The Cultural Career of Coolness: Discourses and Practices of Affect Control in European Antiquity, the United States, and Japan 9780739173169, 9780739173176, 2013023742

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The Cultural Career of Coolness

The Cultural Career of Coolness Discourses and Practices of Affect Control in European Antiquity, the United States, and Japan Edited by Ulla Haselstein, PhD Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, PhD Catrin Gersdorf, PhD Elena Giannoulis, PhD

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2013 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The cultural career of coolness : discourses and practices of affect control in European antiquity, the United States, and Japan / edited by Ulla Haselstein, Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Catrin Gersdorf, and Elena Giannoulis. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-7316-9 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-7317-6 (electronic) 1. Aesthetics--Social aspects. 2. Attitude (Psychology)--Social aspects. 3. Emotions--Social aspects. 4. Europe--Civilization. 5. United States--Civilization. 6. Japan--Civilization. I. Haselstein, Ulla. BH301.A77C85 2013 302.5'4--dc23 2013023742 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction Ulla Haselstein and Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit

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I: “Coolness” in Antiquity 1 Emotionally Challenged, Wisely Detached, or Incredibly Cool? On Stoic Apathy Catherine Newmark 2 Roman Cool Daniel L. Selden

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II: American Cool 3 The Cultural Career of Coolness Ulla Haselstein 4 Kinds of Cool: Emotions and the Rhetoric of NineteenthCentury American Abolitionism Catrin Gersdorf 5 The Mask of Cool in Postwar Jazz and Film Noir Joel Dinerstein 6 Cool Revenge: Kill Bill and the Female Assassin Sophia Frese III: Japanese Cool 7 Is Japan Cool? Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit

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59 61

81 109 127

153 155

v

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Contents

8 “Hot” and “Cold” and “Cool”: Toward a Climatology of Japanese Culture Jens Heise 9 Cold Norms and Warm Hearts: On the Conception of Etiquette Rules in Advice Books from Early Modern and Modern Japan Michael Kinski 10 Iki: A Japanese Concept of Coolness? Elena Giannoulis 11 The Domestication of the Cool Cat Paul Roquet 12 Marketing National and Self Appearances: Cool and Cute in JCulture Aviad E. Raz

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191 215 237

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IV: Global Cool 13 Cool Capitalism at Work Jim McGuigan

261 263

Index

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About the Authors

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Introduction Ulla Haselstein and Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit

Cool is an (American) English word that has been integrated into the vocabulary of numerous languages around the globe. Today it is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles in our postmodern age. But what is the history of the term “cool?” When has coolness come to be associated with certain modes of contemporary self-fashioning? On what grounds do certain nations claim a privilege to be recognized as “cool?” These are some of the questions that served as a starting-point for two research groups at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, which were organized from the disciplinary viewpoints of American Studies and Japanese Studies, respectively. The two groups proceeded with their research independently, but jointly discussed their findings, focusing on coolness as a notion inscribed in the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury American and Japanese semantics and rhetorics of affect control. We did not so much attempt to compare or contrast types of American and Japanese coolness, or analyze the wide-ranging traffic of “cool” phenomena between the two cultures. But we shared the institutional frame of a research cluster “Languages of Emotion” (sponsored by the German Research Foundation DFG) at Freie Universität, and discussed the cultural and psychological concepts each group employed in its respective analysis. As it turned out, the following general assumptions were held in common: 1. Coolness is a metaphorical term for affect control. It is tied in with cultural discourses on the emotions and the norms of their public display, and with gendered cultural practices of subjectivity. 2. In the course of the cultural transformations of modernity, the term acquired new importance as a concept referring to practices of individual, ethnic, and national difference. Depending on cultural context, 1

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Introduction

coolness is described in terms of aesthetic detachment and self-irony, of withdrawal, dissidence, and even latent rebellion. 3. Coolness often carries undertones of ambivalence, since an ethical ideal of self-control and a strategy of performing self-control are inextricably intertwined. As a consequence, the situational adequacy of cool behavior becomes an issue for contending ethical and aesthetic discourses. 4. Coolness as a character trait is portrayed as a personal strength, as an emotional deficit, as an effect of trauma, as a mask for suffering or rage, as precious behavior, or as savvyness. This wide spectrum is significant: cultural texts offer valid insights into contradictions of cultural discourses on affect control. 5. Case studies of American and Japanese cultural productions convincingly show that twentieth-century semantics and rhetorics of coolness hybridize distinct cultural traditions of affect control. To test these assumptions, and to elaborate on them by including topics not covered by the Berlin research groups, we invited international experts from various scholarly backgrounds—from American Studies and Japanese Studies, but also from Classics, Philosophy, and Sociology—to present their work in Berlin and engage in a transdisciplinary dialogue. The results of this endeavor are collected in this volume. While the authors operate within distinct disciplinary frames and deal with different historical manifestations of coolness, they all discuss the structural ambivalence and the transcultural attractiveness of the concept of coolness. As case studies, the chapters do not aspire to create a consistent conceptual narrative to account for coolness across different times and cultures. Rather, they explore the usefulness of the concept in analyzing specific cultural formations and aesthetic forms, and give a vivid impression of the richness of this type of inquiry within the emerging field of affect studies. While concepts frequently overlap at least partly, the different cultural semantics and historical contexts of the analyzed materials always claim center-stage. THE CHAPTERS IN THIS VOLUME The collection starts off with two contributions that deal with notions of affect control in discourses of classical antiquity. The second and third sections are dedicated to critical investigations of coolness in American and Japanese culture. An assessment of contemporary trends of coolness from a sociological point of view provides a conceptual coda. By arranging the chapters in this order, we hope to increase the usefulness of the volume for future research.

Ulla Haselstein and Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit

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The Stoic ideal of apatheia has often been cited as a discourse of affect control that shaped Western thought on affects, and urged the practice of self-discipline as the precondition for a virtuous life. In a concise overview, philosopher Catherine Newmark delineates the rationalist Stoic understanding of emotions as errors of judgment, which must either be repressed by the subject or narrowed down to gentle, luke-warm emotions. Such ideas have been criticized since antiquity as either hypocritical or as indicative of a congenial lack of feeling. Discussing these points, Newmark highlights an understanding of inner autonomy, a “withdrawal into the inner fortress” as the foundation of Stoicism’s favorable reception by modern thinkers, and as a possible conceptual link to African-American coolness as a coping mechanism in situations beyond the individual’s control. Daniel Selden’s wide-ranging chapter “Roman cool” centers its discussion on Horace, Odes 4.7, which for centuries has been praised for its marble-like perfection. Selden first shows that the poem advocates cool equanimity in the face of death through interlocking patterns of repetition and recollection. He then proceeds to show how this attitude of affect control is related in the poem to the duties owed to the state by the Roman citizen. In other words: the aesthetic form of the poem, the existential predicament of human life toward death, and the normative ideals of civic behavior are predicated upon one another—an ideological proposition which may well be at the bottom of the poem’s fame across the ages. The contributors to the section dealing with American versions of coolness discuss their foundation in hybridizations of different traditions. Ulla Haselstein’s survey chapter juxtaposes three distinct historical scenarios. In her analysis of Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd,” she focuses on coolness as a performance of aesthetic detachment and on its negative evaluation as a menacing lack of emotion, which together form the matrix of twentiethcentury ambivalent notions of coolness. The second part of her chapter discusses the well-known mid-twentieth century “birth of the cool,” a fusion of African-American cool, jazz culture, and European bohemian traditions as represented in Kerouac’s cult novel On the Road. In conclusion, she discusses coolness as propagated by the global fashion and entertainment industry against the backdrop of her earlier findings. Catrin Gersdorf addresses the role of coolness in the political and cultural debates over slavery during the antebellum era, and analyzes texts by Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass for their respective understanding of the term cool. While for Lincoln coolness—understood as affect control—was a virtue that epitomized a politician’s required sense of balance (even vis-à-vis a social ill like slavery), in Stowe’s sentimentalist rhetorics coolness amounted to a lack of human compassion and moral feeling. Frederick Douglass’s use of the term partook of both registers. Gersdorf observes a shift in his writings from an abolitionist repudiation of

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Introduction

coolness to a political adaptation of coolness that combines Enlightenment ideals with West African traditions of affect control. Joel Dinerstein investigates American cultural discourses on coolness after the Second World War and compares an African-American cool represented by the jazz musician with a Euro-American working-class cool represented by the male protagonist of film noir. The coolness of the latter is a concept that crossed over from jazz: i.e., as a coping mechanism and a mask, a point Dinerstein elucidates by discussing two American icons of postwar coolness, Miles Davis and Humphrey Bogart. He proposes to read coolness as the “public face of survival,” as a male response to a traumatic loss of belief in modern societies’ promises of individual and social progress. This definition may shed some light on the transnational appeal of coolness without denying the formative power of locally specific cultural histories. Sophia Frese’s chapter on Quentin Tarantino’s cult film Kill Bill offers another facet of the transnational adaptability of images of coolness. Creating a visual style that cross-cuts the Hong Kong martial arts cinema with anime and Italian-American westerns, Kill Bill is the latest example of a wellestablished cinematic tradition (cf. the adaptations of Kurosawa’s Samurai films in American and Italian westerns). The typical revenge-plot of these movies amounts to an anthropological argument, as the emotional turmoil of rage, recklessness and despair, and their temporary control for strategic reasons, appear as the foundation of performances of coolness. Frese’s analysis also demonstrates that these movies’ politics of affect remain conventionally gendered as male, even though Kill Bill features a female avenger. Japan has been associated with “cool” in a number of ways, but speaking of Japan as a “cool” nation tout court is a recent phenomenon. Irmela HijiyaKirschnereit argues that the metaphor is first and foremost linked to a possibly short-lived phenomenon of nation-branding and postmodern lifestyle. Yet, in its dimension of referring to self-discipline and affect control, it is intertwined with general cultural discourses and an aesthetics of cultural identity. The “samurai narrative,” a modern Japanese creation of coolness that reacts to the impact of the Western world in the late nineteenth century, is a case in point. Hijiya-Kirschnereit demonstrates how the notion of coolness can also be employed in analyses of modern Japanese literature, which typically negotiate an awareness of emotional manipulation and of the performativity of rules of conduct. Finally, she addresses a chronology of figurations of cool in pre-war and post-war culture through literary figures such as the dandy and the outlaw, pointing out the extent to which notions of cool are shaped by growing transcultural entanglements. Jens Heise offers a philosophical discussion of metaphors of temperature in cultural theory. Beginning with Lévi-Strauss’s cultural climatology, he carves out features of a “hot” context-free versus a “cold” context-dependent perspective in its implications for concepts of history, for relations to code

Ulla Haselstein and Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit

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and context, and for notions of self. In referring to Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, he probes the applicability of this binary “climatology” to Japanese language and patterns of thinking, which are characterized by a strong context-dependence. Japanese personality patterns as conceptualized by Japanese psychology are then correlated with the “cool” persona as discussed by philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō, and contrasted with Helmut Lethen’s model of the “cool” German persona of the Weimar republic. Heise arrives at the perplexing conclusion that what was described as an anomaly in the case of early twentieth-century Germany is eulogized as the fulfilment of a meaningful personality pattern in its dependence on institutional settings and role patterns in modern Japanese philosophy. In his analysis of etiquette rules in advice books from early modern and modern Japan, Michael Kinski puts to the test some general Western ideas about Confucian morals and manners as empty mechanical behavior of outward conformity that greatly hampers the development of a free and creative mind. Japanese discourses of affect control as exemplified by the “rites” propagated in etiquette books since the Edo period are, after a side-glance at European notions such as ataraxia and apatheia, traced back to Chinese thought and a thoroughly pragmatic Japanese approach. In their descriptions of how to achieve social competence, and a physical discipline linked with the development of an emotional sensitivity, the etiquette books reveal a specific conception of outward form and inner disposition. While shūshin, or cultivating one’s personality, is interpreted as a form of affect management, it is not regarded as conducive to insincerity or unaffected behavior. Rather, self-control and polite behavior are taken as expressions of a “warm heart,” as the antidote to a superficial adherence to rigid formality. Elena Giannoulis discusses the concept of iki, an urban aesthetic ideal as well as a lifestyle or a behavioral code, as a historical variation on coolness. As a counter-cultural behavioral strategy of the increasingly prosperous merchants’ class in distinction to the ruling samurai class in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Japanese cities, iki must be understood as a form of emotional management that leads to a specific mode of communication and provides a ritualized answer to imbalances of power based on social differences. In this context, iki is also about the control of erotic desire defined by the opposition between courtesan and client. In the 1930s, this concept of iki was reformulated by philosopher Kuki Shūzō in order to construct a “genuine” Japanese aesthetic. Kuki developed iki into a form of dandyism that differed from the European tradition both in its lower class origins, and in its applicability to both genders. Paul Roquet reads Yoshiyuki Rie’s texts from the 1980s as an early example of the remapping of emotional investments away from other humans and toward the emotional affordances of artworks, places, and pets. He argues that her work complicates narratives that account for social withdraw-

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Introduction

al in contemporary Japan as a result of infantilization, consumerism, or a breakdown of communication. Yoshiyuki’s work describes lives as lived at a distance from other people, yet “warm” with sensory and affective engagements of other kinds. The divergent emotional investments are interpreted as indicators of what Roquet sees as an emergence of an impersonal aesthetics in Japan at this time; in this context coolness may signal a new trajectory of feeling toward less contingent objects of affection. The contemporary Japanese notion of “cool” is pursued by Aviad Raz, who discusses it in conjunction with “cute” (kawaii) Japan as the dominant trope by which Japan markets itself in a global consumerist world. As popular styles that build on and domesticate foreign (especially American) cultural imagery through daily practices of speaking, eating, dressing, and accessorizing, the two notions form an opposition homologous to such foundational oppositions such as woman/man, childlike/mature, innocent/sophisticated, dependent/self-sufficient, and kitsch/chic. In conclusion, Raz explores the question whether a common denominator of the various facets of Japanese coolness can be seen in a cultural emphasis on external appearances, and hence the maketing of self or nation, rather than on interiority and national character. Finally, in an overview on contemporary transnational cultural trends, sociologist Jim McGuigan addresses the cooptation of disaffection by popular culture as a mainstay of the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. Taking issue with older discourses on cool that celebrated its heritage of bohemian hedonism or African-American survival tactics, he argues that today cool must be regarded as a sign of compliance rather than resistance. Consumer capitalism does not sell goods so much as lifestyles. The ever-growing array of commodities marketed as cool must-haves is complemented by “cool” managerial practices and an ideology of creativity that glosses over the increasingly precarious conditions of work by making flexibility appear cool.

I

“Coolness” in Antiquity

Chapter One

Emotionally Challenged, Wisely Detached, or Incredibly Cool? On Stoic Apathy Catherine Newmark

STOICISM AND COOLNESS: THE PRESENCE OR ABSENCE OF EMOTIONS As general interest in emotions and in the theory thereof has soared, one proposal that has recently attracted a certain amount of interest is to draw parallels between contemporary notions of coolness and the classical philosophical idea of apathy or apatheía developed by the ancient Stoics. It is argued among other things that both coolness and apatheía can be seen as styles of emotional restraint or even as a complete absence of emotionality. 1 Surely the strength of this argument cannot hinge on the perceived presence or absence of emotions alone, but must also consider the reasons for this perceived presence or absence. Emotions may be a natural feature of the human being (as well as of many animals). Yet, when it comes to their expression and moral evaluation in the realm of thought, ethics and politics, there is room for a great deal of nuance. People may be said to have an abundance of emotions or a complete lack thereof; this proposition may be a scientifically accurate psychological description or a circumstantial observation and may concern either the emotions themselves or merely their outward perceptibility. Moreover, to ascribe the presence or absence of emotions to someone may concern emotionality in toto or, as is often the case, merely specific emotions deemed appropriate or inappropriate to a specific situation. (In point of fact, we often speak of “emotions” or “feelings” in general when we mean specific emotions or feelings.) 2 Similarly, the ascription of a presence or an absence of emotions may also refer merely to the strength or 9

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weakness of the emotions felt and/or shown. Furthermore, the possibility to voluntarily show or hide emotions must be considered. And finally, the presence or absence (strength or weakness) of emotions, as well as the showing or hiding of them, may alternatively be the result of a choice or of a psychological or social malfunction. Emotionally restrained persons may be seen as—and/or really be—wonderfully self-controlled, or simply lacking in proper feeling. People may be seen and perhaps described as—or actually take themselves to be—nobly suppressing their unruly emotions, inexplicably hiding their true inner feelings, or pathologically incapable of feeling (the right emotion). Which, if any, of these possibilities applies to Stoic apathy and to modern coolness? This appears to be the pertinent question. In this paper I will critically examine the postulated parallels between Stoicism and coolness by giving a somewhat detailed account of the unruly field of Stoic philosophy, and a less detailed account of the even fuzzier concept of coolness. I will first sketch the philosophical framework of Greek Stoicism, discuss its rationalist and holistic premises, and give a brief overview over its ethical concerns and its passion theory. I will then explain the two notions of apathy and eupathy, which seem to be most relevant to the idea of coolness. In conclusion I will compare these findings with a few modern points of reference to understand what coolness might mean. STOIC PHILOSOPHY AND EMOTION THEORY: TRANSMISSION AND INFLUENCE Stoic philosophy came to be of central importance for emotion theory in occidental thought for a number of reasons. The first and foremost being that no other Western school of philosophy has bestowed the same attention on emotions as classical Stoicism did, or imputed to them the same weight and importance. Stoic ethics are very directly and centrally bound to the problem of emotions. Virtue is defined as the exclusive opposite of páthos and the eradication of the páthe thus becomes the principal duty of ethics. 3 Stoics not only hold emotions to be the crucial phenomenon with which ethics has to deal, but also go on record with a resounding condemnation of the passions that echoes through the centuries. This strong condemnation of the passions leads to the somewhat involuntary consequence that Stoic philosophers are almost boundlessly preoccupied with this central ethical evil, the páthe or passions, and devote much of their writings to enumerating and describing the individual passions. 4 Thus Stoic philosophers introduce the irritating habit of cataloguing emotions and subdividing them into classes, species and subspecies that has been popular in the Western tradition ever since and can still be found in contemporary philosophical work. And in general they display a near obsessive fixation on

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emotions and emotionality, which, albeit negatively, shapes the discourse on feeling for centuries to come. Stoic philosophy is of course not the only philosophical school of antiquity that treats the passions; Aristotle and his followers develop an influential theory of the páthe as well, albeit a much more moderate one. While Stoics take passions to be sicknesses of the soul and demand their eradication, Aristoteleans merely hold them to be morally unreliable natural drives that require moderation through reason. From antiquity onwards and at least until the 18th century, western philosophy takes Aristoteleanism and Stoicism to be the two basic alternative ethical positions regarding emotions; it is, however, the Stoic abhorrence of human emotionality that serves as the most important foil against which every new era of thought in the west attempts to define itself. One reason for the broad and popular success of Stoic thought possibly lies in a measure of uncertainty surrounding it. This is mainly due to a scarcity of sources and to the resulting problems of transmission. From late antiquity onwards authors generally refer to the Stoics or Stoicism as a group or a school, without being very specific about whom they mean. The Stoa was founded as a philosophical school in Athens by Zeno (332–262) in the third century BC; he and his later successor Chrysippos (277–210) are the main authors and most important thinkers of what one generally calls the older Stoa. Their positions are extensively quoted and elaborated on, and with regard to emotion theory it is mainly these two authors that shape Stoic thought. Problematically however, none of their works have survived. What we know about their philosophy, we only know through quotes and references by later authors and especially compilations of late antiquity such as Diogenes Laertius’s Vitae philosophorum. The socalled middle Stoa is Roman, though of Greek origin; its main representatives are Greeks living in Rome in the second and first century BC, such as Panaitios (185–110) and Poseidonios (135–51); their works, too, have survived only in fragmentary form. An important source for this phase is Poseidonios’s famous pupil Cicero (106–43); though he himself is considered an eclectic philosopher rather than an all out Stoic, he does quote and thus transmit a lot of older and middle Stoic philosophy. Finally, the late or imperial Stoa flourished in the first and second century AD and is nearly entirely Roman, with such chief representatives as Seneca (4 BC–65 AD), Epictetus (50–120), and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180). Epictetus’s work, too, only survived indirectly and in fragmentary form, while works by Seneca and Marcus Aurelius are still extant. The late Stoa is more moralistic than philosophic in a strict sense; it relies heavily on the theoretical groundwork of the earlier phases and is mainly preoccupied with elaborating practical applications of Stoic ethics. 5

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The fact that the transmission of Stoic philosophy has been so fragmentary makes a comprehensive historical interpretation of Stoic thought extremely difficult for contemporary scholars. The uncertain character of Stoic heritage may however have contributed to its lasting success and influence in Western thought, insofar as the main philosophical positions could easily be reduced to simple catchwords: passions are sicknesses, one should strive to overcome them, truly wise people have no emotions. In this reduced form Stoic thought not only delivered easy recipes, but also made for a fabulous (negative) foil against which to develop alternative accounts of the emotions. Such reductionist understandings of Stoic thought are very prominent in early modern moral philosophy, which grapples for a century or two with the influence of Neostoicism, the powerful revival of Stoic thought in the 16th century. Based on humanist philology with its many new editions of classical texts, Neostoicism's most important figure is the Dutch jurist Justus Lipsius, who not only edited the works of Seneca but also popularized Stoic philosophy through a number of works of his own. 6 Neostoicism was widely received throughout the 17th century and had a strong influence on philosophers as important as Hobbes, Descartes, and Spinoza. And it provided a negative account of the emotions against which generations of moralists and sensualists would defend a more positive view of feeling. MORAL AUTONOMY, RATIONALIST HOLISM, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL MONISM: STOIC BASICS As a philosophical school that was developed in Hellenistic times, after the decline of Greek democracies, Stoicism, much like Epikureanism, Pyrrhonian Skeptics, and other Hellenistic schools of thought, has a strong tendency toward inwardness, which can be directly related to the decline of democratic political structures and thus civic chances of political influence. Isaiah Berlin has accurately called this the retreat into the “inner fortress.” 7 All Hellenistic philosophies to some extent emphasize an individual's self-sufficient autonomy, without reference to a political or social community, as was central to earlier Greek thought developed in the context of Athenian democracy. Stoic philosophy however takes this to an extreme. One of its main ethical tenets is a theory of happiness that predicates individual felicity on nothing but the subject itself; where other schools stress self-reliance and responsibility for one’s own well-being, Stoic philosophy pushes this doctrine to the point of declaring contempt for all outward circumstances and of asserting that no outward factor can have any relevance whatsoever for individual happiness. This absolutist understanding of inner autonomy is doubtlessly one of the main points that make Stoicism so attractive for late 16th and 17th century thinkers, living in the political and social reality of death, destruction, and

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utter helplessness afflicting individuals in a Europe ravaged by religious wars. A rationalist holism frames Stoic ethics as well as its emotion theory. Nature and the entire cosmos are understood to be rational and good and man is considered a rational being. The ideal for this rational being to strive for is defined by the Stoics, from Zeno to Seneca and beyond, as a life in harmony with nature. 8 For a rational being in a rational universe such a life should, in accordance with nature, necessarily be a rational life. Consequently the Stoics see human happiness as consisting in the true fulfillment of man’s rational nature and they identify this rational behavior with virtue as a whole. Nature, the good, and the rational are thus more or less the same. While in a normative sense Stoics deem every human capable of and called upon to seek complete knowledge of the rational order of nature and the universe, and to act accordingly, that is virtuously, they do however realistically admit that most people do not succeed in this. Consequently, there is also a strongly elitist element in Stoicism: it is generally assumed that only real Stoic philosophers or “Sages” can attain the perfection of knowledge and virtue that is considered to be the fulfillment of human life. Indeed, even while binding moral virtue to intellectual knowledge, the Stoics are nonetheless aware of the fact that human beings in general lack the ability to be perfectly rational or indeed perfectly moral. Stoic virtue consequently becomes a moral achievement that is not attainable by everyone. Only the Stoic sage can be in possession of the adequate knowledge prerequisite to attaining harmony with nature and virtue. 9 This rationalist holism is linked to a monistic theory of the soul. In marked difference to Aristotelianism or Platonism, Stoic philosophy does not postulate parts or upper and lower faculties of the soul, and there is neither a distinction between the rational and the sensual, nor between the cognitive and the voluntative. Aristotelian psychology distinguishes two separate faculties, perception and appetite, and divides each into an upper and a lower. What I perceive with my perceptive or cognitive faculty is, owing to my motive or appetitive faculty, either attractive or repulsive. Whereas that which I know to be good through my rational cognition is something toward which I move by means of my (intellectual) will, what I perceive through my sense perception is something toward (or away from) which I move by means of my sensual appetites. This latter combination of sense perceptions and sensual strivings—neither of which are rational or morally impeccable— is identified as passion or emotion in Aristoteleanism. 10 Stoic philosophy, by contrast, presupposes only one undivided soul lead by reason. 11 Knowledge as well as volition originate in this rational soul and are closely linked. Will or striving, the impulse to action, is considered practically co-extensive with knowledge or perception. Whatever I perceive to be good I also know to be good and I automatically desire and want to attain. For emotion theory this

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monism not only implies that there is hardly a gap between perception and action, but more importantly that there are no irrational, lower (but perfectly respectable) faculties to which emotions could be attributed and whose existence would explain why emotional reactions might not always be reasonable or good. Stoic monism inherently has to think of emotions as part of the rational soul and understand them as phenomena that are cognitive, or at least very closely linked to cognition; no “soft underbelly” of reason for the Stoics, only the hard corset of an entirely rational soul. While the rationalist, holistic framework of Stoicism necessarily has to regard passions as something rational and cognitive, it can, however, consider them erroneous elements of the rational. Passions for the Stoics are errors in judgement. THE PASSIONS AND THEIR MORAL ERROR Epistemologically, Stoic emotion theory must be understood in roughly the following manner. The unordered data that continuously floods our senses must first be ordered by reason to become an actual perception or idea. This first sorting, however, does not yet constitute knowledge. Only when, in a second step, reason has decided whether it agrees or disagrees with this data, does this itself become an idea (as opposed to vague impressions or chimeras, for instance). 12 This approval or disapproval is voluntary and thus falls within our power. This process concerns not only theoretical knowledge, but also practical value judgements. The impression of good or bad, agreeable or disagreeable, useful or harmful, that sense perception usually carries with it is not simply accepted by the Stoic soul, but rather has to be confirmed or negated by reason. In this account then, passions are exactly those approvals of perceptions that are deceived about the value of the perceived thing and which thus constitute errors in judgement. (That passions are judgements is one of the most contested and misunderstood loci classici of Stoic emotion theory, canonized in a fragment transmitted from Chrysipps’ work: “it seems that passions are judgements.”) 13 And what is the error specific to the passions? Here an ethical distinction becomes important, one that the Stoics use to distinguish themselves from other ancient schools of thought, in particular from Aristotelianism: The Stoics do not recognize anything to be unreservedly good except virtue. 14 Everything else commonly held to be important and good in life is deemed by the Stoics beneficial and good in a merely derivative sense; this in truth is according to them indifferent. The same applies to evil. Diogenes Laertius sums this doctrine up in the following manner: “Goods comprise the virtues of prudence, justice, courage, temperance, and the rest; while the opposites of these are evils, namely, folly, injustice, and the rest. Neutral (neither good

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nor evil, that is) are all those things which neither benefit nor harm a man: such as life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, fair fame and noble birth, and their opposites, death, disease, pain, ugliness, weakness, poverty, ignominy, low birth, and the like.” 15 At the furthest the Stoics are prepared to call such things as life or death, commonly held to be of some value, “preferable.” Such a radical distinction between virtue as the only good—and vice as the only evil—and the rest of the universe is, of course, part of the ethics of retreat into inwardness. The Stoics sharply divide between things that are in our power, i.e., virtue, and things that are not, i.e., everything else. The specific error of passions lies exactly in their judgement of such things that are in truth indifferent—that is, everything in the outward world—to be good or evil. The passionate person does not use his reason in the right way, does not understand that all the pleasure and pain flooding his senses is in truth indifferent, but rather erroneously approves these spontaneous sense data evaluations. Passions are extremely wrong in the eyes of the Stoics because their philosophy reduces the notion of the good and of happiness to a virtue that is completely independent of the outer world. In this perspective, passions must necessarily make us unhappy, since they disturb our inner virtue and our rational peace of mind; they are sicknesses of the soul and as such in need of therapy. This therapy, of course, like everything in Stoic thought, has to be rational and cognitive: we should consciously strive to attain complete knowledge of the rational world and eradicate all false judgements, including the passions, from our soul. APATHY: THE ABSENCE OF EMOTION AS ETHICAL IDEAL If we are successful in becoming rational and virtuous, then we come to the point toward which Stoic ethics normatively aims: apathy or apatheía, the complete absence of emotion. The Stoic sage is the person who has reached this point: he makes no false judgements—that is, he judges things only according to their true value or else refrains from passing any judgement. And he has no passions. He is passionless, apathés. 16 Such a doctrine is of course extremely problematic for a number of reasons. For one, there is the aforementioned elitism of having to be completely knowledgeable, that is, a philosopher, to be happy. And even among philosophers it is wholly unclear if anybody can ever be called wise in the Stoic sense. Christian critiques of the Stoa in late antiquity are often indignant at the godlike nature ascribed to the figure of the Stoic sage and doubt that such a man could be found on earth. This doubt was not only formulated in theological terms but also substantiated by empirical observations. It appears that in antiquity it was equally difficult as it is today to find a person who actually displays no emotions, even among Stoics.

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The empirical doubt entertained by critiques of the Stoa and its ideal figure of the emotionless Sage is nicely illustrated by an anecdote recounted in Aulus Gellius’s Noctes Attica from the 2nd century AD. While sailing the Ionic sea between Corfu and Brindisi a ship inadvertently got caught up in a heavy storm that made all the passengers fear for their lives. Among them there happened to be a famous teacher of Stoic philosophy. All the passengers, Aulus Gellius among them, took the opportunity to observe for themselves whether or not a live and present Stoic sage would actually behave in the calm, cool, and collected way that Stoic philosophy seems to teach. Unsurprisingly, he did not. Granted, the Stoic neither sighed nor screamed as many of the other passengers did. But one could easily see that his face looked just as pale and frightened as that of the others. 17 (What appears rather amusing about this episode is the obvious desire of the attending passengers, even while fearing for their own lives, to unmask the Stoic philosopher as a fraud.) The resolution to the problem as given by Aulus Gellius introduces an element of Stoic emotion theory that one finds mainly in later Stoic thought, especially in Seneca, namely the theory of the propatheíai or pre-emotions. After the storm has abated, the Stoic philosopher explains by quoting extensively from Epictetus’s Dialogues (and, coincidentally, committing these to posterity) that there is a clear difference between involuntary affective impulses and full-fledged emotions. The former, the so-called preemotions or propatheíai, are automatically joined to sense perception; thus even the sage will be shocked by storm, lightning, and thunder. But unlike less ethically complete individuals he does not approve with his rational judgement these involuntary evaluations inherent in sense perception. He instead correctly determines that a storm is not actually an evil, but merely a non-preferable outer circumstance. So, once his raw physical reaction has abated, he is back to being his calm, collected self, convinced that the outer world can hold no true evils. If this theory nicely explains how the apathetic Stoic sage can cringe at something frightening, it reveals a major problem inasmuch as it narrows down to the extreme the understanding of what emotions are. By this definition everything that is spontaneous, sensitive, sensual in our emotional reaction to the world would become mere propatheía, while proper emotion would only be the rationally clear state that comes after the fact. Emotion, in this very narrow sense, would amount to no more than my better self judging (after the event) whether my spontaneous emotional reaction was actually correct or not. (In most cases it is of course not.) Such a theory of emotion loses sight of a considerable part of the phenomenon it is trying to explain. If nothing we commonly understand to be an emotion can still be called an emotion, then it is of course easy to have no emotions. 18

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AN ALTERNATIVE ETHICAL IDEAL: EUPATHY Such impasses must have been part of the philosophical debate in the Stoa itself. And it is questionable to what extent apatheía was held up as a normative ideal in the history of Stoic thought. In any case, one also finds in Stoic emotion theory and ethics an alternative ideal, attributed to the wise man only: the eupatheíai or good emotions. The doctrine of the eupatheíai is unfortunately, poorly transmitted. What we find in Diogenes Laertius is the following: there are three main eupatheíai, joy, caution, and willing, which are defined as the reasonable versions of the páthe. 19 They are based on reasonable and correct approvals of true propositions. The eupatheíai are thus judgements, just like normal passions, but unlike those they are not false or erroneous judgements. They are definitely not emotions in the muchreviled Stoic sense of the word. But what are they then? Diogenes Laertius gives a detailed list of the eupatheíai subsumed under the three main ones: “Thus under wishing they bring well-wishing or benevolence, friendliness, respect, affection; under caution, reverence and modesty; under joy, delight, mirth, cheerfulness.” 20 While the scarcity of sources makes it difficult to get a clear picture of the doctrine of the eupatheíai, definitions and lists such as the aforementioned suggest that the difference between bad and good emotions, páthe and eupatheíai, does not lie so much in their technical psychological definition; rather, eupatheíai should probably best be understood as the result of narrowing down the emotional field. They seem to encompass a very restricted group of emotions or feelings, namely what one might in modern psychological parlance call low arousal positive emotions: sweet and nice feelings, nothing too intense or aggressive, no desires, nothing negative, just universal goodwill, joy, and cheerfulness. In light of this part of Stoic doctrine it would appear that what really worries Stoics are not emotions per se, but intense, uncontrolled, libidinous, and aggressive emotions. Their ideal of wisdom, apathy, and peace of the soul would not then necessarily imply a complete suppression of emotions, but rather a cultivation of the self toward exclusively quiet and gentle emotions that are easily compatible with reason. IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION: STOIC PHILOSOPHY AND COOLNESS This brief and somewhat technical overview of the salient points in Stoic philosophy of emotion has shown not only some of the basic problems and ambiguities of classical Stoic philosophy, but also its quintessentially rationalist character. Such rationalism is an important factor when questioning just how far parallels between this philosophy and contemporary coolness make sense.

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Were the Stoics cool? While the term cool has for a long time now become an unspecific catchword in youth jargon and slang that offers a general positive connotation of all sorts of things, there is, as far as I can see, also a general consensus in cultural analyses of the last few years concerning its origin in African-American culture. The fundamental study of Dick Pountain and David Robins traces it back to African-American slaves who were forced to hide their anger and contempt in order to survive. They thereby developed a culture of emotional restraint that served as a protection but also as a form of passive resistance. The authors not only situate the genesis of African-American coolness in a specific historical and political situation, but go even further in tracing the origins of this emotional habitus as far back as the West-African cultural concept of itutu, translated as cool by Robert Farris Thompson. 21 Other authors stress not so much 19th century slave culture as 20th century African-American music culture in general and 1940s jazz culture in particular, as the original scene of cool ideals and cool behavior. 22 Additionally, there are plenty of cultural analyses that find instances of coolness or cool behavior in other times and cultures that do not use the term cool, and are thus not directly related to the U.S.-American genealogy of contemporary coolness, but that nonetheless describe related behaviors and cultural styles. 23 It is in this vein that many authors trace back and connect modern coolness to the more classical English usage of the term cool as a metaphoric description of emotions, temper, or temperament. (This usage, of course, derives from the classical doctrine of the four humors that connects bodily fluids and their qualities with the health, temperament, and basic emotional constitution of the human being.) Calm, cool, and collected people (ones who are “cool as a cucumber”) are not cool in a jazzy sense; rather, they are emotionally controlled. In this older sense, where coolness denotes merely the metaphoric temperature of emotions, a general control of emotions or sheer rationality, Stoic philosophers are obviously cool; they are rational, controlled, and show few, if any, emotions. This is certainly a point of contact between Stoicism and coolness, but not necessarily modern coolness. A second instance in this case for Stoic coolness can be seen in the Stoic tendency to retreat into their inner fortress. The Stoic withdrawal into inwardness, while not indicating coolness in the sense of the contemporary youth culture, could nonetheless be seen as related to the coolness affected by African-American slaves. Both seem to be techniques of emotional distancing and of withdrawal into inner fortitude, autarky, and self-empowerment vis-à-vis an awful outward political or social situation that is beyond our control. Now, for the case against Stoic coolness: If the Stoa maintains an ideal of coolness and distance in apathy, there is also eupathy, arguably even more central to their doctrine, that is much more warm and fuzzy. The eupatheíai,

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those gentle and sweet emotions that appear rather esoteric and new-agey are certainly no mark of coolness in whatever sense one takes the term. Eupathy as a form and technique of cultivating moderate emotions and of toning down the stronger feelings is certainly not cool. If anything, it must be called lukewarm. Tepidness, for its part, is a charge often directed at Stoics, especially in the debates surrounding Neostoicism in the 17th and 18th century, where the extreme rationalism of the Stoics and their pretence to have all emotionality under control is no longer met with approval, but with incredulousness. Stoics are taken to be either hypocrites or rationalist bores, incapable of sharing in the sensual sweetness of life. As Queen Christina of Sweden, a 17th century moralist, succinctly puts it: “This much praised tranquility of the philosophers (sc. the Stoic philosophers) is a bland and insipid state.” 24 The argument against apathy and eupathy in these early modern discourses is as much aesthetic as it is moral. Stoics are not credited as having an aesthetically or morally interesting or useful cultivation of emotions, but rather are seen as boring intellectuals who substitute their incapacity for proper feeling with a rationalist ideal. The philosopher is suspected of being a bore with a crippled emotionality, as opposed to an aesthete with a distinct emotional style that involves emotion control. In these vastly different perspectives on emotional coolness the distinctions with which I opened this essay come to bear: Why are emotions absent? Are they being controlled through a moral effort or are they simply not extant in sufficient strength? If Stoics—or philosophers in general—are not nobly suppressing their emotions in favor of an ethical ideal, but rather are rationalist nerds who lack the ability to feel, enjoy, and cultivate physical and emotional pleasures, then they are not incredibly cool but simply emotionally challenged. Much depends on the interpretation of the reason for emotional restraint, be it in 17th century polemics or in modern attributions of coolness. It is, I believe, an essential ingredient of the contemporary, positive, concept of coolness that it always implies the presence of emotions that are not shown, and never simply the absence or lack of emotions. The aesthetic suspicions raised against Stoics in the 17th century can even today be taken to be sufficiently convincing in making the case against Stoic—or indeed all overly rationalist—coolness. They also bear interesting resemblances to some contemporary sources of conflict between genders, where traditional forms of masculinity are often no longer understood to be the result of a positive and even heroic rational control—the old-fashioned ideal of maleness, incarnated by the John Waynes of this world—but instead the product of a deplorable lack of sentiment and sensibility, or at least an inability to show feeling, which is not admirable but rather in need of psychotherapy. Masculinity might actually be, to close this essay on one last positive note in the case for Stoic coolness, one of the most important points

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of contact between Stoicism and coolness: nobody ever heard of a female Stoic, and coolness is definitely a guy-thing. NOTES 1. Cf. e.g. Andreas Urs Sommer, “Coolness. Zur Geschichte der Distanz,” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, I, no. 1 (2007): 30–44. Annette Geiger, Gerald Schröder and Änne Söll, eds. Coolness. Zur Ästhetik einer kulturellen Strategie und Attitüde. (Bielefeld: transcript, 2010). 2. I do not use the terms “emotion” and “feeling” in any systematic sense; while contemporary philosophy and psychology may use these terms to differentiate between different phenomena, for the historian of thought both terms are at different times—and in different contexts until today—used as general terms for the emotional sphere and can thus in an unspecific sense be used as such. 3. On a brief terminological note: The Stoics often use the Aristotelian term “páthos (tês psychês),” i.e., passion of the soul, or its Latin translations “passio (animae)” and “affectus/ affectio (animae)” for emotions or feelings in general. They also introduce new terms that correspond to their derogatory view of the passions, namely the Greek “nósema” or the Latin “morbus (animae),” i.e., sickness of the soul; a slightly milder version is the Latin “perturbatio (animae),” i.e., perturbation of the soul, that can be found in Cicero: “Quoniam, quae Graeci páthe vocant, nobis perturbationes appellari magis placet quam morbos.[. . .]” (“What the Greek call páthe, I prefer to call perturbations than sicknesses.”) Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes: IV, 10. 4. Cicero already comments somewhat ironically on this habit: “Quia Chrsysippos et Stoici cum de animi perturbationibus disputant, magnam partem in his partiendis et definiendis occupati sunt.” (“Chrysippus and the Stoics, when they discuss the perturbations of the mind, make great part of their debate to consist in definitions and distinctions.”) Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes: IV, 9. 5. Typically writing treatises on topics such as the good life in general or the usage of specific emotions; cf. e.g. Seneca, De ira (On anger), De vita beata (On the happy life), De tranquillitate animi (On the tranquillity of mind). 6. Cf. e.g. Justus Lipsius, De constantia (1584) and Manuductio ad Stoicam Philosophiam (1604). 7. Or “inner citadel.” Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969): 135–141. 8. “Beata est ergo vita conveniens naturae suae.” (“Consequently a life that is lead according to its nature is a happy life.”) Seneca: De vita beata: III, 3. Cf. Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum: VII, 87. 9. Cf. Barbara Guckes, “Stoische Ethik-eine Einführung,” in Zur Ethik der älteren Stoa, ed. Barbara Guckes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004): 20. 10. Cf. Aristoteles, De anima: Book 2 and 3. 11. Also known sometimes as the hegemonikón. 12. This is called synkatathésis and indicates an essential ability of the hegemonikón. Cf. Guckes, Stoische Ethik: 14–15. 13. They are thus judgements, as Chrysippos’s classical and much discussed definition, tansmitted by Diogenes Laertius, has it: “it would seem that páthe are judgements (kríseis), according to what Chrysipp says in his work On the passions.” Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum: VII, 111. 14. Cf. Guckes, Stoische Ethik: 19 and Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum: VII, 101103. 15. Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum: VII, 102–105. 16. “They (the Stoics) say that the wise man is passionless (apathés).” Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum: VII, 117. 17. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae: XIX, I (1–12).

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18. A case of “false labelling” (“Etikettenschwindel”), as Christoph Halbig points out somewhat drastically. Christoph Halbig, “Die stoische Affektenlehre,” in Zur Ethik der älteren Stoa, ed. Barbara Guckes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2004): 59. 19. Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum: VII, 115–116. 20. Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum: VII, 115–116. 21. Dick Pountain and David Robins, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). 22. Lewis MacAdams, Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avantgarde (New York: Free Press, 2001). Cf. Joel Dinerstein in this volume. 23. Cf. e.g. Helmut Lethen, Verhaltenslehren der Kälte. Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). 24. Cette tranquillité tant vantée des philosophes est un état fade et insipide. Christine Reine de Suède, L’ouvrage du loisir: 362.

WORKS CITED Berlin, Isaiah. “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In Four Essays on Liberty, 118–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Christine of Sweden (Christine, Reine de Suède). L’ouvrage du loisir. In Apologies. Edited by Jean-François de Raymond. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1994. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Tusculanae disputationes: Gespräche in Tusculum. Edited by Olof Gigon. München: Heimeran Verlag, 1951. Geiger, Annette, Schröder, Gerald, and Söll, Änne, eds. Coolness: Zur Ästhetik einer kulturellen Strategie und Attitüde. Bielefeld: transcript, 2010. Gellius, Aulus (Aulu-Gelle). Noctes Atticae. In Les nuits Attiques. Edited by Yvette Julien. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998. Guckes, Barbara, ed. Zur Ethik der älteren Stoa. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004. Guckes, Barbara. “Stoische Ethik—eine Einführung.” In Zur Ethik der älteren Stoa. Edited by Barbara Guckes, 7–29. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004. Halbig, Christoph. “Die stoische Affektenlehre.” In Zur Ethik der älteren Stoa. Edited by Barbara Guckes, 30–68. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004. Lethen, Helmut. Verhaltenslehren der Kälte: Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. Laertius, Diogenes. Vitae philosophorum. Vol. I, Libri I-X, ed. Miroslav Marcovich. Stuttgart and Leipzig: Teubner, 1999. MacAdams, Lewis. Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop and the American Avantgarde. New York: Free Press, 2001. Pountain, Dick and Robins, David. Cool Rules. Anatomy of an Attitude. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. De vita beata. In De vita beata, De otio, De tranquillitate animi, De brevitate vitae, Ad Polybium de conso-latione, Ad Helvam Matrem de consolatione, ed. Manfred Rosenbach. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971. Sommer, Andreas Urs. “Coolness: Zur Geschichte der Distanz.” Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, I, no. 1 (2007): 30–44. Vogt, Katja Maria. “Die stoische Theorie der Emotionen.” In Zur Ethik der älteren Stoa. Edited by Barbara Guckes, 69–93. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004.

Chapter Two

Roman Cool Daniel L. Selden

I For Romans of the Late Republic and Early Empire “coolness”—in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s turn of phrase—proved “good to think with.” 1 Philologically, the record appears relatively straightforward, though perhaps only because, as post-Petrarchan readers, we have come to take for granted the astonishing figural leap that M. Tullius Cicero apparently first made—late in the evolution of Latin as a literary language—from frigus as a meteorological condition to frigus as a trait of character. 2 This analogon, which exchanges an outward condition for an inward state, appears somewhat earlier in Greek letters, in connection with the synonym psukhrós. In the prologue to Sophoklēs’ Antigonē (441 BCE), for example, Ismēnē—in a recognizably Sophistic gesture 3—sets her sister’s “warm heart” over and against the “coldness” of others: θερμὴν ἐπὶ ψυχροῖσι καρδίαν ἔχεις. 4 As a hierarchized opposition, thermós/psukhrós constitutes one pair in a series of valorized antitheses that collectively make up the architecture of the play, and through whose conflictual engagement the tragedy unfolds: 5 self/other, life/death, male/female, state/family, exogamy/incest, written/unwritten, and so forth. To the extent, moreover, that psukhrós constitutes not only the opposite but also the absence of thermós, it has served—at least since Anaxímandros (c. 550 BCE), 6 writing in the Īrānian satrapy of Yaunā 7—as one of the mainstays of what Martin Heidegger promoted as “Western” metaphysics. 8 Sophoklēs finds his carnivalesque counterpart in Xenophōn’s Kūrou Paideía (c. 350 BCE), 9 where—after he has brought the work of the Īrānian empire to completion—Kūros and “those of his friends who showed that they were most desirous of strengthening his rule (αὔξειν) and of honoring him 23

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most loyally” 10 banter symposiastically about what sort of woman would make a cold-blooded—or: hard-hearted—king a reasonable match. Then Khrūsántās said: “By the gods, could you tell us what sort of wife would suit a cold king (ψυχρῷ βασιλεῖ)?” At this, of course, Kūros burst out laughing, as did the others as well. “I envy you for this, Kūros,” said Hustáspās, while they were all still laughing, “far more than any other thing in your entire kingdom.” “For what?” Kūros said. “That even though you are cold (καὶ ψυχρὸς ὤν), you still have the ability to provide a laugh.” 11 Given the parodic binaries that organize the immediately preceding conversation—Kūros proposes, for example, that a hook-nosed man should marry a snub-nosed woman; or a convex groom, a concave wife; and so forth— Khrūsántās, snaring Kūros within the logic of his own binary oppositions, implies that a suitable mate for a “cold king” would be a fervid woman (psukhrós/[thermē]), with implicit reference to Kūros himself. In so doing, however, Khrūsántās also puns on the king’s potential impotence, aridity, feebleness, indifference, and even death—all connotations of psukhrós 12— whence the uproarious laughter, which effectively functions less to magnify Kūros than to “decrown” his royal personage. 13 Despite Khrūsántās’ subversive thrust here, 14 which responds in part to Kūros patently hierarchical “fighting and feasting” (Pārsī: ‫ )ﺭﺯﻡ ﻭ ﺑﺰﻡ‬15— “Kūros did not assign his guests their seats at random, but seated on his left the one for whom he had the highest regard; . . . the one who was second in his esteem, he seated on his right, the third again on the left, the fourth on the right, and so on” [8.4.3]—within the context of the Kūrou Paideía as a whole, however, the king’s carnivalesque decrowning remains subject to the overriding logic of the binary opposition (high/low), which thereby leaves Xenophōn’s narrative open to a potentially endless series of figurative substitutions. Hence the point of Hustáspās intervention, which effectively forestalls this movement, and sublates the hierarchized antitheses by reconceptualizing them as dialectical: Kūros constitutes both a cold fish and—concomitantly—a purveyor of laughter, where the king’s “two faces” do not stand in a relation of cause and effect (i.e., Kūros’ frigidity does not itself occasion the laughter in which he also partakes), but rather each facet constitutes the negation of the other. As such, Kūros himself personifies the very principle of σπουδαιογέλοιον, the dominant rhetorical mode of Xenophōn’s narration. 16 II Writers of the Late Republic and Early Empire, partly under the impress of their fraught emulation (zēlōsis) of the Greeks, 17 developed the discourse of frigiditas extensively in new directions. In particular, “coolness” came to

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constitute one of the principal tropes by which Augustan writers came to define the relationship of the Roman citizen (civis) to the political agency of the Roman state (res). 18 On thinks here immediately of Aeneas’ chill reply to Dido: pro re pauca loquar—suppressing his own desires (Italiam non sponte sequor), fate leaves him no choice but to break off with Dido so that he can lead the remnant of the Trojan people toward their resettlement in Rome. 19 Preeminent, moreover, in this regard is Q. Horatius Flaccus’s Carmina 4.7, published in 13 BCE, which A. E. Housman, while lecturing at Cambridge, described as “the most beautiful poem in ancient literature.” 20 Certainly, no small part of the ode’s effect lies in the contrast between the sheer serenity, the marble-like perfection of its language, 21 and Horatius’s overriding preoccupation with death and “la nihilité de l’humaine condition.” 22 However much admired, the poem has nonetheless received comparatively scant close critical attention. 23 Hence, when Alessandro Barchiesi sums up the lyric as “a gloomy transformation of Spring into Death,” 24 he does so at the expense of a figural unfolding that turns out to be considerably more complex. In fact, Horatius plots two main tangents in the ode—one cyclical [1–12 (1)], the other linear [17–27 (2)] 25—which encounter one another at a single point midway through the poem. 1. Repetitio For the occasion of C. 4.7, Horatius chose an Arkhilokhian meter, whose Iambic verses cut, as Kallímakhos of Kurēnē noted, with something of “the dog’s pungent bile and the wasp’s sharp sting” (εἴλκυσε δὲ δριμύν τε χόλον κυνὸς ὀξύ τε κέντρον | σφηκός). 26 Hence, the first three quatrains of the ode portray the cycle of seasons as a series of trenchant upheavals. 27 Diffugere niues, redeunt iam gramina campis arboribus comae; mutat terra uices . . . Frigora mitescunt zephyris, ver proterit aestas interitura simul pomifer autumnus fruges effuderit, et mox bruma 28 recurrit iners.

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The snows have scattered, grass now returns to the meadows and foliage to the trees; the earth transfigures its changes . . . | The cold grows mild with the western winds; summer tramples down spring, itself due to perish the moment that apple-bearing autumn has poured forth its fruits, and soon shiftless winter recurs. 29

“Time,” Antiphōn the Sophist wrote, “is not a reality (hupotupōsis), but a concept (noēma), or a measure (metron).” 30 Hence, the Horatian year pro-

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gresses haltingly, not only as the earth “alters [its] changes” (mutat vices), but also, within the confines of the annual round, as each incumbent season kills its predecessor off. Just as the western winds give rout to winter, 31 so summer—in the agōn for seasonal supremacy—“crushes” (proterit) spring, 32 only in due turn “to be destroyed” (interitura) by autumn, upon whose heels winter “rushes back in” (recurrit; cf. currus, “war chariot”), thereby rendering immobile (iners) what Horatius elsewhere calls the “wintry year” (hibernus annus). 33 Far from internally motivated, then, progress occurs here as the supervenience of some outside force; each season comprises a distinctive mode of alteration (vicis) and, without transition (simul), one mode violently supplants the other, as if, metonymically conceived (nives, gramina, comae, fruges), the seasons constituted a series of disparate figural systems, or, if you will, epistemic breaks. 34 Like the series of five ages in Hēsíodos’ Works and Days, Horatius’s seasons remain sui generis, each unlike the other (οὐδὲν ὁμοῖον [145]), without, however, conforming to any overarching narrative of decline. 35 As a simulacrum of temporal unfolding, moreover, Horatius’s immutable mutability anticipates the distinction that Søren Kierkegaard developed in Gjentagelse (1843) to explain the relationship of Parmenídēs to Hērákleitos, namely recollection versus repetition. “Recollection and repetition are the same movement,” Kierkegaard proposed, “except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.” 36 Of the two, moreover, Kierkegaard observed, “recollection has the great advantage that it begins with loss. The reason it is safe and secure is that it has nothing to lose.” 37 In contradistinction, therefore, to the Ciceronian topos ubi sunt? and its Augustan afterlife, 38 the discontinuities of the Horatian year dispense with such nostalgia—be it for the past or for a stable referent in the present—by recollecting the seasons forward as a series of disjointed repetitions. Although the poet himself stands in an imperfective now (mitescunt, mutat), in this case his eyes are fixed steadfastly upon the future (proterit, effuderit), which circles round so that what initially was past (diffugēre nives) returns chiastically as that which is immediately at hand—bruma recurrit: “next | winter recurs.” In this connection, Kierkegaard remarks, “The dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has been—otherwise it could not be repeated—but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new.” 39 As such, repetition brings the old together with the new in a movement that—like experience (Erfahrung)—faces forward, thereby perpetually deferring meaning to an always henceforth postponed point of coherence in the future. 40 That this is in part the burden of the poem is clear from the Soracte Ode (C. 1.9), where a mountainscape immobilized with snow and ice (vides ut alta stet nive candidum | Soracte . . . geluque | flumina constiterint acuto) melts on the imper-

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ative dissolve frigus! into a vibrant spring scene in the city, 41 filled with young lovers in a flurry of motion: nunc et Campus et areae lenesque sub noctem susurri composita repetantur hora, nunc et latentis proditor intumo gratus puellae risus ab angulo pignusque dereptum lacerto aut digite male pertinaci.

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Now let the Campus and the squares and gentle whispers be sought over again (repetantur) under the night at the appointed hour. Now too pleasant from the most hidden nook is the betraying laughter of the hiding girl and the pledge ripped from her arms or her finger barely resisting. The artifice of time becomes a prospect on eternity, 42 as the ode holds winter and spring, rural and urban, stasis and motion, old and new suspended in a balance, 43 where each rereading of the ode enacts the repetition it describes. Critics who chastise the lyric for its apparent lack of unity—so Eduard Fraenkel: “the season at the end of the ode is not compatible with the beginning” 44—fail to heed the central directive upon which the poem thematically turns: “Flee from seeking that which will be” (quid sit futurum cras fuge quaerere [13]), a forthright statement of the open-ended nature of the future, which not only accounts for the divagations of the ever-shifting present (vides . . . dissolve . . . deprome . . . permittite . . . nunc . . . nunc . . .), but also calls upon readers to anticipate the unexpected. 45 The supreme paradox of the Soracte Ode, 46 then, is that it actually freezes this fluidity so that it remains available each time that the reader “revisits” the composition (repetit), which entails circling back from spring to snow-capped mountains and rivers frozen with ice, through the rhetorical device of enargeia: vides ut stet—a statement rather than a question. In Ode 4.7 (Diffugere niues), Horatius makes this movement even more explicit; the later, revisionary composition progresses from redeunt (“return” [1]), planted prominently in the center of the first line of the lyric, to recurrit (“hasten back” [12]), positioned squarely in the middle of the third quatrain’s final verse. There is thus a clear complicity between the linguistic disposition of the ode 47—including the Simonidean, Lucretian, and Catullan subtexts that Horatius reworks 48—and the seasonal patterning that Horatius describes: what C. 4.7 names, and enacts, is the recurrence of a recurrence, which is to say pure repetition, and what the mature Horatius sees is that, paradoxically, that which perpetually returns is frigus iners, “shiftless cold.” Accordingly, in the serial extirpation of the seasons, as well as in their terminus ad quem, the Horatian year, as Richard Wagner later put it, remains todgeweiht, consecrated to death (cf. interitura [10]). 49 In fact, throughout Horatius’s work,

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cold constitutes that which stands most proximate to man’s demise: morietur frigore. 50 Thus, except for a bit of Hellenistic rococo 51—“Grace, with Nymphs and her twin sisters, dares | unclothed to lead the dance (choros)” [5–6], a couplet in which the Greek mythemes function as a second-order signifying system that concomitantly vivifies and displaces reference to the season, 52 pointing up the facticity of the poem’s “cold pastoral” 53—the landscape of C. 4.7, in contrast to the Soracte Ode, remains stark and entirely unpeopled. Far from a garden awaiting human habitation, 54 nature—as Horatius represents it here—already possesses the cold pall of the reified world that turns Torquatus on his death into a thing , as William Wordsworth puts it, “rolled round in earth’s diurnal course | With rocks and stones and trees.” 55 Extinct, then, Torquatus remains concomitantly immortal. On the one hand, as Jacques Lacan has stressed, man can conceive of his own death only by virtue of the signifier: “It is in the signifier and insofar as the subject articulates a signifying chain that man comes up against the fact that he may disappear from the chain of what he is.” 56 At the same time, however, the signifier places the subject on the far side of death; insofar as “the signifier already considers man dead, in essence it renders him immortal.” 57 As such, both death and immortality constitute predicaments that remain integrally bound up with language. It is in this connection, then, that Horatius personifies the annual round, to whose seasons he not only attributes human qualities and traits (comae, almum, rapit, interitura, recurrit, etc.), but, in an unexpected prosopopoiea, the year turns to address the reader directly, 58 admonishing him not to expect that which does not perish: “‘Hope not for immortal things,’ warn the year and the hour which snatches the life-giving day” (inmortalia ne speres, monet annus et almum | quae repit hora diem [7–8]). The hypogram that underlies the seasonal quatrains of C. 4.7, then, turns out to be the Roman epitaph—or, if you will, the Levantine-Mediterranean memorial inscription— one of whose generic markers is the apostrophe to the passer-by. 59 Nihil sumus et fuimus mortales. respice lector in nihil ab nichilo quam cito recidimus. Nothing we are, mortals we were. Consider, reader, how quickly we relapse from nothing into nothing. 60

As creatures devoted to death (mortales), we arise out of nothing (nihil), only to return, as the Roman epitaph would have it, back into nothing (nihil). Rather than memorialize the deceased, the inscription recollects his death forward into the future where—with each new passer-by—his identity literally falls out over and over again from the signifying chain, at the same time that the epitaph renders his disembodied “voice” immortal. The personification of the annual round in C. 4.7 projects this epitaphic pattern onto nature; each season flourishes briefly, amidst life’s agōn for supremacy, only to

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perish (interitura) between the chillness (nives) of one winter and the frigidity (inertia) of the next. Epitomizing the poem in what now passes for the opinio communis, Paul Shorey comments, “The seasons come and go . . . ; but man goes, and comes again no more.” 61 In this, however, Shorey has Horatius say precisely the opposite of the implications that the poet draws from his observation of the year (immotalia ne speres), thereby inverting the lesson of “the hour (hora) that snatches the life-giving day [7–8].” Moreover, to the extent that hour, day, season, and year—that is, every unit of time that affects the individual 62—all figure for Horatius within the realm of the Symbolic, they have everything to do with what Lacan terms “the great fantasy of natura mater,” 63 which he distinguishes altogether from the Real. For Lacan, the Real is “the domain of whatever subsists outside symbolization;” 64 in other words, extending Immanuel Kant’s formulation of the Ding an sich, 65 the Real, as Lacan defines it, constitutes “the-beyond-of-the-signified,” 66 which therefore remains a priori outside the grasp of human knowledge. 67 For Horatius, therefore, the seasons constitute nothing but a set of rhetorical conceits. Since they do not, therefore, form a continuum, what interests him above all is their serial discontinuity. Like Pindar’s ἐπάμεροι (“creatures of a day”), 68 existence for Horatius, only takes on meaning by virtue of the finite limit set by death, so that—anticipating Martin Heidegger—the predicament of the human subject resides precisely in his “being-for-death” (Sein zum Tode): “With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being (Seinkönnen).” 69 Sigmund Freud, by way of the fort/da—the game that he observed his grandson play in the absence of the child’s mother—helps to clarify the connection that Horatius draws in C. 4.7 between death and repetition. 70 In Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920), Freud explains: The manifestations of a compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang) exhibit in a high degree the characteristics of a drive (Trieb). In the case of children’s play, we see that children repeat an unpleasurable experience for the reason that they can master a powerful impression far more thoroughly by being active than they could by merely experiencing it passively. Each fresh repetition seems to strengthen the mastery of which they are in search. 71

This observation allows Freud in due course to postulate the “death drive” (Todestrieb), whose task is to lead organic life back into an inanimate state. If, as Horatius never ceases to remind us, “the aim of all life is death” 72— moriture Delli . . . omnes eodem cogimur, “Dellius born to die: we are all gathered to the same place” (C. 2.3)—then the repetition of demise forward into the future both in C. 4.7, as well as throughout Horatius’s work, constitutes an attempt to master in advance the subject’s death. Performatively, then, the Horatian ode approaches what Michel de Montaigne called an essais, a “try-out,”an exercise in self-mastery and self-control, aimed at instilling perfect equanimity—a certain “cool and collectedness,” if you will—

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within the subject. Que Philosopher C’est Apprendre à Mourir: after quoting three of Horatius’s odes, 73 Montaigne adds: The goal (but) of our career is death; it is the necessary object of our aim (nostre visée) . . . Let us learn to bear it with a firm foot, and to combat it. And to begin to strip it of its greatest advantage against us, let us take a path entirely contrary to the usual one. Let us rid it of its strangeness, keep company with it (pratiquons le), get accustomed to it. Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death. At every moment let us represent it to our imagination and in all aspects (en tous visages). At the stumbling of a horse, the fall of a tile, the slightest pin prick, let us promptly chew this over (remacher soudain): “Well, what if it were death itself?” and thereupon let us tense ourselves and exert (efforçons) ourselves. 74

T. Lucretius Carus famously remarked: nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum. 75 Writing to Florus, Horatius notes that he studied philosophy in Athens, 76 whence the illustrious 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica explains: “The aim of Horace’s philosophy was to ‘be master of oneself,’ to retain the ‘mens aequa’ in all circumstances, . . . to make the most of life, and to contemplate its inevitable end without anxiety. Self-reliance and resignation are the lessons which he constantly inculcates. His philosophy is thus a mode of practical Epicureanism combined with other elements which have more affinity with Stoicism.” 77 Roman philosophy, Pierre Hadot has shown, consisted largely of a set of spiritual exercises that aimed not simply to inform the student, but primarily to reform him. A municipal institution supported by the Imperial regime, the goal was to cultivate a specific, constant attitude toward life, by way of the rational comprehension of the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos, thereby instilling so far as possible unshakability of mind (ataraxia). 78 One would be hard-pressed to find a better description of the Horatian ode, whose cool perfection constitutes the formal correlate of the mens aequa that C. 4.7, in particular, enjoins thematically (monet) through the exercise of repetition in contemplation of our own demise. 2. Recollectio In situating man’s decease as part of the “natural” order, Horatius tempers death within the strict numbers of the Arkhilokhian verse. In fact, the poem’s prosody articulates the thematics of the composition as a whole; just as death strikes us down unexpectedly (occidit [21]), such that we fall (decidimus [14]) into oblivion (Lethaea [27]), with no prospect of restitution (non te restituet [23–24]), so each couplet in the Arkhilokhian, a hexameter followed by a hemiepes, effectively breaks off the easy flow of dactyls in the middle of the line, untimely and in advance of their completion, as if the line had

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suddenly frozen or come abruptly to a halt (frixit). 79 In effect, then, the admonition in v. 7 constitutes a thematic projection of the meter of the ode: – u u – u u –| u u – u u – u u – u –uu–uu u/ IMMORTALIA NE SPERES, monet annus et almum quae rapit hora diem.

On the one hand, the hemiepes here pulls the line up short, snatching it away (rapit); 80 on the other, the enjambment lends a sense of cohesion to the couplet in its entirety, whose broad assonance (a/e/u) and soft alliteration (m/ n/r/p) “translate” the poem, as Gian Biagio Conte puts it, “into a song of serenity,” where “wisdom, tranquility, balance, mastery of oneself, the aurea mediocritas of the man who can avoid all excess and adapt himself to every fortune, . . . transform apprehension and bitterness into acceptance of destiny.” 81 As such, the Arkhilokhian prosody not only functions as an agent of control but also ties the subject of the first part of the ode (quatrains 1–3) directly to that of the second (quatrains 5–7), insofar as both, formally and thematically, have to do with the abruptness of all endings—insofar as they are absolute 82—and the consequent discontinuities of human demise. Quatrain 4 constitutes a turning point or bridge between these passages. Against the background of the phases of the moon—which, unlike the seasons, monthly wanes from incandescence into darkness, only to wax to its initial luminosity again 83—Horatius plots a second trajectory, a one-way passage of no return to a place where man’s shade lingers immemorious, without recuperative potential. As mortals, we remain destined not for the recurrent spring that the Soracte Ode appears to hold out in the end, but rather for perpetual inertia, which Horatius links directly to memorialization. 84 Just as in the first portion of the poem Horatius propels the ode through repetition, so its latter part unfolds through recollection: Damna tamen celeres reparant caelestia lunae: nos ubi decidimus quo pater 85 Aeneas, quo diues Tullus et Ancus, puluis et umbra sumus

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....... Cum semel occideris et de te splendida Minos fecerit arbitria, non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te restituet pietas.

22

Although swift moons replenish their celestial losses: we, when we have waned toward father Aeneas, toward rich (dives) Tullus and Ancus, we are dust and shade . . . 21 | When once your sun has set, 86 and Minos has fashioned his resplendent judgment on you, not your ancestry (genus), Torquatus,

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Daniel L. Selden not your eloquence (facundia), not your dutifulness (pietas) will restore you to your former state.

Contrasts between “death in the natural order (a reversible event) and death in the human sphere (an irreversible event)” 87 are a commonplace of ancient Levantine-Mediterranean literature, at least as early as the Sumerian and Akkadian wisdom texts and the poetry of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. 88 In ‫אִיּוֹב‬, for example, which Horatius may well have read in Greek (Ίώβ) as part of literary legacy of Alexandria, 89 a mortal man (βροτός) born of woman is proverbially short-lived (ὀλιγόβιος): “He falls, just as a flower that has bloomed. He vanishes like a shadow and does not endure (οὐ μὴ στῇ).” 90 In this thought couplet, the analogy to nature precedes the reduction of mankind to “shadow,” exactly as it does in Horatius’s ode. Resurrection, moreover, was not part of the Old Israelite hope; ’Iyyôb, in fact, speaks of consignment to a “netherworld” (‫שְׁאוֹל‬/ᾅδης—both proverbially cold), 91 which the Septuagint describes as particularly bleak: “A man that has died is utterly gone; and when a mortal has fallen [decidit], he is no more. Certainly, a man who has lain down [in death] shall not rise up again [restituet].” 92 Epíkouros of Athens, who first taught on the coast of Anatolia at Mutilēnē and Lámpsakos, picks up this very theme: 93 “One is born only once, to be born twice is not granted; for eternity (aiōn) we must no longer be.” 94 Hence, the Mišnāh (200 CE) comments, “These are the ones who have no portion in the world to come (‫)לָעוֹלָם הַבָּה‬: he who says, the resurrection of the dead is a teaching that does not derive from the Tôrāh, or the Tôrāh does not come from heaven; and an Epicurean (‫)אַפִּיקוֹרוֹס‬.” 95 In recollecting such LevantineMediterranean commonplaces, Horatius’s interest does not lie simply in rehandling “overworked topics” in new and technically more perfect ways. 96 To the contrary, as the mention of the early Roman kings suggests, the final quatrains of C. 4.7 allude to a set of socio-political values that—despite our ultimate annihilation (puluis et umbra sumus), which locates the reader in the suspended inertia of death—recollect the vocation of the ideal Roman citizen vis-à-vis his duties to the state. In this, the poem recenters its initial macrocosmic vision of the l’humaine condition onto what Georges Dumézil referred to more specifically as idées romaines 97—that is, those concepts, rituals, and beliefs that distinguished the Roman ideological order both from other Indo-European societies, as well as from other Levantine-Mediterranean cultures that Rome had come to or would soon absorb. 98 In this context, Horatius introduces five key terms that sum up the values of the vir bonus: pater, divitiae, genus, facundia, pietas—patriarchy, wealth, breeding, eloquence, and duty. The primary role of the patres was to ensure the perpetuation of the Roman commonweal (res) in two complementary ways: first, through the maintenance of fecundity (divitiae), and second, through the reproduction of the social body (genus). 99 In the public arena, moreover,

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access to power—marked by the rungs of the cursus honorum 100—depended largely upon success in public speaking (facundia), 101 while the overriding value in all pursuits—and under Augustus there was, if anything, a narrowing distinction between the public and the private sphere 102—remained strict devotion to the state (pietas). 103 Together, as Émile Benveniste has shown, these values formed an integrated system. 104 In fact, the only significant piece of the picture that Horatius appears to have omitted here is soldiering (militia), a task incumbent upon all able-bodied male citizens, ideologically related to divitiae and genus, insofar as the charge of the miles was to safeguard the welfare of the community, 105 both by protecting its resources and by enlarging its sphere of agricultural as well as human reproduction. In the roster of the dead, however, that fills the last four quatrains of Horatius’s ode, militia remains staunchly implicit; according to T. Livius— the first installments of whose highly popular Ab urbe condita appeared a decade before Horatius published C. 4.7—Aeneas, Tullus, and even the peaceable Ancus were all fierce warriors (ferox), who did much both to defend and to expand the state. 106 Likewise, the troika of Greek hērōes, Hippolytus, Theseus, and Pirithoüs—figures of cultic veneration, 107 who, in a final touch of Hellenistic rococo, 108 bring the composition to a close— stand as melancholic recollections of former military prowess, now impotent in death. infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum liberat Hippolytum nec Lethaea valet Theseus abrumpere caro vincula Pirithoö.

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From the dark netherworld, not even Diana frees Hippolytus, nor does Theseus have the power to break the Lethaean shackles from his beloved Pirithoüs.

Concomitantly, the ode’s addressee, Torquatus [v. 23], recollects the military achievements of the great patrician line of statesmen, generals, and dictatores, all Manlii Torquati, 109 who included not only thirteen consuls between 347 and 65 BCE, but also the censor of 231 BCE. 110 The latter—who admonished the Senate, “what else is there to do but to remind you, that you ought to adhere to the custom handed down from your ancestors, a precedent indispensable to military discipline?” 111—Romans subsequently remembered for his unflinching adherence to the mos maiorum. 112 One further ideological tenet lodges in the final quatrain. Diana has not only military, but also matrimonial associations, 113 in essence another reproductive function, as Susan Treggiari has made clear: “The Romans conventionally regarded marriage as an institution designed for the production of legitimate children. A wife was given to a man for the purpose of getting children, liberorum quaerandorum causa. It is this purpose which defines the

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woman as a legal wife and the union as a marriage.” 114 However, what the triad Hippolytus—Theseus—Pirithoüs leaves conspicuously out of account is Phaedra, in Roman terms Theseus’ iusta coniunx, 115 who desired (amavit) her stepson Hippolytus, a chaste devotee of Diana, 116 while his father Theseus was off on exploits with his pal Pirithoüs, whom Horatius elsewhere calls a “lecher” (amatorem). 117 The couples thus stand symmetrically disposed, but remain thematically inverse: heterosexual/homosexual, pudicum/ impudicum. 118 Only Phaedra’s infandum malum, which L. Annaeus Seneca (d. 65 CE) claims she “hid behind the marriage torch,” 119 does Horatius withhold from representation, thereby repeating Phaedra’s own illocutionary dilemma. 120 So Seneca’s tragedy: Sed ora coeptis transitum verbis negant; vis magna vocem mittit et maior tenet. vos testor omnis, caelites, hoc quod volo me nolle . . . Curae leves locuntur, ingentes stupent.

605

But my lips refuse passage to the words I seek to frame; some strong power urges me to speak, and a stronger holds me back. I call all of you to witness, you heavenly powers, that what I wish I do not wish . . . 607 | Light troubles speak; the weighty are struck dumb. 121

Despite his reputation as an erotic writer, 122 no woman appears in what the most recent editor of Carmina IV still advocates as “the most perfect poem in the Latin language.” 123 Much like Lavinia in the second half of the Aeneis, it was the vocation of every matrona casta to avoid coming into public speech. 124 For wanton women, M. Tullius Cicero and C. Valerius Catullus had resorted to invective, 125 as M. Valerius Martialis would as well, but Horatius makes the choice that Phaedra failed to elect; he consigns her to discursive silence, in effect a damnatio memoriae that simultaneously forestalls further recollection and complies with mainstream Augustan morals. 126 In enumerating what will fail to restore men from the dead at the same time that he recollects the great Roman leaders and Greek heroes who remain in the “lower gloom” (infernis tenebris) as dust and shadow, Horatius presents the dominant ideology of Republican and Early Imperial Rome as a body of abstract principles that both transcend the vicissitudes of life and remain operative beyond the grave; for Horatius, therefore, these principles have no history, be it cyclical or linear; they simply endure. The major Roman writers of the Augustan era, including T. Livius, Sextus Propertius, and P. Vergilius Maro, all preserve, across the sweeping political changes of the “Roman Revolution,” 127 the main outlines of the idéologie tripartite that proto-Indo-European society bequeathed to its descendants, comprised of three distinct social orders: 128 the first concerned with regnum, the second

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with res militaris, and the third with fructus or fecunditas. 129 This accounts for the sequence of Roman leaders that Horatius recollects in the fourth quatrain of the ode: Aeneas—Tullus—Ancus, each of whom corresponds to one of the three principal Indo-European functions in the order of prestige. Aeneas stands at the head here as pater patriae, a position elsewhere alternately accorded Romulus, of whom the African P. Annius Florus (first century CE) writes “he was the first founder of the city and the empire . . . and, as king, himself created the Roman people.” 130 Tullus, in turn, “founded all military discipline and the art of war,” while Ancus opened up the port of Ostia “foreseeing that it would form as it were the maritime store-house of the capital and would receive the wealth and supplies of the whole world.” 131 On the plane of ideology, this triad and sequence remained immutable, and each has its equivalent in other Indo-European societies. In the Nordic world, for example, we find the same triad of functions linked not to historical personages as at Rome, but rather to mythic figures—Óðinn-Þórr-Freyr 132— just as classical Indic society projected the idéologie tripartite into the ideal order of the castes (varṇa): brahmán-kṣattriya-vaiśya. 133 The same pattern shows up in Old Irish law, where distraint required sureties (ráth) from the three principal components of society—so the earliest of the fénechas: “Ailill mac Mata from the princes (flathi), Celtchar mac Uthechair from the warriors (láthi gale), Blai the Hospitalier from the freemen (féni).” 134 The question that Horatius poses here accordingly transcends in its import the particularities of Rome: what hold or value do such enduring civic principles retain once both their auctores and most vigilant custodians are dead (frigidi)? 135 An imperial Roman epitaph asks, “What good does it do you now to have lived punctiliously (stricte) for so many years?” 136 The Lēthaea vincula that bind Pirithoüs not only stand as metonyms for the fetters of Haidēs; more literally, they constitute the bonds of oblivion (lēthē) as well. So Lacan stresses not only that death constitutes that which is unknowable (inconnaissable) par excellence—hence his equation of death with the Real; 137 of two possibilities, he argues, one must be the case: “Either death does not exist, there is something that survives, but the question of whether the dead know that they are dead remains unresolved; or, there is nothing beyond death and it is certain that the dead, in this case, do not know this (ils ne le savent pas).” 138 Prima facie, Horatius would seem to underscore the first of these two possibilities, insofar as there ostensibly remains something of Hippolytus and Pirithoüs left for Diana and Theseus to rescue from the “dusky throng” (nigro gregi). 139 These, however, are Greek mythemes, that is, for Romans literary fictions. 140 The undecidability, moreover, accurately represents the existential predicament that Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet—citing Q. Septimius Florens Tertullianus—called with notable precision “a je ne sais quoi which has no name in any language.” 141 Thus, the possibility that something of the dead survives which knows that it is dead

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amounts to an imaginative invention that allows Horatius’s ode to circle back around and encapsulate itself. In its representation of cyclical versus linear time, C. 4.7 does not, as Gregson Davis has suggested, “flag the radical incompatibility between two ontological domains.” 142 To the contrary, the poem stages their mutual compatibility. In Horatius’s portrayal, the disjoint cycle of seasons, the self-repairing moon, and the irreversibility of death are all propositions that find their place in Roman ideology, as they would not, say, within Egyptian thought which conceptualized death as in effect “repeating life.” 143 Where Horatius appropriates foreign matter, he does so for the purposes of idées romaines—the Odes show little interest in cultural difference per se—so that when the entire poem presents itself as a defamiliarization of Roman notions of nature, time, and death, this must be regarded as a self-reflexive demystification of primary categories of experience that lends C. 4.7 the sense of cool distance and detachment from its subject matter that every reader feels. 3. Temperantia “[S]erious political commitment,” Gordon Williams stressed, “is the leading characteristic of Augustan poetry,” 144 and indeed many of Horace’s odes respond directly to the energizing pressures of the Augustan regime. 145 Even in C. 4.2, where Horatius dismisses himself as a petty poet who fashions overwrought compositions in the Kallimakhian style (operosa parvus | carmina fingo [31–32]), he delivers an indirect encomium to Augustus, deflected onto the voice of Iullus Antonius [v. 2], and projected into the future: 146 concines maiore poeta plectro Caesarem, quando trahet feroces per sacrum clivum merita decorus fronde Sygambros, quo nihil maius meliusve terris fata donavere bonique divi nec dabunt, quamvis redeant in aurum tempora priscum.

