Shoujo Jidai

LinQ son un grupo japonés, aunque local, de Fukuoka no de Tokyo. Este es el PV de una de las dos canciones que forman su nuevo single. El grupo en esta ocasión se ha dividido en dos unidades, una con imagen más cándida, la otra más adulta. Queríamos haberlas presentado por aquí con su anterior PV, pero queríamos usarlo de ejemplo para tratar de organizar tantas ideas desconectadas, que finalmente abandonamos el proyecto. No funcionaba, no acababa nunca. En todo caso, podemos mostrar los restos del naufragio ¿no?


 Tomemos estos dos comentarios del video de BABYMETAL en YouTube:

“there is no such a word like, too young too take over the world LOL oh my, why is always lolicon image” 


“lolicon metal :/ come on, srsly?”

 Una cosa sería “lolicon” (lo que quiera que signifique eso cuando la gente lo usa, desde una subcultura que se excita sexualmente con caracteres (no personas) de rasgos infantiles hasta toda aquella presentación estética que pretende invocar una imagen juvenil de las mujeres o que mercantiliza la imagen infantil de estas)y otra cosa sería “idol” (un tipo de cantante que surgió en Japón a partir de un programa de televisión, donde estos, como figuras públicas, tanto por su carisma al ser entrevistados como por su físico superando las limitaciones que pudieran tener como intérpretes, lograban contratos discográficos). Y para complicar el asunto, ambas serían “shojo”. Y ¿qué es eso? Un invento.

 De “Opening the Closed World of Shojo Manga” por Mizuki Takahashi:

 Before discussing shojo manga, however, it is important first to understand what the word “shojo” means. Usually glossed with the English word “girl,” the term shojo specifically indicates a young woman who is not allowed to express her sexuality (Treat 1996, 281–283). While a shojo may be sexually mature physically, she is socially considered sexually immature and is therefore identifiable as neither male nor female. In fact, the term was not customary before the late nineteenth century; prior to that, the term “shonen” (originally meaning “children,” today meaning “boys”) was widely used. Signifying both boys and girls, this term allowed for a distinction by age (children/adults) rather than by gender (Honda 1990, 49–51). However, as Japan modernized, the term “shojo” came into common usage; referring specifically to girls, and differentiating young people on the basis of perceived gender differences. This category for teenage girls emerged with the new educational system, and was utilized to justify the emerging state-sanctioned patriarchal hierarchy that privileged boys over girls (Kume 1997, 195–221). Although gender bias obviously predates the Meiji period, it was only in the early twentieth century that the shojo emerged as a distinct entity in need of state (and not merely parental or familial) definition and control. As John Treta writes, the shojo is “a definitive feature of Japanese late-model consumer capitalism” (1996, 280); in other words, it is closely tied to Japan’s modernization. 


 The term shojo refers to a socially conservative gender role that owes its origin to the formative phase of the educational system in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Masuko Honda has noted that the new educational law of 1887 was the major impetus in this regard. Known as the chutogakko rei (the junior high school law), this law sacrificed girls’ education in favor of boys’. Since girls were destined to be future housewives, they supposedly did not need an advanced education (Honda 1990, 178–205). In 1899, a second piece of legislation, the kotogakko rei (the high school law) opened the way for girls’ higher education. While this new law established some schools for girls, most had a limited curriculum, focused on the training of future ryosai kenbo (wise mothers, good wives), and were only accessible to girls of the urban middle and upper classes. These schools did not teach young women how to function independently as adults, but rather inculcated what could be called the shojo ideal—the dream of becoming happy future brides, isolated from the real-life public world outside the family.  

Según Mari Kotani en “Alien Spaces and Alien Bodies in Japanese Women’s Science Fiction”:

 Like “pregnant women”, shojo, too, is a concept that belongs to “the female culture” imagined by patriarchal society. Shojo connotes someone who is neither an adult nor married. She represents the time in a woman’s life before she must succumb to the “woman’s role” assigned to her by the patriarchal system. Within the system, adolescent girls are placed in compounds separate from adult women, mainly in protected spaces like schools. Whereas adult women are constantly restricted by their roles as wives and mothers, adolescence is an independent and more pleasant time for girls. As long as women live in economic stability, they do not have to graduate from shojo status, and even after they have become “women” or “mothers,” they can still hold on to their “shojo interests” (shojo shumi). Although separated from the real world, these spaces constructed by women’s shared interests in shojo continue to exist. 

