Global youth imaginary and the ethnographic site
Here I want to briefly discuss what I would term “authentic, situated bodies called into becoming within a global youth imaginary.” This is a phrasing that requires extensive exegesis in theory and ethnography but is necessary for offering a model to understand the tensions between globalization, imaginaries produced in local practice and capitalist networks, and the role of youth in Japanese society and in urban sites across the Pacific Rim. Imaginary is a term that is much used, like affect, to contain the ineffable, the unstable and unfolding series of relational and finely attuned relays and loops of fantasy, imagination, desire, memory (in the Bergsonian two-fold sense of conscious memory of the past and habit-memory stimulated through context and familiarity), emotion, and bodily sensation. “Counterimaginary” appears in Medovoi’s analysis of post-war American teenage “rebel” culture as a locatable set of commodified feelings and affect, compelling identities created through spatio-social worlds such as the “urban” or the “rural” in opposition to the dominant suburban ideal, that are condensed and circulated through pop culture objects, such as early rock-n-roll 45 rpm records or films. While useful, this idea of a counter-imaginary is limited to its fixed localization in mass-produced media artifacts. As such, the counterimaginary is intentionally overdetermined as an ideologically spatialized site of resistance, not too far from what we could imagine deriving from a Birmingham School position with a bright delineation between hegemonic power structures and youthful sites of (classed and raced) resistance.
Where does an “imaginary” become a useful, flexible tool for understanding the lives of young people? It is a zone of affects, practices and being-action that is circulated through digital media and transnational networks. The imaginary is embodied at the moment or event of the individual experience, even at the level of microsensory contact with the world as with a skateboarder attempting a trick, whirling in a cataclysm of unthinking action, alive to and within the haptic field of the body and its environment. Taussig describes a mimetic process of the shaman chanter engaged in a profoundly embodied affective process, calling into being powerful scenes through speech, emerging inside those scenes but also functioning from outside, watching them as a director might scrutinize the performance of a script. What interests me in “skating” the world into being are the ways the Japanese boarders affiliated with California Image seem to bring to life the very real they imagine, but also how they manage the confrontation with the differences posed the very real Californians. Hence the Japanese media work to generate images, labor that “resurrect(s) a soul—invisible counterpart of the (mimetic) world” (Taussig 1993, 111). The “authentic, situated bodies” produced through practice in a mythic site of origin—California—are largely invisible to the Japanese boarders and the “real” moves in a ghostly, legitimizing parallel to the Japanese scene as a living signfied to their signifier. This parallel constitutes an animated membrane that at the same time is transforming Japanese boarders’ ideas and practices and their social realities. This confusing doubling is exactly what Taussig describes in Michael Lambek’s contorted analysis Mayotte trance with “the copy that is not a copy” (ibid. 115). How can we speak of a “Japanese” scene that is always already “youthful” and “deviant” and therefore slippery against the demand of normative teleologies of adulthood and social future, thus permanently placing the category of “Japanese” at risk of being possessed (or self-annihilated) by a global youth imaginary operating at the levels of image-production and circulation, intense body practices, haptic knowledges, and sensory meanings of built space. Taussig uses the example of Cuna shamanic practice in the Amazon to show the continual process of “maintaining sameness through alterity” (ibid., 129).
My concern is for something more complex than a positing of indigenous adaptation of identity within changing world of European contact. It is not an unfamiliar concern however, in fact, it is at the center of adult anxieties over children: the fear that children are monstrous, inhuman organisms, mimicking adults just enough to sustain themselves until they can enact some bizarre carnage to the social body or the actual bodies of grown-ups themselves. This concern is usually coded within national-cultural bounds, as in Japanese horror tales such as Juon (The Grudge), or grisly narratives of social collapse such as Battle Royale or Natuso Kirino’s novel, Real World.
What I want to get at is the tension created by global affects circulated and shape-shifting through a range of individuals and media. (From Nike advertisements, skate videos, and fashion photo shoots for print magazines, to media creators themselves who work across various national/regional culture-scapes, members/practitioners of “extreme sports” like skating with global networks, and finally young kikokushijo, children of Japanese professional parents who have lived abroad and returned to Japan.) To put it more simply, we have to dispense with the basic binary of globalization as put forward in works such as Iwabuchi Koichi’s Recentering Globalization where certain national industries produce media/entertainment content that is then received elsewhere. This is the model of transmission, circulation, and rearticulation examined in Allison’s Millennial Monsters, or the after-market effects of “local indigenizing processes” to use Iwabuchi’s phrase, on forms like hip-hop, as in Condry’s work (Iwabuchi 2002, 46). The reified legitimacy of Production as organizing center for analyzing and comprehending changing landscapes of identity, governmentality, capitalism, and culture is insufficient in masking the inability of the model to provide a sensuous, affective, and poetic form for telling stories of the changing (urban) world of the Pacific Rim and the young people who inhabit its streets, neighborhoods, schools, parks, and go beyond through digital media. The valorization of products and the means (and owners/managers) of production have resulted in a distorted, top-heavy conception of “globalization” that almost exclusively focuses on prized objects of study in canonical research—capitalist and state institutions, products, and networks—to define, legitimize, and materialize globalization’s location and effects. The West and the Rest do not function under the sign of such convenient totalities. A critical line of disruption is opened through the idea of a global youth imaginary, one in this instance that has increasing velocity around the Pacific Rim. I’m arguing, though tentatively, that youthful narratives depicted in corporate media (damn Nike again) or independently produced media (skate footy[age] on YouTube) and affectively performed by young people themselves on the streets of L.A., Tokyo, Seoul, and Saigon, together generate a global youth imaginary.
