertia and routine crept in, and there was a certain hubris in the lofty goals and ambition that animated the whole project. But these two formative years still have for me the scent of youth and boundless possibilities.

Chinese Movie Stars Are Beautiful and Vulgar

11 Jun 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium, Mila Zuo, Duke University Press, 2022.**

Vulgar Beauty Everything has been written about the “male gaze” and the fetishization of Asian bodies on cinema screens. As film studies and feminist scholarship make it clear, white male heterosexuals fantasize about oriental ladies and make the exotic rhyme with the erotic. But Mila Zuo is not interested in white male cinema viewers: her focus is on the close-up faces of Chinese movie stars on the screen, which she finds both beautiful and vulgar in a sense that she elaborates upon in her book Vulgar Beauty. As a film scholar with a knack for philosophy and critical studies, she builds film theory and cinema critique based on her own experience as an Asian American who grew up in the Midwest feeling the only Asian girl in town and who had to rely on movie screens to find kindred faces and spirits. As she recalls, “When on rare occasion I did see an Asian woman’s face on television, a blush of shame and fascination blanketed me.” True to her own experience, she begins each chapter with a short recollection of her personal encounter with Chinese movies or Asian movie stars. The films that she selects in Vulgar Beauty, and the film theory that she develops, are not about them (American white males): they are about us (Chinese-identifying female spectators and actresses) and even about me (as an individual with her own subjectivity and life history). Her project is to “theorize vulgar Chinese feminity from the purview of a diasporic Chinese/Asian/American woman spectator.” She is “acting Chinese” in her effort to build film theory based on Chinese forms of knowledge and sense-making: the five medicinal flavors (bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour); the practice of face reading or mian xiang; the role of blandness (dan) in the Chinese aesthetic tradition; the materialist cosmogony of traditional Chinese medicine; etc. Her conviction is that Chinese (or Asian American) film studies should not reproduce established patterns of normative knowledge production, but should be truly innovative and challenging even if it runs the risk of being vulgar.

From the male gaze to the female stare

In her endeavor, Mila Zuo does not start from zero. She enters a field rich in intellectual contributions, reflexive theorizing, and disciplinary specificities. The hallmark of Anglo-American cinema studies, and what sets it apart in a field previously dominated by European male theoretical thinkers, is its focus on identity politics and feminist critique. To the concept of the “male gaze,” first introduced by Laura Mulvey in 1975, Asian American feminist scholars have added a rich area of conceptual notions and propositions: the hyper-sexualization of petite Asian bodies; the inscrutability and artifice of the Asian face; the infantilization of actresses through notions of cuteness, perverse innocence, and capricious behavior; the masculinist ideology of Asian virtues such as submissiveness, modesty, and self-restraint; the idealization of filial piety and sentimental attachments. The corpus of theoretical references has been extended to include Lacanian psychoanalysis, Black feminism, and new materialism, all of which are discussed in Mila Zuo’s book. Efforts have been made to break off disciplinary barriers and academic compartmentalization: Vulgar Beauty does not limit itself to cinema from mainland China and includes discussions about blockbuster movies from Hollywood, art films from France, and non-movies such as Youtube videos of stand-up comedy actors. It remains within the paradigm of identity politics, with its emphasis on representing nation, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. But in focusing on female beauty, it raises a question that earlier feminist scholars had deliberately side-stepped. Indeed, in her seminal essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that introduced the notion of the gaze, Laura Mulvey stated provocatively: “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.” Mila Zuo’s intention is not to destroy beauty, but to reveal it and to connect it to the basic sensations of taste, smell, and body touch.

In the decades since Mulvey’s essay was first published, film and cultural critics have been extending the implications of her work. The paradigm of the male gaze is subject to a law of diminishing returns and has now reached a dead end. Synonym with male voyeurism and domination, it equates lust with caution and defines beauty according to a narrow ideological agenda shaped by the drives of the actively-looking male heterosexual subject. On the other hand, Asian American scholarship is experiencing a renaissance of sorts, a new birth fueled by the insights of critical studies that focus on differences in class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ableism, animacy, materiality, and affect. It is from these new strands of inquiry that Mila Zuo draws her theoretical apparatus. To the notion of the gaze, which presupposes a male heterosexual spectator, she substitutes the concept of staring, which leaves open the sexual identity and ethnicity of the viewer. “It would be more apt to say that stardom, an amplification of the actor as mythic and exceptional, engage the eye through an incitement to stare.” The gaze connotes mastery and possession on the side of the male viewer and a passive, submissive role, for the woman on the screen. The stare responds to an interpellation and is always in waiting of an impossible returning glance: “movie stars appear to invite staring.” In particular, Chinese stars hail Chinese-identifying spectators into feeling Chinese. Chineseness is used here as a notion that is supposed to be “performative, contingent, and nonessentializing.” As Rey Chow first proposed, Chineseness is about seeing and being seen: “the jouissance of this experience lies in the elusiveness of seeing the act of seeing oneself, as well as fantasizing about others seeing us seeing ourselves as a validating act.”

Adding spice to a bland recipe

Racial beauties can elicit such staring and generate a form of perverse enjoyment. Several chapters focus on movies where there is only one Asian character (as in Hannibal Rising, Irma Vep, Twin Peaks, and The Crow). Ethnicity so conceived borders on racial appropriation: as bell hooks observed, it adds “a spice, a seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.” In Hannibal Rising, this spice has a bitter taste: Gong Li plays the role of a Japanese lady who trains the young Nazi-escaping Hannibal Lecter in the soft and hard arts of ikebana and swordsmanship. As one viewer commented, “Hannibal Rising puts the blame for a legendary serial killer where it belongs: with the Nazis. And the Communists. And the Japanese.” In Irma Vep and Twin Peaks, Maggie Cheung and Joan Chen add a salty and cool flavor to an otherwise predominantly white cast. Cheung, playing the role of an underworld criminal in a film-within-the-film, wears a tight latex costume modeled after Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman outfit and finds it cool. “Like the latex encasing her body, Maggie’s racial body becomes a formal property through which the elasticity of French identity is tested.” Irma Vep became an “infatuation film” for the director Olivier Assayas and his lead actress, as the two fell in love on set and subsequently married. Twin Peaks was the first American TV show to cast an Asian actress with a leading role, as the pilot episode opens with a closeup on Joan Chen’s cold makeup face. But she disappears midway in season two as her soul (or at least her face) becomes trapped inside a desk drawer knob (or whatever). In The Crow, the atmosphere becomes pungent: actress Bai Ling, herself a hot mess and a regular on TV talk shows, embodies the limits of liberal openness and multiculturalism in a “fascistic-gothic” film that legitimizes spectacular forms of punishment against racial others.

Mila Zuo has assimilated the lessons of Asian American scholarship from the past two decades and applies it to cinema studies. She replaces Asian Americans, and in particular Chinese immigrants, in a long history of victimization and racial segregation. She mentions the Los Angeles Chinatown mob lynching of eighteen Chinese immigrants in 1871, the lethal gas execution of a Chinese convict by the state of Nevada in 1921, and the ethnic tensions between Asian and African American communities during the 1992 riots in South Central Los Angeles. She does not develop the trope of the model minority, but gives voice to Asian-American standup comedians who are able to transform racial alienation into sour jokes and laughter. Charlene Yi and Ali Wong are anything but expressions of the model minority myth. The first, whose offbeat improvisations appear on Youtube videos and who self-identifies as a nonbinary “they”, deconstructs the myth of romantic love in a road movie where they set out to interview random people about love. The second develops a form of bawdy humor and off-color cynicism, as when she comments on her abundant vaginal secretions at age eighteen: “Oh, my god, it was so juicy. You could just blow bubble wand with it, just… ‘I slime you, I slime you. Ghostbusters!’” The model minority Asian in America is supposed to be obedient, hardworking, and self-effacing. By contrast, these comedians elicit laughter by turning their social awkwardness into transgressions that evoke the flavorful aesthetic of sourness. Think of a baby eating a lemon for the first time: as Mila Zuo notes, “the sour is capricious and unexpected; it gets off rhythm, off clock.” Likewise, “racial sour” follows “another tempo, pace, and beat that is out of step and misaligned with dominant demands of time.”

Bitter and sweet

The first Chinese movies consumed by international audiences left a bitter taste to the spectators. In the post-Mao era, bitterness emerged as a structure of feeling, a way to reckon with a traumatic past by “recalling bitterness” during China’s feudal and communist periods and exalting nationalist resilience. Actress Gong Li emerged as the sensual embodiment of China’s bitter flavor, participating in the process of national wound healing while making the aesthetic of “eating bitterness” (chiku) suitable for worldwide consumption. Through a close reading of Red Sorghum, Mila Zuo shows how Gong became the suffering embodiment of China-as-woman, generating libidinal attraction and nationalist longings for reparative justice. As the Chinese saying goes, ”you can’t really know sweetness until you eat bitterness.” But the tastes dictated by Chinese authorities and the flavors favored by cosmopolitan audiences do not always align. The pungent atmosphere of Lust, Caution directed by Ang Lee and starring Tang Wei created a violent backlash among Chinese communities in China and abroad for its vivid sex scenes and moral ambiguity. Recent saccharine comedies like The Knot and If You Are the One imagine Taiwan’s reunification with the mainland through cross-strait romantic stories and are conceived as a channel for Chinese soft power propaganda. They cast Taiwan as “a female partner who, even if she hesitates, ultimately defers to a benevolent, masculine China.” But a close reading of how Taiwanese stars Vivian Hsu and Shu Qi are “acting Chinese” in these movies tells a different story. Hsu’s over-the-top performance in The Knot, where her display of excessive sweetness turns mushy and cheesy, betrays the desperation of soft power’s cloying and calculating tendencies. Noting the frequent use of fade-to-blacks and story cuts, Mila Zuo notes that “the film’s stammering fades gesture to its rheumatic problem—it has a joint issue, in both formal and politico-ideological terms.” As for Shu Qi’s performance in If You Are the One (a film that gave birth to a sequel and a TV show), it is characterized by the same excess of saccharine and glucose. Commenting on the heroine’s remark that “soft persimmons taste the best,” Mila Zuo notes that “persimmons, like kiwis, should be eaten when they are a little overripe, that is, when their flesh begins to soften and bloat.” Unbeknownst to the propaganda apparatus, the soft-sweetness of overripe fruits can act as an antidote of nationalist poison.

Mila Zuo’s book is structured around the five tastes of bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour. These flavors or weidao are more than descriptions of culinary savor: they are aesthetic, sensorial, and affective categories that play a prominent role in traditional Chinese medicine and in Eastern epistemologies. They express a vision of the world that engages the whole cosmos: for example, “a bitter taste in the mouth denotes a disturbance of the element wood in the body, which is internally related to nerves and locomotion, and externally related to the season of spring, the direction of east, and the period of dawn.” Flavors not only make for a good dish but also an ordered cosmos: as Sun Tzu wrote, “Harmony is like soup. The salt flavoring is the other to the bitter, and the bitter is the other to the salt. With these two ‘others’ combining in due proportions and a new flavor emerging, this is what is expressed in ‘harmony.’” What flavors do to the body, how they are internally processed and digested by bodily organs and the fluids or scents they generate, is a reflection of the cosmic balance between the various elements. Material ingredients and spices also combine with affects: for example, salty coldness and sour anger are two ways to cope with aggression and xenophobia. Using epistemologies that are relevant to the formations of China, Mila Zuo brings a new perspective on cinema studies that otherwise rely on western theorizations and abstract categories. In particular, tasting and eating provide foundational understandings of beauty: a woman can be described as tender (nennü) or as ripe (shunü), and the weidao (sensory essence) of charm includes the scent of her skin, the softness of her body, and the sweetness of her smile as well as the bitterness of her tears and the saltiness of her perspiration.

Vulgar is not vulgar

I had trouble understanding what the author of Vulgar Beauty meant by “vulgar.” Applying it to Gong Li (an actress I tend to idolize and fetishize) seemed to me not only wrong, but also blasphemous. Even if I now get it, I am not sure I agree with the use of the term as characterized by Mila Zuo. As she explains, vulgar does not always imply vulgarity, just like sexy does not always relate to sex. “Vulgar senses” designate the bodily faculties of tasting, smelling and touching, in opposition to the more noble sensory abilities of seeing and hearing. It also refers to the “bad tastes” of the bitter, salty, pungent, and sour, as opposed to more pleasant savors of sweet and bland. Mila Zuo opposes “a paradigm of visuality and aurality, on which cinema is predicated, to an affective structure based on the lower sensorium”: one can taste and smell a movie as much as one can appreciate its visual scenes and sonic atmosphere. She also implies that her analysis is vulgar—not because she uses the word f*** several times, but due to her materialist orientation and use of “bad ideas” borrowed from Chinese cosmology. She deploys vulgarity as a critical methodology to reinscribe the Chinese body into the core of media studies. Her film commentary is sensitive to the material aspects of beauty—the “minor acts” of “eye tearing, skin perspiring, smiles cracking, fingers pointing, legs waddling.” Chinese actresses and Asian American comedians can be vulgar in a more common sense—lacking distinction and poise as defined in a white Anglo-Saxon context. The book opens with a scene starring Zhang Ziyi performing sajiao, or childish behavior directed toward a male partner, and there is certainly a lack of class and decorum in this display of self-infantilization. The same can be said of the book cover in which Joan Chen from Twin Peaks applies makeup facing a mirror in a scene that usually remains off stage. “Acting Chinese” means displacing the Western canon of beauty by including the lower senses and material elements that make vulgar beauty generative and beautiful.

