Tokyo as Neo-Techno-Future and Material Bodies as Counter-Affect
The intensively lived reality of Akemi I apprehend only in vapors, after-effects and anticipated events embodied as stress, worry, and resignation. How can Axl Rose, wailing his L.A. rock star fictions, be anything but a timeless trace of a West Coast urban utopia? It is so far from a nostalgically, essentialized lost Tokyo Berardi imagines through Roland Barthes’ writings on the ubiquitous pachinko parlor, Orientalist mechanical chrome chance din racket smoke-hazed rows of overpowering immersion in ritual gamble. The game as machine, space, and practice, exist as another metonym, now for Western eyes hungry for the clue in the ordinary, in the way so many panic sites serve as tissue-samples for social biopsy. “…pachinko reveals a society where people are perfectly individualized, isolated, lonely, reduced to empty containers of productive time, deprived of their memory and any form of heroism except for the silent one of productivity (2009, 145). “Tokyo” read by Berardi through the Wim Wenders’ 1983 documentary "Tokyo-ga," is again the perfect site of dematerialization and the slow implosion of time, erasure of “humanistic and industrial modernity, towards a dimension that cannot yet be named, but appears already as post-humanistic and perhaps even post-human” (Ibid., 143). The documentary is a homage to the Japanese director Ozu Yasujiro, one who, we are to imagine, mastered the visual machine and through its mastery “exalted the centrality of human dimensions: all this happened in pre-war Japan, where the continuity with tradition had not yet been interrupted” (Ibid.). By mass imperial war-making across the Pacific Rim, by firebombing, by nuclear death, by starvation. Suicide. Before Japan was remade into the fetish oracle where those elsewhere, privileged to behold as tourist-theorist, could marvel at the future and imagine what it would be to be transformed into something other by the coming tsunami of psychic, social, capitalist trans-mutations. Japan, made visible, tangible, (sur)real in the urban techno-futures of Japan, for an instant was the center of the coming time. But a horizon swept out of view, in the drift. Opaque in the drifting lives of those lost to the time after the futures failed to converge and Tokyo was lost from the holding, artful gaze of Ozu the auteur and made into a hollowness: “life is nothing but a simulation effect…Objects and foods are simulated, social relations themselves are simulated” (Ibid., 144).
Tokyo as machine-city-simulation persists in the global imaginary. Meanwhile, the depressed, too authentically real hostess listens to Guns-n-Roses in a small, landlocked sea of disposable, well-designed food packaging trash, and stray electronics and stained clothes. After all, Akemi’s continuity with the tradition, we are told, has been interrupted, and so her life is already anachronistic and adrift. The technological narrative is the new history, the site for all these simulated social relations, and the indefatigable source for so much thinking and writing about Japan and its youth. The technology never seems to go anywhere. The young people who use it only talk to themselves in cryptic codes confessing cryptic, listless motives, as in the text-based friendship of the teen murderer and a classmate in Kirino’s 2009 novel Real World, about a tiny dystopia of teenage Tokyo matricide and boredom. This narrative is so familiar, so true in the everyday history of stories, as to be a tedious fiction. Maybe there is then a relief in the gore and pleasure of the raw body. Something fleshy is occasionally too much to ignore, even when pulped into a sensational novella of tattoos, piercing, brutal, casual sex. Maybe, to the jury of aging critics who awarded young author Kanehara Hitomi the Akutagawa Prize in 2003 for her short novel, Hebi ni Piasu (Snakes and Earrings). It is a story of three young people in a meandering sex triangle, vaguely violent, obsessed with altering their state through alcohol and their bodies through private mutilation. It is an exploitation caricature trading in tropes of the body remade painfully, bloodily and ultimately undone but always, safely confined to the zone of the flesh. It is a no-future fairytale of failed bodies and relationships premised on their very corporeality. Technology is strictly subordinated to cell phones vibrating an echo of the tattoo gun as mimetic instrument of penetration. Any sort of reproduction—biological or social—is foreclosed. The characters’ only trajectory is toward the shuddering deadfall of young death in the reassuring mode of murder, a tradition of “live fast, die young” youth representations being the only thing with a vital lineage. There is nostalgia for a tidy, physically rapacious and self-destructive youth deviance as social relations are without technological mediation and anomie is disconnected from a techno-future dystopia. The “lost generation” is narrowed down to male power drifting downwards to exert itself over the masochist female who has encountered the deadening vapidity of “Barbie” consumer culture and desires only that her body become alive in the ecstasy of its own alteration and suffering. In this simplified world the melancholy failure of anything but the splitting of tongues and veins is soothingly material.