This is something that includes but is not limited to social media like Facebook, MIXI (the Japanese equivalent of Facebook), Chatroulette, or music and anime/film. The imaginary is inhabited, possessed, created and mimetically reproduced as a force of sociality that like Foucault’s famous capillaries, runs through conventional sites of cultural articulation (like schools and shopping centers and voting, arrest, and unemployment statistics), but pushes outwards, running along the edges of capitalist routes and marking out unexpected new contours. Like the shaman in Taussig’s account of the Cuna shaman rituals, the imaginary comes from somewhere—it is a parallel and transformative world that is affectively performed into being and even as it does so it is transformed through its copy in the individual experience/event. The very multiplicity of this experience or event in its modes, materials, sensory energy and identificatory potential and durability is always uncertain and in fact, never asks to be marked in equal measure. It is intensely local (or fiercely covets the sign of the “authentic, situated body” as in hip hop or the manga Tokyo Tribes) but does not have a corresponding spatial corollary other than “out there” which a constantly variable set of places and non-places. The urban youth imaginary and the phenomenological events of its mimetic worlds emerge become sensible in Foucault’s moments of “problematization,” and with kids, “problem” seems to be never far away. There is no clear end or beginning, only beings, affects and senses folded over again and again: as one encounters an event or experience, “unfolding” it, “one is led to another, which in turn helps rethink the first while pointing to others—fold coming from folds, plica ex plica” (Rajchman 2000, 60). The unfolding of the imaginary across multiple “scapes” and through the (en)chanting performance of people in such disparate sites comprises an elusive anthropological moment, troubled by temporal and spatial discontinuities. There is no village on an island here. The vanishing is not into the dark horizon of history but rather into a blurry future tense that seems to appear on all sides at once. This is particularly challenging to both Japan studies and childhood studies, each of which has worked hard to preserve the corporeal integrity and history of their respective subjects.
I want to unfold into the pop culture archives for a moment. Let's turn to an fiction example when the near-future was an intense imaginary of technologized virtualities and media saturation as well as chaotic bodies “authentically situated” in the dark abscess of an industrial metropole. The second episode of the sci-fi TV series Max Headroom illustrates presciently the transglobal networks that package and relay youth culture such as skateboarding and the craving for “authentic” bodies made available through fleshy contact with media machines.
Where does an “imaginary” become a useful, flexible tool for understanding the lives of young people? It is a zone of affects, practices and being-action that is circulated through digital media and transnational networks. The imaginary is embodied at the moment or event of the individual experience, even at the level of microsensory contact with the world as with a skateboarder attempting a trick, whirling in a cataclysm of unthinking action, alive to and within the haptic field of the body and its environment. Taussig describes a mimetic process of the shaman chanter engaged in a profoundly embodied affective process, calling into being powerful scenes through speech, emerging inside those scenes but also functioning from outside, watching them as a director might scrutinize the performance of a script. What interests me in “skating” the world into being are the ways the Japanese boarders affiliated with California Image seem to bring to life the very real they imagine, but also how they manage the confrontation with the differences posed the very real Californians. Hence the Japanese media work to generate images, labor that “resurrect(s) a soul—invisible counterpart of the (mimetic) world” (Taussig 1993, 111). The “authentic, situated bodies” produced through practice in a mythic site of origin—California—are largely invisible to the Japanese boarders and the “real” moves in a ghostly, legitimizing parallel to the Japanese scene as a living signfied to their signifier. This parallel constitutes an animated membrane that at the same time is transforming Japanese boarders’ ideas and practices and their social realities. This confusing doubling is exactly what Taussig describes in Michael Lambek’s contorted analysis Mayotte trance with “the copy that is not a copy” (ibid. 115). How can we speak of a “Japanese” scene that is always already “youthful” and “deviant” and therefore slippery against the demand of normative teleologies of adulthood and social future, thus permanently placing the category of “Japanese” at risk of being possessed (or self-annihilated) by a global youth imaginary operating at the levels of image-production and circulation, intense body practices, haptic knowledges, and sensory meanings of built space. Taussig uses the example of Cuna shamanic practice in the Amazon to show the continual process of “maintaining sameness through alterity” (ibid., 129).