Taking Academic Books to the People

12 Apr 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins, Duke University Press, 2010.**

Bring on the Books I do not want to brag, but I am in a league of my own when it comes to reading habits. I am not a professional reader, teacher, academic, or publisher, and yet I achieved to read 365 books in 2020—the year of the great lockdown. What started out as a silly gambit on January 1st—my “one-book-a-day” challenge—turned out to be a transformative experience. If “frequent readers” are said to read twelve to forty-five books a year, and “avid readers” read fifty or more books a year, I propose to create the category of “voracious reader” for those who read more than a hundred books per year, and “gargantuan reader” for those who pass the two hundred mark. And yes, like frequent flyers accumulating miles on air travels, we should get bonuses and free books from online bookstores. To be fair, the type of books you put on the count matters. My daughter just read fifty volumes of Detective Conan during a full weekend of binge manga reading. I do not read comic books, and I have a certain aversion for novels and literature. My preference goes to nonfiction, and more specifically to academic books like the ones published by Duke University Press. They take more time to read and assimilate—this is why I did not write 365 book reviews in the year 2020. Reviewing a book requires time and effort: I am not a native English speaker, and I have long lost the habit of writing term papers and class assignments. But writing reviews, and posting them on the internet, makes me feel I am part of a community—a learned society of sorts, or a book club with a membership limited to one.

One-book-a-day challenge

Bring on the Books for Everybody (BoBE for short) focuses on books different from the ones I am usually reading: it deals with literary culture, and takes most of its examples from novels and literary fictions. Its central argument—that ordinary readers and media personalities have seized the means of literary taste production from the hands of the high priests of academia and literary criticism who once maintained the gold standard of literary currency—contradicts my personal infatuation with high theory and arcane academic books. I must confess I prefer to read comments on literature and literary analysis than literature per se. And yet BoBE’s message resonates with the reading practices I have developed. It argues that popular literary culture is now ubiquitous: it is to be found in Barnes & Noble superstores, Amazon reviews, blockbuster adaptations, and television book clubs, as much as in the hallowed grounds of public libraries and academic office shelves. Similarly, theory is not a category limited to academic scholars and is now making a dent in real life, nurturing new forms of activism and self-realization. Reading literature or nonfiction does not compete with other activities such as surfing the web, watching movies on Netflix, or posting messages on social networks: it feeds itself from such activities in a mutually reinforcing manner. Reading is not a solitary act but a social endeavor, enmeshed in webs of communication and commerce that are interpersonal, transnational, and technological. Reading theory or literature is a self-cultivation project that sometimes borders on self-help therapy. Books are a lucrative market and reading practices are shaped by market forces and economic factors.

New reading practices are challenging existing notions of literary authority. Asked which personality reads the most books in a year, the average American may come up with the name of Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk. The academic scholar surrounded by his bookshelves and piling volumes on his desk has been replaced by the capitalist investor, the billionaire philanthropist, the founder of a corporate empire, or the serial entrepreneur. According to Wikipedia, Warren Buffett became America’s most successful investor because he used his voracious reading habit to learn everything there was to know about every industry. Microsoft founder Bill Gates posts his reading list of the past year along with his annual letter to investors. In 2015, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowed to read one book every other week “with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies.” Young Elon Musk is said to have read for 10 hours each day before growing up to become Tesla CEO. These new reading heroes stand in stark contrast with the college dork, the science nerd, the bookworm, the librarian rat, the armchair theorist, who used to be identified as the most voracious readers. The message they convey is less on which books you should read, but that you should read a lot, and that book reading is somehow connected to economic success and a well-balanced lifestyle. Such individuals seem spectacular to us, almost superhuman. And yet, the apparent enigma in their ability to read a lot amid a very busy schedule spurs the curiosity in us about them even more. We want to know the secret behind their power.

Readers with charisma

Capitalist entrepreneurs and media celebrities have now become the taste arbiters of literary culture. They are challenging existing notions of literary authority and cultural legitimacy. As Jim Collins notes, documenting the rise of a new type of master curators such as Oprah Winfrey or Nancy Pearl, “By the late nineties, literary taste brokers outside the academy could present themselves as superior to an academy that could now simply be ignored.” Academics have painted themselves into a corner of irrelevance and ridicule by sticking to an outmoded model of exclusivity and distinction. The idea that genuine cultivation and proper taste could be secured only through proper instruction and acquired only within the academy didn’t resist the democratization of book guides, reader forums, and amateur circles. Readers were empowered to talk about literary books and form reading communities that didn’t feel intimidated by the traditional discourses of literary appreciation. The discrediting of the academy and the empowering of amateur readers have led to new forms of conversation about books. A new set of players, locations, rituals, and use values for reading literary fiction has emerged on the margins of literary culture. Within this radically secularized conversation, the new cast of curators and readers talk about books in ways that are meaningful to amateur readers, and they have the media technologies at their disposal to make their conversations into robust forms of popular entertainment.

Another central thesis of BoBE is that the literary experience has now become part of our visual culture. Books are a component of a media mix that includes a variety of texts and images: commentary, interviews, cover art, book club flyers, and cinematic adaptations, along with their spin-off products. “What used to be an exclusively print-based activity has become an increasingly image-based activity in which literary reading has been transformed into a variety of possible literary experiences.” Literary value is an important component of the success of high-concept adaptation movies and literary-inspired films: as Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein put it, “our special effects are words.” Within this predominantly visual culture, reading the book has become only one of a host of interlocking literary experiences. New reading practices are changing the public’s expectation concerning just what a literary experience should look like. It now usually comes with a Latte and a proper mise-en-scène. Reading is intertwined with tastes in music, clothing, and entertainment that come as a package: the choice of books, like the choice of wine, interior design, cosmetics, fashion accessories, and cooking utensils, attests to a set of shared values and rituals. A new kind of novels offers an exercise in self-cultivation, affirming the superiority of the reader’s taste culture and self-consciously reinventing the novel of manners for contemporary audiences. Even Jane Austen or Henry James can be read as self-help manuals for busy millennials: contemporary readers still use them as primers about the world, as introductory courses in graceful living.

From literature to theory

My reading practices are different from the ones surveyed in BoBE. I don’t take my cues on what to read from TV celebrities or corporate CEOs. Although I concentrate on scholarly books, I don’t follow an academic syllabus or a prescribed reading list. I don’t have a political agenda to document and sustain. I don’t need a caste of high priests to tell me what to read and how to read it. I make mine Martin Luther’s formula to trust only the scriptures, Sola Scriptura. My choice of books is serendipitous and owes much to the availability of second-hand books on internet platforms or discount bookstores. In concentrating on books published by Duke University Press and other academic publishers, I try to challenge not only the boundaries between the disciplines but, more importantly, the boundary between the academy and the world outside. I try to make academic books relevant for daily life and casual conversations. My reading of academic books is definitely non-academic. I do not skim volumes or skip chapters; I tend to read from the first to the last page. I don’t take notes, but I underscore important sentences or paragraphs with a pen and a ruler. It helps me process mentally the content of the book and to increase my retention rate. This way I can peruse the underscored parts in a second reading and get the gist of the book in a summary. Inscribing my mark on the pages of a book also makes it clear who is the boss. Some books are meant to be read as a struggle, and you definitively want to be on top. I feel perfectly comfortable taking on books that are supposed to be fully accessible only to professional readers. If I don’t understand the book’s content, I blame the author, not me.

New technologies have an influence on the way I read. I started to write book reviews on Amazon, developing on a writing habit I had picked up as a student. BoBE mentions the history of Amazon’s curatorial activities: reviews, articles, and interviews that were originally drafted by an editorial team have been progressively replaced by customer-generated content and algorithms linking customers sharing similar tastes (“Customers who bought this book also bought…”). The book also refers to new technologies of taste acquisition that empower amateur readers to assume the role of curators of their own archives. The website Goodreads (owned by Amazon) allows to track one’s readings, to set book lists and reading challenges for the upcoming year, and to arrange one’s library as an extension of one’s self. The solitary act of reading a book has been transformed by the advent of reader comments, star ratings, and customer evaluations. According to Jim Collins, “The desire to make those evaluations public demonstrates that the need to display one’s personal taste in terms of the books one chooses to read forms an essential part of the pleasures of reading.” People will greatly enjoy reading a whole lot more if they start telling people about what they have read. The author, who used to be a distant figure one approached reverently, now maintains a familiar presence on social networks. Nothing gives me more joy than getting positive feedback from an author on a book review I have advertised on Twitter.

The Duke Reader

So why Duke University Press? This relatively obscure publishing house has recently attracted a fair share of media attention: its editor, Ken Wissoker, as well as two of its star authors, Lauren Berlant and Donna Haraway, have been chronicled in The New Yorker. As the author of the first portrait notes, “Duke has become known as a press that blends scholarly rigor with conceptual risk-taking, where high and low art boldly intermingle on principle.” The history of Duke University Press is, partly, the history of cultural studies in the United States. It is not attached to one discipline: as an example, it is difficult to categorize BoBE between literary criticism, film studies, and the sociology of reception. Duke publishes a steady stream of volumes anchored in the social science disciplines: sociology, anthropology, history, and literary criticism. It is also open to the new disciplines that have flourished in the margins of academia: media studies, sound studies, gender studies, queer theory, critical race studies, disability studies. It is not the preserve of tenured professors and established authors: its catalogue is open to junior faculty, adjuncts, and members of the intellectual proletariat. Part of the story of how Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement came to the academy goes through Duke Press. It is one of the few academic presses with crossover appeal: because its editorial line is so cutting-edge, it can make interventions in contemporary debates beyond the purview of American academy. Through The Duke Reader, I am happy to associate myself with its development.

Animation Studies and Cartoon Science

6 Mar 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Animating Film Theory, edited by Karen Beckman, Duke University Press, 2014.**

I must confess I am averse to film theory. The little I have read in this field confirms me in my opinion: film theory is empirically useless, epistemologically weak, and aesthetically unappealing. Nothing of substance has been written about the topic since Plato’s Cave, the allegory that has people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The books and articles that are collated to form the discipline’s canon are a mixed bag of philosophical references, journalistic musings, and academic jabber. In my opinion, Deleuze’s two-volume work on film, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image, are among his weakest books. They do not amount to a philosophy of cinema, or a theory of film: at best, they are reflections on time and space that take cinema as a pretext and Bergson as an interlocutor. In textbooks and introductory chapters, film theory is a collage of quotations by cultural critics, mostly from the early twentieth century, who have commented on the birth of cinema in the context of mass culture and reproduction technologies. Remarks written in passing by Walter Benjamin or Theodor Adorno are elevated to the rank of high theory and revered as sacred scriptures by a discipline desperately in need of founding fathers. The French contributors to the Cahiers du Cinéma dabbled in film critique as a hobby and did not think of themselves as serious thinkers: they were puzzled to see cinema studies emerge as an academic discipline, and they certainly would have disapproved the emergence of a canon of officially approved texts that includes their own. When film theory tries to build a firmer intellectual grounding, it mobilizes thinkers who have written outside the purview of cinema studies and have never commented on films: Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Lacan, or Baudrillard. Gilles Deleuze for the French domain and Stanley Cavell in America stand as the two exceptions: they have devoted whole books to cinema as part of a program of applied philosophy. My preference goes to Cavell over Deleuze.

Animated films and live-action movies

My biases against film theory were compounded by this volume on animation film theory. If a theory of films rests on shaky ground, what about a theory that takes animated movies as its object and proposes to build an autonomous discourse on this subset of film media? A discipline is not defined by its empirical topic, but by its methods and the way it builds a scientific object as a matter of scholarly investigation. The existence of animated movies and frame-by-frame films—which predate the birth of cinema—is in itself no justification to devote an academic discipline to their study and to engage them theoretically. I do not mean to say that animation movies should be forever marginalized and ignored by cinema specialists and cultural critics. They can provide food for thought for many disciplines and, in some instances, are valuable sources of theoretical engagement. But a discourse on animation does not a theory make. Building an animation theory has more to do with intellectual posturing and academic differentiation than with scientific rigor and sound scholarship. A caricature of the attitude that I have in mind is provided by Alan Cholodenko’s contribution to this volume. An American-Australian scholar who retired in 2001 from the University of Sidney, Cholodenko describes himself as the godfather of animation theory: “theorizing of and through animation has been my project for the last twenty-three years.” His claim of having come first to lay the “first principles” of the discipline doubles the proposition that “historically as well as theoretically, film is the ‘stepchild’ of animation, not the other way around.” Drawing inspiration from the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, and postulating animation as the mother of all disciplines, his contribution to this volume amounts to little more than self-promotion and personal aggrandizement.