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40

You, poet, shall sing (concines) Caesar with a greater quill, when he will lead in train the wild Sygambri up the sacred slope, fitted with the well-earned garland—him whom nothing greater, nothing better have the Fates and gracious gods bestowed upon the world, nor will bestow, even though the times should return (redeant) to ancient gold [32–40]

By contrast, C. 4.7 eschews all political posturing to focus instead on situating Caesar’s achievements—a recurrent theme across Book IV of the

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Odes 147—within the larger inexorabilities of time and death, and the idées romaines that constitute the bedrock of “Augustan ideology.” Caesar’s absence from the poem is therefore emblematic, but no less political in its intent. Thus, Ellen Oliensis has noted how even such seemingly apolitical compositions as C. 4.7 embody in their measured form the dialectic between outward expansion and inner limitation that fueled Augustan imperialist designs. Her remarks bear quotation at some length: The characteristic expression of Horace’s poetic power is not expansion but condensation, not conquest but restraint. Filtering its subject matter through its form, Horatian lyric matches the aesthetics of containment with an ethics of contentment that would seem to leave little room for imperial ambitions. If the indefinitely extendable hexametric form suits the Jovian and Virgilian theme of “empire without end” (imperium sine fine, Virg. Aen. 1.279), Horatian lyric, with its multiple articulations and recurrent arrests, tends to concentrate instead on fines. And yet it is just this emphasis on limit that lends Horatian lyric an “imperial” character. The peculiar energy that charges Horace’s lyric fines both derives from and feeds a larger cultural preoccupation with the masterful articulation of space. Roma’s imperial expansion was bound up with the proper regard for boundaries; the triumphator who ascended the Capitoline hill would find within the temple not only Jupiter but the deified boundary-stone, Terminus. Beyond the sacred pomerium that encircled the city of Rome . . . the army on campaign methodically constructed its own simulacrum of settled order in the shape of the Roman military camp, a masterpiece of formalist invention to which Polybius devoted a good-sized chapter of his history. The land-surveyors who designed and gave form not only to these camps but to towns, colonies, and provinces, were masters of the traditional and ritualized art of ordered space. Under Augustus, the labor of measuring land intensified. While the surveyors parceled out tracts within new colonies, imperial geographers mapped the orbis terrarum, including much unconquered territory, as a set of Roman provinces. Divide et impera. The labor of the finitores supported the ethos of imperium sine fine; the ideal of terminal stability enabled the outward displacement of the termini of both city and empire. 148

However brilliant Oliensis’ remarks, it is nonetheless possible to push matters a bit further. Terminus was not the only deity who shared the Capitoline temple with Jupiter Optimus Maximus; beside Jove also stood Iuventas, yielding the minor triad Iuventas—Jupiter—Terminus, 149 which Indo-Īrānian parallels indicate belongs to the oldest stratum of Indo-European thought. While Terminus guaranteed “the peace, interior as well as exterior, which results from the respect for limits,” Iuventas protected the Roman iuvenes, that is, “the germinative portion of the population which insured its indefinite renewal.” 150 Only in his relation to Iuventas, Dumézil stressed, does Terminus’ place within the logic of Roman sovereignty become clear, as one complementary facet of Jovine power:

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Daniel L. Selden With Mitra, there existed two “minor sovereigns,” Aryaman and Bhaga, the former the patron deity of the “Arya”; the latter, “share” personified, patron of the fair apportionment of goods in society. Zoroastrian transpositions guarantee the antiquity of this structure, the meaning of which is clear: the great sovereign god has two adjuncts, one of whom cares for the persons constituting society, the other for the goods that they share. Such was probably the value, before amplifications, of the notions of iuventas and terminus. The former, personified, controls the entry of men into society and protects them while they are of the age most important to the state . . . ; the latter, personified or not, protects or defines the division of property, not so much movables (chiefly herds), as in the case of Bhaga, but rather property based on land. . . . Granting an extension beyond the limits of their definition, Iuventas and Terminus would then have signified Rome’s youth and stability. 151

This makes it possible to see how the formal containment of the Horatian ode and its strict adherence to poetic measure dovetail with the injunction carpe diem! and the ideal of aurea mediocritas, Horatius’s most constant themes. 152 Whether this takes the form of contentment with the georgic plenty (copia) that the Italic countryside provides (C. 1.7), or the pursuit of a budding girl, ripe for the picking, set against the backdrop of the wilderness of Roman Africa (C. 1.23) there remains a consistent tension throughout Horatius’s Odes between fecundity and borderlines (iuventas | terminus), as if one were the dialectical precondition for the other. So in C. 4.7, where death constitutes the limit, Horatius asks: “Who knows whether the gods will add tomorrow’s time to the sum of today? All that you give to your own companionable soul (amico animo) will escape the greedy hands of your heir” (v. 19-20). There are two drives that cross here which, in company with Freud, we might call Eros and Thanatos. 153 The coolness of the Horatian ode is thus, in the end, an ideological endeavor to balance Tullus against Ancus, Iuventas against Terminus, Eros against Thanatos, under the auctoritas of Augustus’ reign. 154 In this respect, Odes 4.7 begs one further question: does ideology, as Horatius understood it, operate in the mode of recollection or does it impress itself as a process of repetition? A line that Horatius addressed to the aptly named Censorinus epitomizes the issue: dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori—“The Muse prohibits a man worthy of praise from dying,” where mori constitutes a trope for forgetting (C. 4.8.28). The line recalls the ideal of praise poetry as Glaũkos’ articulates it to Sarpēdōn in the Iliás, when Sarpēdōn questions why the Lúkians should fight on the side of Ílion against the Akhaians, who are not precisely their own foes: Glaũkos, why are we two awarded special honors, with pride of place, the finest cuts of meat, our wine cups always full in Lúkia, where all our people look on us as gods? Why do we possess so much fine property, by the river Xanthus, beside its banks, rich vineyards and wheat-bearing plough land? It’s

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so that we will stand in the Lúkian front ranks and meet head on the blazing fires of battle, so that then some well-armed Lúkian will say, “They’re not unworthy, those men who rule Lúkia, those kings of ours. It’s true they eat plump sheep and drink the best sweet wines—but they are strong, fine men, who fight in Lycians’ front ranks.” My friend, supposing you and I, escaping this battle, would be able to live forever, ageless and immortal, then neither would I myself fight among the foremost, nor would I urge you into the fray where men win glory (kũdos). But now, the spirits of death stand close about us by the thousands, and no mortal can elude them, or turn away; therefore let us go forward so that we may grasp glory (eũkhos) from another, or another grasp it from us. (12.322–28)

To put this more succinctly: epic heroes fight so that they can become in turn the subjects of epic song. 155 As Bruce Lincoln explains: “In a universe where impersonal matter endured forever but the personal self was extinguished at death, the most which could survive of that self was a rumor, a reputation. For this, the person craving immortality—a condition proper only to the gods and antithetical to human existence—was totally reliant on poets and poetry.” 156 The passage in Iliás 12 remains exemplary, therefore, not only because it serves to memorialize Glaũkos and Sarpēdōn, but also because it concomitantly encodes ideological propositions central to archaic Greek society: social norms, political relations, existential values, and so forth—the so-called “heroic code”—which the poem passes down along with the agents’ names. 157 As Cicero makes clear in his speech Pro A. Licinio Archia poeta, the objective here is imitation: All these things would lie buried in darkness, if the light of literature were not upon them. How many images (imagines) of the bravest men, carefully elaborated, have both the Greek and Latin writers bequeathed to us, not merely for us to look at but also for our imitation (imitandum). And I, always keeping them before my eyes as examples in the administration of the republic, have endeavored to model my mind and views by continually thinking of those excellent men. 158

The recollective engine here is thus two-fold. Poetry not only provides imagines that immortalize great men—in the case of Horatius’s C. 4.7, Aeneas, Tullus, and Ancus. Concomitantly, it provides ideologically charged exemplars for imitation in the future. In this way poetry plays a central role in social reproduction insofar as it not only sets the standards for future generations, but also rehearses the unwritten codes that structure society—be it in Archaic Greece or in Rome under the rule of Augustus. 159 The mention of Aeneas, alongside the third and fourth Roman kings, both memorializes the individuals and recollects the Indo-European tripartite functionality that their historical traditions uphold. Insofar, however, as it is into the future that Horatius’s lyrics recollect these

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values, this simultaneously renders the carmen (“magical charm”) an agency of repetition. The poet makes this clear in the triumphant signature (sphragís) with which he closed the first, three-book edition of the Odes (23 BCE): Exegi monumentum aere perennius regalique situ pyramidum altius. I have perfected a monument more lasting than bronze and higher than the royal rubble of the pyramids [C. 3.30.1–2].

On the one hand, this confirms the “sepulchral” character of Horatius’s Odes, whose epitaphic subtexts we have already examined—as the poet puts it: impudens Orcum moror (C. 3.27.50). In this connection, however, situ, in the second line, presents the reader with a crux. On the one hand, the word can mean a “structure” or “installation,” that is, a building that remains standing and intact. On the other, it commonly denotes “rubble,”“dilapidation,” or “decay.”Since a case can and has been made for either rendering, it remains unclear whether the Horatian ode is a construction or a deconstruction; what remains most important is to see that it is both. To generalize accordingly, what poetry produces is its own tradition, which—as a process of perennial discursive (de)construction—gathers enduring momentum, regardless of how deftly the poet handles the matter of the song. 160 For Horatius, therefore, it is important that perennius retain the echo of annus, insofar as the passing year serves, within the Odes, as the recurrent measure of what Norman O. Brown called “life against death.” 161 Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni, nec pietas moram rugis et instanti senectae adferet indomitaeque morti.

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Alas, Postumus, Postumus, the swift years glide by; nor will dutifulness (pietas) give pause to wrinkles, to imminent old age, or untamable death. (C. 2.14)

To the extent, then, that Horatius’s poetry itself endures longer than even Postumus (the “latest born”), Horatius claims a kind of immortality for his Odes, not through the continuity of their reception (a recollective enterprise), but, in Kierkegaardian fashion avant la lettre, through a process of repetition that projects his writing into the future’s future. Hence the ritual imagery with which he stakes his claim: Non omnis moriar multaque pars mei uitabit Libitinam; usque ego postera crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita uirgine Pontifex.

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I shall not all die, and a great part of me shall escape Libitina [i.e., the goddess of corpses]. Perpetually, I shall grow anew (recens) by the glorious enterprise 162 of posterity, as long as the Pontifex shall climb the Capitol with the silent virgin. (C. 3.30).

Steele Commager comments that Horatius rests “[a]ssured that his fame will last as long as Rome itself,” 163 but that is not quite what the poet says. The elegist Albius Tibullus, Horatius’s near contemporary, was the first writer to call Rome aeterna urbs (2.5.23), whose survival was thought to depend, in turn, upon the preservation of the Capitol, a symbol of imperium located conspicuously at the heart of the city. 164 What concerns Horatius, who elsewhere calls himself Musarum sacerdos (C. 3.1.3), is neither the city itself nor the aedes of Jupiter Optimus Maximus per se, both of which here merely set the stage, but rather the archaic rite by which the Pontifex Maximus, in company with the Vestal under his authority, would wind his way from the Regia, along the Via Sacra through the Forum, and up the Clivus Capitolinus to the promontory temple overlooking Rome. 165 Horatius does not specify which public ritual is in question; what interests the poet is purely the fact of its rote repetition (dum Capitolium scandet). These rites and their agents— integrally connected to the Indo-European function of sovereignty—belong to the oldest stratum of Roman religion, 166 whose significance had already begun to escape even the office-holders of the Augustan period; 167 only the bonds of religio insisted on their continued performance. As exemplified by C. 4.7, the Horatian ode marks the crossroads between recollection and repetition. What Horatius suggests is not simply that his odes will survive as long as the city of Rome still stands or as long as Rome retains its claims upon our memory. Rather, what C. 3.30 implies is that, however sepulchral, Horatius’s work will “escape death” so long as Rome’s ideological formations, embodied in specific material practices, continue to retain their reproductive force. Ideology, on this account, for which the pontifical rites at Rome stand only as a metonym, constitutes that which impinges upon our thoughts and our behaviors: that which we must take up; that which we must repeat; and that which we must hand down—machine-like— even in the absence of any understanding of its intrinsic significance. The tripartite political division between leaders, warriors, and farmers (or factory men) remains as much with us today, as does the exhortation, “Make it cool!” Only when some new ideological configuration will have supplanted such idées romaines, as summer crushes spring in C. 4.7 (ver proterit aestas | interitura simul), will Horatius’s odes have lost their interest and significance for post-Romanic culture.

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III One facet of Horatius’s immediate Nachleben completes our interest here. On the final page of his vast, unfinished Naturalis Historia (77–79 CE)—a comprehensive survey aimed at cataloging the riches, marvels, and resources that comprised the empire of T. Flavius Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, topically arranged and the model for all such subsequent encyclopedic ventures—C. Plinius Secundus, a native of Cisalpine Gaul, concludes by reflecting on the place that Italia occupied within the Roman world at large: Throughout the entirety of the earth (in toto orbe), wheresoever the vault of heaven inclines, there is no land so beautiful, or whose natural products merit so high a rank, as Italia, ruler and second parent of the world (rectrix parensque mundi altera). Outstanding not only in her men, women, generals, soldiers, and slaves, but also in her accomplishments among the arts, as well as in the examples of genius which she has produced, her situation (situ) too is equally distinguished: the wholesomeness and temperance of her climate; the access that she affords all nations (gentes); her coasts indented with so many ports; the propitious breezes that always prevail on her shores—all these advantages are due to her position (positio), mediate between sunrise and sunset (inter ortus occasusque mediam), and extending in the most favorable direction. (37.77)

Poised medially between East and West, neither too hot nor too cold, but situated in a temperate zone with an ambience that remains generally cool, Italia occupies the most congenial of locations, while Roma—located halfway up the Tyrrhenian coast—implicitly occupies the center of that center, rendering Roman geography isomorphic with the focalization of imperial power. The specular topography that Pliny canonizes here derives in large part from the poetry of the Late Republic, in particular Vergilius’s first Ecloga (c. 40 BCE), which sketched the borders of the Roman world in relation to the impending exile of smalltime Italic farmers, displaced through the resettlement of veterans retired from the civil wars. MELIBOEUS. At nos hinc alii sitientis ibimus Afros, pars Scythiam et rapidum cretae veniemus Oaxen et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos. en umquam patrios longo post tempore finis pauperis et tuguri congestum caespite culmen, post aliquot, mea regna, videns mirabor aristas?

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MELIBOEUS. But we must go hence—some to the thirsty Africans, some to reach Scythia and the chalk-rolling Oaxes, and the Britons, wholly sundered from the world. Ah, shall I ever, long years hence, look again on my country’s bounds, on my humble cottage with its turf-clad roof—shall I, long years hence, look amazed on a few ears of corn, once my kingdom?

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Centered phantasmatically between the parched South and the frozen North, the torrential waters to the East and—by implication—the horribile Oceani aequor to the West, Meliboeus’s humble cottage and his scattered ears of corn appear to him a royal domain that in all likelihood he has forever lost. Only a few lines before this, however, Meliboeus had demystified this beloved homestead as part of a landscape where “bare stones cover all, and the marsh chokes the pastures with slimy rushes” [v. 47–48]: the ostensibly regal farmlands of Italia turn out—once the rose-colored glasses have been laid aside—to be scarcely more inviting than the wastes of Scythia. In this respect, Vergilius proves exquisitely conscious of the aspirations and illusions that fueled not only the civil wars, but also—as he would go on to suggest in the Aeneis, where Aeneas issues from the underworld through the Gates of Ivory, and not those of Horn—the entire political foundation of the Roman state. Plinius, however, has literalized Vergilius’s figuratively specular space as world geography, where Italia—without any trace of irony—constitutes the center of the oikouménē, not as a rocky swampland, but as the most favored of places, affording access to all encompassing peoples, and with a climate neither scorched nor frozen, but consistently cool. In effect here, Plinius has reified Horatius’s ideal of aurea mediocritas, and once again projected that figure onto Italia itself, so that Rome—stationed at the center of Plinius’s concentric conceit—thereby becomes not only the locus, but also the model of all geographic temperance. In this way, the moral comes to overlay the topographic so that it now becomes possible for the first time to speak of an “ethical chorography,” a conjuncture that has never ceased to affect subsequent topologies, not just of Italy but more widely of Europe as a whole. Through Plinius’s cartographical projection of Horatian cool, environmentalism joins forces with Eurocentrism in ways that have overdetermined the master narratives of civilizational progress from antiquity through the modern era. Paraphrasing J. G. Herder, John Morthrop Motley, for example, contends: “Nothing good or great could come out of the eternal spring or midsummer of the tropics, nor from the thick-ribbed winter of the poles. From the temperate zone, with its healthful and stimulating succession of seasons, have come civilization and progress.” 168 This misprision of C. 4.7 bears consequences of considerable weight; crossing the concentric geography of Vergilius with Horatius’s promotion of aurea mediocritas has proved fundamental in forging the ideology of European imperialism, a tropological tangle from which we are still trying to extricate ourselves today.

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Appendix Diffugere niues, redeunt iam gramina campis arboribus comae; mutat terra uices et decrescentia ripas flumina praetereunt. Gratia cum Nymphis geminisque sororibus audet ducere nuda chorus. Inmortalia ne speres, monet annus et almum quae rapit hora diem.

Damna tamen celeres reparant caelestia lunae: nos ubi decidimus quo pater Aeneas, quo diues Tullus et Ancus, puluis et umbra sumus. Quis scit an adiciant hodiernae crastina summae tempora di superi? Cuncta manus auidas fugient heredis, amico quae dederis animo.

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Cum semel occideris et de te splendida Minos fecerit arbitria, non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te restituet pietas. Infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum liberat Hippolytum, nec Lethaea ualet Theseus abrumpere caro uincula Pirithoo.

The Nymphs and Graces, taking off their shame, Dance naked on the wakened grass, The hours devour the livening day to warn you: You like all this shall pass. The Zephyrs curb the cold to bring the Spring The sudden Summer overthrows Which falls to fruitful Fall that spills its yield To fields the Winter slows. Though moon on moon redeem the waste of seasons, When we go deathward and are laid Under with good Aeneas and rich Tullus, We go as ash and shade. Who knows, Torquatus, if the gods shall add Tomorrow to this borrowed day? Indulge your heart, for what your heart receives No heir shall hoard away. No, friend, when you go dead to take your place By writ of Minos the august, No good words nor good name nor simple goodness Will shape you back from dust.

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Even Diana had to let her chaste Hippolytus fall dark and under Where Theseus left a friend in Lethean chains Not even he could sunder. 169

—Translation A. Z. Foreman

Daniel L. Selden

Frigora mitescunt Zephyris, uer proterit aestas, interitura simul pomifer autumnus fruges effuderit, et mox bruma recurrit iners.

Snows scatter. Grass reclaims the field, and trees Regrow the greenery they’d shed. The world is shifting shape. The shrinking river Rolls in the riverbed.

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NOTES 1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le totémisme aujourd’hui (Paris: PUF, 1962), chap. 4, iv. 2. Cicero, Epistulae ad Quintum fratrem 3.3.3. 3. Cf. Gorgias, Helen = Daniel W. Graham, The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy. 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2:754–62. 4. Sophocles, Antigone 88. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 5. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 273–349. For discussion, see Miriam Leonard, Athens in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 96–156; Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen, Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 6. Graham, Early Greek Philosophy, 1:56 [19] et passim. 7. For the Iranian connections of Ionian philosophy, see Martin West, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Daniel L. Selden, “Mapping the Alexander Romance,” in The Alexander Romance in Persia and the East, ed. R. Stoneman et al. (Groningen: Roelf Barkhuis, 2012), 30–33. 8. See Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Seuil, 1967); Barbara Johnson, “Translator’s Introduction” to J. Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), vi–xxxiii. 9. See Mixail Baxtin, Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow: Xudozestvennaja Literatura, 1975), 408–46 and 447–83. 10. Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.4.1. 11. Ibid. 8.4.22–23. 12. For the connotations of ψυχρός, see LSJ s.v. 13. See Mixail Baxtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul’tura srednevekov’ia i Renessansa (Moscow: Xudozestvennaja Literatura, 1965). 14. Cf. Renate Lachmann, “Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture,” Cultural Critique 11 (1988–89), 115–52, on the counter-cultural impulses here; on the utopian dimension, see Michael Gardiner, “Bakhtin’s Carnival: Utopia as Critique,” in C. Emerson, ed. Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin (New York: G. K Hall & Co, 1999). 15. 15 A constant theme of Ferdowsī’s Shāhnāmeh, a compendium of earlier Īrānian traditions. Critical edition: Abū al-Qāsim Firdawsī, Shāhnāmah, ed. Jalāl Khāliqī Muṭlaq; bā muqaddimah-ʾi Iḥsān Yār Shāṭir. 8 vols. (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1987–2008). 16. See Lawrence Giangrande, The Use of Spoudaiogeloion in Greek and Roman Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1972); Philip Stadter, “Fictional Narrative in the Cyropaideia,” in V. J. Gray, ed. Xenophon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 17. Erich S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), and Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 18. See Claude Nicolet, Le métier de citoyen dans la Rome républicaine, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); Sophisticated overviews of the cultural background of the period include Elizabeth Rawson, Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 19. 19. Vergil, Aeneas 4.337ff. 20. Grant Richards, Housman 1897–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), 289. 21. Cf. Edouard Fraenkel, Horace ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 417; Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 240–41; Martin W. Bloomer, Latinity and Literary Society at Rome (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), and “Marble Latin: Encounters with the Timeless Language,” in The Contest of Language: Before and Beyond Nationalism, ed. M. Bloomer (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 207–226. 22. Michel de Montaigne, Œuvres complète, ed. A. Thibaut and M. Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 360. 23. L’Année Philologique lists four papers devoted specifically to C. 4.7 since 1930: Donald Levin, “Concerning Two Odes of Horace, 1.4 and 4.7,” Classical Journal 54 (1958–59),

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354–358; Anthony J. Woodman, “Horace’s Ode Diffugere nives and Solvitur acris hiems,” Latomus 31 (1972), 752–778; Martin Pulbrook, A Correction to Horace Odes IV.7 (Dublin: Dublin University Press, 1982); Iwasaki Tsutomu, “Horace O. 4.7: A Poem without carpe diem,” Classical Studies 3 (1987), 63–82. For a more comprehensive list, see the Bibliography on Horaz assembled by Niklas Holzberg: http://www.niklasholzberg.com/Homepage/ Bibliographien.html, s.v. Horaz; retrieved September 23, 2012. 24. Alessandro Barchiesi, “Poetry, Praise, and Patronage: Simonides in Book 4 of Horace’s Odes,” Classical Antiquity 15 (1996): 34. Such a description makes C. 4.7 virtually indistinguishable from C. 1.4. 25. For a somewhat different treatment of this divide, see Gregson Davis, Polyhymnia: The Rhetoric of the Horatian Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 155–57. 26. Callimachus, fr. 380 Pfeiffer. On the Iambic and Archilochean tradition, see Fredric Will, Archilochos (Farmington Hills, MI: Twayne, 1969); Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 243–52; Alberto Carvarzere, et al., Iambic Ideas (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); Anne Burnett, Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho (London: Duckworth, 2003); Diskin Clay, Archilochos Heros (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Andrea Rostein, The Idea of Iambos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 27. 27. For the poem in its entirety, see the Appendix. 28. Brūma: superlative of brevis—i.e., “the shortest [day of the year]”, “midwinter”, “the cold of winter”; see OLD s.v. and Michiel A. C. De Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and other Italic Languages (Leiden: Brill, 2008), s.v. The term views winter as a type of vanishing point. 29. Translation Michael Putnam, “Horace to Torquatus: Epistle 1.5 and Ode 4.7,” American Journal of Philology 127 (2006), 402; modified. The original reads: The snows have scattered, grass now returns to the meadows and foliage to the trees, the earth transfigures her changes . . . Frosts mellow in the western wind, summer tramples down spring, to perish the moment that fruitful autumn has lavished her bounty, and soon shiftless winter recurs. Unless otherwise noted, the text of Horace is cited from David R. Shackleton Bailey, Horatius. Opera (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008). 30. Cited from Gerard J. Pendrick, Antiphon the Sophist: The Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 31. For the military connotations of diffugere “to flee in fear”, see Rudolf Führer, “Ein Altersgedicht des Horaz: C. IV 7,” Grazer Beiträge 8 (1979), 206. 32. For the implied martial imagery, see Michael Putnam, Artifices of Eternity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 136. 33. Horace, Epodes 2.29. Cf. Varro, De Lingua Latina 8, 6: a brumā ad brumam, dum sol redit, vocatur annus. 34. Michel Foucault, “Forward to the English Edition,” The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970) and L'Archéologie du savoir, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). See also Rosa R. Marchese, Mutat terra vices: identità, cambiamento e memoria culturale nell'ultimo Orazio (Palermo: Palumbo, 2010). 35. See Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs (Paris: Maspero, 1965), 19–47; Claude Calame, Le récit en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1985), chapter 2. 36. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetion, trans. H. and E. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 131. Literally, the Danish gjentagelse means “to take again”, so the meaning is closer to the French reprise, than it is to the English repetition. 37. Ibid. 136. 38. See James W. Bright, “The 'ubi sunt' Formula,” Modern Language Notes 8.3 (1893): 187–88. For example Cicero, Oratio Philippica 8, 23: “Pro di immortales! ubi est ille mos virtusque maiorum?” Cf. Tibullus 2.3.27 and Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.92. Best known, perhaps, are the lines from the Old English poem known as “The Wanderer:”

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Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa? Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas? Eala beorht bune! Eala byrnwiga! Eala þeodnes þrym Hu seo þrag gewat, genap under nihthelm, swa heo no wære. Where is the horse gone? Where the rider? Where the giver of treasure? Where are the seats at the feasts? Where are the revels in the hall? Alas for the bright cup! Alas for the mailed warrior! Alas for the splendor of the prince! How that time has passed away, dark under the cover of the night, as if it had never been! [93–97] 39. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 149. 40. Cf. Stuart Dalton, “Kierkegaard’s Repetition as a Comedy in Two Acts,” Janus Head: http://www.janushead.org/4-2/dalton.cfm: retrieved July 11, 2012. Cf. Daniel L. Selden, “Virgil and the Satanic Cogito,” Literary Imagination 8.3 (2006): 24–27. 41. Ronnie Ancona, Time and the Erotic in Horace’s Odes (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994): 61 is perhaps more precise: “an unspecified ‘season’ of erotic triumph.” 42. Cf. Putnam, Artifices of Eternity. On Horace’s artistry (callida iuntura), see Fabio Cupaiuolo, A proposito della callida iuntura oraziana (Naples: G. Terella e F., 1942); Brink, Horace on Poetry: The ‘Ars Poetica,’ 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 2:138–40. 43. See Lowell Edmunds, From a Sabine Jar. Reading Horace, Odes 1.9 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 3–21. 44. Fraenkel, Horace, 177n1. 45. On the indeterminacies that structure C. 1.9, see Ancona, Time and the Erotic, 61–69. 46. See Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947), 203 and 196. 47. On this aspect of Horace’s artistry, see Steele Commager, Odes of Horace: A Critical Study (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995 [1962]); M. Owen Lee, Word, Sound, and Image in the Odes of Horace (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969). 48. On the intertextual echoes, see Whitney H. Oates, The Influence of Simonides of Ceos upon Horace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932), 76–90; Lee, Word, Sound, and Image, 20–23; Barchiesi, “Poetry, Praise, and Patronage”; Richard F. Thomas, Horace. Odes Book IV and Carmen Saeculare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 175–76. 49. Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 3rd ed., 10 vols. (Leipzig: G. W. Fritzsch, 1897–98), 7:4. 50. Cf. Horace, Sermones II, 1.60–62 (maiorum ne quis amicus | frigore te feriat); Epistulae I, 17.32 (morietur frigore); etc. 51. See Wilhelm Klein, Vom antiken Rococo (Vienna: Ed. Hölzel, 1921). On this passage in particular, see Gordon Williams, Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 636–37. 52. See Jurij Lotman, Analiz poètičeskogo teksta: struktura stikha (Leningrad: Prosvešhčhenne, 1972); Écrits. A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 104: “the symbol is the murder of the thing.” 53. John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. J. Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 283. 54. Cf. Septuagint, Genesis 2:8, etc. Paradeisos < Av. pairidaēza-, “garden enclosure.” 55. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, 2 vols. (London: Biggs and Co, 1800), 2:53. 56. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar VII, trans. D. Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 75. Translation modified. 57. Jacques Lacan. The Psychoses. The Seminar III, trans. R. Grigg (London: Routledge, 1993), 180. Translation modified. 58. See Gian Biagio Conte, Letteratura Latina, 2 vols. (Florence: Le Monnier, 2008), 1:265. 59. Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1980).

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60. Hieronymus Geist and Gerhard Pfohl, Römische Grabinschriften (Munich: Heimeran, 1969), Nr. 422. Cf. also Franz Bücheler, Carmina Latina Epigraphica (Amsterdam: A. M. Hakkert, 1964), Nr. 439, which resonates directly with C. 4.7: Ver tibi contribuat sua munera florea grata | Et tibi grata comis nutet aestiva voluptas | Reddat et autumnus Bacchi tibi munera simper |Ac leve hiberni tempus tellure dicetur. 61. Paul Shorey, Horace: Odes and Epodes, rev. P. Shorey and G. J. Lange (New York: Benj. H. Sanborn and Co, 1910), ad loc. 62. Denis Feeney, “Fathers and Sons: The Manlii Torquati and Family Continuity in Catullus and Horace,” in C. Krauss et al., eds. Ancient Historiography and its Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 214. 63. Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique. The Seminar I, trans. J. Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 149. 64. Lacan, Écrits, 388. 65. Immanuel Kant, Critik der reinen Vernunf, 2nd ed. (Riga: Hartknoch, 1788), 45. 66. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 54. 67. Jacques Lacan, L’éthique de la psychanalyse. Le séminaire VII. (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 142. 68. Pindar, Pythian 8, 95. 69. Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1927), 250. 70. Cf. Andrea Loselle, “Freud/Derrida as Fort/Da and the Repetitive Eponym,” Modern. Language Notes 97 (1982): 1180–1185. 71. Siegmund Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 2nd ed. (Leipzig-Vienna-Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1921), 33; condensed. 72. Ibid. 36. 73. C. 3.1, 2.13, and 3.2. In the course of the essais, Montaigne also quotes C. 2.16, 3.3, as well as Epistles 1.4, 1.16, and 2.2. 74. Montaigne, Oeuvres, 82 and 85. 75. Lucretius, De rerum natura 3.830. 76. Horace, Epistles II, 2:40–45. 77. http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Horace. Retrieved August 9, 2012. 78. Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), 227–42. 79. Cf. OLD s.v. frigesco 2. 80. See Thomas, Odes IV, 173. 81. Conte, Letteratura Latina, 1:266–67. 82. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Apories. Paris: Galilée, 1996. 83. For the calendrical reforms of Horace’s generation, see Feeney Caesar’s Calendar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 84. Cf. Paul de Man The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67–81. 85. Other manuscripts read pius here; pater impresses me, in the wake of Virgil, as lectio difficilior. See Edward C. Wickam, Q. Horati Flacci Opera, 2nd ed., ed. H. Garrod (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), ad loc; Shackleton Bailey, Horatius. Opera: ad loc. 86. The allusion is to Catullus c. 5: “nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux | nox est perpetua dormienda”; see Commager, Odes of Horace, 280–81. 87. Davis, Polyhymnia, 156. 88. See Wilfred G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960); Robin G. M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace Odes, Book I, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 58–61; Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), esp. 23–73; James P. Allen,The Debate Between a Man and His Soul (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 89. On the Septuagint and its circulation, see Giuseppe Veltri, Eine Tora für den König Talmai (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994); Karen H. Jobes and Moises Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Ada, MI: Baker Books, 2005); Gary N. Knoppers and Paul B. Harvey Jr., “The Pentateuch in Ancient Mediterranean Context: The Publication of Local Lawcodes,” in G. Knoppers and B. M. Levinson, eds., The Penteteuch as Torah (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns,

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2007), 105–41; Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context (Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2009); Tessa Rajak, Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Horace refers to Roman Jewry twice: Sermones 1.4.142-143 and 1.9.60–74; see Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), passim. On Jews and Rome generally, see M. Aberbach and D. Aberbach, The Roman-Jewish Wars and Hebrew Cultural Nationalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 23–82; Gruen, Diaspora, 5–53; Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (New York: Vintage, 2008), esp. 366–78. On Horace’s familiarity with Jewish scripture, see Wilfried Stroh, “Vergil und Horaz in ihren prophetischen Gedichten,” Gymnasium 100 (1993): 289–322. 90. Septuaginta Job 14:1 [Alfred Rahlfs, Septuaginta (Stuttgart: Deutschebibelgesellschaft, 1935), 2:293–94]. 91. Job 14:13. 92. Ibid. 14:7–12. 93. For Rome’s increasing penetration into the Near East, see Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East: 31 BC-AD 337 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 94. Epicurus, Gnomologion Vaticanum 14. 95. M. Sanhedrin 10:1. See Yaakov Malkin, Epicurus and Apikorism (Los Angeles: Piscatawy, 2007). 96. Nisbet and Hubbard, Commentary on Horace, 72–73. 97. Georges Dumézil, Idées romaines, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). 98. For summary overview, see Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 7–50; Theodor Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, Bd. 5: Die Provinzen von Caesar bis Diocletian (Berlin: Weidemann, 1894), remains authoritative. 99. Georges Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). 100. See Mary Beard and Michael Crawford, Rome in the Late Republic, 2nd ed. (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2009), 40–71. For more detail, see Thomas R. S. Broughten, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, 3 vols. (New York: American Philological Society, 1951–52). 101. Cicero, De Oratore, and Orator. See most recently Robert Morstein-Marx, Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 102. Pace Paul Veyne, Michel Foucault, Paul Zanker, et alii. See, however, Kristina Milnor, Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 128–29 remarks, with an eye to the Augustan marriage legislation: “the private life of virtually every Roman now became a matter of the state’s concern and regulations. The state massively intruded on matters of private conduct such as marriage—the question was no more whether to marry, but how soon and whom or whom not—and divorce and adultery; the latter was taken out of the jurisdiction of the family and transferred to a public court,” etc. 103. See Joseph Hellegouarc’h, Le vocabulaire latin des relations et des partis politiques sous la République (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963), 276–79; Hendrik Wagenvoort, Pietas: Selected Studies in Roman Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1980); J. Rufus Fears, The Cult of Virtues and Roman Imperial Ideology (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981). 104. Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. 2 vols. (Paris: Minuit, 1969). Cf. Claude Nicolet, L’inventaire du monde. Géographie et politique aux origines de l’Empire romaine (Paris: Fayard, 1988). 105. See particularly Pat Southern, The Roman Army: A Social and Institutional History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 106. See Livy, Ab urbe condita I, 1.4–2.6; 1.22–33. 107. See Louis R. Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Greek Hero Cults and the Ideas of Immortality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921): 64–70, 337–40. 108. See Klein, Vom antiken Rococo, 167–74. 109. See Feeney, “Fathers and Sons”.

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110. See Francisco Pina Polo, The Consul at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 111. Livy, Ab urbe condita XXII, 60.7. 112. See Wilhelm Kierdorf, “Mos maiorum” in Brill’s New Pauly. Antiquity volumes ed. H. Cancik and H. Schneider. Brill Online 2012. http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill -s-new-pauly/mos-maiorum-e810120. Retrieved July 15, 2012. 113. Georges Dumézil, La religion romaine archaïque (Paris: Payot, 1966), 396–400. 114. Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 8. 115. Cf. Seneca, Phaedra 129. 116. So Euripides. Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses XV, 497–547, where Diana returns his love. As Ovid’s tells the story, moreover, Aesculapius does raise Hippolytus from the dead, a version of the myth that Horace obviously rejected. 117. Horace, C. 3.4.79–80; cf. Kenneth Quinn, Horace: The Odes (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1992), ad 3.18.1. 118. Cf. Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 119. Seneca, Phaedra 115 and 597. 120. See John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. Urmson and M. Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 121. Seneca, Phaedra 602–607. Cf. Euripides, Hippolytus 310ff.; see Bernard M. W. Knox, “The Hippolytus of Euripides,” Yale Classical Studies 13 (1952), 3–31; Peter Burian, “Myth into muthos: The Shaping of Tragic Plot” in P. Easterling, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 122. Among the “Parade Odes” 1.5, 1.8, and 1.9 are particularly distinguished; see Matthew Santirocco, Unity and Design in Horace’s Odes (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 14–41. See, more generally, Williams, Tradition and Originality, 560–68. 123. Thomas, Odes Book IV, 174. He approvingly misquotes Housman’s words, adding “[f]or La Penna 1969: 77 it was ‘la regina delle odi oraziane.’” 124. See Moses I. Finley, “The Silent Women of Rome,” Horizon 7 (1965): 57–64. For a fuller historical picture, see Jane F. Gardner, Women in Roman Law and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Richard A. Bauman, Women and Politics in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1992); Elaine Fantham, et al. Women in the Classical World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 207–344; Emily A. Hemelrijk, Matrona Docta (London: Routledge, 1999); Augusto Fraschetti, Roman Women, trans. L. Lappin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Danielle Gourévitch and Marie-Térèse Raepsaet-Charlier, La femme dans la Rome antique (Paris: Hachette, 2001); Eve D’Ambra, Roman Women (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Nathalie Papin-Oléon, Femme dans la Rome impériale (Levallois-Perret: Altipress, 2010). 125. Cicero, Pro Caelio; Catullus, C. 11, etc. 126. Cf. Charles W. Hedrick Jr., History and Silence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 127. Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). 128. On Roman writers in particular, see Dumézil Mythe et Épopée I-II-III (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 289–466, and Mariages indo-européens (Paris: Payot, 1979), 149–243. For critique and resistance to Dumézil’s ideas—none of which I have found convincing—see especially Didier Eribon, Faut-il brûler Dumézil? (Paris: Flammarion, 1992) and Bruce Lincoln, Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 121–40. 129. Etymologies: de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin, svv. 130. Cf. Virgil, Aeneis I, 5–7, of Aeneas: multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem | inferretque deos Latio; genus unde Latinum | . . . atque altae moenia Romae. 131. Florus, Epitome of Livy I, 1–7; Georges Dumézil Mythe et Épopée, 299. For more on the pairing of Tullus and Ancus, ibid, 307–309. 132. See Georges Dumézil, Mythes et dieux de la Scandinavie ancienne, ed. F.-X. Dillmann (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). 133. Benveniste, Institutions, 1:279–92.

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134. Alan Ward, The Myths of the Gods: Structures in Irish Mythology (N.p.: CreateSpace, 2011), 55. 135. For frigidus = dead, see OLD s.v. frigidus 7. 136. Bücheler, Carmina Latina Epigraphica, Nr. 543. 137. Lacan, Le psychanalyse à l’envers, 247. 138. Lacan, L’éthique de la psychanalyse,142. 139. C. 1.14.18. 140. See Gordon Williams, Figures of Thought in Roman Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). 141. Jacques.-Bénigne Bossuet, Oeuvres, ed. L’Abbé Velat and Y. Champailler (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 1077. 142. Dick Davis, “In the Enemy’s Camp: Helen’s Homer and Ferdowsi’s Hojir,” Iranian Studies 25, No. 3/4 (1992): 157. 143. See Jan Assmann, Tod und Jenseits im alten Ägypten, 2nd ed. ( Munich: Beck, 2010). 144. Gordon Williams, The Third Book of Horace’s Odes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 9. 145. Recent treatments include Fowler 1995; Ellen Olliensis, Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Victor G. Kiernan, Horace: Poetics and Politics (Basingstone: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); Robin Bond, “Horace’s Political Journey,” in W. J. Dominik, et al., eds,. Writing Politics in Imperial Rome (Leiden: Brill, 2009: 133–52). 146. Thomas, Odes Book IV, 115. See further Stephen J. Harrison, ed., Homage to Horace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 147. See Thomas, Odes Book IV, 7–20. 148. Oliensis, Horace, 107–108. Cf. Nicolet, L'inventaire du monde. 149. See Samuel B. Platner, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, ed. T. Ashby (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 297–302. 150. Georges Dumézil, Les Dieux souverains des Indo-Européens. (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 171 and 174. Iuventas (PIE h2iu-h1en- “who possesses vital force”) Skt. yúvan-, Lith. jáunas “young”. 151. Dumézil, Religion romaine, 203–206. 152. Respectively C. 1.11.8 and C. 2.10.5. 153. Freud, Jenseits des Lustprizips. 154. For an overview of auctoritas as “increase” (< augeo), see http://chs.harvard.edu/cgibin/WebObjects/workbench.woa/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=3961. Retrieved September 31, 2012. See further Dumézil, Idées romaines, 79–102. 155. See Rudiger Schmitt, Dichtung und Dichtersprache in indogermanischer Zeit (Weisbaden: Harrassowitz, 1967), 61–102. 156. Lincoln, Death, War, and Sacrifice, 15. 157. The basic discussion remains Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). For a succinct overview, see http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/ homer/iliadessay4.htm. Retrieved August 20, 2012. 158. Cicero, Pro A. Licinio Archia poeta 14. 159. See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, La Reproduction: éléments d'une théorie du système d'enseignement, 2nd ed. (Paris: Minuit, 1990). 160. See Gregory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 161. Cf. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, 2nd ed. (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1985). 162. For this sense of laus, see OLD s.v. 3. 163. Commager, Odes of Horace, 314. 164. See Robin G. M. Nisbet and Niall Rudd. A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book III. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ad loc. 165. For the topographical details, see Platner, Topography, 1929. 166. See Dumézil, Religion romaine, 281–88 and 558–56. 167. See, for example, Plutarch’s Roman Questions.

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168. Cited Annette Kolodny, In Search of First Contact. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 138. 169. A.Z. Foreman’s granted permission to republish his translation, which can also be found here: http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2009/06/horace-ode-47-from-latin.html.

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Gardiner, Michael. “Bakhtin’s Carnival: Utopia as Critique,” in C. Emerson, ed. Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999. Gardner, Jane F. Women in Roman Law and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Geist, Hieronymus, and Gerhard Pfohl. Römische Grabinschriften. Munich: Heimeran, 1969. Giangrande, Lawrence. The Use of Spoudaiogeloion in Greek and Roman Literature. The Hague: Mouton, 1972. Goodman, Martin. Rome and Jerusalem. New York: Vintage, 2008. Gourévitch, Danielle, and Marie-Térèse Raepsaet-Charlier. La femme dans la Rome antique. Paris: Hachette, 2001. Graham, Daniel W. The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Gruen, Erich S. Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. ___. Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. ___. Heritage and Hellenism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Hadot, Pierre. Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique. 2nd ed. Paris: Albin Michel, 1993. Harrison, Stephen J., ed. Homage to Horace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Havelock, Eric. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Hedrick, Charles W., Jr. History and Silence. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Hegel, G. W. F. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1927. Hellegouarc’h, Joseph. Le vocabulaire latin des relations et des partis politiques sous la République. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963. Hemelrijk, Emily A. Matrona Docta. London: Routledge, 1999. Hutchings, Kimberly, and Tuija Pulkkinen. Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Iwasaki, Tsutomu. “Horace O. 4.7: A Poem without carpe diem,” Classical Studies 3 (1987), 63–82. Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Treasures of Darkness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Jobes, Karen H., and Moises Silva. Invitation to the Septuagint. Ada, MI: Baker Books, 2005. Johnson, Barbara. “Translator’s Introduction” to J. Derrida. Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981: vi-xxxiii. Kant, Immanuel. Critik der reinen Vernunft. 2nd ed. Riga: Hartknoch, 1788. Keats, John. Complete Poems. Ed. J. Stillinger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Kierdorf, Wilhelm. “Mos maiorum.” Brill’s New Pauly. Antiquity volumes ed. H. Cancik and H. Schneider. Brill Online 2012. http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill-s-newpauly/mos-maiorum-e810120. Retrieved July 15, 2012. Kierkegaard, Søren. Repetion. Trans. H. and E. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Kiernan, Victor G. Horace: Poetic and Politics. Basingstone: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Klein, Wihelm. Vom antiken Rococo. Vienna: Ed. Hölzel, 1921. Knoppers, Gary N., and Paul B. Harvey Jr. “The Pentateuch in Ancient Mediterranean Context: The Publication of Local Lawcodes,” in G. Knoppers and B. M. Levinson, eds. The Penteteuch as Torah. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2007: 105–41. Knox, Bernard M. W. “The Hippolytus of Euripides,” Yale Classical Studies 13 (1952): 3–31. Kolodny, Annette. In Search of First Contact. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. La Penna, Antonio. Orazio e la morale mondana europea. Florence: Sansoni, 1969. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. ___. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Le séminaire IX. Paris: Seuil, 1973. ___. Écrits. A Selection. Trnas. A. Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1977. ___. Le psychanalyse à l’envers. Le séminaire XVII. Paris : Seuil, 1978.

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___. Freud’s Papers on Technique. The Seminar I. Trans. J. Forrester. New York: Norton, 1988. ___. L’éthique de la psychanalyse. Le séminaire VII. Paris: Seuil, 1991. ___. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar VII. Trans. D. Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. ___. The Psychoses. The Seminar III. Trans. R. Grigg. London: Routledge, 1993. Lachmann, Renate. “Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture,” Cultural Critique 11 (1988–89), 115–52. Lambert, Wilfred G. Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Lee, M. Owen. Word, Sound, and Image in the Odes of Horace. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969. Leonard, Miriam. Athens in Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Le totémisme aujourd’hui. Paris: PUF, 1962. Levin, Donald N. “Concerning Two Odes of Horace, 1.4 and 4.7,” Classical Journal 54 (1958–59), 354–358. Lincoln, Bruce. Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Loselle, Andrea. “Freud/Derrida As Fort/Da and the Repetitive Eponym,” Modern. Language Notes 97 (1982): 1180–1185. Lotman, Jurij. Analiz poètič eskogo teksta: struktura stiha. Leningrad: Prosveščenne, 1972. LSJ. A Greek-English Lexicon. Ed. H. Liddell, et. al. 9th ed., with Supplement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Luttwak, Edward N. The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Malkin, Yaakov. Epicurus and Apikorism. Los Angeles: Piscatawy, 2007. Marchese, Rosa R. Mutat terra vices: identità, cambiamento e memoria culturale nell'ultimo Orazio. Palermo: Palumbo, 2010. Millar, Fergus. The Roman Near East: 31 BC-AD 337. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Milnor, Kristina. Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Mommsen, Theodor. Römische Geschichte. Bd. 5: Die Provinzen von Caesar bis Diocletian. Berlin: Weidemann, 1894. Montaigne, Michel de. Œuvres complètes. Ed. A. Thibaut and M. Rat. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. Morstein-Marx, Robert. Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. ---. Pindar’s Homer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Nicolet, Claude. L’inventaire du monde. Géographie et politique aux origines de l’Empire romaine. Paris: Fayard, 1988. ___. Le métier de citoyen dans la Rome républicaine. 2nd ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. ___. Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Untruth. Ed. and trans. T. Carman. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. Nisbet, Robin G. M., and Margaret Hubbard. A Commentary on Horace Odes, Book I. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Nisbet, Robin G. M., and Niall Rudd. A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book III. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Oates, Whitney H. The Influence of Simonides of Ceos upon Horace. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932. OLD. Oxford Latin Dictionary. Ed. P. Glare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Olliensis, Ellen. Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Papin-Oléon, Nathalie. Femme dans la Rome impériale. Levallois-Perret: Altipress, 2010.

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Pendrick, Gerard J. Antiphon the Sophist: The Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pina Polo, Francisco. The Consul at Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pfeiffer, Rudolf. Callimachus. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949–53. Platner, Samuel B. A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Ed. T. Ashby. London: Oxford University Press, 1929. Pulbrook, Martin. A Correction to Horace Odes IV.7. Dublin: Dublin University Press, 1982. [4 pages]. Putnam, Michael. Artifices of Eternity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. ___. “Horace to Torquatus: Epistle 1.5 and Ode 4.7,” AJP 127 (2006): 387–414. Quinn, Kenneth. Horace: The Odes. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1992. Rahlfs, Alfred. Septuaginta. Stuttgart: Deutschebibelgesellschaft, 1935. Rajak, Tessa. Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Rawson, Elizabeth. Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Richards, Grant. Housman 1897–1936. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942. Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 1980. Rostein, Andrea. The Idea of Iambos. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Santirocco, Matthew. Unity and Design in Horace’s Odes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Schmitt, Rudiger. Dichtung und Dichtersprache in indogermanischer Zeit. Weisbaden: Harrassowitz, 1967. Selden, Daniel L. “Virgil and the Satanic Cogito,” Literary Imagination 8.3 (2006): 1–45. ___. “Mapping the Alexander Romance,” in The Alexander Romance in Persia and the East, ed. R. Stoneman et al. Groningen: Roelf Barkhuis, 2012: 19–59. Shackleton Bailey, David R. Horatius. Opera. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. Shorey, Paul. Horace. Odes and Epodes. Rev. P. Shorey and G. J. Lange. New York: Benj. H. Sanborn and Co, 1910. Southern, Pat. The Roman Army: A Social and Institutional History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Stadter, Philip. “Fictional Narrative in the Cyropaideia,” in V. J. Gray, ed. Xenophon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Stroh, Wilfried. “Vergil und Horaz in ihren prophetischen Gedichten,” Gymnasium 100 (1993): 289-322. Syme, Ronald. The Roman Revolution. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956. Thomas, Richard F. Horace. Odes Book IV and Carmen Saeculare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Treggiari, Susan. Roman Marriage. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Veltri, Giuseppe. Eine Tora für den König Talmai. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs. Paris: Maspero, 1965. Wagenvoort, Hendrik. Pietas: Selected Studies in Roman Religion. Leiden: Brill, 1980. Wagner, Richard. Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. 3rd ed. 10 vols. Leipzig: G. W. Fritzsch, 1897–98. Ward, Alan. The Myths of the Gods: Structures in Irish Mythology. N.p.: CreateSpace, 2011. West, Martin L. Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Wickam, Edward C. Q. Horati Flacci Opera. 2nd ed. Ed. H. Garrod. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901. Wilkinson, Lancelot P. Golden Latin Artistry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963. Williams, Craig A. Roman Homosexuality. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Williams, Gordon. The Third Book of Horace’s Odes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. ___. Figures of Thought in Roman Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. ___. Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Woodman, Anthony J. “Horace’s Ode Diffugere nives and Solvitur acris hiems,” Latomus 31 (1972), 752–78.

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Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems. 2 vols. London: Biggs and Co, 1800.

II

American Cool

Chapter Three

The Cultural Career of Coolness Ulla Haselstein

I cool 2a. Of a person or a personal attribute, quality, etc.: not affected by passion or emotion, dispassionate; controlled, deliberate, not hasty; calm, composed. cool 3b. Exhibiting or demonstrating a lack of warmth or affection; not cordial, unfriendly. —OED

At the beginning of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), 1 the narrator is sitting in a coffee house at a hotel in London. Recently recovered from an illness, he enjoys being back among the living. He prefers to keep his distance from others, but feels in a mood “the converse of ennui” (108), amusing himself by reading the paper and watching the people in the street go by. His “pouring over advertisements,” and “peering through the smoky panes into the street” (108) makes seeing and reading one continuous activity. 2 The view of the busy street at dusk provides him with a vivid visual experience, and he idly submits the moving image of the crowd to various perceptual and cognitive orders. While he at first thinks of the passersby only as a moving mass, he later begins to grasp individual details of their “dress, air, gait, visage and expression of countenance” (108). Taking the people in the street as advertisements of themselves, 3 and reading the style of their clothes and their comportment, he places people in their respective social classes and identifies them as noblemen, merchants, clerks, workers, and as gamblers, beggars and prostitutes. He also invents an ironic category in his hierarchized social typology, namely “gentlemen who live by their wits” (110); boasting of his discerning eye, he identifies these gentlemen as dan61

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dies or military men, characterizing the first group by their “long locks and smiles,” and the second by their “frogged coats and frowns” (110). With only a fleeting moment to look at people as they pass, the narrator makes use of the window frame to construct his perceptions in the manner of the then newly invented medium of photography. 4 What he sees however are eighteenth-century genre paintings, or portraits, for he also plays with his capability to read “the history of long years” (112) in the faces and thus attempts to read individual particularity as well as type. Since his vantage point allows him to remain unseen behind “smoky panes” (108), he is able to take note of people’s involuntary facial expressions and treat them as clues to their psychological traits. But all of a sudden he sees an old man whom he cannot place socially, and whose life history and subjectivity he cannot fathom. This sight comes as a shock and destroys the narrator’s narcisstic absorption in his game. His amusement gives way to anxiety, as is indicated by his comparison of the old man’s physiognomy to (the German romantic painter) Retszch’s (sic) representation of the devil. In another effort to regain his sense of control by drawing on his aesthetic competence, the narrator resorts to the Romantic subjectivist paradigm of art and attempts to “form some analysis of the meaning conveyed” (112) by the old man’s face by way of an act of introspection. As a result, he is promptly overcome by “ideas of a vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—of extreme despair” (112). At a loss for his “confusing” and “paradoxical” (112) responses to the old man’s face, the narrator comes up with a different strategy and, like a detective, begins to search for empirical evidence of the old man’s identity. He joins the crowd and observes the old man’s demeanor and actions in a social context. Walking noiselessly in “caoutchouc over-shoes” (114), he turns himself into the old man’s shadow and follows him all night and all the next day. The old man’s movements turn out to be erratic however: he passes a bazaar, reaches a theater, then returns to the hotel where the pursuit began, but only to traverse the city once again; he enters a gin bar in a slum at the outskirts of London, but does not imbibe anything and once again heads back to the hotel. Talking to no one but himself, buying nothing, consuming nothing, never arriving at home, the old man does nothing but roam the city. When the narrator finally confronts the old man in a mute face-to-face encounter, he finds himself ignored, and for the reader (though not for the narrator) it is easy to understand why; for the old man, the narrator is just another anonymous and unreadable man in the midst of the urban crowd. Worn out by the futility of his endeavour, the narrator gives up the pursuit. The twenty-four-hour-surveillance has yielded only a rather insignificant result, namely that the old man “refuses to be alone” (116). The narrator’s anxieties therefore persist, and he only regains his balance by constructing a

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new social type built on the negative results of the pursuit. He defines the old man as “the man of the crowd who cannot be read” and must therefore be regarded as “the type and genius of deep crime” (116). To propose such a social type without any evidence of criminal activity amounts to paranoia. It is a very effective ending for Poe’s story; the reader is jarred out of her complacency. Previously the narrator’s observations and reflections had appeared lucid and logical (if a little excited at times), and seemed to corroborate his projected self-image as an erudite person and competent observer of social life. Sharing the narrator’s fixation on the riddle of the old man’s identity, and expecting its imminent solution, it is only at the very end of the story that the reader will sever the cognitive ties that bound her to the narrator’s perspective and examine the narrative as a performance of the narrator’s self. There are numerous textual features that suggest that the narrator’s readings of the social world are unreliable from the start; he has just recovered from an illness after all and asks himself whether his fever might have returned. At any event, the narrator treats the visible social world as a screen onto which he projects his fantasies, be they of mastery, or, conversely, of anxiety. Some textual features even imply that the narrator and the old man are doppelgangers; the face of the old man may indeed have been the narrator’s mirror image in the “smoky panes.” Regardless, the stranger’s age and external appearance match the narrator’s outdated and ostentatiously erudite style of expression, and the narrator describes in detail how he turns himself into the old man’s “shadow.” This relation of doubles is not just a detail that marks the text as a specimen of Gothic literature. After all, the reader herself has already engaged in a customary activity of fantasy by identifying with the narrator and transforming herself into his double, sharing his point of view and accompanying him on his nightly pursuit. Once the reader has disentangled herself from this identification, she can observe and read the narrator instead. But to this end, she must rely on cultural codes of reading social character and thus inevitably ends up repeating the narrator. By thus constructing the text as a trap for the reader, Poe highlights the fact that reading is a rather precarious and fantasmatic social activity, and not at all confined to books. Reading another person—be it a real person or a fictional character—means applying symbolic codes in order to identify the social type and possibly identify with the person. To encounter an unreadable fictional character constitutes an enigmatic, possibly uncanny aesthetic experience, if the text suggests that this unreadability is the consequence of a conscious effort by the character to mask his or her evil intentions. This scenario is built on experiences in every day life, where the encounter of an unreadable person may trigger interest and curiosity, but also anxiety and fear, depending on the observer’s sense of security.

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I have presented Poe’s well-known story at some length in order to stress some textual features that are important for a discussion of coolness. Drawing on the eighteenth-century imaginary and its notion of a fixed social order, the narrator watches the street as if it were a theatrical mise-en-scène of social types defined by rank and expressed by vestimentary codes or codes of affective disposition. He thus displays both an aesthetic disposition and an elitist social reserve. His paranoid characterization as the “man of the crowd” turns the old man into the type of metropolitan masses who ignore previous class-based dress codes and ways of deportment, signaling a dissolution of the old social order. In his reading of the story, Walter Benjamin remarked on the contradictory characterization of the crowd as “wild” and “disciplined,” and in the material collected in the Arcades Project he discussed the story with reference to Georg Simmel’s analysis of metropolitan life. 5 Once traditions, occupation and rank no longer define social identity, the external appearance and attire of an individual can no longer be reliably read as pertinent to social type. As Simmel put it, the modern “metropolitan type of man” reacts to this development “with his head instead of his heart,” and often assumes a “blasé attitude” 6 to keep latent feelings of aversion and mistrust of others at bay. 7 In the narrator’s perception of the unreadable old man and his later construction of the new type of the “man of the crowd,” aesthetic detachment and rationality give way to anxiety and unconscious aggression. The text thus highlights a latent moral panic endemic to the modern social imaginary, and anticipates Foucault’s analyses by demonstrating that the modern social regime of selfdiscipline is bound up with social practices of surveillance and ostracism. Containing and controlling his fear of the old man, the narrator includes him in imaginary projections of the order of society by excluding him as the embodiment of the type of society’s menacing Other. This rationalization and sublimation 8 of anxiety is made possible by interpreting the old man’s attested coolness. The narrator constructs a chain of metaphoric substitutions of the meaning of the term “cool.” His own failure to read the old man’s face is first figured as the old man’s coolness, i.e. as the lack of a visual sign of being moved; this lack is then read as signifying the old man’s ability to mask his feelings; and this ability to mask his feelings is finally interpreted as an indication of the old man’s evil designs. II cool, 2a. Of a person or a personal attribute, quality, etc.: not affected by passion or emotion, dispassionate; controlled, deliberate, not hasty; calm, composed.

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cool, 2b. Of the blood, as the seat of a person’s emotions or passions; without excitement; (esp. with reference to violent or cruel action) not in the heat of passion, with calm deliberation. cool, 2e. Of Jazz music: restrained or relaxed in style (opposed to hot). Also: performing or associated with music of this type. —OED

“Coolness” and “coldness” have a long history as metaphorical expressions of affect control, or a lack of affect respectively. 9 Referring to the reign of reason over the “hot” affects and desires of the body, the metaphors were bound up with an ethics of (male) self-control and a rhetoric of appropriate public (male) behavior in Greek and Roman antiquity. 10 While modern ethics and aesthetics of cool obviously obey a logic of their own, the respective Greek and Roman texts have nevertheless played an important role in modern ethical discourses no less than in modern aesthetic performances of self (Poe’s story is no exception). Ideas of a Stoic withdrawal from the world by overcoming all passions, or of an Epicurean lifestyle of pleasure predicated on affect-control, have been invoked over centuries by numerous authors attempting to give conceptual contours to discourses on self-discipline. To be sure, the psychological metaphor of coolness is concise enough, as is proven by its historical usage in Japanese and West African cultures as well as in European and American cultures. The function and evaluation of affect control differs with the historical affect regime and its construction of the self (and of gender). Yet it is instructive to analyze the sociocultural connotations of coolness at a given period as a background against which the usage of the metaphor yields its cognitive value. Given the vastness of cultural and aesthetic phenomena described as “cool” in twentieth-century American culture, the following remarks must needs fall short of giving a complete picture. Their objective is rather modest, namely to discuss a few well-known examples, and to mention a few more in passing, while certain important questions such as the role of gender and sexuality are only alluded to and not analyzed systematically. In the age of Enlightenment, coolness epitomized the (male) subject’s control of emotions and affects by way of reason 11, until the dandy appeared on the early nineteenth-century social stage in London. He cultivated coolness in the sense of aesthetic detachment and an ironic stance toward dominant bourgeois social mores and the concomitant regime of emotions. 12 “Coolness was all,” as T. A. J. Burnett wrote, “coolness in the sense of effrontery, but also in the sense of imperturbability and reserve.” 13 Dandies typically displayed an intense interest in fashion and style, and devoted themselves to performances of self that showed their refined taste. This was a reflexive performance of self-control to distinguish themselves from the social milieu of the middle-class (its crude taste and sentimentalism). 14 The

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dandy’s “coolness was frequently required in order to triumph over the risk inherent in those social events which functioned as a trial of character,” observes Colin Campbell, adding that “this stoic self-control was not [. . .] dictated by a philosophy which stated that the passions must be subjected to reason;” rather, “it was a psychological necessity” 15 in the face of public censure. For apart from his indulgence in fashion (often described as effeminate), the dandy was notorious for his ambiguous and transgressive sexuality, and his excessive gambling debts. 16 The dandy created an aesthetic lifestyle imitated by many. His appearance indicated the emergence of a social group that aspired to the aristocratic privilege of conspicuous consumption, 17 and despised middle-class utilitarian norms. But the dandy and his followers did not respect the established social order of inherited rank either. Rather, they created a subcultural social world built on a new form of social exclusivity, namely on fashion and a cool style of deportment. The dandy’s lifestyle anticipated a cosmopolitan bohemian lifestyle which first developed in Paris in the 1830s 18 and has since been “serially reiterated” 19 by various subcultures around the globe. Bohemia is a milieu composed of artists and intellectuals and people who, to quote Poe, “live by their wits” (or in today’s neoliberal parlance, members of the “creative class”). 20 Their dissidence from the conventions of the dominant middle-class society is demonstrated by their disregard for economic success and bourgeois moral sentiment, along with their devotion to aesthetic principles of artistic innovation and pleasure, attitudes that have been characterized as “narcissism, hedonism, and a libertarian habitus.” 21 In American discourses in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the term “cool” was invoked to characterize the ideal type of rational man capable of controlling his emotions and desires. This coolness was regarded as a racially exclusivist practice of self-deportment pertaining only to white men because blacks were thought of as incapable of self-control: they were seen as childlike or as brutes, unable to control their emotions and sensual drives. 22 The meaning of coolness in twentieth-century American culture mostly refers to African American cultural practices however. As an explanation of this major shift, several critics have traced the history of the concept of “cool” in African American culture, where it refers to several interlocking practices of emotional self-control and self-presentation developed against the dominant racist imaginary: a practice of emotional self-control established during slavery, when a black man’s display of anger or rage in conflicts with whites constituted a risk to his life; a street aesthetics of cool which builds on this coping strategy, but transforms the cool mask into ritualized performances of tough guy images that signal invulnerability and the capability of physical violence; and African American jazz culture in the 1940s and 50s, where coolness referred both to a new musical style and the lifestyle of the musicians. Robert Farris Thompson traced African American coolness back to

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West African practices of the sacred which he found in African dance, philosophy, and art: “[C]oolness is an all-embracing positive attribute which combines notions of composure, silence, vitality, healing, and social purification;” 23 it is associated with generosity, calm, beauty, gentleness, personal power and courage. In a footnote, Thompson linked his research to Claudia Mitchell-Kernan’s essay “Signifying as a Form of Verbal Art,” 24 which focused on African American street aesthetic rituals of competition and contestation such as “playing the dozens.” Thompson’s and Mitchell-Kernan’s work in turn inspired Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s well-known study on the African trickster and on signifyin’ as an African American ironic or parodistic practice. Referring to this practice as a “political offensive” and a “guerrilla action, 25 Gates mentions “cool” as one of the English terms thus (re)signified (another one is “hip” 26), and adds: Signifyin(g), in Lacan’s sense, is the Other of discourse; but it also constitutes the black Other’s discourse as its rhetoric. Ironically, rather than a proclamation of emancipation from the white person’s standard English, the symbiotic relationship between the black and white, between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes, between black vernacular discourse and standard English discourse is underscored here. 27

Cool is a “double-voiced word” in African American English, writes Gates, a “palimpsest in which the uppermost description is a commentary on the one beneath it.” 28 It characterizes a visibly displayed attitude of imperturbed equanimity as a “masking behavior” 29 that conceals feelings of contempt, anger, or suffering. African American coolness is thus defined as a rhetorical and performative practice that subverts the manifest attitude of emotional self-control by hinting at its formation in a historical dynamics of racist oppression. Referring to 1950s jazz culture, Dennis McNally wrote: “As protection from American racism in general and the crudities of audience in particular, the Boppers developed a whole culture of restrained coolness that enraged bourgeois critics and older musicians,” and added, Their language was distant and oblique. Their dress—berets, goatees, and glasses—seemed affected. Above all else, it was their withdrawn, somnambulistic intensity onstage, their refusal to talk or shuffle, that made the usually generous Louis Armstrong accuse them of malice and the leading magazine of jazz, Downbeat, attack them as fanatics. As one later student of Bop [Gilbert Sorrentino, U.H.] wrote, ‘Jazz had broken itself free of the middle-class world’s social conception of what it should be.’ 30

With Gates, “cool” jazz culture can be analyzed as citing the white notion of coolness as the normative ideal of “civilized” self-control and subverting it

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by drawing on an African notion of coolness. But European traditions of bohemian coolness were also thrown into the mix: 31 McNally alludes to the dandyism of the Boppers, and Lewis MacAdams has described how they appropriated “the Left Bank café-intellectual style.” 32 American popular media, however, mostly identified cool jazz culture with a lifestyle of the black underclass characterized by hedonism, drug abuse, violence and petty crime. Jazz musicians became celebrities not only because of their art but also because of their personalities and transgressive behavior; 33 the lack of white middle-class patterns of self-control ascribed both to blacks and to bohemian dropouts served as a trajectory for the construction of this image. The writers of the Beat Generation built on this popular idea of jazz culture, but gave it a new twist. In a famous passage of Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical novel On the Road, the narrator Sal Paradise describes the Beats’ attitude toward the jazz musicians and their coolness. Jazz musician Slim Gaillard’s scat singing appears as a “madman’s” performance to him, signifying nothing but a gesture of contempt for society: “To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big orooni” (177). It is this attitude that makes Sal’s friend Dean Moriarty (whom Sal idealizes as a person without internalized norms of emotional self-restraint) adore Gaillard as “God” (177). 34 Dean works himself into ecstasy during Gaillard’s concert, but remains shy in the latter’s presence; at his request, Gaillard joins him at a table for drinks, but “dreams over his head” (177), never acknowledging Dean’s presence. Dean in turn responds to Gaillard’s senseless mutterings by rhythmically responding with “yes;” he engages in a practice of worship, using emphatic expressions of affirmation to indicate his reverence for Gaillard’s indifference to the world at large. In contrast to Dean, Sal keeps his distance; instead he describes Gaillard’s musical performance, translating the intensity of the visual and acoustic experience into his own cool prose: He’ll sing, “Cement Mixer, Pu-ti Pu-ti” and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward to hear; you’ll think he’ll do this for a minute or two, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can’t hear it anymore and sounds of traffic come through the door. Then he slowly gets the mike and says, very slowly, “Great-orooni . . . fine-ovauti . . . hello-orooni . . . bourbonorooni . . . all-orooni . . . how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni . . . orooni . . . vauti . . . oroonirooni . . . [.] (176)

The attested nihilism of Gaillard’s “sad” singing, the booming beats, the “big foghorn blues out of every muscle” of Lampshade’s, another famous jazz musician’s, “soul,” the dope and the drinks, the sweat and screams and “gooky stares” (177), all add up to boisterous scenes of jazz nightlife – which for Sal however only bring out his emotional inhibitedness. The musical

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performances make him experience the depth of his loneliness and detachment from others, feelings which are not expressed but rendered between the lines of the narrator’s description of the event and his laconic comments: I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn’t give a damn. Dean and I goofed around San Francisco in this manner until I got my next GI check and got ready to go back home. What I accomplished by coming to Frisco I don’t know. (177)

In another passage a few pages later in the novel, Sal espouses romantic fantasies of a better life and strong emotions, which he projects onto poor blacks and people of color in general: At lilac evening, I walked along with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. [. . .] I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white man” disillusioned. [. . .] I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensuous gal; and dark faces of the men behind rose arbors. [. . .] I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America. (180)

Engaging in a “racial romance,” 35 Sal takes up the old stereotype of “happy negroes” lacking emotional restraint in order to give it a new positive meaning. It is impossible to differentiate between primitivism and self-irony here: it is a “disillusioned white man’s” fantasy that expresses an ideal as unattainable to him. Yet, this passage may explain why the coolness of jazz musicians (of their music and their lifestyle) was so attractive for the Beats. For the jazz musicians were certainly not “happy, true-hearted, ecstatic negroes,” and in his descriptions Sal does not portray them as such. Rather, in their art and in their lives, the jazz musicians performed the double-voicedness of African American coolness as a paradoxical attitude of emotional self-control: their coolness signified strong emotions, subverting the racialized order of affects of “white” emotional self-restraint versus “black” emotionality, and it is this paradoxical structure of African American coolness that makes it a model for Sal. Describing himself as “a disillusioned white man,” Sal diagnoses himself with emotional paralysis due to the internalization of a normative white middle-class mode of self-discipline. Longing for emotional intensity, and ascribing the capability of experiencing such intense emotions to blacks, he reiterates racist stereotypes in order to transvaluate their foundational binary opposition. Since Sal is aware that he cannot simply shed his internalized emotional restraints, his admiration for jazz musicians and their

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art suggests that Sal attempts to learn from them, not by copying them, but by creating another paradoxical aesthetic form. What Sal does not appear to be aware of, however, is the irony and self-irony that form an important part of African American cool. Two different modalities of a white paradoxical form of coolness can be discerned in On the Road. In the passages on San Francisco jazz nightlife quoted above, Sal subverts the white norm of emotional self-control by signifying an undercurrent of repressed affects, in his case feelings of loneliness and existential anguish. This expressive form is not unprecedented. One might think of Hemingway’s novel portraying Parisian bohemian circles of the 1920s, The Sun Also Rises, where scene after scene of boisterous nightlife (including occasional appearances of jazz musicians) are described by a firstperson narrator whose emotional self-control signals his vulnerability, loneliness and despair. One might also think of the coolness of the lone heroes of film noir, and of many western movies whose stoicism and taciturnity speak volumes about the codes of male affect-control, but occasionally also indicate efforts to signify the emotions that cannot be shown or said. In these cases, the ideal of white male conduct is reiterated but at the same time exposed as a mask, which the subject dons and covers up an emotional abyss to maintain his integrity. In On the Road, Kerouac makes use of this type of white coolness only as a step toward the more liberating—and rather hot— emotional practice of selfhood embodied by Dean Moriarty. To be close to him and other friends is of vital importance for Sal, who seeks a communal life with those who share his dedication to sensuality, immediacy, and authenticity. With the description of the paradoxical phenomenon of a cool burning ecstasy, the Beats’ admiration of jazz culture led Kerouac to a new hybridization of cultural traditions. As Sal puts it in On the Road, his own and his friends’ motto was “[b]urn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” (8). But the jazz musicians were not the only model; buried in the metaphor is an allusion to an older European notion of coolness. In a later comment, Kerouac explained the metaphor by referring to Walter Pater (a classicist and a writer, and the late Victorian dandy Oscar Wilde’s teacher at Oxford) and his credo of fin de siècle aestheticism: “to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” 36 The complexities of the coolness of jazz culture and that of the Beat Generation were lost in the reception of On the Road and Howl. The public controversy over the immediate success of both texts after their publication in 1957 shows that the Beats were credited with a fusion of the image of the black underdog and the juvenile delinquent: they were accused of propagating an image with which young people identified to express their disaffection with mainstream society. 37 The Beats’ coolness was attacked from the popu-

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lar press and from the New York Intellectuals; in February 1958, Playboy ran two articles entitled “Cool Swinging in New York” and “A Frigid Frolic in Frisco.” 38 A few months later, Norman Podhoretz published a review essay in Partisan Review, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” in which he castigated the Beats for being “hostile to civilization” and for worshipping “primitivism, instinct, energy, ‘blood.’” He warned that the Beats’ “solidarity with the primitive vitality and spontaneity they feel in jazz” could “spill over easily into brutality.” 39 No wonder that in 1959, New York authorities required Beat writers to register with the police in order to be permitted to read in coffeehouses. 40 The Beats’ attitudes anticipated the new democratizing trends of 1960s popular culture and the emerging new patterns of postmodern subjectivity. Expressing sympathy with the excluded social Other during a time defined by the Cold War, McCarthyism, and Jim Crow, and envisioning a transracial bohemian world, their texts contributed to the countercultural support of the Civil Rights Movement and the protests against the Vietnam War. After all, “beatniks” were one of America’s three groups of enemies identified by FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover at the 1960s Republican National Convention; the other two were “communists” and “eggheads.” III. cool, 2c. In weakened use: all right, “OK,” satisfactory, acceptable; unproblematic, safe. cool, 8a. Attractively shrewd or clever; sophisticated, stylish, classy; fashionable, up to date; sexually attractive. cool, 2d. Of a person, an action, or a person’s behavior: assured and unabashed where diffidence and hesitation would be expected; composedly and deliberately audacious in making a proposal, demand, or assumption. cool 3b. Exhibiting or demonstrating a lack of warmth or affection; not cordial, unfriendly. —OED

In contemporary usage, the term “cool” is used indiscriminately, and it has therefore become increasingly difficult to define the term beyond a general positive meaning. Today, coolness is the preferred term to characterize an individual’s convincing public self-presentation, implying both an acute awareness of the effects of his or her self-presentation on others, and a distinctive choice of objects as props to that end. Which objects are regarded as cool changes quickly and varies in different places and with different groups, a fact that emphasizes the intimate connection of contemporary coolness with fashion and lifestyle. At the same time, “cool” retains some coun-

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ter-cultural meaning, but it is usually tuned down to merely connote difference from the mainstream. What is at stake here are the connections between consumer culture, postmodern reflexive performances of selfhood, and the legacy of 1960s counterculture. This is once again a very vast field indeed, and I will limit myself to a few remarks that read contemporary coolness in the context of my previous arguments. In retrospect, Poe’s story about “The Man of the Crowd” appears to be a harbinger of later developments. Alternating between reading advertisements and the faces of the crowd, Poe’s narrator anticipates a contemporary individual’s savviness in discriminating commercialized lifestyles as self-advertisements (which indicates in turn that the narrator uses his erudite tale as the self-advertisement of a dandy). 41 But there is another, even more striking parallel with contemporary practices. The wearing of dark sunglasses has been an emblematic sign of contemporary coolness since the 1960s, when it was made popular by jazz musicians such as Miles Davis, or by Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita, which portrayed the hedonistic lifestyle of a fashionable crowd in 1960s Rome and linked it to the Americanization of Italian society after WWII. The wearing of sunglasses immediately transforms a member of the crowd into a detached observer of the crowd: shading the eyes, sunglasses make a person’s emotional expression unreadable and create an image of impassivity. Poe’s narrator made use of a similar device when he sat behind the “smoky panes” of the coffeehouse to watch the passers-by without being seen. As mentioned above, Georg Simmel argued that modern lifestyles reflect the dissolution of older forms of social identity and the historic sedimentation of knowledge and traditions. 42 Modern societies are characterized by social interdependence, functional differentiation, and an accelerating dynamics of social mediation by economic exchange. For Simmel, money is the correlative of lifestyles, the force that generates an aesthetic distance to things and to people, and upon which the construction of an observable “style” of life is based. Processes of individualization engender a modern “pathos of distance,” 43 and foster the subjects’ reflexive performances of symbolic difference and disidentification from the mainstream, together with a concomitant need to identify (with) such others with whom they share certain traits of identity. Lifestyles thus create a new form of social readability; they mark social status by the display of commodities. 44 As an aesthetic form of self-presentation, a lifestyle is marked by a (relative) coherence and a contingency of its material elements: 45 to a certain extent, new gadgets, new fashion items, or new leisure activities can be integrated without putting a style at risk. In the context of lifestyle performance, “coolness” has been bound up with emotional self-control since the age of the dandy. What is new in contemporary cool self-presentations, however, is the apparent evaporation of

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latent anxiety and aggression that formed the undercurrent of the narrator’s aesthetic detachment and self-control in Poe’s story. This postmodern development has been theorized by Fredric Jameson: The liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from any kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings . . . are now freefloating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria. 46

Jameson’s description resonates with the findings of historians of emotion who attest contemporary Americans to be cool in the sense of being “friendly but impersonal.” 47 Coolness in this sense refers to self-presentation and (self-)observation as obverse practices. The emotional distance required of individuals in their various social activities is mirrored by their emotional distance to themselves. 48 Feelings are accessories of the particular performance rather than indicators of emotional states, and tend to be produced as citations of appropriate affectivity by self-monitoring individuals. Jameson’s critical observations are in tune with recent sociological investigations of postmodernity. 49 In Eva Illouz’s definition of the term, “reflexive selfhood” refers to a “peculiar mix of self-interest and sympathy, of attention to oneself and manipulation of others.” She links the postmodern pervasiveness of this type of subjectivity to the advent of modern management culture, post-Fordist transformations of capitalism, the democratization of social relationships, and post-Freudian therapy culture. 50 Jameson’s remark on “free-floating feelings” and “euphoria” also suggests a continuity of the postmodern performances of self with those of the Beats. If this is true, one might wonder if there are no traces of paradox in postmodern performances of self. Contemporary psychoanalytic discourse offers such a view: if the contradiction between internalized social norms and individual choices and practices created guilt as the dominant formative feature of the “inner-directed” self in earlier periods of modernity, 51 the dominant formative feature of postmodern subjectivity may well be shame. As postmodern society has become more diverse (or more “tribal”)—a process that started in 1940s—individuals have increasingly depended on the recognition of others to construct their identity. Shame results from the failure to successfully project a positive self-image acknowledged by one’s group, and is bound up with the threat of social death. 52 Alain Ehrenberg thus refers to the booming therapy industry that prescribes Prozac or provides counselling to individuals who fail in their efforts to keep their cool and suffer from anxiety and depression. 53 Contemporary coolness, then, may well mean more than a dandy’s aesthetic distance to one’s own performances of self and that

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of others: it also may refer to the individuals’ efforts to hide their vulnerability and ward off anxieties of social failure (and in that sense reiterate the behavior of Hemingway’s code hero). Since Prozac is also prescribed to individuals who allegedly suffer from a lack of feelings, there is arguably also a certain social acknowledgment of the Beats’ efforts to liberate the affects. Illouz has therefore argued that postmodern society should not be defined by a general cooling of emotions, but by an emotional self-management in accordance with situation and context. Compared to previous eras of modernity, this view implies a less repressive cultural climate in conjunction with a multiplication of norms of emotional self-control, as the postmodern self needs to navigate different cultural realms; its identity is “characterized by the play of shifting, malleable, constructed differences, with race, ethnicity, location, gender and sexuality predominant, but no one axis of difference inherently more important than others.” 54 Fashion forms a conspicuous part of postmodern lifestyles: it makes them readable as social typologies of identity. 55 Fashion photography, television, movies, and advertising propagate images that highlight codes of body display, 56 and the narrative and discursive frameworks in which these images are inscribed connect them to group-specific markers of identity. The older class-based system of social difference has not been dismantled; rather, it has been differentiated and in the process become less legible. As Pierre Bourdieu put it, “One has only to remove the magical barrier which makes legitimate culture into a separate universe, in order to see intelligible relationships between choices as seemingly incommensurable as preferences in music or cooking, sport or politics, literature or hairstyle.” 57 What is different is the new ethos of producing and performing the self. “The self has become a mass-produced market product: buy this in order to be that. The self has been transposed into an icon and a fetish; it is simultaneously a display of conspicuous consumption and a commodity with an artificial value,” writes Joanne Finkelstein. 58 Fashion not only involves social practices of conspicuous consumption, but practices of symbolic production as well. Fashion produces vestimentary codes and throws them out again, just as the fashion industry creates and propagates certain social types. At the same time, individuals are also encouraged to combine elements of clothing in a surprising, not yet coded way (at least during leisure time). This eclecticism is typically written up as suggesting a richness of personality and a transcendence of social type. 59 In tune with bohemian practices of cultural dissidence, some youth cultures signify their distance from fashion as the market of social identity by ostentatiously breaking the rules of taste. But since the 1960s, fashion has proven able to absorb such hostile energies, and even to appropriate their cultural capital by turning them into signs of individual difference. Recent commen-

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tators have suggested that “[c]ool still retains enough of its potently antisocial content,” 60 but this is a position increasingly difficult to argue. The Beats had provoked the hostility of the “establishment” as their libertarian aesthetics of subjectivity envisioned a new sense of freedom, emotional intensity, and democratic egalitarianism against the norms of white middle-class culture. While their coolness cited the style of previous bohemian groups, their politics evolved into the countercultural politics of resistance and protest of the 1960s. For the Beats had hit a cultural nerve. Their diagnosis of emotional paralysis, their attack on cultural conformity and their admiration for black culture as a culture of dissidence was shared by many, as was the quest for new community. From a sociological point of view, the new social movements must be regarded as a crucial development toward the pluralism of postmodern selves, with lifestyle as their conspicuous social marker. “The communication of a significant difference (and the parallel communication of a group identity) is the ‘point’ behind the style of all spectacular subcultures,” writes sociologist Dick Hebdige. 61 Today this symbolic difference is built mostly on the use of commodities, 62 which is why the fashion industry and the culture industry successfully turned dissidents into trendsetters and hijacked the term “cool” from its moorings in counterculture. 63 Mark Greif has consequently defined the most recent cool subcultural type, the 2009 hipster, as “the name for that person who is savant at picking up the tiny changes of consumer distinction.” 64 If certain types of African American coolness continue to provide models for certain groups of contemporary youth subculture, their stereotyping continues as well, and is in turn taken up and ironically reflected, by gangsta rap for example. The rappers’ personal histories of violence and crime are at the center of their songs, their appearances on stage and in the media: street credibility is portrayed as an asset in creating a convincing performance of a menacing black Other. The gangsta rappers’ rhetorical violence, together with their ghetto chic, performs yet another cool gesture in the double-voiced sense of the word, signifying success in a society which, while denying most blacks a life of luxury, grants it to black entertainers embodying racist stereotypes. But as the rappers’ delinquency is stylized as a rebellion of the socially marginalized against the system, their “bad” image serves as a focal point for signaling suburban dissidence from the norms of white middle-class society. In the black community, the frequency of these images in contemporary popular culture has raised some concern. 65 Perhaps to counter such images, in 2008 Ebony magazine dedicated its August issue to “the 25 coolest brothers of all time.” African American coolness was defined as “swagger, confidence, effortless style,” and the cover featured then presidential candidate Barack Obama. 66

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NOTES 1. Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (London/Melbourne: Dent, 1984), 107–115. All subsequent page numbers refer to this edition. 2. Cf. Kevin J. Hayes, “Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 56.4 (2002): 445–465. 3. Cf. Hayes, “Visual Culture and the Word,” 450. 4. Cf. Poe, “The Daguerreotype” (1840), in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 37f. 5. Cf. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs of Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 170–210: 192; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (1985; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 447. 6. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt H. Wolff, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950), 401–424: 410, 413. The characterization as “blasé” is an unmarked quote from a text by Baudelaire on the dandy: “Le peintre de la vie moderne” (1863). In Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 1152–92. 7. Cf. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” 415f: “If I do not deceive myself, the inner aspect of this outward reserve is not only indifference but, more often than we are aware, it is a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion, which will break into hatred and fight at the moment of a closer contact, however caused.” 8. For an analysis of this process cf. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 9. In the ancient Greek typological system of temperament, “coldness” referred to phlegm or black bile, which made people sluggish or introspective and withdrawn. Cf. Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 10. Cf. Catherine Newmark’s and Daniel L. Selden’s contributions to this volume. 11. Cf. Catrin’s Gersdorf’s essay in this volume. 12. Poe’s narrator may therefore be analyzed as displaying the attitudes of a dandy. 13. T. A. J. Burnett, The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy: The Life and Times of Scrope Berdmore Davies (Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown, 1981), 51. 14. Cf. Michael Müller and Thilo Raufer, “The Dandy Club. Zur Attraktivität eines unpolitischen Lebensstils,” in Figurative Politik. Zur Performanz der Macht in der modernen Gesellschaft, eds. Hans-Georg Soeffner and Dirk Tänzler (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2002), 69–88. 15. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 168f. 16. Clara Tuite, “Trials of the Dandy: George Brummell’s Scandalous Celebrity,” in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850, ed. Tom Mole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 143–167. 17. Cf. Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 18. Cf. Campbell’s analysis in The Romantic Ethic 173–201. 19. Jim McGuigan, Cool Capitalism (London/New York: Pluto Press, 2009), 50. 20. Cf. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Writing about American expatriates in Paris in the 1920s, Malcolm Cowley described the composition of bohemia as including “designers, stylists, trade-paper sub-editors, interior decorators, wolves, fairies, millionaire patrons of art, sadists, nymphomaniacs, bridge sharks, anarchists, women living on alimony, tired reformers, educational cranks, economists, hopheads, dipsomaniac playwrights, nudists, restaurant keepers, stockbrokers and dentists craving self-expression.” In Exiles Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (1934; New York: Penguin, 1994), 57.

