Naming and shaming

[imomus]

How do we name things? Naming Nature is an interesting BBC Radio 4 programme presented by the poet Ian McMillan. (McMillan also presents The Verb, a weekly 'cabaret of the word' on Radio 3. Along with Laurie Taylor, Radio 4's resident sociologist, I think he's the most distinctive radio voice of the post-Peel age.) The bit about the arbitrary Latin names for plants and animals made me laugh a lot.



Language represents the world, and therefore, like politicians, language inevitably betrays the world. Personally, I'm disturbed by labels, which always seem a kind of mini-betrayal. But I'm also disturbed when things don't have names. For instance, the male haircut (seen on a lot of contemporary dancers, for some reason) with 'something going on at the back' (no, not the mullet with 'a party at the back', I mean just some cute, fluffed, tufty stuff going on behind)? What do you call that? Or the baggy ass hipster jeans we've been seeing for the last couple of years, with their sagging, flat-bummed look, what are those called? I just saw a Wrangler poster featuring a pair, so I see they've made it into major manufacturers' lines. But the only word on the Wrangler poster was 'Wanted'. So tell me what you call these jeans? And how to describe my current look? Heimat Fisherman? Soldier Pierrot? Flip Spiv? When it comes to labels, I sometimes think 'the more the merrier'. That way we retain a bit of anarchy and stop any one label winning.

Browsing around clothes store Belleville the other day, I became totally absorbed in a photo book called Exactitudes. The book, by Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek, shows page after page of exaggeratedly conformist 'looks', each given a name and gridded twelve to a page. Ari and Ellie's aim was to point up the contradiction between individuality and uniformity by making 'an anthropological record of people's attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity'. Here are three 'Chairmen':



Here are three 'Musulmen':



Here are three 'Bonitas' (a familiar New York type):



Three 'Casual Queers':



And here are three of the only group I could find that seemed to include people who dressed like me: 'Vagabonds'!



One of the reasons I love regular features like Shift's Girls on the Street snaps is that it's so tempting to try to classify and generalize the looks on offer, and yet the attempt is doomed to failure. Looks are never as rigid as the 'Exactitudes' book makes them seem, and often, by the time you've found a word for a look, it's over. If naming and betrayal are closely related, naming can also be akin to killing. The most fascinating moment for a trend-spotter is somewhere between noticing a pattern emerging and knowing what to call it. As soon as a name is found and enters into common use, the look seems rubber-stamped, reproducible, conformist, commercial, ready to be flogged to death then filed away in some costume museum, ready for revival at some later date, primed for hybrids and irony.

Recently I've been enjoying another sort of street observation, more verbal than visual. Japan Today's regular Pop Vox feature (compiled by Sachie Kanda, it might as well be called 'Kanda Camera') links styles to opinions. Ordinary Japanese people are stopped on the street, photographed, and asked about topical issues. We get to see correlations between their looks and their views, between their objective presence in the world and their subjective reflections on it.



What strikes me is how sweet and sane, how tender and community-minded most Japanese are. If you compare their views with the comments posted by the Japan-based gaijin below, remarkable contrasts emerge. The gaijin (mostly American ex-pats) emerge as volatile and irascible vigilantes, proposing extreme solutions and taking the law into their own hands.

Sample answers to the question 'Should people use cell phones while driving?'

Japanese opinion: 'I know it is convenient to be able to call somebody when you get lost, but if you get hurt in an accident, you will regret it afterwards.' Gaijin opinion: 'If I see a car driver talking on his cell phone while I'm out on my motorcycle, I pull up very close to his window and rev the engine to 4,000 RPM. The noise drowns out their conversation and it drives them crazy. Isn't that fun or wot.'

Sample answers to the question 'How do you feel about men reading porn on trains?':

Japanese opinion: 'I wonder how the daughter of one of those dirty old men would feel if they saw their father reading such a magazine or newspaper on the train or wherever? He must be thinking of only his own gratification because he is lonely.' Gaijin opinion: 'The best way to handle those guys is to walk up to them, pull the magazine out of their hands and loudly ask them in Japanese which photograph is their favorite when they pull their johnson. Public shame works well in this culture from what I have seen.'



Sample answers to the question What do you think of bosozuku biker gangs?:

Japanese opinion: 'They sometimes get together near my house, but I'm not afraid of them because they haven't bothered me yet.' First Gaijin opinion: 'One easy tactic solves all your problems. When you see a line of them parked out in front of your local Lawson, place one firm kick to the center of the first bike, then run like hell. Good ol' Domino effect.' Second Gaijin opinion: 'After being woken up repeatly night after night by the noise I soon realized that the police and general population was ready to tolerate these punks... I decided to take matters into my own hands. I saved up some eggs and let them sit out in the sun on my balcony for a few days. Once I had a couple dozen ready to go I decided it was time to shut down the show. With the lights out and the noisy bastards coming down the road I let fly with the eggs from the 8th floor and couldnt stop laughing as a few of the eggs hit their targets and brought forth a barrage of foul language.'

