11 February 2010: "British Youtube Tween goes ‘big in Japan’ because she looks like an anime character"

This post is about orientalism. Can it really have been more than 30 years since Edward Said wrote his seminal analysis of the sources and ideological purposes behind Occidental attitudes toward the East? Of course Said was principally concerned with the representation of Middle Eastern cultures in Europe, but Carles appropriates the basic limning of the argument and extends its application to Japan, and the exoticization of Japanese culture in contemporary Western societies.

In some ways Japanese culture has always beguiled Western observers, and the nation's tendency to cultural isolationism only exacerbates the situation. Yet that cultural isolationism is thrown into contradiction by the country's reputation as an early adopter of technological trends and a wellspring of exportable cultural motifs, many of which have been exploited in a range of Western fringe subcultures. This makes Japan, as Carles points, "an absurd place, where nothing makes sense."

But modern Japan yields a moment of opportunity for socialist struggle, albeit one also fraught with danger for those partisans seeking to use racial identity politics as a weapon within a larger, truly socialist strategy. As American Stanley Aronowitz has written, "People of color from postcolonial societies simply cannot afford to turn their backs on the opportunities afforded by economic and political inclusion, despite the increasingly insistent attacks by intellectuals on Eurocentrism."

The question then, as Carles chooses to frame it, is what sort of opportunity is presented by the phenomenon of a young white pop singer infiltrating the insular Japanese culture? Is this a reverse example of the orientalism in the West, a sort of Occidentalism in the east? Or does the asymmetry point up the persistent problems in assimilating Asians into Western culture paradigms? "Do u feel turned on by white girls who wish they were AZN / Japanese?" Carles asks, slyly referencing the shameful history of Western colonizers enslaving Asian women in prostitution and thus incurring the misdirected wrath of wives on the homefront. Also built in to this is a critique of the prevailing stereotype of Asian women as being unusually submissive or receptive to patriarchal culture -- infantialized, much as this pre-teen pop star is. Hence Carles's cutting assertion: "I have a feeling that this girl probably appeals to grown Japanese men, though." The comment plays both ways, a comment on partriarchy and the orientalism that locates the patriarchal more firmly in an othered culture.

But Carles's larger point is that Orientalism is an alibi, a distraction from teh larger issues of exploitation that face workers everywhere and which often takes a post-Reichian form of sexual deprivation or, rather, the disciplining of working-class sexuality from on high as a mode of social control. "Maybe it doesn’t matter what culture ur a part of–all that really matters is the simple truth that ’sex sells,’" Carles trenchantly argues.

As Laclau and Mouffe write, "the forms of an antagonism, therefore, far from being predetermined, are the result of hegemonic struggle.... There is therefore no subject -- nor, furhter, any 'necessity' -- which is absolutely radical and irrecuperable by the dominant order." Carles puts his own post-postmodern spin on this view:

Feel like I might not overthink our cultural divide, and just watch clips of Japanese game shows. I will ‘laugh’ at the disconnect between American culture and Japanese culture, but then maybe come to the conclusion that ‘all humans are the same’ because we just want to escape from ‘the grind’ of daily life. We just want things 2 laugh at, things 2 distract us from how sad/trapped we might feel on the inside.

The East/West divide is not overdetermined but instead underwritten by a biologically based commonality that transcends uneven cultural developments. But this prompts an equal resistance to the mantle of savior of the revolution, of adopting the radical praxis that social change requires to unseat an established hegemonic order. Hence Beckii Cruel, an unlikely Other, yet perhaps more radical for her very unlikelihood of being a torch bearer for a consciousness raising movement. Carles explains: "Beckii Cruel represents an ideal identity that they can obtain by consuming different media/art/goods." By they, Carles is clearly referring in a veiled manner to the New Left in all its transnational guises, most of which are under siege as the neoliberal order gasps its last breaths. By adopting teenage pop idols as wedges to break hegemony, the Left can strike a blow at the heart of the culture industry that would seek to nullify dissent, the "grind" of everyday life that Carles had invoked. And a child shall lead them.

If all standard bearers are "recuperable" as Laclau and Mouffe argue, perhaps it's best to seize upon a symbol already thoroughly co-opted and at the same time putatively "innocent."

Carles declares, "Maybe Beckii Cruel is the new ternative," a play on "alternative," that mirrors Deleuze's revealing language play in "Postscript on the Societies of Control," where he radically theorizes the existence of "dividuals" who has succeeded the moribund category of the individual. Carles is arguing that we must move beyond the conception of binary alternatives and strike instead at the root of the structure that gestates such dichotomies.