Crisis and Precariousness: Double Fetish
Folk Devils and Moral Panics
“Youth” is a category full of transients. People make their way through this liminal space unevenly hedged by familial relations, educational obligations, biological imperatives, and economic demands. From the vantage of society, with its investments in perpetuating an orderly continuity while managing to retain some hold on the reigns of power, “(t)he young are consigned to a self-contained world with their own preoccupations, their entrance into adult status is frustrated and they are rewarded for dependency” (Cohen 2002,151). Sociologist Stanley Cohen wrote this as British society spasmed with the upheavals of the post-war teenager and then the 60’s counter-culture. In the present, adult anxieties over “self-contained worlds” with seductive “preoccupations” articulate sharp new generational fault lines as new cyborg youth are attached to mobile devices and immersed in rich gaming and social worlds facilitated by increasingly smart, cross-platform, and attentively affective software. Cohen goes on to say “The teenage culture makes them into ineffectual outsiders. The culture itself is not homogeneous; although its artefacts might be blandly classless, it is highly stratified along class, regional, educational, and other lines” (Ibid.). It is a bit startling that such a narrowly focused analysis would still hold such succinct relevance today when it was penned amidst the moral panics around perceived delinquency and (working class) youth unrest in pre-Thatcher Britain. It is a reminder of the “holding power” youth-as-figure have retained, arguably since the post-war period and into the globalized and intensively technologized present.
Within Japan, tracking change through popular historical categories of youth crisis is a common academic tactic. Studies of Japan seem particularly afflicted by a proclivity for reification of Japan as object—a salvage object where Japan is variously re-invented, vanishing, reappearing after (or despite) itself, or precarious. Despite Cohen’s timeless caution that youth culture is not homogeneous, Japan’s youth are made to be especially susceptible to overdetermined scholarly erasure as preoccupations with the painfully reductive, symptomatic child-figure of social crisis and its reproduction predominate scholarship. Taking the discursive object as an ethnographic site in fact “dispossesses” individuals’ lived experiences and reanimates them with this interrogation of the “flattened” present: “What is going wrong?” Much current anthropological and sociological work deploys the discursive figure of youth—withdrawn, isolated, competing with one another for social significance, bullied, suicidal, precarious in labor and in intimate relations—as signs of crisis and exquisitely abject harbingers of greater calamities. This is a tendency Toivonen and Imoto vocally resist, pointing to “the enormous mileage” extracted by researchers, Allison among them, from symptomatic youth such as hikikomori, irregular workers/freeters, “and other labels in striving to speak to larger topics” (2013, 64). They take Allison to task for “…framing the state of withdrawn youth as a sign of a wider ‘crisis’ in Japan” and thus “implicitly tak[ing] for granted and thereby reaffirm[ing] the existence of certain contested youth problems” (Ibid.). Toivonen and Imoto remind researchers “our role as anthropologically oriented social scientists is not merely to ‘report on’ the native discourse on youth” (Ibid., 66). Further, it is imperative, particularly in the case of Japan, to refuse the convenient hegemonic media and governmental structures devoted to locating and defining youth problems—Foucauldian techniques for the production of new knowledge around panic sites and tools to marginalize, criminalize, and restrain disorderly and non-compliant individuals and groups. Continuing to reproduce narratives of crisis around “precariousness” replete with fashionable jargon and sampled bits of discourse is an anemic strategy, leaving us transfixed in Roitman’s “blind spot for the production of knowledge.”
Crisis and Precariousness: Double Fetish
Crisis construction is not solely the blinding mechanism of academic critique but also a device for the furtherance of state and social power, operating in conjunction with moral panics. David Leheny, writing about how global responses to child pornography and terrorism produced highly local policies, policing, and moral panics in Japan, argues the state fostered and mobilized fears to reorganize the population and consolidate state power (2006). Hamai Koichi examined policing statistics and public attitudes toward crime and determined perceptions of security were increasingly anxious even as crime was quantifiably decreasing. This produced what Hamai terms “the myth of collapsing safe society” (治安悪化神話は). The resulting crime panics focused on “suspect” populations marked by ethnic and national difference such as ethnic Koreans and particular foreigners—Chinese, Brazilians, Filipinos; politicians mobilized and exploited these panics strategically (Hamai 2004).