 Agarrense donde puedan porque vamos a dar un gran salto ahora. Otsuka Eiji es un crítico cultural japonés con un background curiosísimo, interesado en la etnografía para conseguir un trabajo en la publicidad, trabajando como editor de revistas (incluyendo aquella donde el término lolicon surgió), escribiendo sobre todo tipo de temas (desde política a consumo) y después escribiendo mangas y novelas. En 1989 escribió una monografía en torno a la figura “shojo”. No ha sido traducida del japonés, ni completa ni en forma breve, pero breves traducciones de fragmentos salpican artículos sobre el asunto. Por ejemplo:

 ‘The Japanese are no longer producers. Our existence consists solely on the distribution and consumption of “things” brought to us from elsewhere, “things” with which we play. ... These “things” are continually converted into signs without substance, signs such as information, stocks, or land. What name are we to give this life of ours today? The name is shōjo’. 

En otros fragmentos, se puede intuir algo más del argumento tras esto. Al tratar de construir una sociedad de consumo tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, los anunciantes al crear su imaginario para mostrar el gozo que uno debería obtener de la compra de todo tipo de productos y servicios usaron reiteradamente la imagen de la joven, despreocupada, feliz, sin preocupaciones (graves). Es decir, que en cierto sentido, todo consistía en desear o devenir “shojo”.


 Si observan el PV de LinQ ahora, podrán observar porqué resultaba tan interesante para este tema: el conjunto de la clase pierde completamente la cabeza por el almuerzo de la “chica”, incapaces de comprender cómo ese tipo de comida no genera en ella los efectos que ellas padecen, las calorías que dan título a la canción. Para ser una mujer que sea apreciada se ha de tener una buena presentación, lo que en la mayoría de las ocasiones incluye el físico, pero eso entra en conflicto con el deseo de consumir comida, que parece tan nutritiva pero en lugar de ir a tus músculos se dirige a los michelines. ¿Cómo salvar este problema? ¿Cómo resistirse a la tentación de comer un buen plato de fideos, helado (el movimiento del dedo en la coreografía, casi lo mejor del asunto), chocolate, caramelos? ¿Qué hacer para que todo aquello que me gusta no sea “inmoral, ilegal o engorda”? Perseguir a la chica, conseguir su secreto. Aunque al final esto resulte ser una bomba.

 Aquí creo que hay un pequeño problema: “shojo” se presenta como un símbolo. Un símbolo no significa nada si uno no cree en él o está de acuerdo con su significado. Es decir, que presentados con esta alternativa, la podríamos rechazar una vez y terminar con el asunto. Pero es algo mucho más pervasivo, casi tóxico. Quizá, otro de los puntos flacos de esto, estos dos fragmentos de “Metaphors We Live By” de George Lakoff y Mark Johnson, puedan ayudarnos:

 Primarily on the basis of linguistic evidence, we have found that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. And we have found a way to begin to identify in detail just what the metaphors are that structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do. 

(...)

 The essence of metaphor is under-standing and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. It is not that arguments are a subspecies of war. Arguments and wars are different kinds of things—verbal discourse and armed conflict—and the actions performed are different kinds of actions. But ARGUMENT is partially structured, understood, performed, and talked about in terms of WAR. The concept is metaphorically structured, the activity is metaphorically structured, and, consequently, the language is metaphorically structured. 

 Es decir, que enfrentados continuamente a una forma de experimentar la realidad en los términos de otra, podríamos llegar a asimilar y estructurar la realidad a partir de estos términos por ridículos que parezcan. ¿Una bobada? Tal como está presentada aquí, seguramente. Pero que lo que subyace (nada que ver con “shojo”) está presente en el día a día resulta menos fácil de descartar.

 Si tuviera que argumentar, más allá del gusto, por qué debería ser interesante explorar el mundo de las idols japonesas, supongo que mi argumentación sería algo parecido a esto: un montón de gente, en situaciones precarias de trabajo, fácilmente explotables y despedibles pero que aún así presentan a través de su trabajo inmaterial, sus palabras, sus gestos, sus emociones, sus vivencias, los intereses de aquellos que las contratan. Gente embebida en determinados y concretos espacios tecnoculturales, donde la (re)presentación de una misma, se hace a través de redes de comunicación, textos audiovisuales o la propia presencia física. Si eso, no dice algo sobre el presente no se que puede hacerlo. 

Fredric Jameson tiene un artículo tan curioso como aburrido, donde propone dos ejemplos de lo que podría ser un análisis utópico. Uno de los ejemplos es Wal-Mart.

 I consider the Utopian “method” outlined here as neither hermeneutic nor political program, but rather something like the structural inversion of what Foucault, following Nietzsche, called the genealogy. He meant by that to distinguish his own (or perhaps even some more generalized poststructural or postmodern) “method” in sharp contrast from either empirical history or from the evolutionary narratives reconstructed by dealist historians. The genealogy was in effect to be understood as neither chronological nor narrative but rather a logical operation (taking “logic” in a Hegelian sense without being Hegelian about it). Genealogy in other words was meant to lay in place the various logical preconditions for the appearance of a given phenomenon, without in any way implying that they constituted the latter’s causes, let alone the latter’s antecedents or early stages. To be sure, inasmuch as those genealogical preconditions almost always took the form of earlier historical events, misunderstanding—and the assimilation of the new construction to the older historical approaches (chronology, causality, narrative, idealist continuity)—was always inevitable, and could not be warded off by Raymond Roussel’s immortal anecdote of the tourist who claimed to have discovered, under glass in a provincial museum, “the skull of Voltaire as a child.” 