My concern is for something more complex than a positing of indigenous adaptation of identity within changing world of European contact. It is not an unfamiliar concern however, in fact, it is at the center of adult anxieties over children: the fear that children are monstrous, inhuman organisms, mimicking adults just enough to sustain themselves until they can enact some bizarre carnage to the social body or the actual bodies of grown-ups themselves. This concern is usually coded within national-cultural bounds, as in Japanese horror tales such as Juon (The Grudge), or grisly narratives of social collapse such as Battle Royale or Natuso Kirino’s novel, Real World.
What I want to get at is the tension created by global affects circulated and shape-shifting through a range of individuals and media. (From Nike advertisements, skate videos, and fashion photo shoots for print magazines, to media creators themselves who work across various national/regional culture-scapes, members/practitioners of “extreme sports” like skating with global networks, and finally young kikokushijo, children of Japanese professional parents who have lived abroad and returned to Japan.) To put it more simply, we have to dispense with the basic binary of globalization as put forward in works such as Iwabuchi Koichi’s Recentering Globalization where certain national industries produce media/entertainment content that is then received elsewhere. This is the model of transmission, circulation, and rearticulation examined in Allison’s Millennial Monsters, or the after-market effects of “local indigenizing processes” to use Iwabuchi’s phrase, on forms like hip-hop, as in Condry’s work (Iwabuchi 2002, 46). The reified legitimacy of Production as organizing center for analyzing and comprehending changing landscapes of identity, governmentality, capitalism, and culture is insufficient in masking the inability of the model to provide a sensuous, affective, and poetic form for telling stories of the changing (urban) world of the Pacific Rim and the young people who inhabit its streets, neighborhoods, schools, parks, and go beyond through digital media. The valorization of products and the means (and owners/managers) of production have resulted in a distorted, top-heavy conception of “globalization” that almost exclusively focuses on prized objects of study in canonical research—capitalist and state institutions, products, and networks—to define, legitimize, and materialize globalization’s location and effects. The West and the Rest do not function under the sign of such convenient totalities. A critical line of disruption is opened through the idea of a global youth imaginary, one in this instance that has increasing velocity around the Pacific Rim. I’m arguing, though tentatively, that youthful narratives depicted in corporate media (damn Nike again) or independently produced media (skate footy[age] on YouTube) and affectively performed by young people themselves on the streets of L.A., Tokyo, Seoul, and Saigon, together generate a global youth imaginary.
This is something that includes but is not limited to social media like Facebook, MIXI (the Japanese equivalent of Facebook), Chatroulette, or music and anime/film. The imaginary is inhabited, possessed, created and mimetically reproduced as a force of sociality that like Foucault’s famous capillaries, runs through conventional sites of cultural articulation (like schools and shopping centers and voting, arrest, and unemployment statistics), but pushes outwards, running along the edges of capitalist routes and marking out unexpected new contours. Like the shaman in Taussig’s account of the Cuna shaman rituals, the imaginary comes from somewhere—it is a parallel and transformative world that is affectively performed into being and even as it does so it is transformed through its copy in the individual experience/event. The very multiplicity of this experience or event in its modes, materials, sensory energy and identificatory potential and durability is always uncertain and in fact, never asks to be marked in equal measure. It is intensely local (or fiercely covets the sign of the “authentic, situated body” as in hip hop or the manga Tokyo Tribes) but does not have a corresponding spatial corollary other than “out there” which a constantly variable set of places and non-places. The urban youth imaginary and the phenomenological events of its mimetic worlds emerge become sensible in Foucault’s moments of “problematization,” and with kids, “problem” seems to be never far away. There is no clear end or beginning, only beings, affects and senses folded over again and again: as one encounters an event or experience, “unfolding” it, “one is led to another, which in turn helps rethink the first while pointing to others—fold coming from folds, plica ex plica” (Rajchman 2000, 60). The unfolding of the imaginary across multiple “scapes” and through the (en)chanting performance of people in such disparate sites comprises an elusive anthropological moment, troubled by temporal and spatial discontinuities. There is no village on an island here. The vanishing is not into the dark horizon of history but rather into a blurry future tense that seems to appear on all sides at once. This is particularly challenging to both Japan studies and childhood studies, each of which has worked hard to preserve the corporeal integrity and history of their respective subjects.
I want to unfold into the pop culture archives for a moment. Let's turn to an fiction example when the near-future was an intense imaginary of technologized virtualities and media saturation as well as chaotic bodies “authentically situated” in the dark abscess of an industrial metropole. The second episode of the sci-fi TV series Max Headroom illustrates presciently the transglobal networks that package and relay youth culture such as skateboarding and the craving for “authentic” bodies made available through fleshy contact with media machines.
This page is a tag of:
Diagnosing Place: Walking Through the Skin of Another Life, Rakers: Mediated, Youth Gladiators on Skateboards at the End of the World, Willingness to be thrown by things, Picturing the City: Ryo, Skate Photographer and How to Get Legit Photos, Tokyo as Neo-Techno-Future and Material Bodies as Counter-Affect, Margaret Mead and the Anthropology of the Child, Constituting the (Affective) Family in Disneyland Drag View all tags
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