“Precariousness” is a constant feature and effect of crisis, and crisis is perpetual, especially when helped along through cynical political manipulations. “Precarious” subjects have always walked among us, so to speak. Almost as in a séance of ethnographic work are their signs and traces materialized. But this is perhaps the parlor trick of those intent on diagnosing the “new” and inventing the epidemiology of precariousness. It is a refined performance in the tradition of any Foucauldian expert. Allison, in her recent book Precarious Japan, takes the ideology of “my home-ism” (mai-homushugi) and multiplies it into a host of categorical subjectivities situated within familiar panic sites of gender and youth, thus overlooking the impoverished, the dislocated rural worker, the day-laborer, the divorced mother. She places the hikikomori (the chronically withdrawn person, usually male) at the center of a non-(bio)reproductive family unit, ascribing to the contemporary Japanese family an omnipresent and latent risk.
Allison summons the family as a toxic and toxified site—once a bulwark against the pressures of an insistent capitalist outside but transformed into a sinister chrysalis of violence and risk (2013, 30) but its invocation is a spell capable only of conjuring nostalgia for “home,” the space of another (imagined/imaginary) time. The essentialized family glances backward at the losses endured through modernity even as it is beset with instabilities and the ideological foundations once secure are now precariously poised. This conjuring can only happen in this particular moment as Japan continues to stagger from its gluttony of financial deregulation and neoliberal corporate restructuring (Driscoll 2009). Here in the sitting room of crisis and precariousness, “conjuring home” is a parlor trick attempted only with enough distance from its historical object: “Nostalgia can only emerge across a temporal lag” (Ivy 1995, 95). The uncanny emerges in the midst/mist of uncertainty and fuan--the anxiety Allison constantly locates. What Allison describes now as precariousness is only the return of the repressed: “The uncanny effect does not arise from a simple lack of knowledge, for example; it instead erupts from an excess of what was supposed to be kept hidden and repressed” (Ibid., 85). Japan is not faced with an insufficiency. To argue this as the basis for a study of “social precariousness” is to imagine there is a lack, persistent and expanding to encompass all areas of life—from past loss to present concern to future’s absence. Allison requires this void in order to populate Japan with brief sketches intended to authorize her claims of a perpetually impending crisis. It is a twin claim that contains its own undoing as even the sine non qua of crisis is in short supply: “lack is now lacking” (Ibid., 85). No matter how convincingly Japan can be indexed to its anxieties and thus pinned to the wall with sketched observations, there persists an excess and thus a failure of the real to be harnessed to the anthropologist’s magic system. Despite how painstakingly detailed its “social precariousness” can be re-presented through theory transversally cut with anecdote, the excess overwhelms, spills outside the borders, playfully overturns the politely arranged floor cushions, like the pesky zashiki-warashi, young magical children of folklore who are supernaturally tethered to old country homes, the uncanny of the child-figure coming up from the past. They taunt from the hazy future and arrive from the country of the de-territorialized like chrono-fugitives, old ghosts of possibility and potentiality.
Rather than lack, I argue there is an excess. The excess is in the lived experiences of children and young people in this project who inhabit what Fanon terms “the zone of occult instability” of the nation. What their experiences underscore is how precarious existence always has been within modern state and capitalist structures, and how this precariousness is significant insofar as it provides the contrast to see the “instability” of the nation and its hegemonic, biopolitical constructions of youth. What is truly precarious is the state-capitalist order and the culturally conscripted lives it engenders. Power must be turned on its head so it can be seen right way up. Maybe what is transpiring is that the uncanny is actually coming home to a site opening up itself to new possibilities of improvisation, social affinity, global relations, and strange contacts with lived and virtual space.
The apocalypse fantasy of Japan possesses the imagination: the country populated with outsiders, foreigners, rogue children, cyborgs, menacing technologies, unstable environments, birthrates dissipating into the miasma of a disappearing population. Does a nation or culture exist if no-one is left to hoist the hegemonic flag of self-identity and defend a claim to difference? This is the uncanny and the return of a different Japan. The modern, capitalist consumer nuclear family-figure, conjured by the ideology of “my-home-ism” has been evicted in the long stretch of the “lost decade.” The rent is past due, the lease forfeited. The longing cultivated in Japanese society for a pre-industrial, pre-modern “home” or furusato has been lost from its object with the tsunami that crashed into the coast of rural, misbegotten Iwate-ken, the venerated “soul of Japan.” The instability of the nation, first economically, then environmentally with the double blow of the tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster, and finally politically with corruption and deceit marring the government’s feeble attempts to discipline Japan’s omnipresent corporate care-takers/profit-makers. There is no “home” to go back to and furusato is bifurcated into the nostalgic homeplace crafted in Ivy’s account of consumerist travel in a postmodern Japan and the uncanny home produced by the very act of taking over the space one is in—temporary, transitory, and tentative.