What came first, film or animation? And who can claim the privilege of having “invented” animation cinema, in theory and in practice? A central tenet of the fledgling discipline is that animation represents the past and the future of all cinema. Lev Manovich, an author of books on digital culture and new media, made that claim in 2001: “Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case of animation.” The division of cinema into live action and animation has been recently blurred by the digital turn: through CGI and pixel-by-pixel editing, live-action movies are merging with animation in a way that makes them undistinguishable. The cartoonization of live-action movies is propelled by special effects and computer graphics that makes whatever the mind can conceive achievable on screen. Some actors, Jim Carrey for instance (but the same could have been said of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton), have built a whole career acting like cartoon characters. Contributors to Animating Film Theory show that the dividing line between film and animation has never been clear-cut. Photographs and moving pictures have always been mixed with drawings and text editing, such as in Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (Film Truth) experimental newsreel series in 1922-25, or in cartoons in which drawings “come to life” or live scenes are inserted in graphic sketches, a common practice since the silent movies era down to Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The incorporation of animated beings into real-world settings is only one example of the blurring of distinctions between animation and film. Whole movies, like Disney’s 2019 version of The Lion King, are photorealistic renderings of live action scenes in which each detail of character and scenery is animated step-by-step by computer graphics (the sole non-animated shot in the entire film is the sunrise in the opening scene.)

The French did it first

The history of animation intersects with movie history but they do not necessarily move at the same pace. The Lost World (1925) was the first feature-length film made in the United States, possibly the world, to feature model animation as the primary special effect, or stop motion animation in general. The Enchanted Drawing is a 1900 silent film best known for containing the first animated sequences recorded on standard picture film, which has led its director J. Stuart Blackton to be considered the father of American animation. As for the first animated cartoon, it is attributed (by the French) to Emile Cohl, who produced the short movie Fantasmagorie in 1908. Others point to the French inventor Charles-Emile Reynaud and his 1877 patent of the praxinoscope, an animation projection device that predated the invention of the cinématographe by Louis Lumière in 1895. Other optical toys from the nineteenth century or earlier go by the names of zoetrope, thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, and camera obscura. Likewise, animation film theory has many fathers and the competing quest for precursors, pioneers, and key figures oppose various nations, periods, and individuals. One (French) contributor to this volume casts a Frenchman named André Martin as “the inventor of animation cinema” and 1953 as the date when his invention was recorded. Another (Japan specialist) author exhibits another figure, Imamura Taihei, as the first critic to devote a whole book on animation, A Theory of Cartoon Film, first published in 1941. It turns out André Martin used the expression “cinéma d’animation” in the body of a Cahier du Cinéma article about the Cannes festival, thereby donning prestige and dignity to a genre situated at the intersection between “le septième art” (French jargon for movies) and “le neuvième art” (graphic novels and comic strips). As for Imamura Taihei, he confirms the fact that Japan stands as a key site for animation and for theory. His genealogy of cartoons and comic strips goes back to the twelfth century’s emaki picture scrolls, and also includes acting techniques found in the Nō theater and folding screen paintings from the Edo period.

To build a theory of animation, Karen Beckman, the editor of this volume, has mined systematically the writings of film theory specialists to search for references to animation. As she states in the opening chapter, “animation’s persistent yet elusive presence within film theory’s key writings make it both easy to overlook and essential to engage.” These key writings include texts by Norman McLaren, Peter Kubelka, Vachel Lindsay, Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, Germaine Dulac, Miriam Hansen, and André Bazin, none of which I was familiar with. Throughout the book, the rare mentions of cartoons and animation movies in the writings of cultural critics and philosophers are treated as precious discoveries. Theorists of film and mass culture such as Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno repeatedly turned to Disney cartoons and Looney Tunes characters in articulating their reflections on aesthetics and politics. Eisenstein devised a category of “plasmaticness” that he evoked in order to stress the originary shape-shifting potential of the animated movie, the way an object or image can potentially adopt any form. For Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.” Adorno and Horkheimer found nothing funny about cartoons and argued that Donald Duck actively participated in the violent oppression of the proletariat by the forces of capitalism. Writing later in the century, Stanley Cavell mulled over the “abrogation of gravity” in cartoons where Sylvester the Cat or Wil E. Coyote run over the edge of a cliff and continue their course in midair. This allows the author of the last chapter in the volume to enunciate the “first theorem of cartoon physics”: “Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation” (the second theorem states that “Any body passing through solid matter (usually at high velocity) will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter”.)

Cartoon physics

Animation theory is not necessarily tied to film theory: indeed, many contributions to this volume do not start from the pantheon of film theory authors or the key concepts of the discipline. Animation can be engaged with and theorized from other perspectives: as a strand of critical thought that focuses on subaltern cultures, as in Japan, or within an epistemology of scientific objectivity and experimental representation, or from the point of view of graphic art history and media art. Several chapters focus on the link between scientific visualization practices and the history of animation. The scientific experiment plays a central role in the history of cinematography. Animation itself rests on a scientific fact: by presenting a sequence of still images in quick enough succession, the viewer interprets them as a continuous moving image. This persistence of retinal perception was exploited by the early devices of animation that used a series of drawn images portrayed in stages in motion to create a moving picture. One contributor even sees the origins of 3D animation in a 1860 invention by French entrepreneur François Willème. A glass dome, housing a perimeter ring of twenty-four cameras directed inward at a central subject, allowed camera shutters to open simultaneously to produce a “photosculpture” that was not unlike the bullet-time sequence in the film The Matrix. The experiment of film allows the viewer to experience the world in a novel way: animation, like the scientific experiment itself, becomes the way to think at the limit of understanding in an attempt to get past that limit. Scientific uses of animation include medical anatomy and health education, dimensional modeling in biology or in physics, mathematical abstraction, and all kinds of pedagogical materials. Animated images do not only illustrate: they are instrumental in the process of discovery. Climate science would be less potent without the time-lapse images of shrinking glaciers and melting polar ice caps.

Japan is in a league of its own when it comes to animation theory. As mentioned, a book on the theory of anime, Manga eiga-ron, was written as early as 1941, with subsequent editions in 1965 and in 2005. In Japanese, eiga-ron has a different meaning from “film theory”, and a different history as well. Contributions to Animating Film Theory show how animation needs to be thought in relation to media beyond film to account for the singular place of animated images in Japan. One author explores how experimental Japanese Xerox artists in the 1960s operated a crossover between animation and graphic design that sheds light on the specific context within which the issue of technological reproduction and duplication was discussed. The first translation in Japanese of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” was published and discussed in Graphication, Fuji Xerox’s corporate PR magazine that presented itself as a cutting-edge publication venue for graphic art and media criticism. More generally, the great divide between commercial and academic publications that marks the intellectual landscape in America does not exist in Japan, where the bulk of critical theories are translated, published and disseminated through non-academic journals as well as mass-market books and “mooks” (a magazine in book format.) Two of Japan’s main animation critics and public intellectuals, Otsuka Eiji and Azuma Hiroki, have organized part of their critical work outside the circuit of academia and write for a broad public readership consisting of hardcore fans of media subcultures. They invite a re-reading of the question of realism in animation: beyond photographic realism and a drawing style inherited from manga comics, anime films hint toward a new style of transmedia realism without any real-world referent. The vibrant worlds of Japanese anime, manga, and video games form the basis of an alternative sphere of expression that popular Japanese critics theorize from outside the realm of film studies.

Whither animation theory?

For Gilles Deleuze, the primary operation of philosophy is problematization, the cultivation of problems such that philosophy can then go about the task of fabricating concepts. What is the problem of animation that it requires a theory? What are the key concepts that may allow animation theory to make sense and generate meaning? Film studies, in their classical form, evolved from questions of ontology, to questions of reception, to questions of context. What is film and its relationship with reality? How does film have an effect on its viewers? What is the social and political context in which film is made and received? Starting from a different set of questions, animation theory must take its own course and develop its own methodological tools. Animating Film Theory only points toward that goal, and merely sketches out the challenges that theory-makers and philosophers of the moving image might have to grapple with. The first question, already pointed out by Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Epstein, has to do with the quality of “animism” that turns people into objects and objects into animate creatures: what makes a world animated and imbued with a life of its own? A second set of questions could coalesce around the issue of self-reflexivity: animation movies are aware of themselves as works of imaginary creation, and the hand of the drawer is never far from the drawn picture. What separates us from the world of fiction, and how can we inhabit it by breaking the fourth wall that separates screen characters from the audience? The third indication we might learn from animated movies is not to take life too seriously: as the last chapter on “cartoon physics” indicates, we will always enjoy a good Tom-and-Jerry cartoon and the hilarity that courses ending in midair and cat-shaped holes might provoke.

Gay Dykes on Acid-Free Paper

12 Feb 20229 Jun 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, Cait McKinney, Duke University Press, 2020.**

Lesbian feminists invented the Internet, and they did it without the help of a computer. This is the surprising finding that comes out of the book Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, published by Duke University Press in 2020. As the author Cait McKinney immediately makes it clear, the Internet that lesbians built was not composed of URL, HTML, and IP servers: it was an assemblage of print newsletters, paper index cards, telephone hotlines, paper-based community archives, and early digital technologies such as electronic mailing lists and computer databases. What made these early media technologies “lesbian” is that they formed the information infrastructure of a social movement that Cait McKinney describes as “information activism” and that was oriented toward the needs and aspirations of lesbian women in North America during the 1980s and 1990s. And what makes Cait McKinney’s book a “queer history” is that she brings feminism and queer studies to bear on a media history of US lesbian-feminist information activism based on archival research, oral interviews, and participant observation through volunteering in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York. Information activism took many forms: sorting index cards, putting mailing labels on newsletters, answering the telephone every time it rings, converting old archives into digital format… All these activities may not sound glamorous, but they were part of the everyday politics of “being lesbian” and “doing feminism.”

The Internet that women built

Recently the role of women in the development of information technology and the Internet has attracted a great deal of attention. Thanks in part to the effort of popular author Walter Isaacson, the names of Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Jean Jennings, and Jennifer Doudna have become more familiar to modern readers, and their enduring legacy may have contributed to attract more young women into computer science. Even so, computing remains a heavily male-dominated field, and the industry’s openness to “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes” (to quote from a famous Apple commercial) is mostly limited to the masculine part of mankind. It therefore bears reminding that the Internet revolution was brought forth by information activists of all stripes and colors, not just white cis males from California. The “misfits” lauded by Steve Jobs may also have included dykes, stone butches, high femmes, riot grrrls, and lavender women as well as trans and nonbinary subjects. Besides, as feminist critique has pointed out, the concept of the “Internet revolution” or the “information superhighway” are masculinist notions that need to be reexamined. There is a gender bias in popular accounts of technology development and innovation that tends to exclude the contribution of certain agents, especially queer subjects and women of color. Technologies are gendered, and they also exhibit heteronormative and white biases. To fix this problem, much more is needed than writing more inclusive histories of innovation and exposing occupational sexism in the technology industry.

The lesbian volunteers whose activities are chronicled in Information Activism did not really invent the Internet. They did something much more purposeful: they set out to create a world bearable and a life worth living for lesbian women in North America. They did this work within conditions of exclusion from access to reliable information about lesbian life and from the margins of social structures and even mainstream feminism. Confronted with discrimination, isolation, and invisibility, they decided to build an information infrastructure of their own, one connection at a time. Creating alternative communication channels responded to conditions in which many women lacked access to other lesbians and were desperate to find connection. Sometimes, the sole purpose of maintaining this information infrastructure was to show lesbian women that they were not alone. There was another person to talk to at the other end of the help line at the New York Lesbian Switchboard ; other researchers subscribing to the newsletter Matrices were doing stuff in a field marginalized within academic studies ; documents stored at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City bore the testimony of queer lives whose memorialization was a source of inspiration for modern generations. In some cases, just knowing the information was “out there” was enough to go on living with a renewed purpose. In other instances, women engaged in long “rap sessions” discussing feminist politics over the phone, started collaborative research projects that led to the emergence of a full-fledge discipline of queer studies, or found companionship and accomplishment in their volunteering projects. Information makes promises and fulfills aspirations that are much greater than “finding things out.”

A Chatroom of One’s Own

Networks have been critical to the construction of feminist histories. Cait McKinney examines several cases of networked communication initiatives that predate the emergence of online media: the publication of the newsletter Matrices designed for sharing information and resources with anyone doing research related to lesbian feminism; the New York Lesbian Switchboard connecting callers to a source of information and advice; the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ collection of print documents and audio tapes; the patient collection of indexes and bibliographies that made lesbian feminist essays and periodicals searchable and actionable. The technologies used in these pre-digital enterprises now seem antique: typewriters, photocopiers, landline telephones, letter mail, stacks of papers, cardboards, index cards, and face-to-face interactions. But the results were far-reaching and futuristic. They laid the ground on which a lesbian-feminist movement could expand and self-organize. Information and communication networks allowed dispersed researchers to connect with each other, share information, and do lesbian research within unsupportive and sometimes openly hostile research environments. Women living in rural areas or isolated places were encouraged to become active nodes of the network by taking pictures, gathering newspaper clips, and audio-recording interviews to document events taking place in their geographic area. The Matrices newsletter facilitated historical research through the creation of a supportive information infrastructure ; it also allowed for the nationwide expansion of a social movement originally concentrated in New York; and it convinced dispersed readers that lesbian lives mattered and were worth documenting. Key initiatives grew out of the network, such as the volume Black Lesbians: An Annotated Bibliography compiled by JR Roberts to counter the invisibility of women of color in mainstream lesbian feminism. In the 1990s, many print newsletters lost relevance a web browsing developed and academic listservs became key networks for sharing information. Matrices stopped publishing in 1996, replaced ostensibly by commercial enterprises such as Google, Amazon, and digital publishing tools. But online communication does not present as much of a turning point as a continuation of networked modes of organization for feminist social movements.