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21. Dick Pountain/David Robins, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 26. 22. Cf. Catrin Gersdorf’s contribution to this volume. 23. Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act in the Collection of Katharine Coryton White (Los Angeles, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1974), 43. See also the collection of Thompson’s essays Aesthetic of the Cool (Pittsburgh and New York: Periscope, 2011). 24. Cf. Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, “Signifying as a Form of Verbal Art,” in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of African American Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 310–28. 25. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 47 and 46. 26. Cf. John Leland, Hip: The History (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 5. 27. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 50. 28. Cf. Gary Saul Morson qtd. by Gates, The Signifying Monkey 50. 29. Cf. Roger D. Abrahams qtd. in Gates, The Signifying Monkey 77, and Joel Dinerstein's contribution to this volume. 30. Dennis McNally, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America (New York: Random House, 1979), 82. 31. Cf. Alexander Beissenhirtz, Affirmation and Resistance: The Politics of the Jazz Life in the Self-Narratives of Louis Armstrong, Art Pepper, and Oscar Peterson (Kiel: Ludwig, 2012). 32. Lewis MacAdams, Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avantgarde (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 24. 33. The interest in personality also changed the style of musical performance: “After Armstrong, virtually every aspect of jazz thrusts the human element into the forefront: its emphasis on the individual soloist rather than, as in earlier jazz or in traditional classical music, on the collective sound of the ensemble; its fans’ and critics’ fascination with—indeed their obsession with—personalities.” Ted Gioia, The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 15. Cf. also his The Birth and Death of the Cool (Golden, CO: Speck Press, 2009). 34. On the religious aura of celebrities cf. Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 18f; Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001). 35. Leland, Hip, 152. 36. Cf. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (1910; Chicago: Academy, 1977), 236. 37. Cf. Stephen Petrus, “Rumblings of Discontent: American Popular Culture and Its Response to the Beat Generation, 1957–1960,” Studies in Popular Culture 20.1 (1997): 1–17. 38. Cf. McNally, Desolate Angel, 253. 39. Norman Podhoretz, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” Partisan Review 25 (1958) 305–318: 307–8, 318; for sardonic comment on the Denver “happy negroes” scene discussed above 310–11. Podhoretz responded not only to Kerouac, but also to Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” Dissent 4.3 (1957): 276–293. 40. Cf. McNally, Desolate Angel, 265. 41. Cf. the title of Norman Mailer’s volume of essays (fn. 39). 42. Cf. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1900), trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 2011), chapter 6. 43. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 509. 44. Cf. Joanne Finkelstein, The Fashioned Self (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 45. Cf. Hans-Georg Soeffner, Symbolische Formung: Eine Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2010), 88. 46. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 15f. 47. Cf. Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth Century Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 193.

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48. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959). 49. Cf. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 50. Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 93 and 94; cf. Stearns, American Cool, chapters 7 and 8. 51. David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd (1950; Yale University Press, 2001). 52. For the difference between “guilt culture” and “shame culture” cf. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); for a recent application cf. Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 53. Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009). 54. Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 251. 55. Cf. Simmel, “Fashion” (1904), in Fashion Marketing: An Anthology of Viewpoints and Perspectives, eds. Gordon Wills and David Midgley (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973), 171–191; Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; London: Allen and Unwin, 1970). 56. Cf. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 258ff; Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (Routledge; London/New York, 1994); Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 239ff. 57. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 100. 58. Finkelstein, The Fashioned Self, 172. 59. Barthes, The Fashion System, 229. Other authors regard this as a sign of growing interclass mobility, cf. Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 99. 60. Pountain and Robins, Cool Rules, 13. 61. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Routledge, 1979), 102. 62. Hebdige, Subculture, 95. 63. Cf. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) McGuigan, Cool Capitalism. 64. Mark Greif, “Positions,” in What was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation, eds. Mark Greif, Kathleen Ross, and Dayna Tortorici (New York: Small Books, 2010), 13. 65. Cf. Richard Mayors and Janet Mancini Billson, Cool Poses: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Lexington Books, 1992); bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2010). 66. I owe this reference to Catrin Gersdorf.

WORKS CITED Arikha, Noga. Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Barthes, Roland. The Fashion System. Translated by Matthew Ward and Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Baudelaire, Charles. “Le peintre de la vie moderne.” In Oeuvres Complètes, edited by Claude Pichois, 1152–92. Paris: Gallimard, 1961.

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Beissenhirtz, Alexander. Affirmation and Resistance: The Politics of Jazz Life in the SelfNarratives of Louis Armstrong, Art Pepper, and Oscar Peterson. Kiel: Ludwig, 2012. Benedict, Ruth. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs of Baudelaire.” In The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 170–210. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. ---. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Devin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Burnett, T. A. J. The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy: The Life and Times of Scrope Berdmore Davies. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1981. Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Cowley, Malcolm. Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. New York: Penguin, 1994. Craik, Jennifer. The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion. Routledge: London and New York, 1994. DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Ehrenberg, Alain. The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009. Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Finkelstein, Joanne. The Fashioned Self. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Garelick, Rhonda K. Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender and Performance in the Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Gioia, Ted. The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. ---. The Birth and Death of the Cool. Golden: Speck Press, 2009. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Greif, Mark. “Positions.” In What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation, edited by Mark Greif, Kathleen Ross and Dayna Tortorici. New York: Small Books, 2010. Hayes, Kevin J. “Visual Culture and the Word in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd.’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 56, no. 4 (2002): 445–65. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge, 1979. hooks, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge, 2010. Illouz, Eva. Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke Universeity Press, 1991. Kawamura, Yuniya. Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005. Kellner, Douglas. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics. Between the Modern and the Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Leland, John. Hip: The History. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Lethen, Helmut. Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

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MacAdams, Lewis. Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avantgarde. New York: The Free Press, 2001. Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro.” Dissent 4, no. 3 (1957): 276–93. Mayors, Richard and Janet Mancini Billson. Cool Poses: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America. New York: Lexington Books, 1992. McGuigan, Jim. Cool Capitalism. London and New York: Pluto Press, 2009. McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. New York: Random House, 1979. Miller, Monica L. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Staging of Black Diaspora Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia. “Signifying as a Form of Verbal Art.” In Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of African American Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes, 310–28. Englewood Cliffs: Printice-Hall, 1973. Müller, Michael and Thilo Raufer. “The Dandy Club. Zur Attraktivität eines unpolitischen Lebensstils.” In Figurative Politik: Zur Performanz der Maht in der modernen Gesellschaft, edited by Hans-Georg Soeffner and Dirk Tämzler, 69–88. Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 2002. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance. Chicago: Academy, 1977. Petrus, Stephen. “Rumblings of Discontent: American Popular Culture and Its Response to the Beat Generation, 1957–1960.” Studies in Popular Culture 20, no. 1 (1997): 1–17. Podhoretz, Norman. “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” Partisan Review 25 (1958): 305–18. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” In Tales of Mystery and Imagination, 107–15. London and Melbourne: Dent, 1984. ---. “The Daguerrotype.” In Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg, 37f. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. Pountain, Dick and David Robins. Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Roach, Joseph. It. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books, 2001. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited and translated by Kurt H. Wolff, 401–24. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950. ---. “Fashion.” In Fashion Marketing: An Anthology of Viewpoints and Perspectives, edited by Gordon Wills and David Midgley, 171–91. London: Allen and Unwin, 1973. ---. The Philosophy of Money. Translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. New York: Routledge, 2011. Soeffner, Hans-Georg. Symbolische Formung: Eine Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2010. Stearns, Peter N. American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth Century Style. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Thompson, Robert Farris. African Art in Motion: Icon and Act in the Collection of Katharine Coryton White. Los Angeles, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1974. ---. Aesthetic of the Cool. Pittsburgh and New York: Periscope, 2011. Tuite, Clara. “Trials of the Dandy: George Brummell’s Scandalous Celebrity.” In Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850, edited by Tom Mole, 143–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. London: Allen and Unwin, 1970. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Chapter Four

Kinds of Cool: Emotions and the Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century American Abolitionism Catrin Gersdorf

At our current historical moment and in the globalized culture of capitalism, coolness is a term most readily associated with the idioms of popular culture, popular music, fashion, and consumerism. Today, as Jim McGuigan has pointed out, capitalism itself has become cool; it has translated attitudes of cultural and social “disaffection,” and gestures of political and aesthetic rebellion into “acceptance” of and “compliance” with the rules of the market. 1 Emerging in the middle of the twentieth century as the affective sign of resistance against the norms and expectations of middle-class culture, cool is now widely recognized as a signifier of an object’s or attitude’s “fetishistic properties.” 2 Present-day associations of cool with the allure of commodity culture (electronic gadgets, clothes, cars), and with the rhetorical, behavioral, and intellectual mannerisms of the (predominantly white) hipster 3 tend to obscure the concept’s roots in the history and culture of Black America. Describing cool as a style in jazz that emulated the “completely relaxed, antifrenetic approach” 4 of saxophonist Lester Young, but primarily adopted in the late 1940s and early 1950s by white musicians (Miles Davis being the one notable exception), LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka not only identified the time and cultural location for the beginning of cool’s commodification—the jazz scene of the early 1950s—he also hinted at the cultural paradox underlying cool’s deracination on the heels of the style’s commodification. Although the album that heralded the Birth of the Cool came out of the collaborative efforts of black and white musicians (among them notables such as Gil Evans and Lee Konitz, Max Roach and John Lewis), it was marketed and ultimately perceived by the general audience as the invention 81

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of Miles Davis who, next to Charlie Parker, is the most iconic embodiment of the cool, black jazzman so revered by the white male proponents of the Beat Generation. For the Beats, appropriating the sartorial, behavioral, and aesthetic repertoire of jazzy blackness was the most provocative way to rebel against their own white, middle-class backgrounds, and to articulate a critique of the social conformism and cultural conservatism of the postwar era. 5 Yet at the same time, and paradoxically so, the success of the cool style in jazz was not perceived as an African American accomplishment. LeRoi Jones remembers that he “read in print more than a few times during the early fifties that [Miles] Davis was ‘a bad imitation’ of a white West Coast trumpeter, Chet Baker.” 6 For Jones/Baraka, “[if] anything, the opposite was true; but Baker,” who not only played the trumpet but sang as well, “fitted more closely with the successful syndrome of the cool.” 7 Under such circumstances it comes as no surprise that Jones feels obliged to reclaim coolness as an attitude that helped Africans and their American descendants to survive the experience of slavery. Writes Jones/Baraka: The term cool in its original context meant a specific reaction to the world, a specific relationship to one’s environment. To be cool was, in its most accessible meaning, to be calm, even unimpressed, by what horror the world might daily propose. [. . .] In a sense this calm, or stoical, repression of suffering is as old as the Negro’s entrance into the slave society or the captured African’s pragmatic acceptance of the gods of the captor. It is perhaps the flexibility of the Negro that has let him survive; his ability to ‘be cool’—to be calm, unimpressed, detached, perhaps to make failure as secret a phenomenon as possible. 8

To the extent that Jones/Baraka identifies coolness as an affective response necessary for black people to endure experiences of African captivity and American slavery, he reclaims this particular emotional style as one of the key elements in African American culture. More interestingly, he draws attention to coolness as a phenomenon whose history began long before its ostensible “birth” in the counter-cultural atmosphere of mid twentieth-century America. Other critics, especially those interested in tracing the cultural history and sociology of black masculinity, corroborated the assumption of a historical continuity between coolness as a strategy of affect control developed by African Americans in order to survive the grueling experiences of slavery and racism, and an ethics and aesthetic of the cool as it can be observed in mid to late twentieth-century black urban culture. 9 More often than not, the emphasis was not only on a historical continuum within more than three centuries of African American cultural traditions, but also on the continuation of a West African aesthetic of the cool, one that was described by Robert Farris Thompson as an “expressive performance” of “moral aesthetic accom-

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plishment.” 10 The concept of cool as defined by Thompson is based on the term’s metaphorical extension as a form of ritualized affect “control, having the value of composure in the individual context, social stability in the context of the group.” 11 (ibid.; italics in the original). While there is no doubt that the rich ceremonial legacy of the cool mask survived its transplantation from West Africa to America, albeit in modified forms, I will argue in this essay that twentieth-century manifestations of black American cool are the result of a cultural symbiosis between European and West African conceptions of affect control. In Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 (2008), Christine Levecq shows that, to “a substantial degree,” black abolitionist writers “not only appropriated surrounding and evolving political discourses but also managed to radicalize” 12 the core concepts of those discourses, including Lockean ideas of liberalism and natural rights, republican notions of the common good as they emerged in the context of the American Revolution, and the ethical concept of sympathy developed in the moral sense theory of David Hume and Adam Smith. The expression of feelings, or rather, their regulation and utilization in the interest of political stability and economic prosperity, was a central concern in all three of these discursive fields. As Daniel M. Gross points out in The Secret History of Emotions (2006), since Aristotle, tyranny has been considered an unstable form of political organization because “it induces unpredictable passions of hatred and contempt in its citizens.” 13 The philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose thought was so influential in formulating ideas about the affective foundation of modern republicanism, shared Aristotle’s conceptual association of political and affective self-government. Following Gross’ account of the Aristotelian concept of a democratic constitution as “the institutional form of good habits,” 14 we can understand the distinction between social and unsocial passions in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and his figure of “the cool and impartial spectator” 15 in a similar vein—as the theorization of both, the affective foundation of a democratically constituted republic and its citizenry. In Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, coolness appears as a form of “self-command,” 16 a kind of moral and social propriety that depends on an individual’s ability to avoid emotional excess and, more specifically, to temper “unsocial passions” (hatred, anger, resentment) for one’s own as well as for the sake of others. Without being cool and impartial, Smith suggests, it is impossible for us to pass reasonable moral judgments or create sustainable social and political communities in which the self-interest of one person no longer impedes the self-interest of another. In other words, in the wake of the Scottish Enlightenment, cool emerges as the affective precept for the successful administration of government in a modern republic.

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To date there is no study that gives a more detailed account of the conceptual history of coolness in America. This is not counting Peter N. Stearns’s American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (1994), a study that positions the modern, twentieth-century expressions of coolness on a continuum with Victorian standards of social and cultural propriety. Stearns broadens the perspective on coolness, arguing that nineteenth-century practices of emotional self-control became “cool” to the degree that morality and sentimentality gave way to rationality and calculability as gauges for socially appropriate behavior in the private as well as the public realm. However, although it successfully historicizes cool as one of the key markers of modern emotionality, Stearns study falls short of sufficiently accounting for the racial ramifications in the social history of American cool. This may be partly due to the fact that it is difficult to establish empirical sociological or cultural evidence of the presence of African and African American expressions of coolness prior to the twentieth century. It is the purpose of this essay to fill at least some of that gap by asking to what extent and in what form coolness registers in the literature and language of abolitionism? I will approach this task by taking a closer look at the work of some of the most prominent literary and political voices of that era: Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass. COOLNESS AND THE POLITICAL CONSTITUTION OF THE NATION: ABRAHAM LINCOLN One of the most persistent anecdotes in the history of abolitionism and the Civil War is Abraham Lincoln’s description of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as that little lady whose novel started the Civil War. Its apocryphal nature may render it worthless for some historians, while others, more interested in the story’s narrative tenacity than its historical accuracy, may still find a lot to say about its continued presence on the pages of mid nineteenthcentury American history. In a 2009 article, David R. Vollaro wonders, “If there was no historically significant meeting between these two abolitionist icons [Beecher Stowe and Lincoln, CG], why, despite its questionable origins, did this anecdote gain such purchase in the American imagination?” 17 Tracing the history of “the making, and breaking, of [this] Great American anecdote,” 18 Vollaro concludes that it enjoys such popularity in literary studies because it illustrates literature’s political and social power. For many literary scholars, he writes, “Stowe’s novel seems like the ultimate example of a literary work exerting revolutionary influence on American society.” 19 In contrast, Lincoln scholars treat the anecdote merely “as optional decoration to Lincoln’s legacy.” 20 There is, however, a third option for critically approaching the anecdote: read it for what it is—a literary image that cap-

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tures the essence of an affective difference between two of the major protagonists in the history of American abolitionism, both white, but one a rhetorically gifted politician recognized by his contemporaries for his demonstrably “cool judgment” and the “cool, and very eloquent manner” 21 in which he delivered public speeches; the other arguably the most successful American novelist of her time, whose literary work was deeply rooted in the tradition of sentimentalism and whose position on slavery was informed by a circle of family and friends who were all ardent critics of the peculiar institution. While Lincoln and Beecher Stowe shared a common ideological ground— they both agreed that slavery was the reason for the nation’s critical condition—their difference in temperament and public position accounts for the divergent strategies they deemed appropriate for solving the national crisis over slavery. Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist position was famously anchored in a religious ethics that saw slavery as institutionalized evil. As such, it was first and foremost a moral abomination, a breach not only with the humanitarian ideals and principles of Christianity but also, as Gregg D. Crane (1996) suggests, with the philosophy of natural rights that is the core of America’s moral identity. 22 In contrast, Lincoln saw slavery primarily as a political and economic problem. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. observed, “Lincoln’s central opposition to slavery” was based on “[the] economic premise,” that “it constituted the theft of another person’s labor.” 23 Whereas Beecher Stowe regarded the existence of slavery as an expression of the nation’s moral corruption, Lincoln saw it as a force corroding the economic foundation of America’s democratic republicanism. In other words, while Beecher Stowe was concerned with the effect of slavery on America’s moral constitution, Lincoln worried about the consequences slavery would have for the nation’s political constitution as a federal union of democratically organized, selfgoverning states. The most succinct articulation of that concern was his 1858 “A House Divided” speech in which he famously expressed his belief that “this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” 24 The political sectionalism generated by that division, and the constant necessity to find and legally install compromises between the pro-slavery interests of the South and the free labor interests of the North, had been taxing the nation since its revolutionary beginnings. Addressing an audience of Republican Party delegates gathered at the Illinois State Capitol to hear the acceptance speech of their nominee for United States Senate, Lincoln reminded his political friends that in 1852 “a policy was initiated” by their opponents from the Democratic Party, “with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation” 25 in Congress and elsewhere on the federal stage. The rationale behind that initiative was to once and for all settle the question of whether Congress had the power “to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several States,” 26 including the institution of

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slavery. More specifically, and more pertinent for the argument I am making here, Democrats maintained, that all efforts made of the abolitionists or others to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences; and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend of our political institutions. 27

In this section of their platform, pro-slavery Democrats strategically eschew the moral in favor of a constitutional argument, denouncing abolitionists as political hazarders willing to jeopardize all of the nation’s governmental principles and institutions for the abolition of a regionally restricted, economic one—slavery. Present-day readers will immediately identify the political and moral hypocrisy underlying a document that upholds “the liberal principles embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and sanctioned in the constitution” 28 and celebrates the United States as “the land of liberty and the asylum of the oppressed of every nation,” 29 while simultaneously defending the right of some Americans to maintain institutions of oppression and enslavement. It can be safely assumed that such contradictions did not escape a mid-nineteenth-century American public either, especially not those for whom slavery was what Henry Clay had called “that foul blot upon our nation.” 30 But the crucial question remained: What was the best strategy for removing that “foul blot” from the nation’s body politic? Or more precisely, how could a majority of the American public be persuaded to vote against the expansion of slavery and, ultimately, for its universal abolition? In historical hindsight we know that the course of the Civil War and strategic considerations aimed at the moral and military debilitation of the rebellious Confederate States convinced Lincoln to issue the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. At that point avoiding the transformation of a political and ethical controversy into a violent, military conflict had become moot. However, during the decade between the 1850 Compromise between Northern and Southern interests and the beginning of the Civil War, thwarting the eruption of a conflict, already charged with emotions, into violence was the most important task. In fact, it was so important that even when the national crisis escalated after the election of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederate States of America on February 9, 1861, President-elect Lincoln, in a speech delivered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on February 15, 1861, advised his audience to “keep cool:” If the great American people will only keep their temper, on both sides of the line, the troubles will come to an end, and the questions which now distracts

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the country will be settled just as surely as all other difficulties of like character which have originated in this government have been adjusted. Let the people on both sides keep their self-possession, and just as other clouds have cleared away in due time, so will this, and this great nation shall prosper as heretofore. 31

Lincoln took his emotional cue for responding to the secessionist provocation in the manner he proposed to his Pittsburgh audience from Thomas Jefferson, whose ability to distance himself from the passionate debates of the prerevolutionary era and formulate ethical principles of government untouched by the colonists’ resentments against the British became a model for Lincoln in his approach to defusing the nation’s second revolutionary crisis, this one equally fraught with emotional tensions and opposing passions. In a letter he wrote on April 6, 1859, to a group of Boston Republicans who had invited him to participate in their celebration of Jefferson’s birthday, Lincoln expressed his concern over the insidious erosion of the principles of free government at the hands of pro-slavery advocates. Describing them as “the van-guard—the miners, and sappers—of returning despotism,” 32 Lincoln expressed his fear that by not resisting their influence, the country might jeopardize the political legacy of the American Revolution. In the letter’s closing paragraph, Lincoln represents Jefferson as a political agent whose measured conduct in the country’s first revolutionary crisis—that one triggered by the clash of the British government’s economic and political interests in America with historically sanctioned ideas of liberty and civil rights—set an example for generations to come. 33 Writes Lincoln: All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. 34

The coolness Lincoln urged his audiences to keep in face of the current crisis also constituted the affective foundation of his own political persona. Moreover, he regarded coolness as the most appropriate affective response to allegations of sectionalism, a response that is prescribed by the language and letter of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In the summer of 1856, Lincoln sketched an argument that would deflect allegations of sectionalism made against Republicans after nominating John C. Fremont and William L. Dayton as the two men on the ticket for the upcoming presidential election. Both candidates were residents of free states; both opposed the extension of slavery into the nation’s territories; “and this fact,” Lincoln writes, “has been vaunted, in high places, as excessive section-

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alism.” 35 There are clear echoes of cynicism and mockery in Lincoln’s choice of “vaunt” as the verb that represents the attacks on the Republican ticket. But that tone is mitigated, albeit not relinquished completely, in the next paragraph: While interested individuals become indignant and excited, against this manifestation of sectionalism, I am very happy to know, that the Constitution remains calm—keeps cool—upon the subject. It does say that President and Vice President shall be resident of different states; but it does not say one must live in a slave, and the other in a free state. 36

For Lincoln, the most promising mode of deflating the hot balloon of emotionalism flying over the slavery controversy was adopting a demeanor of what I suggest calling constitutional coolness. By that I mean a pragmatic approach to the slavery question and the political and emotional tensions that it engendered, one that is informed by the emotionally subdued, if not neutral language of the Constitution and other legislative documents geared toward balancing divergent political, economic, and governmental interests within the nation. An integral part of Lincoln’s cool position on the abolition of slavery was his conviction that “a physical difference between the white and the black races [. . .] will for ever forbid the two races living together in terms of social and political equality.” 37 As much as he believed that slavery was a seedbed of economic injustice and a breeding ground for violence, he also saw the presence of “the colored race” in America as a major reason for the outbreak of the Civil War. 38 In the fourth debate with Stephen E. Douglas, Lincoln upheld the principle of racial hierarchy, stating that if black and white “do remain together” after emancipation, “there must be the position of superior and inferior,” and that he “as much as any other man” was “in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” 39 As late as 1862 Lincoln coolly declared on the pages of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune: My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I believe what I am doing hurts the cause; and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. 40

These lines echo with the spirit of political conciliation that began with the inclusion of a fugitive slave clause in Article 4, section 2 of the United States Constitution, was continued with measures such as the Missouri Compromise in 1820, and infamously peaked with the Compromise of 1850 and the

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passing of the Fugitive Slave Act that same year. These last two measures, instead of appeasing the opposing camps in the slavery controversy, would deepen the ideological trenches and tax the patience of many an abolitionist, thereby further increasing the risk of the nation’s constitutional collapse. COOLNESS AND THE MORAL CONSTITUTION OF THE NATION: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of many Northern Americans who were indignant about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Enraged about what she referred to as “this miserable wicked fugitive slave business,” 41 Stowe posed a rhetorical question to her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, asking him: “Must we forever keep calm and smile and smile when every sentiment of manliness and humanity is kicked and rolled in the dust and lies trampled and bleeding and make it a merit to be exceedingly cool.” 42 Not one to shy away from melodrama, she closed by encouraging her brother, who had already made a name for himself as one of the most passionate critics of the Fugitive Slave Act, to “fire away” at his opponents and “give them no rest day or night.” 43 The emotional dynamics of this passage bespeak the author’s impatience with the cool strategy of compromise in which slavery, and the people suffering under its oppressive regime, are merely pawns on the political chessboard. For abolitionists, slavery was not primarily a political and economic issue but one of the nation’s ethical integrity. Their language was informed by elements of literary as well as Christian sentimentalism, rhetorical strategies through which abolitionists sought to mobilize the American public to renounce slavery. A crucial part of that strategy was activating emotions such as fear (of the slaves’ vengeance and violence as well as of one’s own moral corruption) and guilt (over one’s own participation in, or tolerance of, a sinful institution). 44 As early as 1832, William Lloyd Garrison told the New England readers of his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, that they are righteously indignant at “the cruel conduct of slaveholders” and that “feelings of abhorrence are credible to our humanity.” 45 “But what,” he continued, “if it should appear, on a candid examination, that we are as guilty as the slave owners? that we uphold and protect a system which is full of cruelty and blood? that the chains which bind the limbs of the slaves have been rivetted by us?” He ends his article exclaiming, “We are guilty—all guilty—horribly guilty.” For Garrison that guilt consists of the participation of New England merchants and sailors in the transatlantic and domestic slave trade, of New England families “jump[ing] into a black fortune” by accepting slaves “as a wedding dowry,” and, last but not least, the political duties and obligations that come with inhabiting the political body of the same nation. 46 Discussing the use of

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fear as an affective trope in abolitionist rhetoric, Robert H. Abzug points out that for Garrison “granting freedom to the slave would remove every motive for revenge.” 47 Garrison considered the grievances of the slaves greater than those brought forth against the British Crown by the founders of the American Republic and their contemporaries; “so would be the ardor of their vengeful fight for freedom.” 48 The immediate emancipation of all slaves would, therefore, most effectively defuse the danger of revolutionary violence. In a 2001 essay investigating the confluence of “Power and Passion in Abolitionist Rhetoric,” Marc M. Arkin attributes the rhetorical forcefulness of Garrison’s abolitionism, and “his strategy of intense, even strident, emotive appeal,” to the influence of Fisher Ames, “New England Federalism’s greatest controversialist and orator.” 49 More specifically, it was Ames’s attention to “the interplay of emotion and reason in politics” 50 that appealed to Garrison. Truly an heir of the Enlightenment, Ames perceived the desire for power as a relic of despotism and unworthy of a reasonable republican. Nevertheless, he recognized that the “only agents in political affairs are popular passions.” 51 In the Jay Treaty speech—a text which, as Arkin points out, was frequently referenced by Garrison—Ames admitted that “On a question of shame and honor—liberty and oppression—reasoning is sometimes useless, and worse.” In those cases, to “feel the decision in [one’s] pulse” may be a much safer path to action and change, for “if it throws no light upon the brain, it kindles a fire in the heart.” 52 It is precisely this belief in the political efficacy of feelings and emotions that became one of the ideological hallmarks of American abolitionism in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Harriet Beecher Stowe shared Garrison’s views on emotions as instruments for moral, social, and political reform. For Beecher Stowe, such reform would presuppose a major revision of the principal character and psychology of both races, black and white. In The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854), she summarily referred to the “negro race” as “confessedly more simple, docile, childlike, and affectionate, than other races.” 53 By assuming a psychological predisposition among African Americans (and other nonwhite, non-Western races) for affective behavior and emotional expressivity, Beecher Stowe constitutes the black body as the cipher that allows the (white) observer access to the workings of the childish, highly impressionable, and unreflective mind of the negro, a mind that is governed by fancy and feelings rather than the rational operations of the intellect. “Their sensations and impressions are very vivid, and their fancy and imagination lively,” she writes. “Like the Hebrews of old and the Oriental nations of the present, they give vent to their emotions with the utmost vivacity of expression, and their whole bodily system sympathises with the movements of their minds.” 54 In contrast,

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the Anglo-Saxon race—cool, logical, and practical—have yet to learn the doctrine of toleration for the peculiarities of other races; and perhaps it was with a foresight of their peculiar character and dominant position in the earth, that God gave the Bible to them in the fervent language and with the glowing imagery of the more susceptible and passionate Oriental races. 55

What emerges from these comments and observations is Beecher Stowe’s position on coolness as a deficiency, an affective state that facilitates judgment and precludes tolerance. Beecher Stowe’s celebration of non-white emotionality reveals the author’s complicity with some of the most pernicious racial biases of her era. At the same time, however, it also marked a rhetorically necessary departure from eighteenth-century tendencies to deny black people the capacity of any emotional expression at all. Beecher Stowe famously created Uncle Tom, the black slave, as a character whose behavior, even under the worst personal circumstances, is governed by the twin emotions of love and loyalty for those who depend on him, thus becoming a paragon of self-sacrifice. The emotional topology of Uncle Tom’s character provides the core of a rhetorical strategy in which the feelings of the slave ultimately function as an apostrophe of the emotional experiences of Beecher Stowe’s white readership. In the chapter “Showing the Feelings of Living Property on Changing Owners,” Beecher Stowe’s narrator registers the “sobs, heavy, hoarse, and loud” that shake Uncle Tom’s body at saying good-bye forever to his children, and the “great tears” that “fell through his fingers on the floor.” 56 The finality of Tom’s separation from his family, and the emotions that this experience generates, are immediately likened to the surge of feelings Beecher Stowe’s white readers may very well remember as their own response to the death of one of their children. Tom’s tears become “just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son; such tears, woman, as you shed when you heard the cries of your dying babe.” 57 Beecher Stowe concludes her apostrophic paragraph by uniting the two races in their capacity to feel and express the pain of irrevocable loss. The commonality of emotions provides the ground for the white reader’s sympathetic response to the slave. In a study of the emotional economy of the revolutionary era, Nicole Eustace pointed out that like their nineteenth-century heirs, eighteenth-century abolitionists resorted to a rhetoric of sympathy for bringing home their anti-slavery arguments. That strategy was virtually ineffective, however, simply because “slaveholders could hardly be called upon to sympathize with black feeling if it did not exist.” 58 It is against the background of this ideological legacy that Beecher Stowe’s critique of coolness as the affective condition for solving the national crisis over slavery gains its historical and conceptual contours. If activating the reader’s sympathy for the pains of the suffering slave was one of the

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major goals of her abolitionist work, those pains, in a very literal sense, needed to be readable. Yet by its very definition, coolness means emotional unreadability. At best, it reads as a sign of affective self-control; at worst, it can be misread as the very absence of feeling and as an immunity to pain or pleasure. As the semantic marker of emotional self-distance, the sign of cool would thwart the purpose of creating a space for imagining the affective proximity, if not emotional identity, between enslaved and free Americans. For Beecher Stowe, coolness was not only a character flaw in the AngloSaxon race, it was also inadequate as a rhetorical tool for mobilizing the power of sympathy. The concept of sympathy was a central tenet in the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment and one of the key concepts in the work of David Hume and Adam Smith. They both understood sympathy as the principle in human nature that compels us to demonstrate an interest in and be emotionally excited, or moved, by the feelings and emotions we observe in other human beings. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith called sympathy “our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever,” 59 and he described it as the psychological mechanism that generates in the spectator an emotion analogous to the one he observes in someone other than himself. “In every passion of which the mind of man is susceptible,” Smith writes, “the emotions of the by-stander always correspond to what, by bringing the case home to himself, he imagines should be the sentiments of the sufferer.” 60 The vehicle for such an exchange is the imagination. “By the imagination,” Smith notes, “we place ourselves in [another person’s] situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.” 61 By recognizing someone else’s emotions as affecting our own, we not only lay the foundation for the respectable virtue of social grace; 62 more importantly, sympathy becomes the prerequisite for moral judgment and the implementation of justice. It is precisely the atrophy of sympathy, and its gradual replacement by the rule of economic reckoning, which Beecher Stowe bemoaned under the sign of the cool. A “natural” flaw in the Anglo-Saxon race to begin with, Beecher Stowe was convinced that the institution of slavery further amplified this affective imperfection. Her position on this became particularly obvious in her response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, a legal measure that cloaked the protection of Southern property rights in the political language of regional appeasement and popular sovereignty. Beecher Stowe represents the supporters of the Fugitive Slave Law through men like Haley, the slave trader in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who is characterized as “a man alive to nothing but trade and profit—cool, and unhesitating, and unrelenting, as death and the grave.” 63 Surrendering to

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economic pressure, Mr. Shelby (Uncle Tom’s original owner) is forced to do business with Haley. The author portrays Shelby as the paragon of a conscientious, benevolent slaveholder, forced by economic circumstance to abandon his moral principles and alienate (in the sense of transferring ownership of property to another) his most trusted slave (Uncle Tom) and an innocent child (Eliza’s son Jim), thereby alienating his own moral self. The psychological effect of Shelby’s alienation of someone else’s inalienable rights surfaces when he finds out that in order to spare her son the trauma of being separated from his mother, Eliza has escaped from the plantation. Having to once more deal with Haley, Shelby resorts to a “tone of dignified coolness” when he informs his business partner that “I shall feel bound to give you every assistance, in the use of horses, servants, &c., in the recovery of your property.” 64 Beecher Stowe also describes as cool the conduct of Cassy, a slave woman who carefully plots her escape from a brutal master, Simon Legree. Here, the word signifies the emotional damage caused both by a mother’s forceful separation from her children as well as the violation of her sexual integrity. Beecher Stowe presents Cassy’s coolness as the result of “anguish, scorn, and fierce bitterness.” 65 Her mind is described as “half-crazed and wandering;” her mode of response to “the avalanche of cruelty and wrong which had fallen upon her” under slavery is that of “retribution” and vengeance (Smith calls such emotions “unsocial passions”); and “partial insanity had given a strange, weird, unsettled cast to all her words and language.” 66 When she returns to her master’s house after he had banished her to the slave quarters, Cassy unmistakably challenges Legree’s authority, but she also puts herself in harm’s way, knowing that resistance against what Frederick Douglass once aptly described as “the brutal and infernal designs of a determined master [. . .] may legally subject [a woman] to be put to death upon the spot” (Douglass, “Farewell Speech to the British People”). While Legree assumes her return to the master’s house means Cassy’s submission to his power (“Hah! You she-devil!” he exclaimed. “You’ve come back, have you?”), Cassy stands up to him, “coolly” responding, “Yes, I have [. . .] come to have my own way, too!” 67 That reply, and its narrative attribution as cool, signals Cassy’s determination to stay in control of the situation. It is indicative of her “ability to be nonchalant at the right moment,” a definition of coolness Thompson found among the Gola of Liberia. 68 For a very brief moment, Beecher Stowe’s narrative recognizes the liberating power of coolness, only to immediately denounce it as a sign of emotional atrophy by describing “a glance” that Cassy casts on Legree as “so wild and insane in its light as to be almost appalling.” 69 In the light of that description, Cassy’s resolve to claim her personal sovereignty is represented as hysteria rather than a well-calculated strategy of resistance. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, coolness thus remains the

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unambiguous sign of emotional perversion caused by the institution of slavery and, ultimately, a flaw in the moral constitution of the nation. COOLNESS AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE PUBLIC MIND: FREDERICK DOUGLASS For Frederick Douglass coolness was a much more complex concept, one that could function as a signifier for emotional indifference to the suffering of others and as an attribute of the politically prudent statesman. In his autobiographical texts, comprising the classic Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845) as well as My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881; 1892), we find uses of coolness similar to those in Beecher Stowe, for example in the depiction of Colonel Edward Lloyd’s overseer Gore, who ran the plantation with “all the coolness, savage barbarity and freedom from moral restraint, which are necessary in the character of a pirate-chief.” 70 The representation of Gore’s coolness as morally repulsive contrasts sharply with a passage in The Life and Times that describes Lincoln’s famous “A House Divided Speech” of 1858 as the words not “of an abolitionist—branded a fanatic, and carried away by enthusiastic devotion to the Negro—but the calm, cool, deliberate utterance of a statesman, comprehensive enough to take in the welfare of the whole country.” 71 While Gore’s coolness exposes the overseer’s incapacity, or unwillingness, to pay heed to the moral sentiment of sympathy, Lincoln’s cool, as much as his words, allows him to be perceived as “the proper standard bearer of all the moral and political forces which could be united and wielded against the slave power.” 72 Attributing the same emotional state—coolness—to men whose affective ties to slavery could not differ more than those of a plantation overseer who depended on the institution for his living and a politician who saw it as a threat to national unity may seem paradoxical. But that is only the case if slavery is seen primarily as a moral problem. While Gore stands for a class of Southerners who did not regard slavery as a problem at all, Lincoln, as we have seen earlier, primarily approached slavery as a political problem. In both cases, the lack of moral outrage, or any other form of showing sympathy with individual suffering, registers as coolness. Yet Gore and Lincoln each represent a different kind of cool—the cold-heartedness of the morally depraved in the former, and the composure of the political pragmatist who refuses to succumb to a general atmosphere of excitability in the latter. It is not a coincidence that references to this latter kind of cool can be found more frequently in Douglass’s later work. First published in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was thematically and stylistically committed to the Garrisonian rhetoric of emotive appeal. Soon after he

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gained his freedom, though still a precarious status at the time, and settled in New Bedford, Douglass subscribed to Garrison’s Liberator and regularly attended antislavery meetings. In The Life and Times, Douglass reveals his admiration for Garrison’s and the Liberator’s passionate abolitionism and, more specifically, for the “words” that “were full of holy fire” 73 and exposed the racial injustice and hypocrisy of the era. Garrison’s paper became the tool of Douglass’s intellectual coming-of-age and of his further education in the art of rhetoric. “Every week the Liberator came,” he writes, “and every week I made myself master of its contents.” 74 It is hardly surprising that, as Tyron Tillery observed, “For seven years following his introduction to Garrison in 1839, Douglass would echo the Garrisonian principles and philosophy,” 75 including the principle of emotional appeal discussed earlier in this essay. In The Life and Times, Douglass recollects his first public appearance as speaker at the 1841 antislavery convention in Nantucket. Unexpectedly summoned to the podium by William C. Coffin, a prominent abolitionist, Douglass “was induced to express the feelings inspired by the occasion, and the fresh recollection of the scenes through which I had passed as a slave.” 76 More than four decades later, Douglass most remembers being absolutely overwhelmed with the unexpected invitation to address a large convention audience. But he also wonders whether “my embarrassment was not the most effective part of my speech.” 77 If nothing else, Douglass’s emotionality inspired William Garrison to “an eloquent plea in behalf of freedom,” one that was so effective that “Those who had heard him oftenest and had known him longest, were astonished at his masterly effort.” 78 Interestingly though, Douglass also recounts Garrison’s rhetorical success as being predicated on “taking me as his text.” 79 The self-description as Garrison’s “text” appears to be a rather idiosyncratic formulation but, in fact, it exposes the former slave’s treatment as an object, or property of abolitionist rhetoric, rather than its subject. Douglass’s narrative of the event suggests that the persuasive power of Garrison’s speech depended on the uncontrolled display of the fugitive slave’s emotions, a rhetorical strategy that can also be observed in Douglass’s first autobiography. Published during the period when Garrisonian principles had the strongest influence on him, descriptions of the author’s pains and sufferings, and an emphasis on “the strong cords of affection” that “bind” individual slaves “to their friends” 80 and family, dominate the affective structure of the Narrative, a text that represents slavery as a moral wrong rather than a political inconsistency and economic injustice that ill befits a democratically constituted republic. However, Douglass soon became dissatisfied with his status as text to be interpreted by white abolitionists. “It was impossible for me to repeat the same old story month after month, and to keep my interest in it,” he writes in My Bondage and My Freedom. 81 Garrison repeatedly implored him to tell his story, but “I could not always obey,” Douglass con-

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fessed years later, “for I was now reading and thinking,” a process during which “New views of the subject were presented to my mind.” 82 During his two-year sojourn in Great Britain between the summer of 1845 and the spring of 1847, Douglass still regarded “the concentration of the moral and religious sentiment of [the British] people against American slavery” the “main object” of his “labors.” 83 After his return to the United States, and as owner and editor of the newly founded North Star, Douglass began to pay more and more attention to the political and economic implications of slavery. In The Life and Times he described his new role as that of a man: wielding my pen as well as my voice in the great work of renovating the public mind, and building up a public sentiment, which should send slavery to the grave, and restore to “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” the people with whom I had suffered. 84

The key phrases in this passage are “public mind” and “public sentiment.” They indicate a shift in Douglass’s thought from an anti-slavery ethics based on religion and addressing people’s emotions to an ethics based on the political philosophy underlying natural rights discourse and that asks for the recognition of “the Negro as a man.” 85 For Douglass, the lack of that recognition and the Negro’s “assumed natural inferiority” 86 are the major obstacles to the abolition of slavery. In other words, while Lincoln perceived slavery as a problem that had repercussions for the country’s political constitution, and Beecher Stowe saw it as an assault on the nation’s moral health, Douglass came to consider slavery an institutional reality that was rooted in the epistemological misconceptions of racial difference and as a manifestation of an inferiority-superiority binary. For Douglass, the best way to correct this error in the “public mind” was the establishment of a newspaper owned and run by African Americans, a proposal he included in both his second and third autobiography. Writes Douglass in My Bondage and My Freedom: [. . .] in my judgment, a tolerably well conducted press, in the hands of persons of the despised race, by calling out the mental energies of the race itself; by making them acquainted with their own latent powers; by enkindling among them the hope that for them there is a future; by developing their moral power; by combining and reflecting their talents—would prove a most powerful means of removing prejudice, and of awakening an interest in them. 87

Note the tone in this roadmap for the abolition of slavery, first offered to his audience in 1855, ten years after the publication of his first autobiography and only three years after Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Gone are descriptions of the slave’s pains and sufferings; gone is the appeal to the readers to synchronize their own with the emotional experiences of the slave. What is audible instead is the cool tone of a political commentator, or specta-

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tor, who, albeit not entirely impartial, nevertheless is in command of his righteous anger in the face of economic exploitation and political injustices. This anger, although still active and a powerful motivational force, no longer dominates his narrative. Or perhaps more precisely, Douglass no longer provides his readers with a narrative performance of this anger. This breach with the rhetorical conventions of sentimentalism, which permeated his first autobiography, becomes even more obvious in the scene described immediately after the petition for establishing a newspaper published by African Americans. After two joyful years in Great Britain, a period during which he often “din[ed] with gentlemen of great literary, social, political, and religious eminence” without being exposed to the slightest sign of racial prejudice, Douglass was going to be denied access to the cabin he had purchased onboard the Cambria for his passage from Liverpool back to the United States. Before leaving England, he “took occasion to expose the disgusting tyranny, in the columns of the London Times” and, upon a public outcry, received an apology from the owner of the Cunard line. Douglass alludes to his indignation and admits, “It is not very pleasant to be made the subject of such insults.” However, he also concedes that he would “patiently” bear similar offenses if they resulted in concerted efforts of public resistance against racial discrimination. Douglass ends the account with a pointed remark on the hypocrisy among “some of my democratic fellow-passengers” who had “denied” him “the right to enter the saloon.” However, he refrains from displaying any of his emotions and instead concludes, “The reader will easily imagine what must have been my feelings.” 88 What we see at work in this sentence is the author’s determination to acknowledge the emotional effects of racism on black subjects, but no longer to display those emotions in order to mobilize abolitionist sentiments. I understand this statement as a manifestation of Douglass’s desire to cool anti-slavery rhetoric and focus on renovating the public’s mind rather than the heart. The critical narrative I have offered so far suggests that Douglass’s adoption of coolness, as a behavioral and rhetorical strategy in the abolitionist struggle, was the result of a “transformation” 89 from slave, or fugitive slave, to man during his British sojourn. 90 While the experience may have pushed him further away from the emotive style of Garrisonian abolitionism toward a more composed rhetoric of rational argumentation, it did not trigger his responsiveness for displays of coolness. As narrator of My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass was in awe of the coolness of a group of sailors he observed right after his escape in New Bedford. Recounting his observations of the business conducted in New Bedford’s port, Douglass writes: I saw industry without bustle, labor without noise, and heavy toil without the whip. There was no loud singing, as in southern ports, where ships are loading

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Catrin Gersdorf or unloading—no loud cursing or swearing—but everything went on as smoothly as the works of a well adjusted machine. [. . .] I found that everything was done here with scrupulous regard to economy, both in regard to men and things, time and strength. [. . .] To the ship-repairing dock I went, and saw the same wise prudence. The carpenters struck where they aimed, and the calkers wasted no blows in idle flourishes of the mallet. [. . .] Men talked here of going whaling on a four years’ voyage with more coolness than sailors where I came from talked of going a four month’ voyage. 91

In this passage, the cool attitude of the whalers is one on a list of several admirable features of the trade-based, industrial economy of the North. In the eyes of the former slave, the unagitated, smooth, and efficient operation of wage laborers on the wharves and in the shipyards of New Bedford becomes the object of utmost admiration and the embodiment of self-possession. We can conceive of the scene described by Douglass as the nineteenth-century version of “cool capitalism.” In the economic environment of a Northern port, coolness signifies “the superior mental character of northern labor over that of the South.” 92 For today’s reader, Douglass’s perception of the “mental character” of free labor as “superior” to that produced by the system of slavery in the South calls to mind Max Weber’s view on capitalism as “identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering” of “unlimited greed for gain,” an impulse perceived by Weber as “irrational” and therefore detrimental to the rationalistic spirit of capitalism. 93 The idea of capitalism in general, and, more specifically, of the capitalist market as a force that restrains irrational impulses and unsocial passions was not unfamiliar to Douglass’s contemporaries. Historian Thomas L. Haskell suggests that if we think of the market “as the abolitionists and their generation often did,” we cease to see it as an environment that merely fosters greed and begin to perceive it from a nineteenth-century perspective, “as an agency of social discipline or of education and character modification.” 94 On a formal level, the inclusion of this scene in his second autobiography can, therefore, be understood as a crucial contribution to the self-proscribed task of renovating the public mind, one that Douglass tackles in this passage by juxtaposing the agitated atmosphere of a southern port scene with the cool rationality of a northern counterpart. In doing so, he provides his readers with an argument against slavery that, instead of being grounded in and addressing the fear of potential slave violence, now focuses on the productivity and psychological health of a free labor economy. However, while Douglass’s narrative takes great pains to meticulously describe the business of the New Bedford port, and while the narrator certainly admires the conduct of the sailors, it remains silent about their racial and ethnic backgrounds. Yet “New Bedford” and “whaling” are textual elements that simultaneously signify the culture underlying one of the most lucrative industries of the North and the novel that mythologized that indus-

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try, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). If the crew of the Pequod, the ship from which Captain Ahab hunts the white whale, is any indication, Douglass’s cool sailors are very likely a multiethnic, multinational, and multiracial group, one that is, nevertheless, defined by a social hierarchy in which ship owners, captains, and chief mates are white Americans. In Douglass’s text, that hierarchy remains invisible, as do the actual feelings and sentiments of the sailors. Yet that mask becomes the emotional signature of a social position—that of the sailor—which, in spite of an aura of mobility and freedom, often resembled a condition of bondage. In other words, a contextual reading of Douglass’s text reveals a significant element of the author’s narrative strategy—the imaginative association of the sailor’s position with that of the fugitive slave. In both cases, coolness is a strategy for coping with a precarious social and economic position. In Slavery and Sentiment, Levecq reminds us that “sailors were an important part of the global capitalist network” but also “symbolic of oppositional and revolutionary forces in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.” 95 Involuntary recruitment, and the resistance against it, turned “the sailor’s world” into “a breeding ground for progressive and liberatory ideas” 96 such as the Lockean notions that “property [. . .] in his own person” 97 is a natural right that applies to every man, independent of national, ethnic, or racial background, and that freedom means “not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.” 98 Levecq’s analysis of texts authored by Afro-British and African American men who worked, either as slaves or as free laborers, on the ships moving through the maritime world of transatlantic, transnational trade and travel, reveals that they often radicalized the ideologies of liberalism and republicanism that surrounded them. 99 One such example is the Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man (1760) who, with the permission of his master, left Massachusetts for Jamaica in 1747, and, after being shipwrecked off the coast of Florida, was captured by an Indian tribe, an ordeal he escaped only to be taken prisoner in Cuba. Levecq states that through his narrative, Hammon presents himself as a man with “a matter-of-fact attitude” and as someone who, “in spite of his various captivities,” managed to stay “cool and in control, his eyes always open for the next escape.” 100 The interpretation of Hammon’s narrative self-representation as indicative of the author’s “cool” is, of course, that of a twenty-first-century critic. However, Hammon’s unsentimental, almost documentary style resembles the performance of self that Douglass observed in the sailors gathered at the New Bedford wharf, which his narrative registers as coolness, and which becomes the narrative hallmark of those passages that describe Douglass’s self-translation from slave to man. As a performative strategy adopted by Douglass’s New Bedford sailors as well as by Hammon’s autobiographical narrator, the

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mask of coolness may well be an article of cultural trade acquired along the routes of the Black Atlantic that, as Robert Farris Thompson pointed out, joins a sense of social and moral responsibility (for one’s own person as well as the communities one interacts with, whether on a local, regional, or national level) with a sense of playfulness, or aesthetic expressiveness, in the exercise of that responsibility. That sense of playfulness is lacking in the European tradition of conceptualizing cool. But we do find the element of social responsibility in Adam Smith’s figure of the “cool and impartial spectator.” It is very likely that both traditions—the West African tradition of the cool mask and the European tradition of moral judgment—informed Douglass’s resignification of coolness as an attitudinal prerequisite of self-emancipation. My Bondage and My Freedom includes a chapter called “The RunAway Plot.” In it Douglass recounts the proliferation of thoughts and feelings making it impossible for him not to escape from slavery. By describing the realization that his “faculties and powers of body and soul are not my own, but the property of a fellow mortal,” 101 Douglass represents slavery as a biopolitical mechanism that systematically depletes the slave’s power of corporal and psychological self-control. The end result of that process is a state in which slaves, already being denied the status of politically and economically autonomous subjects, have also lost control over their bodies as an expressive site of their thoughts and emotions. Douglass was fully aware that regaining control of his own body was the most important precondition for a successful escape. His autobiographical narrator expresses the desire for a mask that would cover the body’s responses, render him intellectually and emotionally unreadable, and re-establish the slave’s corporal and emotional autonomy. Writes Douglass: But here came new trouble. Thoughts and purposes so incendiary as those I now cherished, could not agitate the mind long, without danger of making themselves manifest to scrutinizing and unfriendly beholders. I had reason to fear that my sable face might prove altogether too transparent for the safe concealment of my hazardous enterprise. [. . .] I would have given my poor, tell tale face for the immovable countenance of an Indian, for it was far from being proof against the daily, searching glances of those with whom I met. 102

Fully aware that many slaveholders, in order to secure their economic interests and social position, had attained “astonishing proficiency in discerning the thoughts and emotions of slaves,” Douglass realized “It was necessary [. . .], therefore, to keep watch over my deportment, lest the enemy should get the better of me.” 103 The image of “the immovable countenance of an Indian,” and the narrator’s intent to regulate and control his “deportment” for the sake of self-liberation, register the author’s anthropological awareness of the utility, or psychological efficacy, of the mask of coolness. The value of

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this mask as a performative tool for establishing what Thompson called “a fact of moral equality” 104 in a world of political, social, and economic inequality is further amplified after his escape and later in his narrative when he describes the cool conduct of the sailors he observed in the port of New Bedford. However, as we have seen, the narrative of My Bondage and My Freedom only allows for a circumstantial interpretation of figurations of coolness (as the stereotypically stoic face of the Indian, or the cool conduct of racially unidentified sailors and whalers in the North) as traces of Douglass’s recourse to genuinely black traditions of being cool. Rather, the narrative location as an observer of the business being conducted at the port of New Bedford, and the judgment he renders on the qualitative difference between the “mental character” of labor in the North and the South, suggests the influence on his thinking of the ideology of liberalism that underlies his abolitionist thought and that has its ethical foundation in the political philosophy of John Locke and the moral sense theory of Adam Smith. Nevertheless, I want to argue that in Douglass’s work coolness assumes a distinctly African American character to the degree that it is represented as the emotional premise of the slave’s self-liberation. Without keeping one’s cool, there is no escape from slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe was not blind to this fact, which is evidenced by attributing as cool some of Cassy’s actions in preparation for her escape. But Beecher Stowe was caught in the aesthetics and ethics of sentimentalism in which coolness figured as the sign of emotional insensitivity. In contrast, Douglass recognized the cultural, social, and political value of the cool mask as a habit donned by imaginary Indians and real sailors, and as the political attitude most likely to prevent the dissolution of a constitutional crisis into chaos and violence. The success of his own very literal transition from bondage to freedom, the details of which he did not reveal until the publication in 1881 of the third of his autobiographical texts, was unquestionably dependent on his “skill and address in playing the sailor” who had lent Douglass the protection papers that identified him as “a free American sailor.” 105 These papers described their “bearer very accurately” and, Douglass adds, “called for a man much darker than myself.” 106 The discrepancy made it much more likely that he would be discovered as soon as someone asked the fugitive slave-cum-sailor for his identification. When the conductor on the train that Douglass rode to freedom asked for his free papers, Douglass faced a “moment of time” that “was one of the most anxious I ever experienced.” He admits to being very “agitated” during the “ceremony” of the conductor’s collecting tickets, “but still,” he reports years later, “externally at least, I was apparently calm and self-possessed.” 107 This calmness, or coolness, made it possible for Douglass to redirect the conductor’s attention from the description of the man he purported to be to the imposing seal of the American eagle, an image whose symbolic authority

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prevented the conductor from closely inspecting the paper it sanctioned, and which enabled Douglass to successfully conclude his physical escape from slavery. NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN COOL: A (PRELIMINARY) CONCLUSION This essay began by noting the paradoxical tendency among the protagonists and critics of twentieth-century American culture to celebrate and simultaneously deny the extent to which coolness, as an expressive sign of moral, intellectual, and emotional maturity, was shaped by non-European concepts and cultural practices. The work of Robert Farris Thompson, which describes cool as an aesthetic concept prevalent in many West and Central African cultural and ritual practices, is indispensable for understanding the forms and functions that coolness assumed in the history of African American culture, and, more generally, in the cultural history of the Black Atlantic. Drawing their persuasive force from idiomatic and ritualistic references to the cooling powers of fresh water and green herbs, many of the African societies Thompson investigated perceive coolness as a metaphor for the successful restoration of a society’s social equilibrium and as evidence of a person’s maturity, imagined as the “mind of an elder within the body of the young.” 108 There is no evidence of a direct influence of the African tradition of the cool mask on any of the three writers discussed in this chapter. However, Douglass’s description of his actual escape and the crucial moment on the train as a “drama” 109 underscores the author’s awareness of the performative nature of the event. The overall agitation he experienced during this, the most critical moment of his journey into freedom, combined with the external display of calmness and self-possession, is an image that conspicuously resembles Thompson’s description of “a gifted Egbado Yoruba dancer,” who “maintains the whole time she dances a ‘bound motion’ in her head, thus balancing a delicate terracotta sculpture on her head without danger, while simultaneously subjecting her torso and arms to the most confounding expressions of raw energy and force.” 110 We may read this transhistorical, transcultural iconographic parallelism the same way I suggested reading Douglass’s observation of the sailors in the port of New Bedford—as circumstantial evidence for a continuum between African and African American traditions of coolness. Some readers might dismiss my suggestion as pure critical conjecture, an argument that ultimately remains unsubstantiated by historical and textual evidence. However, we need to further consider such continuities, as well as their interruptions and modifications by European influences, in order to fully understand the cultural career of coolness as a historically complex, conceptually rich, and racially inflected concept.

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NOTES 1. Jim McGuigan, Cool Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2009), 1. 2. McGuigan, Cool Capitalism, 7. 3. Mark Greif (ed.), What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation (New York: n+1 Foundation, 2010). 4. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 209. 5. Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” was first published in 1957, the same year Capitol Records released Birth of the Cool. In this essay, Mailer famously reads the white hipster as a figure modeled after “the Negro jazzman” (285) and his ability “to be cool,” or “in control of a situation” (288), and “swing” in spite of history’s adversarial squareness. Never mind that Mailer’s cultural sociology of the American escape route from “conformity and depression” (277) is based on time-honored clichés. His essay casts “the Negro” as a historical character who “could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization” and “kept for his survival the art of the primitive” (279). For Mailer “jazz is orgasm” (279), pure and simple. It becomes the hipster’s gateway to the orgasmic energy that will enable him to live with his existential angst in the face of death by atomic war, state power, or social conformity in much the same way it had helped “the Negro” to live “on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries” (278). For a discussion of the Beat Generation’s response to the cool aesthetic of jazz see Ulla Haselstein in this volume. 6. Jones, Blues People, 214. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 213. Emphasis in the original. 9. Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974); Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Lexington Books, 1992); bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). 10. Robert Farris Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” African Arts 7.1 (Autumn 1973): 41. 11. Ibid. Emphasis in the original. 12. Christine Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008), 7. 13. Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 65. 14. Ibid. 63. 15. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759. Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), I.ii.3.8. 16. Ibid. I.i.3.3. 17. Daniel R. Vollaro, “Lincoln, Stowe, and the ‘Little Woman/Great War’ Story: The Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 30.1 (2009): 19. 18. Ibid. 18. 19. Ibid. 33. 20. Ibid. 33. 21. Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Worcester, Massachusetts,” September 12, 1848, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, Vol. 2. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953. Web. August 18, 2012. 22. Gregg D. Crane, “Dangerous Sentiments: Sympathy, Rights, and Revolution in Stowe’s Antislavery Novels,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51.2 (September 1996): 176–204. 23. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (ed.), Lincoln on Race and Slavery (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), xxx. 24. Abraham Lincoln, “‘A House Divided’: Speech at Springfield, Illinois.” June 16, 1858. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Vol. 2. Web. November 30, 2012. 25. Ibid.

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26. “Democratic Party Platform of 1852,” The American Presidency Project. Web. November 30, 2012. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Qtd. in Abraham Lincoln, “Second Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Freeport, Illinois,” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Vol. 3. Web. August 17, 2012. 31. Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” February 15, 1861, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Vol. 4. Web. August 18, 2012. 32. Abraham Lincoln, “Letter to Henry L. Pierce and Others,” April 6, 1859, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Vol. 3. Web. 18 Aug. 2012. 33. Elsewhere I provide a detailed discussion of the meanings coolness assumed in early America, during the decades leading to the Declaration of Independence. Cf. Catrin Gersdorf, “Early American Cool: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the Affective Foundation of Republican Government.” In Peter Nicolaisen/Hannah Spahn (eds.), Cosmopolitanism and Nationhood in the Age of Jefferson (forthcoming 2013). 34. Lincoln, “To Henry L. Pierce,” emphasis added. 35. Abraham Lincoln, “Fragment on Sectionalism,” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Vol. 2. Web. August 18, 2012. 36. Ibid. 37. Abraham Lincoln, “Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois,” September 18, 1858, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Ed. Roy P. Basler. Vol. 3. Web. December 2, 2012. 38. In his highly informative introduction to Lincoln on Race and Slavery (2009), Henry Louis Gates Jr. discusses a meeting Lincoln had with a group of African Americans at the White House on August 14, 1862, during which he told his guests that “without the institution of Slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence” (Lincoln qtd. in Gates, Lincoln on Race and Slavery, xxxv). 39. Lincoln, “Fourth Debate.” 40. Abraham Lincoln, “To Horace Greely [sic],” August 22, 1862, Gates (ed.), Lincoln on Race and Slavery, 243. 41. Harriet Beecher Stowe, qtd. in Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 204. 42. Ibid. 205. 43. Ibid. 44. For an extensive discussion of fears of violence and vengeance cf. Robert H. Abzug, “The Influence of Garrisonian Abolitionists’ Fears of Slave Violence on the Antislavery Argument, 1829–1840.” The Journal of Negro History 55.1 (January 1970): 15–26. 45. William Lloyd Garrison, “Guilt of New-England,” The Liberator (January 7, 1832) Web. December 3, 2012. 46. Ibid. 47. Robert H. Abzug, “The Influence of Garrisonian Abolitionists’ Fear of Slave Violence on the Antislavery Argument, 1829–40,” The Journal of Negro History 55.1 (January 1970): 22. 48. Ibid. 17. 49. Marc M. Arkin, “The Federalist Trope: Power and Passion in Abolitionist Rhetoric,” The Journal of American History 88.1 (June 2001): 77–76. 50. Ibid. 85. 51. Fisher Ames, qtd. In Arkin, “The Federalist Trope,” 85. 52. Ames, qtd. in Arkin, “The Federalist Trope,” 89. 53. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1854 (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 41. 54. Ibid. 45. 55. Ibid. 46.

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56. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. 1852. Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 34. 57. Ibid. 58. Nicole Eustace, Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 74. 59. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiment, I.i.1.5. 60. Ibid. I.i.1.4. 61. Ibid. I.i.1.2. Even before Smith described the imaginative self-transportation into the situation of another person, abolitionists advertised such a procedure in order to mobilize their audiences to join their cause. In his 1746 essay “Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes,” John Woolman, a Philadelphia merchant-cum-itinerant Quaker minister, wrote: “How should I approve of this conduct were I in their circumstance and they in mine?” (qtd. in Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2.” The American Historical Review 90.3 [June 1985]: 564). 62. Social grace is articulated in many forms, among them generosity, kindness, compassion, and a list of other “social and benevolent affections” (Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiment, I.i.4.1) 63. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 30. 64. Ibid. 37. 65. Ibid. 325. 66. Ibid. 343–348. 67. Ibid. 320. 68. Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” 41. 69. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 321. 70. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom. 1855. Ed., with a Foreword and Notes, by John Stauffer (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 59–60. 71. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. 1892 (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 211. 72. Ibid. 73. Douglass, Life and Times, 150. 74. Ibid. 75. Tyrone Tillery, “The Inevitability of the Douglass-Garrison Conflict.” Phylon 37.2 (2nd Qtr., 1976): 138. 76. Douglass, Life and Times, 151. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. 1845. The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Signet Classic, 2002), 421. 81. Douglass, My Bondage, 215. 82. Ibid. 216. 83. Ibid. 226. 84. Douglass, Life and Times, 184. 85. Ibid. 183. For a detailed discussion of the endowment of Douglass’s political thought with the principles and ideas of liberalism see Nicholas Buccola, “‘Each for All and All for Each’: The Liberal Statesmanship of Frederick Douglass.” The Review of Politics 70.3 (Summer, 2008): 400–419. Buccola also provides a survey of more recent critical debates on this issue. 86. Ibid. 183. 87. Douglass, My Bondage, 234. 88. Ibid. 235. All quotes in this paragraph are on this page. 89. Ibid. 221. 90. It is not without a grain of historical irony that the people ruled by “a monarchical government” (Douglass, My Bondage, 222) but, nevertheless, animated by “the spirit of freedom” (221) treated Douglass neither as “a slave” and a piece of “property,” nor as “a fugitive

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slave” who was “liable to be hunted at any moment, like a felon” (221), but as “a man” equal to all others by dint of his “humanity” (222). 91. Ibid. 205–206. 92. Ibid. 205. 93. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 17. 94. Haskell, “Capitalism,” 550. 95. Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment, 104. 96. Ibid. 105. 97. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. Ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 111. 98. Ibid. 110. 99. Cf. Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment, 84ff. 100. Ibid. 109. 101. Douglass, My Bondage, 155. 102. Ibid. 158. 103. Ibid. 159. Eustace discovered evidence of the desire to make it impossible for an enemy to read one’s own emotions in pre-revolutionary Pennsylvania where emotional self-regulation was perceived as a means to prevent crises in social relations (cf. Eustace, Passion Is the Gale, 77). 104. Robert Farris Thompson, Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music (Pittsburgh and New York City: Periscope Publishing, 2011), 7. 105. Douglass, Life and Times, 138–139. 106. Ibid. 138. 107. Ibid. 139. 108. Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” 45. The association of coolness with maturity is evoked in the lyrics of “Sheep,” a song written and performed by the British jazz-rap group Us3 and released on their 1997 album Broadway & 52nd. The lyrical voice characterizes “this mad world around me” as a world with “many philosophies, many tongues, many dialects and tones.” Noting that there are “different styles” to respond to this world, the speaker/rapper realizes that “wild is wild, calm is calm, but cool is mature.” In other words, cool is a style whose meaning transcends the semiotic boundaries of the word that is its name. 109. Douglass, Life and Times, 139. 110. Thompson, Aesthetic of the Cool, 6.

WORKS CITED Abzug, Robert H. “The Influence of Garrisonian Abolitionists’ Fears of Slave Violence on the Antislavery Argument, 1829–1840.” The Journal of Negro History 55.1 (January 1970): 15–26. Arkin, Marc M. “The Federalist Trope: Power and Passion in Abolitionist Rhetoric.” The Journal of American History 88.1 (June 2001): 75–98. Web. Buccola, Nicholas. “‘Each for All and All for Each’: The Liberal Statesmanship of Frederick Douglass.” The Review of Politics 70.3 (Summer 2008): 400–419. Crane, Gregg D. “Dangerous Sentiments: Sympathy, Rights, and Revolution in Stowe’s Antislavery Novels.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51.2 (September 1996): 176–204. Web. Douglass, Frederick. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 1845. In The Classic Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Signet Classic, 2002. Print. ––––. My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855. Ed., with a foreword and notes, by John Stauffer. New York: Modern Library, 2003. ––––. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, 1892. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003a. Eustace, Nicole. Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Print.

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Garrison, William Lloyd. “Guilt of New-England.” The Liberator January 7, 1832. Web. Gates Jr., Henry Louis, ed. Lincoln on Race and Slavery. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. Print. Greif, Mark, ed. What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation. New York: n+1 Foundation, 2010. Print. Gross, Daniel M. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Print. Haskell, Thomas L. “Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2.” The American Historical Review 90.3 (June 1985): 547–566. Web. Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. hooks, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963. New York: Harper Perennial, 2002. Print. Levecq, Christine. Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008. Print. Lincoln, Abraham. “Speech at Worcester, Massachusetts,” September 12, 1848. In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Vol. 2., edited by Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953. Web. ––––. “‘A House Divided’: Speech at Springfield, Illinois.” June 16, 1858. In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Vol. 2., edited by Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953. Web. ––––. “Fragment on Sectionalism.” In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Vol. 2., edited by Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953. Web. ––––. “Second Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Freeport, Illinois.” In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Vol. 3., edited by Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953. Web. ––––. “Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois,” September 18, 1858. In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Vol. 3., edited by Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953. Web. ––––. “Letter to Henry L. Pierce and Others,” April 6, 1859. In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Vol. 3., edited by Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953. Web. ––––. “Speech at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” February 15, 1861. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Vol. 4., edited by Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953. Web. ––––. “To Horace Greely [sic],” August 22, 1862. In Lincoln on Race and Slavery, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. 243–244. Print. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. Edited by Ian Shapiro. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. Print. Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” Dissent 4.3 (Summer 1957): 276–293. Print. Majors, Richard, and Janet Mancini Billson. Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America. New York: Lexington Books, 1992. Print. McGuigan, Jim. Cool Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2009. Print Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. Edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, 1852. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Print. ––––.The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1854. New York: Arno Press, 1968. Print. Thompson, Robert Farris. “An Aesthetic of the Cool.” African Arts 7.1 (Autumn 1973): 41–91. Print. ––––. African Art in Motion. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974. Print.

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––––.Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music. Pittsburgh and New York City: Periscope Publishing, 2011. Print. Tillery, Tyrone. “The Inevitability of the Douglass-Garrison Conflict.” Phylon 37.2 (2nd Qtr., 1976): 137–149. Web. Vollaro, Daniel R. “Lincoln, Stowe, and the ‘Little Woman/Great War’ Story: The Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote.” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 30.1 (2009): 18–34. Web. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950. Web.

