The Culture of Kawaii

Wong Kar-wai and the Culture of the Kawaii
Thorsten Bornstein

"The polemical title of this chapter which mentions the culture of the kawaii in the context of a study on wong Kar-wai, attempts to draw attention to an underlying cultural pattern that is, in my opinion, present in the cultures of the aforementioned countries. Kawaii means "cute" in Japanese and denotes a common popular culture closely linked to aesthetic expressions of kitsch which developed remarkably distinct features in all modernized East Asian countries." Modern East Asian popular culture bears traits of a social crisis that is most obvious in Japan, and which some people characterize as being "all style and no substance." An eminent disillusionment with society as well as a psychological helplessness has created a (youth) culture that engages in unspirited consumption and the creation of a commodified dreamworld. Though these features are not necessarily explicit and prominent in Wong's films, I still think that they are implicit and hidden as expressions of the Pan-Asian cultural sphere that I am trying to describe. Unquestionably, Wong depicts, in his particularly nihilistic and detached "dandyist" manner, emotive lifestyles without substance determined by a non-productive existential emptiness. The cute is defined as childlike, sweet, innocent, pure, gentle and weak. The aesthetics of cuteness (kawairashisa) has been developing in Japan since the 1980s and in the late 1990s it turned into an explicit kitsch-culture.'

However, cute culture is not restricted to Japan but has also been observed, for example, in Taiwan. Fluffy stuffed animals dangling from the bottom of the cell phones of women in their thirties, men wearing Pikachu on key chains and the ubiquitous presence of Hello Kitty and Doraemon figurines in households is a substantial ingredient of a'unique culture that has been driven to such an extreme only in East Asia. Wherever it appears, cute-kitsch culture is more than an aesthetic style but a full-fledged way of articulating a subjective attitude that becomes manifest in design, language, bodily behavior, gender relations, and, most generally, in subjective perceptions of the self. I am not saying that Wong Kar-wai's films are kitsch, nor am I saying that his films would straightforwardly produce an aesthetics of the kawaii. Still I believe that, in a most general sense, the kuwaii, as a cultural pattern of East Asian humanized globalization, is indirectly present in Wong's work.

This becomes particularly obvious if we consider the cultural phenomenon of kawaii culture from the angle of another Japanese notion, that of amae. Many authors have linked the kawaii to the amae. The psychologist Takeo Doi detected in the early 1970s a kind of "willful immaturity or childishness" among Japanese youths that revealed, in his opinion, a desire to be indulged like children. ln his famous study on the phenomenon of the amae in Japanese society, Doi shows that being voluntarily dependent on others has been idealized by Japanese society up to the point that it can be considered as a cultural specifity. The amae is the "coaxing" done by children who refuse to recognize, in an adult way, their responsibility towards the world. These children aspire to be wrapped in the dreamy tenderness of their mothers who will not refuse their amae and provide an environment adapted to the needs of the children's amae. It is rather easy to crystallize such a structure of amae or "childish dependence on others" in Wong Kar-wai's films. But let me first establish more clearly my understanding of Pan-Asian culture.


The "Dandyist Sphere:" L'Amour Impossible
I said that Wong is the representative of "dandyist pan-Asianism." Having introduced my understanding of pan-Asian culture I will now have to clarify what I understand by dandyism. Furthermore I will show that a certain kind of dandyism can be seen as an integral part of pan-Asian culture. L 'Amour impossible is the title of a novel written by one of the foremost 19' century dandies, the French writer Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. L 'Amour impossible could also be the title of almost all of Wong Kar-wai's films. Tsung-yiHuang has shown -how Wong establishes himself in Chungking Express as "an archetypical director-flaneur, [a] cinematic detective of urban-life, if you will, on the streets of Hong Kong in the age of globalization."
Not only in Chungking Express but in all of his films except Ashes of Time, Wong's characters stroll aimlessly through urban settings like dandies. And like dandies, they are neither opposed to their capitalist environment nor fully integrated into it but "play the game" of urban life in a strangely indifferent way, developing, equally like dandies, an unreal, dreamlike mode of existence.

In urban life we observe, as said Elizabeth Wilson in an article on the culture of the flaneur, "bits of the 'stories men and women carry with them, but never learn their conclusions; life ceases to form itself into epic or narrative, becoming instead a short story, dreamlike, insubstantial or ambiguous."

In a very similar way the lifestyles of Wong's characters are insubstantial. In spite of the internalized melodramatic struggle that they obviously do undergo, in the very end they receive no more than what the dandyist characters in Barbey d'Aurevilly's novel receive: "Some empty kisses, some gloomy and vain caresses in compensation of missed happiness and impossible enthusiasm."'

The precision with which Leslie Cheung combs his hair at the end of Days of Being Wild, the ritualistic consumption of canned pineapples in Chunking Express - all this can be understood as dandyist and parodist attempts to resist alienation in the consumer world of late modem capitalism. A typically dandyist lack of initiative and resoluteness lets Wong's characters appear simultaneously as victims and as non-victims of their modern environment. In Chungking Express, although Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) spends the night with Brigitte Lin in a hotel room, he has the right only to look at her but not to touch her. This ridiculously aestheticized relationship leaves experience in the domain of the image or imagination. Wong's films represent a panorama of parodied capitalism in which even drug-mafias and crime for money (normally parameters of ultimate harsh capitalism) get absorbed in a dreamsphere eternally cushioned in moderately narcissist emotions and only partially controlled immature subjectivism.

Dandyism as an ironical attitude of the authentic survivor in capitalist society supplemented by a strong feeling of sublimated interdependency among individuals, creates, in almost all of Wong's films, a social and emotional labyrinth from which none of his characters is able to escape. This is what can be considered, in a more general way, as "pan-Asian dandyism." Those who consume today in a detached way, who make fun of consumption and at the same time of themselves are those young Asians who participate in a certain postmodern form of dandyism. Like dandies, they appear to be in a paradoxical way integrated and at the same time resisting capitalist consumer society.
Do young Japanese girls who walk around with expensive Louis Vuitton bags as if they were gadgets not have something of modem dandies?" Yes, in a purely schematic way, because their consumerism has adopted traits that clearly transcend the classical models of bourgeois consumption. The symbolism of the Louis Vuitton bag as a classical attribute of bourgeois lifestyle has obviously been led ad absurdum. Also dandies like to hijack cultural symbols and to apply them within a new, self-made referential framework. At the same time these girls are not dandies because their "dandyism" does not create, as did, for example, the historical Japanese dandyism of iki culture, a certain degree of individualism. For these Japanese girls, the classical dandy culture of resistance or renunciation has become an item for consumption in itself, just like all other items that are sold through our capitalist economic system. This means that, instead of resisting the impulse of consumption and of creating the more stringent style of the "real dandy," contemporary East Asian dandyism creates the coaxing and indulgent style of the "false dandy" that is so closely linked to the concept of kawaii. In a way, "dandyism" exceeds itself here by undergoing an intercultural interpretation which repeats the paradoxical scheme of resistance-integration typical of East Asian modern culture. In any case, it parallels a model that the Japanese sinologist Yoshimi Takeuchi detected as early as 1948 when he wrote: "Through its continued resistance, the Orient appears to have produced non-European things that are mediated by, while at the same time exceeding, the European. "

The Kawaii Sphere
Already in As Tears Go By, a gangster movie in the style of John Woo, Wong explored the theme of the immature person. Fly would "rather be a three-minute hero" than "be a fly all my life." In most of Wong's films the characters are linked through a structure of dependence that Takeo Doi has called the structure of amae.

In classical Japanese aesthetics, this structure has been opposed to that of the dandyist style of iki. In Wong's films, however, the coaxing amae-dandy is the rule. A recurring theme is that of one person attempting to get closer to another person without having the courage to commit him/herself to a real relationship. In Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, and In the Mood for Love, people remain obsessively undecided. ...I suggest that a prominent structure of amae-which is so important for the formation of the aesthetics of the kawaii-makes Wong's films fundamentally East Asian, and this the more so as it produces a certain aesthetic effect: All the characters' actions, captured as they are within the people's amae, appear as strangely self-contained or perhaps even "virtual." This brings us to another aspect that Wong's films share with contemporary East Asian culture: that of "life" as a dreamlike experience.

The Dream Sphere
Unable to live a "real" life, the characters in Wong's films decide to reside in a commodified dreamworld without real relationships, limiting their real activities to coaxing. Wong's films have been described as tragedies of missed encounters. However, where is the tragedy? As a matter of fact, tragedies are impossible here because Wong does not write dramas where the plots develop a tension. One of the reasons is that the deconstruction of storylines, the doubling of characters, etc. destroy any particular perspective from which the story can be seen which creates the impression of something virtual or of a dream. ...Wong's concentration on details, apparently free montage of sketches, experimentation with images and a somehow disconnected presence of characters which are simply there without being inscribed in a clear dramatic structure, lets this film become dreamlike. "Dreams are made only of beginnings," said Paul Valery. Wong does not tell stories but merely shows fragmented aspects of ways of life. At times Wong allows elements from "real" life to penetrate the net of human relationships that have never had a chance to become "real"...

Manga
The deconstruction of real stories or simply of "real life" and its replacement by a dreamworld constructed around the desire of amae and the drive towards consumption is often supported in Wong's films by the kind of manga aesthetics that is becoming ubiquitous in modern East Asia.

These stylized androids who wear space-suit-bikinis and who are somehow reminiscent of the ironic kitsch creations of the video artist Mariko Mori, seem to have stepped directly out of a manga. Wong's films have been likened to MTV aesthetics because of his use of "striking camera angles, abrupt cuts, visual ellipses, sudden dislocations . . .'" I would claim that Wong's films have something of a manga. Wimal Dissanayake notes that "rather than focus on full-body action shots or close-ups on faces and acrobatics in brilliant light, he focuses on shadowy figures partially seen through a haze as fragmented bodies in an encompassing thickness". This is manga aesthetics. While classical American comics stylized their characters in unrealistic ways and let them act in slow-moving plots, Japanese mangas developed an extremely fast-moving and complex visual language. First of all, the visual vocabulary became richer through the use of cinematic techniques like close-ups, fade-outs, montage, slow-motion, perspectives from different angles, etc. In addition, the visual component became much more important than the text. The emphasis was now on the psychological state of the characters that manifested itself through facial expressions as well as through the atmosphere and the dynamics of the situation.