What are young people doing then? It’s not about keeping it together but keeping it moving: through body practice, through a shared cultural imaginary infusing the present manifest geography with finely-calibrated and intensively maintained intimate social circuits—friends with apartments in cities across the world, internet browsers pointed in multiple creative directions at once, illegal content streams coursing onto screens to keep memories and fantasies invigorated. Maybe these sites in motion are daiyō furusato, “substitute homelands” as Kamishima calls them (quoted in Ivy 104). The very concept of home and family need to be interrogated more closely before we can call them into states of precariousness. Furusato is already a split and ambivalent site, exerting a powerful cultural hold “in the wake of large-scale changes in rural Japan, in particular, the exodus of people in search of work in the cities in the early twentieth century, and more recently, in the postwar period” (Ivy 1995, 105).
In approaching "youth," as with any easily sensationalized subject we must resist, “(q)uite simply, the sheer symbolic lure of these categories.” The draw of these “panic sites” is “so powerful that it predisposes researchers across disciplines to pursue certain topics, neglect others, and implicitly adopt many of the associated assumptions” (Tovionen 2013). Becoming ensnared at the very center of crisis as culprit, scapegoat, victim and folk devil is yet another way children appear to magically mobilize and organize energies and knowledge—almost like telekinesis. The entire weight and history of culture seems to be eerily raised up, hovering, helplessly under the disaffected and de-corprealized touch of thoughtless youth overtaken—possessed—by their own unruly and primitive powers mutated through techno-capitalist contact, like Tetsuo in the famous anime film Akira.
Only until kids have been dispossessed and repossessed/re-territorialized under the sign of the father/state are they able to be re-sutured, reconnected to “meaningful” categories of consumption, work and family. These are the faint outlines of the questions this project will explore, as we continue thinking: What is the role of affect and its place in the lives of young people as mode of work, particularly for young women? How do the immaterializations of labor and subjectivity become critical sites for understanding how connections keep kids alive? How do affective relations, arcing through capitalist exchange and globalized desire, put kids to work while they are at the same time an embodied site of biopolitical work? These questions require us to also think through the institutions where affect and identity are formally shaped into the biopolitical assemblage of youth. So this project will reflect on earlier anthropology around youth and social reproduction and pay careful attention to the literature on Japanese schools as valorized site for national ideology and cultural identity to flourish.
“Youth” is a category full of transients. People make their way through this liminal space unevenly hedged by familial relations, educational obligations, biological imperatives, and economic demands. From the vantage of society, with its investments in perpetuating an orderly continuity while managing to retain some hold on the reigns of power, “(t)he young are consigned to a self-contained world with their own preoccupations, their entrance into adult status is frustrated and they are rewarded for dependency” (Cohen 2002,151). Sociologist Stanley Cohen wrote this as British society spasmed with the upheavals of the post-war teenager and then the 60’s counter-culture. In the present, adult anxieties over “self-contained worlds” with seductive “preoccupations” articulate sharp new generational fault lines as new cyborg youth are attached to mobile devices and immersed in rich gaming and social worlds facilitated by increasingly smart, cross-platform, and attentively affective software. Cohen goes on to say “The teenage culture makes them into ineffectual outsiders. The culture itself is not homogeneous; although its artefacts might be blandly classless, it is highly stratified along class, regional, educational, and other lines” (Ibid.). It is a bit startling that such a narrowly focused analysis would still hold such succinct relevance today when it was penned amidst the moral panics around perceived delinquency and (working class) youth unrest in pre-Thatcher Britain. It is a reminder of the “holding power” youth-as-figure have retained, arguably since the post-war period and into the globalized and intensively technologized present.