Chapter Five

The Mask of Cool in Postwar Jazz and Film Noir Joel Dinerstein

Cool is probably the most influential contribution American culture has made to global aesthetics and style. As a word and concept, its modern currency dates back only to the African-American jazz culture of the early 1940s when cool carried four core meanings among jazz musicians: a calm state of mind; an individual’s signature sound and style; a relaxed mode of performance; and, most importantly, a blank, impassive, aloof facial expression. Three of these four meanings constitute a revolution of self-presentation through the self-conscious masking of emotion that historically marked the repudiation of “Uncle Tomming,” the ritual acts of deference then required of Black Americans in public life. Jazz musicians put on a mask of cool: they wore sunglasses on stage at night and spoke a coded slang that walled off the invasive white gaze. The cool mask enacted a public mode of calm defiance that “cloak[ed] one’s feelings in a bullet-proof vest known as ‘cool,’” as Ralph Ellison once defined the stance. 1 Concurrently in film noir, Euro-American male protagonists also projected a mask of cool, but from a different set of historical contingencies. In the first phase of the genre (1941–1947), actors playing hardboiled private detectives and sympathetic criminals—Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and Alan Ladd, in particular—developed a white working-class cool that signaled their rejection of privilege, hypocrisy, and authority, but also of women and emotion. Their cool, inasmuch as it was achieved by repressing emotion, often stemmed from underlying emotional trauma. Nearly onequarter of early noir-films were developed from the works of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, and James M. Cain, and between the world wars, hardboiled fiction also influenced existentialist nar109

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ratives. Known in France as “the American novel” or “the tough novel,” the genre idealized a detached, rational, emotionally repressed, masculinity, which influenced Camus’ creation of Meursault (in The Stranger), and Sartre's characters such as Mathieu (in The Age of Reason) and Pablo Ibbieta (in “The Wall”). In The Plague (1948), Camus modulates this approach through a detached rational third-person documentary narrative that is ostensibly a first-person account of a doctor’s experience, enabling Rieux to project a cool male sensibility as if it is the last ethical mode of being in the world. In these three genres, cool is the sign of rebellion through withdrawal. Musicians, actors, and writers communicate a besieged individuality through cool as they grope for ethical renewal after a period of social failure: for Euro-American men, the Great Depression; for African-American men, the oppression of white supremacy; for French existentialists, the Nazi occupation. For all three groups of artists, cool signals an emergent mode of male subjectivity, and the mask of cool functions as a sign of masculinity in transition. Within these irredeemably misogynist genres, women are often cast either as sexual relief (the jazz vocalist), irresistible temptation (femme fatales), or emotional hysteric. The cool modality in jazz and film noir should also be seen as an offshoot of modernist rebellion. It reflected the continued rejection of European artistic traditions that began with Marxist ideals of egalitarianism and class warfare, the Great War’s mass slaughter of working-class men, and modernist artistic innovation of all kinds. By 1945, any universal ideal of classical human values or social equality lay buried in the atavistic tribal genocides of advanced technological society in concentration camps and bombed-out cities. In the wake of delegitimized authority and artistic ideals, a younger generation of jazz musicians and B-movie actors wore a blank, cooled facial expression to cover the loss. At nightclubs and movie theaters, social activists, and intellectuals were pulled into the gravity of their evocative, mysterious detachment. For college-age audiences, the search for a recast individuality after Auschwitz and Hiroshima can be located in an emergent structure of feeling signaled by the mask of cool. For a decade after 1945, intellectuals, artists, and leftists, felt the loss of Western civilization’s sustaining power as a coherent historical bloc reflecting a shared set of European and American values. Being cool is the public face of survival. As a term and concept, cool unifies the affinities of these concurrent artistic forms around the search for new masculine modes of subjectivity and identity in the face of modernity, trauma, mass society, technological encroachment, and geopolitical crisis. The cool mask was post-traumatic, but it valorized rational despair—despair achieved through reflection on transgression, violence, impulsive desire, or criminality. The mask of cool affirmed the sheer act of survival for audiences

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whose belief systems—religious, ideological, and even teleological—had been shattered. It signified the rejection of innocence, optimism, hypocritical morality, and technological advance as markers of progress. Here’s my theory: cool is an expressive matrix of transition, grounded in the performance of relaxed calm and the aestheticizing of detachment. As facial armor, the cool mask registered traumatic experience without emotional affect. It reflected a period of withdrawal among postwar artists, rebels, and audiences, and marked a consideration of the possibility—often unconsciously—of the demise of Western civilization. Existentialism is central to this theoretical framework in my larger project, but here it will serve more as subtext for film noir (often called a “pulp existentialism”) and as a philosophical grounding for the extended self-expressive solos of bebop. 2 I will first invoke trauma theory to contextualize the cinematic cool that begins with film noir. I will then turn to the emergence of the concept of cool in jazz culture with its semiotic matrix. At the end, I will show the correspondences between the two artistic forms in the postwar formation of this concept. A working definition, then: cool was a public mode of covert rebellion. NOIR COOL My periodization of film noir challenges the current historical paradigms. Against the assumptions that the genre is a reflection of wartime fears, nuclear dread, or gender anxiety, I have argued instead that noir reflected the subjective, internalized failure Americans felt during the Great Depression but deferred into the postwar era. 3 Historian Warren Susman summarized the American mood of the late 1930s as one in which “middle-class America [was] frightened and humiliated, sensing a lack of any order.” Rather than project blame onto social or economic elites, many American men internalized unemployment and poverty, “feel[ing] shame at their inability to cope rather than overt hostility to a technological and economic order they did not always understand.” 4 Class war played out instead in popular culture. In gangster films, angry ethnic revenge figures shot at corrupt politicians and policemen: the genre’s emergence coincides with the onset of the Depression with Little Caesar (1930). In screwball comedies and the dada-esque chaos of the Marx Brothers, the villains were often old, malevolent, corrupt businessmen. In musicals and dramas, upper-class men and women were simultaneously mocked and envied, as audiences mediated their class rage through emulation of the lifestyle and material security of economic elites. Film noir was a deferred response to social trauma. The fragmentation of capitalist mythology and heroic national narrative in 1930s films created the artistic conditions for audiences attracted to an indirect social critique em-

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bodied by trapped, alienated male protagonists. To work through a national sense of failure required first, a rejection of innocence and optimism, and second, a more pragmatic cast of masculinity if audiences were to recuperate the vaunted American value of individuality. In other words, for the audiences of film noir, “witnessing” functioned as a form of deferred self-reflexivity concerning the gritty experiences and choices made during the Great Depression. 5 The first noir films were released in 1941–1942. In the run-up to World War II in the U.S., cautious economic hope accompanied increased employment opportunity in factories retrofitted for defense industries. Looking back on the years 1937–1940, producer and actor John Houseman, Orson Welles’ partner in the Mercury Theater, called the period “a time of transition between the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of the . . . industrial boom that accompanied our preparations for World War II.” 6 This short prewar period was a window of opportunity for films that darkly illuminated the collapse of the nation’s myths and symbols during the Great Depression. For this reason, noir’s signal tension is its temporal disjunction, “its traumas of unrecoverable time and space,” as Edward Dimendberg puts it, “the inability to dwell comfortably either in the present or the past.” 7 The flashback is thus the genre’s signature narrative device. The backstory of the male protagonist in the genre’s first phase often haunts or derails his success in the postwar present, sending him back to the gritty choices he made during the Depression. In fact, the protagonist is often punished for those choices. This is true of classic noirs such as High Sierra (1941), Gilda (1946), The Killers (1946), Out of the Past (1947), and Dark Passage (1947). The protagonist’s past becomes symbolic of a larger national blackout or loss of consciousness such that he functions as a sacrificial hero; he provides audiences with the chance to “work through” their traumatic experiences of the Depression. 8 The film itself enables its audiences to grapple vicariously with their own traumatic pasts. Consequently, nearly all the formal stylistic innovations of noir are in the service of subjectivity. Through flashback, voice-over narration, subjective point of view, and documentary-style presentation, a protagonist calmly explains his often irrational, violent quest for a meaningful existence. In many films of this first phase, there is a protagonist with a repetition compulsion who has chosen a lifestyle allowing for a pattern of violent behavior in response to an unarticulated past trauma. In these ways, noir figures project a fatalistic individuality that one scholar calls “determinism without predictability.” 9 Yet perhaps the key factor in the success of film noir—then and now—is the masculine sensibility of cinematic cool. In the interwar period, the hardboiled tough guy was a heroic ideal for working-class male readers of pulp magazines. Before film noir, the closest analogy was the figure of the charis-

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matic gangster such as James Cagney as Rocky Sullivan in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) or Jean Gabin in films such as Pepe Le Moko (1937). Why was this working-class figure, so recently thought vulgar and frightening, suddenly attractive to American audiences across class and gender? 10 Cool was the sign by which “hard-boiled masculinities” crossed over into mainstream social acceptance. For example, in 1942, Paramount Studios floated a new term for rising star Alan Ladd after This Gun for Hire: “the romantic heavy.” 11 In Hollywood studio parlance, the “heavy” was the villain; the romantic lead was the hero. “Romantic heavy” was an oxymoron; the term might be translated as “the heroic badass.” Good men were not badasses in pre-war Hollywood films; the violence of lawmen was justified while gangsters had to be gunned down according to the dictates of the Hays Code. The heroic badass has a complex cultural past in U.S. popular culture—especially in the Western genre—but in the interwar period, there was a gap of class, prestige, and experience between the hard-boiled toughs of the pulp magazines and the upper-class romantic leading men of Hollywood studio convention. The crucible of the new “romantic heavy” was his masking of emotion— his cool. This was not the sangfroid of aristocratic nonchalance or the dullness of brute indifference, but a near-kinetic detachment projected with a subdued intensity suggesting conscious (and conscientious) suffering. Without this muted despair, the cool mask would register neither style nor personal suffering for its audiences. Instead, the flat affect and unemotive violence would connote coldness, a void or a vacuum, a lack of consciousness. Without cool, such blank dispassion conveys the bare life of an automaton, the mechanical workings of a wind-up soldier. The cool mask signifies both the control of one’s inner intensity—including rage and pride—and its costs. Cool was part and parcel of noir’s stylized framework and it enabled audiences to unconsciously consider a decade of sacrifice, subsistence, and instability. The assertive silence of such men created a resonance between actors and audiences that both validated private suffering and expressed the costs of survival. Philosopher Stanley Cavell once referred to this sensibility as the “banking [of] destructive feeling” through body language and physical gesture. 12 To Cavell, such self-restraint becomes appealing at precisely those historical moments when audiences are seeking new modes “of individuality and distinctness.” 13 Cavell’s theory of the “banked fire” of masculine restraint may be archaic, but as it comes from a memoir two generations old, in which the philosopher reflects upon his non-academic consumption of Hollywood studio films between 1935–1960—its documentary value is important. What Cavell calls the “banked fire” of the noir protagonist, Christopher Breu pathologizes as “the hard-boiled male’s shell-like exterior” through its investment in patriarchal violence. Such hyper-masculinity is certainly disturbing

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in retrospect, but what Breu calls the “unemotive violent masculinity” of Bogart, Mitchum, and others was nonetheless immediately seized upon by critics and audiences as a compelling new masculine register. Almost overnight, the “romantic heavy” became a new masculine type in the American dream factory. 14 In a sense, cool was a mask of composed violence. For Depression-era audiences, the pain simmering through the mask validated their recent traumatic experience by putting a haggard face on it. How else explain the sudden stardom and sexual appeal of the short, older, grizzled Humphrey Bogart (five-foot seven inches, fourty-two years old)? Linda Williams has wondered whether Bogart was “objectively speaking, sexy?” Is any icon ever objectively sexy? An era’s icon is always historically bundled. Yet in 1941, just after The Maltese Falcon, Bogart received 75 percent of his fan mail from women, many of whom asked to see him in more romantic roles. As French critic Andre Bazin later eulogized Bogart’s role as cultural worker: “[T]he raison d’etre of his existence was in some sense [simply] to survive. . . . Distrust and weariness, wisdom and skepticism: Bogey is a Stoic.” And of course, to be stoical is the closest ancient philosophical synonym for being cool. 15 The noir protagonist spoke the American urban vernacular, resented official corruption, and had seen dignified work disappear as an aspect of masculine identity. 16 The noir protagonist lived in humble circumstances, had an egalitarian worldview and a personal code of ethics, and carried class hostility toward economic elites and institutional justice. The cool-masked protagonist was loyal and hardworking, as if to suggest that unemployment was never a matter of laziness or socialist sympathies. In other words, the noir protagonist developed out of the dark side (and dark desires) of American life—i.e., the place formerly occupied by the gangster—rather than the heroic, virtuous side. With the exception of James Cagney, these qualities were in stark contrast to Hollywood leading men of the time, who were overwhelmingly upper-class and Anglicized, whether John Barrymore, Cary Grant, or Fred Astaire. For a case study, I will turn to an “emergent noir” (as I have called the early films in the genre), High Sierra (1941), the film that gave birth to the Bogart persona. It’s early 1941, pre-war (in the United States) and postDepression. Here’s a quick plot summary: Roy “Mad Dog” Earle (Bogart) is the last living member of the Dillinger gang. He gets paroled and drives cross-country to a camp in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to mastermind a bank heist. There he meets two hired thugs, Red and Babe, and Marie, Babe’s girlfriend; he also befriends a stray dog, Pard. The gang pulls off the robbery, but an inside tip puts the police on their tail. Babe and Red die in the chase, and Earle and Marie go on the lam with Pard and the jewels. Earle is

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shot down in an overnight siege on Mt. Whitney that is a national media event. Given this skeletal plot outline, some reviewers of the time considered it a gangster film, but one that broke all the genre’s conventions. The gangster films of the 1930s were characterized by urban settings, ethnically inflected and emotionally unstable gang leaders, and social climbing through violence. Roy Earle is neither ethnic nor urban; he’s from Indiana and visits the old family farm on his cross-country drive. On the road, Earle meets the Goodhues, a pre-modern virtuous agrarian family who have lost their farm and are heading to California; Earle lends Papa Goodhue money on a handshake. Here are two other Depression-era themes: respect for hard work and the virtue of loyalty. Earle is a sympathetic criminal because he has a work ethic and completes his job at considerable personal risk. The initial bond in the romantic subplot between Earle and Marie (Ida Lupino) is their acknowledgment of shared hard times. Earle has a recurring nightmare concerning economic instability and he often moans about “crashing out” from somewhere in order to “go back to the farm,” the pre-modern site of stability. Marie hears these dreams, and in effect, witnesses his trauma; in terms of trauma theory, she is the addressable other in the film. Since the film was a surprise box-office hit, one can speculate that Bogart’s persona found an addressable film audience. Americans used this cinematic text to reflect upon their recent experience as the wartime economy boomed. 17 The key trope for Earle’s redemption is the phrase “to crash out,” which means, abstractly, freedom. Earle mutters it in his dreams: “Take the gates away. . . . I’m crashing out. . . . I’ll go back to the farm. . . . Don’t hold me back.” Marie watches him sleep, offering the potential for a certain kind of redemption. And she, too, wants “to crash out”; Marie also has an inchoate idea of existential freedom, of living by one’s own personal code of ethics. “I’ve been trying to crash out as long as I can remember,” Marie tells Earle in solidarity one morning at breakfast. “My old man used to knock us around a few times a week,” she says. “I crashed out just like you did.” “To crash out” means, again abstractly, to be free—of economic uncertainty, of naïve ideas of institutional justice, of class entrapment. The studio even wove the trope into its public relations. One poster reads: “’Mad Dog’ Earle . . . battl[es] a force bullets cannot conquer . . . [and] crashes out—at last—to freedom!” 18 Already in 1941, High Sierra is a full-fledged film noir, redolent of existential motifs and modernist self-invention, focused more on subjectivity than sociology, and imbued with the genre’s dark vision of entrapment, transgression, and violent death. To Cavell, studio-era era Hollywood films functioned as “an enormous stock company” for its audiences, as “America’s [. . .] State Theater.” 19 Audiences developed relationships with stars by seeing them in films two or three times a year and “the individuality of stars was defined by their self-

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identity through repeated incarnations.” 20 An actor’s cultural resonance was cumulative as their bodies of work “became part of what the movies they are in are about.” 21 In the late 1930s, Bogart was a B-actor typed as a gangster, but when he read the script of High Sierra, he saw a chance to break out of this mold. It would follow up on his role as a hard-working, hard-fighting independent trucker in They Drive By Night (1940), in which his character loses an arm and suffers a crisis of masculine identity while unemployed. If the public’s experience of familiar actors like Bogart were reflections of their own experience, his popularity as Roy Earle reflected the audience’s need to break out of a previous mold. Earle is a bank robber but he is loyal to others and has a strong work ethic. His ethical egalitarianism also extends to women. At first, finding Marie with Red, he mutters bitterly, “Those two will be spilling lead over you before long.” Yet Earle recognizes that Marie is smarter than both men and pistol-whips Babe for beating her. At one point, Marie apologizes to Earle for losing her temper and he jokes, “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t give two cents for a dame without a temper.” At the end, Earle is cornered in a car chase, but he neither panics nor confesses his remorse nor has an emotional meltdown, as per the conventions of the gangster film. He runs up Mt. Whitney with a gun and some supplies, then hunkers down and holds off the police all night long. Earle has chosen his death and looks satisfied with it, a formative existential conceit. In the final scene, director Raoul Walsh chose to shoot the sun rising over the mountain behind Earle, bathing him in sunlight. With his black collar up and rifle alongside, Earle seems either blessed by divine grace or living in defiance of the very concept. Right then he is shot dead by a marksman. Down below, Marie walks along crying and the final shot is a close-up of Marie whispering “free,” a one-word eulogy for Roy Earle. Why did audiences root for Roy Earle? The New York Times noted that Bogart’s “unsmiling face” conveyed a “grim authority.” 22 Satisfied with his ethical choices in the Great Depression and with choosing his moment of death—a form of conscious suicide—Earle represented a symbolic transmutation of shifting expectations for his audience. Even before World War II (and before Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus), film noir holds all the elements of existential individuality and agency in tense cinematic balance. The mask of cool represented controlled suffering, the reigns held on hard-earned individual experience. Earle’s complexity was a creative collaboration between Bogart and John Huston, soon to be one of the premier directors of film noir. In the source text, W. R. Burnett’s novel, High Sierra (1940), “Mad Dog” Earle was animalistic, a man of instincts, a “farmer-ape” who could not control his rages. Huston co-wrote the script with Burnett, and along with Bogart and Walsh, the four men sculpted Earle into a modern figure of alienation. 23 Six

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months later, Huston directed Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941), the first classic of film noir. A year later, Bogart’s cool was codified in Casablanca (1942), a noir transposed to a patriotic key. In two short years, Bogart morphed from Warner Brothers’ archetypal “#1 screen gangster” to the romantic-heavy Sam Spade to the nation’s favorite iconic cool anti-hero of all time, Rick Blaine. Bogart’s grizzled mask of cool was a postwar signifier for “accepting the human condition,” as Bazin reflected, a philosophical outlook “which may be shared by [both] the rogue and the honorable man.” 24 The word “cool” was rarely used outside of jazz culture until the early 1950s, yet in biographies and oral histories of the icons of film noir, this term of praise nearly always comes up. Here’s how the young actor Harry Carey Jr. reflected on working with Robert Mitchum during Pursued (1949): He was just an overwhelming personality [. . .] a much more overpowering figure than Duke Wayne was, no question. And Mitchum—I don’t know if they even had the term them—Mitchum was cool. If they didn’t have that expression he must have invented it, because he was just the coolest guy that ever lived. He had his own outlook on life and he didn’t let anyone interfere with it. 25

Cool is so often invoked in retrospect for the iconic actors of film noir that we assume it was a common postwar term. Rather, it was an emergent concept that crossed over from jazz and was seized upon. An actor’s signature style—like Bogart’s or Mitchum’s—is analogous to a jazz musician’s signature sound. I now turn to jazz, where cool was the sign of a larger semiotic system of rebellion. JAZZ COOL “Being cool,” as Amiri Baraka reflected back on his postwar upbringing, “[was] an attitude that really existed” among African-American men. “The term cool in its original context meant . . . a specific relationship to one’s environment. . . . To be cool was . . . to be calm, even unimpressed, by what horror the world might daily propose.” 26 This horror is a quotidian one, “the deadeningly predictable mind of white America.” 27 Cool was a deadpan response, a mask of self-defense that signaled the denial of communication across the portal of the face; it was a resistant gesture defying the insistent psychological inscription of racism. Emotional masking has always been part of the self-defense system of slaves the world over, as Orlando Patterson showed in his comparative global study, Slavery and Social Death. In 1963, Baraka suggested that this performance of detachment, this “ability to ‘be cool’—to be calm, unimpressed, detached,” began in slavery and became part of the toolkit of affect among African-Americans. 28 As such, there was a

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direct line from slavery to postwar cool and its “calm, stoical, repression of suffering.” 29 Jazz musician and scholar Ben Sidran insisted that “the “cool” posture” was not about detachment, and “in fact, [it was] not passive at all.” It represented “actionality turned inward,” a non-verbal claim to individuality that was “effected at substantial cost and suffering.” 30 The mask of cool supplanted the mask of Uncle Tom, or “Tomming,” as it was then called. African-Americans employed public gestures of deference as survival technology for living under white supremacy in the U.S. South. There was the bent head, the slow shuffle, saying “yessuh” and “no-suh”— “shuckin’ and jivin,” as it was called—but the primary sign of accommodation to the racial order was an ever-present smile. Uncle Tom’s smile was the primary sign of white tyranny, as cultural critic Bernard Wolfe wrote in 1949. “It is the white man who manufactures the Negro’s grin. The stereotype reflects the looker . . . not the person looked at; it is born out of intense subjective need.” 31 The smile was a facial toll extracted by whites to salve their conscience. It was only “fear and force” that kept Blacks subservient, anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer observed at the time: “whites demand that the Negroes shall appear smiling, eager, and friendly in all their dealings with them.” 32 Henry Louis Gates Jr. recalled of the postwar era that “the term ‘Uncle Tom’ became synonymous with self-loathing . . . [and] with the black man all too eager to please the whites around him.” This figure became “the embodiment of ‘race betrayal’” for his generation of African-American men and Gates thought of Uncle Tom as “the model to be avoided.” 33 Even before World War II, African-American authors began writing literary executions of the figure of Uncle Tom. In each of the four stories in Richard Wright’s first collection, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), persecuted Black men—i.e., the sons of Uncle Tom—shoot back at white aggressors in self-defense. Chester Himes depicted an actual funeral for Uncle Tom in the dream of a Black soldier in a short story called “Heaven Has Changed” (1943). 34 Duke Ellington claimed the objective of his popular Los Angeles revue, “Jump for Joy” (1941) was to “take Uncle Tom out of the theatre, [and] eliminate the stereotyped image that had been exploited by Hollywood and Broadway.” 35 In “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949), James Baldwin indicted Harriet Beecher Stowe for the creation of Uncle Tom himself, a character “robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.” 36 And in the first chapter of Invisible Man (1952), Ralph Ellison gives the narrator’s grandfather a deathbed confession in which he defends Tomming: he surprises his entire family by declaiming that his acquiescence has always been a form of resistance. 37 In opposition to the emasculated Uncle Tom figure, the cool man was associated with dignity, control, political consciousness, silent indictment, self-assertion, sexuality, and most of all, a distinctive African-American masculinity. In their recent study of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Clawing

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at the Limits of Cool (2008), Farrah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington re-stated the resonances of African-American cool: “Keep in mind that within African America, ‘coolness’ . . . is something rather like a moral category [. . .] what is revered is the person who is cool, who brings the virtues of this attribute to all of his or her undertakings.” 38 Griffin and Washington then affirm the following attributes: “Being cool involves being relaxed, unruffled, quick-witted, reluctant to use aggression, and, most of all, able to follow one’s own path. Coolness celebrates individuality.” 39 Being cool was the opposite of Tomming and presented to the white gaze a blank facial wall. To be cool was to inhabit an air of detachment, of sullen boredom, of apathy born of defiance, of resignation. Over two decades, cool as a word, mask, and philosophical concept came to signal a stylish stoicism. In a well-known later analysis, psychologist Richard Majors referred to this tough front of bravado as the “cool pose” among young African-American men. However, his analysis does not attend to jazz culture or the formation of this concept in the 1940s. The semiotic strategies of cool were made possible by the Great Migration out of the South, where the rigid protocols of deference to whites could only be defied at the risk of one’s life or freedom. 40 The modern usage of the word, the concept, and the mask were brought into jazz culture by legendary tenor saxophonist Lester Young. By all accounts, Young disseminated the usage of “cool” as a state of being. 41 When Young said, “I’m cool,” he meant “I’m calm” or just “I’m keeping it together in here” against significant social pressure. To be cool meant to be relaxed, to have a situation under control, or rather, to have one’s self under control. The vestigial vernacular phrase today is to say “I’m chill” or “it’s chill,” meaning “I’m relaxed here now” in this environment. Young made of cool an emblematic term that stood for a structure of feeling. It was comprised of a flat affect, coded slang, stylized physical gestures of relaxation, and wearing sunglasses at night and on stage. Young was the first musician to wear shades on stage and, in the same period, he created a personalized, impenetrable, original slang few could understand. Many of his terms, phrases, and nicknames became part of jazz slang and jazz lore. Young effected an air of detachment that created a force field and turned white people into intrusive Others. Young grew up in New Orleans and Mississippi and rarely spoke out against racism. Yet four months before his death in 1959, in an interview in Paris, he revealed his deep understanding of masking in American society. “They [white people] want everybody who is a Negro to be a Uncle Tom or Uncle Sam or Uncle Remus and I can’t make it.” 42 Young suggested that there were only three oppressive frames of acceptance by which whites recognized Black men: Uncle Remus, the desexualized avuncular storyteller; Uncle Sam, the patriotic, deracinated American; or Uncle Tom. Rather than

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live under the sign of the smile, Young created the mask of cool and took his face out of the act. In 1944, Gjon Mili captured Young’s semiotics in the opening minute of the academy-award-nominated short film, Jammin’ the Blues. Over the next two decades, photographer Herman Leonard appropriated Young’s stylish stoicism to create a noir-ish jazz iconography through his porkpie hat, cigarette smoke, saxophone, and placid detachment. Young’s cool aesthetic was aurally (i.e., musically) represented and eulogized in Charles Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” (1958), an iconic jazz composition sometimes known as “Lester’s Theme.” In contrast with Louis Armstrong’s minstrelized clowning of the same era, Young’s semiotic strategies immediately influenced the bebop rebels—Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis— and through them, an entire generation of musicians. Young was one of Parker’s idols and Bird composed his face into an expressionless mask, setting up a disquieting tension between his thrilling virtuosic improvisations and the still portal of his face. Jazz musicians became the model for a new mode of public composure among African-American men. By the early 1950s, “cool came to define a certain sartorial elegance, smooth charm, and self-possession,” cultural critic Nelson George reflected, “that suggested a man [who] controlled not only himself but his environment.” 43 Here’s an example of cultural politics carried out under the postwar sign of cool. In 1960, journalist George W. Goodman, then an aspiring saxophonist, lived in the same building as Sonny Rollins, whom he idolized and dubbed “Mr. Cool.” This honorific stood for Rollins’ commitment to jazz as protest, his complex thematic musical improvisations, his achievement of quitting heroin cold turkey, and his embodiment of individual rebellion. Before Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, “the young lions of jazz were our cultural revolutionaries—rebellious, angry, but always cool,” Goodman reflected in 1998. To be cool meant you projected self-control and playing jazz “with authority meant you were at home in your own skin.” Goodman’s generation was “in awe” of jazz musicians, he wrote, and even their heroin addictions “enhanced the gritty existential mystique that [. . .] James Dean and Marlon Brando were [then] projecting for white America.” For Goodman, “cool was defiance with dignity.” 44 Miles Davis—the epitome of jazz cool—began as Parker’s apprentice in his bebop groups. In the early 1950s, Davis began turning his back on audiences when he soloed, or he would walk off-stage when other musicians soloed. By the late 1950s, his sartorial elegance and strategic silence transformed cool into a compelling mode of Black masculinity. Where Young’s mask of cool suggested deep thought and hurt, Davis inflected it with fierceness and challenge. Young’s shades deflected the world from his private reverie whereas Davis’s mask of cool was a force field—uninvited, you approached at your own risk. Magazine profiles of Davis by white writers

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featured titles such as “The Enigma of Miles Davis,” or “Miles Davis: Evil Genius of Jazz”; on occasion, he was called “the Prince of Darkness.” 45 By 1960, Davis was the first national crossover masculine icon of Black masculinity—he owned a Ferrari and regularly appeared on Esquire’s list of “The Ten Best-Dressed Men in America.” In Davis’s first interview with an African-American writer, Alex Haley (in Playboy, 1961), Miles invoked the figure of Uncle Tom four times. Asked why he turned his back on the audience, Davis explained that when another musician is soloing, “what am I going to stand up there for? I ain’t no model, and I don’t sing or dance, and I damn sure ain’t no Uncle Tom just to be up there grinning.” 46 His second mention of Uncle Tom involved a historical analysis linking slavery to the present. White people have certain things they expect from Negro musicians [. . .] It goes clear back to the slavery days. That was when Uncle Tomming got started because white people demanded it. Every little black child grew up seeing that getting along with white people meant grinning and acting clowns. It helped white people to feel easy about what they had done, and were doing, to Negroes, and that’s carried right on over to now [. . .] They want you to not only play your instrument, but to entertain them, too, with grinning and dancing. 47

This interview occurs right in the midst of the civil rights movement, after the first sit-ins and two years before the Freedom Rides. “I won’t take a booking nowhere in the South,” Davis continued, “I told you I just can’t stand Jim Crow.” Yet Davis also declaimed against wealthy Northern liberal racists—“expense-account ofays”—who went to jazz clubs to show off their hipness but ultimately “used music as a background for getting high and . . . show[ing] off to the[ir] women. . . . What they really want is some Uncle Tom entertainment. . . . These are the kind that will holler, ‘Hey, boy, play Sweet Georgia Brown!’ You supposed to grin and play that.” 48 Without invoking the term cool, Davis was quite conscious of the subtext of his own self-presentation: “I ain’t scared of nothing or nobody. I already been through too much . . . I just say what I think, and that bugs people, especially a lot of white people. When they look in my eyes and don’t see no fear, they know it’s a draw.” Davis’s cool was a non-verbal public declaration of defiance and self-protection; in private, he took down his guard among friends. Quincy Jones spoke of Davis’s “gruff exterior” as a pose that “was more bark than bite.” He added: “I saw through his shell . . . [a]nd it was a shell. Looking back from the 1990s, Jones provided context for Davis’s cool: “[E]verybody did that. All the beboppers. The beboppers invented what the rappers are trying to do now. You know, be cool, the underworld, subculture language, the body language, the lifestyle. You had to be cool.” As a musician who lived through both the bebop and hiphop artistic rebel-

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lions within African-American culture, Jones’ testimony has added value for its recognition of the cool mask in jazz culture. 49 In sum, jazz cool is performative and theatrical; its space is the public or the stage; its intended audience is the Euro-American public. This public sullenness and rejection of everyday social exchange managed to project a collective history while signaling rebellion, withdrawal, secret knowledge, and bored exhaustion with racism. 50 Cool represented a repudiation of Uncle Tomming and rendered silent protest. For effect, I will now invoke the same language to theorize jazz cool as I did for noir cool: The crucible of the jazz musician’s seemingly insolent selfpresentation was the masking of emotion—his cool. Postwar cool was a nearkinetic detachment projected with a subdued intensity suggesting conscious (and conscientious) suffering. Without this muted despair, cool would not have registered as stoicism on stage. Instead, the flat affect and sullenness of the musician’s physical aspect on stage—the composed violence of it— would have connoted a lack of consciousness, and for African-Americans, the stereotype of the brute rage of primitives. The mask of cool signified both the control of a musician’s inner intensity—including his rage and pride— and its costs. Towards the end of Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the narrator sees three young silent men in Harlem wearing zoot suits, walking slowly and sullenly. He stumbles on the semiotics of Black cool as if it is the last mode of being in the world. It was as though I’d never seen their like before: Walking slowly, their shoulders swaying, their legs swinging from their hips . . . their coats long and hiptight. . . . [T]hey seemed to move like dancers in some kind of funeral ceremony, swaying, going forward, their black faces secret. . . . [T]hey were men outside of historical time . . . men of transition whose faces were immobile. [Italics added.] 51

The cool mask is a new public face: secret, silent, stylish, swinging gravely. They were new to Harlem, these cool boys in their zoot suits, long coats, quiet, blank faces, rhythmic strides, “speak[ing] a jived-up transitional language full of country glamour.” 52 Nelson George suggests the new style developed from the Black migration as “many Southern boys now wise to the concrete jungle started to move with a fluid, no-sweat attitude everybody called “cool”. . . . [C]ool was clearly an African-urban thing.” 53 Invisible Man ends with the narrator living underground, reflecting the failure of American society to provide a public space for African-American autonomy and social equality. Underground, he waits and bides his time until a time when he can communicate face-to-face and not simply on the lower radio frequencies.

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In conclusion, I turn again to the existential subtext of jazz and film noir. Cool was a philosophical self-defense system during the postwar era. The mask of cool was a sign of the search for a new morality. It was the embodiment of a defrocked code of situational ethics. In film noir, the mask of cool among Euro-American male protagonists became an emblem of lost ideologies and the quest for meaning. Suffering simmered through the mask such that audiences entered a space of self-reflexivity for its own choices. In postwar jazz, the mask of cool allowed the individual musician to create an identity in the midst of deep emotional excavation manifested in extensive improvisational creativity. As Ellison once wrote about the jazz musician, “each solo flight, or improvisation” taken by a musician created “a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of [artistic and ethnic] tradition.” 54 This artistic method helped give rise to African-American consciousness through subjectivity, on the one hand, and as an act of expressive emotionalism, it resonated with audiences searching for non-Western artistic approaches. For all its separate and distinct meanings among Euro-American and African-American men, there is much commonality to the functions of the mask of cool in film noir and postwar jazz. In effect, the birth of cool symbolically represented the end of a coherent narrative of Western civilization. The cool mask was a transitional face of protest, a theatrical performance of self-control. For two generations—until the late 1970s—cool and its attendant semiotic strategies attracted audiences drawn to an edgier, complex vision of post-Christian, post-Western individuality. NOTES 1. Joel Dinerstein, “Lester Young and the Birth of Cool,” in Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin’, and Slam-dunking, ed. Gena Dagel Caponi (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 239–276. 2. I discuss the three interlocking artistic forms in my forthcoming book, The Origins of Cool: Jazz, Film Noir, and Existentialism in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 3. Joel Dinerstein, “‘Emergent Noir’: Film Noir and the Great Depression in High Sierra (1941) and This Gun for Hire (1942),” Journal of American Studies 42, no. 3 (December 2008): 415–448. 4. Warren Susman, Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 196–197; see also Sherwood Anderson, Puzzled America (New York: Scribner’s, 1935), 29, 46, 147. 5. All of these generic aspects are formative to the genre, even as film noir inflected toward postwar concerns. See Richard Schickel, “Rerunning Film Noir,” Wilson Quarterly (Summer 2007): 39. 6. John Houseman quoted in David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (New York: Vintage, 1996), 73; John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During WWII (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 91. 7. Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1, 3.

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8. On trauma and witnessing, see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). 9. Mark Bould, Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City (London: Wallflower, 2005), x. 10. Erin A. Smith, Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); Christopher Breu, Hard-Boiled Masculinities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 11. The term was stamped on promotional stills of Alan Ladd from The Glass Key (1942), Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, California (hereinafter MHL). 12. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking, 1971), 68. 13. Ibid. 68–69. 14. Ibid. 68; Breu, Hard-boiled Masculinities, 197, also, 188, 193fn1. 15. Cavell, The World Viewed, 55; Pressbook, Casablanca, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California (hereafter, WB/USC); Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir: 1941–1953 (San Francisco: City Lights, 2002 [1955]), 16; Linda Williams, “Of Kisses and Ellipses,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 288, 340, 336; Bazin quoted in Jim Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 98, 100. 16. Smith, Hard-Boiled, 42–47. 17. Felman, Testimony, 7, 59–62. 18. Ad copy in studio publicity material, Poster #208, Pressbook, High Sierra, WB/USC. 19. Cavell, The World Viewed, 76. 20. Ibid. 75. 21. Ibid. 63. 22. Howard Barnes, “The Screen: Return of the Gangster,” New York Times, January 26, 1941, Section VI: 1, clipping file, HS, WB/USC. 23. Internal memoranda, HS file, WB/USC. 24. Bazin quoted in Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema, 99. 25. Quoted in Lee Server, Baby I Don't Care: The Life of Robert Mitchum (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002),114–115; see also Beverly Linet, Ladd: The Life, The Legend, and the Legacy of Alan Ladd (Westminster: Arbor House, 1979), 1–2. 26. Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People (New York: Morrow Quill, 1963), 111–112. 27. Ibid. 111. 28. Ibid. 112. 29. Ibid. 111. 30. Ben Sidran, Black Talk (New York: Da Capo, 1980), 112. 31. Bernard Wolfe, “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit,” in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, ed. Alan Dundes (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 538. 32. Gorer qtd. in Wolfe, “Uncle Remus,” 527–528. 33. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Introduction,” The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Hollis Robbins (New York: Norton, 2007), xi. 34. Richard Wright, Uncle Tom's Children (New York: Harper & Row, 1938); Chester Himes, “Heaven Has Changed,” in The Collected Stories of Chester Himes (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1990), 73–78. 35. Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 175. 36. James Baldwin, “Everybody's Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (New York: Bantam, 1972 [1955]), 9. 37. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995 [1952]), 16. For a full analysis of these literary executions of Uncle Tom, see Joel Dinerstein, “‘Uncle Tom Is Dead!’: Wright, Himes, and Ellison Lay A Mask to Rest,” African-American Review 43, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 83–99. 38. Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington, Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (New York: Thomas Dunne/ St. Martin’s, 2008), 254. 39. Ibid. 254.

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40. Richard Majors and Janet Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Touchstone, 1993); for an analysis of the relationship of jazz, slang, and the Great Migration, see Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (New York: Citadel Press, 1990 [1946]), 222–232. 41. Ted Gioia, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool (Golden: Speck, 2009); see also Dinerstein, “Lester Young,” 239–244. 42. Quoted in Francois Postif, “Interview with Lester Young,” in The Lester Young Reader, ed. Lewis Porter (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1991), 181. 43. Nelson George, Elevating the Game (Los Angeles: Fireside, 1992), 62. 44. George W. Goodman, “Sonny Rollins at Sixty-Eight,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1999, online. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99jul/9907sonnyrollins.html. 45. Joe Goldberg, Jazz Masters of the 50s (New York: Da Capo, 1983), 63–64. 46. Alex Haley with Miles Davis, “The Playboy Interview,” in Miles Davis and American Culture, ed. Gerald Early (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 199–200. 47. Haley with Davis, “The Playboy Interview,” 200-201. 48. Haley with Davis, “The Playboy Interview,” 206. Note: “Ofay” is pig-Latin slang for “foe,” equating a white person with an enemy. It was a common slang term among AfricanAmericans in the twentieth century. 49. Gerald Early, “‘I Just Adored That Man’: Interview with Quincy Jones,” in Miles Davis and American Culture, ed. edited by Gerald Early (Columbia: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2001), 42–43. 50. Leroi Jones, Blues People, 111–112. 51. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995 [1952], 440. 52. Ellison, Invisible Man, 441. 53. See Ellison, Invisible Man, 440; Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Penguin, 2003), 14. 54. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1972), 234.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Sherwood. Puzzled America. New York: Scribner’s, 1935. Baldwin, James. “Everybody's Protest Novel.” In Notes of a Native Son, 9–17. New York: Bantam Books, 1972 [1955]. Blum, John Morton. V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during WWII. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. A Panorama of American Film Noir: 1941–1953. San Francisco: City Lights, 2002 [1955]. Bould, Mark. Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City. London: Wallflower Press, 2005. Breu, Christopher. Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. New York: Viking Press, 1971. Dimendberg, Edward. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Dinerstein, Joel. “Lester Young and the Birth of Cool.” In Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin', and SlamDunking, edited by Gena Dagel Caponi, 239–276. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Dinerstein, Joel. “‘Emergent Noir’: Film Noir and the Great Depression in High Sierra (1941) and This Gun for Hire (1942).” Journal of American Studies 42, no. 3 (Dec. 2008): 415–448. Dinerstein, Joel. “‘Uncle Tom Is Dead!’: Wright, Himes, and Ellison Lay a Mask to Rest.” African-American Review 43, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 83–99. Early, Gerald. “‘I Just Adored That Man’: Interview with Quincy Jones.” In Miles Davis and American Culture, edited by G. Early, 42–43. Columbia: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2001.

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Ellington, Duke. Music Is My Mistress. New York: Da Capo, 1973 Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1995 [1952]. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage, 1972. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Introduction” to The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Holis Robbins, xi-xxxi. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Gioia, Ted. The Birth (and Death) of the Cool. Golden: Speck Press, 2009. George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Penguin, 2003. George, Nelson. Elevating the Game. Los Angeles: Fireside, 1992. Goldberg, Joe. Jazz Masters of the 50s. New York: Da Capo, 1983. Goodman, George. W. (July 1999). “Sonny Rollins at Sixty-Eight.” Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99jul/9907sonnyrollins.html Griffin, Farah Jasmine and Salim Washington. Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever. New York: St. Martin’s, 2008. Haley, Alex and Miles Davis. “The Playboy Interview.” In Miles Davis and American Culture, edited by Gerald Early, 199–207. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. High Sierra. Directed by Raoul Walsh, 1941. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video. DVD. Hillier, Jim. Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Himes, Chester (1943/1990). “Heaven has changed.” In The Collected Stories of Chester Himes, 73–78. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1990 [1943]. Jones, Leroi. Blues People. New York: Morrow Quill, 1963 Linet, Beverly. Ladd: The Life, the Legend, and the Legacy of Alan Ladd. Westminster: Arbor House, 1979. Majors, Richard and Janet Billson. Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America. Lexington: Lexington, 1992. Mezzrow, Mezz and Bernard Wolfe. Really the Blues. New York: Citadel Press, 1990. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Porter, Lewis. The Lester Young Reader. Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1991. Schickel, Richard. “Rerunning Film Noir.” Wilson Quarterly, 31, no. 3 (2007): 36–43. Server, Lee. Robert Mitchum: Baby I Don't Care. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002. Sidran, Ben. Black Talk. New York: Da Capo, 1980. Susman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1973. Smith, Erin A. Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Thomson, David. Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles. New York: Vintage, 1996. This Gun for Hire. Directed by Frank Tuttle. 1942. Hollywood, CA: Universal Home Video. DVD. Williams, L. “Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies.” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 288–340. Wolfe, Bernard. “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit.” In Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, edited by A. Dundes, 524–540. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: Harper & Row, 1938.

Chapter Six

Cool Revenge: Kill Bill and the Female Assassin Sophia Frese

“Revenge is a dish best served cold.” Old Klingon Proverb I Seconds before killing Vernita Green, the heroine of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill I & II informs her victim: “It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack, not rationality.” Beatrix Kiddo thus responds to Vernita Green’s feigned surprise about the dispassionate way in which she goes about her vengeance. Green’s name, like those of the four other assassins who tried and failed to execute Kiddo, now features on the heroine’s death list. Confirming her self-portrait as a rational killer, Kiddo works off her agenda with the methodical determination of a businesswoman closing a deal. Throughout Tarantino’s Kill Bill series, Kiddo promotes an image of herself as a coolheaded avenger by carrying out her deeds in a decidedly aloof and pokerfaced manner. However, the films provide several clues that Kiddo cultivates her appearance as a killer in front of her enemies in order to mask the inner turmoil that propels her retribution. In this article, I argue that Kill Bill stages coolness by dramatizing the tension between a deeply anguished interiority and a calm and collected exteriority that masks the former. In other words, the representation of coolness in Tarantino’s film series depends on the pose of self-control; one appears cool only by mastering and disguising one’s actual affects. What is more, coolness in Kill Bill is linked to the trope of rebelling against patriarchy as embodied in the figure of Bill, who features both as a lover and a father figure to the heroine. To support this claim, I 127

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trace the development of the heroine from a cold-hearted killer to a cool, selfdetermined vigilante. Furthermore, I address the question of how revenge, an action primarily fuelled by “hot” affects such as anger and hatred can be performed in “cool” fashion. 1 For this purpose, I situate Kill Bill within the context of other cinematic negotiations of vigilantism in order to show how the movie both continues and breaks with this tradition. Beginning with the recognition that Kill Bill presents yet another example of an American fascination with vigilante figures executing vengeance I argue that the popularity of the film series points to an enduring American conflict between the ideology of individualism and the demands of societal and judicial order. THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE COOL AVENGER IN AMERICAN POP CULTURE To fully understand how the Kill Bill films became icons of pop culture charged with the aura of coolness, I analyze how the films manufacture a decidedly cool aesthetics by establishing a dense network of intertextuality through artfully shifting visual registers, as well as staging hyperbolic violence. Moreover, I argue that Kill Bill lays out a prototypical psychological development of the female avenger. The film series achieves this by dramatizing the stories of two women who turn to vigilante vengeance only after they and their families have become the victims of violent crime. The fates of Beatrix Kiddo and O-Ren Ishii, Kiddo’s nemesis, are strikingly similar. Both were either raped or witnessed the rape of a family member; both escaped their own death by the skin of their teeth and both lost loved ones to ruthless killers. Furthermore, the films construct the figure of the female avenger through strategic repetitions of certain themes and tropes. Kill Bill stages an iteration of coolness that takes as its starting point the insight that a stoic comportment is awe-inspiring when we find it almost unbelievable given the circumstances. We admire coolness because we see in it a triumph of self-mastery over the threat of discomposure. In short, the films operate on the assumption that we recognize another person as cool when he or she displays disaffectedness under conditions that would lead ordinary people to break down. On the one hand, coolness is a popular aesthetics linked to a practice of feigned disengagement, and on the other hand it must be understood as a form of self-defense and a disguise that conceals a troubled interiority. Before analyzing Tarantino’s Kill Bill films in more detail, I will briefly discuss the connections between the theme of revenge and the concept of coolness. Tracing the semantic shifts in the usage of the term cool, Rüdiger Zill argues that whereas “cool” originally indicated a sensory perception, it came to stand for a projection of affective detachment. 2 In American film

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history, coolness and revenge fuse in the figure of the traditionally male avenger who covers his “hot” affects behind a smooth and unperturbed façade. This figure is epitomized in Westerns like Dirty Harry, Hang ‘em High, and more recently, as a parody of himself, in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. The Hollywood avengers’ coolness appears particularly impressive because it testifies to a high degree of self-constraint in circumstances that would otherwise raise the affective temperature and render self-mastery difficult, if not impossible in the eyes of the spectators. After all, coolly executed revenge plans are hardly born out of indifference; rather, they testify to and perform masterful emotional control through the deliberate and often deadly channeling of affect. Rüdiger Zill has aptly summarized this tension as follows: The cool avenger is divine in his own right. He is the omnipotent God of revenge, whose wrath comes down like lightening, but in a calculated and selcontrolled manner: the hot heart is the motor, the cool head the agent. 3

By taking retribution into his own hands, the avenger is no longer a mere mortal helplessly exposed to whatever evil befalls him. Discarding the concept of divine justice, the vengeful agent undergoes an apotheosis and takes the scales of justice into his own hands in order to right their balance. COOL ROOTS: FROM ANCIENT GREECE TO CONTEMPORARY AMERICA Proposing a taxonomy of “cool,” Zill distinguishes between its three functions: first, a cool demeanor can be employed as a shield, or bulwark against affect; second, coolness can indicate affective numbness; and third, coolness can be used to channel affect. 4 In Zill’s functional triangle, affective numbness is the most passive, even pathological mode of coolness that, in my opinion, would more accurately be described as coldness. Thus, in order to appear outwardly calm although the contrary is true, one has to be in charge of one’s affects; if one already is devoid of feelings in the first place, however, then self-mastery is not required to be cool. Such preexisting detachment is not so much a skillful performance as it is the frightening disclosure of an inner void. In contrast, a dispassionate attitude is appropriated in order to deflect affects or with the purpose of channeling them. In both cases, the impression of being detached and indifferent is accomplished through selfcontrol and self-mastery, a set of skills that is key for understanding coolness as a mode of affect control and cultural technique. Harkening back to European philosophical roots of cool, Zill turns to Stoicism, describing the school’s normative ideal as freedom from affects. 5 He claims that apatheia, Stoicism’s ultimate end, was to rob fate of the power it wielded over the

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individual’s life. 6 By learning to control one’s affective responses to fate’s twists the individual was no longer eternally subject to its unpredictable turns. The stoical notion of apatheia can be understood as a preemptive measure against fate’s future blows. In contrast, Tarantino’s Kill Bill series argues that Kiddo conceals the physical and emotional injuries she has already suffered underneath a fabricated cool surface in order to appear impenetrable to potential future attackers. Although coolness is not identical with apatheia, it too subscribes to the logic that if one does not want to be dominated by one’s affects, one needs to be in charge of them instead. 7 Taking Clint Eastwood's Western Hang ‘em High as an example, Zill contends that the channeling of affects finds its prime expression in revenge fantasies. 8 Kill Bill verifies this theory to a certain extent, but it remains ambivalent whether Kiddo’s retribution allows her to channel the full spectrum of the inner turmoil that propels her to seek revenge. In the same vein, and as I will show in my analysis, it is dubious whether the heroine’s vigilante justice really leads to a cathartic resolution of the initial trauma to which she responds so furiously. Although the methodical execution of her retaliation restores a sense of agency to Kiddo, her drive to eradicate her enemies also represents an attempt to displace her grief. Thus, Kiddo, who has herself survived multiple assaults, believes to have lost her unborn child in an attempt on her life. Through concentrating on the task of vengeance, Kiddo circumvents the task of mourning and proceeds instead to systematically kill those whom she blames for her bereavement. Rather than simply celebrating retaliation as a liberating and cathartic act, Tarantino’s film series both insists on and subverts its redemptive promise. At various points, the film series reminds us that vengeance begets vengeance and that—rather than offering a way out—it is a self-perpetuating cycle. When Kiddo kills Vernita Green, for example, she offers Green’s daughter satisfaction and thereby anticipates the potentially infinite continuation of retributive justice. Startled by Nikkia’s appearance on the crime scene, Kiddo says to the girl: “It was not my intention to do this in front of you. For that I’m sorry. But you can take my word for it, your mother had it comin’. When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting.” Kiddo gives Green’s daughter a chance to avenge her mother in the future, thus opening the window onto another cycle of revenge. Simultaneously, Kiddo’s treatment of the girl reveals a crack in her cool façade and demonstrates that she is not quite as devoid of compassion and mercy as she claims to be. Despite the films’ occasional reflection on the potentially interminable nature of vengeance, Kill Bill fails to imagine an alternative course of action that would allow the heroine to cope with the memory of being victimized without seeking redress. Instead, the films’ exultant staging of each of Kiddo’s retaliatory killings promotes the notion that the most effective way of overcoming victimization is to become a perpetrator yourself, a suggestion

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that is highly problematic because it assigns a therapeutic function to retributive violence. 9 ON THE POPULARITY OF TARANTINO’S REVENGE SPECTACLES In Kill Bill, violence and coolness are inextricably connected, thereby affirming Zill’s observation that the two frequently form a close union in American film history. On the example of Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlow and Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, Zill shows that the poised and cool-headed individual is typically shown as a lone wolf who remains adamant about his own interpretation of justice and executes it single-handedly. 10 In The Big Sleep (1964) and Dirty Harry (1971), the heroes’ persistence in self-determination results in a conflict with the law. For Philip Marlow and Dirty Harry, their emphasis on self-mastery joins an almost inordinate individualism. These protagonists embody an intransigent individualism that implies independence from the law, therein demonstrating the consequences of favoring the individual as lawmaker over the notion of a regulative judicial system that claims the power of judgment and its execution as its prerogative. Accordingly, cinematic representations of the cool avenger can and should not be analyzed solely in terms of an individual’s affective economy. Instead, this figure points to an enduring conflict between society and the individual generally, and more specifically to the friction created by the hierarchical relationship between the legal system and the subject of law. The vengeful vigilantism of Philip Marlow and Dirty Harry signifies a challenge to a centralized justice system, which attempts to control and regulate the individual’s desire for revenge but fails to do so. Kill Bill’s heroine similarly turns justice and revenge into her very own business. Rather than relying on the police and the legal system to find and try the people that assaulted her and killed her wedding party, Kiddo unifies the powers of judge, jury, and executioner in her private persona. Vigilantism continues to be a stock theme in American culture. The myth of the frontier vigilante, exemplified in Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), is perpetuated in countless twentieth-century Westerns and Italian-Westerns, some of which I have already mentioned. As the United States became increasingly urbanized, a new and much more ambiguous character was born: the urban vigilante. This figure is represented in such diverse films as Charles Bronson’s Death Wish (1974), Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), and in countless filmic adaptations of the DC comic hero Batman, most recently in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012). 11 Depending on the concrete representation of the urban vigilante, this predominantly male figure appears as a righteous defender of morals and values that

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are under threat by the proliferating amorality of the big city. A more ambiguous and interesting depiction of this figure abstains from showing the urban vigilante as a morally impeccable hero. Instead, he inhabits a world that is no longer schematically Manichean and navigates treacherous moral gray zones, frequently resorting to dubious tactics in order to achieve his goal. Keeping in mind that Tarantino’s films have to be read as continuing an American fascination with vigilante plots, it is worthwhile asking how one can explain the enormous popularity not just of Tarantino’s Kill Bill series, but also of his other revenge-action films such as his most recent film, Django Unchained (2012). 12 Is there a reason beyond a taste for gory and spectacular action scenes that render Tarantino’s revenge dramas into inevitable box office hits? To understand the predictable popularity of Tarantino’s revenge films, one must examine the underlying needs and desires of the audience to which his pop-culture iteration of vigilantism addresses itself and take a closer look at the political context from which they arise. It is no coincidence that liberal, Western democratic audiences who are themselves barred from taking the law into their own hands sit back and take vicarious pleasure in Kiddo’s wrath, reveling in the trail of blood that she leaves behind. In the societies that helped Tarantino’s films to gain such enormous success, private vengeance has long been outlawed and is harshly punished where it is enacted. Offering a very pragmatic explanation for why private revenge has become such a taboo in many contemporary societies, René Girard explains that “the specter of vengeance” represents such an “intolerable menace,” because it undermines social cohesion: 13 vengeance is an “interminable, infinitely repetitive process [. . .] that threatens to involve the whole social body.” 14 Girard holds that “the judicial system [. . .] serves to deflect the menace of vengeance,” but adds that the “system does not suppress vengeance: rather, it effectively limits it to a single act of reprisal, enacted by a sovereign authority specializing in this particular function.” 15 The popularity of the Kill Bill series, and countless other cultural representations of vigilante justice, shows that even in societies where the judicial system has managed to monopolize vengeance the infatuation with private vengeance not only continues, but in some cases grows. 16 In fact, it would be more appropriate to state that especially in societies where the individual is barred from taking personal revenge, cultural performances of private vengeance enjoy huge popularity. In his study of the culture of vengeance in America, Terry Aladjem argues that it is characteristic for the liberal democratic system that “the ‘real’ individual with all of his or her concerns and devotions is sacrificed to the ‘abstract individual.’” 17 This displacement of the ‘real’ individual occurs with “disturbing regularity” in liberal democracies and leads to a nostalgic longing for a time “when justice, perhaps, was more basic, and the punishment fit the crime.” 18 In my view, Tarantino films are so prominent because they reinstate of an individual whose desire for vengeance is not displaced by

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some abstract, enlightened subject of law. In short, Tarantino’s films utilize the figure of the vigilante avenger to stage an uprising against the guiding principles of a rationalized society in which the individual is always already the subject of a law not her own. In his discussion of the lasting fascination with vengeance in American culture, Aladjem arrives at another recognition that pertains to Kill Bill’s treatment of the subject. He sees an intimate relationship between grief and the desire to take revenge by arguing that “[v]engeance [. . .] cannot be discussed apart from its expression as a quantum of suffering to be lessened in the victim by vanquishing the offender.” Aladjem argues that liberal philosophy and its actualization in liberal justice systems tends to bracket grief as a “merely personal” sentiment, thereby dismissing it as “being extraneous to considerations of justice.” 19 This fateful omission leads to the inability to publicly mourn. Instead of acknowledging the infinite task of mourning, to echo Jacques Derrida’s conception of grief in response to Sigmund Freud, American culture continues to stage the fantasy of revenge as a conclusive and redemptive response to loss. 20 Kill Bill’s heroine Kiddo performs and exemplifies this cultural logic of displacement by allowing herself only a brief moment of grief over the child she believes lost before proceeding to the arguably more manageable task of vengeance. Both the tendency to transpose grief with vengeful fury and the substitution of the “real individual” by an “abstract individual” as envisaged by liberal, democratic law explain why Tarantino’s revenge dramas appeal to such a wide audience. The director’s revenge films, including his most recent work, Django Unchained, thus owe their popularity at least in part to a widespread dissatisfaction with the rationalized and narrowly circumscribed existence of the liberal democratic subject that leaves little room for affect-guided individual action. In societies that bar the individual from executing their sense of law and have simultaneously disparaged or abolished sustainable public mourning rituals, the prominence of vigilante fantasies in response to loss is no surprise. However, the fact that Kill Bill and Django Unchained appeal to an audience beyond AfricanAmerican men and victimized females proves that moviegoers vicariously identify with the films’ heroes, precisely because these revenge fantasies address repressed desires and needs within them that transcend the specificity of racial, or gendered concerns.

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II ENTER THE FEMALE AVENGERS: FROM THE PERIPHERIES TO THE CENTER Vengeance belongs to men, or so we are lead to believe when looking at the history books and the vast majority of cultural representations of the avenger. In her study of the trope of vengeance in early modern literature, and in particular in Shakespeare’s work, Marguerite Tassi concludes that stories of blood revenge “are almost excessively masculine” in Western history and literature (17). Blood revenge has been the practice of traditional honor-based societies, from ancient Greece, to medieval Iceland, to contemporary Montenegro. Revenge is typically perceived in such cultures as the moral and social obligation of men that price honor above all else [. . .] By striking out against their enemies through feuds, vendettas, trial by combat and duels, males communicate a message of zero tolerance for personal affronts and injuries to themselves, their kin, their friends and clan. 21

Tassi’s account of the social function of vengeance clarifies that it cannot be reduced to reactive retaliation. Instead, she argues, avengers also act out their wrath with the purpose of discouraging potential future attackers. But more importantly, for our purposes, vengeance is traditionally tied up with the practice of justice: “Through violent retaliation, they [men] uphold a form of justice based on reciprocity (harm for harm, life for life).” 22 Despite the fact that revenge historically appears to be a primarily masculine prerogative, Tassi observes that from “classical literature onward, female characters articulate claims for revenge, based on rational and moral grounds.” 23 These vengeful women populate “the peripheries of men’s stories . . . [and] constitute a long-standing subversive element in Western literature” that defies the notion that women will passively endure the suffering inflicted on them. 24 Leaping from Shakespeare and classic literature to twentieth-century American cinema, I will now briefly discuss how the female avenger features in Hollywood movies, after having traced Zill’s study of the male avenger in select (Italian-)Westerns and film noir. 25 Moving female avengers from the peripheries, to which they were relegated for centuries, into the center of her analysis, Jacinda Read focuses on Hollywood’s representation of these characters in The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle. As her book title indicates, she specifically attends to the link between rape and revenge. 26 Analyzing such films as In My Daughter’s Name (1992) and an Eye for an Eye (1996) Read describes how “the rape-revenge film [. . .] dramatizes and articulates the gaps and contradictions [. . .] between the

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‘feminine’ (victim) and the ‘feminist’ (avenger).” 27 Tarantino’s films also stage this transformation by recounting the story of a female victim that retaliates against those who have harmed her; the difference in Kill Bill is that the heroine was not only repeatedly raped while comatose, but also believes to have lost her daughter in the assault by Bill and his henchmen. Kill Bill’s affective spectrum ranges from a total break down and loss of control to a triumphant recovery of self-control that is then coolly paraded. The films’ arc of suspense is built around Kiddo’s transformative journey from being a downtrodden female to becoming a righteous avenger. Coolness is not a matter of survival in Kill Bill, but rather the mark and armor of a traumatized survivor. Kiddo’s premeditated and consistently implemented plan of revenge is thus born out of traumatic and unbearable pain. The films employ the cinematic technique of flashbacks, formally suggesting that the heroine is plagued by the uncontrollable return of traumatic memories; these scenes are frequently followed by vengeful actions. Countering the stereotype of a helpless and passive female victim, the Kill Bill series stages Kiddo’s coolly executed retaliation as a strategy of selfempowerment. Instead of awaiting a noble defender, or responding to the crimes committed against her with irrational hysteria, Kiddo refuses to abdicate her fate to another and does not lose control of herself simply because it was taken from her momentarily. Kill Bill’s appeal derives in no small part from its endorsement of female agency against the cliché of women eternally suspended between male violence and male protection. In short, Kiddo’s revenge is cool because it represents an act of defiance and an affirmation of female agency. Far from a mad woman whose affects have spun out of control, Kiddo is a rational actor who kills her enemies according to a self-devised list, methodically checking off each successful kill. The films’ first chapter shows her coming after Vernita Green, a former partner in arms who now lives as a mother and wife of a doctor in suburbia. Green was one of the killers responsible for the massacre at Kiddo’s wedding rehearsal. Analyzing the violent encounter between Kiddo and Green, Claire Henry argues that this first chapter establishes the former as “a masculine heroine” in contrast to the latter who has become a suburban mother. 28 Kill Bill can be read as a revengeaction drama that narrates the heroine’s development from a victimized woman to a self-determined, female agent. In contrast, Henry describes Tarantino’s movie series in other terms, claiming that Kiddo “metamorphoses from a warrior to a mother.” She claims that whereas the main protagonists in rape-revenge movies frequently change from “mothers to aggressors,” as Jacinda Read has argued, the heroine of Kill Bill “undergoe[s]the reverse transformation,” turning from “aggressor to mother.” 29 However, Kiddo’s metamorphosis is not quite as straightforward as Henry would have it and, as I will argue in the last section of this article, the film series ultimately main-

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tains ambivalent in its characterization of the female avenger, oscillating between a reactionary interpretation of motherhood and an affirmation of female agency and independence. PERFORMING COOLNESS: STRATEGIC JUXTAPOSITIONS I have argued initially that Kill Bill presents Kiddo’s coolness as a strategic performance rather than an unaffected interiority. The films create this impression by alternating between depictions in which the heroine appears cool-headed, in control of herself and fearless in the face of her enemy, and showing her in moments of deep despair, where she is entirely lost. By repeatedly juxtaposing such contrasting images of the heroine, Tarantino’s films highlight the disparity between her interior condition and her outward demeanor. On a psychological level, Kill Bill presents coolness as an effective strategy and weapon of choice that function as a gendered form of selfdefense. Kiddo’s defiant statement that it is “mercy, compassion and forgiveness” that she lacks and “not rationality” exemplifies her deliberate efforts to promote an image of cold-bloodedness and impassibility. This carefully constructed image dramatically contrasts with the first impression that the audience gets of her; the film begins with a scene in which a badly beaten Kiddo in her wedding dress lies on the ground of a chapel crying in terror. Reduced to the role of a beggar, the pregnant bride tries in vain to stop her former lover and the father of her unborn child from putting a bullet in her head. The scene concisely introduces Kiddo as the quintessential female victim. Visually dramatizing her destitute and powerless situation, the camera angle shows the faces of her would-be killers hovering over the bride as they are about to finish their murderous mission. The heroine’s pointedly disaffected behavior in later confrontations with her attackers is an attempt to negate the emotional wounds they have inflicted on her. By appearing coolly in charge of herself and her retributive acts, Kiddo also carries out a belated counteroffensive, both against her external enemies and the haunting memory of herself defenselessly exposed. As a result of the assault in the chapel Kiddo falls into a four-year-long coma. Recounting this period of her life and her sudden awakening, Tarantino’s film veers far from the tale of sleeping beauty, replacing the figure of the noble savior with that of a ruthless violator. Instead of being woken by the kiss of a prince, the heroine finds that during her coma numerous men, including the nurse in charge of her care, have sexually abused her. This episode, perhaps most paradigmatically, shows how the film stages the heroine’s transformation from a victim to an avenger. In addition, the hospital scenes also clearly mark her composed and dispassionate demeanor as a mask that hides both her vulnerability and actual affectedness. Illustrating

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that Kiddo is far from the thick-skinned self she presents to others, the scene offers an extreme close up of a mosquito injecting its stinger into her skin. She bolts upright in response woken from her coma by the slight sting of an insect. She hyperventilates and sobs spasmodically as the memory of what brought her to this hospital assails her in a series of flashback cuts. This formal technique illustrates the resurgence of traumatic memory by showing Bill’s bullet zooming toward her face again. Discovering the scar on her belly, Kiddo instantly remembers that she was pregnant before the attack. Contrary to her cool façade and her rational comportment, Kiddo can neither dissociate herself from the (disruptive) force of affect, nor refute that she is as vulnerable and exposed to physical harm as any other mortal. Although this scene as well as Kill Bill I’s opening-shot onto her bludgeoned face are both very short, they are pivotal in understanding what constitutes the allure of this particular female assassin. Both scenes effectively shatter the heroine’s smooth and impassable exterior by showing her overwhelmed and allowing us to see her submerged by the very feelings that she denies being capable of. When she reemerges as an avenger from the traumatic low point of her life, she has recovered the coolness that momentarily gave way to her grief over losing her child. But rather than weakening her image as a cool heroine, the temporary loss of control only enhances her coolness. Knowing that Kiddo’s seemingly effortless tranquility is in fact achieved only through enormous self-discipline heightens the spectators’ respect for the heroine. We realize that beneath the calm surface that she presents to her enemies she feels bereaved and anguished, and that it is an excess of affect, rather than the lack of it that informs and inflects her vengeance spree. On the one hand, she follows the American vigilante tradition by taking justice into her own hands, instead of leaving it to the law. On the other hand, her vindictive desire bespeaks the need to reclaim a form of agency that was taken from her in the moment where she turned from a perpetrator into a victim. Tarantino’s films argue that in order to overcome the trauma of being victimized, we must ourselves turn into perpetrators. The blood that Kiddo spills is the ink with which she overwrites the darkest chapter of her life; she cannot rest until all those who have wronged her are dead. The events shortly after Kiddo wakes from her coma show again how the film amplifies Kiddo’s cool heroism by juxtaposing images of her in deep despair with her perfect self-control. Shaking with grief after waking from her coma, she has to get a grip on her anguish quickly when she hears someone approaching her room. Wary of what is to come, she feigns being in a coma again. A male nurse enters the room with a bulky and sleazy man in tow. Over the body of a seemingly comatose patient, Buck, the nurse, prostitutes her for $75 and, as becomes clear from the instructions that he gives to his customer, this is not the first time that he sells her body. What is more, his detailed rape manual suggests that he himself has taken advantage of Kiddo’s

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helpless state. After Buck has left, the customer tries to mount Kiddo, but before he can proceed she bites off his lower lip, throws him off and kills him. Lying on the ground next to the dead man, she finds that the years of being in a coma have left her unable to control her leg muscles. Before she can decide what to do, Buck returns to tell the customer that his time is up. When he enters the room, Kiddo, who huddles in a corner, slashes his heels with a scalpel that fell to the ground in the previous struggle, causing him to fall over. Now on eye-level with his former victim, he is at her mercy. Looking at his nametag, which reads Buck, she recalls his voice saying the very words that she now repeats to him. “Your name is Buck, right? And you are here to fuck, right?” Before he can respond, she kills him. As if nothing has happened, she puts on his gaudy gold-rimmed sunglasses and retrieves from his pocket a car key that says “Pussy Wagon.” In a few moments she has turned the tables, changing from a rape victim into a killing machine. The appropriation of her tormentor’s possessions symbolically underscores her metamorphosis into a perpetrator of her own right. The yellow pick-up truck with “Pussy Wagon” emblazoned across its rear that previously epitomized Buck’s sexism and misogyny undergoes a semantic transformation of its own, turning from an oppressive into a subversive sign, a veritable pussy riot. MIRROR STAGES: THE METAMORPHOSIS OF BEATRIX KIDDO AND O-REN ISHII O-Ren Ishii’s origin story mirrors Kiddo’s; a former victim turns into a coldblooded killer. As a member of the gang who tried to murder Kiddo, O-Ren Ishii features first on the heroine’s death list. The film introduces the viewers to O-Ren Ishii by way of a retrospective on the traumatic nadir of her childhood. Crucially, Kill Bill switches genres to Anime here. Again, we see a helpless female lying on the ground, only this time it is a child cowering under the bed of her parents and not a pregnant woman on a chapel floor. From her hiding place, the then nine-year-old O-Ren Ishii witnesses how the Yakuza boss, a Japanese Mafioso, kills her father first and then stabs her mother on the very bed under which Ishii lies. The gruesome murder of her parents is shown from O-Ren Ishii’s perspective trembling underneath the bed. After her father falls dead on the ground, the vantage point switches to that of the Yakuza boss. His face transforms into laughing grimace as he pushes O-Ren Ishii’s mother onto the bed, where she assumes a fetal position. The Yakuza boss raises his sword, a close-up shows his monstrously distorted face and we hear the exaggerated sound effects of a blade cutting through the air and then through flesh. The blade comes down right next to O-ren Ishii, cringing in her hiding place, while the mattress above her turns red, with her mother’s blood; it drips on her face, a gruesome baptism that

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charges her with the task of avenging her parents and introduces her to the community of assassins. Through the Anime excursion into O-Ren Ishii’s childhood, Kill Bill doubles nay triples the story of female victimization, creating a thick layering of the same tale over and over again of women and girls who fall prey to male violence. First, Kiddo is shot by her ex-lover and believes to have lost her daughter in turn; second, O-Ren-Ishii is traumatized by the Yakuza’s brutal murder of her family; and thirdly, a sadistic criminal stabs her mother to death. O-Ren Ishii’s story mirrors Kiddo’s own metamorphosis from a “feminine victim” to a “feminist avenger,” to borrow Read’s terminology. The Anime sequence illustrating O-Ren Ishii’s metamorphosis similarly suggests retributive violence as a therapeutic means for overcoming trauma. Revenge, in Kill Bill, is the rite of passage through which a new and defiant type of woman is born. O-Ren Ishii purges herself of her painful memories by killing the Yakuza boss. Ignorant of her history, the boss, a known pedophile, brings the little girl into his bedroom, where, as soon as she sits on top of him, she drives a sword into his chest. Resorting to the typically drastic visual language of Anime, this act ends in a literal rain of blood. The blood of the Yakuza boss drenches the wall behind the girl; strikingly, her contours cast a pure white silhouette offering a stark contrast that illustrates the cleansing effect of her deed. Sitting on the dead Yakuza boss, O-Ren Ishii tilts her head back, her facial expression leaving no doubt that she has attained the satisfaction she sought. A final scene of the Anime section shows O-Ren Ishii as a young woman wearing a bright red cat suit overlooking Tokyo from the roof of a high-rise, while a voice-over informs us that she has become one of the world’s top female assassins. She has literally risen above the position of a little girl trapped under a bed, witnessing the murder of family. This retrospective depiction of another female assassin’s genesis establishes violence as a liberating catalyst and revenge as the bloody quill that overwrites past traumatic injuries. That it does so through the hyperbolic violence of Anime amounts to more then a shift in genre. The excessively brutal visuals and sound effects of this Anime excursion render violence an aesthetic rather then disturbing experience for the viewers. When the blood spouting out of the Yakuza boss’s chest turns him into a living fountainhead coloring everything red the murder scene becomes a cool spectacle rather than an unsettling event. Aesthetic alienation strategies like these operate throughout the movie. Crucially, the introductory shot of Kiddo’s bludgeoned face is in black-and-white, thereby calling attention to the artificiality of the moment and producing an effect of alienation that allows us to coolly look on. The detached and exaggerated aesthetics of the movie thereby purposefully frame violence not as horrifying but as cool entertainment.

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Both O-Ren Ishii and Kiddo painstakingly cultivate the image of being inviolable and impervious, as if the mere performance of these features would actually make the agents invincible. In response to the traumatic turning points of their past, both protagonists have trained themselves to show no weakness, as if their present strength could undo the memory of past powerlessness. Ironically, however, in acting out the role of the calculating and merciless avengers, both women adopt the traits that they loathe in the men who have violated them and their families. Notwithstanding this problematic adaption, Tarantino’s films frame the mercilessness of these women as poetic justice. Kiddo’s retaliation particularly is shown as a justified response to the suffering inflicted on her. In the figure of O-Ren Ishii, adopting the perpetrator’s attributes is more problematic: her blood thirst is not quenched by the death of her parents. Instead, she proceeds to become him and, as the new Yakuza boss, now becomes the city’s scourge. Despite the differences in their reaction to trauma, both Kiddo and O-Ren Ishii undergo analogous transformations, varying in degree and not in kind; both women turn from the violated into violators. In addition to the mirroring of these characters, Kill Bill alludes to a third female avenger, a figure from a Japanese film after whom O-Ren Ishii is modeled and who experiences the same conversion. Through the doubling and tripling of corresponding stories, Tarantino’s films draft a psychogram of the female retaliator and her prototypical inception. JAPANESE-AMERICAN ENTANGLEMENTS: LADY SNOWBLOOD’S SHOW DOWN Beatrix Kiddo and O-Ren Ishii meet again as deadly foes in chapter four. But before challenging O-Ren Ishii to a duel, Kiddo travels to Okinawa to obtain a sword from the legendary sword-maker Hattori Hanzo. Entrusting her with a prime blade, he reminds Kiddo of what constitutes proper samurai behavior, telling her: “For those regarded as warriors, when engaged in combat, the vanquishing of thine enemy can be the warrior’s only concern. Suppress all human emotion and compassion.” Hattori Hanzo’s advice is in accordance with Kiddo’s deliberate masking of all affects in front of the enemy, but it is also a reference to bushido, the samurai’s ethical code that is said to have regulated their behavior in feudal Japan. Based largely on the teachings of Chinese Confucianism, this code required each samurai “to attain a highdegree of self-control, learning not to display the slightest emotion, whether it be joy, fear of sorrow.” 30 If this sounds like an unmanageable task, it is important to note that the historical samurais in feudal Japan did not strictly adhere to this code. In fact, Harold Bolitho shows that the idealization of the samurai as the embodiment of discipline, respectability, loyalty, and fearless-

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ness must be read as a deliberate production of a time long past his actual heyday. In the peaceful years of the Tokugawa period (1608–1868), samurais had largely lost their practical value for Japanese society and it is no coincidence that they attempted to re-affirm their significance in an era where it was in decline; the public needed reminding why they should sustain warriors in a time without war. 31 With his book Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, himself a retired samurai who never went to war, in many ways authored the mythical samurai that lives on not only in the Japanese, but also in Western cultural imaginaries. In his world famous book, Tsunetomo recasts the samurai as an ideal, rather than a historical figure. The pop-cultural allusions to, and reiterations of, this myth—such as in the Kill Bill series –show that it is in the emphasis on self-mastery and the masking of emotions that the American notion of coolness and the Japanese bushido code overlap. 32 With her new Hattori Hanzo blade, Kiddo travels to Tokyo to kill O-Ren Ishii. Armed with a superior samurai sword, Kiddo can confidently finish her task. The film foreshadows her imminent victory by juxtaposing scenes of her plane descending into Tokyo during a blood red sunset, while on the ground below her, we see O-Ren Ishii traveling in a black limousine accompanied by her black suited motorcycle gang. It is in this final chapter that Kiddo dons the yellow motorcycle suit, a reference to Bruce Lee in the Game of Death. Like the Chinese-American action star that she is modeled after, Kiddo also rides a yellow motorcycle matching the color of her leather suit. The armed and fashionable heroine tracks down O-Ren Ishii in a Tokyo nightclub, the interior of which pays visual homage to the multi-leveled Pagoda where Bruce Lee fights his most spectacular battle in Game of Death. Taking hostage one of O-Ren Ishii’s companions, Kiddo throws down the gauntlet by crying out: “O-Ren Ishii! Shoubu wa mada tsuicha inai yo!” (“ORen Ishii, you and I have unfinished business!”). The challenged Yakuza boss steps out from a private room on the second floor where she and other Yakuza gangsters had been amusing themselves by ridiculing the terrified patrons. Citing a filmic technique frequently used in Sergio Leone’s Italian-Westerns as well as in Chinese and Japanese action cinema, the camera juxtaposes extreme close-ups of Kiddo’s and O-Ren Ishii’s eyes as the two women face each other, thereby augmenting the intensity of confrontation. In an interesting twist, this ocular duel is interrupted by a flash-forward to chapter six (Kill Bill II), which gives us an extended version of the “Two Pines Massacre,” elaborating the initial scene in which Kiddo is gunned down during her wedding rehearsal. In the intercepted scenes, we see Kiddo lying on the ground with a bullet in her head and the assassin squad, including O-Ren Ishii, looks down on her. The showdown between O-Ren Ishii and Kiddo begins with a similar camera perspective; O-Ren Ishii again looks down at

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the heroine, this time from the top of the stairs, but now the roles are reversed. Instead of being the helpless victim, Kiddo now resurfaces as a cutthroat assassin who has come to finish her job. Unlike Bill’s cowardly gang, however, she abstains from simply shooting O-Ren Ishii in the back and instead challenges her to a duel, thereby proving to be a true samurai. As Gereon Blaseio and Claudia Liebrand point out, Lady Snowblood (1973) is another important intertextual reference on the theme of female revenge. 33 The film’s main protagonist, Yuki Kashmia, is a sword fighting female avenger. Apart from the plot, Kill Bill and Lady Snowblood overlap formally as well: both arranged in non-chronological chapters that routinely employ retrospectives and flash-forwards. As Blaseio and Liebrand show, the parallels between the Japanese and American film do not stop there. Thus, it is not only Tarantino’s main protagonist who, like Kashima, seeks vengeance, but as we have seen in the Anime explication of O-Ren Ishii’s childhood, the Yakuza boss herself has previously taken on the role of a female avenger as well. Further echoing this classic Japanese revenge film, Kiddo has flashbacks of the traumatic event from which her retaliatory desire stems, just like Kashima, who is haunted by images of her mother getting raped. As in Kiddo’s case, these images resurface in the moment she confronts her enemy. In Kill Bill, O-Ren Ishii cowardly seeks to avoid a direct encounter with the heroine. Instead, she sends her henchmen—black clad sword fighters wearing black masks—to finish her opponent. They surround Kiddo in a scene that closely resembles an encounter in Bruce Lee’s famous Fists of Fury (1972), in which he faces a host of enemies, far outnumbering him. Through a very similar set-up, Kill Bill stages Kiddo as a super-heroine who defeats an endless number of antagonists solely through her superior skills. The battle scene between Kiddo and O-Ren Ishii’s henchmen quotes exaggerated sound effects that are typical for classic Hong Kong action cinema. We hear swords cutting through the air, piercing through flesh, and even the air yielding to the fighters’ acrobatic moves becomes audible. Like the Japanese film genre jidai-geki, sword fighting movies that were mainly set in the Tokugawa era, the final battle between Kiddo, O-Ren Ishii, and her accomplices also indulges in graphic and grotesque bloodletting. 34 The bodies that the heroine dismembers, splits and spears with her katana sword spout blood like veritable water fountains. The hyperbolic visual language of the battle scenes frames violence as spectacular entertainment, with the effect that the audience awaits the next gory detail instead of shuddering in disgust. Hyperbole thus functions as a filmic strategy that seeks to depict violence in deliberately flashy tones, allowing the audience to be entertained yet cool in the face of this gruesome bloodbath. After Kiddo has defeated every single gang member that her real target has used as human shields, the two of them step out into a wintery garden. O-Ren Ishii enters into the duel wearing a white

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Kimono, another homage to the heroine of Lady Snowblood. In a highly choreographed duel that resembles a dance more than a battle, Kiddo kills and scalps the Yakuza boss in the icy landscape of a nocturnal Japanese garden. In the end, O-Ren Ishii turns into a literal Lady Snowblood when she sinks to the ground and colors the snow red with her blood. 35 III THE TASK OF DECIPHERING: INTERTEXTUAL TRAILS AND COOL INSIDERS I have argued that Kiddo’s violence becomes cool because it is staged as a triumph of self-control and a justified act of vigilantism. As I have shown, the depiction of the heroine’s transformation from a victim to an avenger is crucial for achieving this impression. Only by strategically enlisting the audience's sympathy for the heroine in moments of deep despair do her bloodbaths become legible as cool vengeance rather than cold brutality. The Kill Bill series also produces coolness through aesthetic strategies and techniques, some of which I have already analyzed in detail. Using select scenes, I have shown that hyperbolic visual and sound effects help reframe violence as entertaining spectacle rather than appalling slaughter. Through an analysis of Kill Bill’s Anime section, I have also argued that the cut to another genre, as well as implicit references to other genres such as Westerns and Hong-Kong action films, further produce an alienated and highly stylized representation of violence. These formal techniques result in a purposefully artificial representation of carnage that constantly tries to outdo itself, turning what would otherwise be unwatchable into a grotesque joke. This strategic effect of aesthetic alienation allows the audience to keep their cool while watching the goriest scenes. Kill Bill’s dense network of intertextual references to iconic movies and TV serials from America, China, Japan, and Europe further contributes to the film’s iconic and cosmopolitan coolness. More than simply paying homage to and summoning the coolness of the referred material, Tarantino’s films also invoke and address a group of cool insiders, thereby passing the torch of coolness to the fans. This community of insiders distinguishes itself from the uninitiated viewers who cannot pierce through the thick layers of referentiality and thus remain on the surface of the film’s aesthetic universe. In contrast, the cool insiders are adept at deciphering the network of filmic, visual, and audio references and allusions. Undoubtedly, Tarantino’s complex referential code is designed in such a way that it can only be cracked by the most devoted of fans, who share the director’s enthusiasm for Japanese and Chinese martial arts films and American and Italian Westerns. The invo-

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cation of an insider group points to another essential characteristic of coolness that the director’s films exploit with increasing regularity; in order to be cool, one must be exclusive and distinguishable from an uncool crowd who in turn forever wishes to become part of the in-group. To be cool, one must be a privy insider. What is more, the cool crowd paradoxically always stylizes itself as outsiders, as not belonging to the vulgar and uncool majority. For this purposeful marginalization, aesthetic codes are an excellent means, an insight that is crucial to understanding the serially manufactured cool aura of Tarantino’s postmodern spectacles. In the following, I discuss some of the most significant intertextual references that pertain to the article’s focus on cool female revenge. Blaseio and Liebrand have deciphered most of these cross-cultural references accurately. 36 They show that Kill Bill is indebted to the productions of Hong Kong’s Shaw studio and its competitor Golden Harvest. A year after Bruce Lee’s death, the latter studio released the blockbuster Game of Death, a film edited from footage that was mainly shot in 1972. As I have previously pointed out, Bruce Lee wears a yellow jumpsuit to which Beatrix Kiddo’s equally yellow suit pays homage. In Game of Death, Bruce Lee famously fights and defeats the seven feet tall black actor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, an American basketball player who towered over him. The stark difference in size between the two proved that physical size could be trumped by martial arts skills, showing Americans “that Asian people could kick some ass.” 37 Vijay Prashad notes that “[t]o the casual observer, the world of martial or corporeal arts appears entirely masculine, a space with no room for women within it.” 38 Bruce Lee himself perpetuated the machismo of the martial arts industry by publicly slamming female fighters, stating that “[t]hey are all right, but they are no match for the men who are physiologically stronger, except for a few vulnerable points.” 39 Tarantino’s tribute to Bruce Lee through Beatrix Kiddo’s yellow suit must thus be taken with a grain of salt: Kiddo’s attire amounts to more than a superficial allusion to, and reverence of, the world-famous martial artist. It is also an ironic and posthumous rebuttal to Bruce Lee’s condescension of female martial artists. By showcasing a fierce female assassin, Kill Bill offers an imaginary rebuttal embodied in Kiddo’s character who more than matches her attackers, regardless of their gender. Kiddo thus avenges herself, but she also enacts poetic justice for the underestimated female fighters and, in a further step, becomes a role model for fighting back for other victimized women. The fact that women warriors of color, Vernita Green and O-Ren Ishii, are among her victims both mitigates and complicates this reading by pointing to the internal battlefields of feminism, on which the liberation of white women is carried out at the cost of women of color all too frequently. Aside from Hong Kong cinema’s martial arts films and the Japanese Lady Snowblood, Kill Bill draws heavily on the genre of the Italian-Western, par-

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ticularly musically and aesthetically. Sergio Leone famously founded the genre in the 1950s. Blaseio and Liebrand argue that revenge plays a crucial role particularly in his dollar trilogy. Tarantino borrows from Leone’s idiosyncratic style, visually quoting his extreme close-ups, often on the faces of his heroes, and alternating them with extended long shots that lend the Italian-Western its idiosyncratic epic character. Beyond these visual references, the soundtrack of Kill Bill also invokes the Italian-Western by including tracks from Ennio Morricone, whose film music became a signature for the most famous Italian-Westerns such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. This dense network of transcultural and transnational references shows Kill Bill’s indebtedness to postmodern aesthetics. With its playful pastiche of quotes, Tarantino’s films deliberately blur the line between original and copy, as evinced in the epigraph to the Kill Bill films: “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” Tarantino identifies the quote as an “old Klingon proverb,” referring to the cult TV series Star Trek and thereby deliberately laying a wrong trail, as Blaseio and Liebrand show. 40 The reference to Star Trek obscures the phrase’s literary origins in the French novel Mathilde written by Joseph Eugène Sue that was translated into English in 1846. Regardless of the quote’s origins, however, it succeeds in dialing down the affective temperature of the film by countering the common perception of revenge as a hot affect that indicates an escalation of affect, rather than a premeditated and strategic channeling of affect. IV THE BLUE STRIP: THE TAMING OF A WARRIOR WOMAN After she has killed the gang of assassins that assaulted her, Kiddo proceeds to the last name on her death list, Bill. When she enters his house, she sees Bill enacting a shoot-out with a little girl, whom she instantly recognizes as the daughter she believed dead. The girl’s name, BB, identifies her as the perfect fusion of Bill and Beatrix. Both parents maintain a façade of civility until the mother has brought her daughter to bed. Left alone with Kiddo, Bill tells her that before this “bloody tale of revenge” is over he wants to know what she truly thinks of him. Inadvertently admitting that he can only get what he wants through unfair means, he drugs Kiddo in order to break through her impenetrable cool. Bill identifies the drug as a “truth serum” and asks her if she even believed in her alternative life plan—to marry a small town record shop owner and settle down. Did she, he asks mockingly, really think that she could have turned from a “killer bee” into a “worker bee?” Already affected by the drug, Kiddo confesses that she herself doubted whether she could really shed her former identity simply by performing the

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idyll of a nuclear family. But at least, she cries, she would have been able to keep her daughter. When Bill asks her why she left him in the first place, she recounts the story of her last mission as a contract killer. Her tale comes to life through the interposition of flashbacks. We learn that on her last assignment for Bill, she was to kill a Japanese assassin. Already in Japan, and shortly before executing her order, Kiddo takes a pregnancy test because she had been experiencing telltale signs. Just as the test confirms her pregnancy with a blue strip, the assassin that she is supposed to kill enters her hotel room. A surprised Kiddo begs her not to shoot her, pleading, “I am the deadliest woman, but now I just want my baby to live.” Her contempt for death and her fearlessness seem to find an abrupt end in the moment where she carries another life in herself. Motherhood, the film suggests, is irreconcilable with Kiddo’s role as a cool, female assassin. Instead of her usual death-defiance, she now feels protective of her unborn child, an affect that requires her to adopt a different degree of self-care. To Bill, she describes the moment where she learns of her pregnancy as an affective paradigm shift: Before that strip turned blue, I was a woman, I was your woman, before that strip turned blue, I was a killer, I killed for you, before that strip turned blue I would have jumped a motorcycle onto a speeding train for you, but once that strip turned blue I could no longer do any of these things, because I was going to be a mother, do you understand that?

Looking at the test result, Kiddo loses her cool, or at least this is what she wants Bill to believe. However, Kiddo’s claim that her pregnancy changed her from a selfish assassin into a selfless mother-to-be suggests a clear-cut dichotomy that her previous dependence on Bill disproves. That is, before the strip turned blue, she did everything for Bill, and after the affirmative test she was ready to give up her life for her unborn child. In order to provide her baby with a traditional family life, she was even ready to commit to a smalltown businessman, and exchange her identity as an assassin for the mundane and uneventful life of a mother and wife. Despite the film’s transformative promise—evident in Kiddo’s metamorphosis from a powerless victim to a self-determined avenger—Kill Bill maintains a reactionary core: as a woman, Kiddo exists primarily for others. Before her pregnancy she subordinates her life to her lover and mentor Bill. After the blue strip, she surrenders her previous identity in order to devote her life entirely to her child. Kill Bill II thus undercuts much of the films’ feminist agency in the final chapter. However, a residue of ambiguity remains with respect to the softening effect of motherhood and the revoking of her former lifestyle as a globetrotting contract killer. Ironically, it is Bill who objects to Kiddo’s account of motherhood’s taming effect, insisting that a “killer bee” can never become a “worker bee,” thereby arguing that she is

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and remains a natural born killer. After all, in choosing vengeance over forgiveness, Kiddo did not simply seek redress for her own injuries. Rather, it was the loss of her child that turned this bereaved mother into a particularly ferocious avenger. Significantly, the involvement of maternal affects did not lessen Kiddo’s taste for blood; in fact, it only amplified her desire for vengeance. REACTIONARY DETERMINISM: ON REUNITING THE LIONESS WITH HER CUB The final showdown occurs in Bill’s garden. Unlike the battlefield used by O-Ren Ishii and Kiddo—the setting of Kill Bill I’s great finale—Kill Bill II’s closing scene unfolds in an undetermined location out West, on a hot summer night. This setting implicitly refers to the classic Western showdown and completes the films’ journey from the East to the West, evoking another kind of manifest destiny. Bill and Beatrix sit across from each other at the table. With one hand on her Samurai sword, the heroine announces, “We have unfinished business,” an exclamation that once more emphasizes that, for her, revenge is a rationally guided process, much like a business transaction and she has determined that it is time for Bill to pay up. The former lovers, now adversaries, pull their swords and begin battle. Within a matter of seconds, both have lost their weapons, Kiddo’s sword is destroyed, while Bill’s gets stuck in the heroine’s sheath, sexually punning on their previous relation as lovers and symbolically arresting Bill’s manhood. In a flash, Kiddo performs a martial art’s move that requires no weapons: she pounds his chest with her fingertips, deploying a technique that Bill, with blood oozing from his nose and mouth, identifies as the five-finger-palm-exploding-heart-technique. With her last and most important enemy out of the way, Kiddo can now return to her daughter BB. Kill Bill II’s final scenes dissolve a separation that the heroine has otherwise deliberately and conscientiously upheld: whereas she calmly executed her vengeance and maintained her composure—particularly vis-à-vis the persons on her death list—her coolness finally shows cracks when she kills Bill. Tears stream down her face after she has dealt him the deadly blow. As Bill collapses, the camera zooms into an extreme closeup of her face moist with tears, but the grief she feels over killing Bill, her former lover and the father of her child mingles with a defiant and selfcontented expression. She walks into the house, picks up BB and steps out of the door. Outside, a vintage convertible drives up, she gets into the passenger seat with her daughter in her arms and the car drives away; we never see the driver. The next shot shows her and BB in a small motel room. BB sits on the bed, still in her nightgown and giggles as she watches a cartoon. Meanwhile,

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Kiddo lies on the bathroom floor, crying and laughing alternately, while hugging a stuffed lion. Almost inaudibly, she cries “Thank you” and leaves the bathroom to join her daughter on the bed, watching TV. Switching from a full shot of mother and daughter sharing an all-American moment together, watching a cartoon in which a bird hammers an old man’s head, the camera swings to their faces. The last shot shows the two of them looking at us, returning the gaze as if challenging us to interpret the scene. The credits read: “The lioness has rejoined her cub, all is right in the jungle.” By comparing Kiddo to a lioness, Kill Bill II establishes an analogy with far-reaching consequences, both for the film’s framing of violence and its understanding of gender relations. To liken her to a predator exonerates her murderous behavior as part and parcel of her nature (an instinctual reaction, rather than a rational decision) and suggests a larger, natural order that has significant implications for the films’ projection of gender roles. Kill Bill argues through these animal comparisons that male and female behavior is not so much a cultural construct as it is naturally determined; as fierce as the lioness may be, she always remains subordinate to an alpha male. She is not a lone hunter, but a pack animal that acts in concert with other lionesses, much like the group of female assassins that surrounded Bill. Finally, the fact that an unseen driver takes her away from Bill’s house hints at the emergence of another alpha male, an ominous figure that remains equally elusive as Bill. The films’ repeated allusions to lions and its final reference to the lioness and her cub argue that there is in fact a natural and normative order in the first place, and suggests the lioness’ fierceness derives primarily from her maternal instincts rather than, for example, her sexual drives or a competition for resources, coordinates that determine the male lion’s behavior. The films’ frequent references to the animal kingdom, from the “killer-bee” to the “lioness” contradict Kiddo’s own account of motherhood’s taming effect, while simultaneously reinstating a naturalized, rather than culturally informed, conception of the mother and woman. Tarantino’s Kill Bill series upholds this ambiguity with respect to the compatibility of the assassin’s murderous life and the mundane, reactionary politics of motherhood that postulates the primacy of domestic and maternal drives. However, while Kill Bill plays with allusions to the animal kingdom, it also constantly subverts them ironically: the fact that Kiddo has replaced Bill—the alpha male of the pack—with a stuffed lion that she cradles in her arms as she cries on the bathroom floor indicates that the analogy to nature is false and that the omnipotent alpha male is more of a fiction than a reality. NOTES 1. Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill—Volume I & II (2003 and 2004).