The story as a form and a habit holds completeness in tantalizing fixity. The characters will never go anywhere. They are exposed to changes only in how they are understood, interpreted, remembered within our imaginations. The story itself is an airless and unintentionally claustrophobic panic around the inevitable, which turns out to be incredibly trite—just another corpse. The altering of the body is a longed-for counter-sign getting us past the cold, superflatness of unemployed youth. They are understood only through the glass of hackneyed and paper-thin character studies, uniform in their inability to tell us anything about drift, movement, flow, feeling, desire. The story offers the bright containment of inexplicable horror as prime evidence in a symptomatology of crisis, especially around the flashing figure of Japan’s youth. Films also fill this symbolic-turned-evidentiary purpose, like Battle Royale in which junior high students kill one another in a vicious, imposed deathmatch, or "Suicide Club" (2002), about a wave of mass suicides sweeping across Japan in a six-day span. They are powerful fetish sites and are able to summon panic and fear and then skillfully shape it into mediated geometries from which researchers, analysts, concerned parents, politicians, and psychologists are able to deduce affects and desires coding the future.
Sensational Bodies
Real-life youth violence appears at the center of these future-codes and corroborates our anxieties while giving us a grotesque, deadly terminus—the present (self)disfigurement of youth as the butchering of society’s future—from which to track back to a point of divergence. A few recent youth crimes have become legend insofar as they condense panic around strange youth or precarious youth: the Shonen A murders, the Akihabara Tōrima Jiken or “random attacker incident” in 2008 in which a 25 year old temporary worker at an auto parts factory killed seven people and injured ten. The fiction and the real converge into a palpable imaginary of ever-present bodily risk, syncing up with mass killings elsewhere, especially in the US. Writing about “teenagers who kill,” Kathleen Stewart conveys the multiplicity of force these stories summon. “These stories don’t end in a moral but are left to resonate with all the other ways that intensities rise out of the ordinary and then linger, unresolved, until memory dims or some new eruption catches our attention…The intensity of erupting events draws our attention to the more ordinary disturbances of everyday life…And we’re left with the visible signs of relays we can’t name or predict and don’t know what to do with” (2007, 74). Excessive technological masking takes possession of youth on the one hand. “…Wenders pronounces these words…a mediation on the present post-humanistic, semiocapitalist hyper-modernity: ‘Mu, The Void, it’s He who reings now.’” (Berardi 2009, 146). With films and stories crossing over the void from the technologically disembodied to the frighteningly fleshy, we are carried into the depths of individual experience cut with the most painful disconnections, rending de-attachments. Violent, small histories of personal trauma, dislocation, affective energies run hot or cold through unnamed, improvised networks of a human sociality and contact written onto the pages of history with blood.
Immaterial/Affective
If the immaterial as detailed by Berardi and the affective described by Stewart are twinned sites of disorientation, ghosting, chaotic energies, then stories like Kanehara’s do critical work in solidifying what appears to change shape as soon as it is perceived in glimpses and registered in intuitive shuddering. Berardi places special attention on the role of mediation in making sense of rapidly dematerializing and reconstituting social spaces. He draws on Guattari’s final book, Chasomosis, specifically the concept of the “aesthetic” and two different issues it articulates. “Sensibility and its modeling by imaginary machines, mass mythologies and mediatic projections. [Guattari] also refers to artistic creation: the production of refrains, perceptive tunings of a peculiar kind, which are constantly on the run, and incessantly renewing themselves” (Berardi, 2009, 135). The stories, both fantastic and feverishly real, pool into a collective site where art emerges as a “chaoid, a temporary organizer of chaos, a fragile architect of shared happiness and a common map of the imaginary” (Ibid.). It is an earnest suggestion, borne forward on the chaotic drift overpowering evaluative and prescriptive analysis. The chaoid challenges “models of thinking that slide over the live surface of difference at work in the ordinary to bottom-line arguments about ‘bigger’ structures and underlying causes” and effectively “obscure the ways in which a reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and noncoherent singularities” (Stewart 2007, 4). Without being a duping formula, for surely they do communicate along the surface of the drift, however, the stories are still too firm, their lines too sharply etched.
Kanehara’s story of rough sex, inking skin, and body mods caricatures youth and offers it as antidote, hopeful sign of life, fading vitality recoverable in dismembered death. It is a counterweight to the continued academic performance of techno-futurism still embodied magically in Japan’s youth—immaterialized through their cybernetic attachments. “Adolechnic” is the cut-n-paste portmanteau carrying this concept further. Deleuze notes that Lewis Carroll “linked portmanteau words to the status of the problematic” and with such a cumbersome bit of coinage as “adolechnic” in our mouths, we are easily convinced of this truism (Deleuze 1994, 24). The use of keitai (cell phones) by Japanese adolescents is a recurring fetish site where the once-worrying simulated relations perceived by Wenders are folded back into stable social meanings—human, but with a techno-sheen of difference. “Ritual exchanges help establish psychological unity in a group. These may be phatic – ordinary exchanges that reinforce social contact and social status – or emotive – interactions that engender affective bonds among members” (Holden 2006, 79). And so the isolation of the pachinko mechanical gamble-trance is broken by this new cellular ordering and channeling of affect. The social persists but at the cost of bodies in action. It is the void Kanehara’s novella cannot fill with fictional bodies in pained sensuality.
What transpires between the techno-fetishistic accounts of a new youth sociality (always on the near-future imaginary Japan colonizes)? And how do we name the stuff of transpiration?
Akemi carries the private, fragmented portions of her life into the public space of feminine consumption by men indentured to a gendered, profit-making imperative. The requirement to talk herself into performed effacement and act girlish is only a set tactic on the way to restored forms of (con)scripted sociality. The hostess club is a small social assemblage, what Guattari would see as a social machine, full of energetic components, transversally cut with the desires of capital, of men, of money, of belonging, of exclusivity hinged on temporarily suspended hierarchy for some, exclusion of others. All articulated to gender performance and power running its capillaries through them and the space they produce. What is invisible, immaterial even, and impossible to schematize so neatly are the complex lives that squeeze themselves into the shared space of the club for an hour, a shift, a few months, or years so long that the squeezing occurs in the other direction, into family worlds become alien. Kanehara and Kirino’s competing narratives of youthful experience and practice, disconnected and bloody, do not begin to undo the overlaid diagrams of youth, technology, Japan-as-(lost)future, social disorder, adolescent symptomatology, economic prescription. Nor is there a deciphering key. Instead we encounter the dematerialized and the immaterial, affect as “an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes, and disjunctures” (Ibid. 3). The assemblage that fails. The assemblage of failures.
Tokyo as machine-city-simulation persists in the global imaginary. Meanwhile, the depressed, too authentically real hostess listens to Guns-n-Roses in a small, landlocked sea of disposable, well-designed food packaging trash, and stray electronics and stained clothes. After all, Akemi’s continuity with the tradition, we are told, has been interrupted, and so her life is already anachronistic and adrift. The technological narrative is the new history, the site for all these simulated social relations, and the indefatigable source for so much thinking and writing about Japan and its youth. The technology never seems to go anywhere. The young people who use it only talk to themselves in cryptic codes confessing cryptic, listless motives, as in the text-based friendship of the teen murderer and a classmate in Kirino’s 2009 novel Real World, about a tiny dystopia of teenage Tokyo matricide and boredom. This narrative is so familiar, so true in the everyday history of stories, as to be a tedious fiction. Maybe there is then a relief in the gore and pleasure of the raw body. Something fleshy is occasionally too much to ignore, even when pulped into a sensational novella of tattoos, piercing, brutal, casual sex. Maybe, to the jury of aging critics who awarded young author Kanehara Hitomi the Akutagawa Prize in 2003 for her short novel, Hebi ni Piasu (Snakes and Earrings). It is a story of three young people in a meandering sex triangle, vaguely violent, obsessed with altering their state through alcohol and their bodies through private mutilation. It is an exploitation caricature trading in tropes of the body remade painfully, bloodily and ultimately undone but always, safely confined to the zone of the flesh. It is a no-future fairytale of failed bodies and relationships premised on their very corporeality. Technology is strictly subordinated to cell phones vibrating an echo of the tattoo gun as mimetic instrument of penetration. Any sort of reproduction—biological or social—is foreclosed. The characters’ only trajectory is toward the shuddering deadfall of young death in the reassuring mode of murder, a tradition of “live fast, die young” youth representations being the only thing with a vital lineage. There is nostalgia for a tidy, physically rapacious and self-destructive youth deviance as social relations are without technological mediation and anomie is disconnected from a techno-future dystopia. The “lost generation” is narrowed down to male power drifting downwards to exert itself over the masochist female who has encountered the deadening vapidity of “Barbie” consumer culture and desires only that her body become alive in the ecstasy of its own alteration and suffering. In this simplified world the melancholy failure of anything but the splitting of tongues and veins is soothingly material.