Another example of continuity between analog and digital modes of communication is the lesbian telephone hotline staffed by volunteers in New York City that answered to every call with a listening ear and a range of helpful tips and advice. Like newsletters, telephone hotlines connected lesbians at a distance using information. For the historian, they are harder to document: volunteers were anonymous and cannot be traced back, and all that remains of the long nights spent answering the phone are the call logs recording every conversations with a few notes and doodles scribbled in the margin. The logs suggest that many callers expressed despair, loneliness, or confusion; but others called for help finding something fun to do that night, for precise information about support groups or community resources, or just to talk and “rap” about gender issues. Even before the appearance of mailing lists and online forums, the need to have a chatroom of one’s own was clearly felt and answered. McKinney also uses the log archives as entries to thinking about feminist research methods, multimedia practices, care provision, and affective labor involved in lesbian telephone hotlines. She reminds readers that feminist activism involved less acknowledged dynamics such as boredom, repetition, isolation, and burnout. What makes a telephone hotline “lesbian feminist” is the self-definition and principles under which the switchboard operated. Volunteers were recruited from within the lesbian community and bisexual women were tacitly kept out, while the policy toward trans women and gender nonconforming persons was left undefined, although their needs were also addressed on an ad hoc basis. These remarks remind us that terminology, such as the moniker “gay and lesbian” as opposed to the more contemporary “LGBTQI+”, are historical constructions that cast aside or rigidify some categories as much as they include or deconstruct others.

A feminist mode of network thinking

Network thinking has been a feature of feminist activism and knowledge production since before the consumer Internet. “Improving (lesbian) lives with information” could be the motto of a behemoth social media company catering to a niche market; it was always the principle under which lesbian activists operated. The feminist movement produced original ideas about communication, access to information, capacity building, and the power of alternative structures for organizing people and ideas. Lesbian feminists also offered pre-digital feminist critiques of networks as egalitarian ideals that can conceal functional hierarchies and threaten the privacy of participants. Computer networks were dreamt and imagined before they were invented and built. The librarians and volunteers who collected the Lesbian Periodicals Index were imagining computer databases and electronic indexing while shuffling paper cards into shoeboxes ; the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ project leaders were figuring putting all their resources online before they had the equipment and manpower to convert documents into digital format. They were also early adopters of information technology, manifesting a can-do attitude and a hands-on sensibility familiar to feminist activism—and more generally to “women’s work.” McKinnon characterizes as “capable amateurism” a fearless approach to learning and implementing new media technologies; a gendered belief in the capacity of amateurs to work hard and acquire new skills; and a willingness to experiment, improvize, and figure things out on the fly. Lesbian feminism is also informed by values of non-hierarchy, direct participation by members, and an investment in decentralized processes.

Today these values are reflected in many internet communities. A good-enough approach (“rough consensus”), a culture of sharing (“copyleft”), and collectively organized work (“open source”) as well as political militancy (“Anonymous”) characterize segments of the computer industry as much as they are part of the lesbian-feminist heritage. One may even see in the Slow Web movement echoes of the politics of nonadoption and digital hesitancy that was developed by some activist groups surveyed by the author. Beyond lesbian history, these activists have much to teach all of us about why, when, and for whom information comes to matter. The lesbian feminist imagination allows us to envisage a world brought together by connection, care, and “sisterhood” that earlier feminist networks originally articulated and that worldwide Internet connectivity now makes potentially real. A lesbian-feminist approach also reminds us that networks make equalitarian promises that conceal the power structures, protocols, and control mechanisms they actually exert. Computer databases and search engines are not neutral; they determine what is thinkable and sayable through filtering access to information and indexing resources into categories and keywords. These are deeply political choices, and the way decision-making processes and governance bodies are structured matters a great deal. If we want to keep a free and open Internet and uphold the principle of net neutrality, perhaps we should learn from a history of information networks written through older forms of feminist print culture.

Lesbianism is so twentieth century

But does the lesbian past still talk to our queer age? As a self-described “masculine, nonbinary person,” Cait McKinney is ambivalent about the category of lesbianism. She originally assumed that “lesbian” as a specific term of self-identification was historically dated and situated in a period of late twentieth-century militancy, and she was surprised to learn that the term was still popular among a younger generation of queer-identified activists. Young volunteers at the Lesbian Herstory Archives articulate deep attachment to lesbian history and subcultures, and the snippets of information and pictures that the center posts on Instagram are instantly popular. Some business ventures exploit the revival in lesbian-feminist militancy heritage, selling T-shirts, collectable items, and other paraphernalia bearing slogans and pictures from the seventies and eighties. McKinney also thinks lesbianism, while providing a big tent for women with nonconforming gender identities, also had exclusionary effects as many lesbian-feminists were historically hostile to trans women and indifferent to women of color. As a matter of fact, lesbianism meant much more than women having sex with women. Likewise, the erotic exceeds what is commonly understood as sensuous, sexually appealing, and emotionally gratifying acts. Eroticism can be described as a communication practice, and information activism is definitely part of it. Reading archives against the grain (or along the archival grain, as Laura Stoller invites us to do) also refers to the grain of one’s skin, and the archival touch implies an embodied experience laden with sensory perceptions and affects. Libriarianship and archivism are professions that have been historically attractive to women, including persons attracted to same-sex relations, and they have often served as erotic projections of male—and sometimes female—desire. There is something queer about manipulating acid-free paper, and Information Activism consciously addresses how librarians and archivists cope with the affective and intimate impacts of accumulated print media.

Digital Humanities and Sound Studies

27 Mar 20216 Jun 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Digital Sound Studies, edited by Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, and Whitney Trettien, Duke University Press, 2018.**

Digital Sound Studies Nowadays young PhDs majoring in the social sciences and the humanities often list an interest in sound studies when they enter the academic job market. Likewise, digital humanities is a booming field encompassing a wide range of theories and disciplines bound together by an interest in digital tools and technologies. There is a premium in listing these categories as fields of interest in one’s CV, even though the young scholar’s specialization may lie in more traditional disciplines such as English literature, modern history, or American studies. This is what economists call job market signaling: by associating themselves with “hot” topics, potential new hires make themselves in hot demand and differentiate their profile from more standard competitors. And yet, digital humanities and sonic materials have so far had a limited impact on social science scholarship. The humanities remain text-centric and bound by technologies inherited from the printing press and the paper format. The reproduction of sound is ubiquitous, and digital technologies are everywhere but in the content of academic journals and university syllabuses. Student evaluation is still mostly based on silent modes of learning such as final essays, midterm exams, and reading responses. Sonic modes of participation such as asking questions, providing oral feedback, and exchanging ideas with peers during class discussions are weighted with a limited coefficient compared to other evaluation metrics based on the written text.

A new age of digital acoustics

In a way, digital humanities and sound studies are a story of literary scholars catching up with the times. What isn’t digital these days? We live our lives immersed in digital environments and aided by digital devices that transform the way we work, relax, and communicate. The sounds of nature and of city life have given way to artificial soundscapes shaped by recorded music and transmitted signals. We live in an age where a new orality sustained by distant communication, radio, television, and other electronic devices has partially substituted to the written word and the visual cue. Almost all college students now have an audio and video device in their pocket—the challenge is rather to make them silence their smartphone and concentrate on the aural and visual environment of the classroom as opposed to their earbuds and small screens. It has become standard to include video and audio files in powerpoint presentations and to use multimedia material inside humanities work across all fields. As the editors of Digital Sound Studies note, “It has never been easier to build and access sonic archives or incorporate sound into scholarship.” Social scientists and humanities scholars who have grown up alongside digital technologies and audio equipment are comfortable using them in their research and in their teaching. So why not make digital sound itself the object of enquiry?

Despite its societal impact and economic value, technology is not the primary engine of change in the academy. The real game changer is money. Monetary incentives, reinforced by institutional recognition, are what makes the academic world go round. The editors of this volume are very open about it: “One of the reason that digital humanities has burgeoned is that there’s money behind it.” Take the case of Joanna Swafford, from Tufts University. As a PhD student specializing in Victorian poetry, she would have faced a dull doctoral environment and a bleak employment future. Instead, gaining some programming and web development skills, she designed Songs of the Victorians, an archive of Victorian song settings of contemporaneous poems. She went on to create Augmented Notes, a software tool that allows users to integrate an audio file with a score image and a text commentary so that everyone, regardless of musical literacy, can follow along the audio song, the score, and the written text. She was supported in her endeavor by multiple scholarships, research grants, fellowship programs, and skill upgrading sessions in the digital humanities. Her case is not isolated: enterprising scholars in humanities departments everywhere are riding the digital wave to get equipments and research fundings that their more classically inclined colleagues can only dream of. And they are adding sound and music to the mix in order to create a multi-sensory and multimodal experience.

Low cost, high rewards

There are huge incentives to get into digital humanities. By contrast, barriers to entry into the field of digital humanities are very low. The great bulk of research that is being produced can be characterized as low tech, even though there is a premium in making elaborate project designs and using advanced technology methods. Most multimedia tools are already on the shelves, sometimes accessible free of charge as open software and web-based solutions. The curated sound studies blog Sounding Out! is a prime example of a low-tech enterprise: the hosts just use the WordPress platform, SoundCloud, and YouTube, and put all their energy in giving editorial advice and feedback to contributing authors. New academic journals and publishing platforms such as Scalar have created venues for born-digital work that encourage exploration and experimentation while building on established traditions of academic writing and argumentation. New text mining techniques using machine learning and AI allow to search, analyze, and visualize large bodies of audiovisual material. But tagging and indexing audio files to train the machine-learning algorithm is a low-tech, labor-intensive process that requires only limited equipment. Providing uniformity across the sound samples raises the issue of language-based classification systems and individual perception. What sounds “loud” or “inaudible” depends on the person and on the context. More generally, people working on sound are always confronting the issue of writing about sound in text. There is a very limited vocabulary of representing sound, and this vocabulary is usually not included in school curriculum. Categories borrowed from prosody and rhetorics—timbre, accent, tone, stress, pitch frequency, duration, and intensity—are finding new uses in technologies exploring speech patterns and sound archives in order to “search sound with sound.”

There is also a premium for political correctness. Digital sound studies in a North American context intersect with issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and postcoloniality. The editors point out that generations of black cultural critics and authors have drawn deeply from music and sound in their writings. Black studies has also had to confront sonically encoded racist stereotypes, such as those made popular through blackface minstrelsy and the use of “negro dialect” in early radio and television. In his contribution, Richard Rath tries to render in sonic form a text describing the music and dance of enslaved Africans on a Jamaican plantation in 1688. He tinkers with various musical instruments and electronic tools to exercise what he calls the “historical imagination,” but is reluctant to take on the voice of enslaved Africans himself or to make “a singalong with audiences of mostly white folks,” as such performance would smack of cultural appropriation—he has less qualms about having the classroom clap in three and four beat patterns to illustrate polyrhythm. Similarly, African-American writer and Harlem Renaissance figure Zora Neale Hurston is mentioned in several chapters and gets much credit for performing and recording the Deep South songs that white male scholars Franz Boas and Alan Lomax made her collect—the fact that she exposed the sexual promiscuity of some of her childhood neighbors in the ethnography of her hometown in Florida is not mentioned, but remains controversial to this day.

Raiders of the lost sound

Some academic disciplines are more attuned to digital sounds than others. In the 1960s and 1970s ethnomusicologists often included LPs with their monographs so readers could hear the music the book described. Anthropology and folklore scholars also used recording equipment to document oral traditions and sonic environments. These fields have evolved as technology moved from analog to digital, and they have acquired a new sensitivity to power imbalances and cultural hegemony: it is no longer white men recording native sounds for their own uses. Sonic archives and recordings are repatriated to their communities of origin, sometimes using portable devices like USB sticks and minidiscs in places with low internet connectivity. Literary studies have also experienced a sonic turn. In particular, the intersection of music and poetry is a booming area of research. The English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is bringing musical settings to the fore by digitizing almost eight thousand ballads from England, and it includes facsimiles, transcriptions, and when available, audio recordings of the ballads. In the Songs of the Victorians project mentioned above, Joanna Swafford was able to show that women musicians used songs performed in the parlor as part of a courtship ritual that unsettled the gendered status quo. Poetry is also a place where, in the space of one generation, scholars have rediscovered the importance of voicing and listening. Literature needs not be a silent experience: some words cry out to be articulated, whispered, or shouted.