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2. Rüdiger Zill, “Coole Typen: Eine Familienaufstellung,” in Coolness: Zur Ästhetik einer kulturellen Strategie und Attitüde, eds. Annette Geiger, Gerald Schröder and Änne Söll (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2010): 39–52, 40. 3. Zill, 52. (My translation). 4. Ibid. 48. 5. Ibid. 42. 6. Ibid. 43. 7. For a detailed discussion of how the philosophy of Stoicism and contemporary notions of coolness overlap and differ see Catherine Newmark’s contribution to this volume. 8. Ibid. 51. 9. The films’ projection of therapeutic violence is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s conception of violence in a colonial context. Fanon argues that violence is a crucial tool with which the colonized not only rid themselves of their oppressors, but also re-create themselves as new men. Similarly, Tarantino’s Kill Bill also suggests that the heroine renews herself by transforming from a victim to a perpetrator. For an analysis of Fanon’s therapeutic violence see: Gail M. Presbey, “Fanon on the Role of Violence in Liberation,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds. Lewis R. Gordon et al. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996): 284. 10. Zill, 48. 11. For a brief history of vigilantism in the United States that focuses on the concept in the context of alternative justice see: Anne Wolbert Burgess et al., eds., Victimology: Theories and Applications (Sudbury: Jones and Barlett Publishers, 2010). 12. For a discussion of vigilantism in the context of the myth of the frontier see: Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992). For a discussion of vigilantism in 20th century American film and a useful distinction between collective and individual vigilantism as well as the difference between the historical phenomenon of mob violence and cultural iterations of the lone wolf vigilante see: John G. Cawelti, Mystery, Violence and Popular Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). 13. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York: Continuum, 2005), 15. 14. Ibid. 15. 15. Ibid. 16. 16. This article focuses on the fascination with private vengeance, reading it as a response to the monopolization of vengeance through the judicial system. But vengeance is by no means a private American obsession; the popular fascination with and tacit acceptance of vigilantism can also be exploited for political causes. Thus, in response to the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration openly employed a rhetoric of vengeance, thereby legitimizing retaliatory violence as a national response to the hateful deed of individuals, collectively punishing whole nations for the actions of a transnational terror network. Openly revealing his indebtedness to a crude Wild West notion of justice, George W. Bush thus made his intention in respect to Osama bin Laden clear, when he said. “There’s an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, ‘Wanted Dead or Alive.’” Cf. Michael Sherry, “Dead or Alive: American Vengeance Goes Global,” Review of International Studies 31(2005): 245–262. 17. Terry Aladjem, “Liberalism and the Anger of Punishment: The Motivation Vengeance and Myths of Justice Reconsidered,” in The Culture of Vengeance and the Fate of American Justice, chapter 1 (New York: Cambridge University, 2008), 1. 18. Ibid. 1. 19. Ibid. 10. Aladjem argues that the systematic dismissal of grief as a private matter that does not figure in considerations of justice is exemplified in John Stuart Mill’s treaties On Liberty. He writes: “It seems wholly appropriate then, that in Mill’s founding argument of liberal justice, On Liberty, his own enormous grief at the loss of his wife Harriet Taylor—of the ‘great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave’—is sealed off in an epitaph at the beginning of that most rationale treatise” (11–12). Cf. also: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government, edited by H. B. Acton (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1976). 20. Countering Sigmund Freud’s initial understanding of “successful mourning,” Jacques Derrida reframes the task of mourning as unending. He writes: “For this is the law of mourning,

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and the law of the law, always in mourning, that it would have to fail in order to succeed. In order to succeed, it would well have to fail, to fail well.” Cf. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 144. 21. Marguerite Tassi, Women and Revenge in Shakespeare: Gender, Genre and Ethics (Cranbury: Associated University Press, 2010), 17. 22. Ibid. 17. 23. Ibid. 18. 24. Ibid. 19. 25. For an insightful article on the mask of cool in postwar film noir with a specific focus on its function for shifting conceptions of masculinity in times of economic hardship, see Joel Dinerstein’s article in this collection. 26. Jacinda Read, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000). 27. Ibid. 4. 28. Claire Henry, “Maternal Revenge and Redemption in Post-Feminist Rape-Revenge Cinema,” in Best Served Cold: Studies on Revenge, eds. Sheila C. Bibb and Daniel Escandell Montiel (Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2010), 106. 29. Ibid. 107 30. Barry Till, The 47 Ronin, A Story of Samurai Loyalty and Courage (Warwickshire: Pomegranate Communication, 2005), 5. For further information on the Bushido ethos see also: Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Warrior’s Code, ed. Charles Lucas (Burbank: Ohara Publications, 1979); Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, transl. William Scott Wilson (Boston: Shambhala Publication, 2012); Justin F. Stone (Ed.), Bushido: The Way of the Samurai, based on the Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, transl. Minoru Tanaka (Garden City Park: Square One Publishers, 2002). 31. Harold Bolitho, “The Myth of the Samurai,” in Japan’s Impact on the World, eds. Aland Rix and Ross Mouer (Melbourne: Japanese Studies Association of Australia, 1984), 2–8. Focusing on one of the most influential documents in the creation of “the myth of the samurai,” Bolitho shows that its author, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, had enough leisure to indulge in “stream of consciousness monologues” about the role of the Samurai, only because he and the samurais of his time did not see battlefields. In fact, his oeuvre, the Hagakure, was “compiled after almost a hundred years of sustained peace” in Japan (7). Proving that the term bushido does not appear until the 17th century, Bolitho argues that it is “no accident that in an age of peace samurai should have begun to sit down and ponder over their calling,” observing that “as a demoralized, largely penurious class of bureaucrats, they needed more then ever the consolation of an ideal” (6). For a more contemporary cultural history of the samurai see also: Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai Swordsman: Master of War (North Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing, 2008). 32. For American filmic adaptations of the samurai figure see Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2002). Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) should be mentioned as one Japanese film that had enormous influence on the American filmic adaptations of the samurai and generally became popular in the Western world beyond Japan. In this film, Kurosawa tells the story of a masterless samurai, a ronin, who creates a team to aid a village in distress. 33. Blaseio and Liebrand, 21. 34. J. L. Anderson, “Japanese Swordfighters and American Gunslingers,” Cinema Journal Vo. 12, no. 2 (Spring 1973): 1–21. 35. Gereon Blaseio and Claudia Liebrand, “‘Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Cold’: ‘World Cinema’ und Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill,” in Unfinished Business: Quentin Tarantinos “Kill Bill” und die offenen Rechnungen der Kulturwissenschaften, eds. Achim Geisenhanslüke and Christian Steltz (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2006), 13–33. 36. Ibid. 13–33. 37. Van Troi Pang, “To Commemorate My Grandfather,” in Leong, Moving the Image, 44. Prashad footnote 52. 38. Vijay Prashad, “Bruce Lee and the Anti-imperialism of Kung Fu: A Polycultural Adventure,” Positions: East Asia Culture Critique 11 no. 1 (Spring 2003): 51–90, 73. 39. Bruce Lee in Prashad, 73.

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40. Gereon Blaseio, 18.

WORKS CITED Aladjem, Terry K. The Culture of Vengeance and the Fate of American Justice.New York: Cambridge University, 2008. Anderson, J. L. “Japanese Swordfighters and American Gunslingers.” Cinema Journal, Vol. 12, no. 2 (Spring 1973): 1–21. Blaseio, Gereon,and Claudia Liebrand. “‘Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Cold:’ ‘World Cinema’ und Quentin Tarantinos Kill Bill.” In Unfinished Business: Quentin Tarantinos “Kill Bill” und die offenen Rechnungen der Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Achim Geisenhanslüke and Christian Steltz. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2006. 13–33. Bolitho, Harold. “The Myth of the Samurai,” in Japan’s Impact on the World, edited by Aland Rix and Ross Mouer. (Melbourne: Japanese Studies Association of Australia, 1984), 2–8. Burgess, Anne Wolbert et al. (eds.).Victimology: Theories and Applications. Sudbury: Jones and Barlett Publishers, 2010. Cawelti, John G. Mystery, Violence and Popular Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Django Unchained. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. 2012. Hollywood, CA: The Weinstein Company and Columbia Pictures. Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001. Dirty Harry. Directed by Don Siegel. Hollywood, CA: The Malpaso Company and Warner Bros. Pictures. 1971. DVD. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Geisenhanslüke, Achim. “Silly Caucasian Girl Likes to Play with Samurai Swords.” Zur Affektpolitik in Quentin Tarantinos. In Kill Bill. Unfinished Business: Quentin Tarantinos “Kill Bill” und die offenen Rechnungen der Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Achim Geisenhanslüke and Christian Steltz. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2006. 111–132. Hang `em High. Directed by Ted Post. 1968. Leonard Freeman and Mel Goldberg. Production, The Malpaso Company. DVD. Henry, Claire. “MaternalRevenge and Redemption in Post-Feminist Rape-Revenge Cinema.” In Best Served Cold: Studies on Revenge, edited by Sheila C. Bibb and Daniel Escandell Montiel. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2010. 105–114. Kill Bill-Volume I. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. 2003. Hollywood, CA: Miramax Films. DVD. Kill Bill-Volume II. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. 2004. Hollywood, CA: Miramax Films. DVD. Lady Snowblood. (Shurayukihime, original title). Directed by Toshiya Fujita. 1973. Japan, Toho Film (Eiga) Co. Ltd. DVD. Mentges, Gabriele. “Coolness-Zur Karriere eines Begriffs.” In Coolness: Zur Ästhetik einer kulturellen Strategie und Attitüde, edited by Annette Geiger, Gerald Schröder, and Änne Söll. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2010. 7–16. Michaels, Sharon and Phyllis Vernick. In My Daughter’s Name. Directed by Jud Taylor. 1992. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty, in Utilitarinism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government. Edited by H. B. Acton (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1976). Nitobe, Inazo.Bushido: The Warrior’s Code. Edited by Charles Lucas. Burbank: Ohara Publications, 1979. Prashad, Vijay. “Bruce Lee and the Anti-imperialism of Kung Fu: A Polycultural Adventure.” Positions: East Asia Culture Critique 11 no. 1 (Spring 2003): 51–90. Pountain, Dick and David Robins. Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Read, Jacinda. The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.

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Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992. Stone, Justin F., ed. Bushido: The Way of the Samurai. Based on the Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo. Original Translation by Minoru Tanaka. Garden City Park: Square One Publishers, 2002. Tassi, Marguerite. Women and Revenge in Shakespeare: Gender, Genre, and Ethics. Cranbury: Associated University Press, 2010. Till, Barry. The 47 Ronin, A Story of Samurai Loyalty and Courage. Warwickshire: Pomegranate Communication, 2005. The Big Sleep. Directed by Howard Hanks. 1946. Hollywood, CA: Warner Brothers Burbank Studios. DVD. The Game of Death. Directed by Robert Clouse. 1978. Hong Kong: Golden Harvest Company. DVD. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, original title). Directed by Sergio Leone, 1966. Produzioni Europee Associati et al. DVD. Tsunetomo, Yamamoto. Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, transl. William Scott Wilson. Boston: Shambhala Publication, 2012. Turnbull, Stephen. The Samurai Swordsman: Master of War. North Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing, 2008. Zaibert, Leo. “Punishment and Revenge.” Law and Philosophy 25, no. 1 (January 2006): 81–118. Zill, Rüdiger. “Coole Typen: Eine Familienaufstellung. “Coolness: Zur Ästhetik einer kulturellen Strategie und Attitüde, eds. Annette Geiger, Gerald Schröder and Änne Söll. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2010. 18–39.

III

Japanese Cool

Chapter Seven

Is Japan Cool? Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit

I In one sense, the question that the title poses does not seem to be a question at all. National branding since the early 21st century has marketed Japan as “cool,” and the country has happily accepted this slogan, which originated in Douglas McGray’s 2002 article in Foreign Policy entitled, “Japan’s Gross National Cool.” 1 Read as a confirmation of the global attractiveness of Japan’s contemporary popular and lifestyle culture, 'cool' was not only taken up enthusiastically by the Japanese media and the publishing industry at a time when economic and political stagnation in the context of the ‘lost decade(s)’ overshadowed the country’s self-image, but has also been put to use for cultural diplomacy and as an economic factor in the creative contents market. 2 While some readers might associate the “cool” national brand with a rather generalized and stereotyped expression signifying a positive sense of sophistication, fashion, or being up to date, our point of departure in this context is a different one. The English term “cool,” when applied to a person or as a personal attribute and taken in the sense of emotional self-control, functions as a sounding board to explore its potentials as an analytical tool in the case of Japan. What follows here is a sketch of its potential productivity and pitfalls. Our general thrust lies on a theoretical level, namely, to explore “coolness” on the basis of shared theoretical assumptions and conceptions. We are interested in the cultural specifics, which can, however, only be identified from the vantage point of shared assumptions. But first of all, why Japan? Japan or Japanese culture is often associated with strong affect control and has been termed, at home and abroad, as a “cold” or “cool” culture, a society which stresses formal behavior and politeness in interpersonal rela155

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tionships, and provides finely orchestrated rules for maintaining physical and emotional distances. Before discussing the usefulness and applicability of the term to Japan, let us identify some of the cultural phenomena that tend to be associated with this metaphor of temperature, and which invite an investigation into the analytical potentials of this notion. First of all, there is a vast array of texts termed Nihonron or Nihonjinron (literally “theories/discussions about Japan or the Japanese”) dealing with cultural specificities of the Japanese; these texts range from the literary and philosophical to the sociological and historical, among other disciplines. These discourses on Japanicity, most of them authored by Japanese, were first recognized as a kind of genre in the 1970s and persist now, fed by the urge to define a Japanese identity vis-à-vis the world and, most conspicuously, “Western” nations. Whether we look at texts from the Meiji period (1868–1912), or from the nationalist interwar period of the 1930s, or consult the huge amount of popular Nihonjinron literature since the postwar years, the explicit or implicit confrontation with the “West” forms a basic argumentative pattern. Japanese cultural theory may employ pre-modern concepts, but the binary structuring this discourse as well as the pervasiveness of “Western” theories in the general intellectual setup both show the difficulty of filtering out a purportedly genuine, authentic quality of (autochthonous) Japanese culture. Nihonjinron are, willingly or unwillingly, entangled in occidental self-interpretations. We need to keep this observation in mind when examining the images produced through these discourses. In the context of the reception of psychoanalytical theory in Japan, and in the light of Lévi-Strauss’ distinction between “cold” and “hot” cultures, one scholar suggested classifying Japan as a well-tempered, “cool” society, and chose “the cool soul/mind” (“Die kühle Seele”) as the key term in an anthology of paradigmatic Nihonjinron texts. 3 Beyond such collections, we can identify other clues for a “cool” quality in Japan and the bushidō discourse or samurai narrative comes to mind most readily in this context. It was only after the samurai class was abolished in the latter 19th century by the Meiji government that the ideology of bushidō was invented as a national myth. Gerhard Bierwirth, who analyzed the implications of the samurai narrative as a Japanese discourse on individuality, pointed out that it was as early as 1912 that Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935) identified it as “The Invention of a New Religion.” 4 Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933), an outstanding Meiji scholar, educator, and diplomat, wrote his Bushido—The Soul of Japan in 1899 in an attempt to explain to the Western world what he saw as samurai virtues, while generalizing loyalty, politeness, self-control, endurance, and prowess as the virtues of all Japanese. It is this book, published in English in 1900 5 with subsequent translations into Japanese (1908) and many other languages, which deeply influenced Japan’s image at home and abroad to the present age, and remains one of the most powerful Nihonjinron to date.

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The productivity of the samurai narrative on an international scale can be seen in mass cultural productions such as Japanese 6 and Hollywood cinema, whether we think of films directed by and featuring Kitano Takeshi, 7 or Western productions in which the “samurai ethos” represents the pinnacle of “cool” masculinity, such as Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 crime thriller Le Samouraï featuring Alain Delon or Edward Zwick’s 2003 production The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise and Ken Watanabe, 8 to name only the best known examples. 9 Another clue to the qualities of Japanese culture that tend to be associated with “cool” is the observation by—mostly Western—foreigners that the Japanese possess extreme self-control, mask-like facial expressions and suppression of emotion in social contacts and even in situations of existential relevance. Calm composure in face of extreme endangerment, a smile on the face of a person who is in deep sorrow, these manifestations of the Japanese virtue of self-control have led some observers to characterize Japanese culture as marked by codes of cool. In his perceptive Tokyo Tango Uwe Schmitt reflects on the massive amount of travel reports and books on Japan by foreigners, and counts “mask” or “mask-like smile” among the ubiquitous stereotypes and keywords used to describe Japanese culture and society. 10 We will return to the “mask-like smile” later. The unmoved facial expression, whether observed on the cinema or TV screen or in real life, points to different codes of etiquette and behavior that demand enryo (restraint) by not bothering others with one’s emotional difficulties. 11 Most recently, Japanese composure gained much international attention in the context of the triple disaster in Northeastern Japan in March 2011. This attention drew reactions of incomprehension and rejection, as when Japanese were seen in some media and countries as devoid of emotion. 12 On the other hand, a survey by the University of Hong Kong showed that Japan’s ‘likability’ surged from 35 percent to 60 percent in only a few months following the March 11 disasters, due to “the images of Japan's calm and cool reaction to the magnitude 9.0 quake and killer tsunami.” 13 Could what has been described as a characteristic Japanese “stoicism” in this context 14 form an access point to our topic? In reviewing these and other possible approaches, it is obvious that the problem of how to grasp a Japanese “cool” requires attention to phenomena on different levels, in different historical stages and settings, be they cultural rules of etiquette and behavioral norms, or aesthetic concepts, or, in more recent contexts, strategies of distancing oneself, of lifestyle and commodity in the 21st century. Perceptions of Japanese “cool” are, as we have seen, often but not exclusively, based on an outside perspective, as hetero-images. This foreign view meshes uneasily with the fact that there is no single Japanese term to designate the phenomena described here, and reminds us of the necessity to reflect first on the applicability of “cool” in the case of Japan.

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How can the notion possibly be made productive in a contrastive context alongside studies on American cool? II The choice of the English word “cool” as the central notion for our investigations leads to a “natural” imbalance when researching other cultures. We have to keep this simple fact in mind when trying to assess its consequences. One approach—already demonstrated in the introduction—is to look for analogies on the level of cultural phenomena. However, this procedure is apt again to lure us into the trap of Anglocentrism, as it implies an interpretation of “cool” guided by the semantic structuring of the English word. Yet the semantic scope of the term in historical and in contemporary usage, as it is sketched by Ulla Haselstein in her overview of the term’s “long and complex history” in this volume, is considerable and ranges from the ancient Greek typological system of temperament, the Aristotelian idea of controlling affect, and the Renaissance notion of sprezzatura through nineteenth century dandyism as an aesthetic down to twentieth-century, African-American cool. In the majority of these cases, however, “cool” functions as a meta-language, an abstraction encapsulating a semantic kernel signifying emotional detachment and affect control. For an analysis of Japanese “cool,” we refer to this meta-linguistic usage as opposed to the lexeme “cool” in English as the object language. When dealing with a historical stage where we can suspect the more or less direct influence of an American or a globalized version of cool, we will, admittedly, also deal with “cool” as a Japanese loanword from English as an object language, a point to which we will return later. Our general thrust, however, lies in exploring the potentials of this category of inquiry in a meta-linguistic sense. Would it not be wiser, then, to abstain from using the term “cool” in the general Japanese context altogether in order to avoid the risk of mistaking object and meta-language? Michael Kinski, who deals with Japanese norms of behavior and rules of etiquette, suggests that the term’s trendiness overshadows its use as an analytical category and that other notions might as well substitute it. 15 While we have to take this objection seriously, it is also evident that coolness can well function as a heuristic device, including the metaphorical aspect of adjectives of temperature, as Kinski’s own delineations of the rules of conduct within a historical Japanese framework demonstrate. Kinski's productive observations are carefully anchored and developed against the backdrop of European or “Western” ideas of detachment, ataraxia and coolness, as well as an ideal of indifference in East Asian philosophy and its reflections in what he terms “household encyclopedias” and the like in the Edo period (1603–1868). Elena Giannoulis also points to the productivity of

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“coolness” as a heuristic term in her reconstruction and meta-critical discussion of an Edo period aesthetic ideal as it was instrumentalized in earlier twentieth century Japan. 16 At the same time, they also alert us to the fact that aesthetic discourses are always embedded in concrete historical situations and defined by concrete intentions. For instance, the aesthetic ideal of iki during the later Edo period as well as, in its refraction in the twentieth century discourse on cultural identity, the rising self-assertion of the chōnin (“townspeople”) class is as much a condition of iki’s formation as is the globalizing culture of twentieth century Japan for its modern usage. Translating terms in this context can be rather misleading, as it may obscure their complexities. 17 It takes a conscientious effort to strip away the layers of notions and concepts, all the more so in cases of transcultural entanglements, whether with the Asian continent or with the “West.” In the case of the Japanese notion of makoto, habitually translated as sincerity, it has been shown that this translation violates its considerable complexity for the very fact that the notion of sincerity, which had been introduced into Japan in the early modern period from the West, was grafted onto the Japanese word. In this process, makoto lost its earlier semantics as an amalgam of aristocratic and chōnin culture. 18 Whether a similar kind of “capping” (“Überkronung,” Bierwirth’s term) occurred over notions of “cool” in Japan remains to be seen. The Japanese loanword kūru, which seems to have come into general use as late as the 1960s, 19 even though Japanese writers in their fad for foreign language words had used “cool” and “coolness” as referring to temperature as early as the late nineteenth century, 20 does not offer itself to such a sophisticated analysis for the simple reason that it is an imported word with a rather shallow history in Japan. Nevertheless, this does not exclude the possibility that we may detect specifically Japanese uses even with this relatively young loanword. Moreover, translations are always to be treated with the utmost care, as they may obscure original connotations, even in the case when both the original and the translation consist of English lexemes. The translation of a key notion in a Japanese analysis of native fascism in the early 1930s, where the English “cold” in the original Japanese text is translated by “cool,” may serve as a case in point here. First of all, it seems worthwhile registering that Japanese authors appear much less scrupulous in applying the term fascism to the cultural and sociopolitical system in their country from the early 1930s onwards, whereas most Western researchers try to avoid its application to Japan for the obvious fear of generalizing a Western notion. 21 As early as 1932 Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875–1969) diagnosed a specific form of fascism in his country that he termed “cold fascism” (kōrudo fashizumu). 22 Without going into details here, it may be stated that Hasegawa’s “cold fascism” envisions a heavily bureaucratic, non-violent, superficially democratic form based on the logic of capitalism, but without nationalist intoxication. 23 The fact that Hasegawa em-

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ploys this English adjective of temperature to characterize a specifically Japanese—and a possible global future—form of fascism attests to a certain familiarity of his implicit readership with this kind of foreign nomenclature. Perhaps Gavan McCormack’s translation of this Japanese taxonomy as “cool” in his discussion of Hasegawa’s concept reads as an appropriate rendering in English of the original. And yet, there may be connotations to Hasegawa’s specific choice of word that get lost when translating “cold” as “cool.” 24 This brief digression into issues of translation should serve to sensitize us to the complexities involved in dealing with concepts on a metalinguistic and object language level. We also concede that the term “cool” functions primarily as a heuristic tool in the context of looking into Japanese phenomena of affective control and indifference. 25 The complexities of outside versus inside perspective and transcultural entanglements will be highlighted in the next section. III It is time now to tap the rich reservoir of Japanese literature that artistically negotiates codes of behavior, affective control, and transcultural entanglements. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s story “The Handkerchief” (“Hankechi”), written and published in 1916, confronts us with a multi-layered elaboration of the issue, binding together several of the aspects highlighted so far. As an extraordinarily well-read and acute writer and intellectual of his time, Akutagawa (1892–1927) stands for the intensive absorption of and reflection on Western influence and his inherited culture in an attempt to define a Japanese cultural identity, which had occupied the Japanese since early Meiji days. “The Handkerchief,” too, serves as an example of the degree to which its author is familiar with the European culture of the day. There is more to this example, however, as we will see when we take a closer look at the text. 26 “The Handkerchief” opens with a professor of law reading Strindberg’s Dramaturgy, in order to keep up “with the thoughts or sentiments of the students of the time,” even though “with art—and especially drama—he had no natural affinity.” 27 He is distracted from Strindberg by the Gifu lantern hanging on the veranda, which he had bought together with his American wife. So the lamp, a typical souvenir for foreign travelers, “did not so much represent the Professor’s taste but rather was an expression of his wife’s enjoyment of the things of Japan . . . ” (141). Whenever he put down his book, the Professor thought of his wife and the Gifu lantern and Japanese civilization as represented by that paper lantern. According to his convictions, in the past fifty years Japanese civilization had shown remarkable progress on the material side; but spiritually, it had not

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made any appreciable progress that was readily discernible; no, rather, in one sense there had been a decline. Therefore, it was the urgent duty of the thinkers of the day to consider what had best be done to remedy this decline. It was the Professor’s contention that there was no other recourse but to depend upon the Japanese heritage of bushido. Bushido ought never to be looked upon as simply the moral code of a narrow-minded insular people. On the contrary, its essence might well be identified with the Christian spirit of the peoples of Europe and America. If this bushido could be revived in the existing current of Japanese thought, it would not only revitalize the spirit of Japanese civilization, but it would be advantageous in facilitating mutual understanding between the European-American peoples and the Japanese people. Or, it would be a means of advancing international peace. (142/39)

When reading this paragraph, to the knowledgeable reader it will have become clear at last that the Professor is a parody on Nitobe, the author of Bushido. The Professor in the story returns to reading Strindberg and comes across a passage where Strindberg complains about a whim of actors. Once an actor was successful with a certain mode of expression, he was prone to employ this device again and again, without considering its suitability to the occasion. “And this is what may be termed a mannerism.” (143/39) The Professor does not quite understand. Then, the mother of one of his students pays him an unexpected visit. She informs him that her son has died. The Professor only vaguely remembers the student, “who had written essays on Ibsen and Strindberg” (145/40) and feels somewhat uneasy. In his irritation he busies himself with his teacup and picks up his fan. In this woman’s attitude, in her behavior, there was nothing in the least to suggest that she was talking of the death of her own son. There were no tears in her eyes. She spoke in a normal voice. And, moreover, there was a fleeting smile at the corners of her mouth. Anyone, without hearing her conversation, would certainly have thought that this woman was talking of mundane household matters. All this seemed very strange to the Professor. (147/42)

The Professor then remembers how, during his student days in Berlin, he witnessed with a mixture of distrust and sympathy the heartrending lament of two children at the news of the demise of Wilhelm I, father of the Emperor. These children called the Emperor their “grandfather.” The Professor, like his Japanese reader, marvels at this outburst of emotion. In this situation, his fan slips from his hands to the floor, and as he bends forward to pick it up again he catches sight of his guest’s secret turmoil under the table. The Professor’s eyes then happened to glimpse the hand which, clasping the handkerchief, rested on her knees. Of course, this alone was no revelation. But the Professor had also noticed that the lady’s hands were trembling violently. He had noticed that, in her struggle to suppress her agitated feelings, she was grasping her handkerchief so tightly in her trembling hands as almost to tear it.

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After the visitor leaves, the Professor talks to his wife over dinner and, in relaying the story to her, extols the bushido of Japanese women. “His wife, who loved Japan and the Japanese had listened with a sympathetic ear,” satisfying the Professor (150/44). She remains on his mind alongside the Gifu lantern and his recent visitor when he returns to reading Strindberg and hits on a passage that leaves him thoroughly irritated: When I was young, I heard a report which probably originated in Paris, concerning one Frau Heiberg. While she smiled, she would tear a handkerchief in two—a dual performance. [. . .] We now call it mätzchen (slapstick). (151/ 45) 28

The visitor is now no longer in his mind: Nor was his wife in his mind, nor the Japanese civilization. Rather was it something indefinable which jeopardized the peaceful harmony of his soul. The performance which Strindberg disdained and the problem of practical ethics were, of course, different. But among the insinuations present in what he read, there was something which ruffled the Professor’s mood of complacence he had had since he had stepped out of the bath. . . . Bushido and its manier (mannerisms) (151/45)

The story ends with the Professor, “as though from discontent,” shaking his head two or three times and looking once more intently at the Gifu lantern. The majority of readers seem to savor the story’s pointed contrasting of Japanese and Western ways 29 or the West-East conundrum. 30 On some, even the parodic nature of Akutagawa’s reference to Nitobe is lost, if they notice it in the first place. 31 The text is often read naïvely as evidence for cultural differences between Japanese and Westerners. One Japanese blogger felt reminded of Akutagawa’s story when watching a TV interview with a Japanese mother who lost her daughter in the Northeast Japan disaster area in March 2011. 32 Akutagawa, however, delivers much more than an elaborate contrast of how different cultures handle difficult emotions. While his protagonist, with his lived experience in different cultures and his American wife, is poised to acknowledge different codes of conduct, the crux of the story lies in the realization of the performativity of these codes, a discovery that is made possible through reading Strindberg. The Westernized Professor, who embraces a romantically distorted image of his country, symbolized by the Gifu lantern, feels obliged to save Japan’s threatened spirituality by resorting to bushidō. He concerns himself with theatre without understanding what theatricality is about until he is confronted with the real performance of a traditional Japanese visitor. The lady

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acts according to bushidō etiquette, concealing her feelings, but she almost tears apart her handkerchief under the table. Even when the Professor later hits upon Strindberg’s criticism of the “dual performance,” the hokum-like handling of the handkerchief, he is only irritated and disturbed without seeing the obvious connections. He does not realize the fact that he himself and his American wife are theatrical existences, and so he resorts to comparing his experience of the Japanese visitor's hidden emotion to the grief of the German children lamenting the death of their “grandfather” Wilhelm I, which he understands as a “real” expression of emotion. On a meta-level, however, this episode is no less theatrical and ambivalent, as it clearly addresses the Japanese image of the Emperor as father of all Japanese and the people as his children. Strindberg’s Dramaturgie, with its enlightened European reasoning, renders visible the theatricality of lamenting the death of an old monarch. Thus, both options, of returning to bushidō or eschewing “real emotions” in a European vein, result in an impasse. Bierwirth, who described Akutagawa’s text as “a splendid example for a successful deconstruction,” points out that the reader is left with “a deeper insight into the fundamental theatricality of existence, including all expressions of emotion and concepts of morality.” 33 Akutagawa discloses a keen consciousness of emotional manipulation, and of the performativity of rules of conduct in his own and in other cultures. This consciousness, as we have seen through side glances at other readings of the text, is not necessarily shared by others who continue to resort to specifically Japanese “cool conduct” and bushidō codes of behavior as explanatory models. IV Akutagawa’s brilliant deconstruction of the bushidō code of cool in one of his earliest works is premised on his thorough familiarity with Western literature and a consciousness that “East is no longer East, and West is no longer West, because the twain have met inside him.” 34 This author’s exposure to the West, however, took place exclusively in Japan and was based on his extensive reading without ever having traveled overseas. 35 His writer-colleague Nagai Kafū (1879–1959), who is known for inspiring Japanese imaginations with his visions of America and France, spent more time abroad than any other writer of his generation. He is to be credited for bringing into twentieth century Japanese literature, through his particular cultural and reading experiences, an amalgamation of Japanese and Western literary traditions including the theme of the flâneur and the dandy, both associated with coolness. In Europe, the (male) dandy who cultivated coolness “in the sense of aesthetic detachment and an ironic stance toward dominant bourgeois

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social mores and its concomitant regime of emotions” entered the social stage in the early 19th century. 36 Kafū was sent to study abroad and spent the years between 1903 and 1908 in the United States and France. He was part of the generation brought up in the uncomfortable double school system of Confucian and Western learning, which another famous Meiji author with a background of studying in Germany, Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) likened to the feeling of wearing two different sandals on the one pair of feet. 37 Well versed in Japanese, Chinese, and European literature, Kafū was particularly fond of Zola, Maupassant, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Musset, Gide, Régnier, and Loti, while his diaries suggest that he studied more than seventy Western writers. He published two famous collections of stories and essays about his experiences abroad, Amerika monogatari (American Stories, publ. 1906) and Furansu monogatari (French Stories, publ. 1907), which address the fundamental incompatibility of conflicting value systems and which are remarkable for their experimental nature in positioning his narrator as an external observer and “uninvolved yet involved narrator.” 38 Inspired by Maupassant and Zola, Kafū develops in his travelogues a keen eye for naturalistic details and simple episodes from mundane life, but this and his predilection for darkness, decay, and the démi-monde are equally fed by his predilection for the genre painting-like style of gesaku, the popular literature of the Edo period (1603–1868), which is also reflected in his narrative strategies. 39 Back in Japan, he feels appalled by the superficiality and hypocrisy of a modernizing Japan and what he sees as the destruction of traditional Japanese culture in this period, and he experiences the increasingly strict censorship of the Meiji authorities. 40 He reacts by creating a “unique persona embodying his bitter rejection of all that was acceptable and thus respectable to the state.” 41 Thus, Kafū, with his thoroughly modern critical consciousness, uses Edo, especially the decadent gesaku fiction of the late Edo period, to form his literary persona as an eccentric and self-indulgent aesthete. The ambivalent image of this writer, who chooses the vanishing world of the “low city” and the pleasure quarters as epitomes of the last remnants of authentic traditional culture as his literary material in his novels, novellas, and essays, has long stood in the way of a serious scholarly acknowledgment of his social critique and oppositional stance, hidden as it is behind the playfulness of his muchadmired polished and poetic style. 42 In his famous diaries, which count among the highest accomplishments of the rich heritage of twentieth century Japanese autobiographical texts, his distanced viewpoint as a stranger, an étranger, in his own city can be studied in detail. Barbara Yoshida-Krafft, who has translated Kafū’s diary of 1937 into German, calls him a flâneur in the sense of Baudelaire and Manet, showing how his diary, intricately constructed as it is, reads as an example of modern city literature (Großstadtliteratur). 43 For Kafū other cities or the countryside are provincia and his favored areas of the metropolis the only place to be.

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However, on his daily walks he registers changes, decay, and the ugliness of reconstruction after the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 with an alienated glance, equipped with insider knowledge. Japan, as Kafū sees it, is out of balance, and “his skepticism over the qualities of modern life later turned into a kind of aristocratic disdain.” 44 Once again, however, the amalgamation of literary modes of presentation is notable as the author accentuates the travel mode through everyday life, a classical topos, in his diaries and his artistic fiction in the vein of traditional travel literature, and his observations in the city are modeled on city stroll guides which were popular in the late Edo period. 45 Kafū was a stylist who preferred to dress in kimono or three-piece suit with hat and walking stick. He kept a distance to writers’ circles and official duties and honors and cultivated his image as a dandy in the Edo style, who preferred the company of geisha, prostitutes, waitresses, and female performers and frequented the Yoshiwara and other pleasure quarters where he also collected inspirations for his literary narrations. No wonder that he was admired by some colleagues but frowned upon by many others. Remarkably, it was Kafū who is said to have inspired philosopher Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941) to write his famous theory of Japanese chic or “cool,” Iki no kōzō (1930). 46 Kafū’s novelistic works are permeated by a strong lyricism and nostalgic longing, paired with ironic objectivity, which was part of his distancing strategy for writing. One of his most famous works of fiction, Bokutō kitan (tr. A Strange Tale from East of the River), 47 published in 1937 and set in the red light district of Terajima in Tokyo, is not only a vivid example of this author’s dandyish posture and skillful evocation of setting and character as defining each other with a seemingly light touch, but also a highly sophisticated and self-conscious story about storytelling inspired, as many researchers agree, by Gide. The text demonstrates the modernity of his literature, which embodies the indissoluble entanglements of traditional Japanese and Western literary forms. “The narrator is a fugitive, a poser, a voyeur, but he is also very much at the center of the text,” writes Dennis Washburn in his analysis of this work. Washburn adds, “The creation of narrative through the tension between an observer and an idealized character is a technique deeply embedded in works of Japanese literature that exhibit a strong sense of the modern.” 48 Kafū’s psychological distance from his culture, his “remove from his surroundings, not in time, but in artistic attitude,” and his profound involvement with French literature 49 have resulted in a modern Japanese version of dandyism, the political nature of which remains contested, 50 while its aesthetic aura and literary achievements endure.

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V As the twentieth century proceeds Japanese formulations of cool proliferate, indicating a growing agglomeration of global flows. During the interwar years, Japanese culture may not have been as “barren” as literary history has it, but the militarization of society and an increasingly strict system of censorship did impede free artistic expression and liberal ideas. With Japan’s defeat in World War II in August 1945, the devastation of war, and the transvaluation of all values comes a disorientation which leads to new forms of “cool” cultural attitudes. In a rough survey of the decades to follow the end of the war, several strands can be observed. Burai-ha, which translates as the School of “Decadents” or “Libertins,” 51 was a loosely knit group of writers from well-to-do families who made a point of associating with city derelicts and were notorious for their excesses. 52 In their disillusionment and existential despair, they presented their criticism of society in a subversive and sometimes deliberately frivolous manner reminiscent of the Edo gesaku style, which earned them the alternative title of “New Gesaku writers” (Shin gesaku-ha). One could see here an echo of Kafū’s self-proclaimed gesaku stance, but the commonality is limited to the eccentric and seemingly selfindulgent image of a fervent oppositionalism to conventions and bourgeois morality. “The combination of intense depression, usually brought on by the loss of hope and a disgust with established values, tended to be expressed not in terms of burning indignation but of farce, and gave the group its most distinctive characteristic.” 53 The group’s most famous member was Dazai Osamu (1909–1948), who, like several others, deliberately ruined his constitution and ended his life by suicide, embodies with his novels, stories, and travelogues, the existential despair of his generation. In his famous, autobiographically inspired novel Ningen shikkaku (translated as No Longer Human), published posthumously in 1948, his protagonist, the perennial rebel against orthodoxy and conformism, is tormented throughout by feelings of shame beginning with the very first sentence: “Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess what it must be to live the life of a human being.” 54 This totally unsentimental but piercing self-portrait of a stylish young man 55 who resorts to pretending as a means to protect himself from society’s impositions, and whose shame 56 is a reflection of his painful social maladjustment, resonated with his huge contemporary and successive readership as an expression of a generational experience. Dazai’s works could be read as exemplifications of what Ruth Benedict, in her wartime anthropological study of the Japanese, described as “shame culture” as opposed to a Western “guilt culture.” 57 Instead of applying the approach of this controversial but influential study, which after having been translated into Japanese in 1948 has also largely shaped Japanese self-perception at a time of intensive questioning national identity, 58 it may

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be even more promising in the context of our coolness topic to draw on Helmut Lethen’s study of the culture of distance in Weimar Germany. 59 This and other influential texts of the time like Sakaguchi Ango’s famous “Darakuron” (“Discourse on Decadence,” 1946) or Mishima Yukio’s essay “Jūshōsha no kyōki” (“The Terrible Weapon of the Gravely Injured,” 1948), to name only two purportedly discursive but at the same time highly literary texts, can be read, like their authors’ fictional works, as documents of a historico-political trauma producing a particular version of cool. Both authors, while belonging to very different formations in intellectual and literary history, appear to be marked by the deep anxiety caused by the overthrow of the previous system of values. Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955), who had already made a name for himself by writing subversive and boldly iconoclastic texts during the war, advocated in his “Discourse on Decadence,” by his ambivalent key-word “decadence” (daraku) and the related “to fall” (ochiru), a new beginning and “as proper spiritual goal a more authentic, close-to-the-bone mode of life.” 60 Interestingly enough, this postwar essay, which had long been read as testimony to the author’s opposition to cultural nationalism and ideology, appeals on a subconscious level to the same essentialist ideas that it seems to antagonize. 61 With its revolutionary pathos and its theatricality, Ango’s text appealed strongly to his contemporaries and has much in common with Mishima’s lesser known essay; both texts make Japan’s ruin in the war a mere metaphor for a place or topos from which a re-definition of the relationship of individual and society is to be conceived, even though both authors are generally regarded to occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum. 62 Ango, the rebellious Burai-ha author, and Mishima Yukio (1925–1970), the newcomer who would later be identified with an aestheticist stance and a right-wing conservationist utopianism, both share a feeling of belonging to a generation marked by a traumatic experience, which both express in highly abstract tropes. In Mishima’s text, the lamenting subject floats between an elitist, self-assertive, and exclusive feeling and “a longing to merge with the banality of postwar life.” 63 Mishima’s pride in “belonging to a generation of outsiders, criminals, and nihilists” 64 is indirectly evidenced in his literary materials. One of his masterworks, his 1956 novel Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, tr. 1959), is modeled on and told from the perspective of the young Buddhist acolyte who burned down Kinkakuji, the famous Reliquary or Golden Pavilion, a national monument, in Kyoto in 1950. The work, which takes on the character of a philosophical novel while also building up considerable suspense, traces the protagonist’s interior development against the progression of the war, in which the Pavilion, epitome of eternal beauty, is threatened to be destroyed by American bombs. The war provides the protagonist, a stammering boy and outsider, with a heightened sense of exis-

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tence in the imminence of death, but as Kyoto is spared destruction and the suffocating antagonism between the temple’s perfection and his own existence as ugly outsider grows unbearable, he decides to destroy the temple. The book ends with the protagonist, after executing his plot, watches the burning temple from the opposite hill smoking a cigarette. “I felt like a man who settles down for a smoke after finishing a job of work. I wanted to live.” 65 Mishima’s cool outsider hero embraces a nihilist attitude, which the author himself sees as a natural expression of the deep-seated trauma and despair caused by his country’s defeat and what he repeatedly described as the last chance to die a beautiful and meaningful death. 66 Mishima intended his next novel Kyōko-no ie (Kyōko’s house), published in two parts in 1958 and 1959, to describe the vital consciousness of his own generation, and he termed the work his “study in nihilism.” 67 The novel is set in the years 1954 to 1956, a time when Japan’s reconstruction was regarded as complete. One day Kyōko, the female central character and owner of the salon, which forms the crossroads to four male friends, talks of her impression looking down on the reconstructed city from the rooftop of a high-rise building. It becomes very clear, however, that she feels somewhat uneasy with the sight of normality restored. Her friend Seiichirō agrees with her feeling that in walking over the new cold streets of concrete, they will always remember and cherish the wide, refreshing sight of light over the desert of debris. Instead of rising from the ashes and turning to reconstruction and starting all over again, they value destruction, both the destruction that belongs to the past as well as a destruction to come. 68 The scenery of light on sparkling debris is a central trope or topos, reminding the characters of their youth and of the immediate postwar period, a time without duties or responsibilities when everything seemed possible, a time lacking any hope, which prompts an elevated feeling in the protagonists. It is their longing for this state of mind, a longing for destruction and a definite “end of the world” (sekai hōkai) in the future ahead of them, which gives meaning and vitality to the protagonists. Seiichirō, an elite company employee who later marries the company’s vice president’s daughter Fujiko, embodies the work’s nihilism to the fullest. For him, his professional and private success, as he moves on to represent his company in New York, is a clear sign of an imminent nemesis. His wife is no less cynical, as she sees in him the ambitious upstart, but this attracts her to him, who always maintains his cool attitude, even in a situation when she confesses an affair with an American man to him. The novel is permeated by an atmosphere characterized by the keywords stoicism (sutoishizumu), disarray (muchitsujo), ennui (taikutsu), loneliness (kodoku), and absurdity (muimi). 69 In the end, Seiichirō is at the peak of his career, but the reader has learned that this cool protagonist in the paradox configuration of his mind only pursues success because he cherishes demise. Both Mishima novels,

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then, present versions of traumatized postwar anti-heroes in their protagonists. As suggested before, these literary figures offer themselves for an analysis inspired by Lethen’s study on “conducts of cool” in a time of disorientation and social upheaval in the wake of Japan’s defeat. What Lethen terms the “masquerade of virile narcissism” 70 is, of course, based on different socio-cultural and historical circumstances in the case of interwar Germany, but nevertheless can be applied fruitfully to artistic manifestations of the Japanese postwar situation of shock and disintegration. A fuller development of this approach would also allow for a more integrated perspective on the different strands of postwar coolness, a theme that functions as an eye-opener to the commonalities between a variety of literary and artistic movements of the late 1940s through the 1950s and beyond. In the light of the themes of shame, masquerade, and narcissism, the works of Dazai and Mishima, who had his literary breakthrough with his 1949 novel Kamen no kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask, tr. 1958), reveal a distinctive affinity in spite of conventional literary historical categorizations, which assign each author to different camps. Likewise, the so-called literature of the flesh or “body literature” (nikutai bungaku) of the late 1940s, which celebrates a radical individualism and the liberation of the body to sensual experiences after the wartime regulatory regime, 71 can be identified as another strand of postwar “cool.” Moreover, we might as well draw a line from these sub-cultural phenomena through the rebellious youth-culture of the 1950s onwards as we find it exalted in the works of an Ishihara Shintarō (b. 1932) or Murakami Ryū (b.1952). 72 Ishihara’s 1956 novel Taiyō no kisetsu (“Season of the Sun”) about the rebellious and rakish life of a group of youngsters created a splash by being awarded the coveted Akutagawa Prize, as did Murakami's 1976 literary debut, the short novel Kagiri naku tōmei ni chikai burū (tr. Almost Transparent Blue, 1977), by vividly depicting the monotonous and self-centered life of promiscuity, excess, and drug use among disaffected Japanese youth in the vicinity of an American military base. Both works, which became outstanding bestsellers and were made into films, stand for the postwar popularity of artistic expressions of a pronounced coolness, rebelliousness, indifference, and the refusal of emotional attachment, combined with outbursts of sexual violence. An attempt at historicizing these expressions with their cults of masculinity and their “cool armoring” (Otto Rank) 73 will have to take into account the Americanization as well as the effects of globalization in occupied and post-occupation Japan. The rock ’n roll and jazz fad in Japan is just one indication of the attraction of the American way of life in the postwar cultural scene, 74 reminding us of the fact that coolness in postwar Japan is as much a globalized phenomenon as it is rooted in the historical, social, and cultural specificities of a Japan “embracing defeat.” 75 Whether we take the “highbrow” strand of postwar

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Japanese cool, as it is developed in Mishima’s protagonists’ nihilism and contempt for society, or the youth-cultural, “tribal” version represented by “body literature” and what has been termed, after Ishihara’s success, the “sun tribe” (taiyōzoku) 76 and subsequent literary manifestations of a rebellious younger generation in an increasingly affluent society, the impact of the American Beat Generation is irrefutable, even in a case of intellectual “overdetermination” as when “evil” youth is posited in the context of Sade and Bataille’s concept of transgression. 77 With the global success of Murakami Haruki (b. 1947) since the late 1980s, a confessed fan of cool jazz, who grew up reading a wide range of American authors such as Kurt Vonnegut or Richard Brautigan, and translated authors such as Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, F. Scott-Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, Paul Theroux, and many more, we have come full circle to our initial question whether we can identify a “Japanese” version of cool. Could we not detect in the typical male Murakami hero, a cool, nonchalant, and non-committed young man a postmodern performance of cool, which shares core qualities with the emotionally distanced and the more “tribal” attributes of a contemporary sensibility? The coolness of Murakami’s “friendly but impersonal” protagonists, an attribute given to contemporary Americans by historians of emotion 78 is thus more than anxiety management. It shows the degree to which the Murakami hero has internalized a postmodern selfhood based on practices of what Eva Illouz, in her sociological investigations, has termed the “cold intimacies” in “emotional capitalism.” 79 In this broad review of versions of contemporary Japanese cool, we must also mention the strand of violent and brutal narratives in literature and film that have shaped one side of Japan’s cultural image in the world since the 1970s. Whether we think of the average-man-turned-gangster type as he is inadvertently being dragged into a yakuza, a Japanese vendetta, and drawn into a slapstick fiction with orgies of violence by the popular author Tsutsui Yasutaka (b. 1934) in his Ore no chi wa tanin no chi (“My Blood is the Blood of Another”), published 1974, or look at Murakami Ryū’s later novel In za Miso Sūpu (tr. In the Miso Soup,2005), of 1997 or his film Topāzu of 1992, internationally distributed under the title of Tokyo Decadence—the theatrical performance of a detached masculinity with periodic outbursts of brutality is pervasive. Towards the turn of the millenium, even the gender bias seems to dwindle, as a generation of female writers excels in drastic evocations of violence reminiscent of splatter movies. Kuroda Akira (b. 1977), who received the 37th Bungei literary prize for her debut work YOU LOVE US in 2000, is a case in point. The controversial work was re-named Made in Japan when published in book form, 80 an overtly symbolic title considering its material, the disorientation of a group of four Japanese youngsters who have returned to their country after longer stays abroad. In their affluent waywardness, their craving for extreme experiences culminates

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in the prolonged and playful killing of one of the adolescent protagonists, which is recorded and transmitted by mobile phone. The intermediality of the text oscillating between reality and the virtuality of the monstrous atrocities as they are being recorded, its echoes of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho as observed by a German reviewer, 81 and its explicit transculturality accentuated on the textual level 82 points to a globalized artistic consciousness. At the same time, however, the text, which begins with “Hi, kids! Do you like violence?” written in English 83 as an invitation to watch a snuff video, and closes on the phrase “DEAD END,” 84 was read as an allegory of Japan’s disintegrating society and an urgent expression of angst and ennui of the female author’s generation. Made in Japan’s extremity points to a possible closure of this most recent strand in postwar Japanese expressions of cool, as do filmmaker Kitano Takeshi’s productions 85 with their unpredictable male protagonists and their tendencies to brutal violence in a milieu of yakuza, gangsters, and other figures on the margins of a square society. 86 Still, the question whether there is a “Japanese” undercoat to these variants of cool remains to be answered. VI The initial question of these explorations was about the productivity of the notion of “cool” as an emotional style that emphasizes affect control in Japan, and, as a consequence, shapes self-consciousness and interpersonal relationships, organizes social and cultural habits, and influences aesthetic, pop-cultural, and commercial practices. As we have seen, it offered avenues into a wide range of phenomena in the culture of modern and contemporary Japan. The Japanese people’s restrained and mask-like behavior, as it was deconstructed as performance by Akutagawa, the figure of the flâneur and dandy with his disdain for the vulgarity of modern Japan embodied by Kafū and his literary persona in a rebellion through withdrawal, the postwar existentialist and nihilist writers as well as the character mask of the bourgeois Mishima protagonist, who, guided by distorted reading of Nietzsche, escapes into privatism and finds in a double life his key to clever life management, including a more recent and perhaps softer variant as it is lived by the laterborn protagonists in Murakami Haruki’s novels and short stories, as well as the celebrations of violence in contemporary literature and film can altogether be understood as versions of a Japanese “cool” independent of the use of the term. On a side note, metaphors of temperature have been and are productive in Japanese and Japanese literature, but in all the examples presented a core term could not be identified. Nevertheless, we have fine examples for the creative metaphorical use of terms of temperature. One only has to think of

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the cosmic chill and the fatal coldness of the protagonist as it is developed in Akutagawa’s story “Samusa” (“Coldness,” 1924, tr. as “A Cold Day”). A recent novel by Kurumatani Chōkitsu (b. 1945) titled Akame shijū yataki shinjū misui (1998, tr. The Paradise Tattoo [or, Attempted Double Suicide], 2011), plays extensively on attributes and metaphors of temperature between cold and hot, and offers a fascinating collection of tropes and motifs that pull together pre-modern and modern forms of Japanese cool as we have observed it in other samples. In the novel, a man escapes the treadmill life of his advertising job and lands in the bleak environment of a decrepit industrial town with a miserable job skewering refuse meat for a local restaurant. His room, which he hardly leaves, is a grotesque refraction of a hermit’s hut in the traditional genre of inja bungaku or “hermit literature,” allowing the worldly-man-turned-hermit to distance himself from mundane matters and to reflect on his life and the world. 87 The protagonist’s quiet and at times almost blithe attitude as he inadvertently witnesses his neighbors’ lives, all of them on the fringes of respectable society, his despair, his attitude of observing instead of acting, and his mixture of refusing life while accommodation to the grim reality of his environment, a “district without a temperature,” 88 make him a contemporary specimen of the stoic and loser hero reminiscent of existentialist postwar loners. Throughout the work, the trauma of World War II looms in the lives of the characters to form an additional anchor in the mental history of modern Japan. Consequently, this prize-winning novel functions as a fine example of the complex cultural, historical, domestic, and transcultural roots of a “cool conduct” in Japan as it crystallizes in works of contemporary literature. We must be prepared, however, to encounter opposite uses of temperature adjectives as well. Thus, Japan and Japanese society have often been described in domestic discourses as human-oriented, emotional, and “warm” in opposition to the cold rationalism of the West; this binary trope is central to the discourses of cultural self-assertion in the 1930s, employed by writers such as Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) or Yasuda Yojūrō (1910–1981) in their momentous essays, 89 and remains pervasive throughout the twentieth century. 90 This observation reminds us of the arbitrariness of such taxonomies, and of the fact that “cool” as a notion is not a Japanese term. In conclusion, what can be said about the universal applicability of “cool” as a category of inquiry? We have seen that there is a range of analogous phenomena and derivations, whether we look at philosophical traditions of indifference or at etiquette, aesthetics, and norms. The examples presented suggest that in modern Japan, in response to socioeconomic modernization and individualization in the wake of the contact with the Western world, 91 particular forms of disinvolvement, of avoiding conflict, but also of marking a difference and of protest have evolved, which glance back to the premodern while clearly being anchored in a globalized consciousness. Much of

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what has been described in scholarship about coolness as a desired emotional and social norm in modern Western societies finds an echo in the Japanese examples discussed here, including phenomena such as bushidō discourse, which could also be described as an “invented tradition,” the discovery of the theatricality of social behavior, or the nostalgic “escape” into pre-modern lifestyles and aesthetics; all of them are clear expressions of a modern consciousness. To describe these phenomena, which were presented here only through some scattered examples, in the form of a coherent narrative is a task left for future research. It will be important in this context not to confuse the work of art or the literary text with anthropological evidence, and to sharpen the theoretical basis in dealing with the multitude of cultural phenomena, applying methods such as the theory of signs, historical discourse analysis, gender theory, or hermeneutics or other approaches. The considerable variety of artistic and cultural manifestations and underlying attitudes, however, converge in respect to their performativity, and it is this performative quality that could form a focal point for possible inquiry. Admittedly, it remains questionable whether such an inquiry based on the concept of cool can successfully shake off its American background. In effect, the notion, in spite of its cosmopolitan and global impression, is loaded in a culturally specific way. This conclusion comes into sharper relief by the contrastive inquiry of a culture as different as Japan’s. Nevertheless, we have seen that as a heuristic device, it opens up insight into the rhetoric, functioning, and cultural effects of affective self-control in different societies. What is more, such contrastive inquiries grow profitable to the degree that trans-cultural entanglements begin to grow denser from the late 19th century onwards, until we observe confluences and even flows in both directions, as is the case with the contemporary consumerist version of “Japanese Cool,” which has developed a considerable international appeal in the areas of food, art, and fashion. If we had limited our horizon of inquiry to this most recent manifestation, the global fantasy of a “Cool Japan” created by marketing experts and Japanese government officials, we would now confront its proclaimed closure. “Now Cool Japan is over,” declares a recent study on the contemporary Japanese art and pop culture on the global scene. 92 And while the Japanese government campaign for a “cool” nation branding continues, 93 observers state the “exhaustion” of this phenomenon, symbolically forming the cover story of a recent edition of Newsweek Japan. 94 The relatively well-researched terrain of this globalized boom, 95 also represented in this volume, 96 will undoubtedly have to be revisited to look into the economic as well as socio-cultural and political background of this claim. 97 In the larger context of our topic, however, it may even be more fruitful to pursue the strings of argument presented by Joel Dinerstein who claims that “the birth of the cool symbolically represented the end of a coherent narra-

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tive of Western Civilization,” and the beginning of “an edgier, complex vision of post-Christian, post-Western individuality.” 98 Whether the interpretation of the postmodern performances of self in the light of a “shame culture,” as Haselstein explicates, 99 could form another interface for a conceptualization linking Japanese behavioral norms and attitudes with socio-cultural research on “Cool,” remains to be explored. These propositions, however, point to a common ground of inquiry where our contrastive investigations into the notion of cool in America and in Japan promise to bear fruit in the future. NOTES 1. Douglas McGray: “Japan’s Gross National Cool,” Foreign Policy, No. 130 (May-June 2002), 44–54. Published by: Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive, LLC. Accessed: May 3, 2011. 2. Cf. Wolfram Manzenreiter: “The Mangatization of the World: Japanese Popular Culture, Cultural Diplomacy and the New International Division of Labor,” Japan aktuell (April 2007), 4–23. 3. Cf. Jens Heise (ed.): Die kühle Seele: Selbstinterpretationen der japanischen Kultur. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer TB Verlag 1990. See also Heise’s contribution in this volume. 4. Gerhard Bierwirth: Bushidō: Der Weg des Kriegers ist ambivalent: Ein Essay, (Munich: Iudicium, 2005), 13. “The Invention of a New Religion,” refers to the title of Chamberlain’s 1912 text. 5. Inazo Nitobe (1900). Bushido: The Soul of Japan, An Exposition of Japanese Thought, (Philadelphia: The Leeds and Biddle Company). 6. The genre of so-called chanbara eiga (sword-fight films) has been extremely productive in Japanese cinema between the 1950s and 1970s, and is still thriving in the form of popular TV series. The story of the forty-seven rōnin (masterless samurai), who avenged the death of their master, also counts among the most cherished national myths since its first transformations into Bunraku theatre immediately after the incident from the early 18th century, and countless novelistic, cinema, and TV productions, including manga and anime versions. Cf., e.g., Henry D. Smith II: “Chūshingura in the 1980s: Rethinking the Story of the Forty-Seven Rōnin.” In Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., ed., Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre: From Hamlet to Madame Butterfly (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 187–215, and other publications by this author. It has to be pointed out here that revenge in itself is not part of the bushidō code, but the code provides those patterns of behavior for a rational, long-term plan and a control of affects to act out loyalty to one’s master, as an epitome of the “samurai spirit.” For the topic of revenge, cf. Sophia Frese’s contribution in this volume. 7. Kitano Takeshi’s prize-winning Hanabi of 1997 is analyzed as a contemporary version of the samurai narrative in Bierwirth (2005), 42. 8. The Japanese production The Twilight Samurai (Tasogare Seibei), a 2002 production directed by Yamada Yōji, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and won an unprecedented twelve Japanese Academy Awards, offers itself for comparison. 9. Cf. also the material cited in Giannoulis’s contribution in this volume. 10. Uwe Schmitt: Tokyo Tango. Ein japanisches Abenteuer, (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1999), 219. 11. Cf. note 7 in Giannoulis’s chapter. 12. Cf., e.g., the “Bad Journalism Wall of Shame,” http://jpquake.wikispaces.com/ Journalist+Wall+of+Shame, retrieved March 20, 2011, which registers, among others, reports on “Japanese weirdness” in being devoid of emotions. 13. “Japan’s ‘likability’ up in Hong Kong,” (Kyodo) The Japan Times, June 30, 2011.

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14. Reinhard Zöllner, in his Japan. Fukushima. Und wir. (Munich: Iudicium 2011) 122 explicitly denies Japanese “stoicism” during the disaster, but he differentiates between fear and panic. On the concept of stoicism, cf. Catherine Newmark’s chapter in this volume. 15. See Kinski’s contribution in this volume, note 5. 16. See Giannoulis’s contribution in this volume. 17. This is one reason why Kinski rightly insists in working with many of the original terms, even though he adds paraphrases to ensure the legibility of his contribution. 18. This process is analyzed in Gerhard Bierwirth’s fascinating study Makoto und Aufrichtigkeit: Eine Begriffs- und Diskursgeschichte, (Munich: Iudicium, 2009), to which we owe many important insights into the possibilities of analyzing culturally and historically specific notions in a transcultural context. Cf. Bierwirth, p. 278–279. 19. Cf. Arakawa Sōbei, Gairaigo jiten [Dictionary of Loanwords], (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1967), kūru, 336, which lists altogether four references from newspaper articles in 1962 and 1963 denoting suzushii (“cool”), and six more references for the denotation tsumetai (“cold”) as opposed to “warm,” among them several collocations with color (“from warm to cool color”), but also, in Japanese transcription, composite expressions such as cool makeup, cool fashion, or “a mode of cool looks,” alongside with cool drinks, all from the period between 1961 and 1964. It is obvious that the second sub-group is dominated by usages of “cool” in the metaphorical sense, which, interestingly enough, seems to have slipped the author’s attention. At least he did not feel motivated to give it a gloss or form another sub-group. 20. Cf. Giannoulis in this volume, note 9. 21. This attitude of Western researchers results in either playing down or making historical circumstances in Japan appear unique and incomparable. Cf. my discussion in Irmela HijiyaKirschnereit’s: “Fascist Moments: New Research on Twentieth-Century Japanese Aesthetics and Ideology,” Monumenta Nipponica 66, 2 (2011), 319–333. 22. Cf. Hasegawa Nyozekan: “Nihon fashizumu hihan” [A Critique of Japanese Fascism], in Hasegawa Nyozekan zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kurita shuppankai, 1969), 278–408. 23. Hasegawa, 279, 290. 24. Cf. McCormack, Gavan: “Nineteen-Thirties Japan: Fascism?” Social Analysis 1981, 20–32. 25. The notion of indifference is used in a comparable context by Dorothee Kimmich in her “Indifferenz oder: Prothesen des Gefühls,” arcadia, 44 (2009), 161–174. 26. This reading is inspired by and follows closely Gerhard Bierwirth’s brilliant interpretation in his Bushidō, pp. 20–24, based on the conviction that a better example and a more penetrative reading can hardly be found for the case in point. 27. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: “The Handkerchief,” in Exotic Japanese Stories, the Beautiful and the Grotesque (tr. John McVittie in conjunction with Takashi Kojima). New York: Liveright Publishing Corp. 1964, 140–151, here 141, and 143. The Japanese version is quoted after “Hankechi” in: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke-shū, Nihon Bungaku Zenshū, Vol. 28, Tokyo: Shūeisha 1966, 38–45. All subsequent page numbers refer to these editions. 28. The core notion in this passage, 臭味 (shūmi), is glossed in the Japanese text as furigana mettsuhen [Mätzchen] (hokum, silly affected behavior), just as the notion of 型 (kata), with its current meaning of model, form, type, style, convention, is added the furigana manīru (Manier), echoing the word mannerism in the earlier Strindberg quote, cf. Akutagawa, 45 and Bierwirth, Bushidō, 21. 29. It is worth pointing out that the handkerchief itself as an accessory for personal hygiene and for the purpose of waving goodbye was only introduced in the early Meiji period, and it has developed specific Japanese uses into the present time. 30. “The traditional Japanese light on the imported Western texts becomes a metaphor for cultural delineation and exchange,” writes Masha Tupitsyn in a review of a recent re-translation of the text, in Book Forum (September-November 2007). http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/ 014_03/883, retrieved November 6, 2012. 31. Cf., e.g. Shin-ichi Morimoto, “Confrontation, Embarrassment, and Reflection: Japan Meets the West,” in ABAC Journal Vol. 23, 3 (September-December 2003), 59–64, here 63. Weingärtner quotes another affirmative reference to Akutagawa’s story as an example for emotional control, (Kimura Yōji 2000), cf. Till Weingärtner: “Samurai Smiles? Unique Guiles?

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Reflections on Japanese Smiles, Laughter and Humour,” in Frank Kraushaar (ed.), Eastwards: Western Views on East Asian Cultures. 2010, 229–239, here 235. 32. The bi-lingual entry of March 17, 2011, of this fifty-nine-year-old prep teacher in Okinawa is titled “Akutagawa’s ‘Handkerchief,’” and reads in English: I saw an interview of the East Japan great earthquake. A woman talked plainly that she had [been] separated from her daughter. You may feel that she is cold. The interview reminded me of “Handkerchief” that Akutagawa Ryunosuke had written. A lady visited a professor to tell her son’s death. The professor wondered why she was speaking plainly. He dropped his fan, and he noticed her hands shook intensely under the table. She was crying intensely though her face was smiling. http://lang-8.com/220433/journals/850379/Akutagawa-Ryunosukepercent2527spercent2522Handkerchiefpercent2522 retrieved November 6, 2012. 33. Bierwirth, Bushidō, 23–24. 34. Serdar in an insightful review of the re-edition of the English translation of Akutagawa’s stories, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, The Beautiful and the Grotesque: http://www.genjipress.com/ 2010/11/ryunosuke-akutagawa-the-beauti.html, retrieved October 30, 2012. 35. He was sent to China as a reporter for the Osaka Mainichi shinbun in 1921, but his four months’ stay, which meant an interruption for his career as a writer, was overshadowed by illness and stress. 36. Cf. Haselstein’s contribution in this volume. 37. “nisoku no waraji,” quoted by Katō Shūichi, Nihon bungakushi josetsu, ge [Prolegomena to a History of Japanese Literature, Vol. 2], (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1980), 330; cf. also Rachael Hutchinson, Nagai Kafū’s Occidentalism: Defining the Japanese Self, (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2009), 16. In the English translation of the work which I consulted for a cross-check (Shūichi Katō: A History of Modern Japanese Literature, Vol 3: The Modern Years, tr. and ed. by Donald Sanderson, (Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International 1983), 113, the wording is different. (“Two pairs of sandals”). 38. Hutchinson, Occidentalism, 38, 24. 39. The cumulation of coincidence, e.g., is a typical feature of gesaku Literature. 40. Throughout his career, his works were often censored. Thus, his Furansu monogatari was immediately suppressed after publication. 41. Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals: Writers and the Meiji State, (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1984), 121 and Hutchinson, 195. 42. Edward Seidensticker’s seminal literary biography titled Kafū the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafū, 1879–1959, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), (the “scribbler” alluding to his gesaku stance) may have contributed to this ambivalence. 43. Barbara Yoshida-Krafft: “Das Tagebuch als Werk,” in Nagai Kafū, Tagebuch: Das Jahr 1937. Übersetzt von Barbara Yoshida-Krafft. (Munich: Iudicium) 2003, 205–220, here 210. 44. J. Thomas Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions: An Introduction, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 142. 45. This point is made by Yoshida-Krafft, 212. 46. Cf. Elena Giannoulis‘ contribution in this volume. 47. Cf. Seidensticker, Scribbler, 278–328. It should be noted, however, that this translation is incomplete as it leaves out the substantial epilogue to the work. A complete version is available in German: Nagai Kafū, Romanze östlich des Sumidagawa, (tr. and with a postscript by Barbara Yoshida-Krafft, Frankfurt, Main: Insel Publishers, 1990). 48. Dennis Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 208. 49. Rimer, 143. 50. Cf. the discussion of this issue in Hutchinson, chapter 5, “Resistance,” 173–217. 51. Burai 無頼 means “irresponsibility” or (being) “undependable,” and reflects the image of their proponents as behaving in opposition to social conventions. 52. Cf. Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, Fiction, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 1022-1023. 53. Keene, Dawn to the West, 1023. 54. Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human, tr. Donald Keene. (Tokyo et al.: Tuttle, 1990), 21.

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55. The Dazai persona, like the author himself, cultivates a “secret fashionableness,” which can be studied from photographical evidence in the case of Dazai, the writer, and from his works, cf. a story titled “Oshare dōji” (The stylish child), published 1939, cf. Phyllis Ryans, The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 87. 56. This topic is also treated in other works such as “Haji” (Shame), published in 1942, or “Dōke no hana” (The Flower of Buffoonery), published in 1935, cf. Ryans, The Saga, 87. 57. Cf. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946; Tokyo: Tuttle, 41st printing, 1986). 58. Critical Japanese discussions of the book are legion. As one sample assessment cf. Aoki Tamotsu: “Nihon bunkaron” no hen’yō: Sengo Nihon no bunka to aidentitī [Transformations of the “Discourse on Japanicity:” Postwar Japanese Culture and Identity] Tokyo: Chūō kōron 1990. 59. Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 60. Dorsey, James. “Culture, Nationalism, and Sakaguchi Ango,” Journal of Japanese Studies vol. 27, no. 2 (Summer 2001), 347–379, here 376. For a lively illustration of the “joyous iconoclasms” for which this author is famous, cf. the “Introduction: The Scribbler and the Sage,” by James Dorsey in: Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and the War, ed. James Dorsey and Doug Slaymaker, with translations by James Dorsey (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2010, 3–22, here 5). 61. This is shown by Dorsey, “Culture . . . ,” and by Bierwirth, Bushidō, who gives a close reading of this ambivalent text as “quasi-expressionist provocation,” 53–60. 62. It has to be pointed out, however, that both authors are basically un-political. 63. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, “‘The Terrible Weapon of the Gravely Injured’: Mishima Yukio’s Literature and the War,” in: War and Militarism in Modern Japan: Issues of History and Identity. Ed. Guy Podoler. (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2009), 53–62, here 61. 64. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, “Terrible Weapon . . . ,” 60. 65. Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, tr. Ivan Morris (Rutland, Tokyo: Tuttle, 1959), 262. 66. This is thematized in a number of essays and fictional works. In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, this lament comes in the form of regret of not having perished with the beautiful object, cf. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, ibid., 54–57. 67. Cf. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Mishima Yukios Roman Kyōko-no ie: Versuch einer intratextuellen Analyse, (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1976), 32. 68. Mishima Yukio, Kyōko-no ie (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1964) 33–34. 69. Cf. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Mishima Yukios Roman Kyōko-no ie, 167–176. 70. Lethen, Cool Conduct, 60. 71. Cf. Ulrike Pickardt, “Nikutai koso, subete da,” Nikutai bungaku und die Entdeckung des Körpers im Japan der frühen Nachkriegszeit [“Nikutai koso, subete da". Nikutai bungaku and the Discovery of the Body in Early Postwar Japan], Japanstudien, vol. 11 (1999), 235–264, and Igarashi Yoshikuni, “The Age of the Body,” in Igarashi: Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 47–72. 72. It is worthwhile noting that Mishima, too, produced a version of this youth-cultural, “tribal” form of cool in his 1963 short story “Budōpan” (tr. “Raisin Bread,” 1989), in which he develops a synthesis, which dissolves the clear separation of good and bad out of the conflicting moral oppositions within the self, on the basis of Lautréamont, Sade, and Bataille as well as cultural motifs of the Beat Generation, cf. Christopher Scholz: “Atavistische Rituale und moderner Nihilismus in Budōpan,” [Atavistic rituals and modern nihilism in Budōpan] in: Yukio Mishima: Poesie, Performanz, und Politik [“Yukio Mishima: Poetry, Performativity, and Politics”], ed. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit and Gerhard Bierwirth, (Munich: Iudicium, 2010), 151–174. 73. Cf. Lethen, Cool Conduct, 161. 74. Cf. E. Taylor-Atkins: Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), and Maiku Morasukī, Sengo Nihon no jazu bunka: eiga, bungaku,

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angura, [Postwar Japanese Jazz Culture: Film, Literature, Underground Culture] (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2005). 75. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, (New York: Norton/The New Press, 2000). 76. There is even a category of films termed taiyōzoku films starring Ishihara Yūjirō (1934–1987), Ishihara’s younger actor and singer brother, who became famous in the book’s 1956 film version, Taiyō no kisetsu, directed by Furukawa Takumi, with a supporting role. The fact that he was called a Japanese Elvis Presley speaks to the extent to which this idol was identified with American youth culture. 77. Cf. Scholz, 165–168. 78. I refer to Haselstein’s contribution in this volume, who bases her argument on Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth Century Style, (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 193, cf. her footnote 44. 79. Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, (Oxford and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), and Haselstein in this volume. 80. Kuroda Akira: Meido in Japan, (Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha, 2001). 81. Cf. Kolja Mensing’s review of the book’s German translation: “Lust auf Gewalt,” in Die Tageszeitung December 2, 2005, http://www.taz.de/1/archiv/archiv/?dig=2005/02/12/a0341, retrieved January 8, 2012. The book has not been translated into other languages to-date. 82. All ten chapter titles in the Japanese book are spelled out in English only, cf. chapter titles like “I. WHO CAN DENY?,” “V. Mask Hypnotism,” or “VIII. EAT THAT SHIT.” Foreign languages, mostly English, but also Spanish or German scraps of speech are scattered over the text. 83. This is also the opening line of a song by the American rapper Eminem. I owe this hint to Shashi Rao Thandra. 84. Cf. Kuroda, 5 and 137. 85. Kitano’s internationally best-known films in this vein are Sonachine (Sonatine, 1993), Hana-bi (released in the U.S. under the title Fireworks, 1997), and Autorēji (Outrage, 2010), as well as Autorēji biyondo ( Outrage Beyond, 2012). 86. Kuroda has refrained from writing more texts in the vein of Made in Japan. She changed her image, professing publicly that she has been cured from her angst. Her “letter from Tokyo,” which was broadly publicized in German media immediately after the Northeast Japan disaster of March 11, 2011, is a case in point, see Kuroda: “Ich habe keine Angst mehr” (I am no more afraid), in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 16, 2011, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/ feuilleton/buecher/2.1719/brief-einer-autorin-aus-tokio-ich-habe-keine-angst-mehr-1612336. html, retrieved January 8, 2012. In the case of Kitano Takeshi, the more restrained international reactions to his most recent films—Outrage, characterized as “extreme gun, blade and chopstick violence,” cf. Manohla Dargis: “The Violence that Japanese Gangsters Do,” in the New York Times, December 1, 2011, cf. http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/movies/outragedirected-by-takeshi-kitano-review.html?_r=0, retrieved January 8, 2012, with less than usual attention at international film festivals, seem to suggest that this style of baroque violence has been exhausted. 87. The most famous examples of this type of mostly medieval literature, Yoshida Kenkō’s Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, 1330–1331), Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki (An Account of my Hut, ca. 1212), and poetry and prose jottings by Saigyō (1118–1190) are firmly established in Japanese cultural memory. 88. “ondo no nai machi”—“district without temperature,” an attribute which is used in a leitmotif fashion throughout the work and which corresponds with the countless adjectives of temperature used in the narration is translated as “district with no human vitality” in the English version of the book. This seems a far-reaching and patronizing interpretation which obscures the work’s semantic and symbolic richness, cf. Kurumatani Chōkitsu, Akame shijū yataki shinjū misui, (Tokyo: Bungei shunjū (12th printing), 2007), 11. For the first occurrence of this epithet, and The Paradise Tattoo (or, attempted double suicide), tr. Kenneth J. Bryson (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011), 7. 89. Tanizaki employs this figure in his famous essay “In’ei raisan” (“In Praise of Shadows,” 1933), Yasuda in his 1936 essay “Nihon no hashi” (“Japanese Bridges”). For Yasuda’s essay,

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cf. Alan Tansman, “Bridges to Nowhere: Yasuda Yojūrō’s Language of Violence and Desire,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56, 1 (June 1996), 35–75. 90. Cf. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishōsetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 315–316. 91. This is not to say that modernization is mainly based on the impact of the West. Recent research has stressed the indigenous impulses for the development of a modern mass society in Japan. 92. Adrian Favell, Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990–201, (Hong Kong: Blue Kingfisher, 2012), 47. 93. To be observed, among others, on platforms such as NHK International TV and You Tube with the regular TV show “Cool Japan.” 94. Ikigire kūru Japan [Breathless Cool Japan], Newsweek Japanese Edition, June 13, 2012, with stories titled “Is Cool Japan Going Cold?,” “Dwindling Creativity,” and “Losing Your Cool,” 49–59. 95. Cf. the survey by Lisette Gebhardt: Cool Japan Studies. http://www.japanologie.unifrankfurt.de/__Dateien/_Texte/cool_japan/index.html, retrieved July 31, 2011. 96. Cf. the contribution by Aviad Raz. 97. After the completion of this contribution, the international discussion about the end of Japanese Cool has heated up. Dan Grunebaum’s article titled “Is Japan Losing Its Cool?” in Christian Science Monitor, December 8, 2012, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/ 2012/1208/Is-Japan-losing-its-cool/, has triggered a wider discussion, cf. also Christopher Johnson: COOL JAPAN: Why Japan Losing Its Cool Might Be a Cool Thing, in Globalite Magazine, December 10, 2012, http://globalitemagazine.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/cooljapan-why-japan-losing-its-cool-might-be-a-cool-thing/ and Mark Schreiber: “Japan Loses Its Cool as South Korea Heats Up,” in The Japan Times , December 16, 2012, http://www. japantimes.co.jp/text/fd20121216bj.html, retrieved December 16, 2012. At the same time, art exhibits still make use of the image, cf. “Tadasu Takamine no kūru Japan,” Art Tower Mito, December 22, 2012–February 17, 2013, http://arttowermito.or.jp/gallery/gallery02.html?id= 341, retrieved December 20, 2012. 98. Cf. Joel Dinerstein’s essay in this volume. 99. Cf. Ulla Haselstein’s essay in this volume.

Chapter Eight

“Hot” and “Cold” and “Cool”: Toward a Climatology of Japanese Culture Jens Heise

The topoi of hot and cold is part of cultural theory. “Hot” means, in a general sense, the formation of a context-free self as an abstract and independent entity; “cold” refers to a self that is linked with a concrete context. First, I would like to clarify the basic terms of this climatology; secondly, I want to question to what extent these topoi apply to Japanese culture.

