CODA

Feeling Cute, Might Delete Later

[1] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, Reprint edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
[2] Foster et al., “The Politics of the Signifier II.”
[3] “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde,” 816.
[4] “Introduction: The Time of the Child,” in The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness, ed. Jen Boyle and Wan-Chuan Kao (New York: Punctum Books, 2017), 13.
[5] Kao and Boyle, 14.
[6] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2004), 3.
[7] Edelman, 2.
[8] “‘Survival of the Cutest’ Proves Darwin Right,” ScienceDaily, January 21, 2010.
[9] Patrick Barkham, “‘Kill Them, Kill Them, Kill Them’: The Volunteer Army Plotting to Wipe out Britain’s Grey Squirrels,” The Guardian, June 2, 2017, sec. Environment.
[10] Agence France-Presse, “Using Cute Animals in Pop Culture Makes Public Think They’re Not Endangered,” The Guardian, April 13, 2018, sec. Environment.
[11] “Saving or Harming the Planet with Plush Toys?,” Fur Commission USA (blog), accessed June 14, 2018.
[12] Ellis S. Krauss, Thomas P. Rohlen, and Patricia G. Steinhoff, eds., Conflict in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984).
[13] Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 24.
[14] “The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo’s Parapolitics,” Mechademia 5, no. 1 (November 10, 2010): 29.
[15] Ivy, 5.
[16] Cross, The Cute and the Cool, 44.
[17] Dale et al., The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, 27.
[18] Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 2012, 4.
[19] Dale, ‘The Appeal of the Cute Object: Desire, Domestication, and Agency,’ 52.
[20] Anne Allison, “The Cultural Politics of Pokemon Capitalism,” January 1, 2002, 2.
[21] Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 43.
[22] Ngai, “Our Aesthetic Categories,” October 1, 2010, 64.

i.

“When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself. ”
— Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l'horreur [1]

A sticky film of protein forms over hot milk—white milk, sweet milk, a signifier of childhood, and baby schema. Kristeva’s words emphasize the minorness of the lactoderm. Harmless, thin, and pitiful. A fragile, volatile surface entangled with the realm of abject phenomeno-poetics, of the primal impulse to spit out and expel the Other in us.

How far can you stretch the cute, until it is nothing but insignificant?

How cute is a nail paring?

 

ii.

In its apparent immediacy and “dumbness,” cuteness resists, even repels, the seriousness expected from art and the academia. No matter how much thought one puts into analyzing cute things, there remains an impression of an academic hoax.

(Do we really need a paper on cat videos?)

The expression “Cute Studies” captures this contradiction. Do Cute Studies study cuteness, or are the studies themselves cute? The “cute” before the “studies” adjectivizes less than it classifies.

 

iii.

In “The Politics of the Signifier II: A Conversation on the ‘Informe’ and the Abject,” Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh refer to the scatological and “scatterological” impulses in art,[2] the latter suggesting a Bataillean collapse of the structure. Like the formless, the cute is seldom informal. Instead, as Sianne Ngai puts it, it “bears the look of an object not only formed but all too easily de-formed under the pressure of the subject’s feeling or attitude towards it.”[3]

My encyclopedia explores how cuteness’s dark side ties in with these de-forming drives. To which one may add—an eschatological drive toward the end of human history. Enantiodromia: the unconscious opposite of the kinderschema is death; and, of beginnings, the end.

 

iv.

The cute is a valuable, although undervalued, tool for navigating issues of time and scale, critical in topical debates like the Anthropocene—or, as Jen Boyle and Wan-Chao Kao point out, “the study of cuteness, at its heart, is an investigation of the problematics of temporality.”[4]

Cuteness “facilitates a kind of aesthetic time travel backward and forward,”[5] an out-of-jointness in which the Child works as a time-traveling device between the far-off past and the distant future. Our childhood (or even, ancestral) memories are put on a continuum with the discourse of “reproductive futurism,”[6] projecting our species into the future. After all, as Lee Edelman puts it, “the future is kid stuff.”[7] But in the face of our present social, technological, and environmental crises, survival is not a simple thing to do.

Far from removed from reality, the “minor” aesthetic category of cuteness has factored, and continues to factor, into the evolution of humans and nonhumans. Dogs, cats, and other “companion species” have been selectively bred to create cute pets, often with terrible consequences for their health.[8] Other species are killed in favor of cuter ones—like the grey squirrels in England, in favor of the native, and quainter, reds.[9] Studies suggest that the strong presence of cute animals like giraffes, tigers, elephants, or pandas in popular culture creates a ‘virtual population’ in the public’s mind, “actively contributing to the false perception that these animals are not at risk of extinction, and therefore not in need of conservation.”[10] Moreover, plush toys, used by green organizations to raise awareness for environmental issues, often contain non-biodegradable materials like polyester, undermining their causes.[11]

 

v.

Against this backdrop, the global dissemination of kawaii culture may index a broader “crisis of the future that modern capitalist societies such as Japan know,” suggesting that the West is just catching up to the state of political depression in which Japan has lived for several decades.

The image of Japan’s social order as one of harmony and consensus, “effectively solving the problems of advanced industrial societies through group cooperation,”[12] has translated into—to use Lauren Berlant’s formulation—a form of “cruel optimism.” That is, it has become a “relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.”[13] The phenomeno‑poetics of the kawaii negotiate this complex web of impossible or too possible desires regarding gender, nature, society, and techno-science.  

 

vi.

