Hello! A Self-Introduction...

[Sylvia Chong]

Birgit,

Thanks for the recommendation of the Dale book ... I will get my hands on
it when I have some time to do some non-school reading.  My general
impressions of the Allison book were positive, but mixed ... I was pleased
to see an anthropologist tackling with some of the same issues that come up
for me in literary criticism, but her handling of the theories (i.e. Lacan
on fantasies, Zizek on the ideological fantasy, film theory on the gaze)
seemed forced and clumsy.  However, I think she was on the right track with
the initial ideas.  I had only read two chapters in Permitted & Prohibited
Desires: the one on ero manga, and the one on censorship law, and the
censorship law chapter was much stronger.  I don't have as much of an issue
about her handling of pornography: I think any analysis of pornography's
link to real violence against women is real tricky to pull off without
demonizing sex and sexual representations in general (as MacKinnon and
Dworkin do), and I'm personally not interested in that line of analysis.

I'm curious what you think (in general) about using psychoanalytic theory
on non-Western cultures or texts.  My interest in the Ajase theory is
mainly as a challenge to the the supposed universality of psychoanalysis,
but I still think psychoanalytic ways of thinking about texts are valuable
when dealing with sexuality, or desires/fantasies.  Do you use
psychoanalysis at all in your own work?

Sorry to be so long-winded.  No one in my department is familiar with this
stuff, so I can't even talk about it. I look foward to your reply.

Sylvia Chong

At 12:52 AM +0900 3/14/99, birgit kellner wrote:
>Sylvia Chong wrote:
>
>> If anyone on this list is familiar with Allison's book, I'd be interested
>> in what you think of her use of the Ajase complex (a variant of the Oedipus
>> complex proposed by Kosawa in the 30s).  I've found very few mentions of it
>> anywhere, but it was a fascinating contrast to Freudian psychoanalysis, and
>> I ended up using it to propose a "Japanese" model of sadomasochism.  How
>> Japanese it really is is anyone's guess.  Comments?
>
>The Ajase myth and its connection with Japanese psychoanalytic theories
>are quite extensively discussed in Peter Dale's "Myth of Japanese
>Uniqueness" (Routledge 1986). In addition to the (quite polemically
>phrased) criticism of it that is put forward in this publication, it
>seems to me that the Deleuze/Guattari assault on the Oedipus complex as
>voiced in Anti-oedipus also effectively does away with the Ajase-complex
>in the sense of a bona fide 'genuinely' or 'uniquely' Japanese
>psychological complex. [One of the issues with the Ajase myth is that it
>rests upon a rather creative, not necessarily plausible and definitely
>not unequivocal interpretation of Indian Buddhist texts. But of course
>if one treats both the Oedipus and the Ajase myth as metaphors for
>socio-culturally specific psychological complexes, adherence to
>transmitted scriptures as well as philologically sound interpretation of
>ancient texts is not really an issue.] At least, it seems to me that any
>analysis of Japanese pornography which makes use of the Ajase complex
>has to take into account the way in which the Oedipus complex, as a
>counterpart of which it had originally been posited, is currently
>conceptualized within psychoanalytic theory.
>
>I personally found Allison's book (which I read upon the recommendation
>of Udo Helms on this list - thanks a lot for the reference, by the way)
>rather disappointing, because (a) given her goals, she did not carry out
>precisely that type of anthropological basic research that she would
>have needed to carry out, e.g. interviews with consumers of ero-manga,
>(b) there is no distinction drawn between different types of
>pornographic materials at all and the way in which their design/media
>dynamics affect modes of consumption (i.e. porno videos, ero-manga,
>magazines with pornographic photographs), (c) obvious issues such as a
>possible (or implausible, depending on what stance what takes)
>connection between consumption of pornography and sex-related violence
>are not or only very superficially addressed. Now, the third point of
>criticism could be answered by saying that it was outside the scope of
>her book; fair enough. As for the rest, it seemed to me that her
>methodology was pretty much a post factem theory - the scholar ventures
>out into the field, experiences and observes, writes down, and
>afterwards tries to construct some sort of consistent theory that is
>supposed to methodologically inform their research, but in fact ends up
>merely justifying a convolute that was strung together in a quite
>arbitrary fashion.
>
>I would be happy to hear more, and more profound, comments on this book.
>I'm sorry that mine end up being so vague, but I've already sent the
>book away and can only rely on memory.
>
>--
>birgit kellner
>department for indian philosophy
>hiroshima university