In 2001, the manga artist Takashi Murakami presented, in a lecture, the opening scene of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and pointed to the "hyperrealistic fetishization of bullets piercing flesh as particularly American" which he contrasted with the melodramatic almost balletic slow-motion versions of of such scenes in Japanese films. In Ashes of Time many fighting scenes are filmed in slow-motion, which pushes them towards an utmost abstraction. This abstraction is pushed even further because, as Abbas finds, "invisibility is more important in Wong's fighting sequences than visibility. Very often action has been speeded up to a blur." Nothing could be more opposed to the "American" realism described by Murakami. The parallelism between Wong and mangas is not as amazing as it might appear. Wong's cinema has a direct link with Hong Kong action cinema that evolved in close contact with martial arts; and mangas integrated a lot of martial arts. But there is more to say about the abstract, hieroglyphic nature of Wong's images.

Tesuka Osamu, the "father" of Japanese mangas, has said that manga pictures are in the first place hieroglyphs. They are abstract and "read" like a graphic character. Dissanayake insists on the hieroglyphic nature of Wong's pictures and refers to Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier's studies on cinematic signs. According to her, the hieroglyphic nature of cinematic signification "challenges realistic assumptions and mimetic impulses in order to highlight the polysemous nature of cinematic signs" (p. 71).

The sociologist Sharon Kinsella analyzes amateur mangas as-in some respects--extreme manifestations of manga aesthetics; she detects an almost total absence of narrative structure: "The symbolic appearance of characters and the emotion attached to the characters' situations [can] become more important than the traditional plot." It remains to note that this also corresponds with Paul Valery's definition of dreams: "In dreams there is [only] the rule of the linear and the superficial. There is no perspective [and] everything appears word for word."

Last but not least, mangas, as the prime examples of escapism from postindustrial society that they are, are products of East Asian kawaii culture. Being made for and featuring "passionless cultural connoisseurs," "crystal people" and introverted consumers born into relative affluence and lost in the realm of aesthetics, mangas are foremost examples of a Pan-Asian dandyist consumer culture. There is a marvelous Japanese example of fusion of "serious" literature with manga aesthetics which bears, in my opinion, parallels with Wong Kar-wai's films: the novels of Banana Yoshimoto who acknowledges mangas as a primary influence of her works. In her novels, just like in most mangas, the main protagonist is most often the shbjo (young girl). The shojo is an immature figure who lacks "libidinal agency of her own," is unproductive and, finally and in the context of capitalist society, "not real." In other words, the shojo is kawaii: she cannot express herself and is stuck between reality and fantasy. The vacuous sense of her life is compensated by a kind of cold, idealized romanticism that often ends up as a simulated life.

Also in Banana's fiction we read mainly about amours impossibles: near incestuous pairs of half-siblings, playful flirtations with stepfathers, narcissist self-love, and lesbian attractions whose nostalgic objects become dreamlike and unreal. And all this happens in overpopulated cities emptied of human feelings but richly filled with consumable commodities.

Conclusion
Wong's films, Banana's novels, and mangas, typically homegrown cultural productions of East Asia that they are, depict neo-humanist attempts to survive in a capitalist environment. They are based on a common East Asian escapist cultural experience in which culture appears less than ever as a real world containing objectified elements but in which culture has become a dream language able to produce itself spontaneously and in a strangely self-sufficient manner. This is why I said at the beginning of this chapter that Wong's work should not be seen as a selective amalgamation of "East" and "West" but as a phenomenon flowing out of the sphere of modern East Asian culture. The dream language of East Asia is "pure" to the extent that elements (from Eastern and Western cultures) have not merely been "used," combined, and fused...

In other words, here "culture" is not so much evoked as a geographical and historical reality but appears as something that bears imagined and fictionalized characteristics from scratch and by definition. Wong Kar-wai's films are examples of such contemporary East Asian aesthetics as his images are like riddles or, as Walter Benjamin has pointed out with regard to modernity in general, as "picture puzzles" that persistently elude semiotic fixation. This is also the reason why I am extremely cautious when it comes to evaluations of Wong's oeuvre in terms of cultural decadence or pessimism. Dissanayake - though he is not the only one- believes that "the world that WKW repeatedly recreates is one of decadence, exhaustion, decay and ruin. A focus on fragmentation, rather than on totality, is a way of highlighting the contours of this world". That this is not necessarily true becomes clear when we think of the cultural framework of kawaii into which the present chapter attempted to integrate Wong's films. The kawaii, as Larissa Hjorth has said, is "not about post-humanism but rather a clear demonstration of neohumanist types." In this sense, East Asian kawaii culture, just like Wong's films, should be understood as desperate attempts to create a dreamlike humanist space within the harsh reality of globalized capitalism."

http://www.scribd.com/doc/68076691/Films-and-Dreams-Bergman-Tarkovsky-Sakurov-Kubrick-and-Wong-Kar-Wai

Other Contents:

1. From Formalist ostranenie to Tarkovsky's 'Logic of Dreams'
2. Space and Dream: Heidegger's, Tarkovsky's and Casper David Friedrich's Landscapes
3. On the Blurring of Lines: Alexandr Sokurov
4. Ingmar Bergman and Dream after Freud
5. A Short Note on Nordic Culture and Dreams
6. From 'Ethno-Dream' to Hollywood: Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and the Problem of Deterritorialization
7. Wong Kar-Wai and the Culture of Kawaii
8. Aesthetics and Mysticism: Plotinus, Tarkovsky, and the Question of Grace
9. Image and Allegory: Tarkovsky and Benjamin
10. Ten Keywords Concerning Filmdream.

Hmm, faulty to say the least.
The Japanese have always liked their dolls (think Geisha)...
Same with some of the porcelain Europeans...
And they all gravitate towards 'cute' and faces that say "I'm surreal"...

To blame it on capitalism is silly.

Very nice.
In some respects it conforms to my perspective on feminization, taking on a distinctly Asian character.

I would also say that recent reports indicate that young males in Japan are opting out of the system, referring to immerse themselves in digital realities rather than play the harsh game of sexual competition on terms dictated by feminism and the overall decline of family structures.
This "loser" psychology can be considered a reaction to the shame of becoming aware of their own sexual limitations choosing artificial worlds rather than the cruelty and the risks of the real one.
The lesser males, the omegas, come to terms with their status and choose not to participate at all....giving rise to the social phenomenon of females who must now choose from amongst the few more dominating males or for playing the part themselves - a form of homosexuality.

We see here the growing cracks being produced by modernism.
Feminism being but a symptom.

Like all forms of art and entertainment, the two being combined, they provide an arena for venting the stresses rising to the surface.

I think it has more to do with women being expected to be helpless & and adorable little damsels and this is the way it's always been in civilized cultures where males are supposed to take care of their women.

Japan's 'Princess Peach' :0

Fact is, women just can't be perfect enough to fit their ideal...
There are plenty of Japanese women for the men but it's probably also that video game culture makes both sexes more anti-social, so ironically neither sex feels worthy of the other.

See the boys shy away from the girls who shy away...
Might as well stay in the realm of virtual reality where there's less danger.

It's in the news that there are Japanese guys who end up marrying their video game characters. I'm sure the only thing that makes them 'losers' is their addiction to the game, and the only reason they can't get girls is because they don't do anything else.

There was another story about an asian couple who had an abandoned baby left at home because they would go every day to take care of a virtual one in a cafe somewhere. The baby ended up dead from malnourishment... :/

This is an issue of technological addiction, and the social consequences thereof.

Satyr> In some respects it conforms to my perspective on feminization, taking on a distinctly Asian character.

The latest Peter-pan complex was interesting; I'm struck by your observations on the 'lack of commitment' today.

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Another interesting piece, exploring the type a more different way.


The Flâneur

"'Man as civilized being, as intellectual nomad, is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free intellectually as hunter and herdsman were free sensually.' Spengler, vol. 2 p. 125" (AP 806)


"Taking a walk is a haeccity . . . Haecceity, fog, glare. A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome". (1000 P 263)


"Flâneur" is a word understood intuitively by the French to mean "stroller, idler, walker." He has been portrayed in the past as a well-dressed man, strolling leisurely through the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century--a shopper with no intention to buy, an intellectual parasite of the arcade. Traditionally the traits that mark the flâneur are wealth, education, and idleness. He strolls to pass the time that his wealth affords him, treating the people who pass and the objects he sees as texts for his own pleasure. An anonymous face in the multitude, the flâneur is free to probe his surroundings for clues and hints that may go unnoticed by the others.

As a member of the crowd that populates the streets, the flâneur participates physically in the text that he observes while performing a transient and aloof autonomy with a "cool but curious eye" that studies the constantly changing spectacle that parades before him (Rignall 112). As an observer, the flâneur exists as both "active and intellectual" (Burton 1). As a literary device, one may understand him as a narrator who is fluent in the hieroglyphic vocabulary of visual culture. When he assumes the form of narrator, he plays both protagonist and audience--like a commentator who stands outside of the action, of whom only the reader is aware, "float[ing] freely in the present tense" (Mellencamp 60).

The flâneur has no specific relationship with any individual, yet he establishes a temporary, yet deeply empathetic and intimate relationship with all that he sees--an intimacy bordering on the conjugal--writing a bit of himself into the margins of the text in which he is immersed, a text devised by selective disjunction.

Walter Benjamin posits in his description of the flâneur that "Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd. He . . . enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes" (Baudelaire 55). In this way the flâneur parasite, dragging the crowd for intellectual food--or material for his latest novel (Ponikwer 139-140). In so doing, he wanders through a wonderland of his own construction, imposing himself upon a shop window here, a vagrant here, and an advertisement here. He flows like thought through his physical surroundings, walking in a meditative trance, (Lopate 88), gazing into the passing scene as others have gazed into campfires, yet "remain[ing] alert and vigilant" all the while (Missac 61) .

