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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Main Argument: Allison argues that several things were different about the "J-cool" boom that began in the 1990s, beginning with the fact that it had a far greater level of influence on the U.S. marketplace than did previous Japanese cultural imports. Allison believes that fantasy, capitalism, and globalism are conjoined and (re)configured in Japanese media mix properties [the term is anachronistic to her book], and that the "polymorphously perverse" play they engender (and embody) is key to their appeal--both at the level of practice and at the level of the media mix itself.
Historiographical Engagement: Lots of historians of Japanese toys, and lots of ethnographic interviews. Also, Uncle Karl
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples For Allison, J-cool is rooted in "the specific conditions and policies in postwar Japan that shaped both the nation's mass fantasies and the vehicles through which they are communicated in particular ways" and in "the development of a consumer and entertainment style internationally recognized today as 'Japanese,'" which she sees as, essentially, a "techno-animist sensibility" (11, 12). For Allison, Japan thus "offers an alternative capitalism to what modernization theory claimed in the 1950s would be the standardized (Western) form capitalism would take in any and all countries across the world" (13). Allison argues that this techno-animism "is deeply embedded in material practices of commodity consumerism" and sees this embeddedness as a process that "reenchants the everyday" (ibid); the media mix, then, is "a business of enchanted commodities" (16). What makes them distinctively Japanese even as they circulate globally is polymorphous perversity + techno-animism. NB: Allison in her own admission does "see a redemptive potential here not only in the power with which these goods capture kids' imaginations but also in particular capacities these play technologies accord youth for interacting with, connecting to, and (re)imagining the world today" (30). These toys indicate "the potential for postindustrial play technologies to give back to youth that capacity for experience that late-stage capitalism threatens to take away" (31).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This looks at the years 1945-60 as "the era of reconstruction," from ashes to cyborgs. The three sites here are the tin toys produced during the Occupation and exported to the States; Gojira; and Astro Boy. Allison argues that
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "some of the socioeconomic factors that have shaped the national mood in Japan at this moment of the millennial crossover and can be traced not only in the 'pathologies' of the era–Aum Shinrikyô, social shut-ins, criminal youth–but also in the trends in producing, accumulating, and bonding with 'cute' play commodities that define the subject of this book.
As I have tried to suggest, there is a thin line between the 'monstrous' behavior of children who, once 'good,' retreat into their rooms or act out in random violence and that of so-called normal kids who fetishistically consume brand-name goods and compulsively play with the fantasy monsters that are so popular in (and whose profits are so important to) the Japanese market place today. (92)
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and its transPacific appeal. Allison sees the appeal of MMPR and "mecha superheroes" [NB: the Power Rangers are not mecha, which are giant robots] as lying in "power as it fuses and defuses in bodies with shifting and exploding borders of identity" (126). She continues, "This elaborate, interchangeable, and mobile multipartedness is what I see as the appeal of the fantasy; it is what has made the Rangers series such a long-lasting fixture in the terrain of postwar Japanese kids' culture and, more recently, such a global craze in the worldwide marketplace of cyber-infected, techno-mobilized, post-Fordist kids" (ibid). By buying the toys, kids (or more precisely, their parents on their behalf) buy entrance into the fantasy world of the story.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Sailor Moon. Allison argues that it "embodies the cultural logic of post-Fordism: fragmentation, flexibility, customization (just-in-time demand. As a global commodity/cutlure, then, it carries a different fantasy and a different politics than the more Fordist model" (160). Its appeal also rests "in the way action is articulated with and as fashion, changing both the type of 'girl' who is (re)presented and the type of 'girl' (which includes many boys) who consumes, and identifies with, these characters" (ibid). Thus, "Sailor Moon is a harbinger of a consumer demand/product based on transformation, fragmentation, and polymorphous perversity" (161).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Tamagotchi, "the form in which this cyborgian fantasy [of the virtual pet] was popularized and (re)produced as mass culture" (164). Allison argues that tamagotchi and other virtual pets are actually selling techno-intimacy, which she says is a sign of the times.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Pokémon. Allison argues that Pokémon and character goods in general are "constant and reliable companions that disseminate 'unconditional love' in these postindustrial times of nomadism, orphanism, and stress" (231). But "because pokémon are a fluid currency–cute but powerful, alienable and inalienable, a form of both capital and companionship–they have affective as well as 'market' value and mix (up) different economic logics: the communicative spirit of gift exchange and the addictive frenzy of capitalistic acquisition" (ibid). For Allison, the emergence of the "parliament of things", as we might say, is not all positive:
Chapter 8: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at what Allison calls the "Pokémonization" of America and the world. Allison sees this as resting in the "informaticization" of various aspects of life under capitalism: "in a labyrinth of networks erected in the pursuit of profit ('getting'), there is also a 'glue' that ties disparate elements together–a virtual culture where digital icons link to humans in relationships at once intimate and instrumental" (266). This virtualization and informaticizaiton is mirrored in the global regime of capital, which seeks ever more efficient ways to circulate. Thus, Allison reads the third Pokémon movie as "a tale about loss, it is also about new possibilities: about facing the dismantling of old attachments by adopting global capitalism/virtual intimacies–ties that compensate for, bu themselves spur, the erosion of a more rooted sense of home, country, and nation. In this, a monster that can be 'family-like' rather than 'family' encodes a libidinal economy for millennial Japan (and global fantasy making): virtual entities that serve (as) capital and as intimacy at the same time" (270).
