Sat, 11 May 2024 22:04:06 -0700WeeblySun, 31 May 2020 23:55:48 GMThttp://jaekevin.com/home/miscellaneous-thoughts-on-the-pandemicIn Wuhan wet markets the first transgression occurred: the virus was transmitted from animal to human being. From there the virus spread, latching onto the endless hustle and bustle of people coming in and out of this locale of commerce, passing from human to human in the city, penetrating into homes and families, flying past mountains and oceans guided by the frenzied free-flow of global commerce.
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A quarantine was ordered in Wuhan on January 23 at 10:00am CST. It marked the first coordinated effort to cut off the viral flow of movement. But it was too late. Less than 100 days after the initial attempt, here I am, halfway across the world, imprisoned in my home for the several months as are a billion other people all around the world.

I have barely stepped outside the threshold of my home. While familiar interior spaces promise safety and cleanliness, external spaces are like enemy territory. I imagine invisible coronavirus molecules floating about, carried hither and thither by the breeze. Outside, there is always the potential to be contaminated. From inside I regard those outside, even close neighbours and familiar faces, with a measure of suspicion. I picture noxious fumes escaping their mouths. Have they been contaminated?

As long as I can control what enters through the threshold—the doorway—I am able to maintain the purity and safety of my sanctuary, my home. I received a book ordered from Amazon today. As I gingerly extract the package with the tips of my fingers, I feel coronavirus particles invading—the tips of my fingers have been soiled. I leave the packaging outside and make sure to wash my hands, soaping and lathering them for at least 15 seconds as prescribed. I wipe down the book with Lysol. Purity and order are restored.

A single left-click on my mouse has activated criss-crossing global logistics systems. This is what I picture in my mind’s eye. In a non-descript bookstore in Japan the book is selected by an anonymous pair of hands and sent to the post office, where it is packaged by another pair of hands. Another person loads it for the long journey across the Pacific by boat, where it arrives at the Amazon fulfillment centre somewhere in America. An American worker picks up the package and sends it off to the postal office in Canada, where it is received by Canadian hands. It is then given to the postal worker who dropped it into the mailbox just a moment prior. I’ve heard that COVID-19 can live for three days on delivery packages. How many has this package infected?

In Canada, individuals are asked to practice “social distancing.” We have our own hygienic bubble two metres in radius. Couples are kept separate from trading pleasures; friends kept away from convivial exchanges at a dinner table, where they swap ideas and micro-droplets. Micro-droplets—now the invisible menace—are a natural result of conversation and interaction. In the name of social distancing, we lose our great public spaces, the commons where a microcosm of society gathers, and micro-droplets of citizens separated by class, race, and other demographic divisions are passed around from the rich to the poor and the poor to the rich. Through micro-droplets people achieve a common understanding, and through micro-droplets society emerges. Without public spaces we lose this intimate and fertile exchange, and we are left with sterile, mediated images of others that only seem to confirm our suspicions. Instead, we log onto online locales—these are sanitary spaces without micro-droplets. In these online echo chambers, we retreat into the safety of our personalized tribes.

There is a transgressive fluidity in contemporary globalized society that disregards boundaries. Globalization encourages the movement of capital, goods, and services across borders and the movement of labour follows. Dislocated individuals drift around from country to country, from megacity to megacity, where they dissolve into the masses.

Contagion-wary nation-states have responded with borders and have canceled international flights and prohibited the entry of foreign nationals. Formerly intimate trade relationships are left cold, and complex global supply chains are starting to be repatriated. Global commerce dries to a trickle: the transfusion of trade across national borders has slowed. In these new relations of commerce, the commodity is no longer the birthchild of an orgy, where raw materials from Chile and Canada are transported to China and Korea for parts development and finally assembled in Italy to be sold in the American consumer. These new commodities bear the mark of national purity and are made by the trustworthy hands of the co-national.

As mutual transactions of commerce slow down between nations, a perverse competition emerges in its stead: these are the mounting tallies of new coronavirus cases and new deaths. National media outlets compare these numbers like the performances of athletes in the Olympics. These numbers are risk assessments against the foreigner. Citizens learn how dangerous “they” are.
 
This is only the first wave of coronavirus; most of the world has gone under lockdown for just over a month. We can expect a second round, a third round, and maybe even a fourth—this state of affairs may become the new normal for the next few years until a vaccine is discovered.