The flâneur is the link between routine perambulation, in which a person is only half-awake, making his way from point A to point B, and the moments of chiasmic epiphany that one reads of in Wordsworth or Joyce. Like Poe’s narrators, he is acutely aware, a potent intellectual force of keen observation--a detective without a lead. If he were cast a character in the "drama of the world," he would be its consciousness.


There is little scholarship surrounding the subject of the flâneur that does not in some way refer to Benjamin's writings on Baudelaire or The Arcades Project. This character first appeared in Benjamin's work in 1929 in "Die Wiederkeht des Flâneur," a work reviewing Hessel's Spazieren in Berlin, the title of which "suggests that the flâneur is properly a creature of the past". In his later work on nineteenth-century Paris, however, Benjamin re-examines the figure in what he deems its true dwelling place: Paris.

The flâneur figures prominently in his 1935 sketch for The Arcades Project, "Paris--Capital of the Nineteenth Century" and in the two studies of Baudelaire written in 1938 (Rignall 113). Much of Benjamin's research into the flâneur was inspired by the work of George Simmel, who notes that the relationships between members of a large city are more deeply influenced by the activity of the eye than of the ear. His interest in the surrealist movement of the early twentieth century also played a crucial part in his development of the flâneur as a literary concept. Combining "the casual eye of the stroller with the purposeful gaze of the detective" (Rignall 113), Benjamin constructs a literary creature capable of seeing the city as "landscape, lying either desolately or seductively open before the fictional characters, and . . . as a room enclosing them either protectively or oppressively" (Rignall 113). In this context, the city for Benjamin is both an interior and an exterior, "knowable and known, and . . . mysteriously alien and fantastic" (Rignall 113-114). Benjamin collected notes and reflections from mid 1927-1929 in preparation for an article-length essay to be titled "Paris Arcades: A Dialectical Enchantment." In response to the surrounding surrealist influences of the time, Benjamin's "ambition was to read the arcades as phantasmagorical images, 'the hollow mold' from which the image of the 'modern' was cast" (McCole 229); this would place the flâneur in its twentieth-century incarnation, as a product of surrealism; however, Benjamin disagreed with much of the surrealists' theory of images, which, in his opinion, "remain[ed] ensnared in pernicious romantic prejudices that left them prey to the mythic forces they had discovered" (McCole 229). Regardless of Benjamin's perception into the intellectual shortcomings of his surrealist contemporaries, Benjamin's study of Aragon and the architectural theories of his time influenced his work with the flâneur a great deal, allowing him to examine the resident mythologies of the modern city while preserving "fresh antitoxins against the vitalist strains of romanticism" (McCole 231). His favorite flâneur was Charles Baudelaire, who in his poem "A une passante," perhaps best articulates the relationship between the flâneur and the inhabitants of his city. (See section on "A une passante" by clicking HERE.)


Charles Baudelaire begins with a chapter on the flâneur. Benjamin commences his argument with a discussion of the rise of the physiologie as a literary genre. He refers to these "modest-looking, paperbound, pocket-sized volumes" as examples of "panorama literature" devised to orient the individual in the market-place in light of all the social changes brought on by the French Revolution (Baudelaire 35), while remaining "innocuous" enough and safely within the demands of the September Laws, which tightened censorship in 1836 (Baudelaire 36). These little books examined "types" that one might encounter while walking around Paris; from "the itinerant street vendor of the boulevards to the dandy in the foyer of the opera-house, there was not a figure of Paris life that was not sketched by a physiologue" (Baudelaire 35). They went by titles such as "Paris la nu it, Paris à table, Paris dans l'eau, Paris à cheval, Paris pittoresque, Paris marié" (Baudelaire 36). Benjamin notes that in "1841, there were seventy-six new physiologies. After that year the genre declined, and it disappeared altogether with the reign of the citizen-king Louis-Philippe" (Baudelaire 35-36). Benjamin dismisses these writings as "a basically petty-bourgeois genre" (Baudelaire 36) that was somewhat "socially dubious": "The long series of eccentric or simple, attractive or severe figures which the physiologies presented to the public in character sketches had one thing in common: they were harmless and of perfect bonhomie" (Baudelaire 37).

These booklets attempted to articulate the textual representation of flânerie, while at the same time giving people "a friendly picture of one another" (Baudelaire 38). The governing principle behind these works was the idea that a person could be sized-up in a glance: "If that sort of thing could be done, then, to be sure, life in the big city was not nearly so disquieting as it probably seemed to people" (Baudelaire 39). However, their superficiality and safe adherence to the black-and-white prevented them from fitting the role of the flâneur as Benjamin defines it.


According to Benjamin, the flâneur came to rise primarily because of an architectural change in the city of Paris. This change, which was rooted in budding capitalism, involved the creation of the arcades, which were passageways through neighborhoods which had been covered with a glass roof and braced by marble panels so as to create a sort of interior-exterior for vending purposes. These passages were "lined with the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, even a world in miniature" (Baudelaire 36-37). Within these arcades, the flâneur is capable of finding a remedy for the ever-threatening ennui. He is able to stroll at leisure; one might even go to the extreme of allowing a pet turtle to set his pace, observing the people, the building facades, the objects for sale--entertaining and enriching his mind with the secret language of the city (Baudelaire 36-37). The flâneur is completely at home in this cross between interior and exterior worlds because his own personal interior-exterior boundaries are also ambiguous:

To him the shiny, enameled signs of businesses are at least as good a wallornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeoisin his salon. The walls are the desk againstwhich he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces ofcafés are the balconies from which he looksdown on his household after his work isdone. (Baudelaire 37)

According to Benjamin, the flâneur disappeared as the commercial world slowly deserted the interior-exteriors of arcades for the carpeted, artificially lit department stores that were to replace them: "If in the beginning the street had become an intérieur for him, now this intérieur turned into a street, and he roamed though the labyrinth of merchandise as he had once roamed though the labyrinth of the city" (Baudelaire 54).


The physical placement of the traditional flâneur in a setting that is an interior-exterior or an exterior-interior is essential to its significance in literary analysis. The flâneur's dual interior-exterior nature, his ability to be both active and intellectual, to be reading the past of the city while existing entirely in the present, and his manner of coloring the landscape with a bit of his own psyche places the flâneur at the center point of a whirlwind of contradictions. The manner in which the flâneur resolves the opposing stimuli that pelt him from every which way, while maintaining an aloof, yet empathic perspective of his surroundings--always alone in the crowd--makes him a powerful literary device that is capable of outdoing the omniscient narrator in objectivity and the first-person narrator in intimacy. The flâneur is like a ghost who is physically manifest in the material world, but not opaquely. His translucent personality, like a phantom, haunts his own narrative, leaving a tinge of himself, of his latent, repressed personality, on every detail of his interior-exterior universe, as though he were leaping into and out of his surroundings.


The flâneur may be a ghost in more ways than one: for Benjamin he may be a cold, dead thing from an epoch of old. However, the death of Benjamin's flâneur in the sterile capitalist wastelands of department stores does not necessarily mean the death of the flâneur for everyone else. Because Benjamin's flâneur is weighted with such political and socioeconomic importance, being as he is an icon of bourgeois "conspicuous leisure," the critic does not apply the concept to later literary figures who may have merited the same title, nor does he examine in much detail its manifestation in American literature outside of Edgar A. Poe."

http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/flaneur.html

Poison > I think it has more to do with women being expected to be helpless & and adorable little damsels and this is the way it's always been in civilized cultures where males are supposed to take care of their women.

Is that good or bad for you?

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> In some respects it conforms to my perspective on feminization, taking on a distinctly Asian character.

The latest Peter-pan complex was interesting; I'm struck by your observations on the 'lack of commitment' today.

But commitment is a result of an investment.
When someone has no guaranteed interest he does not commit...furthermore in reproductive practices the male can not commit to one female and her brood. This goes agaisnt his nature as seeder (sperno, spyro ).
Therefore marriage or monogamy did not only limit female sexual choice, her power, but it also curbed male sexual practices.
At least it attempted to.
When the male, in this case, has no investment i the system and the odds of his acquiring an investment are slim, he drops out or he becomes a dangerous free-radical living on the periphery of the dominant male's dominion.
But, as was noted by me elsewhere, frontiers are absent. There is no outside an alpha-male's dominion on this fine earth.
To deal with the problem the system, the dominant male, provides safety valves....it allows the effete males to vent....porn, digital realities, drugs, or it funnels their un-quenched libidinal energies towards productive, for it, goals: wealth, productivity, consuming etc.

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Lyssa wrote:

"Flâneur" is a word understood intuitively by the French to mean "stroller, idler, walker." He has been portrayed in the past as a well-dressed man, strolling leisurely through the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century--a shopper with no intention to buy, an intellectual parasite of the arcade. Traditionally the traits that mark the flâneur are wealth, education, and idleness. He strolls to pass the time that his wealth affords him, treating the people who pass and the objects he sees as texts for his own pleasure. An anonymous face in the multitude, the flâneur is free to probe his surroundings for clues and hints that may go unnoticed by the others.

A kind of....Hannibal Lecter, no?
What did I say about parasites? It is the only alternative to that of total isolation or suicide. To feed off the herd, as the movie caricature did.
To live amongst them, as a wolf in sheepskins, but to be outside their premises.
Are we not a little community of parasites here? If parasite is an unflattering term for you then try another.

Lyssa wrote:

As a member of the crowd that populates the streets, the flâneur participates physically in the text that he observes while performing a transient and aloof autonomy with a "cool but curious eye" that studies the constantly changing spectacle that parades before him (Rignall 112). As an observer, the flâneur exists as both "active and intellectual" (Burton 1). As a literary device, one may understand him as a narrator who is fluent in the hieroglyphic vocabulary of visual culture. When he assumes the form of narrator, he plays both protagonist and audience--like a commentator who stands outside of the action, of whom only the reader is aware, "float[ing] freely in the present tense" (Mellencamp 60).