 There is so far no term as useful for the construction of the future as that of genealogy for such a construction of the past; it is certainly not to be called futurology, while utopology will never mean much, I fear. The operation itself, however, consists in a prodigious effort to change the valences on phenomena which so far exist only in our own present; and experimentally to declare positive things which are clearly negative in our own world, to affirm that dystopia is in reality utopia if examined more closely, to isolate specific features in our empirical present so as to read them as components of a different system. This is in fact what we have seen Virno doing when he borrows an enumeration of what in Heidegger are clearly enough meant to be negative and highly critical features of modern society or modern actuality, staging each of these alleged symptoms of degradation as an occasion for celebration and as a promise of what he does not—but what we may—call an alternate Utopian future. 


 This kind of prospective hermeneutic is a political act only in one specific sense: as a contribution to the reawakening of the imagination of possible and alternate futures, a reawakening of that historicity which our system— offering itself as the very end of history—necessarily represses and paralyzes. This is the sense in which utopology revives long dormant parts of the mind, unused organs of political and historical and social imagination which have virtually atrophied for lack of use, muscles of praxis we have long since ceased exercising, revolutionary gestures we have lost the habit of performing, even subliminally. Such a revival of futurity and of the positing of alternate futures is not itself a political program nor even a political practice: but it is hard to see how any durable or effective political action could comeinto being without it. 

 Frederic Jameson "Utopia as Replication" (Valences of the Dialectic pags. 433-434)

 En otro salto abismal, casi tanto que no parece guardar relación alguna con nada de lo anterior, también nos llama particularmente la atención uno de los aspectos que la gente normalmente encuentra particularmente frustrante de la música o la presentación visual, no tanto el aspecto “cutre”, lo idiota, infantil o amateur que puede parecer todo esto.



 Más bien se trata de la repetición de elementos, células, fragmentos. Pero no tengo ni idea de cómo hablar sobre esto. Este fragmento de Carol J. Clover en "The Same Thing—Sort Of", un artículo donde trata de explicar porque sus dos principales intereses académicos (el cine de género y los textos medievales) le parecen “la misma cosa”, puede resultar revelador al respecto:

 It’s seldom medievalists who ask that question. I like to think that me- dievalists get it. Medieval literature too is a world of the formulaic. A world of cycles, in which there is no original, no real or right text, but only variants. A world in which texts can be shortened, lengthened, imitated, disguised, se-queled, prequeled, changed from verse to prose or prose to verse, and so on. A world in which, to fall back on an old but useful distinction, character is more a function of plot than vice versa. A world in which texts were com-monly meant to be heard. A world in which authors’ names are unknown to us not only because they are lost but also because they may not have mattered that much to begin with. Even when we have authors, as in the case of Gottfried or Chrétien, it’s not clear what that means when the texts in ques-tion are another Tristan and another Perceval. 


 The notion of authorship sits no less uneasily in the world of modern genre film, and for much the same reason. This too is a world of retellings— of copies of copies of copies. What are the slasher films of the 70s and 80s but a cycle? Ditto film noir, the western, the backstage musical, and so on. What does it mean that, after the success of Double Indemnity in 1944, so many Hollywood movies were structured as first-person voiceover flash-backs—or restructured as such, in the case of those already in production? How many thousands of times has Hollywood retold the Oedipus story in one guise or another? Or the Ash Lad tale type or its female version, the Cinderella story, playable as comedy, western, courtroom drama, musical, gangster, and so on? And what are the formulaic protocols of classical Hollywood shooting and editing but a technological version of the system of clichés that generate oral literature more broadly? It’s no surprise that auteurism should be so disputed in film studies. No surprise, either, that intellectual property law, so often invoked in the industry, is inadequate to the task. 

 Que, ya en un derroche, podríamos tratar de conectar con ese otro artículo de Otsuka Eiji donde presenta su idea del consumo de la narrativa en el contexto de los “media mixes”, cuando, de repente, se retrotrae al término “sekai” en el kabuki. Lo cual podría ser una completa tontería tomado literalmente, pero como recurso disponible en la tradición literaria, no tanto.



 Y así perdemos los días. Para no ser tachados de ingenuos, en el PV, la metáfora enseña las bragas en 2:32.

1 comentarios:

nullius dijo...

http://www.verkami.com/projects/1292

Archivo del blog