What is Cute?

[imomus]

The London Review of Books leads this month with Cute: Kitty Hauser on style in Japan. It's a workmanlike article, a review of Fruits by Shoichi Aoki (which I recently commented for Index magazine) and The Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan by Donald Richie. Hauser writes:

'Acting and dressing like children represents their refusal of the adult world: as Kinsella writes, cute style 'idolises the pre-social'. Cute is a kind of rebellion, then, but its retreat to the imagery of childhood indicates that there is no alternative to the adult world except a deliberate regression to this one remaining realm of freedom. Seen in this way, cute style is bleak: it allows no looking forward to a future, either for individuals or for society. In this sense it is far darker than punk, which had an energy and rage that promised action, if not social change. Cute disguises its pessimism and political inertia as winsomeness. The curious thing about the outfits paraded in Fruits is that they seem to acknowledge both the idealism of youth and its commercialisation. Punk motifs, in particular, recur again and again, but only as hollow signifiers on pre-slashed and distressed clothing bought from boutiques. Hippy styles, too, are often assembled entirely from branded items. Coupled with cute, these motifs seem like the ghosts of idealism, clinging to the bodies of teenagers capable only of shopping and acting dumb.'

Hauser thinks that 'cute may not yet have its aesthetician'. A good start has been made, though, by Frances Richard, whose Fifteen Theses on the Cute appeared in Cabinet Magazine in Autumn 2001:

'Draw a circle, and ray out from it the abject , the melancholic , the wicked , the childlike. Now in the zones between add the erotic , the ironic , the narcotic , and the kitsch . Intersperse the Romantic/Victorian , the Disney/ consumerist , and the biologically deterministic . At the center of this many-spoked wheel lies a connective empty space. Label it CUTE.'

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That 'Cute Character' baby has the inward-pointing toe gesture that many 'burikko' Japanese girls strike.

I was glad that Kitty Hauser said this: 'If cute means anything, it isn't going to be what it seems to mean. It isn't, for example, necessarily juvenile to dress like a child.' As a man -- and I mean sexually as well as emotionally -- I certainly respond to 'protect me' gestures, to the child-woman. Now, in the west this treads on the toes of taboo: it means you're a possible pedophile, a macho caveman who wants women to remain eternal children, and so on. Women in the west are not saying 'Protect me' in the poses they're being asked to strike, in fact most of the time they seem to be saying 'Suck my dick' (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/2004/04/04/)! Women are conditioned in the west to do that, and men are conditioned to like it. But I think we have much deeper conditioning which likes the appeal 'Protect me', and I think it's sure to win in the end.

I mean, you might want to go to a Peaches show and laugh at the groin thrusting, but is she really, as she proclaims, 'the bitch you want to get with'? Does the average man want to move in with Peaches and snuggle up to her at night? I think not. Given the choice between 'I am vulnerable' and 'I am invulnerable', I go with 'I am vulnerable' -- not because I'm so macho that I want my women to be fragile, but because I hate machismo so much that I want neither men nor women to be macho. And also, just as childish values can be embraced by adults, so feminine values can be embraced by men, and childish and feminine values are things we need very much to learn from, whatever age or gender we are.

'I am vulnerable' is the essential social gesture, the gesture which shatters the myth of the irresponsible, wilful individualist. It's a gesture I'd like to see more in films, pop videos and in life. Say it loud and say it proud, the Cute Pledge:

"Although adult, I can be vulnerable and even childlike. I am not afraid to ask for your help. I want to be co-dependent; that's an okay thing to be. I might fuck you, but I will never say 'Fuck you!'"

[neurasthenic.livejournal.com]

Would you say that the Japanese are more comfortable being "objectified," that cardinal sin of Western relations? When Peaches shouts and women say "suck my dick" they seem to be asserting that your attempt to fit them into a certain category is going to fail, and they have the power to reshape your observation (unless of course, "chicks with dicks" become a category and we can blow them off all the same). But Japanese girls in particular (and of course, my contact is mostly limited to photographs) seem more comfortable to put their energies into a fashion instead of an individual voice that has a story to tell. I don't look at a girl sporting Japanese fashions and think, what is she about, what is she thinking, as an individual, but I examine her clothes and am wowed by the presentation. this is a difference too between visual and narrative art...for instance, are blogs as popular among Japanese youth as they are Western?

[neurasthenic.livejournal.com]

I suppose this really has to do with your essay on Cute Formalism, and the value (perhaps misread in this binary) of conformity over individualism. Also form without content. I'd love to see how the Japanese view evolution, if they view it...in the West it seems charged with individuality/anomie, in Japan, likely not.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Are blogs as popular among Japanese youth as they are Western?

From my experience I'd say yes, but my experience is limited to anime/manga otakudom and music fans.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

On the question of western individualism, I hope you'll forgive me for referring you to my song 'Robocowboys':

There's so many insiders on the outside
I think it's beginning to be the inside
And fire regulations have disallowed
Another lonely cowboy
From joining the lonely crowd

There's so many mavericks right off the map
We've redrawn the map to bring them all back
There's so many renegades off the beaten track
They're beating a track to my door
And I'm beating them back with a board

And breaking the rules has become the new rule
They're teaching it now at business school
They're all wild and crazy and one of a kind
Anarchists to a man
Everybody does it like no-one else can

We're way more conditioned than we realise, and it's quite possible that from a distance we all look the same, and our blogs all look the same. For instance, I just noticed that in the main entry here, while trying to say that Westerners should admit they don't really know what the apparently-western styles in Japan actually mean there, I was actually bringing a Protestant, protest-friendly, Romantic reading in by the back door when I talked about 'defiance, even resistance'. That was my way to say 'The Japanese are good, because they're nearly post-Protestants like me'. Western readings are full of these projections. Sometimes the only appropriate response is just to look. And to say 'Wow!'

[neurasthenic.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I'm reminded of your essay on transgression...it seems on the model of individualism that transgression is necessary to remain distinct, as opposed to part of a huge pool of outsiders (take nu-punks or emo kids today). Whereas, many Japanese fashions don't transgress but recontextualize, as has been said? And if we have such a hard time escaping our conditioning, is Sofia Coppola right in the end? One can try to create but the same Western tools are forced into one's hands (talk about soul! deal with angst!) Nonetheless I agree with Stanley Lieber about "willful self programming" being important. It's individualistic, but not in the Western/authentic model. And it seems the Japanese are allowed to do that...then again, not all Japanese are as hip as the ones we scrutinize.

I feel as if I'm just making excuses...

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Self-programming. Perhaps ironically, I was deeply influenced by Tendai Buddhist theory in books I stumbled across at a university library as a child. I'm certain the thinking I gleaned from those books affected the entire structure of my emerging young-adult mentality. Sometimes it occurs to me that the preoccupation I've developed with the non-existence of objective reality is/was deeply informed by that early reading.