I HOT AND COLD: CONCEPTS History/Without history Claude Lévi-Strauss introduces the distinction between “hot” and “cold” to describe the savage mind of premodern cultures. 1 He criticizes the term “without history” for such cultures and replaces it with “cold.” However, Lévi-Strauss does not discuss the vocabulary of climatology developed after Hippocrates. “Cold” premodern cultures work mechanically like clocks; they try to annihilate the effect that historical facts may have on their balance and continuity. “Hot” modern western cultures, on the other hand, are based on a thermo-dynamic principle like steam engines; they enforce historical change, development, and progress. Lévi-Strauss constructs this distinction with reference to the evolutionary pattern of writing and orality, arguing that writing forms the basis for hot cultures to develop. Here, the opposition of hot and cold must be understood more comprehensively. The Egyptologist Jan Assmann, for instance, demon181

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strated that in ancient Egypt writing did not serve to enforce historical change, but rather to fix or freeze cultural memory. 2 “Having no history, according to Lévi-Strauss, means, not just a lack, but a cultural achievement. Coldness has to be culturally generated, as well as heat. Among cultural institutions that promote coldness are myth and ritual, whereas heat is generated by technical evolution and ‘historical memory.’” 3 For Assmann, hot and cold are cultural options that are possible at any level of civilization. Cultural coldness is produced even in highly developed societies because no culture is completely hot or cold; rather, every culture develops spheres with specific temperatures. We are dealing here with a cultural climatology. Code/Context For Lévi-Strauss, the hot-cold distinction is bound up with another dichotomy that posits scientific knowledge as an attribute of hot cultures, on the one hand, and symbolism (or “wild thinking”) of cold cultures on the other. While scientific knowledge attempts to establish a universal code, symbolism generates concrete forms. Following Ikegami, we can delineate a relation between semiosis and different cultures. An important scale along which the different semiotic orientations of different cultures are located will employ one pole to represent the maximally code-dependent (or the minimally context-dependent) semiosis, and another pole to represent the minimaly code-dependent (or the maximaly context-dependent) semiosis. 4 So we can reformulate hot as the code-dependent and cold as the context-dependent principle. 5 As a part of her framework for understanding Japanese society Jane Bachnik distinguishes between two ways of perceiving meaning at issue here: the semantic and the pragmatic approach. A semantic (or referential) approach to meaning views language and social life in terms of what is communicated, rather than as a set of contextual relationships that locate this particular reference in time and space. Here, the semantic value of a sign is considered to have a core meaning disconnected from contextual factors. This follows a tradition in logic and linguistic semantics, in which meaning is treated as an inherent property of a proposition regardless of its context of use. The pragmatic approach to meaning, on the other hand, addresses the question of how something is communicated. This approach stipulates a relationship between reference and context, which is embedded in complex spatiotemporal conditions. The pragmatic construal of meaning produces reference in relation to the context.

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Independent/Interdependent The “hot” context-free perspective and the “cold” context-dependent perspective correspond to different conceptions of self. From the first perspective the organization of social order is disconnected from situations. This social order is defined as structures, patterns, traits and so forth, which are in turn utilized to identify a general, context-free self as an abstract and independent entity. From the second perspective, self and social life are defined in practical terms; the context and the process by which each is constituted are taken as integral components to the organization of both self and social order. Here the chief characteristic of the self is its interdependence with others. 6 Markus and Kitayama differentiate an interdependent construal of self in contrast to an independent self, “the so called Western view of the individual as an independent, self contained autonomous entity.” The interdependent self “insist[s] on the fundamental relatedness of individuals of each other,” so that it “cannot be properly characterized as a bounded whole, for it changes structure with the nature of the particular context.” 7 We can summarize the aims of a “hot” culture as follows: to establish an independent self or subject that is detached from its environment and centered around faculties like reason and free will. These terms represent a set of dualisms such as mind/world, ideal/material, objective/subjective, clustered around the binary differentiation between inside and outside. To be clear, however, reason and free will are based on dualisms, but are not dualisms themselves. This kind of dualistic thinking has had a considerable impact on the way we experience, describe, and analyze everyday life. The idea of the autonomous individual and the idea of a separation between subject and environment are a consequence of privileging one term of the opposition over the other. This kind of thinking has shaped mainstream European cultures, and is manifest in modern scientific discourse as well as in the philosophy of subject and of consciousness. Again, we are not dealing with absolute opposites. As a part of Western philosophy the idea of an autonomous subject has been often criticized since the mid-nineteenth century (to mention just a few names: Nietzsche, Freud, James, Heidegger, Luhmann). But the key point is that the idea of autonomous subjectivity remains very effective as a philosophical issue. “Cold cultures,” on the other hand, establish an interdependent self that is understood as part of its environment. Here the separation between inner self and outside world is impossible. The notion of interdependency is incompatible with the notion of self as an inner self or as essence. Rather, the interdependent self manifests and locates itself always in a particular scene, situated in a relationship between speaker, hearer, and context. This type of thinking does not conform to the mainstream of European cultures, but it might apply to Japanese culture. Again, it should be noted, as Markus and Kitayama

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stressed, that interdependent constructions of the self are representative not only of Japan and other Asian cultures but of Africa, Latin America, Island Pacific cultures, as well as southern Europe. 8 II JAPANESE CULTURE: CONTEXTUALISM In many respects, the individual subject is emphasized less in Japanese culture than in the European—that is to say, the subject’s cultural context matters more in Japan. 9 This tendency has been defined as contextualism (jōkyōshugi). The Japanese language, for instance, does not need to distinguish the subject from the environment. Ikegami delineates Japanese as a maximally context-dependent language. Anyone who has heard or read something about Japanese must have been told that, on the one hand, the “omission” of the grammatical subject is quite common in this language; that there is no distinction between singular and plural for nouns; no comparison for adjectives; no distinction as to grammatical person for verbs; and so forth—features which cause the language to be necessarily and heavily dependent on context in fulfilling its communicative function. On the other hand, the same person may also have been told that the language has at its disposal dozens of pronouns to choose from, and an intricate honorific system of saying things differently to persons of different rank—features also characterizing the language as extremely sensitive to context. 10

The absence of personal pronouns in the strict sense, and especially the lack of a direct equivalent for the first person singular pronoun in Japanese demonstrate that the grammatical subject is not as prominent as in European languages. In English, French, or German, I am myself in any situation; but in Japanese, “I” is a succession of terms (watakushi, boku, ore etc.) that are topologically determined by the environment. This means that what must primarily be communicated is not the subject, but the environment; the question is how the subject can be related to an environment? Nishida, the Japanese philosopher and founder of the Kyoto School of philosophy has shed light on this problem. 11 His philosophy leads to the idea that the opposition between subject and object, between self and non-self, appears only at a certain level, while at another level both terms merge. Nishida stressed the importance of basho (place) to suggest that the grammatical subject cannot transcend the context. Although he did not elaborate on this correlation, he demonstrated a logic that seems to lie at the core of Japanese culture. Nishida called this logic basho no ronri, the logic of place,

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and stressed that, contrary to the Western tradition, which since Aristotle has been centered on the subject (shugo no ronri), the logic of place is centered on the predicate (jutsugo no ronri). In this logic, entities can be assimilated if they possess a common concrete predicate. In Western subject-centered logic, however, one can do so only inasmuch as these particulars are abstractly included in the same general category. In other words, at the level of the predicate we find metaphors operating instead of notions, and they operate more easily as the level of the predicate is given precedence over the level of the subject. Given that this characteristic of diminishing the importance of the grammatical subject and enhancing the predicate is intrinsic to the structure of Japanese language, it could be argued that Japanese culture is cooling down, or controlling the power of subjects by relying on metaphorical assimilation rather than on categorical articulation to unify its world. In such a logic—which Italian psychiatrist Silvano Arieti, called “paleologic” and detected on one hand in schizophrenia, and on the other in symbolism and creativity—two particular entities can be assimilated if they posses a common concrete predicate. . . . This tendency must be related to the long tradition which, in Japanese thought, pleads for the rejection of egocentrism (mushi, muga etc.), i.e., the debasement of the subject’s proper substance, in favor of its relation to the context. 12 This linguistic/cultural tendency calls for the rejection of egocentrism and its view of the isolated subject in favor of a subject interdependent on contexts. The metaphorical process mentioned above works at the heart of any culture of course, but a sensitivity for place (bashosei) is particularly pronounced in cultures which, as in the Japanese case, do not stress the subject's pre-eminence to the degree European cultures have done. III WRAPPING The description of Japan as a “wrapping culture” may serve as a first example. 13 In her interpretation of Japanese culture, cultural anthropologist Joy Hendry points to the extreme care and attention the Japanese take in wrapping objects, from groceries to gifts. She draws parallels between wrapping material objects and linguistic “wrapping,” which is the frequent use of polite and deferential language (keigo). Both can be linked to ritual wrapping, exemplified by the heavy rope that wraps a Shinto shrine to create a transition from the profane to the transcendent, or in the other direction, from the highly polite and formal to the profane. In Japan then, wrapping is more than a “cover” for the exterior of objects, social activities, and linguistic meaning.

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Two different approaches to meaning are at issue here. One approach thinks the meaning of gifts, language, social order, and ritual in terms of a “center” or “core” underneath the wrapping. In this approach, wrapping covers up or even hides the contents, and must therefore be removed and discarded to receive the actual gift or the core meaning, respectively. This would be the “hot” option. But according to Hendry, wrapping as a form of polite language, ritual, dress, architecture, and so on, is indeed essential for the Japanese. Meaning is not found in the core beneath the wrapping but is bound up with the wrapping itself as a necessary embedding of the content (be it a gift or a speech act). And the wrapping may even be more significant than the content. To realize that everything has an (artificial) surface and that the contact between human beings is always indirect suggests that wrapping is a cold principle, because significance is not attached to a general code but to a concrete context. IV DEPENDENCE Lévi-Strauss’s differentiation between “hot” and “cold” cultures can also be understood in psychoanalytic terms, as Mario Erdheim, Swiss ethnologist and psychoanalyst, has demonstrated. 14 Erdheim identifies hot cultures with a psychic pattern of getting rid of childhood bonds and of using adolescent energies to bring about cultural change. In the psychoanalytic notion of the Oedipus complex, this principle is represented by the father because he interferes with the dyadic relationship between mother and child and channels infantile desires through threats of punishment. 15 Erdheim critiques Freud’s argument that in archaic societies initiation rites (or rites of passage) facilitate the individual’s transition from the sphere of the family to that of society. In Erdheim’s view, initiation rites have the effect of cooling down the dynamism of adolescence and preserving earlier affective bonds in new relationships of reciprocal commitment. He assumes “that initiation is a kind of cooling system serving to neutralize the effect of the distribution of power in these societies.” 16 This structure has been repeatedly emphasized in Japanese psycho analytic discourse. Doi Takeo, Japanese psychoanalysis, for example stresses the “structure of dependence” (amae) as a dominating psychic structure in Japanese society. 17 Doi defines the concept of amae in his well-known book The Anatomy of Dependence as “the feelings that all normal infants have toward the mother—a kind of dependence, the desire to be passively loved, and the unwillingness to be separated from the warm mother-child-circle and cast into a world of objective ‘reality.’” 18 Doi finds the prototype for amae in

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the infant’s relation to the mother. In this sense, amae can be viewed as an attempt to deny the fact of separation that is however an inevitable part of human existence and to ease the pain of separation.“ Thus, amae involves a constellation of feelings that emphasizes a positive sense of connection to the mother, and not the need for separation from her. V COOL PERSONA: TWO CONCEPTS OF “COOLNESS” In conclusion, let me contrast two concepts of “coolness,” one put forward by Helmuth Lethen in his analysis of Weimar culture, and the other one by the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō. As a response to the combined disasters of war and defeat, a new style of behavior—the “cool persona”— was formed in the Weimar Republic. Helmut Lethen 19 has reconstructed the history of this persona on the basis of ethnological and sociological findings about shame culture 20 as well as Helmuth Plessner’s contemporaneous text Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. 21 In this new “cool” style of self-presentation, the focus shifted from internal to external features of subjectivity, and to visible traits like the social space or the body. These shifts corresponded with notions put forward by the New Objectivity movement, in which subjective expressions were no longer understood as manifestations of inner experiences, hence the interest in gestalt psychology, and the sociology of gestures. In Lethen’s view, 1920 German shame culture lacked the characteristics that had defined authentic subjectivity since the 18th century, namely an individual conscience and a distinctive sense of guilt. In contrast, the cool persona was directed outward, controlled by social norms and evaluation by others. It offered codes of conduct that prescribed behavior in every situation. The worst fear of such a cool persona was to be shamed, to appear ridiculous in the eyes of others. In modern Japanese philosophy, Watsuji Tetsurō’s Ethics present an anthropological model that also characterizes the subject as a cool persona. But Watsuji’s description and evaluation are remarkably different from Lethen’s/Weimar Germany. They are based on three principles. 22 In the characters used for “man” in the sense of “human being” in East Asian cultures (ningen), Watsuji discovers a double meaning: ningen points to the social sphere of human beings and to the individual person at the same time. He argues that “ningen is the public and, and the same time, the individual human beings living within it. Therefore, it refers not merely to an individual ‘human being’ [nor] merely to ‘society.’ What is recognizable here is a dialectical unity of those double characteristics that are inherent in a human being.” 23

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Man is characterized by the conjunction of individual and social life, and is situated in a social context. Watsuji emphasizes that this dual structure of “being in between” is not based on a binary opposition and cannot be explained from the perspective of self-consciousness. Watsuji’s model has profound anthropological consequences; existence has an outer side, a surface, it is visible. Subjective Spatiality (shukanteki kūkansei) Man as a “being in between” can be grasped only from the outside of his or her existence, from the space he or she is in. Man’s dual structure and subjective spatiality are interconnected. “From this standpoint we can say that subjective spatiality is, in the final analysis the basic structure of ningen sonzai. Our endeavor to grasp ningen not only as a human being but also as possessing the dual structure of individuality and [at] the same time sociality leads us of necessity to the idea of spatial extendedness” 24 (165). The central idea of Watsuji’s ethic is that man is located and tied up in space. Watsuji starts his analysis of the spatiality of human existence with examples of traffic and communication, aiming to show that subjectivity can only exist and evolve in space. “Spatial extendedness, as it is evident in publication, communication, and so forth is an expression of this subjective spatiality. I regard this subjective spatiality as the essential characteristic of human beings.” 25 Watsuji thus points to the exteriority of human existence, to the visible surface of being. Subjects are situated in spatial settings, have a body, and they interact with other subjects in space. For Watsuji, space can neither be interpreted as a constructed space made up by natural objects nor as a form of intuition. Rather, he argues that “this sort of spatiality is . . . a dialectical one, in which relations such as ‘far and near, wide and narrow’ are mutually transformed into one another. In a word, it is the betweenness itself of subjective human beings.” Watsuji’s anthropology constructs man on the basis of the exteriority of spatial presence; the subject’s surface and and the subject’s core are intertwined. Reciprocity (sōi kankei) Watsuji explains the dual structure of the individual and the social by introducing the term “reciprocity.” That is why he begins his Ethics by introducing the term “reciprocal connections” (sōi kankei), and tries to explain the institutions of “being-in-between” with examples like author/reader, teacher/ pupil, father/son. He further demonstrates this principle of structural reciprocity with examples of social ties in everyday life, but also refers to the conditions of his own writing as a philosopher. Since the mode of writing is defined by readers who will read the text, the connection between author and reader is essential.

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This is betweenness, a fact that occurs before our eyes. A writer is a writer by virtue of being determined by his readers, and a reader in turn is a reader by virtue of being determined by the writer . . . the relationship between a writer and a reader cannot be established without this reciprocal determination as its essential feature. 26 For Watsuji it does not make sense to base elementary problems of human existence on the concept of self-consciousness, even if the self is defined by its relation to the outside world (as the concept of intentionality assumes). Watsuji’s notion of reciprocity between self and other covers something more fundamental than intentionality. “The essential feature of betweenness lies in this, that the intentionality of I is from the outset prescribed by its counterpart, which is also conversely prescribed by the former.” 27 Watsuji argues that a concept of reciprocity that defines man as a dual structure cannot be found in the Western tradition. It is the Buddhist concept of emptiness (kū) where the idea of reciprocity is formulated most radically. While Watsuji does not refer to Buddhist texts nor to Buddhist enlightenment, he borrows the Buddhist term “emptiness” and uses it in a functional sense to argue that “. . . the ultimate feature of every kind of wholeness in human beings is ‘emptiness’ and, hence, that the whole does not subsist in itself but appears only in the form of restriction or negation of the individual.” 28 This conception of emptiness allows Watsuji to interpret reciprocity as betweenness and present it as an alternative to Western anthropology. The factors that characterize the 1920s “cool persona” according to Lethen—an orientation toward the other, identification with social roles, the rhetoric of visibility—are the same factors that Watsuji uses to describe man’s true existence. But for Lethen the appearance of the cool persona is a symptom of cultural anomie, while for Watsuji the cool persona is the manifestation of the dual structure of the self and its connectedness with others. Watsuji’s perspective implies that man can find himself only through embodiment in institutional settings and role patterns. Surfaces, wrapping, and roles do not hide the core of a person, nor do they suggest an individual’s lack of conscience and interiority, but rather indicate who we are. NOTES 1. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage, chapter VIII (Le temps retrouvé) (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1962). 2. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, chapter III (München: C. H. Beck, 1997). 3. Jan Assmann, “The Hot and the Cold in History” in Symposium in Honour of Rudolf G. Wagner on his 60th Birthday, (Heidelberg, November 3–4, 2001), 30. 4. Ikegami Yoshihiko, “Introduction: Semiotics and Culture” in Ikegami, ed. The Empire of Signs: Semiotic Essays on Japanese Culture, (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins B. V., 1991), 9.

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5. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l´œuvre de Marcel Mauss” in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, Vol. 1 (Paris: PUF, 1950). 6. For a psychological approach see Hazel R. Markus, and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion and Motivation” in Psychological Review 98 (2), 1991: 224–53. 7. Ibid 18. 8. See Ibid. 9. Augustin Berque, “Identification of the Self in Relation to the Environment” in Nancy R. Rosenberger, ed., Japanese Sense of Self, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 93–104. 10. Ikegami, Introduction 6. 11. See Nakamura Yūjirō, Nishida Kitarō, (Tōkyō: Iwanami, 1983) 42–66. 12. Augustin Berque, “The Sense of Nature and Its Relation to Space in Japan” in Hendry/ Webber, ed., Interpreting Japanese Society, (Oxford: JASO, 1986) 103. 13. Joy Hendry, Wrapping Culture: Politeness, Presentation, and Power in Japan and Other Societies, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 14. Mario Erdheim, Die gesellschaftliche Produktion von Unbewußtheit—Eine Einführung in den ethnopsychoanalytischen Prozeß, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984) 284–295; 187–199. 15. Ibid 183, 184. 16. Ibid 190 (my translation). 17. Jens Heise, ed, Die kühle Seele—Selbstinterpretationen der japanischen Kultur, (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1990) 7–20. 18. Doi Takeo, The Anatomy of Dependence: The Key Analysis of Japanese Behavior, (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1973) 88. 19. See Helmut Lethen, Verhaltenslehren der Kälte—Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994). English translation: Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002). 20. Ruth Benedict introduced the term shame culture for the interpretation of Japanese culture. See Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, (Boston: Houghton Miffflin, 1946). Lethen , however, refers to the sociology of shame. See Sighard Neckel, Status und Scham: Zur symbolischen Reproduktion sozialer Ungerechtigkeit, (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus), JAHR. 21. Helmuth Plessner, The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism, (New York: Prometheus Books, 1999). 22. Watsuji Tetsurō, Zenshū, Vols. 10–11, (Tōkyō: Iwanami, 1961–1963). English translation: Ethics in Japan, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 23. Ibid 15. 24. Ibid 165. 25. Ibid 157. 26. Ibid 52. 27. Ibid 51. 28. Ibid 92.

Chapter Nine

Cold Norms and Warm Hearts: On the Conception of Etiquette Rules in Advice Books from Early Modern and Modern Japan Michael Kinski

Some years ago, Japan Tobacco (JT) designed a number of illustrations admonishing smokers of conscientious behavior. They can be found on JT’s homepage and even appeared on protective book covers used by Japanese bookstores. I have one in my possession that bears the catchphrase “If you pay attention, manners will change [for the better]” あなたが気づけばマ ナーは変わる (Anata ga kizukeba manā wa kawaru). The picture below stems from this campaign and shows a scene from a movie with two cowboys shooting at each other. The “cool” hero had been smoking and flicks away his half smoked cigarette. Obviously, “cool” in this example is “uncool.” The word “cool” only appears in the English catchphrase while the Japanese text reads in translation, “The main character threw away his cigarette butt. But that was in an old movie film.” 1 A discussion of etiquette, especially historical etiquette, would seem an unlikely candidate for a book concerned with “coolness,” and not only because etiquette since the European enlightenment has been considered as something “uncool,” something superficial and inferior to the inner moral disposition of a human being and secondary to ethically noble behavior. (Of course the word “uncool” did not exist at dawn of the Enlightenment but it captures well the sentiment expressed in the critical comments cited by Norbert Elias in his introduction to The Civilizing Process). 2 No, a society that values the rules of etiquette or (external) polite behavior above all as the principle for giving shape and order to human 191

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Figure 9.1. The Cool Cowboy Permission for use granted by Media Relations, Japan Tobacco Inc.

relations could be presented as the epitome of the conformist society stifled by conventional norms producing the robotic “organization man,” which Thomas Frank described in The Conquest of Cool as the negative reverse image of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, with all its offshoots down to the present day “disgust with falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppression of consumer society.” 3 This concern with falseness and authenticity, of course, already lay at the heart of the accusations leveled against the demands for outwardly refined and polite behavior in Europe since the late 18th century. And even although Japan is currently “cool,” 4 it was Japanese society that until not so long ago, more than any other society, was cast in terms of prevailing norms of conventional etiquette and of a universal rule of external modes of polite behavior so restricted that the true persons and their “real” (inner) thoughts and feelings lay behind masks of smiling polite faces to become unrecognizable, untrustworthy, and therefore threatening. Must not, therefore, the culture of etiquette in Japan be seen as the exact opposite of “coolness” and the values associated with it?

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I TOPICS AND CONTENTS: COOLNESS, ATARAXIA, DETACHMENT I will not go into a discussion of what is meant by “cool” in the context of American, especially Afro-American popular culture here, whence it entered into discussions of modern American or even global culture. Much has been written about it and some of the contributors to this volume like Joel Dinerstein and Jim McGuigan count among the leading scholars concerned with studying “coolness” as an important cultural and societal phenomenon. Rather, I would like to switch perspectives and look at the culture of etiquette as it evolved in Japan since early modern times from within, so to speak, by delineating the ways in which representatives of etiquette book literature themselves explained the need for standardized rules of conventional behavior and their effects on the social and individual lives of human beings. What may look “uncool” from the outside, then, may be represented in a different perspective and a changed balance in the conflict between the new “coolness” and the old “stuffiness.” 5 This approach will help to clarify the question whether elements of what has been described as “coolness” in one cultural context might not have their place in other cultural environments. For example, Japanese etiquette and the inner disposition required for adhering to its dictates bear resemblances to “coolness,” although these were conceptualized in other ways and described in completely different terms. Without taking a specific look at the role played by the words in the context of American cultural history studies, the common or colloquial connotations of “coolness” and the adjective “cool” are manifold, but in many cases they describe interhuman relations and concern the state of aggregate which characterizes social interactions. At the negative end of the scale “coolness” and “cool,” due to their semantic vicinity to “coldness” and “cold,” might signify a severe atmosphere rigidly binding a whole society; the shapes of interrelationships between different segments of this “cool” society are marked by a disinterest in and indifference to the fate of the single human being and especially the weak among them. In the middle, one might find an individual stance of aloofness or detachment that might be viewed in a negative or positive light. Finally, at the opposite end of the scale the positive evaluation of a “cool” attitude might have brought about such figures of speech as “I’m cool,” a phrase used to suggest, “Please do not worry about me. I am fine.” How then—confronted with this plethora of connotations—does one pinpoint the exact meaning of “coolness” and how should one determine its heuristic value as a tool of cognition with regard to etiquette and the norms of “civilized,” polite behavior?

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In answer to this question, a look into a comprehensive dictionary of philosophy such as the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie might be of help. 6 To be sure, there is no lemma on “coolness,” but the word appears in the entry on “impartiality.” It was in the context of English-Scottish “moral sense ethics” that impartiality acquired a place of prominence, in which a disinterested attitude was considered the precondition for endowing moral decisions based on the subjective basis of a natural feeling with a sense of universal validity. Thus, in the moment of making a moral decision, the individual sets his private interests aside and chooses, as David Hume put it, “a point of view common, common to him with others” and conceives of himself as member of a superordinate “party of humankind against vice or disorder.” 7 It was a little later, in the age of utilitarianism, that Jeremy Bentham actually used the word “coolness.” Since it connotes a rational “coolness,” impartiality for him is a fitting expression to describe the “Principle of Utility” that serves to gauge the value of a certain act according to whether it serves to increase the benefit of all persons involved. 8 From this position perhaps it is not too far a step to consider “impartiality” and its correlative “coolness” in terms of a distance or even the active promotion of differentiation as a means of order and organization among members of a society or among hierarchical status groups. Such an attitude stands in a long line of rationalizations of detachment and a reflected stance toward social involvement that, in the European context, at least starts in antiquity with Epicurean ataraxia and the Stoic ideal of apatheia as, in the case of Seneca, a means to cope with a world poisoned by the insanity of the ruling. From there the detached management of emotional stirrings as a model course for adapting to changing situations of social engagement can be traced up to the canon of behavior of the nobility in the age of the Ancient Regime. 9 II CHINESE THOUGHT AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF ETIQUETTE In the East Asian context, similar attitudes can be recognized, not least in the sphere of Confucian learning. The “Doctrine of the Mean,” the ideal middle way that goes together with a moderate and controlled temperament, lies at the center of Confucian philosophy. This ideal is joined by an emphasis on “rites” 禮 (Chin. li, Jap. rei), the rules or forms giving shape to all kinds of human actions and endeavors, which in Benjamin Schwartz’s interpretation of Confucius as he is depicted in the Analects 論語 (Lunyu / Rongo) serve as “channels” along which even the expressions of man’s inner moral disposition have to flow in order to maintain a harmonious social framework where

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everyone knows his place with regard to all others and shoulders corresponding responsibilities without any excesses in one or the other direction. 10 “Rites” guide human emotions, prevent friction, and for this purpose they take the form of concrete rules on manner. This view developed into a philosophy of existential relevance. As Watanabe Hiroshi explains, the full-fledged Confucian learning of the Southern Song era (1127–1279), with its metaphysical grounding and ties to a personal ethic and discipline, was perfectly tailored to the role of the mandarin. Appointed to office because of his literary erudition, responsible only to the emperor, entrusted with positions of high responsibility, moved from one administrative office to the next, without being able to rely on the support of the population in his district and on the loyalty of his staff members, cultivation of his personality and an insight into the “principle” 理 (li / ri) inherent in everything must have been of imminent importance in order to face the populace as well as the subalterns with authority and a firm character, and to discharge himself honorably of his duties. 11 This tradition of Confucianism was well known in Japan, and the conspicuous rise of Confucian studies is one of the best-researched aspects of the Edo period. This phenomenon was accompanied by a general spread of learning and book production. Both the prevalence of Chinese education and the development of a printing and reading culture also set the framework within which popular etiquette and reflections on it developed since the 17th century. Influenced by Chinese classics like the Record of Rites禮記 (Liji / Raiki), an indigenous tradition of etiquette developed in Japan. Before the Edo period, this had taken the form of yūsoku 有職 or “[courtly] knowledge” and kojitsu 故実 or “cases of precedent from former times.” However, both of these were restricted to behavior on formal occasions either at the imperial palace or at the court of the shogun and the regional lords. They did not contain much detail about concrete behavior in diverse situations. Such information can be found, but it retreats behind the much more elaborate details about the paraphernalia and utensils required in the context of specific ceremonies and on formal occasions. 12 By contrast, during the Edo period, popular collections of etiquette rules increasingly focus on concrete acts and bodily movements, almost completely eclipsing information on utensils offered in the preceding age. 13 Apart (and different) from the experts of “methods of rites” reihō in shogunal employ, an increasing number of books introducing rules of etiquette for almost all situations circulated in society. Manuals of etiquette in a strict sense, as well as works of encyclopedic dimensions, such as setsuyō shū 節 用集 or “[time and trouble]-saving collections,” ōrai mono 往来物 or “things [i.e., letters] going hither and thither,” chōhō ki 重宝記 or “records of precious treasures,” 14 including chapters on “methods of discipline” 躾方

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(shitsukekata) or reihō 15 set out, at first glance, etiquette rules for warrior society. But a closer examination reveals that the instructions have been detached from any social group and orient toward standardization and generalization valid for all groups of society, as well as the interactions within and between them. 16 However, there are few clues that allow the modern observer to determine the degree to which such manuals spread throughout society and found practical application. 17 From his study of one subgenre of advice book literature, namely dietetic writings such as Kaibara Ekiken’s 貝原益軒 (1630–1714) Admonitions for Nourishing Life 養生訓 (Yōjō kun, 1713), Matsumura Kōji concludes that as recipients of such works one has to imagine male city dwellers who were the head of a household—not necessarily but preferably of a warrior household—and who were in possession of a comparably high degree of income and education. 18 In addition, members of the leading strata of rural society were also demonstrably consumers of dietetic works and a much broader spectrum of advice books, among them Ekiken’s Secrets of the Three Rites 三禮口訣 (Sanrei kuketsu, 1699) and two writings by Namura Jôhaku 苗村丈伯 (died after 1694), namely Records of Weighty Treasures for Women 女重宝記 (Onna chōhō ki, 1692) and Records of Weighty Treasures for Men 男重宝記 (Otoko chōhō ki, 1693). 19 Female readers targeted by numerous etiquette rule collections probably came from similar social milieus. This view is supported by the observation that already during the Edo period itself works by scholars such as Ekiken were regarded as endeavoring to offer advice for the everyday activities of the common populace. 20 On the other hand, Yokoyama Toshio’s research offers insights into the spread of just one single work over all segments of society. As far as this could be ascertained, the sixty-four known examples of the Inexhaustible Storehouse of [Time- and Trouble]-Saving Use for Innumerable Generations 永代節用無尽蔵 (Eitai setsuyō mujin zō, 1831) 21 were in the possession of widely different members of society, including court nobles, higher and lower warrior families from various parts of the country, merchant houses in and around Kyōto, doctors, village headmen, scholars, and musicians. One owner even seems to have been an express courier from the city of Kanazawa (with the rank of a lower warrior). 22 The following words in the Collection of Enlightening Illustrations on Human Relationships 人倫訓蒙図彙 (Jinrin kunmō zui, 1690) provide recognition early in the Edo period of the wide dissemination of etiquette rule collections: “The records of House Ogasawara, as the form of rites (reishiki) of the warrior houses they are the method of rites that reach as far as the common people” (Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryō shūsei 30: 381). 23 In the Edo period the name “Ogasawara” had almost become synonymous with courtly rites and etiquette rules, and many popular expositions emphasize the importance of this family for indigenous etiquette culture.

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Thus, in the Storehouse of the Sea of Characters as a [Time- and Trouble]Saving Encyclopedia from [the Era] Calendar Treasure 宝暦節用字海蔵 (Hōreki setsuyō jikai kura, 1757) the expression “rites” 禮 is placed in the Confucian context and the transition from the “rites” of Chinese antiquity in the comprehensive sense of political institutions to “rites” as practical rules of behavior under everyday circumstances is recounted: Verily, the sages deigned to establish/fashion rites and music and to rule the realm and its states [through them]. If as a man/human being one does not know rites and propriety, one is on a par with the savage birds and animals. Although at this court [e.g., in our country] there had been the rites of the imperial court since olden times, under the military houses in the days of [the Lord of] the Hall in the Deer Park, [the Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408)] charged the three houses of Imagawa, Ogasawara, and Ise and deigned to codify the actual matters [based on cases of precedence] from old times as well as the method for teaching discipline; and these rites listed what was essential for use among the various princes [. . .]

Other texts go into more detail on the ancient sages and the temporal order in which the “rites” came into being. For many, the Records of Rites is the locus classicus in such matters, and the importance of rules of etiquette for human beings is just as clear. The Various Rites as a Record of Precious Treasures (1803) is a good example: “[. . .] Now, rites begin with eating and drinking. 24 If as a human being one does not have rites, one does not differ from the savage birds and animals. One has to know them by all means.” The possession of “rites” as the distinguishing attribute between human and other beings is an oft repeated topos in etiquette literature opening up so to say an anthropological dimension for explaining the origins and the necessity of “rites” or etiquette rules. Paired with this anthropological constant, the recourse to a historical perception functions as only one thread in the endeavor of providing the rules for polite behavior with legitimacy. To invert this view, the essence of being human itself is historicized; only due to the achievements of the ancient sages in establishing the “rites” as well as the contributions of enlightened rulers of later ages, the foundations were laid for human beings to become genuinely human beings. The topos of “rites” is inextricably interwoven with Menschwerdung or the birth of mankind itself! The transmission of “rites” or etiquette rules as well as the account of their origins is nearly tantamount to the preservation of the essence of being human. If the essence of humanity is dependent on the possession of “rites” it is no wonder at all that such a high value is placed first on their enactment and then on their preservation and transmission in written form. Collections of “rites” or of “etiquette rules,” therefore, are no triviality of everyday culture—they are collective memory as such. Collective memory of what? Of

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being a member of the human community, and—in the last resort—of being human! III PATTERNS OF RELATIONSHIP The consequences of being human for etiquette literature, it would seem, are restraint and control over the affects. These can be achieved by heeding a whole set of formal rules that govern interactions between men, whether they are of the same or of different social standing, in all situations of life. But restraint and affect control are only one half of what marks a civilized human being. While these effects point in the direction of “coolness” as a synonym for emotional detachment, etiquette rule collections up to the present envision a rather different and even contrary result of the civilizing powers of “rites.” Theories and practices of affect control certainly concern my study of etiquette rules in Japan since the 15th century, especially those related to the act of eating. I will take these rules as my point of departure and look at an undercurrent within etiquette literature that serves their goals and understanding of the workings of a human society that pays attention to the rules of polite behavior opposite to “coolness.” Etiquette rules describe patterns of relationships, and with norms of eating four basic domains can be distinguished. First, the relationship between eater and food is at issue. Without going into detail, the rules testify to a cultivated, even ritualized treatment of food in which each act is styled according to a choreography of movements. Only consider the example of eating a grilled fish. In his Secrets of the Three Rites三礼口訣 (Sanrei kuke tsu, 1699) the Confucian scholar Kaibara Ekiken wrote: “On eating grilled fish: Only the upper side should be eaten. [Thereafter] one has to turn [the fish] upside down and [thus] to cover the traces of eating.” 25 The second domain concerns relations with persons present according to the relative social status involved. The most elaborate etiquette manuals contain a number of paragraphs to differentiate attitudes of behavior vis-à-vis the host or other guests as well as passages that focus on unsavory behavior and thus imagine other people whose feelings have to be respected. The chapter “How Women Should Eat the Ten Thousand Things,” in the Chastity Bookstore House for Teaching Women Loyalty 女忠教操文庫 (Onna chūkyō mi sao bunko, 1801), for example, gives the following admonition: “One should eat in such a way as not to make any loud noises with the mouth.” 26 The third and fourth patterns of relationships call for a distinction between the relationship to one’s internal personality and one’s relation to the (external) body. Norms of eating in themselves constitute a “technique of the

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self” that does not only address itself to the outer appearance but also affects internal motives; it subjects dispositions, urges, and emotions to a discipline that is conducive to life in society. Compliance with table manners amounts to not yielding to emotions and urges. Satisfaction of hunger or gratification of the lust to eat are brought into a form that follows established rules of social exchange and that acknowledges (and heeds) the feelings, sensitivities, and thresholds of shame and repugnance of others. Achievement of social competence does not only mean command of appropriate attitudes (and the inner dispositions they are grounded in) with which a human being enters upon relations of interaction; disciplining the body, too, becomes an indispensable task. However, internal cultivation can only show itself via external bodily movements. The disciplining regimen that table manners impose upon the body evolves along two tracks. One has to master a large number of motion sequences to be able to handle utensils like bowls, plates, and chopsticks in a manner appropriate for the norm set by the immediate occasion and the given constellation of persons involved. 27 Moreover, the body has to grow accustomed to a mode of control over its natural expressions that, like noises while eating, occur unintentionally through carelessness; better even that this control is internalized so that it becomes second nature. Internalization of the control function can, as Norbert Elias had argued, be achieved by means of developing shame and repugnance thresholds that have found social acceptance and that are impressed upon the body. Thus bodily discipline is linked with the development of an emotional sensitivity attuned to a certain image of man and his body as agents fit for social intercourse. The image that this culture of etiquette called forth in observers from Europe and North America is well exemplified by Matthias Heine’s words at the end of his report on the 2007 workshop. “‘We’ [Europeans] do not see ourselves as cold ‘robots’ like the East-European communists of the past and present day East Asians.” 28 Such summary characterizations of “East Asians” have a long history, of course. Johann Gottfried Herder described what he saw as the rigors of Confucian morals and rules of conduct in harsh words and arrived at a devastating conclusion. He respects Confucius but at the same time states, “I do not neglect the fetters he himself wore and that he in full consciousness forced upon the superstitious masses and the whole Chinese institutions of government by way of his political morals for all ages. Because of his moral teachings this nation came to a standstill in the midst of its development, arrested at the age of a boy-child because this mechanical engine of his teachings of manners eternally impeded the free progress of the mind [. . .].” Despite all their useful inventions like printing and so on the Chinese will always remain Chinese and never attain to the freedom of the mind of the ancient Greek. 29

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The scathing criticism in Eduard von Hartmann’s study on moral consciousness even surpasses Herder. The principle of the Doctrine of the Mean does not belong to Hellas but to China where long before Aristotle it had been brought forth by Kung-tse or Konfutse. Where the whole of life is externalized in mannered ceremonies and politeness is raised to the position of a cardinal virtue, where the people in their empty mode of conduct look so much alike each other as chinaware figurines, where society in its mindless and characterless uniformity resembles a lacquered tea tray, there the principle of the Mean indeed is the perfect expression of the national ethical thinking.

A few lines later von Hartmann speaks about the “apotheosis of mediocrity” and “narrow-minded parochial pedantry.” 30 IV OUTWARD FORM AND INNER DISPOSITION Neither Herder nor von Hartmann found anything “cool,” in the colloquial sense of the word, in the Confucian culture of morals and affect management. Confucian literature in China as well as in Japan knows a long history of discussing the role of li / rei or rules of conduct / politeness for the shaping of social relations, the maintenance of order and the control of detrimental drives in human nature. There was even an awareness that rei, as the force that differentiates men and their behavior according to their social positions, might cause too much strain on human beings to be bearable. Therefore rei has to be paired with “music” or yue / gaku 楽 as the complementary force that harmonizes men with each other and cancels out the stressful effects of “rites.” Not only Confucian theory but also the practical advice books, which were published in ever growing numbers since the early 18th century in Japan, place etiquette in the context of shūshin 修身 or cultivating one’s personality, an undertaking that can well be interpreted as a form of affect management. But does affect management have to be placed side by side with aloofness, detachment, or, for that matter, “coolness?” Japanese etiquette rule manuals down to the present day would not agree with such an identification. On the contrary, following the tenets of rei does not make men detached and uncaring at all, but caring, cordial and “warm.” To be sure, Tei might entail social differentiation and the atmosphere of estrangement and even coldness as undeniable constituents of etiquette rule collections. The importance of the “rites” for giving order to society is explained in the Colorfully Dyed Paper for Women in Idle Hours 女つれづれ色紙染 (Onna tsurezure iro kamizome; 1721): “Rites” ensure that the social hier-

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archical positions of “lord” and “retainer,” of “parents” and “children,” of “elder” and “younger,” and of “noble” and “base” do not fall into disorder. Similarly, the Hundred Articles According to the Ogasawara School 小笠原 流百ヶ条 (Ogasawara ryū hyakkajō, 1770) avows: “Rites distinguish between Honorable and Vulgar. [. . .] The way to serve one’s parents and one’s lord, is totally based on the prescriptions of rites 礼式 (reishiki).” Another representative of the popular exhortatory literature, the Instructions on the Five Constant [Virtues] for Women 女五常訓 (Onna gojō kun), offers a similar message in the following words: “禮 is a character that is read [in Japanese] as ‘to forbear / to treat with respect’ 慎む (tsutsushimu). One has to treat the Buddhas and the Spirits / Gods with respect, honor one's lord, look up to one’s teacher, esteem one’s relatives, and, without behaving indiscreetly, one has to discern the middle way / the right measure even with regard to those of equal standing or of a lower rank and to strive for the proper course of action / behavior 行儀 (gyōgi).” But the object of all cultivation is the innermost part of the personality, the “heart” 心 (shin, kokoro) or inner disposition as the Instructions for Use at Home as Teachings for Boys or Seven Treasures for the Coming and Going [of Letters] 童学庭訓七宝往来 (Dōgaku teikin shichihō ōrai, 1745) know: [. . .] There is a heart filled with respect 敬ふ心 (uyamau kokoro), and one expresses the form of showing this respect in the diverse matters and things [of daily life]. In order to respect lord or father there are shape and form for doing so. In order to respect other persons one likewise finds the appropriate shape and form for it. When making a present of garments or when offering rice wine and delicacies one puts a heart filled with respect into these things. Just to make the presents look beautifully and to embellish one's words without a heart filled with respect does not conform to the original meaning of rites.

But the text goes even further. The inner disposition of showing respect that supports a civilized behavior is not restricted to situations of interaction with others only: If the above holds true might it then not allowed to behave as one likes when no person requiring respect is present? Since human beings do not possess a more precious good than their own body [i.e., their own person], it corresponds with the rites to be modest and to show respect so as not to incur any harm even at times when one does not face others—[this is true for all kinds of behavior] even unto eating and drinking, standing up and sitting down [i.e., the common forms of day to day activities]. For this reason rites and music should not part from one’s own body [one’s own person] for even a short while.

The description of “rites” in the chapter “Instruction on the Method of Discipline According to the Japanese Rites for Immediate Use” 和礼当用躾方指

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南 (Warei tōyō shitsukegata shinan) in the Grove of Characters with Great Benefits as a [Time- and Trouble]-Saving Large Collection No One Could Hope For 大益字林節用不求人大成 (Daieki jirin setsuyō fukyū jin taisei, 1717) is based on elements taken from Confucian ethics, most of all the relationship between “rites” and the virtue of “modesty” 譲 (rang / jō): Generally, the intention of the rites for dealing with others consider giving precedence and modesty 辞譲 (jijō) as the most important. Giving precedence and modesty mean to behave humbly when dealing with other persons. For example, in a reception room during the heat of summer one leaves the coolest places to others and does not mind to sit in the hottest place. Generally, this concerns choosing the most unpleasant for oneself and leaving the best for others.

But the true motivation for offering the nicest places to others and choosing the worst for oneself should not be outward appearance. This is emphasized in the Methods for Discipline as a Humorous Poem or a Collection of Various Rites 狂歌躾方諸礼集 (Kyōka shitsukekata shorei shū, 1836): However, it is not a matter of ordering the exterior 外身 (uwabe). If the innermost of their heart [i.e. inner disposition] is not made right men cannot properly execute the true meaning of rites and ceremonies. If the innermost of their hearts is not sincere, standing up and sitting down, proceeding and retreating 起居進退 (tachii furumai) [all forms of behavior] will not be sincere. When men, therefore, at all times inspect their hearts and correct the innermost of their hearts, rites and ceremonies will be executed [properly] on their own account, and when they strive for sincerity in their appearance 容貌直き (katachi naoki), the heinousness and the defects of their hearts will be healed on their own account.

The inner disposition or “sincere heart” (naoki kokoro) that is so much on the mind of the authors of these lines certainly is much more than a “cool” heart with emotions held under a tight rein. Rather, the naoki kokoro is a caring disposition that has the interest of the interaction partners at heart, so much so that even in the hottest season of summer solicitude for the comfort of the other leads one to offer him the coolest place in the room. Thus, “sincerity” here does not only connote “honesty” but also “cordiality,” “consideration,” “kindness,” and “warmhearted-ness.” The only example in this context that bears connotations of “coolness” and “detachment” might be found in remarks that use the word “dignity” to describe a behavior filled with the spirit of rei. Thus the Confucian scholar Yamaga Sokō 山鹿素行 (1622–1685) says, “If one does not properly follow the rites when eating and drinking, one probably lacks in dignity.” 31 But it is a matter of interpretation or imagination whether one wants to equate dignified conduct with reduced feelings. The texts under consideration do not hint in such a direction. Rather, a

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conduct that embodies rei is something beautiful. For another Confucian scholar, Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728), rei means to strive for the “beautiful,” a behavior of exquisite form which conforms to aesthetic demands. 32 V ETIQUETTE FOR THE MODERN AGE The concern with the heart and its caring feelings is even more conspicuous when one looks into more recent guide books. At the very beginning of his etiquette guide, Etiquette for the Modern Age 現代の作法 (Gendai no sahō, 1927), Homori Kingo 甫守謹吾 defines his understanding of a “perfect personality” 完全な人格 (kanzen na jinkaku). 33 Someone who possesses such a personality is characterized by a spirit that is lofty 高尚 (kōshō) and amicable and in his words and deeds, too, he strives to be lofty and amicable. 34 Therefore, in a person of a “cultivated and brilliant character” 修養した立派な人格 (shūyō shita rippa na jinkaku) his words and deeds that appear on the outside have to be as perfect as the loftiness and amicability of his spirit on the inside. 35 This is where etiquette comes into play: “In other words, etiquette and manners in the true sense usually have to be the manifestation of a cultivated personality.” 36 The central aspect of “etiquette and manners” lies in the outward form or practice. But Homori does not tire of stressing that this form is not just something mechanical. Rather, the mark of etiquette is that words and deeds possess an order that is based on lofty virtues and find a beautiful expression in actual behavior 美し く実行に現はれる (utsukushiku jikkō ni arawareru). 37 The outward form might be the extreme of politeness, if one’s “true heart” 衷心 (chūshin) is not endowed with “lofty virtues” one’s sincerity and true feelings cannot be beautifully expressed in words and deeds. 38 For true etiquette both these sides have to go together, and only in this combination it is part of Homori’s idea of the “essence of civilization” 文明の精華 (bunmei no seika). 39 Naturally, for a true mastery of etiquette it does not suffice to just read etiquette rules and memorize them, one has to master them by putting them to practice again and again. Only then gentlemen and ladies can truly act in a gracefully and elegantly 優美に言動する (yūbi ni gendō suru) manly or womanly manner. 40 In Motegi Misao’s advice book on “everyday etiquette” published in 1943 the historical background takes shape in a nationalistic exposition of the spirit inherent in etiquette. 41 Although the etiquette and manner rules in all societies show similarities in their purpose to maintain the social order, Japanese etiquette differs radically from that of foreign countries in that it is

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imbued with a spirit of reverence for the imperial house. Therefore, all forms of etiquette are performed with “loyalty to the lord” at their center, and it is because of this that “our national manners” 我が国民作法 (waga kokumin sahō) can “express the true Japanese spirit beautifully, raise the elegance [of behavior] and heighten the spirit of our Japanese empire.” 42 Of course, other Confucian virtues like filial piety and respect for elders are mentioned. What this results in is anything but a cool detachment. Respect for the rules of etiquette means that one treats others cordially 他人に厚く (tanin ni atsuku), takes oneself back and behaves modestly, and among friends one shows respect, treats each other with a “warm heart” 温かい心 (atatakai kokoro). 43 This again leads to a sense of beauty: “The etiquette of our country is practiced on the grounds of such a lofty and beautiful spirit 高く美しい精神 (takaku utsukushii seishin.” 44 Where do young Japanese acquire this spirit and the etiquette that flows from it? In their families of course. And it is to this purpose that “severe fathers” and “loving mothers” are required. 45 Mothers especially are tasked to bring up “splendid Japanese” 立派な日本人 (rippa na Nihon jin). 46 The discipline children learn at home is the result of “deep love and incessant patience” 深い愛と、絶間ない忍耐 (fukai ai to, taema nai nintai). 47 This discipline finds expression in a “beautiful fragrant outward form” 美しく匂 かな型 (utsukushiku nioyaka na kata). 48 But the latter only can come forth on the grounds of a “beautiful spirit/disposition” 美しい心構へ (utsukushii kokorogamae). 49 VI ETIQUETTE AND CIVIL SOCIETY After WWII the wording of etiquette guides changes and the new ideal of a democratic civil society speaks through the pages. Although adjustments became necessary concerning the concrete rules, the underlying spirit does not change despite uncoupling with Homori’s attempt to ground manners in ethics. What etiquette book authors continue to envision is a happy society of pleasant and caring people. The editors of Manners (Sahō), published by the printing house Shufu no Tomo Sha (literally the Housewife’s Friend Company) as vol. 11 in the series “Bride’s Library” in 1954, offers a clear exposition of the roles etiquette plays in modern times: “In order that we can build happy/harmonious families/homes 円満な家庭 (enman na katei), shape a society where it is a pleasure to live and lead a joyful life” etiquette rules are necessary. 50 These should not be considered something stiff and rigid, because one can handle them in a free and open manner. 51 Of course, there are

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limits to this freedom since there are certain necessary rules of behavior for all situations of life, even between the most harmonious husband and wife. 52 In the wake of the transformation that affected people’s material lifestyle as well as their political consciousness and the organization of social life after WWII, the old expression reigi sahō (“etiquette and manners”) was increasingly replaced with the new word echiketto エチケット (etiquette), as Tajima Junnosuke argued in 1966; 53 still, the core of etiquette training remained unaltered. Although a democratic spirit now suffuses Japan and people interact with each other as equals, the essence of etiquette is to “maintain a warm sympathy/kindness/caring consideration for others and not to cause them any inconvenience” 相手に対してあたたかい思いやりを保 ち、他人に迷惑をかけない (aite ni taishite atatakai omoiyari tamochi, tanin ni meiwaku o kakenai). 54 An example used to illustrate this spirit unconsciously refers to the same kind of consideration as the earlier Edo period specimen: When entertaining a guest one offers him the coolest place in the heat of summer and the warmest in winter. And this does not happen only out of a concern with outward appearance. The inner disposition or “spirit” 精神 (seishin) that strives to make the guest feel comfortable is what really matters. 55 Mastery of etiquette rules that will result in naturally performing them without need to even think how to do this, of course, will bring about a “cheerful and pleasant atmosphere” 明るく、楽しい雰囲気 (akaruku, tanoshii funiki) to one’s acts and result in a “beautiful graceful attitude” 美しく 気品ある態度 (utsukushiku kihin aru taido). 56 If only one follows etiquette in the spirit of not doing to others what one does not want to suffer oneself, Tajima avers, then it will keep a lid on tendencies of a “cold and mechanical discipline” and bring about the “warmness necessary for human society.” 57 However, these avowals seem at odds with just such examples even in present-day etiquette books that might strike the reader as “cold and mechanical.” VII ETIQUETTE AND HIERARCHY Since the earliest forms of etiquette literature greetings were an important subject. In the Japanese instance, this centrality can already be deduced from the fact that rei 禮 also means “greeting;” in other words, greeting is the epitome of polite and well-mannered behavior as such. The Encyclopedia of Manners for Daily Life edited by Ogasawara Kiyonobu who claimed for himself the position as the thirty-third head of the main branch of house Ogasawara devotes a considerable number of pages to the different situations of greeting, even including encounters in the rest room. Of importance here

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is the attitude required when meeting a superior. In the first instance, a woman, perhaps an office lady, notices the approach of a superior ahead. Well before passing him she “hurriedly” draws to the right side of the walkway so as to make it convenient for the other person to walk by her. While waiting on the side at a slight angle (perhaps forty-five degrees) for the superior to pass her she places both feet side by side and adopts a pose of respect, slightly bowing forward. Once the other is no more than three meters away she retreats half a step in order to signal that she is relinquishing the way to him and performs a deep bow of ninety degrees. Once the superior has passed her, the woman again raises her upper body but keeps it slightly inclined and follows the other’s retreat with down-turned eyes for several steps. Only then does she start to walk, taking the first step with the foot on the far side of the person who passed her (in this case the right foot), “so as not to turn her behind toward him!” 58 The reaction of the superior during this choreography of greeting consists of extending his hand in a patronizing manner when drawing near to the inferior person. The other four situations, meeting a superior in a broad corridor, a narrow corridor, meeting him while coming up or descending a staircase, follow the same principle. 59 The main subject of this exposition is an old one: the modeling of etiquette rules according to differences in social rank. This aligns with Edo period advice on how to greet properly in the Great [Time]-saving [Compilation] of Japan for Countless Generations as an Inexhaustable Storehouse 大 日本永代節用無尽蔵 (Dai Nihon eitai setsuyō mujin zō, 1849). How to greet on the road: When encountering a noble person or one’s lord, one has to greet by lowering both hands so that the fingers touch the back of one's foot and by bending down the head. This is the proper form [of greeting].

Other early modern texts go even further when they distinguish between three different levels of polite behavior relative to the social standing of the interacting partners. This is illustrated well by rules that focus on how to hold one’s chopsticks. In one case, the rules advise readers to hold their chopsticks “shortly,” or “a little bit above the middle” when eating in front of a “noble person” (Brush-[written] Records of the Various Rites 諸礼筆記 or Shorei hikki, 1706). Similarly, the Manner of [Teaching] Discipline for the Good Medicine 薬躾方 (Ryōyaku shitsukegata, 1851) explains for the same situation that one should hold the sticks at “seven parts” of their length. But when eating together with someone of equal rank it is “eight parts,” and in case of an inferior “nine parts.” Such status conscious differentiations keep their validity beyond the Edo period and can still be observed in early Meiji period etiquette manuals. This is illustrated again by rules for formal greeting, bowing to people of superior or inferior status, that closely follow their early modern predecessors. De-

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spite changes in wording, contemporary etiquette books still distinguish between three degrees of greeting, i.e., “deep bowing” (“most polite bowing” 最敬礼, sai keirei), “ordinary bowing” (“polite bowing” 敬礼, keirei), and “slight bowing” (“head bowing” 会釈, eshaku). The first entails lowering the upper half of the body by nearly ninety degrees. The arms are kept near to the body, with the hands gliding down the front of the legs while executing the bow. This kind of bowing is reserved for situations of highest formality and for greeting persons of particularly high rank. “Ordinary bowing” applies in all every-day situations and calls for bowing by forty-five degrees. Lastly, the third way of greeting can be used in all situations where a formal bow is not necessary. 60 Pre-1945 etiquette books, however, specify that the most formal way of bowing is reserved for the Emperor, members of the imperial family as well as Buddhist and Shintōist deities. Interesting enough, the prescribed degree of bowing is not ninety but only forty-five degrees. “Ordinary bowing,” then, requires bending by thirty degrees. 61 It seems that the extreme way of bowing with lowering the hands until they touched the feet described in Edo-period texts was discontinued after 1868. These rules have their place in what already the ancient Chinese literature had identified as one of the main functions of “rites,” namely to make clear the differences in social standing by means of the way people behave in contact with each other. At that time, the separating effect of the “rites” had been recognized as something that in its severity might be too exacting, and for this reason “rites” were paired with “music” for its soothing and harmonizing results. The strain of such a status conscious implementation of etiquette rules, one might expect, is too heavy to bear for those who stand at the lower end of situations of human interaction (although in a hierarchically organized society status is relative to that of the persons with whom one interacts, and while in one situation one might have to behave in accordance with the inferior position in others one might be the superior). Despite the ancient literature’s claims to a harmoniously ordered society grounded in a system of “rites and music,” the dissatisfaction of those who have to express their social inferiority via forms of polite behavior expected from them can be imagined, and was eloquently voiced by Fukuzawa Yukichi 福沢諭吉 (1835–1901) in his autobiography. The philosopher writes about his childhood: Not only on official occasions, but in private intercourse, and even among children, the distinctions between high and low were clearly defined. Children of lower samurai families like ours were obliged to use a respectful manner of address in speaking to the children of high samurai families, while these children invariably used an arrogant form of address to us. Then what fun was there in playing together?

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In another place he recalls, “If he [a warrior of low status] should encounter an upper samurai on the road in the rain, he had to take off his wooden clogs and prostrate himself by the roadside.” Such recollections abound, and in the end Fukuzawa rationalized his aversion of the status system and the rules of etiquette concomitant with it in the following way: Born as I was in a family of low rank, I recall being always discontent with the things I had to endure. But later, whenever I felt myself insulted, I resented the fact of the insult but did not hold it against the person who committed it. I was rather sorry for such men, for I regarded them as coarse fools who did not know the wherefore of sensible behavior. 62

For the etiquette literature itself, however, there seems to be no contradiction between the “warm heart” that has to find expression in the manner one performs the rules of polite behavior and the severe formality of the patterns of behavior envisioned for an exchange situation such as greeting a superior. This is true for Edo period texts as well as for their modern counterparts. VIII GENTLE AND WONDERFUL PERSONS Despite Fukuzawa Yukichi’s critique, the Japanese discussion of etiquette does not have a counterpart to the hostile sentiments voiced during the European enlightenment and the debasement of outward rules for polite behavior when compared to ethics. There are critical voices, of course, and a general disregard of etiquette in daily life. But someone who thinks he does not need manners because he will not pander to others and trusts in his personal abilities in the end is nothing but a child that annoys his peers because he does not know the proper way of interacting with others. 63 Therefore, such famous etiquette book authors as Shiotsuki Yaeko call for remembering the valuable aspects of the old Japanese customs and mores that do not have to fear comparison with their European-North American counterparts, and she offers her books as a “clever mix of the good customs of old Japan and modern life.” 64 Or as the editors of another advice book by the Woman’s Friend Company stresses, even in the midst of our rational modern lives it is necessary to acknowledge how important the customs from the past are. After all etiquette is the lubricator that makes our lives run smoothly. 65 It is only necessary to choose what fits present-day life and to remind oneself of eschewing shame. If one masters the manners for a harmonious and smooth interaction with others one well can expect to be called a “gentle and wonderful person” やさしくて素敵なかた (yasashikute suteki na kata) or be characterized as sumāto スマート. 66 This word, derived from English

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“smart,” perhaps is the one word in modern etiquette books that comes nearest to any idea of “coolness.” A sumāto na person is someone who knows how to act in a refined and smooth way in the company of others. However, such smoothness does not mean to be “cool” in a detached or emotionally controlled way but to be “gentle and wonderful!” Now, one might argue that in order to give such an amicable impression under all circumstances it is unavoidable to hold one’s feelings in check. And would that not mean that one wears a pleasant face on the outside that does not correspond to what one feels within? Here lies the age-old dilemma of the question of how sincere someone with refined manners can be. Japanese etiquette books in the past and the present are of one mind in this regard. Form does not exist for form’s sake, and though a management of affects certainly is necessary, inner heart and outer form have to correspond. The sumāto na kata or “gentle and warm person” is not a dissembler. She or he is able “to act at all times with a gentle disposition that cares for others.” 67 Etiquette literature is concerned with the true and sincere heart and the ways it can express itself. And this goes even beyond the pale of interhuman relationships, as the New Family Etiquette for Special Events teaches: Not only the death of a dear person causes grief and pain. The same holds true for the death of pets, but dead pets hitherto have just been corpses, a kind of waste that were disposed of for a fee. Such a cold treatment does not meet with the emotions of the bereft, and now one can have them buried like other members of the family. Thus, the funeral for pets and their grave are part of the etiquette for grieving, and as the text explains, one can have Buddhist memorial services performed for them too, if one so wishes. 68 This, too, is part of what is advertised in the foreword; the need to master etiquette as something that helps to interact with others in a pleasant manner without being carried away by mere form, so that “bountiful/rich human relations” 豊 かな人間関係 (yutakana ningen kankei) can be established. 69 IX CONCLUSION: WARM HEART VERSUS DETACHMENT This last example, more than any other, might show that etiquette rules do not aim at a reduction, suppression, or even obliteration of emotions. They offer a technique of affect management, to be sure, but this does not necessarily lead to a “cool” or even cold and disinterested personality. On the contrary, emotions are viewed positively, and the warmer and more caring they are the better. Etiquette rules, in the understanding of Japanese advice texts at least since Edo times, offer to help bring these emotions into an ordered shape that is conducive to the maintenance of social life. The poten-

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tially destructive force of unhindered emotions is turned into the lubricant that makes society harmonious and pleasant. What etiquette books down through the ages envision, therefore, is not far removed from what Master Kong or Confucius himself might have thought about rei or “rites” in Benjamin Schwartz’s interpretation: The various forms of rei are channels through which the energies of “benevolence” and the other central virtues of Confucian ethical thought find their shape in the sphere of social life. 70 The tendency to stress the importance of the “heart,” the “warm heart,” or finally a sumāto na personality in Japanese etiquette manuals is present since Edo times. As the early modern texts already explained, this inner disposition serves to counter the danger of a perfunctory subservience to etiquette rules. To follow the “rites” just for outward appearance would run contrary to their aim of bringing about ordered, harmonious, and reliable human relations. Thus one might even argue that warm heartedness as a prerequisite of polite behavior can be seen as the antidote to superficiality and cold adherence to an outward rigid formality. The detrimental effects caused by a complex system of etiquette rules in a hierarchy conscious society, which were voiced by Fukuzawa Yukichi, do not play a role in the advice literature. Here, one finds criticism, if at all, only of those who revile good manners as outward “form” 型 (kata), as something that an independently thinking human being does not need, which today results in “unprincipled and selfish” 無節操で自 分勝手 (musessō de jibun katte) young people. 71 If asked, etiquette book authors might answer that if etiquette rules were enacted by warm-hearted persons full of solicitude and caring on both sides of a hierarchically structured exchange relation, the problems that caused so much anguish to Fukuzawa Yukichi would not arise. But that is only conjecture. It cannot be denied, however, that etiquette books believe human beings capable of encountering each other in a caring and warm-hearted manner, showing their solicitude for each other via the rules of polite behavior. Thus, one might conclude, they are based on a trust in the fundamental benignity of human nature. 72 NOTES 1. JT (http://www.jti.co.jp.) 2. Norbert Elias: Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, 2 vols., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 21977. Engl. as The Civilizing Process, Blackwell 2000. 3. Thomas Frank: The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1997, 31. 4. This is not the place to discuss the “Cool Japan” campaign of the Japanese government following the publication of Douglas McGray’s article “Japan’s Gross National Cool” in 2002 (Foreign Policy 130, 44–54), the “cool” image fostered about certain products of contemporary Japanese popular culture, and the discussions about soft power. Cf. Lisette Gebhardt: “Cool

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Japan Studies—Japanologie Frankfurt,” University Frankfurt 2008, http:// www.japanologie.uni-frankfurt.de/__Dateien/_Texte/cool_japan/index.html. 5. On a side note it may be allowed to voice some doubts concerning the pertinence of “coolness” as an instrument of analysis and epistemological cognition that is superior to what could be expressed by established expressions in philosophical discourse outside a very specific area of interest within American cultural studies. My impression is that “cool” and “coolness” are fashionable words that tend to rouse interest without delivering a new form of content beyond what had been available as analytical tools so far—at least in a not too small number of cases. An example is Thomas Frank’s Conquest of Cool. This insightful and thought-provoking book could well have done without a reference to “cool.” In the text, the word occurs in only two (!) places, and that in a very unspecific sense. The author talks much more about “hipness.” Yet, he puts “cool” in the main title, thus arousing interest. Might this be a case of creative advertisement, perhaps? On the other hand, “cool” and “coolness” contribute significantly to our insight into specific cultural and social constellations, as Joel Dinerstein and Jim McGuigan have shown in their respective essays. The question, however, remains whether this category of inquiry can be detached from its original context and turned into a category of analysis of universal applicability, regardless of time and cultural or social context. To explore this possibility, to my mind, is one of the tasks of this book. 6. Joachim Ritter (ed.): Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 13 vols., Basel, Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co, 1971–2007. 7. Ibid.: 11 (2001), 254. 8. Ibid. 9. This already was subject of a workshop in Berlin (“Apatheia Besonnenheit Coolness. Das ABC der reduzierten Gefühle”) in 2007. 10. Benjamin Schwartz: The World of Thought in Ancient China, Cambridge, London 1985, 77. 11. Watanabe Hiroshi 渡辺浩: Kinsei Nihon shakai to Sō Gaku 近世日本社会と宋学 (Early Modern Japanese Society and Song Learning), Tōkyō Dagaku Shuppan Kai 1985. 12. I elaborated this point in Kinski: “Rei wa inshoku ni hajimaru. Kinsei Nihon no sahō shū o megutte” 礼は飲食に始まる.近世日本の作法書をめぐって (“Rites” Begin with “Eating and Drinking.” Deliberations on Early Modern Japanese Etiquette Books), Zinbun gakuhō 86, Kyoto: Kyōto Daigaku Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyū Sho 2002, 97–142. 13. Ibid.: 115–24. 14. These writings can be characterized as household encyclopedias containing the knowledge of their times in concise form. See Yokoyama Toshio: “Some Notes on the History of Japanese Traditional Household Encyclopedias,” Japan Forum 1 (2), 1989: 243–55. 15. Cf. Kinski: “Basic Japanese Etiquette Rules and Their Popularization: Four Edo-Period Texts, Transcribed, Translated, and Anotated,” Japonica Humboldtiana 5 (2001), 59–101. 16. Ibid. 17. Etiquette rule collections are a kind of normative text and as such they tell how one should behave. It is not their purpose to describe how people actually acted. 18. Matsumura Kôji 松村浩二: “Yōjō ron teki na shintai e no manazashi” 養生論的な身体 へのまなざし (The View on the Body in the Discussions on Nourishing Life), in: Edo no shisō 6. Shintai, josei ron 江戸の思想. 身体,女性論 (The Thought of Edo 6. Discussions on Body and Women), Perikan Sha 1997: 99.　 19. Yokota Fuyuhiko 横田冬彦: “Ekikenbon no dokusha” 益軒本の読者 (The Readers of Ekiken’s Books), in: Yokoyama Toshio 横山俊夫 (ed.): Kaibara Ekiken: Tenchi waraku no bunmei gaku 貝原益軒. 天地和楽の文明学 (Kaibara Ekiken: The Learning of Civilization Contributing to Peace and Harmony Between Heaven and Earth), Heibon Sha 1995: 315–53; “Kinsei minshū shakai ni okeru chiteki dokusho no seiritsu: Ekikenbon o yomu jidai” 近世民 衆社会における知的読書の成立. 益軒本を読む時代 (The Establishment of Reading out of Intellectual Motivation among the Early Modern Populace: The Age that Read Ekiken’s Books), in: Edo no shisō 5. Dokusho no shakai shi 江戸の思想. 読書の社会史 (The Thought of Edo 5: A Social History of Reading), Perikan Sha 1996: 48–67; Tenka taihei 天下泰平 (The Realm in a State of Highest Peace), Nihon no rekishi 16 (The History of Japan, vol. 16), Kōdan Sha 2002: 325, 327.

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20. Matsumura adduces a number of works from the late 18th and early 19th century—e.g., Ban Kōkei’s 伴蒿蹊 (1733–1806) Biographies of Eccentric Men of Recent Times近世畸人伝 (Kinsei kijin den) of 1790 (Kansei 2) and Hirose Tansō's 広瀬淡窓 (1782–1856) Evaluation of the Grove of Confucian [Scholars] 儒林評 (Jurin hyō) of 1836 (Tenpô 7)—that introduce Ekiken as a scholar who provided useful knowledge for everyday practice. Matsumura 1997: 115. 21. Expanded versions were published in 1849 and 1864. 22. Yokoyama Toshio: “In Quest of Civility: Conspicuous Uses of Household Encyclopedias in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” in: Zinbun 34 (1991), 197–222; Yokoyama Toshio, Kojima Mitsuhiro, Sugita Shigeharu: Nichiyō hyakka gata setsuyō shū no tsukawarekata: Ji koguchi shutaku sō no densan gazō shori ni yoru shiyō ruikei sekishutsu no kokoromi (Patterns of Usage of Setsuyōshū, the Popular Household Encyclopedias of Nineteenth-Century Japan: A Graphic Analysis of Wear and Tear on the Bottom Surface of Surviving Copies), Kyoto: The Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University 1998. The history of reading together with the development of printing, book stores, and commercial lending libraries has been the subject of a number of studies. To give only a few examples: Konta Yōzō 今田洋三: Edo no honyasan 江 戸の本屋さん (Edo’s Bookshops), Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai 1977; Nagatomo Chiyoji 長 友千代治: Edo jidai no shomotsu to dokusho 江戸時代の書物と読書 (Books and Reading in the Edo-Period), Tōkyō Dō Shuppan 2001; David Chibbett: The History of Japanese Printing and Book Illustration, Tokyo, Los Angeles, San Francisco: Kodansha International 1977; Ekkehard May: Die Kommerzialisierung der japanischen Literatur in der späten Edo-Zeit (1750–1868). Rahmenbedingungen und Entwicklungstendenzen der erzählenden Prosa im Zeitalter ihrer ersten Vermarktung, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1983; Peter Kornicki: The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press 2001. However, reading as an actual practice and the correlation between reading and the application of what has been read—e.g., in advice books—is still an intangible subject. 23. Jinrin kunmō zui, in: Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryō shūsei 日本庶民生活史料集成 (Collection of Historical Materials Concerning the Life of the Common People of Japan), Tanigawa Kenichi 谷川健一 (ed.), vol. 30, Sanichi Shobō 1982: 381 . 24. Liji, SBBY 7.2b–3a. 25. Ekiken zenshū 益軒全集 (Complete Works of Ekiken), ed. by Ekiken Kai 1910, Vol. 1: 314. It is beside the point here to inquire after the motives for eating only half the fish and then turn it upside down. Cf. Michael Kinski: “Bratfisch und Vogelbeine: Frühmoderne Ettikettevorschriften zum Verhältnis von Mensch, Tier und Nachrung,” in: Japonica Humboldtiana 3 (1999), 49–103. Suffice it to say that Ekiken’s advice diverged from what became the common rule for consuming grilled fish. Already the Record of Weighty Treasures for Women 女重宝記 (Onna chōhō ki) had stipulated in 1692 that one should only eat the upper side but thereafter refrain from turning the fish upside down by all means. Ibid. This became standard behavior— at least according to the collections of etiquette rules—and stayed so until the beginning of the 20th century. 26. Michael Kinski: “‘How to Eat the Ten Thousand Things’: Table Manners on the Edo Period,” in: Eric Rath, Stephanie Assmann: Japanese Foodways: Past & Present, Urbana, Chicago, Springfield: University of Illinois Press 2010: 47. Of the ninety etiquette collections from the Edo period that I have investigated about a third address women only. Among these, seventeen contain a prohibition of eating noises as an offensive bodily expression. Of the seventeen, twelve speak of “mouth noises” (kuchioto) or “tooth noises” (haoto) in general. Another five warn against noises while eating certain dishes, noodles among them. Of the remaining sixty works for men or the general reader only thirteen address eating noises in some way, and only two of these contain a comprehensive prohibition. All the others warn against noises when eating one dish or the other (noodles, grilled fowl, rice gruel, or bones among them). Kinski: “Kuchioto takaranu yō ni kuu beshi: Reigi sahō no fuhensei to Edo ki reihō shū ni okeru tokushu sei. Seibetsu o rei ni” 口音高からぬ様にくふべし. 礼義作法の普遍性と江 戸期礼法集における特殊性, 性別を例に (You Should not Eat with Loud Noises: Universality of Etiquette Rules and Gender Differences in Edo Period Etiquette Literature), in: Kokubungaku Kaishaku to kanshō 70.8 (2005), 211–22.

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27. Ekiken’s advice for uncovering the dishes and eating them in the proper sequence is a masterpiece of elaboration: “If one takes up the chopsticks, first one should take them up in reverse manner [from above], clamp them in between the ring finger and the small finger of the right hand, take off the cover of the rice bowl with the thumb, index finger, and middle finger and pass it over to the left hand. One should put down [both] on the right side [of the eating table]. Moreover, in the case that the side dish bowl too has a cover one should open it with the left hand. [. . .] At first one takes the rice bowl up with the left hand, takes the chopsticks in correct order properly, eats once or twice of the rice and puts it down. [Next] one takes up the soup bowl with the left hand and eats of the contents. Then one should eat again of the rice, slurp/drink of the soup [. . .] and eat of the side dish on the main eating table. If there are two side dishes on it, one should [first] eat of the one standing on the left. If pickles are standing on the left, one should eat [at first] of the right hand side dish. One should not eat of side dishes [on other eating tables] before first having eaten of the side dishes on the main eating table. One should several times eat in the order rice, soup, side dish, rice, soup, side dish. It is wrong to change from rice to side dish, or from one side dish to another, or from the soup to a side dish. It is also wrong to change [directly] from the main soup to the second soup.” Ekiken kai 1910: 306–307. 28. “Was die Queen und einen Auftragskiller verbindet,” in: Die Welt 10.12.2007; online http://www.welt.de/kultur/article1445884/Was_die_Queen_und_einen_Auftragskiller_ verbindet.html;20111213. 29. J. G. Herder: Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 214–15. 30. E. von Hartmann: Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewußtseins, Berlin: Wegweiser-Verlag 1924: 117–18. 31. Yamaga gorui 山鹿語類 (Yamaga’s Words According to Subject), Yamaga Sokō zenshū 山鹿素行全集 (Complete Works of Yamaga Sokō), ed, by Hirose Yutaka 広瀬豊, vol. 7, Iwanami Shoten 1940–1942: 86. 32. “Rei means to strive for beauty.” 礼は美を務むる者也. Mōshi shiki 孟子識 (Insights into Master Meng), cf. Tahara Tsuguo 田原嗣郎: Sorai gaku no sekai 徂徠学の世界 (The World of Sorai’s Learning), Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppan Kai 1991: 68. 33. Homori Kingo: Gendai no sahō, Nankō Sha 1927: 1. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid.: 2. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. This understanding of civilization and the view of etiquette as essential to becoming a civilized human being stands in the intellectual tradition of the Meiji era enlightenment philosophers and their interpretation of Americo-European philosophy. Cf. Watanabe Hiroshi 渡辺浩: Nihon seiji shisō shi: 17–19 seiki 日本政治思想史. 十七十–九世紀 (History of Political Thought in Japan: 17th to 19th Century) Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppan Kai 2010: 404–12. 40. Homori 1927: 3. 41. Motegi Misao 茂手木みさを: Nichijō reihō to seiyō 日常礼法と整容 (Everyday Etiquette and Taking Care of One’s Outward Appearance), Zōshin Dō 1943. 42. Ibid.: 3. 43. Ibid.: 5. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid.: 7. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid.: 7, 10. 50. Shufu no Tomo Sha 主婦之友社 (ed.): Sahō 作法 (Manners), Shufu no Tomo Sha 1954: 1 (Hanayome bunko 11). 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid: 2.

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53. Tajima Junnosuke 田島淳之介: Gendai no reigi sahō 現代の礼儀作法 (Etiquette and Manners of Our Age), Nihon Bungei Sha 1966: 28. Tajima finds it necessary to stress that the word echiketto is not “an English word dropped like a misbegotten child by the occupying forces” but has its roots in French and refers explicitly to the “our country’s etiquette and manners.” Ibid.: 29. 54. Ibid.: 32. 55. Ibid.: 33. 56. Ibid.: 37, 39. 57. Ibid.: 41. 58. Ogasawara Kiyonobu 小笠原清信 (ed.): Kanzen zukai. Kurashi no manā zensho 完全 図解. くらしのマナー全書 (Explained by Illustrations Throughout: Encyclopedia of Manners for Everyday- Life), Tōyō Shuppan 1994: 30. 59. Ibid.: 31. In the latter case it is vital to time the waiting, bowing, and commencing to walk so as not to look down on the superior. 60. Ogasawara 1994: 12–13. 61. Homori Kingo: Shin sahō yōgi 新作法要義 (New Essentials of Etiquette), Kinkō Dō Shoseki 1931: 88–90; Motegi Misao, Hayami Kimiko 早見君子: Nichijō reihō to seiyō 日常礼 法と整容 (Every-Day Etiquette and Correct Body Posture), Ōsaka: Zōshin Dō 1943: 27–29. 62. The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, rev. transl. by Eiichi Kiyooka, New York: Columbia University Press 1966: 18, 179. Cf. also Carmen Blacker: The Japanese Enlightenment: A Study of the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1969: 2. 63. 対人関係を知らないコドモが混じっていてはみんなが迷惑なのだ (taijin kankei o shiranai kodomo ga majitte ite wa minna ga meiwaku na no da). Chiteki Seikatsu Kenkyū Jo 知的生活研究所: Otona no rūru bukku 大人のルール・ブック (Rule Book for Adults), Seishun Shuppan Sha 1994: 3. 64. Shiotsuki Yaeko 塩月弥栄子: Shiotsuki Yaeko no kankon sōsai jiten 塩月弥栄子の冠 婚葬祭事典 (Shiotsuki Yaeko’s Encyclopdedia of Etiquette for Special Events), Kōdan Sha 1998: 8. 65. マナーは私たちの暮らしをスムーズにする円滑油なのです (manā wa watakushi tachi no kurashi o sumūzu ni suru junkatsuyu na no desu). Shufu no Tomo Sha: Kankon sōsai jiten 冠婚葬祭事典 (Encyclopdedia of Etiquette for Special Events), Shufu no Tomo Sha 1999: n.p. 66. Ibid. 67. 絶えず相手を思いやるやさしい気持ちで実行してくださること (taezu aite o omoiyaru yasashii kimochi de jikkō shite kudasaru koto). Matsumoto Shigemi 松本繁美: Kankon sōsai, kurashi no manā dai hyakka 冠婚葬祭・暮らしのマナー大百科 (Great Encyclopdedia of Etiquette for Special Events and the Manner Rules for Everyday Life), Nihon Bungei Sha n.a.: 3. 68. Yanagibashi Setsuko 柳橋節子et al.: Atarashii katei no kankon sāsai. Kore kara no ostukiai to manā 新しい家庭の冠婚葬祭. これからのおつき合いとマナー (New Family Etiquette for Special Events: Rules for Getting Along with Others and Manners for Times to Come), Shin Nihon Hōki Shuppan 1999: 279. 69. Ibid.: n.p. 70. Schwartz 1985: 77. 71. Baba Keiichi 馬場啓一: Otoko no sahō: “Kakko ii jentoruman” ni naru seitōha sutairu 男の作法: “格好いいジェントルマン” になる正統派スタイル (Good Manners for Men: The Proper Style for Becoming a Stylish/Attractive Gentleman), Kō Shobō 2008: 1. 72. The repeated emphasis on a “warm heart,” of course, can be read as an indication that the authors of etiquette rule collections are aware of how people in actual social life perform etiquette rules: namely in the perfunctory way warned against through all ages.