As this happens, we will withdraw into the safety of our clean, interior spaces and jealously guard the threshold from the menacing “others” on the outside. Our old relational habits will be replaced by a new culture: a culture of separation, excessive hygiene (both bodily and in our ideas), and purity.
]]>Tue, 10 Mar 2020 03:50:05 GMThttp://jaekevin.com/home/art-in-the-age-of-democratic-production
(Wrote this August 31, 2016; some parts were interesting so decided to re-upload)

​T. S. Eliot writes, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead... what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new… the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”

The artist is in dialogue with his predecessors, in dialogue with the whole cultural tradition, and each new work is not an isolated phenomenon but a piece that is connected to the whole and has the ability to transform the whole tradition with its emergence. Thus the artist to T. S. Eliot is a figure charged with a great responsibility in every single one of his creations, a responsibility not to himself but to his predecessors stretching back millennia of other great creators. With the advent of technology there has been a democratization in artistic creation. Whoever has an internet connection can now claim to be an artist and artistic creation becomes about a short-sighted expression of the self. Everyone is now a creator, an artist, but how many know the great responsibility they are charged with, while they chase their 15 minutes of fame?

Democratization through technology has not only affected production, but consumption as well. While works of art were initially like private conversations happening between the educated, wealthy elite, greater advancements in technology have allowed the ‘rabble’ to join in and listen. The printing press brought literature to the masses, $15 will allow the bored consumer to spend an evening at the cinema, and music has experienced democratization in consumption as well, as Kundera relates with the invention of the radio in L’ignorance:

“Already in 1930, he [Schönburg] wrote : “Radio is an enemy, an enemy without pity that avances irresistibly and against whom all resistance is without hope,” it “force-feeds us music, without wondering if we have a desire to listen to it, if we have the chance to receive it,” so that music became a simple noise, a noise among noises.)”

Music, which has become noise, is now a hodgepodge “where everything gets mixed without one knowing who the composer is (music-turned-noise is anonymous), without one distinguishing the beginning or the end (music-turned-noise does not know form) : the dirty water of music where music dies.”

What is art now but mere distractions for facile consumption and immediate forgottenness? No longer is it an extended conversation among distinguished luminaries lighting up the present to bring it forward into the future, the work of men and women who have vanquished Time and conquered death with their creations, which are the greatest achievements of a culture or a people. Now it is merely a commodity with a short shelf life, a hit of non-thought and momentary bliss into a fifty shaded world rooted in the groundless present, an isolated ephemeral manifestation of mediocrity.
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While consumers and creators of the democratic arts drink to their inability, bathed in the drunkenness of the forgotten present, in an inebriated fiesta of mass consumption and gaudy glitter, the great wonders of cultural achievement lie forgotten a short distance away, accessible to any who are willing to sober up and walk to the public library…*  (to be continued)
 
 
*a manifestation of the same mechanisms of technology and democratic production! 
 
Translations from French:
“Déjà en 1930, il [Schönburg] écrivait: « La radio est un ennemi, un ennemi impitoyable qui irrésistiblement avance et contre qui toute résistance est sans espoir » ; elle « nous gave de musique […] sans se demander si on a envie de l’écouter, si on a la possibilité de la percevoir », de sorte que la musique est devenue un simple bruit, un bruit parmi des bruits…“ 

]]>Wed, 07 Aug 2019 19:10:15 GMThttp://jaekevin.com/home/rent-a-family-the-commodification-of-kinship-tiesFamily Romance is a company that offers family member rentals in Japan. It is a small scale service that receives around “250 requests a month”: what I am describing is not a mainstream trend.[1] However, the emergence of this service signals a shift in the culture—this is what I will attempt to comprehend in the article.

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by celebrated anthropologist Ruth Benedict gives us descriptions of family life in Japan in the early-mid 20th century. The Japanese family described in the study is in a hierarchical structure, and generation, gender, and primogeniture determines one’s position in the hierarchy. Being in a position of authority does not give one the prerogative to exercise power arbitrarily. Individual interest is subsumed under the needs of the family, and with authority comes the burden of increased responsibility. Within the traditional three generation Japanese family, family solidarity is reinforced by mutual obligations of debt.[2]

The Japanese family has gone through a transformation. The 2018 Palme d’Or winning film Shoplifters by Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda is an evocative illustration of the contemporary Japanese family. Kore-eda is a filmmaker known for his family dramas, and this latest film portrays an unconventional family. The film seems to center on a loving, three-generation Japanese family: Osamu and Nobuyo play the husband and wife in precarious jobs; Aki and Shota are the older daughter and younger son; finally, there is Hatsue, the old matriarch whose pension and home contributes to the whole family’s survival. As the film reaches its conclusion we realize that these people are strangers and unconnected by biological ties—this “family” is a performance put on by a band of misfits collected together for survival.