The story as a form and a habit holds completeness in tantalizing fixity. The characters will never go anywhere. They are exposed to changes only in how they are understood, interpreted, remembered within our imaginations. The story itself is an airless and unintentionally claustrophobic panic around the inevitable, which turns out to be incredibly trite—just another corpse. The altering of the body is a longed-for counter-sign getting us past the cold, superflatness of unemployed youth. They are understood only through the glass of hackneyed and paper-thin character studies, uniform in their inability to tell us anything about drift, movement, flow, feeling, desire. The story offers the bright containment of inexplicable horror as prime evidence in a symptomatology of crisis, especially around the flashing figure of Japan’s youth. Films also fill this symbolic-turned-evidentiary purpose, like Battle Royale in which junior high students kill one another in a vicious, imposed deathmatch, or "Suicide Club" (2002), about a wave of mass suicides sweeping across Japan in a six-day span. They are powerful fetish sites and are able to summon panic and fear and then skillfully shape it into mediated geometries from which researchers, analysts, concerned parents, politicians, and psychologists are able to deduce affects and desires coding the future.
Sensational Bodies
Real-life youth violence appears at the center of these future-codes and corroborates our anxieties while giving us a grotesque, deadly terminus—the present (self)disfigurement of youth as the butchering of society’s future—from which to track back to a point of divergence. A few recent youth crimes have become legend insofar as they condense panic around strange youth or precarious youth: the Shonen A murders, the Akihabara Tōrima Jiken or “random attacker incident” in 2008 in which a 25 year old temporary worker at an auto parts factory killed seven people and injured ten. The fiction and the real converge into a palpable imaginary of ever-present bodily risk, syncing up with mass killings elsewhere, especially in the US. Writing about “teenagers who kill,” Kathleen Stewart conveys the multiplicity of force these stories summon. “These stories don’t end in a moral but are left to resonate with all the other ways that intensities rise out of the ordinary and then linger, unresolved, until memory dims or some new eruption catches our attention…The intensity of erupting events draws our attention to the more ordinary disturbances of everyday life…And we’re left with the visible signs of relays we can’t name or predict and don’t know what to do with” (2007, 74). Excessive technological masking takes possession of youth on the one hand. “…Wenders pronounces these words…a mediation on the present post-humanistic, semiocapitalist hyper-modernity: ‘Mu, The Void, it’s He who reings now.’” (Berardi 2009, 146). With films and stories crossing over the void from the technologically disembodied to the frighteningly fleshy, we are carried into the depths of individual experience cut with the most painful disconnections, rending de-attachments. Violent, small histories of personal trauma, dislocation, affective energies run hot or cold through unnamed, improvised networks of a human sociality and contact written onto the pages of history with blood.
Immaterial/Affective
If the immaterial as detailed by Berardi and the affective described by Stewart are twinned sites of disorientation, ghosting, chaotic energies, then stories like Kanehara’s do critical work in solidifying what appears to change shape as soon as it is perceived in glimpses and registered in intuitive shuddering. Berardi places special attention on the role of mediation in making sense of rapidly dematerializing and reconstituting social spaces. He draws on Guattari’s final book, Chasomosis, specifically the concept of the “aesthetic” and two different issues it articulates. “Sensibility and its modeling by imaginary machines, mass mythologies and mediatic projections. [Guattari] also refers to artistic creation: the production of refrains, perceptive tunings of a peculiar kind, which are constantly on the run, and incessantly renewing themselves” (Berardi, 2009, 135). The stories, both fantastic and feverishly real, pool into a collective site where art emerges as a “chaoid, a temporary organizer of chaos, a fragile architect of shared happiness and a common map of the imaginary” (Ibid.). It is an earnest suggestion, borne forward on the chaotic drift overpowering evaluative and prescriptive analysis. The chaoid challenges “models of thinking that slide over the live surface of difference at work in the ordinary to bottom-line arguments about ‘bigger’ structures and underlying causes” and effectively “obscure the ways in which a reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and noncoherent singularities” (Stewart 2007, 4). Without being a duping formula, for surely they do communicate along the surface of the drift, however, the stories are still too firm, their lines too sharply etched.
Kanehara’s story of rough sex, inking skin, and body mods caricatures youth and offers it as antidote, hopeful sign of life, fading vitality recoverable in dismembered death. It is a counterweight to the continued academic performance of techno-futurism still embodied magically in Japan’s youth—immaterialized through their cybernetic attachments. “Adolechnic” is the cut-n-paste portmanteau carrying this concept further. Deleuze notes that Lewis Carroll “linked portmanteau words to the status of the problematic” and with such a cumbersome bit of coinage as “adolechnic” in our mouths, we are easily convinced of this truism (Deleuze 1994, 24). The use of keitai (cell phones) by Japanese adolescents is a recurring fetish site where the once-worrying simulated relations perceived by Wenders are folded back into stable social meanings—human, but with a techno-sheen of difference. “Ritual exchanges help establish psychological unity in a group. These may be phatic – ordinary exchanges that reinforce social contact and social status – or emotive – interactions that engender affective bonds among members” (Holden 2006, 79). And so the isolation of the pachinko mechanical gamble-trance is broken by this new cellular ordering and channeling of affect. The social persists but at the cost of bodies in action. It is the void Kanehara’s novella cannot fill with fictional bodies in pained sensuality.
What transpires between the techno-fetishistic accounts of a new youth sociality (always on the near-future imaginary Japan colonizes)? And how do we name the stuff of transpiration?
Ordinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of. They give circuits and flow the forms of a life. They can be experienced as a pleasure and a shock, as an empty pause or a dragging undertow, as a sensibility that snaps into place or a profound disorientation. They can be funny, perturbing, or traumatic. Rooted not in fixed conditions of possibility but in the actual lines of potential that a something coming together calls to mind and sets in motion, they can be seen as both the pressure points of events or banalities suffered and the trajectories that forces might take if they were to go unchecked. (Stewart 2007, 2)
Akemi carries the private, fragmented portions of her life into the public space of feminine consumption by men indentured to a gendered, profit-making imperative. The requirement to talk herself into performed effacement and act girlish is only a set tactic on the way to restored forms of (con)scripted sociality. The hostess club is a small social assemblage, what Guattari would see as a social machine, full of energetic components, transversally cut with the desires of capital, of men, of money, of belonging, of exclusivity hinged on temporarily suspended hierarchy for some, exclusion of others. All articulated to gender performance and power running its capillaries through them and the space they produce. What is invisible, immaterial even, and impossible to schematize so neatly are the complex lives that squeeze themselves into the shared space of the club for an hour, a shift, a few months, or years so long that the squeezing occurs in the other direction, into family worlds become alien. Kanehara and Kirino’s competing narratives of youthful experience and practice, disconnected and bloody, do not begin to undo the overlaid diagrams of youth, technology, Japan-as-(lost)future, social disorder, adolescent symptomatology, economic prescription. Nor is there a deciphering key. Instead we encounter the dematerialized and the immaterial, affect as “an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes, and disjunctures” (Ibid. 3). The assemblage that fails. The assemblage of failures.
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