Chapter Ten

Iki: A Japanese Concept of Coolness? Elena Giannoulis

Coolness as a form of emotional management has not been researched in the field of Japanese culture and literature. 1 If “cool” is mentioned in connection with Japan, it is almost always associated with the slogan “Cool Japan” coined by the American journalist Douglas McGray as an allusion to Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia” of the year 2002. It has been repeatedly drawn on since this time in the United States and Europe when describing Japanese pop culture. Since 2005 “Cool Japan” has also been instrumentalized in Japan, as politicians used it to create a positive image of Japan abroad, where the country presents itself mainly via its achievements in popular culture. The sales strategy proved successful; the nation branding practiced since the mid-1990s led to the establishment of a Japanese lifestyle in popular and youth culture in the United States and Europe, which includes manga, anime, cosplay, 2 J-pop, 3 and video games. 4 But “cool,” or rather its nominalized form “coolness,” is more than just a brand. The slogan coolness is also used outside Japan in connection with Japanese Cinema, 5 with self-control, bushidō (“way of the warrior”), 6 the aesthetics of Zen, and to describe the cultural self and other, such that the Japanese mentality is sometimes depicted as “cool.” 7 These few examples suffice to illustrate the difficulties involved in grasping and defining the semantic field of coolness in its entirety and complexity. In the scope of the above examples alone, it can touch on such diverse areas as marketing, emotional/affect control, (seeming) lack of emotion, social conventions, or culturally defined patterns of behavior, as well as specific concepts of identity and self-definitions. 8 Similarly, an etymological approach will grant only a limited glimpse of the meaning of (Japanese) coolness. It was only after World War II that the loan word “cool” (kūru) 9 came into use more frequently in Japan through the reception of U.S. (pop) 215

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culture, and thus its semantic connotations are almost the same as in the United States. However, an investigation into Japanese literary and cultural history for concepts that are not subsumed under the slogan of coolness, but are nevertheless similar in meaning, yields results dating back to the socalled Edo period (1603–1868). This chapter discusses one such Japanese concept, that of iki—an urban aesthetic ideal as well as a lifestyle or a behavioral code—as one variation on coolness, and endeavors to prove that iki fulfils functions similar to the European and North American variants of coolness, though composed of a different set of elements. In this context, coolness is understood as a form of emotional management leading to a specific mode of communication, which provides a pre-defined ritualized answer to imbalances of power based on social differences. Coolness as a pattern of emotional management is the subject’s attempt to distance itself by means of specific strategies from its own emotions and from its surroundings. Thus, coolness functions mainly as a self-protective mechanism. This chapter first introduces iki from a terminological and conceptual point of view, explaining the necessity to differentiate between historical iki and the modern term, which was conceptualized by the philosopher Kuki Shūzō (1888-1941) in his study ‘Iki’ no Kōzō (1930; translated as The Structure of Iki). 10 The main focus here will be on the reasons why it is difficult to frame iki as a concept (1). The following section discusses the functions of and forms taken by the concept (2). Finally, these will be measured against criteria for definitions of coolness commonly used in research. With respect to the modern version of iki, the attitude of the dandy needs to be outlined, since this seems to be the foil against which Kuki drafted his iki (3). The conclusion will question whether iki should be discussed as a concept of coolness, and will also examine to what extent coolness is a suitable and useful category for systematic analysis (4). I APPROXIMATE DEFINITIONS OF IKI Iki in the context of its time of origin The corresponding entry in the new Großes deutsch-japanisches Wörterbuch (Comprehensive Japanese-German dictionary) outlines the semantic scope of the word iki. Translations into German include: Eleganz (elegance), Chic (chic, stylishness) Raffinesse (sophistication), exquisit (exquisite), fein (classy), geschmackvoll (tasteful), kultiviert (cultivated), stilvoll (stylish), soigniert (soigné), nobel (posh), mysteriös (mysterious) or gewitzt (quickwitted). Kenyūsha’s Japanese-English Dictionary translates iki as smartness,

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stylishness, chic, highspirit, verve, refined, elegant, fashionable, with good sense, worldly-wise, sophisticated, aware of the latest trends, and au fait. According to Ueda iki means in Japanese simply “high spirit” or “high heart” 11 and was built from the concept of sui 12, 13 which is written with the same Chinese character 粋. While sui had been cultivated toward the end of the 17th century in Ōsaka, the term “iki” appeared in the Edo region during the 19th century. 14 More specifically, it developed during the Meiwa period (1764–1772) in Fukagawa, an unlicensed red light district, and at this time its meaning already included: “to be refined or chic; sophisticated beauty; to be elegant.” 15 Thus, iki was an attribute typically used to describe courtesans and geishas. 16 It was used initially only by insiders, later becoming a symbol for the character of merchants and the lifestyle of a whole social class. A man or a woman in pursuit of iki would employ a certain elegant and flirtatious demeanor, backed by pluck, to win over the object of desire. Like a good Edokko [inhabitants of the capital who were also born there], though, a successful pursuer [of iki] was able to recognize a relationship destined to fail, and thus retreat quickly. This spiritual tenet became sublimated in the psyche of the common people of Edo, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the townspeople there identified themselves very closely with iki and strove to cultivate and embody this spirit. 17

Further, Iki was incorporated into many facets of everyday life, such as “patterns of speech, choices in food, furniture, and other house hold items [. . .].” 18 Before the functions and exact components of this historical iki are examined in more detail, the following section will deal with its modern adaptation. The Framing of the term iki at the beginning of the Shōwa-period (1926–1989) In the 1930s, as Japan sought to shape a national and cultural identity of its own, and to find its place within the international community of states, the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shūzō returned from a stay in Europe and published his study ‘Iki’ no Kōzō, in which he takes up and “updates” the concept of iki. Karatani Kōjin’s speaks of an “Edo revival” during the 1930s—an “‘Edo’ found within the topic of the so-called overcoming of Western modernity.” 19, 20 Kuki draws on iki as a means to construct a genuine Japanese aesthetic in contrast to Western aesthetics and philosophy. Although he takes the parallels between iki and dandyism into account, he emphasizes the uniqueness of the former based on its roots in the philosophical tradition of Japan. 21

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While it appears that mostly the artists themselves discussed aesthetic standards and principles in pre-modern Japan, in Kuki’s time the aesthetic nexus was a favorite instrument for emphasizing the validity of Japanese society and culture within the community of states, and for constructing a Japanese image abroad. 22 Doubts remain whether Kuki pursued political ambitions in outlining a Japanese aesthetic and a cultural phenomenon declared to be uniquely Japanese. It is a fact, however, that his texts were instrumentalized by political circles in the context of culturalism and imperialism. This can be observed also in essays by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965) 23 and Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960). 24 In ‘Iki’ no Kōzō, Kuki redefines the importance of iki for Japanese society and culture by locating it within a theoretical framework developed from Western methodology. 25 This is one of the reasons for the text’s polysemic character, enabling the reader to perceive it on various levels according to their cognitive interest or method: Atypical among the works composed by Kuki Shūzō, this brief and sometimes provocative study, although most often read and commented upon as a work of philosophy, actually opens itself up for examination from several directions at once. Read as philosophy, it has been subjected to analysis in terms of the formal ideas its author presents, as well as in the context of the book’s philosophical, cultural, even political implications. 26

Rimer sees ‘Iki’ no Kōzō as an “elegant example of cultural anthropology, or [. . .] as an example of a work of literature, composed in the spirit of the heritage of the European manner.” 27 According to Tanaka Kyūbun, Kuki's text can be understood as a critique of the theory of love by the Neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert, which is based on the body-soul dualism of occidental modernity. 28 In most cases ‘Iki’ no Kōzō is interpreted biographically, since its content displays numerous parallels to Kuki’s life. He grew up within the demimonde of the red light districts, and his life style is said to have been shaped by a mixture of stoicism and hedonism. 29, 30 In this study, Kuki’s essay is viewed as a treatise on aesthetics comprising of an inherently Japanese version of coolness designed to let Japan compete discursively with the West, and to show his countrymen that Japan has developed an aesthetic of its own. Marra comments that Kuki’s iki is “the best description of “cool” that has ever been produced.” 31, 32 According to Kuki himself, iki is a mode of existence that originates from Japanese ethnicity, and which no Western expression can even come close to grasping. Tanaka comments on Kuki’s understanding of iki as “the infinite move of a man and a woman toward each other without their ever becoming united in one body and, moreover, as a state of mind that actually takes pleasure in such a tension. [. . .] Thus Kuki detects in the world of iki a movement toward a new philosophy of the

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self.” 33 This interpretation will be explained in more detail below in the context of the structural components of iki. Problems in defining iki As can already be seen from the brief description of the development of the concept of iki in the Edo period and more modern times, a truly accurate definition of iki is difficult. Thus no Edo period documents discussing iki on a theoretical basis survive; it was practiced on a daily basis, but it was not necessarily verbalized. There is a scarcity of contemporary sources that permit conclusions about connotations of iki in that period. At best, literary texts such as ninjōbon (“love stories”) or sharebon (a prose narrative genre set in the red light districts) might be sources of implicit or explicit expressions of iki. In this chapter, however, only dictionaries and secondary sources can be used to illustrate, or reconstruct, Edo period concepts of iki. The secondary sources trying to reconstruct historical iki pose a problem because most authors draw rather uncritically on Kuki’s ‘Iki’ no Kōzō, in which iki is instrumentalized, ideologized, restructured, and partly given new semantic contents. It also important to stress that Kuki was not so much concerned with iki itself, but with positioning himself in the discourse on iki as a concept. Its reconstruction serves the self-discovery and self-assertion of a person and/or the Japanese Nation. Doubts also remain concerning Kuki’s historical sources for the definition of iki, which never really gains clear contours in his reflections. Although he occasionally cites examples from literary works and sometimes names his sources, most of his claims are not verifiable. However, these and other issues cannot be dealt with here in detail since this chapter is not concerned if iki really does consist of the components circulating in the discourse. Rather, this study focuses on whether, and to what extent, iki can be viewed in form and function as a Japanese system of coolness. II FUNCTIONS AND VARIANTS OF IKI Functions of iki In order to distil the historical functions of iki, the social and political situation during the latter half of the Edo period needs to be explained, especially the key role played by the merchants’ class (chōnin). During the late 17th century the Japanese capital of Edo prospered, and transformations began to take place in a social order based on the estates that had evolved in the feudal system. At the top of the estate system (shinōkōshō) were the samurai (shi),

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followed by the peasants (nō), the craftsmen (kō), and finally by the merchants (shō). Craftsmen and merchants, who belonged to the lowest ranks of Edo’s class hierarchy, together make up the chōnin (citizens, inhabitants of a city). 34 Thanks to their constantly increasing financial success, their social position grew stronger. In principle, feudal lords (daimyō) and samurai retained legal authority, but they gradually became more and more financially dependent on the merchants, which led to a power struggle between the two. The wealthy chōnin [. . .] lived, at least on the surface, a strictly regulated life devoted to business and the maintenance of their credit and reputations. [. . .] Despite the economic power that their wealth gave them, they were always strictly subject to the Samurai authorities, and their codes of conduct always stressed this. Although their style of life was regulated by sumptuary laws and conspicuous extravagance was liable to bring summary punishment, rich chōnin lived in a style unthinkable for the average Japanese and beyond the reach of most Samurai. 35

Prosperity allowed merchants to turn their interests toward the development of art forms of the masses, such as Kabuki, ukiyo-e (woodcuts), rakugo (comic monologues), and the already mentioned narrative forms sharebon or ninjōbon, which were set mainly in the red light districts. Publishing culture developed during the Genroku period (1688–1704), and laid the foundations for today’s mass culture by giving a broad audience direct access to information for the first time. 36 This evolution of group communication is the precondition for a common aesthetic consciousness of the merchant class, allowing them to distance themselves through their code of behavior from the samurai, who were said to lack iki. In the eyes of the merchants, the warriors were viewed as yabo (without taste, plebeian, uncultivated, stupid as well as simple, inelegant, barbaric, noisy, coarse, and provincial). Practicing iki was thus a strategy by which the lower classes could set themselves apart from the ruling class, i.e., a counterculture. In other words, iki was a mode of communication that evolved through the social inequalities of the feudal system. It also functioned as a self-protective mechanism in the face of humiliation and expropriations by the authorities, helping the chōnin to keep up a pose or attitude almost impenetrable for outsiders, which demonstrated inviolability and honor. The historical functions of iki mentioned above fade away in the context of Kuki’s uses of the term, because he lived in a different time with other contexts. As previously explained Kuki abstracted iki and tried to express it using Western terminology in order to construct a genuine Japanese aesthetic, which would enable the Japanese to develop a national consciousness of their own. Iki was fashioned into the paradigm of a Japanese self-view, and this self-view included certain factors, or features. The first manuscript of ‘Iki’ no Kōzō was written while Kuki was in Paris, toward the end of his stay

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in Europe, and thus was composed in direct contact with Western culture. Interestingly, Kuki’s approach is that he seeks Japanese uniqueness not in archaic phenomena, but in comparatively new ones. Yet it would be wrong to deduce from the article’s place of production that it was written solely with Western readers in mind. Despite using Western methodology, Kuki in fact repeatedly denies that iki may be understood outside Japan or the Japanese language. 37 Variants of iki The most important component of historical iki is coquetry. This can be explained with reference to the term’s emergence from the red light districts. In the practice of iki, coquetry refers to the tension between the two poles of man and woman, 38 where the woman (here the geisha or courtesan) embodies iki and the man (the client of the Geisha or courtesan) is the so-called tsū (connoisseur), a term that came into use around the year 1770. 39 The courtesan “knew exactly how much display of eroticism was desirable by the highest standard of taste.” 40 The tsū for his part was able to react to iki in an appropriate manner. “The appropriate manner” meant to cultivate one's emotions and not to lose oneself within the game of distance and intimacy or forget the rules of the game. 41 Thus, iki was based on a well thought-out field of tension based on reserve. Without the tension resulting from playful reserve in the field between the two poles, iki breaks down. Thus, it is the unattainability of a desired person that produces iki. Iki is a state of uncertainty, kept up by potentiality and a game of closeness and intimacy, within a mercantile relationship. Neither the courtesan nor the client allowed their emotions to get the better of them, taking up an ironically reserved posture toward each other in order to maintain control. The courtesan, who has the right to reject a customer, is thus able to assert herself (as are the traders against the samurai). As has just been demonstrated, iki is constituted by the maintenance of possibilities, within the deficient state of uncertainty tending toward the reaching of an ideal. It thus represents an interesting counterpart to Western concepts of perfection, usually achieved by reaching a final state of affairs, or gaining complete control of an ability. Iki combines—essentially as the expression of a relationship—the attributes of intimacy and reserve. Its origins differ from those of other aesthetic notions, such as wabi-sabi (a concept of the cognition of beauty), in that it relates specifically to the Edokko, and therefore symbolizes a suitable expression for use in metropolitan everyday culture. Apart from possessing iki, the Edokko were said to be “epicurean”—proud and scornful, and famous for their so-called hari (“strength of character”). Jōkanbō Kōa in his Kyōkun zoku heta dangi (“Didactic Clumsy Sermons, Continued”) (1753) describes Edokko as follows:

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Elena Giannoulis The people of Edo wish to be rude, showing respect seems to them a shame. The worst offenders are those of the lowest rank. Some Edo people even make malicious remarks that one mustn’t be afraid of Samurai and lice. Such people lack all discretion. 42

In 1788 Santō Kyōden (1761–1816) wrote in Tsūgen sō-magaki (“Grand Brothel of Connoisseur Language”) (1788) and Nitan no Shirō Fuji no hitoana kenbutsu (“Nitan no Shirō Views the Cave of Mount Fuji”): • He [An Edokko] receives his first bath in the water of the city’s aqueduct; he grows up in sight of the gargoyles on the roof of Edo castle. • He is not attached to money; he is not stingy. His funds do not cover the night’s lodging. • He is raised in a high-class, protected manner. He is quite unlike either warriors or country bumpkins. • He is a man of Nihonbashi [. . .] to the bone. • He has iki (refinement) and hari (strength of character). 43 Nishiyama stresses that hari, along with bitai, was a formative element of historical iki: Hari was a sharp, straightforward, coolly gallant manner that resisted all compromise, conciliation, and undue social adroitness or tact. In Edo, the capital of the warrior, cold and brusque human relations confronted one at every turn; quarrels and sword fights were the order of the day. But in the egalitarian world of Yoshiwara pleasure quarters, Samurai were required to lay down their swords; hari then became an ideal of behavior. Hari was also esteemed as the very essence of Yoshiwara courtesans [. . .]. 44

As a third generating element of iki, Nishiyama names akanuke (urbanity), which “demanded an unpretentious air, a thorough familiarity with all aspects of life, and an unconcerned, unassuming character.” 45 He then points out that iki works only in urban space. 46 Overall, historical iki is difficult to sum up, composed as it is of a combination of bitai, hari, and akanuke, and not having been conceptualized and systemized (at least during the Edo period). Its artistic forms of expression, which Kuki occasionally refers to, are hardly described in secondary literature. 47 However, conclusions on the historical functions of iki can be drawn more easily from a reconstruction of the social system of the time (see section 2.1). The description of the three major characteristics of iki has shown that iki is a mode of communication and a code of conduct formed by two playfully interacting poles whose convergence is prohibited by rules or conventions. The subject’s detachment from itself and others derives from its ludic qual-

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ity. After becoming popular outside the red-light milieu, iki became the culturally encoded lifestyle of a whole age. Kuki shows in ‘Iki’ no Kōzō how this lifestyle functioned as a counterculture. However, Nara Hiroshi is correct in stressing that Kuki’s “claims for effects of iki specific to [the Bunka and Bunsei eras (1804–1830)] [. . .] are exceedingly hard to substantiate.” 48 He criticizes the lack of explicit evidence supporting Kuki’s arguments and expresses legitimate doubts as to whether iki can speak for the spirit of an entire era. 49 In order to describe iki as a phenomenon of consciousness and a mode of being, Kuki starts by dealing with intensional and extensional characteristics of iki—the former determining its semantic contents, the latter locating it within the semantic field to differentiate and define it more precisely. He then presents the objective forms of expression of iki, differentiating between natural and artistic forms. Within the framework of the intensional analysis iki is composed of three elements: 1. bitai, 2. ikiji (pride, honor, scorn, nonchalance, audacity) and 3. akirame (resignation; insight through acceptance). According to Kuki, the first shows the “keynote” of iki, while the other two may be defined via the ethnic and historical background of the Japanese. Marra classifies the intensional characteristics of iki conceived by Kuki as follows: The cultural aspect of the relationships of these three moments with specific philosophies (Shintō, although Kuki never used this word, Confucianism, and Buddhism) run the risk of being too schematic and deterministic, but this is a problem intrinsic to the method Kuki used the structuralist method of which he was a pioneer. 50

All three elements of iki are based on “detachment,” which is embodied mainly by coquetry. This coquetry is a relational category, which does not have an exclusively male coding. According to Kuki, its essence lies in getting as intimate with another person as possible in view of the fact that the “contact” will never take place. From this detachment evolves the field of tension on which Kuki remarks: Let us say that coquetry is a dualistic attitude; that it puts a person of the opposite sex in opposition to the monistic self; and that it posits a possible relationship between that person and the self. [. . .] This dualistic possibility is the fundamental determinant for the being of coquetry, and coquetry disappears on its own accord when the opposite sexes unite totally and lose that source of tension. This is because the hypothetical goal of coquetry is conquest, destined to disappear when this goal is fulfilled. 51

Ultimately, the game of coquetry, which serves to test power relationships, prevents attachment. According to Kuki, seriousness and emotion are

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in contradiction to iki, for as soon as love comes into being, iki is no longer an option. This is why iki must transcend “love” in order to keep its free and coquettish character. Since coquetry prevents attachment, it can go along with the moment of resignation/acceptance. According to Kuki, the second major characteristic of iki is ikiji (pride and honor), one of the moral ideals of Edo culture, and, according to the author, part of a mentality embodied by bushidō. In addition, ikiji is a precondition for the strength necessary to endure and maintain the tension caused by coquetry. Kuki assumes that the bushidō spirit exists within iki, and that the merchants, or Edokko, had adopted it partly from the samurai. A cool demeanor may well be the result of pride and wounded pride, an underdog’s strategy to protect oneself against those in power. In this sense it is also a means of dissociation. Kuki gives the following example to demonstrate ikiji: “A Samurai uses a toothpick even when he has not eaten.” 52 In this context ikiji is connected to defense and resistance, because using a toothpick means nothing other than displaying contempt for hunger. Kuki gives further examples to clarify what ikiji stands for: True Edokko praised firefighters, who risked their lives to fight the “Flowers of Edo;” and otokodate “neighborhood dandies,” who sported only thin coats even in the middle of winter. In iki, one must have the stubborn pluck of Edo. [. . .] To personify iki, one must possess an inviolable dignity and grace, commonly expressed in words such as inase “dashing, spirited,” isami “chivalry,” and denpō “show off bravado.” 53

According to the Edogaku jiten (“Dictionary of Edo Studies”) ikiji was already an important marker of iki at that time, and was understood mainly as an attitude of protest. 54 Interestingly though, ikiji was not believed during the Edo period to be derived from the spirit of bushidō, as Kuki argues in ‘Iki’ no Kōzō. Tanaka believes that, by ikiji, Kuki means the following: “an ethically and aesthetically refined version of the structure of the self that is peculiar to the Japanese—a mixture of shame and pride in which is grounded the tension relationship between the self and other. Kuki searched for the origin of brave composure in the way of the warrior (bushidō).” 55 This is a very fitting argument, since Kuki leaves the impression that he uses bushidō as a conscious stereotype in order to make the case for a specific Japanese mentality, as did Nitobe Inazō. Both assume that the Japanese self, in contrast to the Western self, is formed by a tradition with shame and pride as its main ingredients. They both see an ideal spiritual exposition in the samurai’s predisposition toward these matters. Yet, it remains unclear on what concept of bushidō Kuki bases his assumptions. The third characteristic of iki according to Kuki is akirame, “a state of mind that presupposes the (let us say) Buddhist philosophy of life as a basis. Akirame refers to disinterest which, based on the knowledge of fate, permits

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us to detach ourselves from worldly concerns.” 56 This leads the individual to consider that resistance can be kept up only to a certain extent. This realization allows someone embodying iki to adopt a superior, detached, and worldly-wise attitude, and thus to be fit to deal with every situation, even if one’s resistance is broken. Kuki sums up: In short, iki arises from the “world of suffering” in which we are scarcely able to keep afloat. [. . .] Resignation or disinterest in iki represents the state of mind that has suffered through hard ukiyo’s [life’s] tough and merciless tribulations and shed worldly concerns; in other words, the state of mind that is free of grime, inclining, disinterested, and free from obstacles, and that has removed itself from any egotistical attachment to reality. The saying “Yabo turns into iki, after so much suffering” refers to this situation and no other. When we detect a trace of seductive and ingenuous tears behind a charming lighthearted smile, we have finally been able to grasp the truth about iki. Perhaps the sentiment of resignation in iki is the fruit of decadence. It may very well be that the experience and critical knowledge that iki embodies have been socially inherited rather than individually acquired. It could be either. Whatever the case, this undeniable fact remains: iki contains the sense of resignation to fate and the freedom from attachment based on that resignation. 57

In conclusion, historical iki can be said to be made up of bitai, hari, and akanuke, while Kuki’s iki is formed from bitai, ikiji, and akirame. The meaning of hari is comparable to that of ikiji, but akanuke and akirame are completely different. In setting akirame in relation to iki, Kuki gives iki a metaphysical component not associated with the historical meaning of the term. He tends to see it as an aesthetic concept, while historically it was more of an urban lifestyle that marked a counterculture. For Kuki, therefore, iki consists of three components based on distance: 1) Distance due to a game of tension (bitai), 2) distancing from an other (ikiji), and 3) obliviousness and resignation as distance (akirame). The first is the result of forms of social communication practiced in the pleasure quarters; the second spread through the mind-set of low-ranking samurai; and the third developed from Buddhist ideals. Kuki does not only define iki exclusively through its meaning in itself, but also by separation from other terms of the same semantic field, thus sharpening its profile. Without going into detail at this point, a few aesthetic concepts that are related to iki should be mentioned. Generally, iki stands for a field of tension between two opposite aesthetic ideals, one of which has negative and the other positive connotations in a social context. Cited are jōhin/gehin (elegant, sophisticated, exquisite; refined vs. vulgar; low, tasteless, barbarian, rude, common), hade/jimi (flashy, showy; spectacular vs. plain; simple, quiet, subdued, unflashy, sober, modest) and shibumi/amami (astringency; tartness vs. sweetness). Kuki locates iki between “cultivated”

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and “rude.” Refinement, sophistication, and iki are almost exclusively connoted positively, as is coolness, while rudeness usually has a negative connotation. Further, iki is considered to be a superior form of taste. However, iki and sophistication differ when it comes to coquetry. An excess of coquetry results in vulgarity. Accordingly, for Kuki it is of major importance how coquetry manifests itself. 58 Finally, Kuki comes to deal with the objective forms of expression of iki. The natural forms materialize through physical manifestations, postures, and gestures. A certain slight relaxation of the body could be iki, but the body itself could also be an expression of iki, if it is slim and slender. Further, a facial expression was iki if the eyes, mouth, and cheeks expressed both tension and relaxation, i.e., a relatively static face. 59 The artistic forms of iki are explained using examples from art, design, and architecture. Parallel lines or vertical stripes express iki, while curvatures are opposed to it. Kuki points out: Someone once said that “all warmth, all movement, all love is round, or at least oval, and goes in spirals or other curved lines! Only the cold, immobile, worthless, and hateful is straight as string stretched taut or something bent at an angle. [. . .] Iki embodies cold disinterest.” 60

Colors with the capacity for expressing iki are gray, brown, and blue, because they are cool and dark and only slightly saturated. Within architecture, iki expresses itself through simplicity and transparency, as in a teahouse. As an example for the opposite, Kuki uses “the kind of boorishness we might see in Russian interior decoration.” 61 This and other examples give the reader a concrete impression of the aesthetics of iki, and show that iki involves aesthetic concepts that are at least similar to those associated with coolness, especially with regard to its objective and artistic forms of expression. III IKI IN THE CONTEXT OF DIFFERENT DEFINITIONS OF COOLNESS Since the mid-nineties numerous monographs have been published in the field of literary and cultural studies on the subject of coolness. Research ranges from ancient to contemporary times, and includes European as well as African and American cultures, since coolness is brought to bear on terms and movements as diverse as stoicism, apatheia, itutu, sprezzatura, Gracián’s cold persona, aristocratic demeanor, slavery, Dadaism, social realism, dandyism, femme fatale, jazz, hard boiled, Minimal Art, or hip hop. What these

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studies share is an aim to define coolness, concentrating mainly on its social, cultural, political, and economic forms and functions. What coolness means in each respective culture is demonstrated—synchronically as well as diachronically—mainly by using music, cinema, art, philosophy, aesthetics, or “everyday practice.” Self-assertion, dissociation, defense, protest, or selfprotection are often mentioned as functions of coolness. Tied to these functions are various categories dependent on their social context, such as power, hierarchy, identity, autonomy, (self-)control, detachment, individuality, or discrimination. Further, the understanding of coolness also differs according to age, generation, social ranking, gender, or simply peer group. Coolness is highly subjective, its meaning always dependant on the eye of the beholder. Whether it functions well depends on the specific setting and the parties’ interaction within this space. Iki as a concept of coolness can be understood both in terms of its functions, as described with regard to Afro-American concepts of coolness (1), and in comparison to the coolness of the dandy around 1900 (2). First, at the beginning of the twenty first century, coolness is a positively connoted and globally established attitude of performative affect control, signaling invulnerability and superiority. 62 It serves to establish a difference with, and distance to, the mainstream by defining a counterculture. This pattern of coolness can be traced back phenomenologically within the history of Afro-American culture to the times of slavery, when coolness served black people as a survival strategy distancing themselves emotionally from their hostile white environment. 63, 64 After the abolition of slavery, and to an even greater extent in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, coolness became a symbol of rebellion against social, political, and cultural norms. When cool jazz became popular around the 1940s, coolness developed into a widely acknowledged aesthetic concept. Since the 1980s, it has finally evolved an attractive subcultural lifestyle, enabling the individual to raise his or her social status and signal superiority. Today, coolness is a commodity found in films, music, and other fields of popular culture. In terms of its potential to serve as a mechanism of self-defense, and as a strategy of self-assertion or social differentiation, coolness—as described above—can also be applied to the social situations in Japan during the Edo period, serving the same functions inherent to iki. Secondly, on the subject of modern iki, dandyism plays an important part in Kuki’s definition. The reader of ‘Iki’ no Kōzō gets the impression that iki has been traced from a pattern of dandyism that existed in the age of Décadence and of Symbolism, with the dandy as a lonely hero, hiding rebelliously from the impositions of modern times behind a melancholic, nihilistic pose. 65 On several occasions Kuki also refers directly to the dandy. An important parallel between dandyism and iki lies in the fact that both can be perceived as mind-sets determined by a desire for distinction and self-control. Both of

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these mental attitudes are also postures representing an ironically detached play with and against society. As is the case with dandyism, concepts of iki offer a framework for the evaluation of taste, which simultaneously implies a subtle provocation of those unfamiliar with particular matters of style (outward elegance) and patterns of behavior (mental disposition). Primarily, iki is comparable to the decadent and aestheticist form of dandyism defined by Barbey d’Aurevilly and Charles Baudelaire. To them the term “dandy” indicated a man of [. . .] simple, decent, refined elegance; an elegance that is the expression of a certain mindset and attitude to life. The dandy is a pattern of behavior characterized by superior taste, perfect manners, a cynical frivolity in conversational tone, sangfroid and unshakebility in all circumstances, as well as a cult of the self pushed to the extreme. [. . .] He adheres to aristocratic distinction as a way of life. The Dandy knows neither responsibility nor personal ties. [. . .] Strict self-discipline, affect control, the perfecting of behavior—this is what counts for him. 66

Characters embodying iki also achieve superiority through their ready wit and subtle irony, which is covered by bitai. With regard to life itself they retain no illusions, are immune to outside influences and adopt a detached pose toward themselves and their environment, aspects that Kuki locates mainly in the akirame and ikiji elements of iki. The modern metropolitan dandy envisioned by Baudelaire embodies the sublime and the pride of one who stands in tactful, playful, and subtle opposition to the masses, qualities equally associated with iki. One major difference between the two concepts, however, is that dandyism was developed at the end of the 18th century by nonconformists of an aristocratic culture that was otherwise still almost completely self-contained; in contrast, iki was a movement within the lowest classes of society, and then became a mass movement. Further, the coolness of the dandy is masculine in connotation, whereas iki can also be expressed by women. Referring to this point, Kuki himself draws a line between iki and dandyism, writing: As a “doctrine of élégance” dandyism is “a kind of religion.” Dandyism no doubt has a similar structure to that of iki. But as an ideal [. . .] dandyism is seen as a property almost exclusively male. Iki is notably different in that respect, since its “heroism” is also the life and breath of delicate women, even women reduced by circumstances to a “life of prostitution.” 67

Kuki poses the following question: “Does the meaning of ‘dandyism’ really exhibit the same structure as iki in full and at all strata of concrete consciousness?” 68 His answer is simply “no,” while the reasoning behind it is hardly convincing, and relates not only to dandyism: “The fact that the West has no

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word corresponding to iki is itself evidence that the phenomenon of consciousness that is iki has no place in Western culture as a certain meaning in its ethnic being.” 69 IV IKI AS A CONCEPT OF COOLNESS The comparison of the historical and the modern version of iki with Western concepts of coolness demonstrates that many functions and forms are similar, even in dealing with differing epochs and cultural spheres. Historical iki can be understood as a counterculture born within the lowest social classes, which served to maintain self-assertion and self-defense. Certain essential lifestyle elements of this counterculture, such as self-control and detachment/ reserve, can also be seen as qualities shared with the Afro-American type of coolness. Along with coolness, the historical iki was a form of mental disposition and a mode of communication helping to make delimitation possible. Further, it is related to hierarchies and to categories of power and identity. Kuki’s modern iki was doubtless developed with a view to juxtaposing it with dandyism (in France). Even if he himself points to the parallels, and more importantly, to the differences between the two concepts, he still defines iki as an exclusively Japanese phenomenon in the interest of cultural self-assertion vis-à-vis the West. This leads one to question what is supposed to be so unique about iki, especially since Kuki only endeavors, more or less convincingly, to find a Japanese counterpart for decadent dandyism. The latter is then given a different name and is said to have derived from some specifically Japanese historical development, but it basically means the same thing. Kuki misappropriates and bends historical iki to make it comparable and describable in the terms of Western forms. I would argue that iki can be understood as a cool strategy of behavior employed by the chōnin vis-à-vis the governing class of the samurai, but it is not necessary to draw on the concept of coolness in order to describe this strategy. Iki as counterculture, possessing the functions of self-assertion and of self-defense, also has a certain resemblance to coolness with regard to self-control and detachment. Yet this does not only apply to iki, but also to other aesthetic concepts. Coolness generally remains so ambiguous and elusive that one will find a connection between most of its properties and other concepts. What are the consequences of these considerations for the usefulness of coolness as a category of systematic description and evaluation? As we have seen, coolness has weaknesses as a yardstick for comparison or category of systematic analysis. Yet this does not mean that it cannot be systematically examined in order to sharpen its profile. The problem is that

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many of the components that make up the definition of coolness can be described equally well without having to use the term itself. The reason for this may lie in the fact that the function of coolness is based on mechanisms that can be explained psychologically and anthropologically. What is certain is that “coolness” means different things in different cultures, yet points of contact can be found. Simply tracing the reasons for this and making coolness describable would provide valuable research results, yielding links to subsequent research in sociology and cultural anthropology, to economics and semantics of emotion. NOTES 1. There are only a handful of theory-based works in Japanese Studies to date that can be classified under emotion research. The reason for the reluctance of Japanese Studies to deal with emotions appears to lie partly in the fact that the academic community is quick to banish emotional forms specific to Japanese culture into the realm of “Japan discourses (nihonron or nihonjinron).” A good illustration of the mechanics that constitute such a discourse is Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946), which presents Japanese culture as a premodern “shame culture” as opposed to a Western “guilt culture.” 2. Cosplay is an acronym derived from the English words “costume play.” It refers to a costume and roleplay culture that originated in Japan and reached Europe and North America together with the manga and anime boom of the 1990s. 3. The abbreviation for Japanese pop music or Japan pop. 4. The mechanics behind this kind of marketing strategy have been the subject of a number of analyses in cultural studies . . . , social sciences, cf. for example Kelts 2006, Allison 2006, Richter 2008, West 2009, Sugiyama 2009, Hasegawa 2010. 5. Good examples of this are the films of Kitano Takeshi, who combines affect control and supreme self-possession with wild and bloody explosions of violence for dramatic effect. His heroes belong to a milieu of crime, some as yakuza and some as policemen, and are simultaneously marginal figures fighting for autonomy within their own peer groups. According to Rüdiger Zill, “Japanese emotional masking [has become] a model for Western coolness” (Zill 2010: 50) in films since the 1960s. Zill illustrates this observation with the image of the samurai as embodied by Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967). More recently, too, there has been a tendency in American films for samurai to represent the epitome of coolness— witness the TV serialization of James Clavell’s Shogun (1980) or Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2003). 6. One of the most influential Japanese protagonists of cultural discourses on bushidō, whose writings have been formative for the image of Japan not only in the West, but also in Japan itself, was Nitobe Inazō (1862–1933). Nitobe had spent time in France and Germany in the 1880s, when his study The Soul of Japan: An Exposition of Japanese Thought was published (originally in English in 1899, and only later in a Japanese translation). He put forward the hypothesis that typical elements of the Japanese character such as self-control, courage, honesty, and honor developed from samurai codes of conduct. 7. The purported “coolness” of the Japanese is exemplified by emotional and affect control. Foreign observers have often referred to a mask-like quality and emotional minimalism displayed by the Japanese in social contexts or interpersonal communication. To invalidate these prejudices or misinterpretations, it would be necessary to refer to the “display rules” (cf. David Ricky Matsumoto, Unmasking Japan: Myths and Realities about the Emotions of the Japanese [Stanford; California: Stanford University Press, 1996]) that vary with cultural context, to Japanese etiquette, or to behavioral norms associated with such standards as enryo

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(restraint, reticence, control, modesty, distance, respect, consideration, discretion, timidity, shamefulness). For a discussion of “coolness” in Japanese culture (cf. Heise 1990). 8. To define more precisely what is meant by “coolness” in each case, it would be necessary to trace aspects of the heredity and/or sociocultural system with which the respective norm is associated. 9. According to the Nihon kokugo daijiten (“Great Dictionary of the Japanese Language”) the term “cool”—written in katakana (クウル) and used of the temperature—was first used in 1899 in a literary text by Tokuda Shūsei (1872–1943). “Coolness” (クールネス) was first documented in Gakusei jidai (“Schooldays,” 1918) by Kume Masao (1891–1952). 10. Kuki wrote this text in 1926 while living in Paris and originally gave it the title ‘Iki’ no honshitsu (“The Essence of ‘iki’”). One year after his return to Japan in 1929 he published it as ‘Iki’ no Kōzō in the journal Shisō. He revised the text once again for the 1930 book publication. 11. Ueda Makoto, “Iki and Sui” Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan (Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1983), 268. 12. Pandey Rajyashree, “Love, Poetry and Renunciation: Changing Configurations of the Ideal of ‘Suki’” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, (Third Series, Vol. 5, No. 2), 225–244. 13. “The origin of the word sui is not clear [. . .] it described the language and deportment of a person who fully knew the sour taste of this life, was able to infer others people’s suffering, adapt himself to various human situations with the shapelessness of water, and become a leader in taste and fashion for its contemporaries” (ibid.: 267). 14. “Aesthetically both pointed toward an urbane, chic, bourgeois type of beauty with undertones of sensuality. Morally they envisioned the tasteful life of a person who was wealthy but not attached to money, who enjoyed sensual pleasures but was never carried away by carnal desires, and who knew all the intricacies of earthly life but was capable of disengaging himself from them” (ibid.). 15. Maeda Isamu, “Iki” In Edogo daijiten [Great Dictionary of Edo-Language] (Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1974), 64. 16. Liza Dalby remarks of Geishas in Fukagawa: “Besides avoiding the obvious excesses of tawdry gorgeousness, a truly iki style had an element of daring and unconventionality. The geisha of the Tokyo hanamachi of Fukagawa became synonymous with iki because of their dress. They wore a kind of loose jacket, a haori, over their kimono, which had a somewhat masculine effect. [. . .] Fukagawa geisha were also renowned because they never wore tabi socks. The image of the geisha’s cold white foot outlined by her black lacquered clog as she stepped out in the snow was the height of iki. Although here the erotic element was pronounced, it was the strength of character implied by this act that made it truly iki. Eroticism still does, however, underlie whatever else one might say about iki and doubtless contributes to its fascination. [. . .] Iki also implied sincerity, but a sophisticated sincerity, not the blind devotion of the young or the eagerness of the inexperienced. [. . .] To be iki was to be sophisticated but not jaded, innocent but not naïve” (Liza Crihfield Dalby, Geisha [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 272f]). 17. Ueda Makoto, “Iki and Sui,” 267. 18. Nara Hiroshi, “Introduction” In The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō with a Translation of ‘Iki’ no Kōzō ed. Hiroshi Nara (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 2 and cf. Yamamoto Yuji, An Aesthetic of Everyday Life—Modernism and a Japanese popular aesthetic ideal, “iki” (University of Chicago. In: http://cosmoshouse.com/works/papers/aes-every-e.pdf (last access: February 25, 2012), 1999). 19. Karatani Kōjin, “Edo Exegesis and the Present” In Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader ed. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 270f. 20. Leslie Pincus discusses Karatani’s revival of the intellectual discussion about ‘Iki’ no Kōzō in the context of postmodernism in the late 1980s: “Karatani would appear to be suggesting that [. . .] Kuki Shūzō caught an anticipatory glimpse of a postmodern disposition in the cultural style of nineteenth-century Edo. And it is perhaps in this anticipation that Karatani discovers a strategy for sidestepping the modern and lifting its imposition of unilinear historical necessity and universal rationality—an imposition that worked to the detriment of (Japanese) difference” (Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of National Aesthetics. Berkeley et al. [University of California Press, 1996], 9).

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21. Kuki Shūzō, The Structure of Iki. Translated by Hiroshi Nara. In The structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō, ed. Hiroshi Nara (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 54–60. 22. Nara Hiroshi, “Introduction” In The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō with a Translation of ‘Iki’ no Kōzō ed. Hiroshi Nara (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 3. 23. Consider especially his essay In’ei raisan (1933; In Praise of Shadows, English, 2001; Lob des Schattens—Entwurf einer japanischen Ästhetik, German, 1987). 24. In the context of culturalism, one can mention his study Fūdo (1935) (Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study, English, 1961; Fūdo-Wind und Erde: Der Zusammenhang zwischen Klima und Kultur, German, 1992). 25. Marra Michael F., Kuki Shūzō: A Philosopher’s Poetry and Poetics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 10. 26. Rimer Thomas J., “Literary Stances: The Structure of iki” In The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō with a Translation of ‘Iki no Kōzō’ ed. Hiroshi Nara (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 130. 27. ibid. 28. Tanaka Kyūbun, “Kuki Shūzō and the Phenomenology of iki” In A history of Japanese Aesthetics ed. and trans. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 319. 29. Kuki Shūzō, Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki. Translated from the Japanese by John Clark, ed. by Sakuko Matsui and John Clark (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997), 20f. 30. Kuki Shūzō’s father Ryūichi was a typical Meiji Restoration bureaucrat and reputed to be somewhat petty-minded. By contrast, his mother Hatsuko came from one of the Kyōto pleasure quarters and is said to have been an emotional woman. This difference in character eventually led to the couple’s divorce and Hatsuko’s subsequent marriage with Okakura Tenshin, who had already accompanied her home when she became pregnant with Shūzō while her husband was serving as ambassador to the United States. John Clark writes: “Put simply, Kuki Shūzō loved his mother, hated his father, and saw in Okakura a replacement for his father” (cf. Kuki Shūzō, Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki. Translated from the Japanese by John Clark, ed. by Sakuko Matsui and John Clark, 18). Even if this is a simplification, it may be imagined that Tenshin had a certain degree of influence on Shūzō. Kuki embarked on his journey to Europe together with his wife in 1921 at the age of thirty-three. First of all, he read philosophy with neo-Kantian scholars in Germany, before reading with Sartre and Bergson in Paris. He then went once again to Germany, where he was in contact with Husserl and Becker, before returning to Paris (cf. Ōhashi Ryōsuke, “Nihon kindai no jimon—‘Iki’ no Kōzō no hikari to kage” [Questions to oneself: Light and shadow in ‘Iki’ no Kōzō] In Chūō Kōron 1252 [November] [Tōkyō: Chūō kōron shinsha, 1989], 277). 31. Marra Michael F., Essays on Japan: Between Aesthetics and Literature (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010), 149. 32. In places Marra translates iki as “cool” (ibid.: 55). 33. Tanaka Kyūbun, “Kuki Shūzō and the Phenomenology of iki”, 319. 34. The majority of chōnin actually belonged to the merchant class, and chōnin is frequently used synonymously with shōnin (merchant). 35. Crawcour Sydney, “Chōnin” In Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan (Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1983), 302. 36. Okuno Takuji, Edo “iki” no keifu [Genealogy of iki in the Edo-period] (Tōkyō: Kadogawa Gurūpu Paburisshingu, 2009), 38ff. 37. Already in the preface to ‘Iki’ no Kōzō Kuki remarks: “A living philosophy must be able to understand reality. We know there is a phenomenon called iki. What is the structure of this phenomenon? It is not, after all, a way of ‘life’ that is particular to our people? Comprehending the reality as it is and expressing logically the experience one undergoes are the tasks of this book” (Kuki Shūzō, The Structure of Iki, 13). The study is described as being for “us” (wareware), i.e., for the Japanese. Kuki’s writings also show that he makes use of methods of gaining insight and/or knowledge derived from both Eastern and Western traditions. This becomes

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particularly clear in his remarks about “experiences” (taiken), which are to be represented “in a logical way” (ronriteki ni) (Kuki Shūzō, ‘Iki’ no Kōzō [Tōkyō : Iwanami Shoten, 1960]). 38. This bipolar structure illustrates that iki can never be found in a situation devoid of tension. Thus a young woman would lose with her marriage the potential to possess bitai—the coquetry associated with iki, irrespective of any objective beauty of appearance (cf. Groemer Gerald and Matsunosuke Nishiyama (ed.), Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, 56ff). 39. The term “daitsū” (grand connoisseur) was en vogue around 1777 (cf. Groemer Gerald and Matsunosuke Nishiyama (ed.), Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, 58). 40. ibid. 41. But in the 1840s the “high culture” of the pleasure quarters lost its vigour, and sui and tsū disappeared. The customers in the pleasure quarters became merely ordinary city dwellers (cf. Nakano 1989: 126): “From that time the pleasure quarters became what they have remained in living memory: merely market-places for sex. Present-day depictions of Yoshiwara and Shimabara so popular in TV dramas and films are precisely those of such degraded times; the ugly decadence underlying the superficial glamour in such dramas is a far cry from the aesthetic of their heyday” (ibid.). 42. Groemer Gerald and Matsunosuke Nishiyama (ed.), Edo culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 49. 43. ibid. 44. ibid.: 54. 45. ibid. 46. ibid. 47. Nishiyama points out: “Iki seems to be a specifically Japanese form of aesthetic consciousness. Pinpointing where or how a person embodies the quality of iki may be difficult, but its presence is felt by every Japanese. [. . .] An adequate definition if iki, however, remains elusive. Iki may be quite easily grasped experientially, but verbalizing this experience is difficult. Parallels may be found in the performing arts: here too direct (and often secret) transmission, not verbal explanation, provides the surest means for attaining true mastery of details in speech or movement. Since verbal description cannot fully convey a culture of feeling, no generally accepted theory of iki has yet been established” (ibid.: 53). By writing that “the presence of iki [is] felt by every Japanese,” and at the same time that it is indefinable, Nishiyama runs the risk of sliding into nihonjinron. For further information about iki in the context of nihonjinron cf. Pincus 1996. 48. Nara Hiroshi, “Capturing the Shudders and Palpitations: Kuki’s Quest for a Philosophy of Life” In The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō with a Translation of ‘Iki’ no Kōzō ed. Hiroshi Nara (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 107. 49. cf. ibid., 110. 50. Marra Michael F., Essays on Japan: Between Aesthetics and Literature, 194. 51. Kuki Shūzō, The Structure of Iki, 19. 52. ibid.: 20. 53. ibid. 54. Edogaku Jiten, 297f. 55. Tanaka Kyūbun, “Kuki Shūzō and the Phenomenology of iki,” 329. 56. Kuki Shūzō, The Structure of Iki, 21. 57. ibid.: 21f. 58. “‘Flashiness,’ like iki is capable of expressing coquetry to others. But the flashy, showoff character is incompatible with the resignation of iki and ‘flashiness’ is often associated with tackiness. ‘Soberness’ cannot have the coquetry that iki possesses, because it inherently stands in an inactive relation to something or somebody. Instead, ‘soberness,’ always simple and understated, exhibits a certain type of sabi ‘quite elegance’ and embodies a possible link to the resignation of iki” (Kuki Shūzō, The Structure of Iki, 27). 59. Further examples of iki are sparingly applied makeup, informal hair styles, and walking barefoot. 60. ibid.: 45f.

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61. ibid.: 51. 62. Danesi Marcel, Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 63. Connor Marlene Kim, What Is Cool? Understanding Black Manhood in America (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995). 64. “During captivity, cool was in its infancy. Being cool meant surviving, at its most basic level. But after captivity, cool, as we recognize it today, began to take shape, responding to new circumstances and new needs. In the beginning that need was simply the need to survive. As time went in that need became the need to define an achievable manhood” (ibid.: 8). 65. Kuki often refers to the aesthetics of Nagai Kafū, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō or Kawabata Yasunari in order to explain iki. He alludes to the fact that in their literature the protagonists are often geishas who embody iki. Here, one should criticize Kuki for ignoring the fact that these authors developed their supposedly Japanese aesthetics using Western aesthetics. What they considered to be characteristically Japanese was often an image of Japan constructed by the West that they had internalized. Since the decline in status of aestheticism and the death of the authors referred to by Kuki, iki in the traditional sense has no longer been displayed in literature; it is, however, used in contemporary Japanese literature as a synonym for coolness. Thus, Yamada Eimi (born 1959), uses the term iki in her literature to describe Afro-American protagonists displaying a cool attitude in a Japanese environment (cf. Yamada Eimi, Beddo taimu aizu [Bedtime eyes] [Tōkyō: Shinchōsha, 1996], 19 and 19). Today, iki is also practiced or referred to some jidai geki (period dramas) set in the Edo period, enka (sentimental ballad music), nihon buyō (traditional Japanese performing art), or kimono fashion. 66. Erbe Günter, “Der modern Dandy: Zur Herkunft einer dekadenten Figur” In Depressive Dandys: Spielformen der Dekadenz in der Pop-Moderne ed. Alexandra Tacke and Björn Weyand (Köln; Weimar; Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2009), 19f. 67. Kuki Shūzō, The Structure of Iki, 59. 68. ibid.: 58. 69. ibid.: 59.

WORKS CITED Bierwirth, Gerhard. Bushidō: Der Weg des Kriegers ist ambivalent. München: Iudicium, 2005. Connor, Marlene Kim. What Is Cool? Understanding Black Manhood in America. New York: Crown Publishers, 1995. Crawcour, Sydney. “Chōnin.” In Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, 300–302. Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1983. Dalby, Liza Crihfield. Geisha. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Danesi, Marcel. Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Erbe, Günter. “Der moderne Dandy: Zur Herkunft einer dekadenten Figur.” In Depressive Dandys: Spielformen der Dekadenz in der Pop-Moderne ed. Alexandra Tacke, Bjōrn Weyand, 17–38. Köln; Weimar; Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2009. Gerstle, C. Andrew. 18th Century Japan: Culture and Society. Richmond: Curzon, 2000. Groemer, Gerald and Matsunosuke Nishiyama (ed.). Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997. Hasegawa, Yūko. “What’s Japanese Cool?” In Trans-cool Tokyo: Contemporary Japanese Art from MOT Collection, ed. Hiroko Katō, 49–56. Tokyo Culture Creation Project. Tōkyō: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2010. Heise, Jens. (ed.) Die kühle Seele: Selbstinterpretationen der japanischen Kultur. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990. Karatani, Kōjin. “Edo Exegesis and the Present.” In Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader ed. Michael F. Marra, 270–299. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999. Kelts, Roland. Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the U.S. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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Kuki, Shūzō. The Structure of Iki. Translated by Hiroshi Nara. In The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō, ed. Hiroshi Nara, 13–92. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Kuki, Shūzō. Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki. Translated from Japanese by John Clark, ed. by Sakuko Matsui and John Clark. Sydney: Power Publications, 1997. Kuki, Shūzō. ‘Iki’ no Kōzō. Tōkyō : Iwanami Shoten, 1960. Maeda, Isamu. “Iki.” In Edogo daijiten (Great Dictionary of Edo-Language), 64. Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1974. Marra, Michael F. Kuki Shūzō: A Philosopher’s Poetry and Poetics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Marra, Michael F. Essays on Japan: Between Aesthetics and Literature. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010. Matsumoto, David Ricky. Unmasking Japan: Myths and Realities about the Emotions of the Japanese. Stanford; California: Stanford University Press, 1996. Nakano, Mitsuyoshi. “The Role of Traditional Aesthetics.” In 18th Century Japan: Culture and Society, ed. Andrew C. Gerstle, 124–131. Richmond; Surrey: Curzon Press, 1989. Nara, Hiroshi. “Introduction.” In The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō with a Translation of ‘Iki’ no Kōzō, ed. Hiroshi Nara, 1–6. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004a. Nara, Hiroshi. “Capturing the Shudders and Palpitations: Kuki’s Quest for a Philosophy of Life.” In The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō with a Translation of ‘Iki’ no Kōzō ed. Hiroshi Nara, 95–129. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004b. Nitobe, Inazō. Bushido: The Soul of Japan: An Exposition of Japanese Thought. New York (et al.): Putnam, 1905 [1899]. Odin, Steve. Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Comparative Aesthetics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. Ōhashi, Ryōsuke. “Nihon kindai no jimon—‘Iki’ no Kōzō no hikari to kage” (Questions to oneself: Light and Shadow in ‘Iki’ no Kōzō). In Chūō Kōron 1252 (November), 276–291. Tōkyō: Chūō kōron shinsha, 1989. Okuno, Takuji. Edo ‘iki’ no keifu (Genealogy of iki in the Edo period). Tōkyō: Kadogawa Gurūpu Paburisshingu, 2009. Pandey, Rajyashree. “Love, Poetry and Renunciation: Changing Configurations of the Ideal of ‘Suki.’” In Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, Vol. 5, No. 2, 225–244. Pincus, Leslie. Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of National Aesthetics. Berkeley (et al.): University of California Press, 1996. Richter, Steffi. “J-Culture: Zwischen beautiful Japan und cool Japan.” In Japan Lesebuch IV: J-Culture, ed. Steffi Richter and Jaqueline Berndt, 110–138. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2008. Rimer, Thomas J. “Literary Stances: The Structure of Iki.” In The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō with a Translation of ‘Iki’ no Kōzō, ed. Hiroshi Nara, 130–147. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Sugiyama, Tomoyuki. Kūru Japan: Sekai ga kaitagaru Nihon (Cool Japan: Japan that the World Wants to Buy). Tōkyō: Shōdensha Shinsho, 2006. Tanaka, Kyūbun. “Kuki Shūzō and the Phenomenology of Iki.” In A History of Japanese Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Michael F. Marra, 318–344. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. In Praise of Shadows. Transl. by Thomas J. Harper. London: Vintage, 2001 (Orig. In’ei raisan, 1933). Ueda, Makoto. “Iki and Sui.” In Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, 267–268. Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 1983. Watsuji, Tetsurō. Fūdo—Der Zusammenhang von Klima und Kultur. Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 1992 (Orig. Fūdo [Wind and Earth], 1935). West, Mark I. (ed.) (et al.) The Japanification of Children’s Popular Culture: From Godzilla to Miyazaki. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009. Yamada, Eimi. Beddo taimu aizu (Bedtime eyes). Tōkyō: Shinchōsha, 1996.

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Yamamoto, Yuji. An Aesthetic of Everyday Life—Modernism and a Japanese Popular Aesthetic Ideal, “Iki.” University of Chicago. In http://cosmoshouse.com/works/papers/aes-everye.pdf (last access: February 25, 2012), 1999.

Chapter Eleven

The Domestication of the Cool Cat Paul Roquet

The domesticated cats in the stories of Yoshiyuki Rie (1939–2006) provide an unusual model for coolness as communication strategy: a feline sociality based around keeping others at a distance, with a buffer of quiet and privacy in between. Yoshiyuki’s cat stories document both the desirability and the danger of keeping calm and distanced—of being reisei, “cool and still.” In Yoshiyuki’s “The Little Lady” (Chiisana kifujin, 1981), 1 this emotional distance becomes a way of life. Sensitive to noise and socially awkward, the story’s protagonist mostly keeps to herself, living quietly with her cat Cloud in a small apartment in central Tokyo. The narrator’s quiet life models a form of domestic solitude based around keeping social interaction at a minimum. The way cats relate to each other becomes an ideal alternative to the brusque dynamics Yoshiyuki documents in the human realm. While the humans in these stories tend to quickly lose their cool, the calm cats keep their distance, softly purring nearby. DOMESTIC SOLITUDE The quiet life sought by Yoshiyuki’s narrator can be situated within a larger movement toward domestic solitude in urban Japan, beginning in the postwar period and continuing on today. 2 We might first ask why someone in Tokyo might come to prefer a solitary life in the first place. In Yoshiyuki’s writing, the reasons her characters choose to keep society at a distance are clear. In “The Little Lady,” the moments of quiet the narrator is able to achieve are continually offset by hostile interruptions from society at large. Over the course of the story the narrator describes living for eleven years in what seems to be a cursed apartment building, constantly accosted by noise from 237

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ongoing nearby construction work and the busy street outside. Random drunks come by and urinate on the walls, and she even has to ward off a stalker, making her the subject of neighborhood gossip. When she leaves home and enters public space, she feels she is constantly being judged negatively; more than once in the story she describes a sudden shameful awareness that shop owners and passerby are probably looking at her with suspicion. On top of all this, the narrator suffers from a chronic and severe psychosomatic illness, made worse by environmental and social stressors. All of this leads to a situation where the quiet life must be understood as a much needed and hard-won refuge from the pressures of daily life. At the same time, it is clear Yoshiyuki’s narrator is never completely alone even when she wishes to be. She is never at liberty to disregard the people circulating all around her in the city, and the larger expectations of the society within which she has carved out her livelihood. She has not fled out to the mountains, but is trying to maintain her solitude while living in a busy area at the center of what was, at the time, the largest city in the world. In Yoshiyuki’s work the scarcity of quiet in Tokyo combines with the pressures of the surrounding human community, making for a situation where the problem is often with too much social engagement rather than too little. In this context, the solitude of home offers a much-needed place of refuge. In Yoshiyuki’s stories, home is often the only space where an individual can develop a selfless subject to ongoing social pressures to conform. Keeping this in mind allows us to understand how the narrator’s reluctance to engage in interpersonal exchange is less anti-social than an attempt to rethink the shape society might take, such that it supports rather than undermines her sensitive constitution. Yoshiyuki uses her writing to carve out an alternate set of principles for urban living, more supportive of her own need for personal space. At the same time, Yoshiyuki’s domestic solitude is thoroughly informed by what Eva Illouz refers to as emotional capitalism: the mutual penetration of emotional and economic discourses, particularly among the middle class (60). Yoshiyuki and her narrators’ emotional attachments are organized around pets, art, and tourism: “When it comes to people, I do not feel sustained feelings of love. I love Cloud, the cat I raised. I love things like books, films, music, paintings, and places discovered while traveling” (Yubune, 164). Yoshiyuki reserves her deeper feelings for those ownable experiences supporting her need for sustained calm: Claude Debussy records, reproductions of paintings by Paul Klee, visits to the sea. But it is the domestic cat, above all, that serves as her ideal companion. Having Cloud around helps keep her calm and emotionally detached.

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CLOUDS AND CAT BOOMS In Yoshiyuki’s short stories, it is cats, not humans, who best provide a model for the social and emotional distance needed to sustain calm solitude. While her earlier poetry collections (1963–1967) and first short story collection (1970–1972) make no mention of cats, felines come to play an increasingly important role in Yoshiyuki’s writing, eventually emerging as the main theme of her work. After Yoshiyuki first raised a cat herself, cat characters began to appear with increasing regularity in her work, beginning with the fairy tale “The Magical Kushan Cat” (Yonaha 155; Yoshiyuki, Mahō tsukai). Yoshiyuki’s newfound fascination coincided with a larger “cat boom” starting in the 1970s, when Japanese pop culture turned to all things feline (“Shizuka ni neko būmu”). This included a small community of women writers publishing stories in the “cat literature” [neko bungaku] genre. Yoshiyuki’s works occasionally make reference to this larger trend, and, as we will see, they play ironically with the cliché of the cat-obsessed single woman, an image Yoshiyuki was consciously playing into and playing with. 3 The pop culture of the cat boom can be divided into two groups. The first group of works focus on everything “cute” [kawaii] about the cat. Here Hello Kitty (introduced by Sanrio in 1975) and the Namennayo cats (1980–1982) play a starring role. 4 The second group imagines cats as graceful, clean, and noble, and in these terms often compares them favorably to members of the human species. The refined and quiet qualities of the latter group are clearly the major draw for Yoshiyuki and her literary community of cat lovers. The cats they describe are often beautiful, but rarely are they “cute” in a helpless and bumbling way. Kittens are nearly absent, whereas mature cats figure prominently. These noble cats play two specific roles in Yoshiyuki’s work. They generate a calm ambience for their owners, and they model a type of cool, distanced sociality that Yoshiyuki hopes might carry over to the human world. For the narrator of “The Little Lady,” the preference of cats over people can be traced back to a particular episode in her youth. One day, not long after hearing a middle school teacher declare that she has no social skills and no ability to make friends, she notices a cat wander casually in through the door of her family house. She is surprised to discover that while watching it a strange calm has descended over her (Yubune 296). The narrator’s own cat, Cloud, has a similar ability to calm the narrator’s stresses and allow her to focus on her work: “As I was writing I would suddenly sense a pair of eyes on me, and from some tall place or dark area there would be Cloud gently watching over me. When I grew tired I would gaze at Cloud. The haze in my mind would dissipate and I would soon feel the strength to go on writing gathering inside” (Yubune 272–73).

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In moments like these, Cloud serves her as a mood regulator and a muse, providing a gentle atmosphere conducive to poetry and imagination. He has a reassuring presence, keeping watch with a quiet dignity. The real Cloud was a rather large, charcoal-gray stray cat. He lived with Yoshiyuki through most of the 1970s, passing away at the age of nine from a spleen disease. He appears under his own name in “The Little Lady” as the pet of an unnamed narrator, a writer of cat fiction with clear parallels to Yoshiyuki herself. The story opens about two years after Cloud’s death, as the narrator happens upon a stuffed animal in a local store that looks exactly like him. She purchases the stuffed doll, which leads to a series of extended reflections about their time together. Through these reflections, the story details how Cloud served as an extremely calming presence for the narrator. His name comes from a line in an essay by poet Hagiwara Sakutarō, where Hagiwara praises “the free time of looking at clouds” [kumo o miteiru jiyū no jikan] (Yubune 269). 5 The narrator experiences this same open-ended temporality when gazing at her cat, hence the name. This blurring of Cloud the cat and clouds in the sky serves as a recurring theme in the story’s image of the calming feline. The overlap is enhanced by the Japanese language, which has no special case for distinguishing proper nouns, and allows for ambiguity between the singular and plural. The resulting potential for polysemy is greatly exploited in Japanese poetry, and here Yoshiyuki draws on her background as a poet to play with the blending of Cloud and cloud(s) in her prose. In this passage, she recalls an episode from exactly one year after Cloud’s passing: The crows were especially noisy on the day Cloud [kumo] died, but on that day not a single one came to visit. I went up on the roof in the evening. The clouds [kumo] were a light pink overlapping a pale gray, looking so much like the roof of a building in the woods that I couldn’t believe they were clouds [kumo] in the sky. The atmosphere resembled a painting by Klee. I want to live quietly with Cloud [kumo] in a house like that, I thought (Yubune 279).

Not only do the different clouds overlap here, but cat and environment also seem to share the same qualities; the sky is quiet in the same way Cloud was quiet, and the narrator dreams of living quietly with Cloud in a house that is made of clouds. She stands on a roof looking at a sky that looks like a roof, made of clouds the color of Cloud’s nose overlaid on the color of Cloud’s fur. In moments like these, a series of similes render Cloud’s body coextensive with the calming phenomenon that is his namesake. His coat is initially described as “a pale charcoal gray like the sky before sunrise,” connecting him not only to the clouds but to the larger night sky that surrounds them (Yubune 269).

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At other times, the text links Cloud with the narrator’s other favorite cooling environment, the seashore. Cloud’s light blue and pale-violet eyes are said to be the color of the sea (291). Like the sky, the shore serves as a relaxing landscape for the protagonist, and she describes early on in the story her practice of leaving the bustle of Tokyo behind and traveling out to the coast whenever she needs to clear her mind. The sea here is therapeutic primarily for its soundscape, with the leisurely pulse of the waves helping to slow the narrator’s breathing. Thinking back on Cloud’s life, the narrator links his purring with this restorative rhythm: “Whenever I heard that rumbling, a sound that reminded me of waves, I used to feel unaccountably calm” (282). Cloud is associated not only with the calming environments surrounding Tokyo, but with the aesthetic landscapes of the narrator’s (and Yoshiyuki’s) favored artworks: the paintings of Paul Klee and the music of Claude Debussy. The story revels in quintessential Paul Klee colors: charcoal grays, desaturated pinks and blues, light violets, and gray greens. Like a Klee painting, Yoshiyuki’s lush atmospheric backgrounds seem coextensive with the characters and objects that appear within them. Similarly, the impressionistic contours of Debussy’s music allows Yoshiyuki’s narrator to bring a little bit of the ocean back into the domestic environment with her. After Cloud’s death, the narrator stays up all night listening to a recording of his orchestral work “Fêtes” (1899), apparently one of Cloud’s favorites. 6 Cloud and these related aesthetics allow the narrator (and Yoshiyuki, and her readers) to merge the domestic space of the apartment with these larger restorative environments. In a nonfiction essay about Cloud, Yoshiyuki writes, “I love how this animal is completely free, with eyes that change shape, and a body, particularly as a kitten, as fluffy as a cloud” (Kumo no iru sora; qtd. in Yonaha 155). These fluid qualities of the cat connect not only to Yoshiyuki’s favored landscapes, but also to her literary style. Just as Cloud is constantly melting into the sky and sea, Yoshiyuki’s writing is marked by an extreme porousness between characters, between objects, between moments, and even between publications. The flow of “The Little Lady” is marked by an almost constant slippage between different times and locations, between waking and dreaming, and between domestic life and a world of the imagination. The temporality of the story is constantly shifting, jumping backwards and forwards to different episodes in the narrator’s past and present at least once every few paragraphs. The present of the story is thoroughly interlaced with memories from Cloud’s life, his death two years prior, the events of the intervening years, and more distant childhood episodes, as well as the stories of the other characters and the alternate world of the fairy tale serially excerpted within the story. These shifts in scene often have only the slightest transition between them. The narration often slips back and forth mid-paragraph between

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an account of what another character said and the narrator’s personal recollections, blending them into one larger imaginative space. Like Cloud, clouds, and personal recollections, characters often blend into one another in Yoshiyuki’s fiction. The main characters in “The Little Lady” all share similar traits. G, an older female writer of cat fiction the narrator meets at the stuffed animal store, appears to be a doppelganger; the narrator notes at one point they may in fact be the same person (Yubune 297). The cats also overlap a great deal: Cloud, G’s late cat Diana, and the stuffed cat all look alike, and G’s characters for “Cat Murder” (the fairy tale she is writing, excerpted in the story as the narrator reads it) are based on a photograph of Cloud and his “little sister.” The mother of the stuffed animal store owner, also parallels G and the narrator, having once owned a charcoal-gray cat that looked just like Diana and Cloud. As one character states, “it’s said everyone has two identical twins somewhere in the world” (284). One critic perceptively describes the three women as “sensitive variations” of Yoshiyuki herself (Kōno and Saiki 204). In the end, all the characters in the story appear to be acting out different versions of the same basic relationship between an introverted, sensitive, and socially-insecure woman and a more beautiful, noble, sexually androgynous feline (we will return to this pairing later in the chapter). Moreover, as Yoshiyuki Junnosuke notes, “The Little Lady” is characterized by a great deal of fluidity between the human world and the cat world (“Dai 85-kai” 341). The narrator jokes that she is aging faster than usual because she is turning into a cat, while the cat in G’s fairy tale tries to become human to slow down her life cycle. This use of repeated themes and images is the central technique of Yoshiyuki’s literary style. Repetition is central to the impact of her poetry, which often repeats phrases and entire lines verbatim, allowing shifting contexts to shade the language differently with each iteration. Repetition reemerges as a central interest in her prose works, though here the repetition also works intertextually across her various publications. Personal experiences described in her essays regularly reappear verbatim within her stories, couched within larger fictional constructs. Meanwhile, her narrator is almost always a figure clearly identifiable as a version of Yoshiyuki herself, with some minor details altered. Okuno Takeo describes Yoshiyuki’s style as “somewhere between poetry and novel and essay” (qtd. In Yonaha 156), and “The Little Lady” often seems to be operating in several genres simultaneously, freely mixing fairy tale, poetic reverie, and personal memoir. This proliferation of parallels takes on additional complexities when we consider that a few years before this story appeared Yoshiyuki published a story of her own with the same title as the fairy tale excerpted in “The Little Lady.” Yoshiyuki’s “Cat Murder” (“Neko no satsujin”) is not the same as the tale excerpted in “The Little Lady,” but rather is a story told by a woman

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who works at a post office. A woman named G also figures prominently in this work, seemingly the same character that appears in “The Little Lady.” In both stories, G is working on a fairy tale entitled “Cat Murder,” though it is only excerpted in the later work. This overlap of episodes and characters between autobiography, fiction, and even seemingly different fictional texts lends to the atmosphere of amorphousness characterizing Yoshiyuki’s work. The world of imagination and the real world of lived experience appear inextricably intertwined. Both Yoshiyuki and her characters are constantly lapsing into daydreams [kūsō], and this half-dreaming, half-awake state is the mode of awareness to which her poems and stories often aspire. Yoshiyuki has her narrator ironically reference these qualities in “Cat Murder” as she is listening to G ramble on incoherently: “The way she spoke it was hard to distinguish between people and cats, dreams and reality, but her stories were interesting and I found myself listening intently” (“Neko no satsujin” 131). In her poetry, Yoshiyuki often features similar moments of shape-shifting, using the precise ambiguities of the Japanese language to produce a remarkable blending of figure and landscape. Hiding somewhere in the sky… You climbed up the cypress tree “wait for me” Though I began to sob you transformed into a bird of violet and flew away I wander lost in this graveyard Hiding somewhere in the sky you suddenly transform into rain as if copying me and my tears, back then (Yoshiyuki Rie shishū 40–41, author’s translation)

Here Yoshiyuki deftly realigns an ostensibly human subject of address to a more impersonal and dispersed environment; the “you” of the poem shifts from an implied other (perhaps dead) to a departing bird, then to an enveloping rain. This rain, in turn, comes full circle to express the initial internal emotions of the speaker, subsuming “you” into the poem’s I through metonymic liquidation. “You” become the rain blending with “me and my tears,” just as time suddenly folds back on itself at the poem’s end. This sudden alignment of emotion and atmosphere, of affect and percept, serves as a

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moment of catharsis for the speaker. The rain falls as a gift from “you,” both acknowledging and dispersing the speaker’s grief. Through these substitutions, the poem works to shift the discomfort of loss to a scene of immersion, in which the landscape cooperates with the speaker’s emotions, providing a field for their release and dispersal. In a discussion of contemporary women’s fiction, writer Kōno Taeko and literary critic Saeki Shōichi note the paradoxical spaciousness of Yoshiyuki’s work. Though her stories seem to take place in small and enclosed worlds, these prove to be especially “reverberant” settings, hinting at a much larger universe lying beyond. Noting the overlapping voices in Yoshiyuki’s fiction, Kōno compares her work to a performance of chamber music, where the acoustics allow just a few players to produce a sound much larger and more layered than the small number of players would seem to imply (204). This type of dispersal is key to the cloudlike quality of Yoshiyuki’s stories. Like the poem above, “The Little Lady” constantly renders emotions atmospheric. Daily encounters remind the narrator of Cloud, and Cloud reminds the narrator of sky and sea. The sensorium of domestic life is constantly steered, through the soothing properties of the cat, toward a more porous world of soft colors and calm emotions. In the next section, I explore more closely what it is about the company of cats—as opposed to the company of humans—that allows Yoshiyuki and her characters to cultivate this cool dispersion. FELINE SOCIALITY Yoshiyuki’s appreciation of the feline way of life extends to their reserved way of relating to others. Cats offer an appealing mirror of Yoshiyuki’s quiet lifestyle, providing positive reinforcement for her own distance from society: “Because cats instinctively hate things that make loud sounds, it seems they like me as an owner, as I hardly make a noise and do not restrict them” (Kumo no iro sora; qtd. in Yonaha 155). In her study of cats in the work of writers like Rudyard Kipling, Natsume Sōseki, and Charles Baudelaire, Katherine M. Rogers notes the repeated use of the cat as a symbol of individualism and distance from social influence: “imagining ourselves as cats, we can imagine ourselves free of impractical aspirations, moral inhibitions and social pressures to conform” (150). Yoshiyuki’s cats are well within this tradition of outsiders. As Yonaha Keiko writes, Yoshiyuki finds in cats an ideal form of relationality, where individuals keep a respectful distance from one another (155). While social standards of the time might have looked askance at her lifestyle choices (particularly her decision to remain unmarried and live alone), in her work Yoshiyuki uses feline sociality to portray domestic solitude in a more dignified and poetic light.

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Through her work she explores feline sociality as a superior model for human relationships as well. The humans her stories favor are always careful not to impose too much on one another. The narrator describes how “people who don’t avert their eyes when talking to another person usually embarrass me, but with Shino [the owner of the stuffed animal store] it is as if she is looking at the air between us” (Yubune 277). As Rogers describes, “Cats have a habit of looking at us steadily without showing any sign of emotional engagement” (49). Shino reproduces this feline quality, as noted approvingly by the narrator. The stuffed animal shop also serves as a displacement of feline relations onto the world of humans. Alongside stuffed animals the store is full of catrelated goods and publications of cat literature, including the narrator’s own stories. Through the narrator’s repeated visits, the store emerges as a gathering site for women to talk about their dead cats and purchase these cat-related objects. This cat-oriented community models cat behavior in its forms of sociality, as the women get to know one another in way that, like Shino’s gaze, always carefully refrains from coming too close. As described earlier, the line between cats and humans often blurs in Yoshiyuki’s work. This blurring often serves to locate sympathetic characters’ appeal precisely in the amount of “cat” they have within them (Yonaha 156). The narrator even jokes about how she herself is becoming a cat, and thus aging faster then the ordinary humans around her. These feline-qualities are contrasted favorably with the majority of humans in Yoshiyuki works, so much so that she even bases the positive human characters on cat models. As the narrator of “The Little Lady” notes, “There were always plenty of real people to model my thickheaded, insensitive, mean-tempered characters on, but in cases where I was writing of a kind and gentle child, I would draw on Cloud” (Yubune 272–73). As Sachiko Schierbeck writes, “Yoshiyuki is not comfortable with people who are insensitive, greedy, or egocentric” (248). As this quote from the story also hints, however, there is an element of infantalization mixed in with the narrator’s relationship to Cloud. He serves the narrator both as a source of cool feelings and a model of social restraint, but both of these depend on the disavowal of her role as Cloud’s master and domesticator. In the final part of this chapter, I begin to unravel these mixed feelings that threaten to upset the narrator’s carefully cultivated calm. NOBILITY, DOMESTICATED A large part of Cloud’s appeal for the narrator clearly lies in his implicit otherness, the mystery of encountering a creature of another species. And yet the narrator herself has domesticated him, turned him into an apartment cat

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serving her with companionship and consolation. Aware of this aspect of their relationship, she feels some degree of guilt about having robbed Cloud of his freedom to roam, particularly after he passes away having lived his life largely confined to the interior of her apartment. These conflicted feelings manifest in repeated comments about Cloud’s “noble” appearance. As stated earlier, one aspect of the cat boom was the attribution of a noble character to cats. More specifically, they were associated with a reticent but morally-resolute masculine ideal, akin to the type of chivalry found in European fairy tales. This type of princely cat emerged in Japanese popular culture in the 1970s, feeding off a general Rococo turn in influential manga like The Rose of Versailles (1972–1973, anime 1979–1980) and building off a longer fairy tale tradition of royal cats in stories like Madame d’Aulnoy’s The White Cat (La Chatte Blanche, 1698). Feline nobility later surfaces in two Studio Ghibli animated features, Whisper of the Heart (Mimi o sumaseba, Kondō Yoshifumi, 1995) and The Cat Returns (Neko no ongaeshi, Morita Hiroyuki, 2002). All of these cats are “cool” and in line with an older upper class masculine model of emotional control, emphasizing pure, resolute feelings, carefully concealed. Crucial to the noble cat image is a sense of contained ferality, as if the surface gentleness did nothing to tame the wild tiger under the surface. On rare occasions in the story Cloud turns fierce, as when he is on his deathbed being attended to by a veterinarian. Otherwise, and especially when interacting with the narrator, Cloud is never anything but genteel. Alongside these chivalrous fantasies, however, the story makes clear that the relationship between woman and cat is never equal. Although the narrator’s masculine ideal is influenced heavily by the cat's strength of character and understated wildness, she submits Cloud to a series of domestications that can only be described as emasculating. Cloud is physically neutered, restricted to remaining inside the apartment at all times, and eventually replaced by a stuffed version of himself—named “The Little Lady”—after he passes away. This final indignity also serves as the trigger for the narrator to rethink her relationship with Cloud as she struggles to accept his passing two years on from his death. At the beginning of the story, the narrator is out on a shopping trip when she happens upon Shino’s store and a stuffed cat for sale that looks exactly like her lost Cloud. She anxiously purchases the doll and brings it home with her, not exactly comfortable about the idea of replacing Cloud with a stuffed doll, but nonetheless unable to resist the urge to do so. At first she enjoys the doll’s uncanny resemblance to her lost cat, feeling as if Cloud has returned to the apartment at last. The stuffed cat is frozen in Cloud’s most noble pose, as the narrator points out, and the narrator is finally free to do whatever she likes with him. She thinks first of sleeping side-by-side with the stuffed

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doll—something the living Cloud would have never allowed—but ultimately decides against it, for it would somehow betray Cloud’s memory. Gradually, however, the inertness of the stuffed cat begins to haunt the narrator, making her long even more for Cloud when he was alive. She attempts to distance the stuffed doll from its origin as a consumer object by returning to the store to make sure another copy of Cloud has not appeared to replace the one she purchased, assuring herself that the stuffed cat she is growing attached to is not merely a mass-produced item with hundreds like it elsewhere. She later sews a scented sachet onto the doll’s tag to cover up the words “Made in England.” These ongoing efforts to treat the stuffed animal as a replacement for the real thing appear more and more futile as the story continues. Sitting perched on the narrator’s dresser, the doll increasingly appears to make a mockery of the once-living Cloud. The narrator finally wraps him up and packs him away. The lifelessness of the manufactured cat fails to produce the same atmosphere as the living Cloud, as only the latter successfully references the open ocean and the open sky. Cloud was calm and domesticated, but also maintained a degree of independence and aloofness that the narrator found alluring and endearing. The stuffed cat lacks the capacity to echo and respond to the narrator’s feelings—even at a distance—and lacks the sense of tempered wildness that enabled Cloud’s calming effect. What the narrator ultimately misses is the sound of Cloud’s breathing, a soft purring she relates to the sound of ocean waves, the mark of an energy both infinite and sublime. This sound of a living creature in all its otherness is ultimately undomesticatable. The stuffed Cloud, we might say, passes from being cool to just plain cold. In this way the human-cat relationship is laced with contradictory desires. The narrator imagines Cloud to hide a feral chivalrous strength within him, a wildness that persists despite his domesticated and emasculated existence. At the same time, in his trajectory from wild cat to stuffed animal wrapped in plastic, Cloud submits to her desires for permanence and stability. She wants to protect him from getting dirty, from the noise and ugliness of the outside world. Ultimately, he is reduced to serving as a mood-regulator for the narrator, involuntarily participating in forms of emotional labor historically performed by women in human society (Hochschild). Yoshiyuki’s narrative implicitly registers these conflicts. The highly independent women in her stories feel guilty about taking away the independence of their cats, ironically through disempowering forms of domestication that they themselves have resisted. The narrator secretly wants Cloud to remain untamed even as she works to ensure his domestication. Her desire for ownership mixes with guilt and nostalgia over what this ownership has destroyed. This affective amalgam might be understood as one of the paradoxes of coolness in the domestic arena. In the case of “The Little Lady,” the narrator

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desires the cat as a reliably cooling emotional regulator, but at the same time, this capacity for emotional regulation in part depends on her fantasy of the cat as spontaneously and freely performing this behavior on her behalf. The narrator’s ability to keep her distance depends on her imagination of the cat’s own ability to do so. His immutable wildness transposed into noble restraint echoes back and informs her own position, rendering it nobler in turn. From the narrator’s perspective, she and Cloud perform their coolness for each other, each affording the other calm through a distanced companionship, an implied affection couched in disaffection. This interspecies gap allows the narrator the capacity to stay composed in her apparent solitude, but only to the extent Cloud is there to reflect this solitude back to her as a noble bearing. As noted above, over the course of the story the narrator begins to discern at least some of the fantasies involved in her desire for Cloud, and finally begins to accept the reality of his death. She begins to understand that underneath all of his apparent cloudiness he was a finite creature after all, facing his own pains and struggles during their time together. As a result, the narrator’s attentions start to shift to the other cat she has been living with, a less attractive female cat with a squashed face she has simply been calling “Cloud’s little sister,” neglecting even to give her a proper name. In stark contrast to Cloud’s noble air, this cat resembles the narrator herself in her awkwardness and less attractive appearance. In Cloud’s little sister, however, the narrator comes to find a more realistic mirror of her own position, one based less in fantasy than the unromantic realities of day-to-day domestic survival. When she tells Cloud’s little sister “You are capable, and resilient,” the statement hints at a newfound selfacceptance (Yubune 275). CONCLUSION: COOL DEPENDENCIES Yoshiyuki’s “The Little Lady” traces a fine line between emotional distance and death-by-domestication. Cloud serves the narrator as an ownable version of sky and sea, bringing their amorphous expanses into the narrator’s otherwise circumscribed life. This domestication enables the narrator to keep cool and to keep the discomforts of human society at a safe distance. However, the narrator feels guilt for being the agent of Cloud’s imprisonment, robbing him of his external wildness while still secretly hoping to find it burning within. The story powerfully articulates the pleasures of a quiet life with cats while simultaneously exploring the dangers this isolated existence poses when the desire for domestic control is pushed too far. This “free time for looking at clouds” appears at first to be a solitude with no connection to anything beyond itself, and privately ownable in the form of

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a cat. As Yoshiyuki’s story implicitly recognizes, however, to own this freedom is always to take away the freedom of others. The coolness of apparent solitude can only be sustained through the continued support of others. As the narrator begins to finally accept Cloud’s passing, she becomes more aware of the less attractive cat with the smashed face, so far neglected, and turns slowly to a measure of self-acceptance and a way out of grief. She may continue gazing out at the clouds, finding relief in the imagination of a boundless existence, but she might also come to value the less immediately endearing parts of the world around her, including those parts of herself less boundless and free. NOTES 1. This work won Yoshiyuki the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, in early 1981. Her more famous older brother, novelist Yoshiyuki Junnosuke (1924–1994), was on the jury. The older Yoshiyuki received the same award in 1954, making the two of them the first pair of siblings to have both received the prize. For an English translation of “The Little Lady,” see Yoshiyuki 1982. 2. While shrinking households are a common feature of urbanism across the globe, the single-member household stands out as a particularly prominent feature of Japanese cities over the last four decades. The number of people living alone in Japan has steadily increased since the 1970s, and has recently surged even higher. According to the 2010 census, over thirty percent of the population now lives alone. The average number of people per household in Japan is at a record low of 2.46 (2.06 in Tokyo), and these numbers are expected to decrease even further (“Only the Lonely”). 3. For example, “Cat Murder” makes fun of a woman who suddenly starts raising a cat and declaring cats are better than men around the time of the cat boom, despite having no interest in them prior to this time. “Neko no satsujin,” 132. 4. The Namennayo [Don’t Lick Me] cats were real cats dressed in miniature human outfits, photographed in front of scale dioramas depicting human scenes. Pioneered by Tsuda Satoru, the trend quickly spread in the early 1980s, no doubt to the dismay of pet cats everywhere. 5. Hagiwara Sakutarō (1886–1942) was a major figure in the development of free verse poetry in Japan, and one of Yoshiyuki’s key influences. 6. “Fêtes” is the second of three “Nocturnes” Debussy composed inspired by the eponymous impressionist landscapes of painter James McNeill Whistler.

