The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo's Parapolitics

In the beginning was, is, the word: fan. What is a fan? I refer to the Oxford English Dictionary, which I often do in such moments: it tells us that fan comes from fanatic (it is surprising how many people don't realize this origin). Whereas the OED does list a 1682 precursor ("The Loyal Phans to abuse"), not until the turn of the twentieth century does fan emerge as an American transformation of fanatic, referring to "a keen and regular supporter of a (professional) sports team" (originally, the OED states, baseball). From there it was not a big transformation for fan to morph into a "keen follower of a specified hobby or amusement" and thence to indicate "an enthusiast for a particular person or thing."¹

Then, we might ask, what is a fanatic? The OED tells us that as an adjective, fanatic meant that which "might result from possession by a deity or demon; frantic, furious"; "Frenzied; mad." Furthermore, the fanatic is "characterized, influenced, or prompted by excessive and mistaken enthusiasm"; she is an "unreasoning enthusiast."²

The excessive, the unreasoning, the enthusiastic, and the mistaken: these, then, are some of the semantic dimensions of the fan that haunt its history. In the fan's singular obsession with a mistaken object—one that somehow inappropriately, and excessively, stands in for healthier, normal object choices—we hear more than a suggestion of the notion of the fetish.³ The affect of the fan—devoted enthusiasm—is here combined with a question mark appended to the object of that (inappropriate) enthusiasm. In its indication of the phenomenon of possession, the OED reveals how affect and object exchange substance; the body of the fanatic is caught up in a frenzy of identification with the object of his devotion, such that the deity takes over the fanatic's very being. The excessiveness of the fan's enthusiasm is bound to result in a mistaken object of affection; conversely, the very mistakenness of the object is tied to the mistaken enthusiasm of the fan. In either or both cases, the social abnormality of the fan-object relation is staged.

Perhaps nowhere more so than in Japan has the fan figure, with its incarnation in the otaku, been pushed to the extremes of mass cultural fascination. The stereotypical otaku figure displays an intense intimacy with massmediated fan objects; a highly developed connoisseurship of animated minutiae; a solitary mode of being, yet accompanied by absorptions into virtual sociality (with forms of convening and movement that bespeak new modes of communication); and something akin to fetishism, in which small objects of desire come to stand in for the larger, more totalized sexual relationships that are designated as normal and good.⁴ We might think of the otaku figure as embodying the core contradiction of the fan figure in general: big passion, little object (often literalized in the otaku's attraction to and passion for minutely specified elements of aesthetic form—the color of an animated figure's hair, for example, or the cat's ears a character displays: elemental provocations of desire, elements of moe, to use the Japanese word).⁵

The otaku-child figure, lost to normal sociality, sexuality, and national–cultural identification, has thus been refunctioned in academic and aesthetic discourses as the most appropriate sign for the strange fate of the Japanese nation-state and its peculiar history: defeated in World War II, bombed atomically (the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was called "Little Boy"), and dominated by the looming, fraternally sinister, yet comforting presence of the United States. To many, the otaku figure has seemed to encapsulate all-too-perfectly the infantilization and impotence of the Japanese nationstate and its mass culture in the wake of Japan's defeat in 1945.⁶ But the otaku figure is merely the most publicly available and capitalized-on object of national-cultural anxieties about youth and national futurity. Primarily gendered male, otaku find their mass-cultural counterparts in the objectified persona of shōjo (young girl), a word indicating a subject position that is primarily female but can be affectively...