File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9803, message 230


Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 18:58:55 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Mass-Culture & Violence


Dennis,

When you have enough courage to strip yourself of grad-school theory-speak
and used items from pop culture thrift shops, your words and thoughts, I
guarantee, will become more revelatory.

One note of caution (this is the second time). Never turn a selective +
sexist import of cultural commodities into a synecdoche for the entire mass
culture of a given nation. Don't think that your local video store or comic
book market can give you a clue as to how others do culture, much less how
others live. (Re-read Edward Said in your spare time for good measure.) I
have an impression that you speak neither Japanese nor Chinese. If so,
learning either language might be a step in the right direction. (However,
given the pervasive nature of reactionary scholarship in the "area studies"
and foreign language instruction in the U.S., it might put you into a
right-wing direction.)

Regarding your comment on the "violent corporeality of Japanese
mass-culture," I think that it reveals more about American teenage hetero
male consumer tastes than the state of mass culture in Japan. The same
goes, I am pretty certain, for Chinese mass culture. The question to be
asked, IMHO, by American scholars who do not have enough knowledge about
the language, culture, + social relations of Japan and other Asian nations,
is what makes American hetero male teenagers desire the cultural waste
products from Japan, HK, etc.? What do they get from them? What does their
desire say about the society they live in, that is, the United States?

>Actually, this raises an interesting question: how
>different is the sadism in the manga and anime from the American
>run-and-gun films? Or is it just that the former is more of a televisual,
>video form, a kind of indigenous Japanese version of the latter?

Suppose one can compare Samuel Fuller, Sergio Leone, Sam Pekinpah, John
Woo, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, etc. (for 'feral homoeroticism').
[Or read _Billy Budd_ with Eve Sedgewick eyes.] Or compare _Akira_ with
_Blade Runner_, _Brazil_, the _Alien_ series, etc. (for post-industrial
dystopias). Or _Tetsuo_ with anything by David Cronenberg, David Lynch,
Alex Cox, etc. (for 'violent corporeality'). We can write many papers on
such subjects, and it may be that we have no way around the *conspicuous
production* treadmill of cultural junk studies given the state of the
academic job market, but we had better remember that they will be "very
clever, radical, and completely pointless," to borrow Fergal's words.

Yoshie




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