WORKS CITED “Dai 85-kai jō-hanki Akutagawa-shō kettei happyō” [85th First Season Akutagawa Prize Selection Presentation]. Shinchō (February 1981): 339–44. Fukue Natsuko, “Elderly Living Alone Increasingly Dying the Same Way.” The Japan Times (July 21, 2010). Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Illouz, Eva. Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Kōno Taeko and Saeki Shōichi. “Joryū shinjin no genzai – taidan jihyō” [New Female Writers Now—Conversation and Commentary]. Bungakukai 35.3 (March 1981): 194–207. “Only the Lonely: More People Living Alone.” Asahi shinbun, English Edition, February 28, 2011.

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Rogers, Katherine M. Cat. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Schierbeck, Sachiko. Japanese Women Novelists in the 20th Century: 104 Biographies, 1900–1993. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 1994. “Shizuka ni neko būmu—ureru kanren shōhin, rekōdo ya shashinshū mo tōjō (keizai repōto)” [Quietly, a Cat Boom—Related Goods Selling, Records and Photo Books also Introduced (Economic Report)], Nihon keizai shinbun (March 4, 1978). Yonaha Keiko. “Yoshiyuki Rie.” Kokubungaku kaishaku to kanshō 50.10 (September 1985): 155–56. Yoshiyuki Rie. Mahō tsukai no kushan neko [The Magical Kushan Cat]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1971. -----. Yoshiyuki Rie shishū [Collected Poems of Yoshiyuki Rie]. Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1975. -----. Kumo no iru sora [Sky with Cloud]. Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1977. -----. “Neko no satsujin” [Cat Murder], Shinchō (March 1978): 126–45. -----. Chiisana kifujin [The Little Lady]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1981. -----. “The Little Lady.” Translated by Geraldine Harcourt. Japanese Literature Today 7 (1982): 5–18. -----. Yubune ni ochita neko [The Cat Who Fell into the Bath]. Tokyo: Chikuma bunko, 2008.

Chapter Twelve

Marketing National and Self Appearances: Cool and Cute in J-Culture Aviad E. Raz

This commentary on coolness in Japanese culture begins with a return to a “scene of crime” that I left about sixteen years ago, namely my study of Tokyo Disneyland, or TDL for short (Raz, 1999). It was in TDL that I came to know, and appreciate, the Japanese passion for cuteness, or kawaii. It is from that vantage point that I later became interested in cool, or culu as it is rendered in Japanese. My exploration of cool as a leading icon of “J-culture” (Japan’s consumer culture) will therefore start with cute in the context of Disney’s success in Japan. I will then come to the inter-connectedness of cute and cool. Since the 1990s, “Cool Japan” and “cute Japan” have become the dominant international tropes through which Japan markets itself in the global consumerist world. Consequently, it is important to understand how cool Japan has become a cultural text that is interconnected to cute Japan, exploring the two as a dyadic structure reflecting a cultural syntax of woman/man, childlike/mature, dependent/self-sufficient, kitsch/chic, stable/dynamic, traditional/novel, and of course Japan/America. My underlying argument is that such a dyadic structure should be examined as a cultural construction in which oppositions are never objective and stable but rather hybrid and reversible (Raz, 1996). I will conclude with some thoughts on the role of Japanology in the construction of national and self-representations of the empire of signs which is “Japan.” Indeed, the point of departure for this analysis is that “Japan” does not exist, except within inverted commas. “Japan,” perhaps more than any other modern country, signifies a rapidly changing kaleidoscope of images. As Roland Barthes (1982: 3) wrote: “If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it a fictive name (. . .) which I shall call: Japan.” 251

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Barthes has taken this view to a semiotic extreme, claiming that “Japan” is an empty signifier standing only for other images, not reality, but an onion-ofstyles whose center is empty. In that sense, the place that “Japan” occupies in the popular Western imagination has probably been one of the best examples of postmodernity. I have in mind this focus on social constructions and media-disseminations when I speak of J-culture, which I prefer to use rather than the traditional term “Japanese culture.” Let us therefore plunge into a hyper-real, organized tour of “Japan;” and what better, cooler place to start than the Disneyland in Tokyo? I DISNEY-JAPAN AND J-CUTE Young Japanese women are a major “market segment” of TDL and the Disney Stores in Japan. Women older than age eighteen years comprise more than 60 percent of TDL guests. The shopper profile of the Disney retail stores in Japan similarly shows that their largest consumer age group (around 33 percent) is between 20–29 years old, and that 53 percent of their total customers are single females. In the United States, Disney stores’ major market consists of a different group—people over twenty-five that are married with children (Raz, 1999). Kodansha has published, since 1982, an expensive color bi-monthly magazine called Disney Fan whose readership is comprised of young women aged 20-26. Many American observers have noted with surprise the “inscrutable” zeal that young Japanese women have for Disney. These “office ladies” (OLs) clutter their desks with toys and pins of Disney characters (Lo, 1990: 43). Love hotels are equipped with Disney themed rooms including Mickey Mouse sheets (Feiler, 1991: 206). Perhaps Disney is so successful in Japan because it is one of the high temples of cuteness (kawaii). Kawaii is “childlike, sweet, adorable, innocent, pure, simple, vulnerable, denoting weak and inexperienced social behavior and physical appearance” (Kinsella, 1995: 220). This style is evidently not restricted to OLs, although it has been certainly promoted by them. Several idioms—like kawaiiko burikko (or “mock cutie-pie,” pretending to be a cute child) were distinctly made in the context of high school girls and OLs. Kawaii style dominated Japanese popular culture in the 1980s, coinciding with the formative years of TDL, which was opened in 1983. It inspired various fads (see Kinsella 1995; Shimamura 1990, 1991), including fancy goods (“Hello Kitty”), clothes (for example, knee-length “school-girl” socks), women’s magazines (“Cutie for Independent Girls”), a top rated animated TV show with Chibi Maruko-chan as the terminally cute central character, pop music idols (most notably Matsuda Seiko) and a special style of handwriting (burikko ji,

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mock child-writing; extensively researched by Yamane 1986, 1990). Disney characters fitted neatly into this local consumerist realm of the kawaii. Disney as kitsch is readily fused into Japanese kitsch culture (see also Moeran, 1983, 1989, 1993). Donald Richie (1991: 44) summed it up properly by suggesting that: Japan found in Disneyland something in which a true fellow-feeling was discovered . . . recognized in it one of its own enduring qualities: This is a passion amounting to near genius for kitsch . . . Japan embraced the biggest piece of kitsch in the West . . . broke off a chunk and brought it home to add to its collections.

Does this indicate the Disneyfication of Japan or the Japanization of Disney? This question highlights the ubiquity of the cute/kawaii in J-culture. One of the best artistic embodiments of this iconic ubiquity can be found in some of the paintings of Fukuda Miran. In one of her paintings, Disney kitsch from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is inserted into a kitsch landscape of Mount Fuji with ink on silk on a traditional hanging scroll, creating a pastiche of Disney-fied Japan. Is Disney inherently cute? Is there some internal quality in the Disney characters that makes them universally kawaii? Or is it just the Japanese who are taking this ride? One of the keys to this cultural link is that both Disney and kawaii—especially burrikko—reveal forms of neoteny, a condition in which there is forced retention of youthful characteristics in the adult form. The physical evidence of neoteny includes a rounded face and cheeks, big round eyes, short and stubby limbs, softness, smallness, squeaky voice, and vulnerable weakness. These very characteristics were described by the ethnologist Konrad Lorenz (1981: 164–65) as innately producing human parental care responses. The behavioral juvenilization accompanying this includes out-going and playful friendliness, and infantile speech. The Disney characters embody all this, especially Mickey, whose speaking voice is always that of a small child, not entirely unlike the squeaky falsetto of some young Japanese women. Cute is also a social mask. Being “cute” is furthermore, “an act of self-mutilation: posing with pigeon toes, dieting, acting stupid, squeaking and giggling” (Shimamura, 1990). On the other hand, the cute act has also been viewed as a youthful rebellion against adulthood. “Rather than acting sexually provocative to emphasize their maturity, Japanese youth acted pre-sexual and vulnerable in order to emphasize their immaturity” (Kinsella, 1995: 243; see also Silverberg, 1991). This has also been connected to the so-called lolicon phenomenon, the Lolita complex of Japanese men.

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II FROM CUTENESS (KAWAII) TO COOLNESS (CULU, KAKKOII) In merchandising, cute and cool can be coupled to expand the market value of a product. Imagine a product that combines the adorable sweetness and cheerful girlishness of Disney with the hi-tech, sophisticated, masculine feature of modern information technology. What do you get? The Disney mobile. Disney’s mobile marketing in Japan is helped by NTT DoCoMo with a “luxury smartphone” sold only in Japan that features silhouettes of Mickey and Minnie Mouse (http://gdgt.com/disney-mobile/f-08d). Not surprisingly, Disney seems to be expanding its traditional cuteness marketing strategy by combining it with coolness, especially in terms of its merchandising. By combining traditional cuteness with modern-day hi-tech information technology, Disney markets itself as both kawaii and culu. In what follows I will continue to develop this notion of the coupling of cute and cool. What is cool Japan or J-cool? According to the recent NHK program “Cool Japan Hakkutsu: kakkoii Nippon!” (Discover cool Japan), the answer is pop culture: manga, anime, fashion, computer games. How did “cool” become J-cool, namely a Japanese idiom, a consumerist image related to Japan? There is here a process of back-translation, domestication or even glocalization (the localization of global culture) since “cool” is originally an American word. This is in contrast to “kawaii,” whose original linguistic form is Japanese. But of course at the end (as well as the beginning) of the day nothing is entirely “original,” “authentic,” or “essential” when we are discussing consumerist images. Nevertheless, the cultural career of “cool” has been distinctly American during most of the 20th century. It goes back to jazz clubs in the 1930s in America where jazz performances were defined as “cool.” In the 1970s, the hippies created the antonym uncool, and later, California surfers renewed it as way cool. Today, “cool” is abundant on the Internet—“Click here for cool stuff.” Cool is thus a concept whose cultural extensions undergo constant changes, its denotations repeatedly moving from one fashion to another hype. The cool stuff of yesterday is no longer cool today. Yet even though cool changes its denotation, the word has resisted change and kept its popular usage even in the face of competition such as “groovy,” “far out,” and more. Interestingly, cute is quite different: the meaning of cute is rather fixed, unchanging. Cool and cute thus complement each other in terms of change versus stability. This is, as we shall see, one in many couplings. Nevertheless, the opposition is also reversible. As cute may not be fashionable next year or next month, its stability may turn into a false illusion as it is replaced by the next fad—the next cool stuff. In this respect, then, it is cool that is

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much more stable and persistent since it accommodates the very dynamism of cultural fads. Another important coupling is that cool equals American and kawaii equals Japan. The Japaneseness of cute is encapsulated in a notion Japanese call “cuteness” (kawaisa). Variable in what this actually refers to, cuteness involves emotional attachments to imaginary creations/creatures with resonances to childhood and also Japanese traditional culture. But of course cool has also been Japanized even while some say it has always been Japanese, for example in the case of cool fascism or the coolness of bushido. On the other hand, cute can also be seen in American-made pop culture like Disney. Yet another important coupling of cool and cute concerns gender relations. Cool is often translated into Japanese as kakkoii, meaning handsome, well-dressed, and sophisticated. Usually, the word kakkoii is used in Japanese to describe men. However, this word is not usually used among men. Kakkoii or unkakkoii men are virtually always judged by women. For example, the Japanese girls’ comic book Omoikkiri Kakkoii Otokonoko (思いっきりカッコイ イ男の子) shows what kinds of boys are considered to be kakkoii from the girls’ point of view. Cute evidently works in the opposite way. Cute is usually used to describe women. However, denoting women as cute—kawaii—also subjects them to men’s gaze; and also vice versa. Once again, the gendered coupling is a social construct and as such can undergo reversal. Transmutation can take the form of a unisex style as in the case of kakkoii jyosei—women who dress simply, casually, in black and white, like men, masculine, independent, are considered to be kakkoii. In fashion lingo, both cute and cool are interchangeable. This is illustrated by the Kawaii College Student Fashion, Kawaii Office Lady Fashion, Cool College Student Fashion, and Cool Office Lady Fashion. III READINGS OF J-COOL For some, especially in the industry, J-cool is a growing source of local and international consumption, a “soft power” to be recognized and cultivated. This is illustrated by the recent opening of a special cool Japan office in Japan’s Trade Ministry. The Trade Ministry reaffirmed, in June 2010, its “strategy to promote a culture-oriented industry.” In a recent editorial entitled “Time to capitalize on ‘Cool Japan’ boom,” the Yomiuri Shimbun argued that: Japanese pop culture—widely referred to as “Cool Japan”—has taken off overseas. . . . But this popularity has not necessarily led to overseas expansion

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Aviad E. Raz by domestic companies involved in these industries. The domestic animation industry remains dominated by small and midsize companies, and exports of textiles have slackened. Japanese restaurants have been mushrooming the world over, but many are operated by non-Japanese. . . . Japan should emulate the Korean formula of ensuring [that] cooperation transcends fields such as fashion, movies, food and manga, instead of promoting business through separate government ministries and agencies” (From The Yomiuri Shimbun, August 30, 2010).

The road of such commercial readings, always driving toward profitability, is often paved by stereotypical market research. For example, market research on Pokémon sales was interpreted as showing that J-cool is best exported by Japan to the West while J-cute is best imported, since much more cute Pokémon shirts were sold in Japan, as compared to much more cool Ash T-shirts sold in the United States. This interpretation that the Japanese prefer cute products, while compatible with the case of Disney in Japan, may be of limited generalizability. However, what matters for this reading is that Japanese merchandise is being sold in large quantities. Others employ a more critical and individualistic reading of J-cool. For example, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (2011) in his recent book on the CoolKawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity, argues that, Cool and kawaii are expressions set against the oppressive homogenizations that occur within official modern cultures but are also catalysts of modernity. Cool and kawaii do not refer us back to a pre-modern ethnic past. Just like the cool African American man has almost no relationship with traditional African ideas about masculinity, the kawaii shojo is not the personification of the traditional Japanese ideal of the feminine, but signifies an ideological institution of women based on Japanese modernity in the Meiji period, that is, a feminine image based on westernization. At the same time, cool and kawaii do not transport us into a futuristic, impersonal world of hyper-modernity based on assumptions of constant modernization. Cool and kawaii stand for another type of modernity, which is not the technocratic one, but a “Dandyist” one that is closely related to the search for human dignity and liberation.

Another Japanologist who sees J-cool as undermining American cultural imperialism is Anne Allison, who in her recent book Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (2006) describes the emergence of an ethos of “coolness” around Japanese cultural imports—moving from a time when the industry sought to erase markers of cultural difference to the present moment when many Western consumers are embracing these products (toys, anime, manga, games) because of their Japaneseness. In a recent online interview, Allison candidly reflected that, It’s always struck me that Americans are very insular; we tend to see America as the center of the world, American culture as the global standard and norm,

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and the American lifestyle as the best in the world. Much of this is unconscious and comes from, among other things, a popular culture so dominated by U.S.-produced fare. So, to disturb this sense of American-centeredness and to open up Americans to understanding and recognizing cultural difference is good, I'd say. Of course the question then is: does the popularization of J-cool amongst American youth really signal an opening up of consciousness and sensitivity to cultures and a cultural way of life that is different? I would say— to a degree, yes. But what matters here is not that fans of J-cool necessarily understand the complexity of “Japan” as the origins of this different popular culture. Rather, what is important here is more the disruption of the dominance of American culture. (Quoted from http://henryjenkins.org/2007/02/ lets_start_where_your_book.html#more)

IV REFLECTIONS ON COOL AND CUTE IN J-CULTURE The plurality of readings attached to fads and images of coolness and cuteness, and the reflexivity these readings invoke, can be now given a metareading. This reflexivity represents and epitomizes the shift to a new stage in Japanology, which forms an antithesis to its previous, formative phase that dominated much of the 20th century. Japanologists have been pre-occupied, like detective Connor in the film Rising Sun (the character played by Sean Connery), by a dual role. On the one hand, they were the “interpreters” of the “secrets” of the Japanese essence; on the other, they were the ones most determined to keep the mystery of “Japan” alive. The “Great Tradition” (Mouer and Sugimoto, 1981) of Japanology was dominated by the search for that Holy Grail, the ultimate signifier, the “Japanese spirit” (yamato damashi) or Nihonjinron (literally, theories of the Japanese people). Images of collective character, long dismissed by anthropologists as belonging to the realm of the invention of primitive society, were kept alive in Japanology. It was the field’s Great Tradition, its “paradigmatic approach” (Neustupny, 1980), its myth (Dale, 1986) and, in the last analysis, also its “Orientalism” (Minear, 1980). Under that stereotypical and riveted gaze, Japan could be depicted as either “model” or “monster” (Delassus, 1970), depending on the economic circumstances. By focusing as we do here on cute and cool, our subject matter becomes fads and images. There is no ultimate signifier any more, merely fragments in a consumerist kaleidoscope. This is the antithesis; this is also a post-colonial shift, of the Orient “striking back” in the words of Joy Hendry (2001), possibly also leading to or standing for the end of the exotic (Hijiya-Kirschnereit, 1988). It is also a culmination of the postmodern shift. This view is also neither new nor original, and can be found in Nishida Kitaro’s philosophy, articulated some forty years before Barthes’s analysis,

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of “mu no basho,” place of nothingness, which “became that tacitly understood foundation of the postmodernism of the 1930s in Japan, or the socalled theory of ‘kindai no chokoku’: ‘overcoming the modern’” (Asada, 1991). This anthology on coolness Japan, and the conference from which it emanated, portray a significant shift away from what has been the mainstream tradition of Japanese studies. Previously, the disciplinization of Japanese studies had produced an insularity of scholarly concerns with Japan. “Japanese scholars,” stated Miyoshi and Harootunian in 1991 (5), “all-tooreadily assemble among themselves as Japan specialists rather than as members of distinct intellectual constituencies.” In contrast, many of the academics who spoke in the conference on coolness Japan and contributed to this book—including myself—are not primarily Japanologists but also philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, historians, and cultural studies scholars. To sum up, my point is that cool and cute are to be seen and visited as new site of attraction in the fictive land that Marco Polo called “Chipangu” and we call “Japan.” Images of Japan have been often classified according to three periods. The first dates from the end of the 19th century to World War II, in which the Japanese were admired and studied as being “the most aesthetic of modern people”—a nation which produced such “things Japanese” as Tempyo sculptures, the Tale of Genji, Kamakura and Ashikaga ink paintings, etc. (Hearn, 1888). During WWII, this old, intimate, sensitive, nature-oriented, mystical “Japan” was replaced by a “Japan” of militaristic zealots, the descendants of the merciless Samurai. How can these opposing images be reconciled? Obviously, by introducing a third image: “Japan” as the land of paradox and incommensurability, “Japan” of the chrysanthemum and the sword (Benedict, 1946), and of the lotus and the robot (Koestler, 1960). Since the 1970s, with Japan’s “modernization” accomplished or recognized, the next wave of writings gave rise to the notion of “Japan, Inc.” and other representations of overly coordinated or orchestrated “economic animals.” In cool and cute we are reaching a fourth stage of imagery, which is indeed an antithesis to the work-centered image of Japan incorporated—cool and cute being derived from leisure, emanating from a pop-culture that highlights the insatiable, seductive, and yet ultimately alienating pleasures of consumption. WORKS CITED Asada, Akira. Infantile Capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale. Boundaries 2, 18:3, special issue on Japan in the World, 1991: 629–34. Aviad, Raz and Jacob Raz. “‘America’ Meets ‘Japan’: A Journey for Real between Two Imaginaries.” In Theory, Culture & Society 13(3) (1996): 157–82. Barthes, Roland. The Empire of Signs. New York: Hill & Wang, 1982. Benedict, Ruth. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

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Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. The Cool-Kawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011. Dale, Peter. The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Delassus, Jean-François. Japan: Monster or Model? Paris: Lausanne, 1970. Feiler, Bruce. Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991. Hearn, Lafcadio. Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1888. Hendry, Joy. The Orient Strikes Back. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela. Das Ende der Exotik: Zur Japanischen Kultur und Gesellschaft der Gegenwart. Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1988. Kawamura, Nozomu. “The Historical Background of Arguments Emphasizing the Uniqueness of Japanese Society.” In Social Analysis 5/6 (1980): 44–63. Kinsella, Sharon. “Cuties in Japan.” In Women, Media and Consumption in Japan edited by Lise Skov and Brian Moeran, 220-255. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1995. Koestler, Artur. The Lotus and the Robot. London: Macmillan, 1960. Lo, Jeannie. Office Ladies and Factory Women: Life and Work at a Japanese Company. New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc, 1990. Lorenz, Konrad. The Foundations of Ethology. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981. Masao, Miyoshi and Harry D. Harootunian (ed.). Japan in the World. Boundary 2, 18:3, special issue on Japan in the World. Duke University Press, 1991: 1–8. Minear, Richard H. “Orientalism and the Study of Japan.” In Journal of Asian Studies 3 (1980): 507–17. Moeran, Brian. “The Language of Japanese Tourism.” In Annals of Tourism Research 10 (1983): 93–108. Moeran, Brian. Language and Popular Culture in Japan. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1989. Moeran, Brian. “Cinderella Christmas: Kitsch, Consumerism, and Youth Culture in Japan.” In Unwrapping Christmas edited by Daniel Miller, 105–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Neutspuny, J. V. “On Paradigms in the Study of Japan.” In Social Analysis 5/6 (1980): 20–28. Raz, Aviad. Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland. Harvard University Press (The Council on East Asian Studies), 1999. Richie, Donald. “The ‘Real’ Disneyland.” In A Lateral View: Essays on Culture and Style in Contemporary Japan, 41–46. Tokyo: The Japan Times Ltd, 1993. Shimamura, Mari. Fanshii no kenkyū: kawaii ga hito, mono, kane o shōhai suru (Research on Fancy: Cute Controls People, Objects, and Money). Tokyo: Nesco, 1990. Shimamura, Mari. “Kawaii!: The Cult of Cute Begins with Infancy, and Never Seems to End.” In The Japan Times Weekly 31(1) January 5 (1991): 1–3. Silverberg, Miriam. “The Modern Girl as Militant.” In Recreating Japanese Women 1600-1945 edited by Gail Lee Bernstein, 236–67. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Yamane, Kazuma. Hentai Shōjo Moji no Kenkyū (Anomalous Teenage Handwriting Research). Tokyo: Kodansha, 1986. Yamane, Kazuma. Gyaru no kōzō (The Structure of the Girl). Tokyo: Sekai Bunkasha, 1990. Yoshio, Sugimoto and R. Mouer. Japanese Society: Stereotypes and Realities. Melbourne: Monash University, 1981.

IV

Global Cool

Chapter Thirteen

Cool Capitalism at Work Jim McGuigan

The cool capitalism thesis contends that signs and dispositions of disaffection are incorporated into the mainstream of mass-popular culture and are thereby neutralized in effect, at the very least diminishing their subversive force. 1 The thesis is not just a commentary upon consumerism. This proposition about a typical way of social being today also applies to the sphere of production and the routine experience of working life, an everyday pattern of experience which is notably accentuated in the burgeoning “creative” occupations of the culture industry. A cool way of life that is most evident in affluent segments of the world is, on the surface, extremely attractive. LEGITIMATION Sociologically, the cool capitalism thesis addresses the problem of legitimation. For Max Weber, 2 legitimation referred to political authority, whether politics was conducted according to, say, traditional or charismatic authority, or, under modern conditions, on rational-legal grounds. Like other classical social theorists, Weber was concerned very generally with the transition from tradition to modernity. Later, rather differently, Antonio Gramsci 3 made a major contribution to our understanding of the hegemonic leadership of nation-states, placing particular emphasis on the argument that political power was, amongst other determining forces, supported by cultural power. In his native Italy, this was focused on the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the difficulties of creating a counter-hegemonic bid for socialist leadership of the state. For him, the struggle for leadership in society involved the formation of a power bloc which, in effect, represented a class alliance; so, in some sense, it was underpinned by economics. 263

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The concept of hegemony became very popular in cultural analysis in the 1980s, the highpoint of so-called British cultural studies, but, unfortunately, it came to be used widely in a peculiarly superficial manner to make sense of quite trivial matters of meaning and, exaggeratedly, of symbolic contestation. 4 In this academic tendency, the economic aspects of hegemony were neglected, thereby losing sight of Gramsci’s purpose in his writings at Mussolini’s pleasure. The anti-economism of that excessively culturalist analytical position did, however, somewhat belatedly come to acknowledge a phenomenon named by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques as “New Times,” which actually served, in practice, as a bridge to the “Third Way” politics of New Labor in Britain. 5 The cool capitalism thesis differs from Weberian political legitimacy theory and also the Gramscian conception of ideological class struggle in that it is concerned with the popular legitimation of an economic system that holds sway across the globe today, to whit, neoliberal capitalism. 6 Now, of course, it has to be acknowledged that capitalism is not just one undifferentiated civilizational formation. It is a variable phenomenon, taking different forms over time and even contemporaneously, as the distinction between, say, German and American capitalism might ostensibly attest. Still, however, present-day capitalist dynamics in general are most notably transnational. As a necessary background, it is reasonable to sketch three broad historical phases of capitalism over the past two centuries that are germane to the cool capitalism thesis: liberal, organized, and neoliberal. As Boltanski and Chiapello quite rightly argue, capitalism always needs to be justified. 7 The Weberian justification for the earlier phase of liberal capitalism referred to religion, specifically the Puritan ethic of hard work and deferred gratification. When capitalism got into difficulties, however, as it did in the midtwentieth century, another source of justification and indeed renewal became critique, at that time, the socialist critique. It was not just that socialists had criticisms to make of capitalism and could point with plenty of evidence to the failings of liberal or, as we might say now, unregulated capitalism; some also pointed optimistically to “actually existing socialism,” to cite a wellworn phrase, the communist Utopia apparently being constructed in the Soviet Union and, subsequently, in satellite states and China. A second phase of this broad scheme of development, the organized phase, formed in the midtwentieth century. A notable feature of Western organized capitalism until the late-twentieth century turned out to be the incorporation of socialistic elements: strong labor representation and rewards, welfare states, national health services, and the like—the very supports that have been steadily eroded away in recent decades. The economic crises of the 1970s and the collapse of “actually existing socialism” in the late-1980s plus the Chinese turn onto “the capitalist road,” to cut a long story short, all contributed to the unravelling of organized

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capitalism and the growing hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. It was not only that communism collapsed but social democracy was also eclipsed once the agencies of capitalist power no longer feared a more serious threat that had to be fended off with popular concessions. How does the current phase of neoliberal capitalism with which we have become so familiar that it seems natural rather than socially and historically constructed justify itself? And, indeed, how does it continue to be justified in the wake of the apparently systemic crisis brought about by hyper-financialization and the excessive virtualization of assets over recent years, setting aside for the moment, the ecological crisis that we face, arguably, due to an irresponsible accumulation strategy and the unrestrained growth orientation of capitalism per se? Most evidently, neoliberal capitalism is justified by its apparent capacity to deliver the goods, in more ways than one, to comparatively affluent subjects and to frame the aspirations of the poor. The hegemony of neoliberalism is quite definitely not only obtained, in the Gramscian sense, at the philosophical level, by educated appreciation of the proven truths of neo-classical and “free-market” economics. It is also obtained, more significantly, at the popular level by the seductive symbols and experiences of everyday life. To some extent, then, the cool capitalism thesis is an attempt to explain the popular legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism. COOL CAPITALISM As proposed in Cool Capitalism, 8 the basic definition of cool capitalism is the incorporation of disaffection into capitalism itself. It is, in Goffman’s 9 sense, a “front region” that is seductively tasteful in its appeal to populations at large, both the comparatively affluent and, indeed, the aspirant poor. There is, however, a “back region,” rather like an industrialized kitchen with dirty secrets that do not meet health and safety standards. This back region is occasionally glimpsed and, in consequence, the fare on offer is called into question by troubled voices. As in any good restaurant, the maitre d’ must somehow cool out the customers who might otherwise take their business elsewhere. Maybe it is “cool” to have a filthy kitchen and, in any event, you have to smash eggs in order to make an omelette; and sometimes they spill onto the floor where the rats hang out. It is almost unnecessary to point out how ubiquitously the word “cool” is used presently around the Earth and not only in English; or, just as important, how widely embedded is the sensibility associated with that term whether the word is actually used or not. It is everywhere. Coolness is not some marginal or dissident trend. It is at the heart of mainstream culture insofar as we can speak at all of such a phenomenon.

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Cool Capitalism gives several examples of present-day coolness, particularly in commerce. The genealogy of the word and the discourses through which it has passed are also traced. “Cool” derives from West African itutu, the core meaning of which refers to composure in the heat of battle. Although it was closely associated with masculinity in origin, this may not have been exclusively so and, in any case, it is not exclusively so today. The American art historian Robert Farris Thompson has documented the aesthetics of itutu in the West and South of Africa, its passage to the Americas with the slave trade and the formation of a cool culture of disaffection on the margins of US society. 10 Generally speaking, coolness became a personal stance, mode of deportment and argot, associated with dignity under pressure in oppressive circumstances. It is a distinctive feature of “Black Atlantic” 11 culture and it also became extremely prominent and attractive to others, including whites, especially through mid-twentieth century jazz culture. 12 Although coolness is difficult to pin down—and deliberately so—Pountain and Robins have, nevertheless, sought to identify three essential traits of the cool persona: narcissism, ironic detachment, and hedonism. 13 It is easy to call up plenty of subcultural examples over the years, either indirectly or directly related to black culture, from, say, Parisian existentialism to latter day hip-hop culture. Very recently, an article in a philosophy magazine that was unusually on sale on the mass market celebrated coolness as a “fusion of submission and subversion.” From this point of view, the cool person, albeit perpetually alienated, conducts a creative balancing act. The would-be philosopher in question obviously thinks coolness is still cool. I don’t. Some black American commentators don’t either. Social psychologists Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson remarked several years ago in their empirical study of black masculinity in urban locales, “coolness may be a survival strategy that has cost the black male— and society—an enormous price.” 14 Whilst it represents black identity and pride in the ghetto, such “compulsive masculinity” in that context is also seriously damaging to both women and men, not to mention the druggy lifestyle, disorganized sociality, and violent criminality—which is by no means confined to working-class black males in the United States. Cool today is not only about black American culture; it is global and colorless. The sign floats free. And, key to the cool capitalism thesis, “cool” has traversed the political landscape, roughly speaking, from the Left to the Right. It is now more a sign of compliance than of resistance. This argument is substantiated by Thomas Frank’s research on “the conquest of cool” in which he claims that the cool sensibility caught on in the American mainstream as long ago as the 1950s with the rise of rebels without a cause, rejecting the staid conformity fostered by post-Second World War organized capitalism in middle-class life and business. 15 Nowadays, of course, nearly every management consultant you meet plays blues guitar.

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According to Frank, the counterculture caught on very rapidly in corporate America. A cool pose and the buzzword “creativity” are now de rigeur in managerial ideology. Indeed, as a couple of Swedish management theorists have pointed out, business today is “funky.” 16 It is interesting that Frank confined his research on latter day business and management discourse to the United States while Boltanski and Chiapello restricted their research to France. Yet, even French management texts are influenced by “Anglo-Saxon” neoliberal thought and, indeed, Gallic cadres read American management books. Cool capitalism is now a global phenomenon, albeit with American roots though by no means restricted to the United States. It is indisputably a feature of “Americanization,” but Americanization, it has to be said, is only part of the story and too simple a way of understanding cool capitalism’s presence in the world at large. COOL SEDUCTION In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell bemoaned capitalism’s loss of puritanical zeal and complained about the rise of mass hedonism. 17 As he said, “The greatest single engine in the destruction of the Protestant ethic was the invention of the instalment plan, or instance credit.” Bell believed that the culture of immediate gratification severely undermined the legitimacy of capitalism. In this, of course, he was wrong. It was, in fact, an ebullient source of renewal. Critics of mass consumerism have long complained of the “manipulation”—and even “exploitation”—of the consumer. This is a mistaken form of analysis that has recently been revived by Douglas Rushkoff. 18 A more satisfactory account of consumer behavior can be thought about, rather, in terms of seduction, something that Jean Baudrillard acknowledged and sought to theorise as “cold seduction.” 19 Zygmunt Bauman’s much more sociological take on seduction, however, is analytically preferable to Baudrillard’s quasiFreudian argument. 20 We can usefully speak of “cool seduction” in consumer culture. This notion is confirmed by Jacqueline Botterill’s research on the cool rhetoric of advertising today, “the fifth frame” that is deployed particularly in the targeting of young urban professionals, the so-called “culturati” taste leaders. 21 It is also confirmed by the market research practice of “cool hunting,” noted by Malcolm Gladwell. 22 Bauman himself talks of the destruction of skills that make people so dependent on the market to create and satisfy their needs. In addition, Karl Marx’s original thinking on commodity fetishism 23 is of refreshed significance here, especially allied to what Raymond Williams called “mobile privatization.” 24 Before considering these matters, it is necessary, however, to

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say something about the rhetoric and practice of producerly consumption, which is deemed especially cool in the mainstream. Time magazine’s “person of the year for 2007” was nominated as “You.” That year it was not some illustrious personage, such as Bono or Vladimir Putin—but, instead, “You.” At the 2006/2007 turn of the year, Time complimented “ordinary people” for being the agents of a digital democracy. Web 2.0 was the liberating medium, facilitating peer-to-peer communication over the internet. While such “people power” may perhaps have seemed threatening to the media conglomerates at one time, much of it was swiftly incorporated with, say, Rupert Murdoch buying out MySpace and the like ahead of the rise of Facebook and Twitter. “Social networking” is, first and foremost, a market research tool, albeit providing a form of communication from below, apparently fulfilling the long-held wish of cultural radicals since Brecht and Benjamin. 25 It’s all very seductive, submitting willingly. Cool are the many-splendored communicational gadgets at our disposal today, with Apple the coolest of corporations, market-leader in delivering the kit to rebels without a cause. We have seen an enormous burgeoning of commodity fetishism around these magical technologies, the iPad being only the latest in a long and apparently endless succession of devices essential to life under cool capitalism, that’s if you can afford them. Williams formulated the concept of mobile privatization to capture a key feature of everyday life in modern urban civilization that is closely connected to the operations of capitalism. Privately cocooned in the small household, people gained access to great virtual mobility through broadcasting and, in the case of television, were seeing images arriving in the home instantly from as far away as the other side of the world. Williams also commented on the motorcar and the coordination of traffic on the roads in this respect. Such mobile privatization has been further extended by digital technologies. The Walkman had already created a private audio space for the subject moving through public physical space in the 1980s ahead of the 2g mobile phone’s rapid take-up in the 1990s. Soon telephony and music were combined with the advent of the iPhone and kindred devices. The individual perpetually on the move, accompanied by a personal soundtrack, online and in constant touch, is the ideal figure of cool capitalist culture in the sphere of consumption and, to an extent, production as well. As Marx pointed out in his discussion of commodity fetishism, the source of the magical goods is erased in their reception—they appear like manna from Heaven. That’s just as well when you consider the conditions of production in places like Shenzen, Hell-on-Earth conditions that would have shocked Marx himself. 26 Yet, we all know about that, don’t we? Remember all the fuss about the global garment trade a few years ago, which occasionally still erupts to our chagrin? But, apparently, there is nothing we can really do about it. The public relations departments of the corporations are too

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cunning. They claim disingenuously not to have known what the manufacturers were up to and vow unconvincingly not to allow it any longer. We, however, are too worldly wise to be hoodwinked by PR. We know only too well that such extreme exploitation occurs routinely in supplying us with cool commodities. Unfortunately, it is just the way of the world, according to conventional wisdom. This is a thoroughly cynical and, indeed, cool capitalist attitude. Capitalism was never so naturalized as it is today and we were never so compliant. Seduction is the complement in the sphere of consumption to exploitation in the sphere of production. In sum, then, the commodity fetishism of mobile communications today exemplifies Raymond Williams’s concept of mobile privatization as the epitome of socio-cultural experience under mature capitalism. COOL WORK The cool capitalism thesis is not just another critique of mass consumerism. The general argument is equally applicable to the sphere of production as it is to consumption. Boltanski and Chiapello analysed management texts from a similar point of view in identifying the ideal figure of the freewheeling project worker. As Sebastian Budgen helpfully summarized, such a person’s heroic mentors are “dressed-down, cool capitalists like Bill Gates or ‘Ben and Jerry.’” 27 Demotic versions of latter day management “science” crowd out the shelves of bookshops today, such as, to pick an example at random, Ken Langdon’s Cultivate a Cool Career—52 Brilliant Ideas for Reaching the Top. 28 Langdon’s tips for young cadres include “lead with style,” “encourage the musician in everyone,” “draw your own map,” and “be a dedicated follower of fashion.” Although these suggestions may be merely metaphorical, it is significant that cool managerial practice should be articulated in the language of creativity and artistry, thereby substantiating Boltanski and Chiapello’s argument concerning the incorporation of the artistic critique into capitalism itself. The same aesthetico-managerial sensibility has been enunciated in Richard Florida’s extraordinarily influential thesis on “the rise of the creative class,” 29 which equates the specific category of cultural work with professional-managerial occupation in general, 30 inspired by David Brooks’s identification of “the bobo,” the bourgeois bohemian. 31 This blurring of categories is an ideological distortion that obliterates the differences between art and business. We need to be more specific in order to analyze the precarious conditions of work in different kinds of occupation, 32 and not simply accept the suggestion that all work—or, at least, all professional-managerial work— is becoming more creative when, in fact, human creativity is being squeezed

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by economic considerations, which is hardly a novel state of affairs. 33 However, there is no more profound site of cool capitalism as lived experience than in cultural work, by which is meant the production and communication of meaning in symbolic artifacts, not just any kind of work. Angela McRobbie has already commented on the experience of young workers in London’s so-called “creative industries.” 34 Competition for such work is fierce because it is believed to be glamorous, though in reality it is far from being so. Young entrants to the cultural labor market are employed typically in the first instance as unpaid interns in order to cultivate their creativity. 35 For the lucky few, when wages are eventually paid, they are much lower than unions in the past would have negotiated, particularly in the modern media, contracts are short and frantic networking is required in order to build a career. Many are wasted and drop out before long, in search perhaps of something less stressful. For those who survive, the subculture of such work tends to favor the self-presentation of a modishly eccentric persona but, as McRobbie remarks, “It’s not cool to be difficult.” 36 Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim’s concept of individualization 37 addresses a widespread trend and is especially illuminating when applied to the conditions and character of cultural work today. 38 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim expressly argue that it is an Anglo-Saxon error to equate individualization in the labor process and everyday life with the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism. In this, they are mistaken since the notion of individualization beautifully captures the precariousness of much work today under neoliberal conditions, which is exemplified, epitomized, and accentuated in young people’s experience of cultural work in particular. It is an outstanding feature of the cool capitalist culture of neoliberalism and the competitive individualism and insecurity that it actually cultivates. An important strand of recent research in the occupational sociology of the creative industries confirms it. German sociologists, for instance, have formulated the notion of self-employed employee (Arbeitskraftunternehmer) to make sense of such typical modes of precarious work, and applied it, for instance, to the working lives of theatre workers. 39 That may not, however, be the best example for illustrating the novelty of cool capitalism since theatre work has never been notably secure. Nonetheless, the self-fashioning, self-marketing, and economization of life suggested by the concept of selfemployed employment is not dissimilar to the argument that the individualization of cultural work is a feature of cool capitalism. There is a growing body of research and literature on these matters from a critical point of view. For instance, from the United States, Andrew Ross’s Nice Work If You Can Get It—Life and Labor in Precarious Times is consistent with the issues discussed in this chapter concerning the paradoxical incorporation of disaffection into capitalism and its implications for “creative” labor. “Flexibility” is a watch word of the neoliberal labor market in

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general and cultural work in particular that makes for precarious, insecure, and stressful conditions; however, as Ross asks us to remember, “the demand for flexibility originated not on the managerial side, but from the labouring ranks themselves as part of the broadly manifested ‘revolt against work’ in the early 1970s.” 40 Capitalism has been brilliant at responding to disaffection, criticism, and opposition by stealing the enemy’s clothes and flaunting them cynically on the catwalk as a means of refashioning an exploitative system, in effect, of denying genuine entitlement and, indeed, liberation. NOTES 1. Jim McGuigan, Cool Capitalism (London and New York: Pluto, 2009). 2. Sam Whimster, ed., The Essential Weber (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 3. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). 4. Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 5. Stuart Hall & Martin Jacques, eds., New Times—The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989). 6. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 7. Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London & New York: Verso, 2005 [1999]). 8. McGuigan, 2009, op.cit., 1. 9. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 [1959]). 10. Robert Farris Thompson, African Art In Motion (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974) and Black Gods and Kings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976 [1971]). 11. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic—Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993). 12. Lewis McAdams, Birth of the Cool—Beat, Bebop and the American Avant-Garde (London: Scribner, 2002 [2001]). 13. Dick Pountain and David Robins, Cool Rules—Anatomy of an Attitude (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). 14. Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, Cool Pose—The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Touchstone, 1993 [1992]), pxi. 15. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool—Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1997. 16. Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom, Funky Business—Talent Makes Capital Dance (London: Pearson, 2002 [2000]). 17. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 20th Anniversary edition [1976] (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 21. 18. Douglas Rushkoff, Coercion—Why We Listen to What “They” Say (New York: Riverhead, 1999). 19. Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990 [1979]). 20. Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumption and the New Poor (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998). 21. William Leiss, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, and Jacqueline Botterill, Social Communication in Advertising—Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace, 3rd edition (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), 453–578.

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22. Malcolm Gladwell, “The Coolhunt,” New Yorker, March 17, 1997. 23. Karl Marx, Capital—Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976 [1867]), 163–64. 24. Raymond Williams, Television—Technology and Cultural Form (London: Fontana, 1974) and Towards 2000 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1983]), 188–89. 25. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Consciousness Industry—On Literature, Politics and the Media (New York: Seabury Press, 1974). 26. Joseph Wilde and Esther de Haan, The High Cost of Calling—Critical Issues in the Mobile Phone Industry (SOMO, Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, November 2006). 27. Sebastien Budgen, “A New Spirit of Capitalism,” New Left Review 1, 2nd series, January-February (2000): 151. 28. Ken Langdon, Cultivate a Cool Career—52 Brilliant Ideas for Reaching the Top (Oxford: The Infinite Ideas Company Limited, 2007 [2004]). 29. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class—And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (Melbourne: Pluto, 2003 [2002]). 30. See my critique of Florida, Jim McGuigan, “Doing a Florida Thing—The Creative Class Thesis and Cultural Policy,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 15, no. 3 (August 2009), 291–300. 31. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise—The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 32. Guy Standing, The Precariat—The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury 2011). 33. Kevin Doogan, New Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). 34. Angela McRobbie, “From Clubs to Companies—The Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds,” Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 516–31. 35. Ross Perlin, Intern Nation—How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy (London & New York: Verso, 2011). 36. McRobbie, op. ccit., p. 523. 37. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck Gernsheim, Individualization—Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences, trans. Patrick Camiller (London & New York: Sage, 2002 [2001]). 38. Jim McGuigan, “Creative Labor, Cultural Work and Individualization,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 16, no. 3 (August 2010): 323–35. 39. Axel Haunschild and Doris Ruth Eikhof, “Bringing Creativity to Market—Actors as Self-Employed Employees,” in Creative Labour—Working in the Creative Industries, ed. Alan McKinlay and Chris Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 156–73. 40. Andrew Ross, Nice Work If You Can Get It—Life and Labor in Precarious Times (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 5.

WORKS CITED Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990 [1979]. Bauman, Zygmunt. Work, Consumption and the New Poor. Buckingham: Open University Press. Beck, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck Gernsheim. Individualization—Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London and New York: Sage Press, 2002 [2001]. Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. 20th Anniversary edition. New York: Basic Books, 1996 [1976]. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso. 2005 [1999]. Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise—The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

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Budgen, Sebastien. “A New Spirit of Capitalism,” New Left Review 1, 2nd series, JanuaryFebruary 2000. Doogan, Kevin. New Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. The Consciousness Industry—On Literature, Politics and the Media. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. Farris Thompson, Robert. African Art In Motion. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974. Farris Thompson, Robert. Black Gods and Kings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976 [1971]. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class—And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Melbourne: Pluto, 2003 [2002]. Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool—Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic—Modernity and Double Consciousness. London and New York: Verso, 1993. Gladwell, Malcolm. “The Coolhunt.” New Yorker, March 17, 1997. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 [1959]. Hall, Stuart and Martin Jacques, eds. New Times—The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Hoare, Quentin and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971. Haunschild, Axel and Doris Ruth Eikhof. “Bringing Creativity to Market—Actors as SelfEmployed Employees.” In Creative Labour—Working in the Creative Industries, edited by McKinlay Alan and Chris Smith, 156–173. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Langdon, Ken. Cultivate a Cool Career—52 Brilliant Ideas for Reaching the Top. Oxford: The Infinite Ideas Company Limited, 2007 [2004]. Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, and Jacqueline Botterill. Social Communication in Advertising—Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace, 3rd edn. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Majors, Richard and Janet Mancini Billson. Cool Pose—The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America. New York: Touchstone, 1993 [1992]. Marx, Karl. Capital—Volume One. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976 [1867]. McAdams, Lewis. Birth of the Cool—Beat, Bebop and the American Avant-Garde. London: Scribner, 2002 [2001]. McGuigan, Jim. Cultural Populism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. McGuigan, Jim. Cool Capitalism. London and New York: Pluto, 2009. McGuigan, Jim. “‘Doing a Florida Thing’—The Creative Class Thesis and Cultural Policy.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 15, no. 3 (August 2009): 291–300. McGuigan, Jim. “Creative Labor, Cultural Work and Individualisation.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 16, no. 3 (August 2010): 323–335. McRobbie, Angela. “From Clubs to Companies—The Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds.” Cultural Studies 16, no. 4 (2002): 516-531. Perlin, Ross. Intern Nation—How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy. London and New York: Verso, 2011. Pountain, Dick and David Robins. Cool Rules—Anatomy of an Attitude. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Ridderstrale, Jonas and Kjell Nordstrom. Funky Business—Talent Makes Capital Dance. London: Pearson, 2002 [2000]. Ross, Andrew. Nice Work If You Can Get It—Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Rushkoff, Douglas. Coercion—Why We Listen to What ‘They’ Say. New York: Riverhead, 1999. Standing, Guy. The Precariat—The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury, 2011.

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Whimster, Sam, ed. The Essential Weber. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Wilde, Joseph and Esther de Haan. The High Cost of Calling—Critical Issues in the Mobile Phone Industry. SOMO, Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, November 1976. Williams, Raymond. Television—Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana, 1974. Williams, Raymond. Towards 2000. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1983].

Index

Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 144 abolitionism/abolitionists, 3, 81–102; Emancipation Proclamation (Lincoln), 86 Aeneas/Aeneid , 24, 33, 34, 39, 43 aesthetics, 19, 128, 139, 145 affect, 28, 65, 69–64, 113, 117, 119, 122, 127, 128, 129–130, 135, 136, 140, 145, 146, 198, 209, 243; affect control, 1, 2, 2–3, 3, 4, 5, 64, 65–66, 67–68, 69–70, 72–74, 82–83, 129, 155, 158, 160, 171, 173, 198, 215, 227, 228, 230n5; affective detachment, 128; affect management, 5, 194, 198, 200, 209; affect studies, 2; politics of, 4; West African conceptions of, 82–83. See also disaffection African-American culture, 18, 66–68, 69, 75; Black urban culture, 82; jazz, 66, 67–69, 70, 72, 77n33; rap, 75; representation of, 69; signifying, 67 agency, 24, 98, 116, 130, 135, 136, 146 akanuke, 222, 225 akirame, 223, 224–225 Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke, 160, 162–163 Aladjem, Terry K., 132, 133, 149n17 Allison, Anne, 230n4, 256 amae, 186 Amerika monogatari, 163 Analects (Chin. Lunyu, Jap. Rongo), 194 Anaximander, 23

Ancus, 33, 34, 38, 39 anime, 4, 138, 139, 142, 143, 215, 230n2, 254, 256 Antigone, 23 Antiphon, 25 apatheia/apathy, 3, 5, 9–10, 15–16, 17, 18, 19, 25, 27, 119, 129–130, 194, 211n9, 226 apostrophe, 28 Archilochus/Archilochian, 25, 30, 31 Aristotle, 11, 13, 14, 83, 200 Ashikaga, Yoshimitsu, 197 assassin, 127, 136, 138, 139, 141, 144, 145, 146, 148 Assmann, Jan, 181 ataraxia, 5, 30, 158, 193, 194 Athenian democracy, 12 Athens, 30, 32 Augustan/Augustus, 24, 26, 32, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41 Aurelius, Marcus, 11 autonomy, 3, 12, 122, 227, 230n5; and subjectivity, 100, 183; emotional autonomy, 100; moral autonomy, 12–14 avenger, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 139, 140, 142, 143, 146, 150n26 Bachnik, Jane, 182 Baraka, Amiri, 81–82, 117 Barchiesi, Alessandro, 24 275

276

Index

Barthes, Roland, 251 Baudelaire, Charles, 163, 164 Baudrillard, Jean, 267 Bauman, Zygmunt, 267 Bazin, Jacques, 114, 116 Beats/Beat Generation, 68, 69, 70–71, 73–74, 75, 82 Beck, Ulrich and Elisabeth BeckGernsheim, 270 Bell, Daniel, 267 Benedict, Ruth, 166, 190n20, 230n1, 258 Benjamin, Walter, 64 Bentham, Jeremy, 194 Benveniste, Émile, 32 Bierwirth, Gerhard, 156, 159, 175n18 Birth of the Cool, 81, 103n5 bitai, 221, 222–223, 225, 228, 233n38 Black Atlantic, 102, 266 Blaseio, Gereon and Claudia Liebrand, 142, 144, 145 body, 199, 212n26 Bogart, Humphrey, 4, 109, 114, 114–116 bohemian, 66, 67–68, 70, 70–71, 74, 75, 76n20; bobo (bourgeois bohemian), 269 Bokutō kitan, 165 Bolitho, Harold, 140, 150n31 Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello, 267 Botterill, Jacqueline, 267 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 35 Bourdieu, Pierre, 74 Bronson, Charles, 131 Brooks, David, 269 Brown, Norman O., 40 Buddhism, 223, 224–225 Budgen, Sebastian, 269 Burnett, T. A. J., 65 bushidō, 140, 150n30, 156, 160, 162, 162–163, 172, 174n6, 175n26, 175n28, 177n61, 215, 224, 230n6, 255 Cagney, James, 112, 114 Callimachus, 25, 36 Campbell, Colin, 65 Camus, Albert, 109, 116 capitalism, 98, 263–271; and commodity fetishism, 267; cool capitalism, 98, 263–271; and creative class, 269; and creative industries, 269; emotional capitalism, 169, 238; liberal/neoliberal,

264 carnival/carnivalesque, 23, 24 cats, 239–242, 244; cat boom, 239; feline sociality, 237, 244–245 Catullus/Catullan, 27, 34 Cavell, Stanley, 113, 115 Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 156 chōnin, 158–159, 219–220, 229, 232n34 Christina of Sweden, 19 Chrysippos, 11, 14 Cicero/Ciceronian, 11, 23, 26, 34, 39 city, 26, 34, 37, 41, 62, 131, 140, 164–165, 166, 168, 220, 222, 238. See also New York; Rome; Tokyo; urban/urbanity/ urbanization civil wars (antiquity), 42, 43 Clay, Henry, 86 Coffin, William C., 95 cold/coldness, 23, 24, 25, 27–28, 32, 65, 76n9, 113, 129, 145, 159, 170, 171–172, 174n12, 176n32, 193, 199, 200, 205, 222, 226, 231n16; cold blood/ cold-bloodedness, 24, 136, 138; cold fascism, 159; cold/hot cultures, 4, 42, 155, 156, 181–189; cold persona, 226; cold seduction, 267 Commager, Steele, 41 compassion, 3, 105n62, 127, 130, 136, 140 Confessions of a Mask, 169 Confucius/Confucian/ Confucianism, 5, 140, 163, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 209–210, 223; filial piety, 203; modesty, 201, 202; respect for elders, 203; sincerity, 202; virtues, 203, 210 The Conquest of Cool, 191, 211n5 Conte, Gian Biagio, 31 context-dependent/ context-free perspective (anthropology), 4, 182–183 cool/coolness: aesthetics of, 82; conquest of, 266; constitutional coolness, 88; contemporary usage of, 71; “the cool and impartial spectator”, 83; coolhunting, 267; cool persona, 187; definition of, 23–24, 61, 64–65, 71; and emotional autonomy, 100; and emotional restraint, 9–10, 18; and gender, 1, 4, 19–20, 111, 113, 136, 227, 255; history of, 65–66, 76n9; mask of,

Index 100–101; performance of, 3, 4, 111, 117, 136, 169–170; West African traditions of, 82. See also affect control; capitalism; postmodernism; Stoicism Cool Japan, 155, 173, 179n93–179n95, 179n97, 210n4, 215, 251, 254, 255–256 coquetry, 221, 222, 222–223, 225, 228, 233n38 counter-culture, 71, 75, 225, 227, 229 crowd, 61–63, 64, 72 cultural memory, 182 cultural work, 270 The Culture of Vengeance and the Fate of American Justice, 132 cute, 239, 251–258. See also kawaii damnatio memoriae, 34 dandy/dandyism, 4, 65–66, 67, 70, 72, 73, 76n12, 76n6, 158, 165, 217, 226–228, 229 Darakuron, 166–167 The Dark Knight Rises, 131 Davis, Gregson, 35 Davis, Miles, 4, 72, 82, 118, 120–122 Dazai, Osamu, 166, 177n55 dead/death/demise, 24, 29–30, 30, 31, 32–33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41 Death Wish, 131 Debussy, Claude, 238, 241, 249n6 Declaration of Independence, 86–87 Derrida, Jaques, 133, 149n20 Descartes, 12 detachment, 128, 158, 163, 193, 194, 198, 202, 203, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 229. See also emotion/emotionality Dido, 24 differentiation, social, 200, 205–208 Dinerstein, Joel, 173, 193, 211n5 Dirty Harry , 128, 131 disaffection/disaffectedness, 128, 136, 265; See also affect discipline, 198, 199, 204, 205 “Discourse on Decadence”, 166–167 dispassion/dispassionate, 61, 64, 113, 127, 129, 136 disposition, inner (moral), 191, 193, 194, 198, 199, 201, 202, 205, 210 Django Unchained, 131, 133 Doctrine of the Mean, 194, 200

277

Doi, Takeo, 186 domestication, 247, 248 domestic solitude, 237, 249n2 Donald, Richie, 252 Douglas, McGray, 155, 215 Douglass, Frederick, 3, 84, 94–101 Dumézil, Georges, 32, 37 Eclogues, 42 Edokko, 217, 221, 222, 224 Edo period, 5, 158, 163–164, 195–196, 205, 206, 208, 212n22, 212n26, 215, 216, 217, 219, 219–220, 221–222, 224, 227, 234n65 Egypt/Egyptian, 32, 35 Ehrenberg, Alain, 73 Elias, Norbert, 191, 199; The Civilizing Process, 191 Ellison, Ralph, 13, 14–15, 118, 122–123 emotions/emotionality, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 13–19, 61, 65, 69, 83–84, 86, 89–90, 91, 94, 100, 106n103, 109, 140, 194, 198, 200, 201, 202, 209, 230n1; absence of, 9–10, 15–16, 157, 174n12; “black”/non-white emotionality, 69, 91; emotional atrophy, 93; emotional attachment/detachment, 158, 169, 198, 209–210, 238, 255; emotional capitalism, 169, 238; emotional distance/distancing, 73, 156, 169, 227, 237, 239, 248; emotional expression/ style, 82, 84, 90, 91, 163, 171; emotional intensity, 69, 75; emotional investment, 5; emotional management, 5, 74, 194, 216; emotional paralysis, 69, 75; emotional restraint, 9–10, 18, 19, 68, 69; emotional (self-)control, 65, 66, 67, 69–70, 72, 129, 155, 175n31, 202, 208, 215, 246; emotional tensions, 87, 88; emotion theory, 10–12, 13, 14, 17; emotional unreadability, 63, 92, 100; masking of, 109, 113, 117, 122, 157, 230n5; and gender, 65, 109, 232n30; and morality/moral judgement, 90, 92; Stoic philosophy of, 17; See also affect; cool/coolness; passions; the self enargeia, 27 Enlightenment, 4, 65, 83, 89, 92, 189, 191, 208, 213n39

278

Index

enryo, 157, 230n7 Epictetus, 11, 16 Epicurus/Epicurean/Epicureanism, 12, 30, 32, 194 epitaph/epitaphic, 28, 35 Erdheim, Mario, 186 eternal/eternity, 27, 32, 41, 43 ethics, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 37, 65, 82, 84, 96, 101, 114, 115, 123, 162, 187, 188, 194, 201, 204, 208 eupatheíai/eupathy, 10, 17, 18–19 Eye for an Eye, 134 Fanon, Frantz, 149n9 fashion, 71–72, 74–75; See also dandy fecundity, 32, 34 feeling/feelings, 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 17, 19, 20n2, 20n3, 64, 67, 68, 70, 73–74, 83, 89–90, 91–92, 96, 97, 99, 103n12, 109, 110, 113, 129, 136, 161, 162, 163, 166, 168, 186, 191, 194, 198, 202, 203, 209, 233n47, 238, 245, 246, 247, 253. See also affect; emotion/emotionality; passions feminism, 134, 144 film noir, 4, 70, 109–117, 123, 134 Finkelstein, Joanne, 74 Fists of Fury, 142 flâneur, 164, 171 Florida, Richard, 269 Florus, P. Annius, 34 Foucault, Michel, 64 Fraenkel, Eduard, 27 Frank, Thomas, 191, 211n5, 266 free-market economics, 265 Freud, Sigmund, 29, 38, 133, 149n20 frigus/frigiditas/frigidus/frixit, 23, 24, 27, 30, 35 Fukuzawa, Yukichi, 207, 208, 210 Furansu monogatari, 163 gangster films, 111, 112–113, 114–115 Garrison, William Lloyd, 89–90, 94–95 Gates, Henry Louis, 66–67, 67, 85 Game of Death, 141, 144 Gellius, Aulus, 16 gender, 19–20, 74, 133, 148, 173. See also cool/coolness; emotion/emotionality gesaku, 163–164, 166

Girard, René, 132 Gjentagelse, 26 Gladwell, Malcolm, 267 Glaũkos, 38–39 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 144 government: affective foundation of, 104n33; principles of, 87; selfgovernment, 83. See also affect control Gramsci, Antonio, 263 Great Depression, 109, 111–112, 114–115, 116 Greece/Greek, 24, 34, 35, 39 greeting, 205, 206, 208 Greif, Mark, 75 grief, 130, 133, 137, 147, 149n19, 163, 209, 244, 249 Gross, Daniel M., 83 Hadot, Pierre, 30 Hagakure, 141 Hagiwara, Sakutarō, 240, 249n5 Hammon, Briton, 99 The Handkerchief, 160–163 Hang ‘em High, 128, 130 Hankechi, 160 happiness, 12 hari, 221–222, 225 Hasegawa, Nyozekan, 159 Haskell, Thomas L., 98 heart true, “sincere heart,” 201, 202, 203, 209, 216 Hebdige, Dick, 75 hedonism, 66, 68, 72, 263 hegemony, 264 Heidegger, Martin, 23, 29 Heine, Matthias, 199 Hellenism, 12; Hellenistic rococo, 27, 33 Hemingway, Ernest, 70, 73 Hendry, Joy, 185 Henry, Claire, 135 Heraclitus, 26 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 43, 199, 200 hero/heroic, 33, 34, 39 Hesiod, 26 heterosexual, 33 High Sierra (1942), 114–116 Hippolytus, 33, 35 hipster, 75, 81, 103n5 Hobbes, 12

Index Homori, Kingo, 203 homosexual, 33 Hong Kong action cinema, 142, 143, 144 Hoover, J. Edgar, 71 Horace, 24, 25–30, 30–35, 36–41, 42, 43 hot cultures, 183. See also cold/coldness humors, doctrine of the four, 18 “A House Divided,” 85 Housman, A.E., 24 Howl, 70 Hume, David, 83, 92, 194 Huston, John, 116 idées romaines, 32, 36 ideological/ideology, 3, 6, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 43, 84, 89, 91, 99, 101, 111, 127, 156, 167, 175n21, 219, 256, 264, 266, 269 Iliad, 38, 39 Ikegami, Yoshihiko, 182 iki, 27, 158, 165, 215–216, 216–217, 218–219, 219–220, 221, 222–226, 227–228, 229, 231n10, 231n16, 232n34–233n38, 233n47–233n59, 234n65 ikiji, 223, 224, 225, 228 ‘Iki’ no Kōzō, 165, 216, 217–219, 220, 222, 224, 227, 231n10, 231n20, 232n37 Illouz, Eva, 73, 74, 238 immortal/immortality, 27–28, 39, 40 imperial/imperialist/imperium, 30, 35, 37, 41, 43 In My Daughter’s Name, 134 In the Miso Soup (In za miso sūpu), 170 individualism/individualization, 110, 127, 129, 131, 132, 133, 244, 270 Indo-European, 34, 39 Indo-Iranian, 37 internalization, 199 Iranian, 23 ironic detachment, 266 Ishihara, Shintarō, 169 Ishii, O-Ren, 128, 138–140, 140–143, 144, 147 Italo-Western, 131, 141, 144 itutu (composure, cool), 266 Jameson, Fredric, 72–73 Japan Tobacco (JT), 191

279

Japanese Cinema, 156, 215, 230n5 jazz, 3, 4, 169; jazz cool, 109–111, 117–123 jidai-gekii, 142 Jove/Jupiter, 37 judgement, 14–15 justice, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 140, 144, 149n16, 149n19 Kagiri naku tōmei ni chikai burū, 169 Kaibara, Ekiken, 196, 198, 213n27 kakkōii, 254–255 Kamen no kokuhaku, 169 Kant, Immanuel, 28 Karatani, Kōjin, 217, 231n20 kawaii, 6, 239, 251, 252, 253, 254–255, 256 Kerouac, Jack, 3 The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 90 Kierkegaard, Søren/Kierkegaardian, 26, 40 Kill Bill, 4, 127–148 Kinkakuji, 167 Kitano, Takeshi, 156, 230n5 Kitayama, Shinobu, 183 Kiyonobu, Ogasawara, 196, 205 Klee, Paul, 238, 241 Kurou Paideia, 23–24 Kuki, Shūzō, 5, 165, 216, 217–219, 220, 222–226, 227, 228, 229, 231n10, 231n20, 232n30, 232n37, 233n58, 234n65 Kuroda, Akira, 170 Kurosawa, Akira, 25 Kyōko-no ie, 167–169 La Dolce Vita, 72 Lacan, Jacques, 27, 28, 35 Ladd, Alan, 109, 113 Lady Snowblood, 140, 142, 144 Laertius, Diogenes, 11, 17 Lavinia, 34 Lee, Bruce, 141, 142, 144 legitimation, 263 Leone, Sergio, 141 Le Samouraï, 156 Lethen, Helmut, 166, 169, 187 Levantine-Mediterranean, 28, 32 Levecq, Christine, 83, 99 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 23, 27, 156, 181

280

Index

liberal/liberalism, 83, 99, 101, 132, 133; neoliberalism, 265, 270 The Liberator, 89, 95 The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 94, 95–96 lifestyle, 72, 75 Lincoln, Abraham, 3, 84–88 Lincoln, Bruce, 39 Lipsius, Justus, 12 Livy, 33, 34 Locke, John, 101 Lorenz, Konrad, 253 Lucretian/Lucretius, 27, 30 MacAdams, Lewis, 68 Made in Japan, 170 Majors, Richard and Janet Mancini Billson, 266 makoto, 159, 175n18 The Maltese Falcon (1941), 114, 116 “The Man of the Crowd,” 61–64, 72 Markus, Hazel Rose, 183 Marx, Karl, 267 masculinity, 19–20, 266; black masculinitiy, 82. See also gender Matsumura, Kōji, 196 martial arts, 4, 143, 144 Martialis, 34 McGuigan, Jim, 193, 211n5 McNally, Dennis, 67 McRobbie, Angela, 269 Meiji Period, 156, 163–164, 175n29, 206, 213n39, 232n30, 256 Melville, Jean-Pierre, 156, 230n5 Meter, 25, 30–31 metonymy/metonymic, 25, 35, 41 military/soldiering, 32–33, 33, 34 Mishima, Yukio, 166–169 Mishnah, 32 Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia, 67 Mitchum, Robert, 109, 113, 117 mobile privatization, 267 Montaigne, Michel de, 29–30 monism, 13 moralists, 12, 19 moral philosophy, 12, 83, 92. See also emotion/emotionality; judgement Mori, Ōgai, 163 Motegi, Misao, 203

Motley, John Morthrop, 43 mother/motherhood, 135, 138, 139, 142, 145–146, 147–148 mourning, 130, 133, 149n20 Murakami, Haruki, 169, 171 Murakami, Ryū, 169, 170 My Blood is the Blood of Another, 170 My Bondage and My Freedom, 94, 95–97 Nagai, Kafū, 163, 165, 166, 234n65 Namura, Jōhaku, 196 narcissism, 66, 263 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 94 Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man, 99 natural rights philosophy, 83, 85; and liberalism, 83, 99, 101; and republicanism, 99 Neostoicism, 12, 19 The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cylce, 134 New York, 70, 168 nihonjinron/nihonron, 156, 157, 230n1, 233n47, 257 nikutai bungaku, 169, 177n71 Ningen shikkaku, 166 Nishida, Kitarō, 4, 184 Nitobe, Inazō, 156, 161, 162, 224, 230n6 nobility, 245–246 Nolan, Christopher, 131 No Longer Human, 166 North Star, 96 Ōgyu, Sorai, 202 oikoumene, 43 On the Road, 3, 66 Oliensis, Ellen, 36–37 Ore no chi wa tanin no chi, 170 outlaw, 4 Parker, Charlie, 82, 120 Parmenides, 26 passions (páthe), 10–11, 13–15, 17, 20n3, 61, 64, 65, 83, 87, 89, 92, 93, 94, 98, 251, 253. See also affect; emotion/ emotionality passive resistance, 18

Index Pater, Walter, 70 patriarchy, 32, 113, 127 perception, 13–14, 16 performance, 41, 63, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 75, 82, 99, 123, 129, 132, 140, 162; musical, 68, 75, 77n33, 109, 244, 254; narrative, 97. See also cool/coolness; the self Petrarch/Petrarchan, 23 Phaedra, 33–34 Pindar, 29 Pirithoüs, 33, 35 Pliny, 42, 43 Plessner, Helmuth, 187 Poe, Edgar Alan, 3. See also “The Man of the Crowd” Podhoretz, Norman, 70–71 Polybius, 37 postmodernism, 71, 72–74, 75 Pountain, Dick and David Robins, 263 Prashad, Vijay, 144 precarious labor, 270 pride, 223, 224, 225, 228 Principle of Utility, 194 professional-managerial work, 269 propatheíai, 16 Propertius, 34 prosopopoiea, 28 Prozac, 73–74 psukhros, 23–24 Pyrrhonian Skeptics, 12 Rank, Otto, 169 rape, 128, 134, 135, 137, 142 rationality/rationalism, 3, 10, 12–14, 15, 16, 17–19, 30, 64, 66, 84, 90, 97, 98, 109–110, 110, 127, 132–133, 134, 135, 136, 147, 148, 172, 174n6, 194, 208, 231n20, 263 Read, Jacinda, 134, 135 reciprocity, 188 recollectio/recollection, 30–35, 38, 41 Record of Rites (Chin. Liji, Jap. Raiki), 195, 197 reihō, 195 repetitio/repetition, 25–30, 38, 39, 41 resignation, 223, 224–225 respect, 200, 201, 203

281

restraint, 157, 198, 230n7, 245, 247; See also the self retribution, 93, 127, 129, 130 revenge, 127, 128, 130–135, 139, 142, 144–145, 145, 147. See also retribution rites (Chin. li, Jap. rei), 5, 194 Rollins, Sonny, 120 Roma/Roman/Rome: Late Republic, 23, 24, 34, 42; Early Empire, 23, 24, 34, 39; citizen, 24, 32; state, 24, 28, 32, 35, 37–38, 41, 42–43 Romulus, 34 Ross, Andrew, 270 Rushkoff, Douglas, 267 Sakaguchi, Ango, 166–167 samurai, 4, 5, 140–141, 147, 156, 174n6, 174n8, 175n31, 207–208, 219–220, 221–222, 222, 224, 225, 229, 230n5–230n6, 258 Sarpedon, 38–39 Schmitt, Uwe, 157 Schwartz, Benjamin, 194, 209 Scorsese, Martin, 131 season/seasonal, 25–26, 27–28, 28–29, 31, 35 seduction, 267 the self, 4, 6, 16, 17, 23, 39, 65, 73, 74, 93, 119, 181, 183, 189, 198, 215, 218, 224, 238; performance of, 99, 173; selfadvertisement, 72; self-assertion, 118, 159, 167, 172, 219, 226, 227, 229; selfcontrol, 2, 5, 10, 29, 65, 66, 69–70, 72, 84, 91, 100, 120, 123, 127, 129, 135–137, 155, 156–157, 173, 215, 226, 227, 229, 230n6; self-defense, 117, 118, 123, 128; self-deportment, 66; selfdiscipline, 3, 4, 64, 65, 69, 228; selfdistance, 92; self-employed employee, 270; self-empowerment, 18; selffashioning, 1, 270; self-image, 63, 73, 155; self-interest, 83; self-liberation, 100–101; self-mastery, 29, 128, 129, 131, 140; self-possession, 87, 98, 102, 120, 230n5; self-presentation, 63, 65–66, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74, 109, 121, 122, 187, 269; self-reflexivity, 112, 123; self-reliance, 12, 30; self-restraint, 68, 69, 113; self-sacrifice, 91. See also

282

Index

autonomy; government; lifestyles Seneca, 11, 12, 13, 16, 33, 194 sensualists, 12 sentimentalism, 85, 89, 97 Shiotsuki, Yaeko, 208 shitsukekata, 195, 197 Shorey, Paul, 28 Shufu no Tomo Sha, 204 shūshin, 5, 200, 201 Simmel, Georg, 64, 72, 76n6, 76n7 slavery/slaves, 3, 18, 82, 85–86, 98; controversy over, 84–88; and Civil War, 88; Fugitive Slave Act, 89, 92. See also abolitionism Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Slavery Writing, 1770–1850, 83, 99 Smith, Adam, 83, 92, 100, 101 social networking, 268 social type, 61–64, 74 soft power, 210n4, 255 Sophist/Sophistic, 23, 25 Sophocles, 23 Soracte Ode, 26–27, 27, 31 Spinoza, 12 Stoics/Stoicism, 3, 13, 15, 16, 30, 114, 117, 129, 157, 168, 175n14, 194, 218, 226. See also emotion/emotionality Stearns, Peter N., 84 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 3, 84, 89–93, 101 A Strange Tale from East of the River, 165 The Structure of iki, 165, 216, 217–219, 220 subjective spatiality, 188 sui, 216, 231n13, 233n41 sumāto, 208 sympathy, 91–92 symbolism, 182

See also cold/coldness temperantia, 36–41 The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 167 tepidness, 19 Terminus, 36, 37 Tertullian, 35 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 92 therapy, 15, 19 thermos, 23–24 Theseus, 33, 35 Thompson, Robert Farris, 66–67, 82, 100, 102 thresholds of shame and repugnance, 198, 199 Tibullus, 41 time/temporal, 25, 27, 28, 35, 36 Tokyo, 139, 141, 165, 237, 238, 241, 251 Tokyo Disneyland, 251, 252–253 Tokyo Tango, 157 Topāzu (Tokyo Decadence), 170 Torah, 32 Torquatus, 27, 33 trauma/traumatic/ traumatization, 2, 4, 92, 109, 110–111, 111–112, 114, 115, 130, 135, 136–140, 142, 167, 169, 171 Treggiari, Susan, 33 Tsunetomo, Yamamoto, 136, 140 Tsutsui, Yasutaka, 170 tsū, 221, 233n39 Tullus, 33, 34, 38, 39

Taiyō no kisetsu, 169 taiyōzoku, 169 Tajima, Junnosuke, 205, 214n53 Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō, 172, 178n89, 217, 234n65 Tarantino, Quentin, 4; See also Kill Bill Tassi, Marguerite, 134 temperament, 18, 76n9, 84, 158, 194 temperature, metaphors of, 4, 18, 129, 145, 156, 158–160, 171–172, 178n88, 182.

Vergil, 34, 37, 42, 43 Vespasian, 42 vigilantism/vigilante, 127, 128, 130, 131–133, 136, 149n12, 149n16 virtue, 10, 13, 14, 15 Vollaro, David R., 84 Von Hartmann, Eduard, 200

Uncle Tom (or Uncle Tomming), 109, 117–122 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 84, 92–93 urban/urbanity/urbanization, 1, 5, 27, 62, 82, 114, 115, 122, 131, 216, 222, 225, 231n14, 237, 238, 239, 249n2, 266, 268; See also city

Wagner, Richard, 27 Washburn, Dennis, 165

Index Watanabe, Hiroshi, 194 Watsuji, Tetsurō, 4, 187–188, 188–189, 217 Weber, Max, 98, 263 Western (genre), 70, 128, 130, 131–132, 134, 140, 143, 147 Weiskel, Thomas, 76n8 Williams, Gordon, 36 Williams, Raymond, 267 Wister, Owen, 131 Woman’s Friend Company, 208 Wordsworth, William, 27 World War II, 166, 204, 205 Works and Days, 25 wrapping culture, 185

283

Xenophon, 23–24 yakuza, 170, 230n5 Yamaga, Sokō, 202 yamato damashii, 257 Yasuda, Yojūrō, 172, 178n89 Yokohama, Toshio, 196 Yoshida-Krafft, Barbara, 164 Yoshiyuki Rie, 5, 237–239, 240, 241–245 You love us, 170 Young, Lester, 81, 119–120 Zeno, 11, 13 Zill, Rüdiger, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131

About the Authors

Joel Dinerstein is associate professor in the Department of English at Tulane University, where he also directs the American studies program. He is the author of Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and AfricanAmerican Culture between the World Wars (2003), an award-winning cultural study theorizing the relationship of jazz and industrialization. He is at work on a cultural history of the concept of cool, The Origins of Cool: Jazz, Film Noir, and Existentialism in Postwar America (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press). He is also the co-curator of American Cool, a photography exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution (opening February 2014). He has been a consultant on jazz for Putumayo Records and the HBO drama, Boardwalk Empire. Sophia Frese currently prepares her dissertation with the title “No Cover Up”: Jewish- and Palestinian-American Literature on the Israeli-Palestinian-Conflict for publication and develops her post-doctoral project on “Work and its Counterpart: What Occupies Us.” She was a researcher in the “Languages of Emotion” Cluster at Freie Universität Berlin. She has published an article on literature and violence in Palestinian-American poetry and was a member of the team that edited Peter Weiss’s diaries. Catrin Gersdorf is professor and chair of American studies at the Universität Wüerzburg, Germany. From 2009 to 2012 she was a member of the research group on “Coolness” at the research cluster “Languages of Emotion,” Freie Universität Berlin. The author of The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction of America (2009), she has published several articles on nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S.-American literature and culture.

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About the Authors

Elena Giannoulis is a junior professor and advanced research fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. From 2010 to 2012 she was a researcher in the “Languages of Emotion” Cluster at Freie Universität Berlin. She currently works on her project Emotion Management in Japanese Literature and Culture since the 1980s. Publications: Giannoulis, Elena. Blut als Tinte: Wirkungs-und Funktionsmechanismen zeitgenössischer shishōsetsu [Blood as Ink: Mechanisms of effects and functions of contemporary shishōsetsu] (2010). Ulla Haselstein is professor of American Literature (chair) at the John F. Kennedy Institute and the director of the Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Her book publications include Entziffernde Hermeneutik (1991), Die Gabe der Zivilisation (2000), Iconographies of Power: The Politics and Poetics of Visual Representation (2003, co-edited with Berndt Ostendorf and Peter Schneck), Cultural Transactions: 50 Years of American Studies in Germany (2005, co-edited with Berndt Ostendorf), and The Pathos of Authenticity: American Literary Imaginations of the Real (2010, co-edited with Andrew Gross and MaryAnn Snyder-Körber). Jens Heise is a Japanologist and professor of cultural philosophy, University of Leipzig. Selected publications: (ed.) Die kühle Seele: Selbstinterpretationen der japanischen Kultur. Frankfurt/M. 1990; (with Peter Pörtner) Die Philosophie Japans. Stuttgart 1995; Präsentative Symbole—Elemente einer Philosophie der Kulturen. St. Augustin 2003; 地平としての場所—日本にお けるﾄﾎﾟｽの哲学。(Der Ort als Horizont. Topische Philosophie in Japan) In: Beiheft Nishida Kitarô, Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 20, S.1–12. Tôkyô 2007; Freud-Grundwissen Philosophie. Stuttgart 2010. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit is professor of Japanology (Chair) and director of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She was awarded the Leibniz Prize 1992. Series Editor: 1990–2000—Japanische Bibliothek (Japanese Library), 34 volumes; 1994–present—Iaponia Insula (Studies on Japanese Culture and Society), 27 volumes. Her monographs include: Rituals of Self-Revelation: Shishosetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA. 1996 (German version 1981, expanded ed. 2005, Japanese version 1992); ed.: Canon and Identity: Japanese Modernization Reconsidered: Trans-Cultural Perspectives. (2000). Michael Kinski is professor of history of Japanese culture and thought at Frankfurt University. His publications include Knochen des Weges. Katayama Kenzan als Vertreter des eklektischen Konfuzianismus im Japan des 18. Jahrhunderts (1996) and “Admonitions Regarding Food Consumption: Takai Ranzan’s Shokuji kai. Introduction, Transcription, and Translation” (Japonica Humboldtiana, vols. 7 (2003) and 9 (2005).

About the Authors

287

Jim McGuigan is professor of cultural analysis at Loughborough University, United Kingdom. His latest books are Cool Capitalism (Pluto 2009) and Cultural Analysis (Sage 2010). He is currently editing together a collection of Raymond Williams’s writings and completing the work for his next book, provisionally entitled Culture, Critique and Policy. Catherine Newmark is a lecturer at the Institute of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. Publications include: Passion—Affekt—Gefühl. Philosophische Theorien der Emotionen zwischen Aristoteles und Kant. Hamburg 2008; “Moving the Soul—Moving Into the Soul: On the Process of Interiorization in Early Modern Philosophy of the Passions.” In Rüdiger Campe, Julia Weber (eds.): Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and Contemporary Thought. Berlin / New York (forthcoming); The Problem of the Passions and Descartes’ Mechanistic Anthropology. In: Hubertus Busche, Stefan Heßbrüggen-Walter (eds.): Departure for Modern Europe: A Handbook of Early Modern Philosophy (1400–1700). Hamburg 2011. Aviad E. Raz is professor of sociology and director of the program in behavioral sciences, Ben-Gurion University (BGU). Currently he is a visiting AICE professor in the Department of Sociology, University of California at San Diego. Raz has written seven books and numerous articles and book chapters on topics in organizational and medical sociology, anthropology, culture, and science. Paul Roquet is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University. He holds a PhD from the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department at the University of California, Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in film studies. Roquet’s research and writing focuses on environmental aesthetics, soundscape studies, and the affective dimensions of media use in contemporary Japan. Daniel L. Selden is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has written widely on both classical Indo-European and classical Afro-Asiatic literatures. His most recent book is Hieroglyphic Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Literature of the Middle Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). He is currently editing The Oxford Handbook on Literatures of the Roman Empire, as well as The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature.