Project Cartography
This project examines how young people enliven their local situations with global subjectivities and energetically deploy these youthful subjectivities in spaces of school, play, and work. Their experiences are comprised of folded, drifting layers of language, spatial use and meaning, body practice, and visual culture. These experiences move at speeds of the body cross-cut with speeds of trains, skateboards, computer processes, cell phone texts, internet connections, video cameras replaying footage, classroom periods, job interviews, and shifts at a hostess club and convenience store. All these speeds shift with different intensities while globalized inflections connect them to diffuse (dis)locations of social relations even as they are engaged in the immediacy of schoolwork, design jobs, and skateboard tricks intended for a clothing advertisement. The young people range in age from ten years old to their mid-thirties. They are returnee children (kikokushijo) who have lived abroad and are studying at an English-language cram school, skateboarders in western Tokyo, and creative workers scattered around the city.
Through a survey of Western theorizations on children, anthropological studies of young people situated across periods of global contact, and histories of youth in Japan this project brings contemporary experiences of young people in Tokyo into focus. Understanding the production of social change through capitalist relations positions the figure of the child in present society. Viewing Tokyo as a node along rhizomatic urban clusters encircling the Pacific Rim and stretching across the world destabilizes an essentialized national conception of these young people. Analyzing the various ways media generate links to other spaces, both remembered and imagined, and amplify experiences of space and the body in the immediate, the simultaneously haptic and technologized conception of an authentic, globally situated subjectivity comes into view. Tracing how young people affectively, emotionally, and imaginatively engage with one another, urban space, their bodies, and sites of work and study shapes, albeit provisionally, the tenuous, transitory, and mutable micro-exchanges from which everyday relations are assembled.
Young people are framed through their practices such as skateboarding, their formal institutional positions as students, and their work along the often contingent, part-time seams of cultural relations and production. The category of youth is dismantled into political, historical, and cultural fragments from which flexible and multiply inhabited forms of youth are composed.
Naming Youth
As such there is a persistent and productive slippage throughout this project between the terms youth, young people, children, and kids. “Youth” often denotes a category of people but also communities of shared belonging, interests, and practices. “Young people” is used as the broadest term of inclusion into roles and identities demarcated from maturity as achieved through the twin signs of social arrival: permanent, legitimate work and incorporation into and continuation of a family unit. “Children” and “child” most frequently refer to discursive subjects though sometimes are used directly to speak of elementary and middle school students. Though the subjects range widely in biological age, they share three significant traits: they are all connected to a global youth imaginary of images, media texts, narratives, styles, aesthetic and visual languages, and urban life. They are discursively apprehended as figures at risk and part of a population made legible primarily through its incoherence within traditional expectations of transition to adulthood and instead appears precarious for many reasons—malformed Japanese identity, lack of reproductive inclination or possibility, inclusion within a growing labor pool of temporary workers. And, from the viewpoint of the Japanese state, they all came of age after the major economic collapse in the early 1990s. In 1991 in a government policy paper considering the “furittaa situation” or the situation of part-time workers the age of youth was expanded to 35. The rise in the age of the youth category served a two-fold purpose: it not only permitted analysts and demographers to capture a wider portion of the working population within an growing sector of the laborforce but it also coincided with a rise in the ages at which marriage was occurring (Kosugi 2008, 244). Thus, youth was both those who 1) weren’t working very much and 2) weren’t likely to be biologically (re)productive either.
Method and Theory
This demonstration of youth as a flexible, state-constructed category for measuring the risks and productivity of a population is a historical fold from which to investigate the construction of youth and its mobilizations as resource for future social reproduction and cultural continuity. Through two years of ethnographic fieldwork with skaters, students, and a floating group of young workers in the creative and service sectors, I try to understand how youth persists as a subjectivity available, sometimes imposed, through environment, social relations, and global contact in conjunction with uses of the body and technology. Rather than thinking of youth itself as a stable category traversed and left behind by maturing/transitioning generations, I imagine youth as a shape-shifting identity taken up and carried on by people within it such that it expands and changes organically while also producing the multiple affects, orientations, languages, and practices people themselves use strategically in articulating themselves to local sites of belonging and spaces of global imagination and play. Central to these ideas of change is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming shaped particularly by Elizabeth Grosz’s interpretations. Becoming informs analyses of the future and disrupts notions of youthful teleology directed towards the stability of society and state while at the same time contesting analytical models of youth predicated on crisis and situated within “panic sites” or zones of behavior, affect, and imagination coded as deviant or abnormal.
Youth is not reducible to terms of development, liminality, and transition. In its polytonality, its proliferating intensities, speeds, rhythms, connections, and energies, youth is social field full of multiplicity. It ensnares all aspects of Japanese culture even as it fragments into a spectacular fractal projection. Youth skates across the seemingly solid surfaces of traditional institutions, social formations, and normative practices of the everyday. This psychedelic illumination is endless: it refracts backward off of Japanese histories of national schooling, juvenile policing, and popular anxieties coinciding with modernity. It spills out across the present in the sheer luminance of global experience, memory, and media and delicate play across small, prosaic moments of lived space and intimate relations. Youth endlessly radiates outward into lines describing shifting future topologies. It always at once a body and the environment, culture, and relations it inhabits, creates, and is affected by. The question is never closed and youth is never over. Through the multiple forms, expressions, and articulations of youth with global Japanese subjectivities we might discover critical ways of thinking the changing interrelations of time, bodies, and space within a global city of the Pacific Rim.