Within Japan, tracking change through popular historical categories of youth crisis is a common academic tactic. Studies of Japan seem particularly afflicted by a proclivity for reification of Japan as object—a salvage object where Japan is variously re-invented, vanishing, reappearing after (or despite) itself, or precarious. Despite Cohen’s timeless caution that youth culture is not homogeneous, Japan’s youth are made to be especially susceptible to overdetermined scholarly erasure as preoccupations with the painfully reductive, symptomatic child-figure of social crisis and its reproduction predominate scholarship. Taking the discursive object as an ethnographic site in fact “dispossesses” individuals’ lived experiences and reanimates them with this interrogation of the “flattened” present: “What is going wrong?” Much current anthropological and sociological work deploys the discursive figure of youth—withdrawn, isolated, competing with one another for social significance, bullied, suicidal, precarious in labor and in intimate relations—as signs of crisis and exquisitely abject harbingers of greater calamities. This is a tendency Toivonen and Imoto vocally resist, pointing to “the enormous mileage” extracted by researchers, Allison among them, from symptomatic youth such as hikikomori, irregular workers/freeters, “and other labels in striving to speak to larger topics” (2013, 64). They take Allison to task for “…framing the state of withdrawn youth as a sign of a wider ‘crisis’ in Japan” and thus “implicitly tak[ing] for granted and thereby reaffirm[ing] the existence of certain contested youth problems” (Ibid.). Toivonen and Imoto remind researchers “our role as anthropologically oriented social scientists is not merely to ‘report on’ the native discourse on youth” (Ibid., 66). Further, it is imperative, particularly in the case of Japan, to refuse the convenient hegemonic media and governmental structures devoted to locating and defining youth problems—Foucauldian techniques for the production of new knowledge around panic sites and tools to marginalize, criminalize, and restrain disorderly and non-compliant individuals and groups. Continuing to reproduce narratives of crisis around “precariousness” replete with fashionable jargon and sampled bits of discourse is an anemic strategy, leaving us transfixed in Roitman’s “blind spot for the production of knowledge.”
Crisis and Precariousness: Double Fetish
Crisis construction is not solely the blinding mechanism of academic critique but also a device for the furtherance of state and social power, operating in conjunction with moral panics. David Leheny, writing about how global responses to child pornography and terrorism produced highly local policies, policing, and moral panics in Japan, argues the state fostered and mobilized fears to reorganize the population and consolidate state power (2006). Hamai Koichi examined policing statistics and public attitudes toward crime and determined perceptions of security were increasingly anxious even as crime was quantifiably decreasing. This produced what Hamai terms “the myth of collapsing safe society” (治安悪化神話は). The resulting crime panics focused on “suspect” populations marked by ethnic and national difference such as ethnic Koreans and particular foreigners—Chinese, Brazilians, Filipinos; politicians mobilized and exploited these panics strategically (Hamai 2004).
“Precariousness” is a constant feature and effect of crisis, and crisis is perpetual, especially when helped along through cynical political manipulations. “Precarious” subjects have always walked among us, so to speak. Almost as in a séance of ethnographic work are their signs and traces materialized. But this is perhaps the parlor trick of those intent on diagnosing the “new” and inventing the epidemiology of precariousness. It is a refined performance in the tradition of any Foucauldian expert. Allison, in her recent book Precarious Japan, takes the ideology of “my home-ism” (mai-homushugi) and multiplies it into a host of categorical subjectivities situated within familiar panic sites of gender and youth, thus overlooking the impoverished, the dislocated rural worker, the day-laborer, the divorced mother. She places the hikikomori (the chronically withdrawn person, usually male) at the center of a non-(bio)reproductive family unit, ascribing to the contemporary Japanese family an omnipresent and latent risk.
Allison summons the family as a toxic and toxified site—once a bulwark against the pressures of an insistent capitalist outside but transformed into a sinister chrysalis of violence and risk (2013, 30) but its invocation is a spell capable only of conjuring nostalgia for “home,” the space of another (imagined/imaginary) time. The essentialized family glances backward at the losses endured through modernity even as it is beset with instabilities and the ideological foundations once secure are now precariously poised. This conjuring can only happen in this particular moment as Japan continues to stagger from its gluttony of financial deregulation and neoliberal corporate restructuring (Driscoll 2009). Here in the sitting room of crisis and precariousness, “conjuring home” is a parlor trick attempted only with enough distance from its historical object: “Nostalgia can only emerge across a temporal lag” (Ivy 1995, 95). The uncanny emerges in the midst/mist of uncertainty and fuan--the anxiety Allison constantly locates. What Allison describes now as precariousness is only the return of the repressed: “The uncanny effect does not arise from a simple lack of knowledge, for example; it instead erupts from an excess of what was supposed to be kept hidden and repressed” (Ibid., 85). Japan is not faced with an insufficiency. To argue this as the basis for a study of “social precariousness” is to imagine there is a lack, persistent and expanding to encompass all areas of life—from past loss to present concern to future’s absence. Allison requires this void in order to populate Japan with brief sketches intended to authorize her claims of a perpetually impending crisis. It is a twin claim that contains its own undoing as even the sine non qua of crisis is in short supply: “lack is now lacking” (Ibid., 85). No matter how convincingly Japan can be indexed to its anxieties and thus pinned to the wall with sketched observations, there persists an excess and thus a failure of the real to be harnessed to the anthropologist’s magic system. Despite how painstakingly detailed its “social precariousness” can be re-presented through theory transversally cut with anecdote, the excess overwhelms, spills outside the borders, playfully overturns the politely arranged floor cushions, like the pesky zashiki-warashi, young magical children of folklore who are supernaturally tethered to old country homes, the uncanny of the child-figure coming up from the past. They taunt from the hazy future and arrive from the country of the de-territorialized like chrono-fugitives, old ghosts of possibility and potentiality.