Kore-eda’s comments on his film are crucial for the analysis:

“The traditional concept of family was already being dismantled or destroyed in Japan … In ‘Shoplifters,’ I was looking at three generations living together, because that’s typically what you’d find in a Japanese household. But I wanted to play with that, and show that even within those terms the nuclear family is undergoing a permanent change.’  

“He remembered back to 2002 … ‘At that time, all the kids we saw were living in close proximity to their grandma or grandpa or both, and you could hear it in their vocabulary … [But] that has ceased to be the case. More elderly people are living alone. It’s very rare these days to see a family where the children have that kind of close contact with their grandparents, or live in traditional family structures.’ ”[3]

Between The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and the Shoplifters the Japanese family has undergone a mutation, and Family Romance fills in Japanese needs in response.[4] However, to deepen the analysis, we need an understanding of the overarching neo-liberal political economy in Japan.

Neo-liberalism, as anthropologist David Harvey writes, “is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade”.[5] In the labour market, neoliberal ideology is articulated in the form of labour market flexibility, leading to the dismantling of previous social institutions that limit flexibility (like unions), replacing traditional labour arrangements with short-term contracts and other flexible labour arrangements. The contemporary labour landscape supplies us with ample examples, with the gig economy and the precariats who populate it.[6] According to Harvey, neo-liberal ideology also operates under the presumption “that market and market signals can best determine all allocative decisions...” which is “to presume that everything in principle be treated as a commodity”—the logics of the markets expand to construct fictional commodities.[7]

We have here the two key pieces for understanding Family Romance. Neo-liberal ideology permits the understanding of ‘family’ as a commodity, something to be bought and sold in the market, and, according to the founder of the company, Family Romance draws on a flexible labour force of “about 2,000 employees” who are housewives, underemployed workers, salarymen, and pensioners to provide their service on-demand, leading to the uber-ification of the family.
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It is not only in Japan that traditional, family structures are transforming, and all throughout the world ties of intimacy are purchased—variants of Family Romance may spring up all over the world to fill in regional desires. What happens to the family? I suggest two hyperbolic images of the past and the potential future as a way of conclusion: The family, the traditional site of social solidarity, a lifelong, inescapable commitment, is transformed into a performance by individuals—this new family is a flexible arrangement that is bought and sold in the market as a commodity.
 


[1] http://family-romance.com/

[2] Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. (Boston: Mariner Books.)

[3] https://deadline.com/2018/05/shoplifters-hirokazu-kore-eda-palme-dor-cannes-video-interview-1202394721/.

[4] The origins of Family Romance: the founder had a friend who was a single mother and wanted to take her daughter to a private kindergarten; due to Japanese stigmas against single mothers he had to act as the father.

[5] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: New York, 2005), 2.

[6] While I analyze this cultural phenomena through the neo-liberal political economy and neo-liberal ideology, I do not mean to suggest that this is the only reason for the gig economy. Technological disruptions have also transformed the labour market, as Klaus Schwab describes in his The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

[7] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: New York, 2005), 165.
]]>Wed, 12 Jun 2019 18:37:48 GMThttp://jaekevin.com/home/fake-news-and-the-internet-online-communities-and-the-fragmentation-of-the-mediascapeThe Trump presidency is marked by the powerful discourse of “fake news.” Fake news, firmly wedged in public discourse, puts into question the facts and narratives disseminated in mainstream media. While it may have been Trump that popularized this word, I will approach the emergence of fake news through an analysis of the changing mediascape in the internet age. I analyze two trends in particular; one, the flattening of the media landscape; and two, the formation of small, niche “tribes” in virtual space that develop a worldview with which to interpret events.