The flâneur has no specific relationship with any individual, yet he establishes a temporary, yet deeply empathetic and intimate relationship with all that he sees--an intimacy bordering on the conjugal--writing a bit of himself into the margins of the text in which he is immersed, a text devised by selective disjunction.

Could he be the beginning of a new species?
When the lack of frontiers forces all to live within shrinking spaces would not the one who might have fled a long time ago, splitting off genetically and mimetically, not find an alternative methods of surviving; would he not adapt?
Now evolution finds a way to separate to produce new forms though the circumstances are pressuring towards uniformity...though it is assimilating, consuming, individuality into its singular premise, the absolute Self.

Lyssa wrote:

Walter Benjamin posits in his description of the flâneur that "Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd. He . . . enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes" (Baudelaire 55). In this way the flâneur parasite, dragging the crowd for intellectual food--or material for his latest novel (Ponikwer 139-140). In so doing, he wanders through a wonderland of his own construction, imposing himself upon a shop window here, a vagrant here, and an advertisement here. He flows like thought through his physical surroundings, walking in a meditative trance, (Lopate 88), gazing into the passing scene as others have gazed into campfires, yet "remain[ing] alert and vigilant" all the while (Missac 61) .

is this not a variation of Nietzsche's Wanderer?
Only for him there still existed an "outside" the walls world, if he did not simply mean an internal frontier where the wall is no more than a metaphor for the skin, the skull and bones structure of the biological form, keeping "out" the unwanted. Here the metaphor is a reversal...those "in" the city or behind the city walls are really the trapped and The Wanderer who lives within his own boundaries, as much as he can, is really "outside" their values....unhindered by their chains and structures.

To a prisoner the one outside the fence might be misconstrued as being "inside"....did we not talk about inversions and the Judeo-Christian method?
Is this the best inversion? To have a slave convinced that he is free....would you require a rope or a wall when these are in his mind?

Lyssa wrote:

The flâneur is the link between routine perambulation, in which a person is only half-awake, making his way from point A to point B, and the moments of chiasmic epiphany that one reads of in Wordsworth or Joyce. Like Poe’s narrators, he is acutely aware, a potent intellectual force of keen observation--a detective without a lead. If he were cast a character in the "drama of the world," he would be its consciousness.

Is not indifference a symptom of power: is not care a symptom of weakness?
When we are made to care are we not enslaved, as in love being the most wonderful form of it for most?
When compassion is taught or shamed into the individual is this mind not being trained to be a slave to othrness?

But let me be clear....I have already said that strength is a measurement of weakness.
We are talking about quality of weakness; degree of it. When I am told to care to love everyone am I not being made a whore; am I not being told that I should be enslaved to all...is this not assimilation?
If my care, my love, is more discriminating is it not less embarrassing?

Dandyism

Lyssa wrote:

Poison > I think it has more to do with women being expected to be helpless & and adorable little damsels and this is the way it's always been in civilized cultures where males are supposed to take care of their women.

Is that good or bad for you?

There wasn't much of an uproar until the days of telephone operators. I mean before a girl could be a nurse but once they got their hands on those switches it was a whole different atmosphere- they were making the big bucks. Again, I blame technology. It's what has lead us into industrial globalization with factory labor being the biggest backbone to the multitudes of consumer items that people, namely the women who did the shopping back in those days, had no real use for.

Satyr wrote:

Could he be the beginning of a new species?
When the lack of frontiers forces all to live within shrinking spaces would not the one who might have fled a long time ago, splitting off genetically and mimetically, not find an alternative methods of surviving; would he not adapt?
Now evolution finds a way to separate to produce new forms though the circumstances are pressuring towards uniformity...though it is assimilating, consuming, individuality into its singular premise, the absolute Self.

No, no new species. This is not the first time in history there's been a large civilized populace. Asia is no stranger...

The Chinese Dynasty has been going on for ages. This people is a prime example of what happens after 'evolution'.

Quote :

is this not a variation of Nietzsche's Wanderer?
Only for him there still existed an "outside" the walls world, if he did not simply mean an internal frontier where the wall is no more than a metaphor for the skin, the skull and bones structure of the biological form, keeping "out" the unwanted. Here the metaphor is a reversal...those "in" the city or behind the city walls are really the trapped and The Wanderer who lives within his own boundaries, as much as he can, is really "outside" their values....unhindered by their chains and structures

To a prisoner the one outside the fence might be misconstrued as being "inside"....did we not talk about inversions and the Judeo-Christian method?
Is this the best inversion? To have a slave convinced that he is free....would you require a rope or a wall when these are in his mind?

Not entirely true.

While there may be limitations set within civilized society, like with anything, it also presents us with added possibilities. When one must struggle day-to-day outside these walls there is another kind of bondage, that of the most basic needs. When a society is kept together and sets up these arcades and shopping places, and markets, and other places of commerce there is a communal effort to make things easier so that they may partake in the 'finer' things like civilized art and structures that give us more to do than just hunt, dance around a fire, and shake our booties.

Quote :

Is not indifference a symptom of power: is not care a symptom of weakness?
When we are made to care are we not enslaved, as in love being the most wonderful form of it for most?
When compassion is taught or shamed into the individual is this mind not being trained to be a slave to othrness?

But let me be clear....I have already said that strength is a measurement of weakness.
We are talking about quality of weakness; degree of it. When I am told to care to love everyone am I not being made a whore; am I not being told that I should be enslaved to all...is this not assimilation?
If my care, my love, is more discriminating is it not less embarrassing?

Depends on what you care about. Most people don't care about the important things going on in their life like politics and the banking systems. Instead they just whine and complain once their food and entertainment is put at risk.

They're mad that people are richer than them, yet they continue to work slave wages. That's not a populace that cares or is taught to care.

Caring, and loving is a matter of exclusion. When people claim to love everyone, what they are really saying is that they love no one..

Poison IV wrote:

No, no new species. This is not the first time in history there's been a large civilized populace. Asia is no stranger...

The Chinese Dynasty has been going on for ages. This people is a prime example of what happens after 'evolution'.

Indeed...and what happened was controlled emasculation through religion, primarily.

Poison IV wrote:

Not entirely true.

While there may be limitations set within civilized society, like with anything, it also presents us with added possibilities. When one must struggle day-to-day outside these walls there is another kind of bondage, that of the most basic needs. When a society is kept together and sets up these arcades and shopping places, and markets, and other places of commerce there is a communal effort to make things easier so that they may partake in the 'finer' things like civilized art and structures that give us more to do than just hunt, dance around a fire, and shake our booties.

Freedom from need, and fear, results in increased leisure and comfort: sheltering.
How each individual reacts to this is based on his/her genetics and the circumstances he was brought-up in.

Schopenhauer said that life was shared between stress and ennui.
One being inversely proportional to the other.
For the average dolt, being free from the struggles for survival means he can dedicate more time to fucking and to shallow pursuits.
Do you expect him to pick up a book or seek out wisdom or to be more creative?

My dear, there is a split occurring along memetic lines, basically because genes are now considered something to be overcome.
The battle then is over what direction and how and to what degree they shall be overcome.

Now, for me, and I think this is rooted in Hellenism, genes should not be overcome but controlled.

Poison IV wrote:

Depends on what you care about. Most people don't care about the important things going on in their life like politics and the banking systems. Instead they just whine and complain once their food and entertainment is put at risk.

Then for them this safety and boredom becomes decadence, unrefined hedonism, a form of escapism.
See, Christianity was supposed to deal with the excess of energies at play once large populations are given free-time and the means to satisfy their basic needs easily. It also was meant to deal with the decrease of respect this decrease of fear results in.

Poison IV wrote:

Caring, and loving is a matter of exclusion. When people claim to love everyone, what they are really saying is that they love no one..

Exactly sweets. they love no one because they do not love themselves.
What it is a reflective love.

Love the other so as to reflect this love back to yourself: self-love via otherness.
It is also a means of maintaining one's self. I will pretend to love all so that all can do the same towards me.
The pretense to mask the reality.

Did I not once say, a long time ago, that civilization is based on lies?

This is why I became so combative and vulgar and unforgiving. I had to be the extreme negation to uncover the bullshit....simply by raising the emotional levels to the point where the masks fell.
Did you not see them fall, dear?

Well, that's why it's cool to be like inbred royalty that only breeds within its kind and reads books and things while everyone else believes in equality and humanity and tv etc

Civilization still exists, in effect, but only in designated areas...they keep the apes out.

Poison IV wrote:

Well, that's why it's cool to be like inbred royalty that only breeds within its kind and reads books and things while everyone else believes in equality and humanity and tv etc

Thanks for your approval....I assure you it was unnecessary and rude of you to think that it was.

But since we're sharing, allow me to offer my own approval for shagging the gorillas and sampling the vermin.
They too need love, and we must be christian about it.
Until now you've proven what value you place on your own affections, so please do not let me cause you to re-evaluate.

The comment on "in-bred" is applicable when it comes to blood lines and genetics, my sweet, but we are discussing mimetic lines and about a different kind of association.

Your confusion is understandable, given the aforementioned.
Maybe, along the way, some other "crazy" injured eagle with his tongue flapping on the pavement can stir your heart and make you moist....in the eyes.

Allow me one more indiscretion by pointing you towards the dungeon.
It is always where gold is buried: underground.

Satyr,


p.s. My sweet, one more thing.
An understanding as to why civilization is not the same as culture or as Spengler says how Rome is civilization and Hellas (Greece for you barbarian Germanic half-breeds) is Culture.
Given the above then we can presume, if we are to dare being so bold as to think for ourselves, that the U.S. or Washington D.C. is civilization - the worse kind - and Jerusalem is culture.

Think of it in dualistic terms as body (matter, flesh) and spirit (mind, soul, heart).
Both part of the same organism but different contexts.
One can be civilized and be totally uncultured, unsophisticated, brutish and bland.
Take those you misconstrue as males because their all brawny and tall and have deep voices and speak with some "authority" yet remain obtuse, deferring and dimwitted, all muscled stupidity...like Negroes.