Rather than lack, I argue there is an excess. The excess is in the lived experiences of children and young people in this project who inhabit what Fanon terms “the zone of occult instability” of the nation. What their experiences underscore is how precarious existence always has been within modern state and capitalist structures, and how this precariousness is significant insofar as it provides the contrast to see the “instability” of the nation and its hegemonic, biopolitical constructions of youth. What is truly precarious is the state-capitalist order and the culturally conscripted lives it engenders. Power must be turned on its head so it can be seen right way up. Maybe what is transpiring is that the uncanny is actually coming home to a site opening up itself to new possibilities of improvisation, social affinity, global relations, and strange contacts with lived and virtual space.
The apocalypse fantasy of Japan possesses the imagination: the country populated with outsiders, foreigners, rogue children, cyborgs, menacing technologies, unstable environments, birthrates dissipating into the miasma of a disappearing population. Does a nation or culture exist if no-one is left to hoist the hegemonic flag of self-identity and defend a claim to difference? This is the uncanny and the return of a different Japan. The modern, capitalist consumer nuclear family-figure, conjured by the ideology of “my-home-ism” has been evicted in the long stretch of the “lost decade.” The rent is past due, the lease forfeited. The longing cultivated in Japanese society for a pre-industrial, pre-modern “home” or furusato has been lost from its object with the tsunami that crashed into the coast of rural, misbegotten Iwate-ken, the venerated “soul of Japan.” The instability of the nation, first economically, then environmentally with the double blow of the tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster, and finally politically with corruption and deceit marring the government’s feeble attempts to discipline Japan’s omnipresent corporate care-takers/profit-makers. There is no “home” to go back to and furusato is bifurcated into the nostalgic homeplace crafted in Ivy’s account of consumerist travel in a postmodern Japan and the uncanny home produced by the very act of taking over the space one is in—temporary, transitory, and tentative.
What are young people doing then? It’s not about keeping it together but keeping it moving: through body practice, through a shared cultural imaginary infusing the present manifest geography with finely-calibrated and intensively maintained intimate social circuits—friends with apartments in cities across the world, internet browsers pointed in multiple creative directions at once, illegal content streams coursing onto screens to keep memories and fantasies invigorated. Maybe these sites in motion are daiyō furusato, “substitute homelands” as Kamishima calls them (quoted in Ivy 104). The very concept of home and family need to be interrogated more closely before we can call them into states of precariousness. Furusato is already a split and ambivalent site, exerting a powerful cultural hold “in the wake of large-scale changes in rural Japan, in particular, the exodus of people in search of work in the cities in the early twentieth century, and more recently, in the postwar period” (Ivy 1995, 105).
In approaching "youth," as with any easily sensationalized subject we must resist, “(q)uite simply, the sheer symbolic lure of these categories.” The draw of these “panic sites” is “so powerful that it predisposes researchers across disciplines to pursue certain topics, neglect others, and implicitly adopt many of the associated assumptions” (Tovionen 2013). Becoming ensnared at the very center of crisis as culprit, scapegoat, victim and folk devil is yet another way children appear to magically mobilize and organize energies and knowledge—almost like telekinesis. The entire weight and history of culture seems to be eerily raised up, hovering, helplessly under the disaffected and de-corprealized touch of thoughtless youth overtaken—possessed—by their own unruly and primitive powers mutated through techno-capitalist contact, like Tetsuo in the famous anime film Akira.
Only until kids have been dispossessed and repossessed/re-territorialized under the sign of the father/state are they able to be re-sutured, reconnected to “meaningful” categories of consumption, work and family. These are the faint outlines of the questions this project will explore, as we continue thinking: What is the role of affect and its place in the lives of young people as mode of work, particularly for young women? How do the immaterializations of labor and subjectivity become critical sites for understanding how connections keep kids alive? How do affective relations, arcing through capitalist exchange and globalized desire, put kids to work while they are at the same time an embodied site of biopolitical work? These questions require us to also think through the institutions where affect and identity are formally shaped into the biopolitical assemblage of youth. So this project will reflect on earlier anthropology around youth and social reproduction and pay careful attention to the literature on Japanese schools as valorized site for national ideology and cultural identity to flourish.
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