Historians are also designing their acousmetologies, exploring the world through sound and recreating historical soundscapes that are true to the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” As Geoffroy-Schwinden argues, digital explorations of sonic history must do more than simply attempt to recreate the sound and fury of the past; these projects must also historicize sound and contextualize the listening experience, as similar sounds were not perceived in the same way then and now. Musicians attempting to execute historically informed performances must not stop at the use of period instruments and past performance techniques: they must also recreate the ancient concert hall soundscape with its low-voice conversations, loud cheers, sneezing and coughing that modern concert goers try to silence as much as they can. Immersive environments can go beyond the sonic experience and include the visual, the haptic, the olfactive, the tactile, and the visceral. Listening is a multisensory experience: incorporating sound into digital environments must also attend to the ways in which users physically interact with and are affected by sound at the level of the senses. In many experiments such as the reconstruction of historical soundscapes (Emily Thompson,s “The Roaring Twenties,” Mylène Pardoen’s “Projet Bretez”) or the incorporation of multi-vocal narratives in social science projects (Erik Loyer’s “Public Secrets”), the frontier between art and science blurs and the public is invited to take part in a performance of “artistic research.” This, according to the editors, illustrates the “turn toward practice” and away from high theory that characterizes recent academic orientations, of which digital humanities is a part.

Talking shop

By combining two hot topics, digital humanities and sound studies, this book provides a blueprint for making sound central to research, teaching, and publishing practices. And yet, despite its profession of inclusiveness and accessibility, this seems to me a book targeted to a very small segment of the academic world, as potential readers will mostly be people already engaged in teaching and research activities they describe as digital sound studies. Instead of addressing digital natives and sound aficionados at large, they engage in a conversation that concerns mostly themselves. The concluding chapter, which takes the form of a discussion between Jonathan Sterne and the three editors, illustrates this inward-looking and parochial nature of the whole endeavor. The discussants concentrate on practical issues that appear mundane to outsiders but in which they invest considerable energy: how to get tenure, what counts as scholarly work as opposed to teaching duties or to community projects, how to get published into the “best” journals, which fields are hot and which aren’t, what will be the next epistemological turn or the new paradigm that will redefine scholarly practices, etc. Free labor is an issue for them: like everybody else, they do many things for fun, like blogging or building stuff, but unlike other professions they would like to see these activities recognized as part of their academic contribution. Scholars can be openly frank and direct when they speak among themselves. They use simple words and colloquialisms, as opposed to the heavily barbed jargon of academic publications. But they also expose their petty interests and narrow corporatism when they are allowed to talk shop in public. Digital Sound Studies taught me more about the functioning of academia in a segment of disciplinary studies than about sound studies and digital humanities as such.

Let’s Talk About Sex

6 Feb 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia, edited by Purnima Mankekar and Louisa Schein, Duke University Press, 2013.**

This is not a book about Asian sex videos. Indeed, reading Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia should lead the reader to question why the category “Asian sex video” exists in the first place, why Asian bodies are disproportionately represented in Internet porn, and how we should react to such unregulated flow of images. In fact, none of the entries in this book deals with explicitly erotic content or with pornography, and the only chapter that concerns the Internet as a medium, a study of online discussions about correspondence marriage between the US and the Philippines, insists on rejecting facile analogies with the sex trade or with mail-to-order catalogues. For scholars and for feminists—and most authors in this volume are women—, the erotic has to be distinguished from the sexual. And writing about eroticism should in no way lead to stoke the base instincts of the reader. The erotic extends beyond sex acts or desires for sex acts to become “enmeshed in, for instance, yearnings for upward mobility, longings for ‘the homeland,’ formulations of nationhood and citizenship, and ruptures of ethnic and racial identity.” Desires for sexual encounters intertwine with those for commodities and lifestyles. Such a paneroticism may break gender, class, ethnicity, or age boundaries. Synonymous with desire, it may be at odd with an Orientalist vision of Asia as feminized and the West as setting the standard for homo- and heteronormativity. For instance, “what constitutes ‘lesbian’ desire may look both and function differently than it does within Euro-American social and historical formations, and draw from alternative modes of masculinity and feminity.”

Editing a volume for Duke University Press

The book is an edited volume composed of ten chapters and a dense introduction in which the two editors explain what they mean by “media,” “erotics,” “transnational,” and “Asia.” It is difficult to strike the right balance in the introductory chapter of a collection of scholarly essays written by different authors. One the one hand, the editors want to add value to the book chapters by giving coherence and theoretical depth to the assembled pieces. On the other hand, they need to reflect the diversity of the contributions and leave open their conceptual relevance for theory-building. The introduction is often the book’s signature, its most ambitious part and the text for which it will be remembered. The risk is to promise more than the book chapters can deliver by engaging in intellectual virtuosity, or to remain at the plane of immanence and offer a paraphrase of the book’s content. Mankekar and Schein lean on the theoretical side. Their introduction is thick, sometimes obscure, and heavily referenced. Their ambition is to “construct a transnational analytics” to account for the mediation of erotics in Asia and beyond. They position the book for a broad audience spanning several subdisciplines—Asian studies, media studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies, as well as anthropology and critical theory. And yet they address scholars, and it is as scholarship that they want their contribution to be noticed and remembered. My reading as a non-scholar may therefore miss the mark or misinterpret the intent of the authors. But this is a risk I am willing to take.

One way of studying erotics through transnational media in Asia is to read texts, watch pictures or videos, listen to recordings or radio shows, and then to write about their form and content using the tools and methods of literary criticism and media analysis. This is not how the authors in this volume proceed. For them, desire and erotics can only be revealed through participation in mediated worlds, in a combination of textual analysis and ethnographic research. Erotics is what people make of it: a medium or a text can only be deemed erotic if the viewers invest it with fantasies and emotional longings. Eroticism is in the eye of the beholder: we should “suspend any bounded or determinate option of what comprises erotic texts.” The preferred method of studying erotics is through ethnography and participant observation, or face-to-face interviewing. But the ethnographer cannot only approach his or her informants and say: “Let’s talk about sex.” As Purnima Mankekar notes: “I deemed it neither ethical nor culturally appropriate to interrogate my lower-middle-class and working-class informants about their attitudes toward sex or, worse, their sexual practices.” She doesn’t explain why she considered sex talk inappropriate or unethical, but her reticence probably has something to do with academic norms of proper behavior as much as with cultural sensitivities in a lower-middle-class Indian context. In any case, some of the contributors to this volume do talk to informants about media and sex, as in Friedman’s analysis of the film Twin Bracelets and its reception among interpretive communities in the United States, Taiwan, and China, or in Manalasan’s discussion of the reception of the movie Miguel/Michelle among queer Filipino audiences in Manila and in New York. In other situations, the ethnographer had to listen to her informants’ “silences, hesitations, and discursive detours” and “go beyond the verbal, the discursive, and the visible.”

Getting a book published

When writing a text and seeking publication, the scholar has to choose between three options: the self-standing book or monograph, the journal article, or the chapter in an edited volume. Getting a book published by an university press is the most difficult option: academic publishing houses are fortresses guarded by stern gatekeepers, and getting access involves a long process of book project’s proposal, manuscript editing, and peer review. The publication of a first book, commonly one that is drawn from a dissertation, is a critical event in the career of a scholar, and the book will usually remain the author’s signature to the wider academic community for the rest of his life. Publishing a journal article is more standard: for a scholar, a good publication record is a sine qua non, and life on the academic front is ruled by the discipline of publish or perish. Getting published depends on the prestige and disciplinary slot of the academic journal and necessitates a capacity to adjust to scholarly criteria of presentation without necessarily requiring literary talent. The book chapter is the most flexible contribution: contributing authors are usually invited by the editors to write a chapter for the book, based on presentations they made at conferences or in a rewriting of previously published research material. The editors will be reviewing and accepting the chapters and also be suggesting the authors if any revisions are needed. Though they are supported by their publishers, editors remain of sole responsibility when it comes to the content integrity of their book. Again, the importance of writing an excellent introductory chapter cannot be overstated. The introduction should serve as a “lure” that attracts the reader, allows the reader to comprehend the book’s intent, and encourages the reader to continue reading. In terms of bookshelf longevity, the full-fledged book comes first, then the edited volume and, last, the scholarly article.

Most contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia have published a book, sometimes two or even three, with Duke University Press. Having read and reviewed some of these books on this blog, I will draw a comparison between the full-length books they have published and the chapters in this volume. My favorite author in the sample is Everett Yuehong Zhang, author of The Impotence Epidemic, a study of changing attitudes about sexuality in an increasingly globalized China. The chapter he offers here could have been included in his previous book and centers on the host and participants of a radio talk show addressing sexuality from a clinical perspective. It is only loosely connected to the twin themes of media and erotics that define the edited volume: radio broadcasting is not the medium we first think about when studying transnational media, and there is nothing erotic in talking about premature ejaculation, masturbation, or erectile failure with a medical doctor—even though desires to be normal, to enjoy a fulfilling sexual life, and to have fun talking about personal matters after decades of Maoist silence are also addressed. Dr. Ma, the talk show host, treats both male and female sexual issues and is very open about discussing sexual desire and pleasure in public. His co-host, Ms. Sun, recalls how uncomfortable she was at first using the technical term for masturbation, shouyin, with two characters meaning “hand lust,” and how talking about masturbation became easier in the 1990s with the adoption of a new word, ziwei, meaning “self-consolation.” This change of words signals a transition from the desire to be moral to the desire to be normal, and from a moral economy of seminal essence and revolutionary ardor to the realm of medical normality and individual gratification.

From the book to the article

Whispering Tonight, the call-in radio show and its case study by Everett Zhang, is a microcosm of all the issues raised by The Impotence Epidemic. One the one hand, it contextualizes sexuality within the social changes brought by recent economic reform and through the production of various desires in post-Maoist China. It relocates the body from the periphery where it was confined under Maoism toward the center of public attention, private concerns, and emotional investments. It provides a thick description of call-in patients’ complaints and doctor’s comments, based on extensive fieldwork and ethnographic documentation. On the other hand, and perhaps more explicitly than in the book, this volume’s chapter is a piece of applied theory. It draws on a rich array of concepts borrowed from French theory, and especially Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of flows and affects. Deleuzian notions are sometimes hard to grasp and may provide more obscurity than light, but Zhang uses them in a simple and straightforward way, giving added depth and relevance to his text. The second piece of medical anthropology in this volume, a chapter by Judith Farquhar on “Self-Health Information in Beijing in the 1990s,” also echoes a book by the same author (Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China), but is written in a more personal and reflexive way. Farquhar starts by describing her encounter with two men poring over an illustrated sexual disease textbook in a bookstore, and wonders what meaning this experience had for them—seeking sexual satisfaction or documenting a medical condition—and for the anthropologist, who didn’t dare interrupt and ask. She then examines a number of methodological problems that plague efforts to understand the popular and the everyday in any scholarly project. Self-health manuals, pop psychology books, and other mass-consumption publications can be used as an archive of everyday living in post-socialist China, but do not reveal how this information is read and assimilated by readers.

In addition to the introduction, Purnima Mankekar provided a chapter in this volume that is based on the research she presented in her two books published by Duke University Press, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics and Unsettling India. I usually prefer to read full-length books in anthropology than journal articles or edited volumes. My feeling is that the author needs space in order to set the scene, present the characters, and flesh out his or her argument, and that a single book chapter or article usually falls short on these three counts. But Mankekar’s chapter in this book, “Dangerous Desires,” nicely complements the two books she wrote based on the same ethnographic material: the reception of TV programs, and in particular state-sponsored television serials, viewed by upwardly-mobile, yet lower-to-middle class urban women in New Delhi. Her objective in this chapter is to examine the place of erotics in the reconfiguration of gender, family, class, caste, and nation, through the eroticization of commodity desire in TV commercials and the proliferation of sexual content in programs broadcast by transnational satellite networks. As noted above, she couldn’t just go out and ask her informants to have a “sex talk” on what they were viewing; she had to learn to watch alongside them and over their shoulders, interpreting bodily cues and discursive detours that saturated their conversations. For instance, many women she spoke with expressed their erotic longing via their yearning for certain commodities. On other occasions, her informants expressed their attitudes, feelings, and, very occasionally, their experiences of sex and erotics while discussing television programs. Desire for commodities and sexual longings were very often perceived as threats to proper gender behavior, to social status, and to the Indian nation as a whole. But Doordarshan state-run television no longer has a monopoly of public broadcasting, and the proliferation of satellite channels is having an impact on perceptions and values.

Telling better stories

Anne Allison, who provides the last chapter in this volume, teaches cultural anthropology at Duke University and has published several books on Japan. She wrote the book Nightwork on hostess clubs and Japanese corporate culture after having worked at a hostess club in Tokyo, and she has also researched erotic comic books and mother-son incest stories. The novel she reviews in her essay, Memoirs of a Geisha, doesn’t belong to the erotica literature: it is a fictional memoir of a Japanese geisha, penned by an American man and made into a movie by Steven Spielberg with Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi. Others would call it a story of cultural appropriation or a bad case of Orientalism; but Allison chose to focus on the reaction of (mostly female) American readers who, in the interviews she had with them and in the comments they wrote on Amazon, felt titillated by the fiction and enthralled by its exoticism. She reads erotic desire through the lens of the allure of fantasies generated by being transported to another place and time. In this case, desire is thoroughly political, but it doesn’t involve the masculine fantasies of empire and domination that Edward Said saw as the hallmark of Orientalist thinking. Exotica functions as erotica in the blurring of historical fiction and personal memoir, the minute description of sexual rituals such as the mizuage (by which a young geisha sells her virginity), and the allure of soft kimono fabric and intricate tea ceremony. “When readers described their experience of Memoirs to me,” writes Allison, “it was often in language befitting a love affair. They would smile and get excited, talk quickly and move their bodies. Passion, bordering on arousal, was palpable.” This, concludes Allison, raises a challenge for the anthropologist: “How to tell better stories that are imaginative and compelling, without falling into the trap of exoticizing or essentializing?”