Through a survey of Western theorizations on children, anthropological studies of young people situated across periods of global contact, and histories of youth in Japan this project brings contemporary experiences of young people in Tokyo into focus. Understanding the production of social change through capitalist relations positions the figure of the child in present society. Viewing Tokyo as a node along rhizomatic urban clusters encircling the Pacific Rim and stretching across the world destabilizes an essentialized national conception of these young people. Analyzing the various ways media generate links to other spaces, both remembered and imagined, and amplify experiences of space and the body in the immediate, the simultaneously haptic and technologized conception of an authentic, globally situated subjectivity comes into view. Tracing how young people affectively, emotionally, and imaginatively engage with one another, urban space, their bodies, and sites of work and study shapes, albeit provisionally, the tenuous, transitory, and mutable micro-exchanges from which everyday relations are assembled.
Young people are framed through their practices such as skateboarding, their formal institutional positions as students, and their work along the often contingent, part-time seams of cultural relations and production. The category of youth is dismantled into political, historical, and cultural fragments from which flexible and multiply inhabited forms of youth are composed.
Naming Youth
As such there is a persistent and productive slippage throughout this project between the terms youth, young people, children, and kids. “Youth” often denotes a category of people but also communities of shared belonging, interests, and practices. “Young people” is used as the broadest term of inclusion into roles and identities demarcated from maturity as achieved through the twin signs of social arrival: permanent, legitimate work and incorporation into and continuation of a family unit. “Children” and “child” most frequently refer to discursive subjects though sometimes are used directly to speak of elementary and middle school students. Though the subjects range widely in biological age, they share three significant traits: they are all connected to a global youth imaginary of images, media texts, narratives, styles, aesthetic and visual languages, and urban life. They are discursively apprehended as figures at risk and part of a population made legible primarily through its incoherence within traditional expectations of transition to adulthood and instead appears precarious for many reasons—malformed Japanese identity, lack of reproductive inclination or possibility, inclusion within a growing labor pool of temporary workers. And, from the viewpoint of the Japanese state, they all came of age after the major economic collapse in the early 1990s. In 1991 in a government policy paper considering the “furittaa situation” or the situation of part-time workers the age of youth was expanded to 35. The rise in the age of the youth category served a two-fold purpose: it not only permitted analysts and demographers to capture a wider portion of the working population within an growing sector of the laborforce but it also coincided with a rise in the ages at which marriage was occurring (Kosugi 2008, 244). Thus, youth was both those who 1) weren’t working very much and 2) weren’t likely to be biologically (re)productive either.
Method and Theory
This demonstration of youth as a flexible, state-constructed category for measuring the risks and productivity of a population is a historical fold from which to investigate the construction of youth and its mobilizations as resource for future social reproduction and cultural continuity. Through two years of ethnographic fieldwork with skaters, students, and a floating group of young workers in the creative and service sectors, I try to understand how youth persists as a subjectivity available, sometimes imposed, through environment, social relations, and global contact in conjunction with uses of the body and technology. Rather than thinking of youth itself as a stable category traversed and left behind by maturing/transitioning generations, I imagine youth as a shape-shifting identity taken up and carried on by people within it such that it expands and changes organically while also producing the multiple affects, orientations, languages, and practices people themselves use strategically in articulating themselves to local sites of belonging and spaces of global imagination and play. Central to these ideas of change is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming shaped particularly by Elizabeth Grosz’s interpretations. Becoming informs analyses of the future and disrupts notions of youthful teleology directed towards the stability of society and state while at the same time contesting analytical models of youth predicated on crisis and situated within “panic sites” or zones of behavior, affect, and imagination coded as deviant or abnormal.
Youth is not reducible to terms of development, liminality, and transition. In its polytonality, its proliferating intensities, speeds, rhythms, connections, and energies, youth is social field full of multiplicity. It ensnares all aspects of Japanese culture even as it fragments into a spectacular fractal projection. Youth skates across the seemingly solid surfaces of traditional institutions, social formations, and normative practices of the everyday. This psychedelic illumination is endless: it refracts backward off of Japanese histories of national schooling, juvenile policing, and popular anxieties coinciding with modernity. It spills out across the present in the sheer luminance of global experience, memory, and media and delicate play across small, prosaic moments of lived space and intimate relations. Youth endlessly radiates outward into lines describing shifting future topologies. It always at once a body and the environment, culture, and relations it inhabits, creates, and is affected by. The question is never closed and youth is never over. Through the multiple forms, expressions, and articulations of youth with global Japanese subjectivities we might discover critical ways of thinking the changing interrelations of time, bodies, and space within a global city of the Pacific Rim.
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