Ta, Ta,

Greece in its bankrupt glory...




Germany....




And yes, British royalty counts...

The House of Windsor is the royal house of the Commonwealth realms. It was founded by King George V by royal proclamation on the 17 July 1917, when he changed the name of his family from the German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (a branch of the House of Wettin) to the English Windsor, due to the anti-German sentiment in the United Kingdom during World War I. Currently, the most prominent member of the House of Windsor is Queen Elizabeth II, the reigning monarch of the Commonwealth realms.

And Queen Elizabeth gets her 2nd laugh...

Satyr> A kind of....Hannibal Lecter, no?
What did I say about parasites? It is the only alternative to that of total isolation or suicide. To feed off the herd, as the movie caricature did.

Indeed;
In opposition to this dwarfing and adaptation of man to a specialized utility, a reverse movement is needed... He needs the opposition of the masses, of the "leveled", a feeling of distance from them! he stands on them, he lives off them. This higher form of aristocracy is that of the future..." [N., WTP, 866]

Satyr> To live amongst them, as a wolf in sheepskins, but to be outside their premises.

Like Zarathustra.

Satyr> Are we not a little community of parasites here? If parasite is an unflattering term for you then try another.

'Outsider'?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsider_(Colin_Wilson)

"Because we were the enemies of every material
domination and of every spiritual levelling.
Because we saw, beyond every slavery and every dogma,
the Life dancing free and naked."
- Renzo Novatore
http://www.novatore.it/EngIndex.html

Satyr>  Could he be the beginning of a new species?

A noble species.

Satyr> Now evolution finds a way to separate to produce new forms though the circumstances are pressuring towards uniformity...though it is assimilating, consuming, individuality into its singular premise, the absolute Self.

The same reasons [coercion to assimilate] that make the weak weaker would make the strong[slowest to adopt to the mob] stronger. So, yes.

Lyssa wrote:

Satyr> A kind of....Hannibal Lecter, no?
What did I say about parasites? It is the only alternative to that of total isolation or suicide. To feed off the herd, as the movie caricature did.

Indeed;
In opposition to this dwarfing and adaptation of man to a specialized utility, a reverse movement is needed... He needs the opposition of the masses, of the "leveled", a feeling of distance from them! he stands on them, he lives off them. This higher form of aristocracy is that of the future..." [N., WTP, 866]

And would not this also be a masculine practice, because it is the masculine which assimilates?
The State assimilates because it is a masculine entity, setting up a conflict between organic masculinity and abstracted masculinity.
Could this be part of a controlled, directed, husbandry, just as when a man exploits a beast by manipulating its natural tendencies?
Could, behind this abstraction of a State, not lie another organic masculinity which uses reversals, playing upon natural stresses and disapproval of natural mechanisms to exact its control?

Would an organic male, let's call him that...not be at a disadvantage given the resources at the disposal of the abstracted masculinity?
Would he not have to imitate feminine qualities and use feminine methods to preserve himself within the imposed femininity?

Lyssa wrote:

Like Zarathustra.

The only difference being that Zarathustra could go to the ountain and lvie alone in nature whereas today he would not find an inch of space not monitored and controlled.
Today his cave would be amongst those he wishes to isolate himself from.

Would not a man of Culture not be pressured to participate in Civilization?

I think you people are making too much out of this. Thorsten Bornstein throws a lot of words and complicates things with metaphysical baloney. When in fact it looks like a simple subculture, which isn't special at all, it's just another culture, filled with it's own idiosyncratic rules and cliches. So they wear Pikachu t-shirts and they're dandys and whatnot. Is this anything special? Where there not dandys in Europe? Dandys have existed since the ancient times, I am sure there were a lot of Roman Senators who looked like fagots. And wearing Pikachu T-shirts and not Jesus T-shirts.. so fascinating.. not.

And if I were to give another "explanation" it would be that Japanese culture is very hard on youths and they have almost no time to be kids, but are always studying studying studying. So I guess mature people seem to have their fascination and their own lack of a proper fun childhood and maybe they play preted or Role Play kids.

Satyr> And would not this also be a masculine practice, because it is the masculine which assimilates?

There are benign parasites and malign parasites. I would ask is this parasitic assimilation life-enriching to the best or is this assimilation life-diminishing to the best? In this case, the parasitic assimilation is the latter kind and therefore, the act of a weak masculine entity.

Satyr> Could this be part of a controlled, directed, husbandry, just as when a man exploits a beast by manipulating its natural tendencies?

Breeding a distinct species comes at the cost of Taming a whole other set.


Satyr> Would an organic male, let's call him that...not be at a disadvantage given the resources at the disposal of the abstracted masculinity?
Would he not have to imitate feminine qualities and use feminine methods to preserve himself within the imposed femininity?

"What is noble? That one always has to play a part. That one seeks situations in which one has constant need of poses. That one leaves happiness to the great majority. Happiness... as comfort. ...That one knows how to make enemies everywhere, if the worst comes to the worst even of oneself. That one constantly contradicts the great majority not through words but through deeds." [WTP, 944]
An organic male would have to be a good actor.

N. thought that if the weak didn't come to power for long periods, the strong would have decimated each other and totally wiped themselves out. He thought the weak coming to power was a way of Nature conserving her best elements, protecting them from discharging themselves away too quickly. The organic male would be a wise one to see this advantage, when faced with the disadvantage of living in a weak state. The organic man would have an active masculinity of postponing reactions, restraining himself from acting too quickly, he'd have calm self-control, he'd be self-conserving, he'd have the endurance for protracted enmities. Now, is this instinct for containing a tense vengeance over long periods, brewing it, keeping it simmering at the right temp. without the least sign of it in outward appearance feminine or masculine in control of the feminine? The latter. "Man is Will and Woman is Willingness." The conserving tendency, the patient waiting, gestating, to give birth to a new form after 9-10 months is feminine. The organic male would imitate or employ this and such feminine methods. There's also that saying, the one who springs forward will be the one who takes two steps backwards.

Satyr> The only difference being that Zarathustra could go to the ountain and lvie alone in nature whereas today he would not find an inch of space not monitored and controlled.
Today his cave would be amongst those he wishes to isolate himself from.
Would not a man of Culture not be pressured to participate in Civilization?

The more many unexplored areas are tapped by the State, the more other areas under its control are likely to become "soft spots"; you cannot have an abs. 360 deg. surveillance without experiencing some loss somewhere. There will always be secret caves for Zarathustra - if not the unexplored ones, then the camouflaged ones he would create to gestate within. The strong have always created their own environments.
http://unito.academia.edu/MassimoLeone/Papers/134181/2010_Resemblance_and_Camouflage_in_Graeco-Roman_Antiquity


Jester> I think you people are making too much out of this. Thorsten Bornstein throws a lot of words and complicates things with metaphysical baloney. When in fact it looks like a simple subculture, which isn't special at all, it's just another culture, filled with it's own idiosyncratic rules and cliches. So they wear Pikachu t-shirts and they're dandys and whatnot. Is this anything special? Where there not dandys in Europe? Dandys have existed since the ancient times, I am sure there were a lot of Roman Senators who looked like fagots. And wearing Pikachu T-shirts and not Jesus T-shirts.. so fascinating.. not.

Let me try to put this another way. When you have a society that starts to believe everyone can "manage" any role, any "cute" pose, then nature ceases here and reality becomes hyper-real. Capitalist democracy encourages a false freedom of "you are whatever you believe you can "manage" to be"... as a result, a society becomes composed of individuals who "experiment roles" and whatever is pleasing, than becoming who they are...  this is what Masubuchi [I'm told] points out in his book Kawaii Syndrome to show the aesthetic culture of traditional Japan which based on honour codes now becomes an aesthetic of simply "getting away" with whatever you can, whatever you can "manage" to be... Hence a society and a whole nation falls into a crisis because Real Aims are lacking, and so you have violence/rebellion/anarchy/childishness becoming a Mind-less self-consumptive Ends-in-itself... if you still don't get what I am saying, watch the fantastic Japanese film "Bright Future".
Phenomenal Nihilism captured with an ominous tone, a haunting bleakness that tears its way slowly, acclimatizing into the harshness of reality. Director Kiyoshi is a genius to contemplate a spider's web-like visionary setting such as this in the forefront of alienation, aimlessness, depressive aggression and a general falling apart of the consumer-ecomony. There's so much interpretational symbolism that you can only intuit and remains inexpressible. One of the most magnificent parts of the movie is the capturing of the feeling of being failed by someone you look up to for direction - there is a silent but simmering depth to the Rage that this film carries, which won for it its critical acclaim.

"In 2000, a Japanese contemporary artist, Takashi Murakami, published a manifesto, ‘Superflat’. According to Murakami, contemporary Japanese culture and life is in two significant ways ‘super-flat’ i.e., postmodern. First, because Japanese visual aesthetics have taken their traditional two dimensional aesthetics into the digital realm. Second, Japanese societal artifacts are profoundly lacking in depth in terms of their cultural value. Driven by the fast-moving capitalist production system and influenced by American modernization, Japanese traditional values have metamorphosed from the belief in social production to the illusion that images and culture are expressions of individuality even when they are reproducing or consuming mass culture. Murakami sees this process as central to the fusion of the high and low arts, and hence, a ‘super-flat’ culture where everything has merged into one flat surface.
Murakami's analogy of Japan's ‘super-flatness’ echoes the discussions surrounding postmodernism and hyper-realism. Frederick Jameson (1984) has commented on the commodification of history as a common practice that both sustains and is a consequence of consumerism. On this point, Jyotsna Kapur (2005) has summarized that the insistence of consumer culture on “fun” reduces fun to living in the moment as if it has no relation whatsoever to history. Seriousness is regarded as the enemy of fast consumption, the central attribute of contemporary life, as noted by Jean Baudrillard (1976) and Slavoj Zizek (2001). As Baudrillard says, “At the conclusion of this process of reproduction, the real becomes not only that which can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced.” (p.146). Zizek describes the condition of hyper-realism in his essay, Welcome to the desert of the real (2001). He mentions the phenomenon of cutting or causing injury to the self as a way to see and experience bleeding: in other words, to feel alive. His point is that our perception of reality has been so diminished or compromised because it is so highly constituted and mediated by fantasies or images which have become our reality. In highly capitalistic societies, history/commodities, high arts/low arts, reality/fantasy are merged into one and creating the super-flat culture."
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/46811213/Animating-the-chaos-Contemporary-Japanese-anime-cinema-and-postmodernity

Jester> And if I were to give another "explanation" it would be that Japanese culture is very hard on youths and they have almost no time to be kids, but are always studying studying studying. So I guess mature people seem to have their fascination and their own lack of a proper fun childhood and maybe they play preted or Role Play kids.

No, the strong Japanese "ganbatte" - "do your best come what may" culture has essentially a Shintoist-Zen root sensibility - "demand but the best from yourself" is a national motto, right from primary school to MNCs. They, including the youths, actually take pride in this authentic national identity. The typical Japanese day begins with wishing each other "ganbatte - do your best today" instead of "Good morning"! The kawaii culture [and the "pink films" and even the commodification of "mature" Zen culture and zen t-shirts, etc.] is a derailed off-shoot of this motto, simply to keep pace and "do their best" with the American capitalist industry, to be one step ahead of them, esp. after their occupation by the Americans following WW2.

That link is the kind of thing I feed on.
I want more of those.

"A well-documented encounter with maturity as strategic and semiotic praxis is provided by a constellation of Japanese phenomena including kawaî shôkôgun (‘syndromal’ cuteness as commodity esthetic), shôjo (adolescent female identity/subjectivity, ‘[v]ariously denigrated as narcissistic and nostalgic infantilism and exalted as a splendid escape from the rigidity of adulthood for all Japanese;’ Sherif, 1999, p. 282), Rorita (or Lolita: teenage female age-drag inspired by European literature and historical fashion), and rorikon (or Lolita complex: reportedly widespread salariiman interest in uniformed schoolgirls).

This cluster of phenomena provides a stage to the politics and counterpolitics of maturity as a national, sexed and gendered imperative. The overarching esthetic of kawaisa or cuteness, semiotically based on a cartoonesque magnification of paedomorphic features, opens up to a gamut of stylistic interventions, from costuming or cosplay to ‘cute’ speech and handwriting (hentai shôjo moji, burikko, kawaî kaomoji), collecting and grooming of cutesy paraphernalia, customization, adornment and fandom. Imposing as ‘fundamental esthetic’, kawaî has been interpreted as a Japanese ‘collectivization’ (Aoyagi, 2000, p. 313) of maturational struggles, but equally as a means of ‘softening’ hierarchical structures, and as ‘a method that young women employ to put off the inevitable adjustment to their roles as wives, mothers and family caretakers’ (Kinsella, 1995, pp. 242–243); or again elsewhere, as a commercial structure of feminine, maternal consumer empathy, a structure that ‘blurs identification and commodity desire’ (Merish 1996 quoted by Yano, 2004, p. 56). Kawaî entails ‘a performance and a social category, rather than an aesthetic concept’ (Katsuno and Yano, 2007, p. 287), ‘a deliberately oppositional image, which juxtaposes the idea of a complete identity (a Western sense of identity) with an incomplete or hollow identity, one in which hollowness or emptiness is a natural state, never to be filled’ (Hasegawa, 2002, p. 140). The consumption of cute, thus importantly implies an undoing of gender as periodized predicament (for example, Madge, 1997, pp. 162–163), as well as an iconographic counterpoint to substantivist models of maturity. The Japanese Lolita seems to align with manga characters such as bishōnen ‘pretty boy’, whose female fandom would variably allow female escapism or lesbian refuge through the invocation of a utopian fantasy space where gender is rescued from maturational consolidation (for example, McLelland, 2000; Welker, 2006). As phantasmagoric creations, they deliver the frisson of the oscillation between identifications and complementations, whether phallic, maternal, puerile, sororal or post-human.

The countercultural emergence and meaning of Rorita (for example, Gagné, 2008, pp. 135–136), kawaî and rorikon in Japan remains essentially debated. Kinsella concludes that even when reducing Rorita to patriarchal imagery, ‘a convincing theory of the phenomenon in its entirety has not been forthcoming’ (2006, p. 66). Current theorizing considers kawaî or its appeal as a regressive corollary either of enduring post-war cultural malaise, second wave feminism, Oedipus complex (mazākon or ‘mother complex’), adolescent withdrawal, youth fad, salariiman decompensation or post-industrial escapism. As such it would be a symptom resembling hikikomori (acute withdrawal) and karojisatsu (suicide by overwork). Where some Japanese psychologists suggest that Japan's economic demands on student or employer render kawaî adaptive, anthropologists propose the idea of ‘resistance consumption’. Sharon Kinsella cautions that analysis should clearly differentiate between countercultural movements, massive commoditization and undergirding ‘cults’ of childhood. But such arbitrations and differentiations seem increasingly difficult to maintain, as kawaî rapidly dispersed across age strata and globalized."



Kawaî: Stylization after development
Anthropologist Brain McVeigh (1996, 2000a, 2000b) proposes a cultural semiotics of Japanese cuteness, focusing on the local exegetical, positional and operational parameters that caused cuteness as ‘key symbol’ to attain communicative, sensory, ideological and commercial ubiquity, and through which such semiotic slots as infant/woman/animal/avatar become implicated in identity practices from accessorizing and costuming to caring for mechanic pets. Collective buying, grooming and disdaining of kawaî surcharges a pervasive cultural erotics of submission and domination. It is therefore ‘a complex, paradoxical commentary on sociopolitical relations’, especially gender.
McVeigh's, as well as Halberstam's (2005, p. 159), reference to Dick Hebdige's (1979) work, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, adduces the idea of stylization, in lieu of overt narrativization, as cultural ideology. This resonates with the countercultural origins of kawaî as well as comparable subcultural appropriations of maturational designations. For instance, Sarah Trimble (2005) documented the linguistic appropriation of boy by New York lesbian bois as not based on age but on ‘a playful accessorizing that insists upon disrupting the teleological continuity between “boy” and “man” ’.

Cuteness is sentimentalized through a material culture in which semiotic conventions are, writes McVeigh, ‘unthinkingly and incessantly used’, resulting in a ‘bedrock of belief’ on the basis of which these conventions attain a prediscursive, affective immediacy as well as a poetic urgency. Developmental discourses tried to respond to a culture of discrete manipulations of signs, which may have started out ironic and subversive (as ‘complex, paradoxical commentary’) but become increasingly disputable and contingent when taken up as a borderless fashion. Theory is provoked by semiotic trends and ambitiously establishes their meaning at the national or gender level, but ultimately remains conflicted over the explosive indiscretion of semiotic events. As cute to avant-garde sentiments (Ngai, 2005), immaturity/childishness/puerility/adolescence to the average consumer will appear a radically unsettled matter of violent objectification, poetic address and esthetic agency.

Formal psychological theorizing, in other words, becomes increasingly uneventful and marginal.1 Kawaî expounds a fundamental part of Baudrillard's post-Marxist diagnostics: the late modern eclipse of the commodity by its sign value; the immoderate mass-production and mass-consumption of the sign; the resulting implosion of meaning and obsolesce of critical discourse and of alienation critique; and the ultimate reversal of this catastrophic scenario in the ‘seduction’ (Baudrillard, 1979) or leading astray of capitalism's productive order. A key observation is that kawaî does not deconstruct the order of development, but seduces it – solicits its knee-jerks, swamps it, mocks it and ensnares its logic. I develop these readings below.

Development against time
Kawaî, as argued, powerfully de-stratifies formerly stratified domains, with the result of disinvesting cuteness from any definite developmental implications. In kawaî, gender and maturity are rendered ‘sociodramatic, semiodramatic, melodramatic’ (Baudrillard, 1993a, p. 125), a fate readily comparable to that of the American consumer idioms of cute and cool as discussed by cultural historian Gary Cross (2004, 2008). Formerly successive domains of cute, cool and camp are collapsed; resulting in an evermore ambiguous coincidence of levels of irony in which none such level can decisively monopolize the semblance of authenticity. By indiscriminately saturating society with caricatural figurations of immaturity, kawaî perhaps more radically disrupts the regime of development than do occasional deconstructions or inversions of linear development. Thus, kawaî exhibits the potential to radicalize familiar, post-structural defences of heterogeneity and plurality, including apologies for ‘temporality of others’ (Felski, 2000, p. 3), contrary temporalities (Hesford and Diedrich, 2008), ‘alternative temporal structures’ (Osborne, 1995, p. 200), ‘queer temporalities’ (GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, issue 13[2/3], 2007), and for ‘heterogeneous temporalities’ informing ‘memory culture’ and ‘nostalgia culture’ (Radstone, 2007, p. 2).
The rehabilitation of subordinate temporalities has also been attempted in the form of semiotic interventions in avant-garde art and counterculture. For instance, while the work of modern primitivists deploys ‘the primitive’ through absolute juxtapositions with progress, betraying an intentional basis that is ‘at best ethnocentric and at worst racist’, against a background of a blatantly racist definition of civilization the cross-over esthetics thus eventuated can nonetheless be considered ‘revolutionary in undermining this essentialist presupposition’ (Lemke, 1998, p. 148). The domain of culture studies offers a range of further examples. Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) intervenes in growing up by affirming growing sideways as ‘a mode of irregular growth involving odd lingerings, wayward paths, and fertile delays’. Biography-oriented works (for example, Turley, 2003; Carr, 2006; Posnock, 2006; Mavor, 2007) conceptualize puerility or youthfulness as figurative interventions rather than as distinctive of life stages. According to Turley, for instance, Keats deployed ‘juvenility as a system of interruptions, challenging the mature force of established power over a range of aesthetic and political terrain’ (p. 1). Mavor sets out to salvage nostalgia as ‘an approach that is useful and not simply backward […] a formidable critical tool’ (pp. 33–34). Furlani reads Guy Davenport's utopian fictions as conceptualizing youth sexuality as ‘an idyll the adult must endeavor to recover; as a means of interrogating ideologies’ (2007, p. 24).

Arguably, kawaî announces a more radical intervention than most of these counter-tendentious deployments of the immature, namely in the compromise of an order that is importantly left intact under direct, oppositional challenges of developmental regimes. Although kawaî may have started out as a rebellious form of insubordination (resembling, for instance, the semiotic inversions of punk), its mass commoditization arguably attains a new level of violence against the gender/maturity order: it floods the moderated scene of precise figuration by means of promiscuous, multi-purpose perusal.2

If we reconsider Judith Halberstam's seminal and archival focus on ‘queer time’ (2005, p. 6) – dissident models of social temporality developed in gender-radical subcultural communities in defiance of bourgeois chronologies – the question arises which, whose, archives (‘not simply a repository [… but] a theory of cultural relevance, a reconstruction of collective memory, and a complex record of queer activity;’ pp. 169–170) most acutely cater to subjectivity-centred theories of maturity. ‘Queer temporalities’, in the above reading, may well conscribe temporal dissidence to the limited service of subcultural gender mobility. Can subversion not be accomplished in mass culture, in the very massification of cultural trends? There is an equal need, in any case, to detemporize maturity irrespective of its beneficiaries: not to buy or win (alternative, queer, entitled) time but to disengage from such proprietary logic.

Development after alienation
As reviewed, a number of psychiatric and psychoanalytic formulations of kawaî has been proposed in Japanese and English commentaries. These commentaries seem to align with currents in Anglo-American social studies, including Neo-Marxist, feminist and conservative readings of society, that converge on a twin diagnosis of adultification of children and infantilization of the adult masses, and on attempts to recuperate both adulthood and childhood. It is thus that one finds (im)maturity projected at the civilizational or national level (for instance, Johan Huizinga's puerilism), and as such often confined to age strata (Erikson's adolescent moratorium; Bernfeld and Blos's prolonged adolescence; post-adolescence).
Of interest here, one sees this form of diagnostics more and more as informing consumer and gender pathologies (David Elkind's hurried child; Kay Hymowitz’s tweens, Christopher Noxon's rejuveniles, Benjamin Barber's kidults, Michael Kimmel's Guyland, Robert Bly's sibling society; American adultescents, French tanguys, Italian bamboccioni or mammoni, German nesthockers). These mostly negative appraisals of an alleged wild-growth of maturational limbo gravitate onto two of capitalism's perennially caricatured concerns: the bachelor – classificatory (‘young’ or ‘mid’) adults with lamentable adolescent, childish, silly, ambitionless, unproductive, irresponsible, narcissistic or parasitical housing and career patterns and leisure styles – and the child, prematurely propelled into the vertiginous sign economies of the commodity and its ultimately sexual idioms. There is a tendency to scandalize the two, particularly as sites of sexual promiscuity and dissociation (guys are shy porn consumers, kids are overexposed and ‘traumatically sexualized’), and to try to expose them as symptoms of late capitalism's destruction of society's vital gradients. Critique, in short, emerges largely as a polemic against capitalist implosions (dedifferentiations and destratifications), specifically that of adulthood, adolescence and childhood. The event of critique, furthermore, revolves around the assertion of an uncritical Alltag: the apparatus infantilizes or ‘inappropriately’ adulterates the clueless masses; the critic has to inform the latter of their ill fate. Mentioned assertions consistently privilege an image of a silent, victimizing conspiracy over that of distributed agency, literacy and cultural resiliency. What one sees is entrenchment of a naturalistic ‘Ages-of-Man’ schema.

In mentioned examples, theory is more preoccupied with its own privileged capacity to diagnose a hidden cultural decay than to appreciate semio-linguistic practices and agency at grass-root level. Comparably, synoptic efforts by Coan, Kiefer and Owen referenced above provide a comprehensive picture of Euro-American (and Eastern) maturity, yet remain integral to abstract concerns for the philosophical tenability of projected conditions for maturity, rather than for mundane transgressions that these projections invite and in a sense produce by circumscribing them as such. The same tendency is seen in studies about ‘age identity’, psychometric studies of self-life-staging (see Janssen (2009a), for a review and critique) and numerous contemporary critiques of immaturity (Janssen, 2009b). What is evidenced is a reactionary gaze on what is assumed to be a suspect withdrawal from some ethical sufficiency or conformity, symptomatic of ‘youth bias’, failed pedagogy, alienating economies or cultural stasis. The psychometrics of ‘age identity’ beg for static, numeric discrepancies between ‘actual age’, ‘feel-age’, ‘look-age’ and ‘do-age’, but usually do little to examine the implied centrality of display and performance.

In sum, the underlying master narrative of alienation indicts the semiotic event as pathogenic exposure, and attempts to entrench the idea of a given developmental trajectory besieged, corrupted, and betrayed by the promiscuities of (sexual) capitalism. It rejects the more radical hypothesis advanced here (and echoing Baudrillard's critique of Marxism's naturalization of use value: Baudrillard, 1975): numeric age can not act as the ‘actual’ age that grounds feeling, looking, or doing, for it is itself caught up in these respective administrations."

http://www.palgrave-journals.com/sub/journal/v3/n4/full/sub201021a.html

Baudrillard and Cuteness:
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-7_1/v7-1-botz.html

Cosplay:
http://nuitnoire.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/cosplay/

Herbivores Males:
http://www.factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=629#06
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbivore_men

Bataille and Bukkake: Symbolic human sacrifice in Japanese Pornography
http://www.scribd.com/fb-4304481/d/97158-Bataille-and-Bukkake-Symbolic-Human-Sacrifice-in-Japanese-Pornography

Blunted Affect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blunted_affect

"The Japanese are famous for their fascination with porn, which they
openly consume, in public spaces. That the hara-kiri videos by Kinbaku
are about sex or porn is a misunderstanding however. Roland Barthes in
The Empire of Signs (1970) makes an interesting comment on this: "In
Japan (...) sexuality lies in the sexual organs and nowhere else; in
the United States it's the other way round: sex is everywhere except
in sexuality". In Japan violence also has a different meaning. While
in the West violence is "ascribed no other function than that of the
expression of an underground, an inner self, a nature, of which it is
supposed to be the primary, wild, unsystematised language," for the
Japanese violence is never an expression of an original inner being:
"violence is a direct sign: because it expresses nothing (neither
hatred, nor indignation nor moral ideas) it asserts itself to reach a
goal with even greater assurance". Thus makoto, the Japanese name for
this violence - literally, truthfulness or AUTHENTICITY - can also
come to an abrupt halt. It can, to our eyes, without any apparent
reason, be transformed into absolute surrender.

The West has only one term for the combination of sex and violence:
sado-masochism. In Japan tying up and being bound is not only a genre
in printing, but is also taught as a form of martial art - known as
hojo-jutsu - in police academies. Bondage in cartoons, and the
performance based on this developed by Masami Akita and exploited by
his company Kinbiken, has little to do with kinky sex, but everything
to do with power, or the lack of it, and with the ritualisation of
excessive impulses in the Japanese kokoro or soul. When Kaganof adds
to this "It's The Children"(2002) an observation from Ian Buruma's The
Mirror of the Sun Goddess (1983) can be heard echoing. Buruma posits
that the aesthetic cruelty practised on girls and women is "perhaps
the most extreme expression of anger at the loss of pure
childhood."(67) Seppuku as posthumous abortion.


'War is menstrual envy'

Despite the mechanical pumping of bodies, the theme of Kerkhof's
pornologies was never 'sex'. Every pornology examines the perverted
power, which refuses to give up its position and clings to its
identity. He therefore endorsed Bataille's insights into the
transgressive effect of the sacrifice. As a regulated application of
excessive masculine violence communities throughout the ages - from
tribes to states - have established their identity and imposed it on
others through large-scale slaughters. From the sacrificial
perspective modern media wars hardly differ from mediamatically
induced tribal massacres.

In an economy based on usefulness, efficiency and the optimisation of
productive human force; with the body culture and its health
imperatives as a small-scale variant; there is no room for such
sacrifices: death no longer offers a passage to another life. Even
though the individual sacrifice might perhaps for a top athlete still
have meaning as the ultimate effort and at its euphoric climax may
still even lead to ecstatic loss of self, in our thoroughly mediated
society the literal going outside of oneself - exstasy; has mainly
become a question of TV programmes about TV programmes. The individual
has become the medium of all media. In this radically inmediated life
or literal 'media-crity' we can simply transform stomach muscles or
abs into a grid of flesh by means of electrodes without even having to
interrupt our daily activities. In the world of Tel-Sell it's not
sacrifices but sales which are important. When, as in the land of
Apartheid and the first concentration camps, the altar of History - on
which senseless violence could, even after the Death of God, still
acquire a context - is also dragged in front of a committee of
reconciliation, violence signals only noise. The ritual sacrifice has
then become a statistic victim who through a hefty claim regains a
self-insured life.

And yet the blood that flows through the veins still flows for the
fatherland. Not so much for saving one's life but above all to
safeguard one's own identity. War remains the ultimate orgy of
violence. But it is hardly more than a game. The seamless succession
of images of logistically efficient advancing troops almost forms an
aesthetic legitimisation in itself. War has of late acquired a
mediamatic shield. Nevertheless behind the sophisticated and
thoroughly directed TV images there shimmers a ritual violence which
the media can barely allay. We suspect an Armageddon behind the game.
According to Kaganof there lurks more behind the facade of the
well-oiled war machine than The Solipsist Kerkhof's frantic fear of
castration. Every pseudo-ritual slaughter betrays a masculine variant
of penis envy: men going into battle because of 'menstrual envy' to
experience creative pain and to see the blood flowing, the same blood
that every month initiates women into labour pains." -Kaganoff [ the link I had expired].

The above as cont. with,

Quote:
"He mentions the phenomenon of cutting or causing injury to the self as a way to see and experience bleeding: in other words, to feel alive. His point is that our perception of reality has been so diminished or compromised because it is so highly constituted and mediated by fantasies or images which have become our reality."

I was going to say that I'm like the Japanese "herbivore male" but I can't say that I'm interested in grooming.

I find that I'm more inclined to separate and remain detached, engaging the world only consciously.

I still crave meat, but I'm more selective with the cut and the taste; the frequency declines wanting to approach meat as a delicacy rather than a staple.

The Japanese males described in that link are Metrosexual or the end result of my feminization: females with penises, who in their confusion turn a-sexual.

Satyr wrote:

The slow deterioration of the living experience has
this result.
All is notched-up in severity to deal with the loss.
Things have become so safe, so comfortable, that one
needs to emulate risk, re-inject pain, exaggerate the sexual practice, to feel
anything.
This is a consequence of numbness.
No fear, no risk, no price, no sacrifice....all is
made mute and the body falls into inebriated bliss. It shuffles, hungrily
towards its next fix, consuming, consuming, consuming to fill in the void in
its decaying flesh; wishing to quell the ache of existing.

Suffering and pain are turned into sensations to be
avoided when they are nothing more than the sensation of existing.

But then the mind rebels against this zombification where flesh rots or is
petrified so that it can no longer feel anything beneath a certain grade; it
wants to feel what it means to be alive, knowing that soon this will no longer
be an option.

Yes.

"If the schizoid reality of postmodern society produces fractured individuals, then violence becomes a means by which the alienated and fractured individual can experience feeling and inscribe a history on his body. Inflicting pain on the body becomes a means of exhibiting endurance through visual signifiers like blood, cuts, and bruises. Wounding the self is a way to experience the certainty of existence known only through pain. The use of self-inflicted violence fits nicely within the postmodern paradigm because its relationship to the body is paradoxical. While it is the postmodern remedy to ahistoricity and fragmentation, violence simultaneously perpetuates this fragmentation because the wounding of the body results in a disruption of the totality of the coherent bodily narrative. Fighting and wounding is the only means by which the men in fight club feel truly "alive.

...The men the narrator meets at the "Remaining Men Together" support group are a representation of a cultural loss of masculinity. One of the group's members, Bob, is a former fitness guru whose steroid use has caused him to lose his testicles and in their place develop "bitch-tits" as a result of hormone replacement therapy. While the narrator feels emasculated because of his consumer driven and IKEA furnished life, the men in the support group represent the physical manifestation of emasculation. In Taking it Like a Man David Savran discusses the emergence of the "masochistic male subjectivity" (163) and argues that the "new-narcissist" or "new sado-masochist" is now a dominant figure in U.S. culture and is no longer located in the margin.

The self-inflicted violence that differentiates Fight Club from other old-order "masculine" films such as Rambo or The Terminator can be understood through the lens of the "new sado-masochist." Reflexive sado-masochism allows the individual to portray himself as victim while also feeling powerful because of his ability to endure pain. Pain, then, becomes desirable. "Concealed under a veneer of righteous indignation, willfulness, anger, grief, or guilt, and repudiated by the would-be heroic male subject, reflexive sado-masochism has become the primary libidinal logic of the white male as victim" (Savran 210).

In Fight Club the "group hug" mentality of the early 1990's men's movement is replaced by raw and uncensored violence. The male in Fight Club turns to violence in an attempt to reawaken the senses that have been dulled by quotidian existence. Fight club is a place where men can experience a true sense of "being." "You weren't alive anywhere like you were alive here," the narrator tells us because, "who you were in fight club is not who you were in the rest of the world." The basement arena of the fight club provides a space in which the men in the film can transcend the reality of their lifestyle, their jobs, and their bodies. The narrator demonstrates his understanding of rebirth through violence by describing how after a fight "we all felt saved."

Despite the fact that fighting is supposed to enable the men to rise beyond their innocuous existence, it in fact reinforces social order and power relations. On the first night fight club meets, Tyler establishes eight rules informing the men, "The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club" and "The second rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club." Despite the narrator telling us, "Fight club wasn't about winning or losing" the basic premise of the fight is that one man will emerge victorious. What seems to be at war in the narrator's statement is the fact that what the men in fight club are performing is unadulterated virility in its purest form. "Fight club wasn't about winning or losing," the narrator says. The men have no protection and must rely on their own instinct and strength to "win" the fight. Endurance and the ability to withstand pain becomes a means by which the individual and his masculinity can be saved.

Gone is the powerful white masculinity that triumphed in the 1980's film Wall Street where "greed is good." By the 1980's "American culture…would be a culture based on triumph-on the admiration of power and status-and nothing would be more important to that culture than its symbols" (Mills 12). During the Reagan years, the male "hard body" in films represented "an effort both to remasculinize the nation after what was widely perceived as the post-Vietnam impotence and the result of a feminized presidency of the Carter years and to get government off the backs of the average citizen" (qtd. in Shapiro 139-140). The early 1990's response to this emasculation materialized in the development of men's groups led by gurus such as author Robert Bly. Bly's popular 1991 book Iron John topped the bestsellers list for weeks and exhorted men to "accept that the true radiant energy in the male does not hide in, reside in, or wait for us in the feminine realm nor in the macho/John Wayne realm, but in the magnetic field of the deep masculine" (. The problem with these "mythopoetic" men's groups, as Michael Kimmel notes, is that, "the search for the wild warrior within leads men's movement scions to wander through anthropological literature like postmodern tourists, as if the world's cultures were arrayed like so many ritual boutiques in a global shopping mall" (319), which only further emphasizes the postmodern heterogeneity that contributes to the fracturing of the individual self.

In Fight Club the white male has lost faith in his role as a consumer and wants to experience a "real" sense of being that can only be achieved through pain. The narrator, whose body has been bloodied and broken by Tyler (aka, himself) in the final scene of the film, portrays himself as the victim who wants to reverse the damage of Project Mayhem when he tells Tyler "this is too much!" This scene captures what Sally Robinson is talking about when she writes, "white masculinity most fully represents itself as victimized by inhabiting a wounded body," (6) and "displaying wounded bodies materializes the crisis of white masculinity, makes it more real, like other bloody battles over race and gender in American history" (9). On the one hand, Fight Club could suggest that the only way the white male can truly experience a masculine self, a self that has been lost to the feminized narcissism in the schizoid reality of the postmodern moment, is through wounding. On the other hand, however, Fight Club appears to be more of a critique of violence than anything else by stressing the ephemeral nature of salvation through violence and pain. In the postmodern world, violence becomes just another hackneyed affectation, and by this formulation the men in fight club are just perpetuating their banality. By accepting responsibility for his actions and by acknowledging that he and Tyler are the same person, the narrator matures and recognizes the limits of Tyler's nihilism. While the film acknowledges the frustration felt by men in today's society, Fight Club seems to be telling them that it is time to grow up and take charge of their individuality instead of blaming society for making them feel like they have lost it."
http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7Ema02/freed/fightclub/masviol.html


And isn't the peter-pan state also a perpetual "deferrence"...?

"In contrast to Fincher's conclusion, Palahniuk's novel emphasizes this inevitability of deferral. Because Tyler Durden awakes in a mental institution after his self-inflicted gunshot wound, the onset of Project Mayhem's revolutionary event is presumably pre-empted, and the reliability of the narrator and hence the ontology of the "revolution" are both thrown into question. Although the existence of bruised and battered orderlies in the asylum, along with their remarks to Tyler, suggest an independent confirmation of the existence of the fight club movement, Tyler's closing remarks from the hospital emphasize the choice of deferral over the engagement of the movement itself:
But I don't want to go back. Not yet. Just because. Because every once in a while, somebody brings me my lunch tray and my meds and he has a black eye or his forehead is swollen with stitches, and he says:

"We miss you Mr. Durden."
Or somebody with a broken nose pushes a mop past me and whispers:
"Everything's going according to the plan."
Whispers:
"We're going to break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world."
Whispers:
"We look forward to getting you back." (207)

Critically, Tyler chooses to delay his return to the outside world because it is here, inside the institution, that anticipation--and thus the same logic of deferral that governs masochism--can be endlessly prolonged. Tyler Durden will never "break up civilization," and Tyler's postmodern "present" will never achieve its distinctive, revolutionary significance and identity; instead, this impossibility itself is deferred and thereby transformed into possibility. In Zizekian terms, this is a dialectical reversal whereby deferral itself becomes the object of desire and the positive support for identity: "the impeded desire converts into a desire for impediment; the unsatisfied desire converts into a desire for unsatisfaction; a desire to keep our desire 'open': the fact that we 'don't really know what we really want'--what to desire--converts into a desire not to know, a desire for ignorance" (For They Know Not 143-144). Given what we know about the difficulties of figuring and accounting for one's historical identity, this ending seems preferable to Fincher's--if only because it reminds us of how thinking and positioning oneself historically is always an act of fantasy that can never end and never succeed. It must wait, in other words, for just the right time."
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.503/13.3friday.html

Transcendence in the culture of Extremes:

http://www.soliustitiae.co.za/insights/files/2012/02/THRILLING_Feb-2012.pdf

Satyr wrote:

I was going to say that I'm like the Japanese "herbivore male" but I can't say that I'm interested in grooming.

I find that I'm more inclined to separate and remain detached, engaging the world only consciously.

I still crave meat, but I'm more selective with the cut and the taste; the frequency declines wanting to approach meat as a delicacy rather than a staple.

"Whosoever shall be a man must be a non-conformist." - Emerson

The Lone Wolf Archetype:

http://www.aseekersthoughts.com/2009/10/lone-wolf-as-symbol.html
http://www.aseekersthoughts.com/2010/11/trailblazer-symbol-and-metaphor.html
http://www.aseekersthoughts.com/2010/04/wizards-and-wanderers-as-symbols.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_(trait)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_(terrorism)

It's spreading:




A sadder sight was never seen.