Epilogue: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Lost in Translation and few other media and makes a few observations, one about "the diminishment, if hardly collapse, of American soft power as the hegemonic center of global culture"; another about "new models of the global imagination that, in the case of Japanese cool and its popularization around the world today, carry an attractive power but not one that is driven by or generates an attraction in others for the actual place or culture of the producing country," in which "'Japan' operates more as signifier for a particular brand and blend of fantasy-ware: goods that inspire an imaginary space at once foreign and familiar and a subjectivity of continual flux and global mobility, forever moving into and out of new planes/powers/terrains/relations" (276-77). Finally, Allison argues that "the current popularization of Japanese 'cool' around the world is best understood in terms of its fantasy formation that, in turn, lends itself so productively to capitalist marketing in the new millennium" (277). For her, it makes sense that a culture on the global periphery would be the leader in this new paradigm, but despite the uprootedness and disconnectedness that is part of it, she also sees promising and new(er) elements: "the high degree of techno-interactivity in the play equipment that makes fantasy play ever more personally customizable and also prosthetic," and also "the profusion of polymorphous attachments," and also the challenge to American pop cultural hegemony itself (279).
Critical assessment: I would have liked this book much better if I had read it before I read Marc Steinberg's book, which I think offers a much better grasp on much of the same territory. Admission: that is because I am not an anthropologist, and because I am allergic to culture as a primary causal factor in anything for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture but which can be symbolized by the assertion that culture changes damn quick when people want it to. The "techno-animism" argument, frankly, I think is better explained by simply saying that Japan moved into a new mode of capitalism before other countries; this is Latour's "parliament of things" in a capitalist inflection. But also, I don't like Freud, and Allison is very much a Freudian, albeit in a feminist inflection. Sidenote: WTF is with feminists liking Freud? Freud does not like you, ladies! Freud does not even believe that queerness exists! Vomit. That said, once Allison gets away from all that and into her analysis of capitalism, I think she's basically on the money, albeit in a different and frankly somewhat dated idiom. A worthwhile book, for sure, but very much not the whole story.
Further reading: Steinberg, Anime's Media Mix; The LEGO Movie
Meta notes: Gotta catch 'em all! Also, what does "New Age" even mean anymore?
Main Argument: Allison argues that several things were different about the "J-cool" boom that began in the 1990s, beginning with the fact that it had a far greater level of influence on the U.S. marketplace than did previous Japanese cultural imports. Allison believes that fantasy, capitalism, and globalism are conjoined and (re)configured in Japanese media mix properties [the term is anachronistic to her book], and that the "polymorphously perverse" play they engender (and embody) is key to their appeal--both at the level of practice and at the level of the media mix itself.
Historiographical Engagement: Lots of historians of Japanese toys, and lots of ethnographic interviews. Also, Uncle Karl
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples For Allison, J-cool is rooted in "the specific conditions and policies in postwar Japan that shaped both the nation's mass fantasies and the vehicles through which they are communicated in particular ways" and in "the development of a consumer and entertainment style internationally recognized today as 'Japanese,'" which she sees as, essentially, a "techno-animist sensibility" (11, 12). For Allison, Japan thus "offers an alternative capitalism to what modernization theory claimed in the 1950s would be the standardized (Western) form capitalism would take in any and all countries across the world" (13). Allison argues that this techno-animism "is deeply embedded in material practices of commodity consumerism" and sees this embeddedness as a process that "reenchants the everyday" (ibid); the media mix, then, is "a business of enchanted commodities" (16). What makes them distinctively Japanese even as they circulate globally is polymorphous perversity + techno-animism. NB: Allison in her own admission does "see a redemptive potential here not only in the power with which these goods capture kids' imaginations but also in particular capacities these play technologies accord youth for interacting with, connecting to, and (re)imagining the world today" (30). These toys indicate "the potential for postindustrial play technologies to give back to youth that capacity for experience that late-stage capitalism threatens to take away" (31).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This looks at the years 1945-60 as "the era of reconstruction," from ashes to cyborgs. The three sites here are the tin toys produced during the Occupation and exported to the States; Gojira; and Astro Boy. Allison argues that
…the entertainment industries played a vital role in Japan's postwar reconstruction, spurring the economy (particularly true of the toy and publishing industries with manga, and the film industry throughout the 1950s) and fostering new idols and icons with which the nation and its people began to reimagine themselves. Out of the ashes of war came cyborgs: a new regime of mechatronics fusing robotic technology, consumer electronics, and industrial-strength (as in hardworking) humans. (65)
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "some of the socioeconomic factors that have shaped the national mood in Japan at this moment of the millennial crossover and can be traced not only in the 'pathologies' of the era–Aum Shinrikyô, social shut-ins, criminal youth–but also in the trends in producing, accumulating, and bonding with 'cute' play commodities that define the subject of this book.
As I have tried to suggest, there is a thin line between the 'monstrous' behavior of children who, once 'good,' retreat into their rooms or act out in random violence and that of so-called normal kids who fetishistically consume brand-name goods and compulsively play with the fantasy monsters that are so popular in (and whose profits are so important to) the Japanese market place today. (92)
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and its transPacific appeal. Allison sees the appeal of MMPR and "mecha superheroes" [NB: the Power Rangers are not mecha, which are giant robots] as lying in "power as it fuses and defuses in bodies with shifting and exploding borders of identity" (126). She continues, "This elaborate, interchangeable, and mobile multipartedness is what I see as the appeal of the fantasy; it is what has made the Rangers series such a long-lasting fixture in the terrain of postwar Japanese kids' culture and, more recently, such a global craze in the worldwide marketplace of cyber-infected, techno-mobilized, post-Fordist kids" (ibid). By buying the toys, kids (or more precisely, their parents on their behalf) buy entrance into the fantasy world of the story.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Sailor Moon. Allison argues that it "embodies the cultural logic of post-Fordism: fragmentation, flexibility, customization (just-in-time demand. As a global commodity/cutlure, then, it carries a different fantasy and a different politics than the more Fordist model" (160). Its appeal also rests "in the way action is articulated with and as fashion, changing both the type of 'girl' who is (re)presented and the type of 'girl' (which includes many boys) who consumes, and identifies with, these characters" (ibid). Thus, "Sailor Moon is a harbinger of a consumer demand/product based on transformation, fragmentation, and polymorphous perversity" (161).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Tamagotchi, "the form in which this cyborgian fantasy [of the virtual pet] was popularized and (re)produced as mass culture" (164). Allison argues that tamagotchi and other virtual pets are actually selling techno-intimacy, which she says is a sign of the times.
While mecha-tronics was the fantasy as well as national policy for rebuilding Japan after the war–remaking the country as a techno super nation–sof-tronics is the symptom and corrective to this industrial master plan in the new millennium–assuaging the atomism, alienation, and stress of corporatist capitalism with virtual companionship. What performativity exacts and extracts from citizens in the era of speeded-up, 'just in time' delivery, soft robo-pals promise to make up for: a 'humanness' that, one lost, is to be recopied by mechanical petdom" (190).Thus the tamagotchi "operates as a fetish bearing both an absence (a loss) and a presence (that masks, stands in place for, and–in this case–also transforms what has been lost and is still desired)" (ibid).