Watching Crap Videos on YouTube

2 Sep 202024 Jun 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global, edited by Joshua Neves and Bhaskar Sarkar, Duke University Press, 2017.**

Reflecting on the uploaded content usually found on YouTube, legal scholar and political activist Lawrence Lessig made the following comment: “The vast majority of remix, like the vast majority of home movies, of consumer photographs, or singing in the shower, or blogs, is just crap. Most of these products are silly or derivative, a waste of even the creator’s time, let alone the consumer’s.” This is a book about crap. But it isn’t a crap book: as Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin have taught us, there is meaning and enjoyment to be found in the transient, the fleeting, the contingent. It is by acknowledging these mundane aspects of everyday life that we can paint a true picture of modernity. Modernity as experienced by Baudelaire or Benjamin was Parisian, pedestrian, and picturesque. Our modernity falls under the sign of the global; and it is now in Asia, not on the streets of Paris, that new forms of contemporaneity are being experienced. Videos posted on YouTube and its regional equivalents—China’s Youku, Japan’s Niko Niko Dōga—as well as images circulating on low-tech video supports such as Video CDs and microSD cards are not only the crap of lived experience and a waste of consumer’s time. They are invested with imaginaries, intimacies, and identities that summon other ways of being in the world. As such, they provide weak signals, background noise, and narrow bandwidth communication to the careful observer attuned to Asia’s many presents and futures. But attending to these realities cannot be done merely from a computer screen. The various contributions in Asian Video Cultures emphasize ethnography as a crucial methodological tool for achieving better comprehension of video cultures at all levels of analysis and advocates anthropological case studies and cross-cultural analysis as foundational to a much-needed critical global media perspective.

Asian modernities

The “Asia” the editors have in mind is different from the landmass imagined by politicians, corporate executives, and ideologues. It is not defined by geography: art videos assembled by a gay Singaporean artist in Germany are as much part of Asia as the Bollywood movies that circulate in northern Nigeria. The book includes fieldworks studies taking place in Palestine and Lebanon, while other Asian geographies, such as Central Asia or Iran, are conspicuously absent. Articles about India dominate the count, and introduce us to fine-grained descriptions of localist movements such as the consumption of music videos by rigorist Meo villagers in the state of Haryana or the accession of Telangana to statehood through a politics of YouTube remixes and online comments. Some countries known for their digital modernity, such as Japan and Korea, only appear tangentially, while we are reminded that Indonesia has (or had) the second-highest number of Facebook users in the world. Just as the nation-state was molded by the printing press and the emergence of national literatures, imagined communities in Asia are currently being formed through the circulation of images and affects on online platforms and offline hardware devices. The YouTube video or its social media equivalent is at once intimate and political. It shapes an imaginary and carries values of immediacy, propinquity, self-expression, and affective engagement. Internet videos herald “the age of the amateur” which blurs the divisions between producer and consumer, media and content, uploading and downloading. They proliferate “in the penumbra of the global”, in the twilight hours between dusk and dawn when all cats are grey and dogs and wolves are confused.

The new media formations that the book chapters describe are often relegated at the margin of scholarly attention, statist projects, and corporate strategies. A common trope among intellectuals is to disparage media practices across the region as the emanation of a culture of copy, duplication and counterfeit, devoid of any intellectual creativity and adversarial to legitimate market value. According to this common view, the West is the originator of value and content, and the East free-rides on this authentic culture of innovation by offering knockoffs and low-cost imitations. The tolerance that Asian states grant to these intellectual property infringements is the sign of a retrograde political culture that is, in the end, adversarial to economic development. Another stereotype, which partly contradicts this first trope, is to view the state in Asia as authoritarian and manipulative. In his critique of Stalin’s Russia, Karl Wittfogel saw the authoritarian nature of communism as an extension of the need of totalitarian rule to control water that had shaped civilizations in most of Asia. This “oriental despotism” now takes the form of media censorship, Internet control, and political repression in densely populated cities and states that cannot tolerate political dissent. For the editors, these views, which still inform much of what passes as area studies in Euro-American university departments, are inspired by Cold War geopolitics and market neoliberalism: their objective is to make Asia fit for capitalism and democracy. They prevent us to register the profound social changes that are taking place at the level of the infra-political: most media practices described in this volume operate below the radar of the state and the market. They also make connections beyond and outside the borders of the state, giving way to transnational currents that are as constitutive to globalization as the movement of goods, services, and capital.

Bringing media to the village

Beyond the triumphant view of emerging Asia as a continent of skyscrapers and digital connectivity, one should not forget that Asia is also composed of slums, shantytowns, and remote villages. The economies of survival that sustain these margins also shape the technologies, idioms, and practices that characterize Asian video cultures. In “Video documentary and rural public China,” Jenny Chio describes how video is integrated into contemporary rural and ethnic minority livelihoods in China’s southwestern provinces. She shows that one can be modern and rural and ethnic at the same time. Video recordings of local festivals and folk performances of ethnic Miao communities find their ways to the smartphone screens and computer monitors of migrant workers and farming households living in factory towns or staying in isolated villages. They exist alongside, but not necessarily in conflict with, mainstream national media. The videographers who produce these videos are self-taught or, in some instances, beneficiaries of video-production training workshops run by local NGOs. They bring “media to the village,” but also participate in a rural public culture that allows for different forms of media representation and public participation. Slums and villages shouldn’t be identified as the “local” in opposition to the global. In another chapter on “Sensory politics in Northern Nigeria,” Conerly Casey takes the case of Muslim secondary-school girls who develop signs of spirit possession that include “dancing like they do in Indian masala films.” Qur’anic scholars who adhere to a strict interpretation of the Sunna immediately forbade Bollywood movies, while the local video movie industry produced song-and-dance copies of Bollywood productions and young adults circulated a PalmPilot version of the Kamasutra known as the Palmasutra. Stories of spirit possession, forbidden images, and sexual fantasies also played out in national politics when Nigeria’s strongman, General Sani Abaca, dropped dead after a late-night visit with two “Indian prostitutes”. The transnational circulation of images and content affect people at the level of the sensory, the intimate, the emotional, but also the religious and the political.

Another bias in media studies is to focus on large cinema screens and TVs or computer monitors, and to leave aside smaller screen displays and low-tech hardware supports. Products like VCDs, digital audio tapes, MiniDiscs, and SD cards were widely adopted in the region and successfully competed with DVDs and web uploads until smartphones became ubiquitous in the 2010s. The ethnographies collected in Asian Video Cultures attest that the preferred mode of diffusion is often off-line and through movable hardware devices that are passed on through informal networks of distribution and exchange. As Chia-chi Wu shows in her study of trans-Chinese screen practices, Asia is the continent of small-screen realities. In Chinese-language communities in the recent past, a growing lexicon of the “mini”, the “small” and the “micro” has developed in multifarious forms with radically different political and cultural meanings. “Wēi”, meaning “micro” in Mandarin, has been used in ubiquitous names like Wēibó (China’s version of Twitter), Wēixìn (WeChat in Chinese), and wēi xiǎo shuō (micro-fictions or SNS novels) or wēi diàn yǐng (micro-cinema or “micro film”). Other neologisms centering on the concept of small are also popular, such as xiǎo què xìng (small pleasures), wēi zhěng xíng (micro-plastic surgery) or wēi lǚ xíng (micro-travel). Asian minimalism, a film orientation associated with directors You Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhang-ke, has given rise to the rejuvenation of short-film culture on a regional scale, as evident now in the flourishing of film festivals devoted exclusively to short films or micro-movies. Wēi diàn yǐng has almost completely replaced the Mandarin term for movie shorts, duǎn piàn, which now sounds old-fashioned if not obsolete. As Chinese consumers are enjoined to embrace “wēi” or “micro”, technologies that exploit the small, the mundane, the daily pleasures, and the quotidian begin to shape a specifically Asian or Chinese modernity. All these little things resonate with subtle, multilayered meanings about the production of a self-managing, complacent, and self-comforting subject that is compatible with market neoliberalism and state authoritarianism: of course, making “big” acts of disobedience is not tolerable or even imaginable in China.

Platform and content

Two terms dominate the formulation of corporate strategies and government policies in the digital sector throughout Asia: “platform” and “content”. The shared goal is to create home-grown platforms that would compete with the dominant players, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple, and to generate content targeted at global audiences. But video cultures show us that platforms can be improvised, such as in the exchange of microSD cards among traders and consumers, and that content is often user-generated with a very local audience in mind. Niko Niko Dōga, abbreviated Nico-dō, is a Japanese video-sharing service owned by Kadokawa Corporation as part of a media mix strategy that fuses platform and content. The media mix originally refers to the practice of turning books or manga into moving images or products and vice versa. It ties video together with print, games, plastic figures, comics, and novels in a tightly knit ecosystem. Unlike other video sharing site, comments generated by users on Niko Niko Dōga are overlaid directly onto the video, synced to specific playback times. This feature allows comments to respond directly to events occurring in the video, in sync with the viewer—creating a sense of a shared watching experience. Nico-dō delivers not only videos but also manga, novels, and magazines, via the same interface as its videos, and conjunction with its unique comments function.In Japan, the emphasis on platforms was a rather late addition in corporate strategic discourse. Previous priorities in the 1990s focused on contents and intellectual property, as policy makers entertained the hope that Japanese cultural goods would make up for the decline of Japanese industrial power. But once it was adopted in the 2000s, platforms became ubiquitous. Former telecom services such as NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode were reconceptualized as platforms, and business seminars with MIT professors were organized on the logic of multi-sided markets—as platforms are modeled among economists. The enthusiasm for platform reflected the craze about media theory that had developed among Japanese executives at the time of Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media in the 1960s. Indeed, as Marc Steinberg notes in his contribution, “what we used to call media we now call platforms.”

There is a dark side of Asian video cultures that the authors of this volume do not really explore, and to which they refer only tangentially. In Asia as elsewhere, the Internet is a breeding ground for conspiracy theories, right-wing ideologies, racist provocations, and nationalist mobilizations that abuse free speech and undermine democracy. Evidence points to an Asian genealogy of some of these extremist forums. Japan’s infamous 2Channel (2ch.net), known as nichan, served as the model for the English-language 4chan, on which the hacker collective Anonymous and the far-right conspiracy movement QAnon first developed. First launched in 1999 as a bulletin-board where full anonymity was guaranteed, 2chan became known as a hub for the Net-Right or netto uyoku that bears some responsibility for the rightward swing of Japanese politics in the past two decades. Likewise, nationalism and anti-foreigner sentiment in China would never have developed to the extend it now has without the availability of Internet forums and text messaging services that allowed disgruntled youths to vent the anger they couldn’t direct at the authoritarian regime. The dark side of the net is also reflected in the proliferation of pornographic pictures and sex videos that affects individuals and communities in Asia as in other continents. Without going so far as saying that “mobile phones are responsible for rapes,” as the Karnakata legislature did to ban smartphones in schools and colleges across the state, the proliferation of smutty videos and pictures on modern social networks has certainly taken a toll on populations and especially on the most vulnerable: women, the young, those least able to navigate discriminately the new currents of online streams. With great freedom comes great responsibility.

The new Internet archive

The authors of Asian Video Cultures prefer to insist on the positive, creative and empowering aspects of new media. They offer vignettes of individual emancipation, community involvement, emergent solidarities, and artistic production that all point toward the same direction. Patricia Zimmermann describes a new-media portal in Indonesia that has been described as the “YouTube for Southeast Asia activists”. It focuses not on the national but on micro-territories and micro-practices such as the production of short documentaries for social media that address issues of environmental degradation, social mobilization, and migrant rights, thereby circumventing the mainstream media’s stranglehold on information. Tzu-hui Celina Hung documents how immigrant brides in multicultural Taiwan are able to better negotiate the terms of incorporation into their new household by exchanging information and sharing their stories on social networks. Rahul Mukerjee and Abhigyan Singh explain how young men from the Meo ethnic group in rural Mewat in northwestern India are able to escape the strictures of their rigorist community by appropriating the symbols of individual emancipation, the motorbike and the mobile phone. Feng-Mei Heberer analyzes the art videos of Singaporean artist Ming Wang who performs drag cross-dressing by impersonating the role of female protagonists in German classical movies, thereby giving a face to under-represented ethnic and sexual minorities in Germany. S.V. Srinivas studies the mobilization that led to the formation of Telangana State within India through online activities such as uploading videos and posting comments in the local language on YouTube. Like literacy in 19th century Europe, the diffusion of video cultures in contemporary Asia is conducive to the formation of new subjects and collectives. Unlike literacy, however, it largely escapes the sphere of the state and is not framed by national policies. Video documentaries and short movies are produced outside of the state media system and circulate beyond the realm of the market. Another key difference is that we are able to document 19th century history through the print archive formed by the collection of books, newspapers, pamphlets, and printed material kept in libraries and archival depots. How will future historians and researchers document our video cultures, and how will they deal with the crap that is uploaded daily on YouTube?