Previously, a producer of media required large capital investments; this included large expenditures in property, equipment, and skilled labor. The distribution of media was also restricted to a few players with distribution channels established over time. Both factors limited the number of entrants in the media market, limiting the potential narratives in public discourse. Through the mystery of these mechanisms inaccessible to the masses—from the magic of the latest technologies and the specialized training for professional reporters—reality underwent a transmutation into material facts. Facts from the mainstream news media were bestowed with the brand of authority; they existed on a privileged epistemological plane. The mainstream media, whose narrative was the only narrative, dictated the truth, and constructed the very fabric of reality for the masses.

In the contemporary world, every consumer of the media is also a potential producer. Anyone with a decent camera, a microphone, and a viewpoint can upload and propagate their thoughts through Youtube; the previous barriers to entry have collapsed. In addition, the very medium of distribution has changed—from the lofty and inaccessible heights of a cable network, news from mainstream media have fallen and co-exist alongside the Youtube channel of an everyday man operating from his basement; there has been a formal flattening of distribution mediums to accompany the democratization of media production. News from mainstream media no longer exists in a privileged epistemological plane. They are exposed to and contend with various narratives from smaller media players, who are endowed with the same potential reach. The authority to truth is no longer reserved for mainstream media brands—authority is now measured by subscribers and followers; and truth, in terms of the narratives in public discourse, is a quantitative measurement, measured by views.[1]

The internet has allowed for the groupings of people across previously unbreachable spatial boundaries. The removal of the spatial boundary has facilitated the formation of new communities who are no longer separated by the tyranny of physical space; the virtual space gives them freedom to create new groups of voluntary association. These imaginary communities develop their own spaces of communication—the agoras of the digital world—through means like newsletters, online messaging boards, and media publications. Over time, communities develop a certain ethos, a dialect with which they communicate, and eventually become isolate and institutionalized like islands in virtual space, developing an interpretative lens with which they understand the world.[2]

Around a year prior, one such community announced its presence to the general public in the form of a white van that ran over, injured, and killed tens of people in Toronto—the incel community. The perpetrator, Alek Minassian, wrote this post on his Facebook just before the incident:

“Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

How has this worldview developed? The incel community began as a support group for people with difficulties in dating by a progressive, queer woman in the 1990s.[3] In the 2000s, two sub-communities split off into two online forums; IncelSupport, a mixed-gender support community, and LoveShy, which nurtured a violent, misogynistic strain, and formed online alliances with alt-right communities. The latter community dominated, and developed the “blackpill” ideology, the interpretative lens of the incel community. In the incel worldview, there are two archetypes: the “Chad,” who are attractive males that all women want to sleep with, and the “Stacy,” who are beautiful women who will only sleep with a Chad. In the hierarchy of men, incels are at the bottom and are doomed to celibacy.
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Facts and narratives disseminated by mainstream media can be viewed as texts without an inherent interpretation. A singular, agreed-upon interpretation in the public sphere is a contested process, and interpretative communities view news narratives with a critical lens informed by their world and their social context.[4] These communities are not silent: a simple search for “incel” on Youtube will result in mainstream media videos and various videos from incel Youtube channels. Through the internet, members of these communities are producers of media, contributing to the cacophony of public discourse with interpretations that can verge on the extreme to mainstream sensibilities. As the power of mainstream media and their interpretations disintegrate, as the continent floods and is divided into smaller islands, it becomes increasingly difficult for a single narrative, a single interpretation, to crystallize and construct a singular fabric of reality to understand the world.
 


[1] I use the word “truth” to refer to the fabric of reality that is constructed and disseminated through the media.

[2] This is not to say that these communities are rigidly constituted; communities are always in flux.

[3] Zack Beauchamp spent a year researching the incel community: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/4/16/18287446/incel-definition-reddit

[4] Weller, Robert P. Resistance, Chaos and Control in China. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
]]>Mon, 13 May 2019 20:26:55 GMThttp://jaekevin.com/home/shoplifters-kore-eda-and-the-transformation-of-the-nuclear-familyHirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or winning 2018 film Shoplifters centers on what seems to be a loving three-generation family living under one roof. 

There is Osamu and Nobuyo, the husband and wife, who work low-pay, precarious jobs; there is Aki, the older daughter who works at a host club, and Shota, the younger son; finally, there is Hatsue, the old granny matriarch whose pension and home contributes to the whole family’s survival. 

​They are poor and live in a decrepit old home in the suburbs. Inside, the sheer amount of unordered materiality is overwhelming: their home is filled with scavenged junk and relics that they have redeemed from inutility; and this private collection completes this odd family.[1] As the title of the film suggests, their activities are not always in the legal sphere — they unrepentantly engage in petty crime to make ends meet.

Their insouciant attitude towards petty crime extends to the “kidnapping” of Yuri, a small female child in their neighbourhood who they find left out on the balcony during one freezing night. Coaxing her with food, they take her back home, where she is eventually absorbed into the family. For Yuri, this new “family” is more of a family for her than her real biological family, which consists of a single mother who neglects her for an abusive relationship with her boyfriend.

Kore-eda, a director known for his family dramas, said in an interview that his intentions in filming Shoplifters was to “explore what makes a family.”  Kore-eda applies the filmic lens onto the family as a sociological reality to examine its contemporary workings, and through this process, the very definition of the family is put into question.

The facade of the three-generation family once constructed, Kore-eda dismantles this structure before our very eyes in the latter part of the film. Granny Hatsue dies and she is buried unceremoniously in a hidden place beneath the floorboards. Shota and Yuri go to the supermarket for supplies; Shota is caught shoplifting by the police, and Shota and the police return to the “home” where they encounter Osamu, Nobuyo, Aki, and Yuri attempting to escape, abandoning Shota. 

Once in the police station, we find out their real identities: No one in this “family” is joined together by blood ties. They are pulled together by chance and by necessity, like a temporary alliance; however, they are still able to perform as a family unit, as can be seen in the numerous intimate scenes throughout the film. There is no doubt that their performance is genuine.

In an interview, Kore-eda describes the reasons for portraying the Japanese family in this manner:[2]

“The traditional concept of family was already being dismantled or destroyed in Japan, and 3/11 just made it obvious that was happening. I believe you can no longer interpret the true value or purpose of family based on the antiquated traditional tropes of Japanese society. In ‘Shoplifters,’ I was looking at three generations living together, because that’s typically what you’d find in a Japanese household. But I wanted to play with that, and show that even within those terms the nuclear family is undergoing a permanent change.’ ” 

…

“He remembered back to 2002, when he was just starting to audition children to play the lead characters in ‘Nobody Knows.’ ‘At that time, all the kids we saw were living in close proximity to their grandma or grandpa or both, and you could hear it in their vocabulary,’ he said. ‘There were children who really loved it. But based in my experience over the last 15 years looking at families specifically in the Tokyo area, that has ceased to be the case. More elderly people are living alone. It’s very rare these days to see a family where the children have that kind of close contact with their grandparents, or live in traditional family structures.’ ”

These family formations (however imagined) cannot be divorced from a certain sociological context; while I do not wish to digress too much into this topic, one can look towards research like Precarious Japan by anthropologist Anne Allison, which explores the situation of Japanese society. It is a place where in place of lifetime employment there is precarious labour, in place of a booming bubble economy there is a recession, and in place of population growth and optimism, there is aging and decline as the horizons of the future, the horizons of possibility, disappear. 

In this context of precarity and the decline of previous forms of social solidarity I position Shoplifters as a potential image of the future. It is Kore-eda’s hypothesis of new emergent family formations in Japan. However, it is not a conservative eulogy of this form. Shoplifters demonstrates a possible transformation of the nuclear family. In this transformation, the cultural concept of “family” is slowly being wrested from its biological roots (we are family because we are biologically related) and it is coming into contact with new meanings of “family” (we are family because of how we perform as a family, because of the feelings we have for each other, because of certain benefits of being family etc.).

To quote Kore-eda:

“ ‘One of my major life realizations,’ Kore-eda said, ‘is that having a child is not enough to make you a parent.’ Family, he agreed, is an idea that you have to reaffirm every day. ‘I think my films reflect my own sense of crisis about that, and this film — in which the binding agent is ultimately neither the blood relationship nor the time the Shibatas spend together — brings that crisis to a head.’ “

To quote the most interesting line above again:

“Family, he agreed, is an idea that you have to reaffirm every day.”



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[1] I am reminded of Benjamin’s essay on book collecting, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting”: “I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth… To renew the old world—that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things…”

[2] https://deadline.com/2018/05/shoplifters-hirokazu-kore-eda-palme-dor-cannes-video-interview-1202394721/.

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