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Pokémon. Allison argues that Pokémon and character goods in general are "constant and reliable companions that disseminate 'unconditional love' in these postindustrial times of nomadism, orphanism, and stress" (231). But "because pokémon are a fluid currency–cute but powerful, alienable and inalienable, a form of both capital and companionship–they have affective as well as 'market' value and mix (up) different economic logics: the communicative spirit of gift exchange and the addictive frenzy of capitalistic acquisition" (ibid). For Allison, the emergence of the "parliament of things", as we might say, is not all positive:
On the one hand, a richness of human experience is extended to the arena of things in an era when people otherwise feel thingified themselves. On the other hand, investing things with "lifelike" attributes, energies, and attachments not only reflects but also perpetuates the tendencies Marx attributed to capitalism at a far earlier stage: increased alienation, atomism, and dehumanization (by projecting only commodities the power and value of human labor and relationships–what Marx called "commodity fetishism"). (232)
Chapter 8: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at what Allison calls the "Pokémonization" of America and the world. Allison sees this as resting in the "informaticization" of various aspects of life under capitalism: "in a labyrinth of networks erected in the pursuit of profit ('getting'), there is also a 'glue' that ties disparate elements together–a virtual culture where digital icons link to humans in relationships at once intimate and instrumental" (266). This virtualization and informaticizaiton is mirrored in the global regime of capital, which seeks ever more efficient ways to circulate. Thus, Allison reads the third Pokémon movie as "a tale about loss, it is also about new possibilities: about facing the dismantling of old attachments by adopting global capitalism/virtual intimacies–ties that compensate for, bu themselves spur, the erosion of a more rooted sense of home, country, and nation. In this, a monster that can be 'family-like' rather than 'family' encodes a libidinal economy for millennial Japan (and global fantasy making): virtual entities that serve (as) capital and as intimacy at the same time" (270).
Epilogue: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Lost in Translation and few other media and makes a few observations, one about "the diminishment, if hardly collapse, of American soft power as the hegemonic center of global culture"; another about "new models of the global imagination that, in the case of Japanese cool and its popularization around the world today, carry an attractive power but not one that is driven by or generates an attraction in others for the actual place or culture of the producing country," in which "'Japan' operates more as signifier for a particular brand and blend of fantasy-ware: goods that inspire an imaginary space at once foreign and familiar and a subjectivity of continual flux and global mobility, forever moving into and out of new planes/powers/terrains/relations" (276-77). Finally, Allison argues that "the current popularization of Japanese 'cool' around the world is best understood in terms of its fantasy formation that, in turn, lends itself so productively to capitalist marketing in the new millennium" (277). For her, it makes sense that a culture on the global periphery would be the leader in this new paradigm, but despite the uprootedness and disconnectedness that is part of it, she also sees promising and new(er) elements: "the high degree of techno-interactivity in the play equipment that makes fantasy play ever more personally customizable and also prosthetic," and also "the profusion of polymorphous attachments," and also the challenge to American pop cultural hegemony itself (279).
Critical assessment: I would have liked this book much better if I had read it before I read Marc Steinberg's book, which I think offers a much better grasp on much of the same territory. Admission: that is because I am not an anthropologist, and because I am allergic to culture as a primary causal factor in anything for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture but which can be symbolized by the assertion that culture changes damn quick when people want it to. The "techno-animism" argument, frankly, I think is better explained by simply saying that Japan moved into a new mode of capitalism before other countries; this is Latour's "parliament of things" in a capitalist inflection. But also, I don't like Freud, and Allison is very much a Freudian, albeit in a feminist inflection. Sidenote: WTF is with feminists liking Freud? Freud does not like you, ladies! Freud does not even believe that queerness exists! Vomit. That said, once Allison gets away from all that and into her analysis of capitalism, I think she's basically on the money, albeit in a different and frankly somewhat dated idiom. A worthwhile book, for sure, but very much not the whole story.
Further reading: Steinberg, Anime's Media Mix; The LEGO Movie
Meta notes: Gotta catch 'em all! Also, what does "New Age" even mean anymore?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-16 15:27 (UTC)Heh.
WTF is with feminists liking Freud?
Damn. Good. Question.
---L.