Video Game Theory

30 Jul 202015 Aug 2020 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life, Colin Milburn, Duke University Press, 2018.**

Respawn Video games are now part of popular culture. Like books or movies, they can be studied as cultural productions, and university departments offer courses that critically engage with them. Scholars who specialize in this field of study take various perspectives: they can chart the history of video game production and consumption ; they can focus on their design or their aesthetic value; or they can analyze their narrative content and story plot. There is no limit to how video games can be engaged: some thinkers even take them as fertile ground for philosophy and theory building. Within the past few years, a handful of books have been published on video game theory. Colin Milburn’s Respawn can be added to that budding strand of literature. It is a work of applied theory: the author doesn’t engage with longstanding philosophical problems or abstract reasoning, but draws from the examples of a wide range of games, from Portal and Final Fantasy VII to Super Mario Sunshine and Shadow of the Colossus, to illustrate how they impact the lives of gamers and non-gamers alike. In particular, he considers the value of video games for shaping protest and political action. Video games, with the devotion that serious gamers bring to the task, introduce the possibility of living otherwise, of hacking the system, of gaming the game. Gamers and hackers develop alternative forms of participatory culture along with new tactics of critique and intervention. Hacktivist groups such as Anonymous use video game language and aesthetics to disrupt the operations of the security state and launch attacks on the neoliberal order. Pirate parties have won seats in European legislatures and advocate a brand of techno-progressivism, digital liberties, and participatory democracy largely inspired by video games. Exploring the culture of video games can therefore offer a glimpse into the functioning of our modern democracies in a computerized world.

Geek vocabulary

A culture is formed of various groups that may develop their own specific identity within the context of the larger social system to which they belong. Gaming culture can he treated as a subculture: a series of social codes, technological lore, and insignificant facts of history, popular culture, art and science. Subcultures create social groups by delineating their identities, beliefs, and habits as much as they exclude those who do not belong to the group. Geek culture is a subculture of computer enthusiasts that is traditionally associated with obscure media: Japanese animation, science fiction novels, comic books, and video games. Respawn is replete with trivia, code words, and key expressions that open for the noninitiate a window into the world of gaming. “All your base are belong to us” is the poorly translated sentence from the Japanese arcade game Zero Wing that is now used as a catchphrase for violent appropriation and technical domination. Used by the leader of the cyborg invasion force known as CATS, it signifies that a posthuman future is already inevitable, and presents an allegory of the information age in which mistranslations and malfunctions abound. Made popular by the website Something Awful, it is the feline equivalent of the Doge Internet meme that consists of a picture of a Shiba Inu dog accompanied by multicolored text deliberately written in a form of broken English. Variations on the CATS meme include the message posted by YouTube in 2006 that “All your videos are belong to us” or, following the Snowden affair and the exposure of NSA’s vast data-surveillance operation, various Internet images that proclaim: “All your data are belong to U.S.”

Another obscure lore sentence is the question: “Where were you on April 20, 2011?” that refers to the date the PlayStation Network was shut down as a retroactive security response to an external intrusion. Colin Milburn reconstructs the story of this particular episode, which exposes the troubled relations between Sony Corporation and various groups of hackers, of which the attack on Sony Pictures by operatives allegedly sponsored by the government of North Korea is only the last installment. It all began with Sony’s decision to make its PlayStation 3 open to homebrew programmers and technological innovators in order to encourage participatory science, peer-to-peer design, and do-it-yourself innovation. With its PlayStation Network or PSN, it even claimed to have created “the most powerful distributed computing network ever” and made it accessible to Stanford University’s researchers to simulate the mechanics of protein folding by installing the Folding@home software on all its stations. However, in January 2010, the young hacker George Hotz—more commonly known by his alias, GeoHot—announced that he had found a way to hack the PS3, gaining access to its system memory and processor and allowing users to make pirate copies of their games. Sony backpedalled on its open system policy and filed a lawsuit against GeoHot, which then found supporters among the hacker collective Anonymous who launched a massive DDOS attack against Sony servers. It is in this context that the PlayStation Network outage occurred, disabling gamers access to their favorite occupation and exposing them to the risk of leaked personal data, including passwords and credit card numbers that the hackers were able to extract from servers. Anonymous was quick to deny responsibility for the criminal intrusion, but it wasn’t the end for Sony’s troubles and the company was exposed to more attacks by malicious black-hat hackers. Meanwhile, the unsolved mystery of who hacked the PSN invited conspiracy narratives and dark humor mashups. “PlayStation Network was down so I killed Osama Ben Laden” was how a meme described president Obama’s reaction, while others noted the time coincidence between the PSN shutdown and the day the Skynet network took over the world in the Terminator movie.

Doing it for the lulz

The gamer culture intersects with hacking in the lulz, a form of corrupted laughter that derives pleasure from online actions taken at another’s expense. The “field of Theoretical Lulz” as depicted on Encyclopedia Dramatica includes trolling, gooning, griefing, and pranking, as well as the various forms of online harassment developed by hackers who, as they say, “do it just for the lulz.” Modding refers to the act of modifying hardware, software, or any aspect of a game, to perform a function not originally conceived or intended by the designer, or achieve a bespoke specification. Mods may range from small changes and tweaks to complete overhauls, and can extend the replay value and interest of the game. Respawn, a command-line first occurring in the game Doom, means to reenter an existing game environment at a fixed point after having been defeated or otherwise removed from play. It is the opposite of permadeath games that make players start over from the very beginning if their character dies. Yet another option is to play in “Iron Man mode” and try to reach the end of any game with only a single avatar life, eschewing the “save” or “respawn” functions. The hacker concept of “magic” refers to “anything as yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain,” but also to the command words in adventure games that included functions such as “XYZZY” or “PLUGH”. The word “pwn” is not a programming function or an instruction code, but a term of appreciation (as in “This game pwns”) that originated in the gaming community itself, probably born from a typographic error. According to the most enthusiastic critics, games raise philosophical issues. The role-playing game Portal includes the sentence “There will be cake” in its opening, but the player soon realizes that “The cake is a lie.” Of course, these two sentences have achieved cult status, and are repeated in countless Internet memes or signs carried at street demonstrations.

For Colin Milburn, games are closely correlated to the meaning of life. Many concepts from computer science draw parallels to the realm of organic life—worms, viruses, bugs, swarms, hives, and so forth. Sony has built upon this connexion by attaching its brand to an image of biological organism and vitality, from its 2007 “This Is Living” advertising campaign to its 2011 “Long Live Play” motto. Sony executives routinely speak about the PlayStation’s DNA, refer to its microprocessor as The Cell, and insist on the nucleic compatibility between successive generations of hardware products. For Colin Milburn, “‘respawn’ stands for a surplus of vitality, a reserve of as-yet unexpended life, a technologically mediated capacity to keep on going even while facing dire adversity.” He uses the term “technogenic life” to refer to the entanglement between organic life and digital media and the emergence of new life-forms, neither fully human nor artificial. This is of course a familiar trope in science fiction, and the author lists classic novels such as John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider, Vernon Vinge’s True Names, or William Gibson’s Neuromancer as part of any gamers’ portable library. Video games are experiments in applied science fiction: they allow players to test the limits of life, to engage with anticipation and foresight, and to make other futures imaginable. Gamers always have the possibility to reset, save, shut off, or reload. Games tend to encourage a playful and experimental attitude to life: working through error, overcoming failure, persevering toward the goal while staying open to the unexpected. Playing games can teach us how to live: indeed, they are part of our lives as Homo Ludens. Gamers respond to the injunction to “get a life” by arguing that they already have one, indeed many: “I am a gamer, not because I don’t have a life, but because I choose to have many.”

We Are Heroes

Gamers are also influenced by the subculture of comic books and superhero movies. Since 1978, when the first Superman cartridge appeared for the Atari 2600, the video-game industry has produced a steady stream of superhero adventures. One such game was City of Heroes, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game or MMORPG that attracted a large community of followers. In the game, players created super-powered characters that could team up with others to complete missions and fight criminals belonging to various gangs and organizations in the fictional Paragon City. When the South Korean company NCsoft decided to terminate its Paragon Studios development team and to shut down the game in 2012, massive protests arose. Online testimonies reflected feelings of camaraderie and shared culture, domestic and social belonging, comfort in times of sorrow, and personal accomplishment—indeed, all the qualities of “having a life”. Rallying under the motto “We are heroes. This is what we do,” participants envisaged various measures to keep the game operating past the announced date of closure. Their logic was straightforward: the company had made a game where players had spent the past eight years defending their city; it was only natural that they rose in protest against this attack on Paragon. Some decided to go rogue and keep the game running on servers based on the leaked source code. Like in the world of superheroes, the online community has always had its rogue elements, its vigilantes and its villains. The author is not sure where to categorize hackers such as the group Anonymous: “despite their roguelike appearances, hacktivists might even seem to be on the right side of history.” But the hate speech, misogynistic attacks, and racist slurs that circulate on forums such as Reddit or 4chan clearly fall into the villainy category. They represent “the dark side of the lulz,” the politics of terror and mayhem that is already familiar to the fans of Batman’s Gotham City and other superhero worlds.

Gaming also shapes a political imaginary. Numerous players have attested to the impact of gaming on their own political or ecological sensitivities. The dispositions and practices cultivated by gaming can inform political choices, responsible policy decisions, and collective action. Under the right circumstances, video games offer ways to experiment with the technopolitics of the present, to think otherwise even from the inside of a computer system. Edward Snowden has confessed that his motive for challenging the security state has developed partly through his lifelong interest in video games. According to Colin Milburn, video games frequently present interactive narratives about civil disobedience, social resistance, and transformation, becoming models for engagement. The quotidian act of saving or resetting gameplay data itself models an orientation to social change, affirming that duration and persistence are not givens but are always active processes of construction. Final Fantasy VII has encouraged a generation of players to consider “how deeply the fights for economic democracy and environmental sustainability are intertwined.” Gaming and hacking cultures are intrinsically correlated. The “primal scene of hacking” occurred in the early 1960s when MIT research scientists experimented with the university’s mainframe computer to create the first video game, Spacewar! The first online role-playing game, Adventure, which circulated on the ARPANET in the seventies, included a secret hideout place where the author left his unauthorized signature. Many games include hacking as a function, and offer the possibility to tweak the code or experiment with alternative commands even from the inside. But in the end, even those who resist the prevailing systems of control are likewise products of those same systems. Like in Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One, the only possible option may be to play through to the end or to quit entirely. Completing a game inevitably triggers the formula: “Game Over”.

Cultural studies

Colin Milburn advances the scholarly study of video games in several directions. First, he shows how to engage theoretically with video games. He borrows many of his tools from the cultural study of literature and cinema. For example, he focuses on particular episodes of video games, or he summarizes the plot of select games such as Final Fantasy VII. As in book or film reviews, his descriptions entail some disclosure of plot details that may constitute a spoiler for some gamers: if you don’t want to know the final scene in System Shock 2 or the location of the secret AVALANCHE hideout in Final Fantasy VII, you may have to skip some passages in the book. He also dwells on the psychology of some characters, just as a critic would do with a novel or a movie. In this sense, video game theory is not especially new: games are amenable to the tools used to analyze artworks that belong to the narrative genre. As a second contribution, Respawn offers a description of gaming culture. The author introduces the unfamiliar reader to a community brought together by code words, favorite expressions, a common history, and modes of engagement with video games and with life in general. Video game culture consists of a rich mythology of lore, trivia, fun facts, episodes, and images that are communicated through online discussions, the diffusion of Internet memes, and the participation in social events such as gaming conventions or cosplay parties. Thirdly, Colin Milburn underscores the transformative power of games, the subversive potential of role-playing and other forms of ludic recreation. The book traces the intersections of gaming with hacking and high-tech activism, focusing on several online campaigns launched by the hacktivist collective Anonymous. It underscores that lulz, fun, and games can no longer be thought as separate from issues of political or technological governance. Games allow other ways of being in the world: they create the possibility to act like a superhero, a vigilante or a villain, or to escape the laws of gravity by wavedashing or airdodging along with Super Mario. Most importantly, Colin Milburn demonstrates that video games matter—even for casual users or non-gamers. Video games have become increasingly sophisticated, not only in the evermore complex issues that they present, but also in revealing their own explicit and reflective awareness about theoretical issues. Video game theory may not just be about applying existing theory tools to video games, but also crafting new tools, concepts and theories brought forth by video games and that may be of broader relevance for culture and society.

Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movies

5 May 201924 Jun 2019 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies, Alexander Zahlten, Duke University Press, 2017.**

The End of Japanese Cinema Cinema is an industry. But very often aesthetics gets in the way of analyzing it as such. For cinema—or some portions of it—is also an art. Industry or art: these two approaches give rise to two distinct bodies of literature, one focusing on professions, publics, and profits, the other one on visual style, narrative content, and film textuality. There are movie industry specialists who may teach in professional schools or in economics and sociology departments, applying the standard tools of their discipline to one particular sector that represents up to one percent of the US economy. And there are cinema critics and film studies academics who develop concepts such as genre, auteur, style, form, periods, and apply them to a canon of authorized films conserved in national archives. Film studies may emphasize culture (cinema as representative of national culture), psychology (a movie reflects the inner psyche of its director), formalism (focusing on the formal or technical elements of a film), history (itself divided into the history of genres and national traditions), or theory (film theory as a branch of applied philosophy). What these approaches have in common is that they consider a movie as worthy of cultural commentary and critique. By contrast, an industry specialist is more interested in macro factors such as film production, distribution, and box office figures. He or she will focus on context more than content, on cost and revenues more than artistic quality. In the case of Japanese cinema, an art critic will focus on directors such as Kurosawa Akira or Ōshima Nagisa, specific genres such as jidaigeki (samurai movies) or kaijū eiga (monster movies), and techniques such as Ōzu Yasujiro’s signature tatami shots and multiple scene framings; while an industry specialist will study the studio system long dominated by Shōchiku, Tōhō, Tōei, Nikkatsu, and Daiei, the unionization of workers, or the distinct distribution channels for hōga (domestic movies) and yōga (foreign movies).

Pink Film, Kadokawa Film, and V-Cinema

In The End of Japanese Cinema, Alexander Zahlten combines the two approaches. He analyzes cinema as a cultural form and as a socio-economic activity with deep political ramifications. He proposes concepts that bridge the gap between the artistic and the industrial, the qualitative and the quantitative, the individual movie and the whole economic sector. It helps his case that the three categories he discusses—Pink Film or sexploitation films, Kadokawa Film produced by one single, multi-media entrepreneur, and V-Cinema made straight for the video market—are almost devoid of any artistic value. In fact, they are ignored in critical and academic discourse on films from Japan, and do not feature in Japanese movie histories. Like the infamous AV (adult videos), a large fraction of them may not even be included in film production statistics. But collectively they form an archive of close to 8000 movies: enough for the social scientist to build models, test inferences, and draw meaningful conclusions from such a large sample. They matter for a genuine history of cinema in Japan that is willing to go beyond the time-worn theories of auteurship, national character, and genre normativity. For all practical purposes, watching a movie in Japan meant, for a large fraction of the public and during a significant period of time, attending a film that belonged to one of these three categories. The reason academic work on films in Japan hardly discusses or even mentions these movies is because they cater to the base instincts of the public and are generally considered of bad taste and poor artistic value (some Pink films nonetheless made it to the Euro-American cinema festival circuit). If some of them achieved high scores at the box office or on video rental figures, it is because the public was lured by sexual attraction or by marketing ploys and media campaigns. This is particularly the case for Kadokawa films, which include a few blockbusters: but they were derided by the critics and the art movie profession, who declared that “Kadokawa films are not films” and, in the case of Kurosawa Akira at the 1980 Cannes film festival, refused to shake hands with the producer.

Sex sells, and it is no wonder that sexually themed films feature heavily in the sample studied by the author. In fact, it has been estimated that adult films represented up to 40 percent of the video rentals in the 1980s, and that close to 75 percent of films produced in Japan in 1982 positioned themselves in this market segment. Nudity and sex officially entered Japanese cinema with Kobayashi Satoru’s controversial and popular independent production Flesh Market (Nikutai no Ichiba, 1962), which is considered the first true pink film or pinku eiga. Pink films are not to be confused with Roman Porno films, a series of theatrical erotic movies produced by the movie studio Nikkatsu riding the wave that the first Pink movies had created. Nor are they similar to Adult Videos, pornographic films adapted to Japanese proclivities and visual censorship rules. Alexander Zahlten gives a strict definition of the Pink Film genre: a one-hour length format with regularly spaced erotic scenes (shot in color while the rest of the movie is often in black-and-white), a budget of around 3 million yens since the mid-1960s (decreasing in value over the years), an independent system of production, distribution, and exhibition (with specialized Pink Film theaters), extremely fast scripting and shooting schedules (tantamount to guerrilla warfare), and intensely misogynistic content. Pink movies carry explicit titles such as Meat Mattress (Niku futon), Naked Embrace (Hadaka de dakko) or Mature Woman in Heat Ball Licking (Jukujo hatsujō tamashaburi). But in fact, these films were much less explicit that their titles suggest. The same holds true for V-Cinema, which included sub-genres such as jokyōshi (female schoolteacher), danchi-dzuma (suburban wife), and chikan densha (train groper): the video cover sleeves were covered with titillating pictures that far exceeded the film’s actual explicitness. As for Kadokawa movies, they were geared for a mass audience and limited the stoking of the male public to the exhibition of underage starlets (the three Kadokawa girls, or Kadokawa san-nin musume). But they indulged in another kind of porn: the titillating of national feelings, with the screening of a national identity discourse that passed itself for cosmopolitanism and contemporaneity.

The politics of time and the aesthetics of confusion

Watching one of the first Kadokawa productions, Proof of the Man (Ningen no shōmei) made me feel particularly ill at ease. Besides the dismal performance of George Kennedy, a veteran of Japanese movies and one of the worst actors in the history of cinema, I couldn’t pinpoint the reason for my malaise, but it certainly had to do with the mixed-race character who provides the plot that the movie unfolds. The movie, and the TV drama that came after it, are suffused with deep-seated fears about miscegenation and inter-racial contact. We find the same ideologies of nationhood in the movies and dramas adapted from the novels of Yamazaki Toyoko. The question of the Other and the question of temporal hierarchy—with Japanese time being in front of its Asian neighbors yet still behind Euro-America—is a common theme of the three genres. As the author notes, “industrial genres performed complex negotiations concerning a position vis-à-vis dominant temporal discourses such as colonial time, sequential time, straight time, and homogenous time.” Pink Film rejected the possibility of a clear separation between past and present, showing how postwar Japan was haunted by remnants of its militaristic and colonial past. Kadokawa Film exchanged history itself for a perpetual present which brought confusion between the native self and the foreign Other, the victim and the victimizer, the movie plot and its reincarnation in other media supports. V-Cinema used video technology’s ability to manipulate time by starting, pausing, rewinding, stopping, and rewatching at the viewer’s convenience, thereby creating the temporality of the rewind and the fast-forward. Each industrial genre illustrates a politics of time. Each genre also generates an aesthetics of confusion: a mixing of identities, temporalities, geographies, and media. Pink Film insisted on the messy, confusing and contradictory experience of Japan two decades after the war. Kadokawa Film conflated genre and textuality with the trademark and business strategy of a corporation. V-Cinema was an untidy and disorganized collection of cheap flick pics, sleazy journalism, endless serials, how-to tapes, and soft porn videos. Not only the movies but also the viewers were confused: they deserted movie theaters and retreated to other pastimes (in 1984, motorboat racing boasted attendance figures twenty-five times the total audience of theatrical film.)

For traditional film critics, Japanese cinema offers a meta-narrative of Japaneseness: elements of culture are isolated and reflected in the form and content of a particular movie or in the history of a genre. For Alexander Zahlten, movies and genres in his sample are self-reflective. There is “a match between the textuality of the film and the textuality of the industry structure.” The aesthetics and business organization of the industrial genre is a reflection of the filmic codes and narrative patterns of the films that compose them. The story of an industrial genre is the story of a movie writ large. Textuality can be found at the level of the business structure, corporate strategy, labor relations, spatial organization, and lifecycle of industrial genres. Pink Film tells a story (largely fabricated) of antisystem resistance, oppositional realism, class politics, cultural avant-garde, and student warfare. These narrative elements are found in the films’ stories and style but also extend beyond it to encompass the identity politics of those involved in the production of Pink films, as well as their viewers and those who commented upon them. For Kadokawa Film, business practices were part of the product that was marketed to the public. The “media-mix strategy” that the company developed was a package of films, mass market paperbacks, magazine covers, and movie theme songs marketed by a single entrepreneur to the widest possible audience, with each product advertising the others. The larger-than-life personality of Kadokawa Haruki himself was part of the service package he proposed and was reflected in the movies in which he made guest appearances. He famously declared: “I like Japanese films, but I detest the Japanese film world.” His strategy was the opposite of business as usual: he broke cartels and pitted the majors each against the others, outsourced work, released Japanese films in theaters usually reserved for foreign movies, destroyed the block-booking system, deployed blitz media campaign to advertise the release of a new blockbuster, launched the careers of the first kawaii idols, and bypassed the critics to appeal directly to the audience. The story that V-Cinema narrates is one of postbubble angst and endless repetition.

Bridging the gap between art and industry

By narrating the story of industrial genres and reflecting upon the movies they encompass, Alexander Zahlten bridges the gap between art and industry, aesthetics and business. This theoretical gesture operates a transformation of what textuality itself entails. It is no longer attached to a story, a character, a subgenre, or a national space: in contents industries or platform business models, the media model is no longer based on a clear distinction between producer and consumer, with the media text delivering a message between them. The new media ecology emphasizes mobility and connectivity rather than a transmittable and consumable narrative. In today’s multimedia environment, the medium is the message: this is a truly McLuhanesque moment that is materialized in the growth of user-generated content and jishu (self-directed) productions, but that Zahlten also sees at work since the 1960s in the trajectories of the industrial genres. Kadokawa Haruki initiated the media-mix strategy by simultaneously releasing film, book, music theme, and media articles. His younger brother Tsuguhiko, who took over the company when Haruki was indicted with drug offense, introduced the platform business model that leverages user engagement and content creation. Moving away from novel adaptation, the company largely shifted to fictional characters from manga, anime, light novels, and games for the media mix, targeting a public of otaku millennials. The new media ecology in Japan marks the end of Japanese cinema: shinecon (cinema complexes) compete for viewers’ attention span, offering a free flow of subgenres, narratives, and characters without discernible borders, while the platform model shifts the emphasis from owning the commodity to owning the world in which the commodity exists and that generates commodifiable activity. The “contents business” has gripped the imagination of policymakers who see in Japan’s “Cool National Product” a vector of international influence and soft power. The story these new assemblages tell is still the story of Japan, but the visual plot is increasingly blurred by users’ online comments, viral internet memes, and gaming devices.

Are there general lessons that the economist or the business executive can draw from reading this book? The concepts that Alexander Zahlten proposes—the industrial genre, the politics of time and the aesthetics of confusion, the new media ecologies and the platform model—operate at both levels of industrial structure and textual content. Indeed, perhaps unwittingly, Zahlten borrows many concepts from industrial organization, the branch of economics that studies industrial sectors and firm strategies. Although he doesn’t always use these terms, he addresses issues of barriers to entry, sunk costs, market power, product differentiation, price discrimination, customer segmentation, niche markets, collusion and signaling. More specifically, his analysis can be linked to the organizational ecology approach associated with the names of Michael Hannan and John Freeman. There is the same focus on populations and cohorts as opposed to individual organizations and single movies or directors. The ecological approach insists on the environmental selection processes that affect organizations through a cycle of variation, selection, and retention. Similarly, Zahlten describes a wild creative exuberance and high profit margins at the beginning of an industrial genre’s life cycle, followed by a period of consolidation and attrition in which the genre ossifies and loses part of its innovative aspect. The history of industrial genres also illustrates the Galapagos syndrome that affects many Japanese productions: no movie in the sample succeeded in making a significant impact abroad. The media ecology is a closed system with no gateways or pass-through. There may however exist a subterranean influence exerted by Japanese industrial genres on the history of Korean cinema, as can be attested in the movies collected in the Korean Film Archive on Youtube. We find the same kinds of sexploitation movies, B-Films, and formulaic genres that were produced at a time when Japanese cultural exports to Korea were officially banned.

Spirited Away

Alexander Zahlten explains in the acknowledgments section that his book was long in the making. His PhD dissertation project spanned space and time between Germany, Japan, and the United States, and involved curating film programs for various institutions including the Athénée Français cultural center in Tokyo. While in Japan, he must have heard the sentence “you know Japanese cinema better than we do” many times. And indeed, his knowledge of the three industrial genres he covers in The End of Japanese Cinema makes him without peers. Only a film freak or a movie otaku may have accumulated more data and material on such a narrow topic. He complements his documentary work on film archives with interviews with directors and producers, analysis of trade journals and specialized publications, and readings of key texts in film theory and Japanese studies. He seems to know everything there is to know on Pink Film, Kadokawa Film, and V-Cinema. Like the young girl Chihiro in Miyazaki’s movie, he may have been “spirited away” by his topic: he spent an inordinate amount of time in a world of cheap movies and low-budget productions. For despite his timid denial, the movies covered in the book must have been a pain to watch. They are, to take the title of a Korean movie that is sometimes shown in indie-art theaters, “timeless, bottomless bad movies.” And yet, art can emerge from the rubble, and one can detect a certain beauty in the whole picture that each of these movies dots. Not only in the sense that art is in the eye of the beholder: the curator that guides the public through a selection of cultural productions is himself an artist, for he has the power to change our vision and to make us see things from a different angle. Who knows, next time I visit Japan, maybe I will pick one of these old movie tapes kept on the dusty shelves of sleazy video rental shops in the back alleys of train stations, between the pachinko parlor and the second-hand manga reseller.