While the kawaii (and the cute in general) is entangled with the systemic violence of capitalism, it does not inevitably submit to it. In “The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo’s Parapolitics” (2010), Marilyn Ivy produces the concept of parapolitics to indicate an alternative form of political engagement which often goes unrecognized but can “produce forms of solidarity resistant to right-wing politics, the justification of war, and neo-nationalist movements in Japan (and elsewhere).”[14] Works like Nara’s, in their re-functioning of the kawaii with an activist sensibility, enact a parapolitics of cuteness that hovers outside the arena of mainstream politics, as an “expressive means to identify… experiences of advanced capitalist everydayness and the mysteries of psychic maturation.”[15]

The “weak-strength” (Brandon LaBelle) of the kawaii, with all its negotiations and contradictions, can potentially resist the subjugation and control of living bodies, human or otherwise, through the joy of connectedness, of losing ourselves in the anarchic (para)politics of play.[16]

 

vii.

Tackling with the cute and the kawaii entails a constant reckoning with their ambiguity. Cuteness thrives in the crevices of dialectic oppositions. Man, woman; adult, child; Western, non-Western; human, nonhuman, sexed, asexual; animate, inanimate; reality, fantasy; art, craft. Sometimes these oppositions are clouded, sometimes reinforced, but always knotty, as cute objects are “both amenable to manipulation by authoritarian structures and available as a tool to critique such institutions.”[17]

Often, cuteness works as an ambiguous image akin to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s rabbit-duck illusion, slipping between two ways of reading it that seem to be mutually exclusive but coexist in the same formation: avant-garde or reactionary, subversive or complacent, engaged or escapist and apathetic, capable of destabilizing conservative patriarchal power or aligned with its chauvinist fantasies.

 

viii.

As Sianne Ngai suggests, “it is not just that cuteness is an aesthetic oriented toward commodities” but that “something about the commodity form itself already seems permeated by its sentimentality.”[18] The contrived charm of the cute, seen in adorable blobjects and smiling mascots begging us to take them home, wraps us in the warm and fuzzy feelings of self-indulgent tenderness and nostalgia, domesticity and romance.

Here, cuteness is arguably at its darkest: embedded in the industrial-complex, working as an affective apparatus for binding humans to a social and economic order that fails the Earth we inhabit and us.

 

ix.

Two impulses coexist in contemporary art and pop culture as far as cuteness is concerned. On the one hand, the impulse to wildify the cute. On the other, the desire to cutify the wild and dangerous.

The first takes something that is considered adorable, harmless or otherwise “prosocial” and infuses it with qualities liable to cause shock, disgust, or discomfort. The trends of guro-kawaii, kimo-kawaii, or busu-kawaii, among others, capture this stretching of the limits of the cute to the disturbing ends of antagonism and aversion. The wildification of cuteness ranges from the “soft” creepiness of Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Kobitodukan to bloodier incarnations like Happy Tree Friends or Gloomy Bear, or even the sexualization of cuteness in lolicon, ero guro, and ero-kawaii.

In turn, the cutification of the wild is “connected to domestication in its broadest sense: the taming of the wild and dangerous”[19] found, for instance, in Japanese alternative idols like Babymetal or BiS, that take music genres characterized by violent imagery and mainstream inaccessibility, like metal or punk, and cutify them with the aesthetics of Japanese idol groups (e.g., Babymetal’s “Gimme Chocolate!!” or BiS’s “Idol Is Dead”). Likewise, the Superflat movement seeks to cutify the tropes of Western modernism and postmodernism. In such cases, “cuteness is raising deep-rooted anxieties towards authenticity and originality in art, and the appropriation of negativity by a sanitizing embrace of ‘cute capitalism.’”[20]

Perhaps contrary to expectations, then, the cutification of the wild—epitomized by Murakami Takashi’s cutification of the atomic bomb in Little Boy—often comes off as more unsettling than the wildification of the cute.

 

x.

In Logique de la Sensation (The Logic of Sensation, 1981), Gilles Deleuze writes that Francis Bacon considered himself to be “cerebrally pessimistic” but “nervously optimistic.”[21] The former relates to his figurative side, his painting the horrors of the world; the latter, to his faith in the intensity of life and sensation.

Bacon, of all artists, is decidedly not cute. But there may still be something to take home in relation to cute aesthetics. In the realm of the spectacle, the benign cute object evokes the violence inherent to the commodity form; as Ngai puts it, “what we love because it submits to us.”[22] But archaic cuteness, the “natural” cute, manifests the love of life—a shameless enjoyment of pretty colors and cuddly characters, of the fluffy, soothing, and playful. Regardless of how minor these may be with respect to the Western art canon, the aww-factor is a violent enough sensation to bleed through the spectacle, to disarticulate our sense of self and the narrative of our desires—to fall open to play, and insist on boundless compassion.

xi.

My encyclopedia maps the relationship between cuteness and negativity through cute filth, cute outbreaks, cute others, and cute scatters. It follows the entanglement of kawaii aesthetics with dirty or disgusting matters, from physical pollution to pollutive formations in mediatic milieus; instances in which alterity is rendered cute, including “abject” human others (women, LGBT+), abhuman (supernatural, alien, monstrous), and nonhuman entities (animals, robots); the collapsing boundaries of the political, legal, institutional, or stylistic, that is, the perceived contagiousness (miasma?) of cute aesthetics. Cuteness shapes and sometimes disrupts the Whole, by enacting a cutification of form and composition.

As pop-cultural artifacts associated with Japan become a central feature of twenty-first century mediatic milieus—reaching from the heights of contemporary fine arts to the netherworlds of mass culture and the “wrong side” of the Internet—the kawaii (as a corner piece of the broader cute aesthetics framework), anime, manga, visual novels, and so on  may be used as privileged analytical tools to explore these liaisons dangereuses in contemporary society at large, as they are very far from being a Japanese predicament.

The shared territories between Japanese and Western art (and societies, for that matter) in today’s globalized world become a fluid common ground that continuously shapes contemporary worldviews.

REFERENCES in “Coda”