Question: How can Japan preserve the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Japanese opinion: 'War is not only the A-bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. War is always happening somewhere in the world every day. If the media could report timely news with details such as the use of depleted uranium shells in Iraq, we would still be more aware of the present cruelty of war and human beings.' Gaijin opinion: 'You japanese should stop bitch whipping on every Aug. 06 et Aug. 14. All you deserved it.'

Question: Should porn be wrapped in plastic?

Japanese opinion: 'Even if the plastic bag is intended to prevent kids from looking at obscene materials, preventing them from learning about such things is even worse. Kids will find out about sex in the future anyway. We should teach sex education at an early stage.' Gaijin opinion: 'The only solution is to forget about the magazines, and to wrap anyone under 17 in plastic. This will also cut down on social diseases.'

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Of course, your not being able to speak Japanese means that you're unable to access 90 percent of discourse about Japan, and most crucially, all of the dialogue in newspapers, internet etc. that the Japanese are having amongst themselves (apart from the crumbs that are translated for gaijin). That can only result in a pretty skewed vision of their society, n'est-ce pas? It would be as if a Japanese man spent a few months every now and then in London, talking only to Japanese-speaking Londoners, reading only newspapers put out by the ex-pat Japanese community there, or bilingual art magazines. You'd miss all the fine-grained aspects of the culture, ie, everything that's really important.

James R

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't agree. You see, although I'm a highly linguistic animal, I am deeply distrustful of language. I think language in many ways distracts attention away from important realities. Have you ever been in an art gallery and watched people (or even yourself) spending more attention studying handouts, brochures and labels than the paintings? Have you ever watched TV with the sound down and felt like you could 'see' more clearly what TV is actually about than when you watch it in the intended way? I don't want to get mystical or rockist on your ass here and talk about 'direct experience' or 'intuition', but I do know that some of my most interesting explanatory ideas about Japan, like 'cute formalism (http://www.imomus.com/thought300501.html)' or 'superlegitimacy (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/2004/07/20/)', have come to me because I was racking my brains for explanations for things which, had I been able to 'read the label', I wouldn't have thought about in such a fresh way.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I do find it very interesting that my entry is all about nomenclature, or 'naming as betrayal', and we find ourselves here in the Comments section with accusations that I can't speak the language. I state in the entry that 'if naming and betrayal are closely related, naming can also be akin to killing.' It seems to me that it's not an appropriate response to an argument about the problematics of nomenclature and the advantages of extra-linguistic cultural perception to say 'Learn the language'. Click Opera is often about the limits of language, and the need for visual interpretation, embodiment, etc as alternative interpretors. You could say that my most important Japanese impression this year has been sento-visiting (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/2004/09/01/). I literally soaked Japanese culture in through the pores of my skin. It was extremely educational. I'm afraid anyone who rules that out as a method of understanding Japan is not going to impress me very much.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not ruling that out as a method. But I think it's perfectly possible to focus on the visual by learning to distance oneself from the linguistic, rather than taking the radical, handicapping step of not learning the language! After all, I'm sure blind people have an interesting perspective on the world, and interesting things to tell me, but I don't think I'll be putting out my eyes just yet. Your inability to enter Japanese discourse on their own terms has no doubt coloured your perspective and thrown up some interesting thoughts; but you're probably losing more than you're gaining. It makes it easier to see what you want and ignore whatever doesn't fit your fantasy. I'll speculate that it's hardened your orientalising notion of Japan as the exotic other and counterweight to the West, and has also led to the 'more Catholic than the Catholics' syndrome of the newly converted. Although, unlike other Westerners, the object of your adoration is not the the old, traditional Japan but the postmodern Japan, which becomes the object of romanticisation and overemphasis.

James R

[(Anonymous)]

To speak more generally from experience: I live in France and I speak fluent French. (France is not as different from Anglo-Saxon culture as Japan, but it's different enough, it's maybe a pradigmatic intra-Western 'Other', rather than an exta-Western one.) And I know plenty of Americans here who haven't needed to learn the language and therefore haven't bothered. That inability to enter into the mainstream of communication and always remaining in the slipstream of English-language discourse leads to a very different take on the French, in my experience. They miss many of the subtleties and fine-grain of French culture and end up with a more simplistic notion of how the French are and interact. They hang onto old clichés, both negative and positive. The French remains the Other, whereas as a French-speaking foreigner, I'm on a sort of bridge between their culture and mine. At times, they're the Other, and at other times, not. And that's ultimately a more interesting place to be, I think.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The thing is, there have been attacks from within the West's own culture on that notion of agency. Communism, socialism, deconstruction, postmodernism and identity politics have all undermined it. The last influential intellectual movement in the West to espouse that view of agency is Existentialism, back in the 1950s.

Re: Name Calling

[(Anonymous)]

I'd counter with something, but I don't mind being associated with "rational, liberal post-industrial revolution European culture." I admit it - I am not on the fringes of leftist cultural studies.

I can understand the idea behind "fundamentally different ways for the Self to interact with other Selves in a culture" but I find it hard to use this to apologize for authoritarianism. If Momus would just say "I think Japan has the right to be an authoritarian government," then I think we could get somewhere. If you really think it, do not be ashamed to say "the Japanese do not want free will." (Free will is an outdated Eurocentric concept anyway, right?)

Marxy