Interview with Samantha Frost, ‘Attentive Body’: Epigenetic Processes and the Self-formative Subjectivity

The interview is a follow up from Samantha Frost’s paper, ‘The Attentive Body: How the Indexicality of Epigenetic Processes Enriches Our Understanding of Embodied Subjectivity’ in Body & Society 26(4): 3-34. Tomoko Tamari invites Frost to explore her interest in ‘biocultural creatures,’ which led a focus on ‘bodies’ responsive self-transformation’ in epigenetic processes, and unfolds Peirce’s account of the index for understanding meaning-making in biological processes. Tamari also introduces Katherine Hayles’s notion of ‘cognitive nonconscious’ to raise the question of the possible theoretical and mechanical similarities/discrepancies between epigenetic processes in organisms and the meaning-making process in computational systems. Drawing on Jacob von Uexkull’s notion of ‘umwelt’ and introducing Yoshimi Kawade’s remarks on a living being’s subjective orientation in environments, a further question about ‘intention’ and ‘subjectivity’ enables Frost to unpack her notion of ‘the attentive self’ and discuss its relation to ‘intentionality’ and ‘referentiality’ in epigenetic processes. Finally, Samantha Frost remarks on current projects that seek to explore the connection between ‘attention-as-responsive-self-transformation and ‘mode-of-living-as-form-of-live’. The biosemiotics view of the living body presented in your paper leads us to go beyond the mechanical view of organism functionality and formation process of subjectivity. This challenge asks us to combine biology and semiotics in order to explore the complex mechanism of meaning-making in organisms and to capture ‘the attentive body’ and ‘embodied subjectivity.’ You argue that the concept of the attentive body helps us make a bridge between the body as matter and mind/subjectivity which natural science usually excludes from its domain

Interview with Bryan S. Turner: Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Body & Society

Body & Society started in 1995. The journal has been continuously exploring and problematizing critical issues which have been opening up new horizons in the field of the body studies. As an interdisciplinary journal, it has engaged with a wider range of innovative approaches to the body, which includes sociology, cultural studies, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, history, science and technology studies, sensory studies, and media studies. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Body & Society, managing editor, Tomoko Tamari invited Professor Bryan S. Turner who was one of the journal’s founders (with Mike Featherstone), to reflect on the academic and historical background of Body & Society along with his own academic trajectory over the last 40 years

Modernization and the Department Store in Early 20th Century Japan: Modern Girl and New Consumer Culture Lifestyles

This paper focuses on the way in which the department store became a key site for the constitution of Japanese modernity in early 20th century Japan. The first Japanese department store, Mitsukoshi not only provided new goods along with pragmatic ideas of how to use and how to evaluate them, but also sought to promote images and advice on how to integrate the ‘new’ into existing lifestyles and value systems. Mitsukoshi offered a new type of consumer experience to explore how ‘to be modern’. This can be well tuned with the government policy, ‘reform of everyday life’ which encouraged people to be more efficient and rational in everyday practices. This policy was also well-fitted to new middle class who sought to new lifestyle which would be modern. To be modern was particularly important for urban working woman who was often seen as a modern girl. Department store provided them with not only a set of ideas to be modern, but also a new aestheticized urban consumer space as a stage to perform. Hence, Mitsukoshi served both as a political device to create modern citizen and as a cultural device to produce modern consumers in political and cultural transition era of Japanese modernization

The Department Store in Early 20th Century Japan: Luxury, Aestheticization and Modern Life

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the innovative luxury marketing strategies of the early Japanese department store, Mitsukoshi, which created a new type of spectacular and sensual consumer space with the western style building and interior design. Mitsukoshi was also a new attractive urban public space in which Japanese women began to enjoy luxury settings, enact new types of personae and learn to enjoy new aesthetic sensibilities and experiences. This paper also considers Mitsukoshi’s contribution made in providing new ideas about western lifestyles in line with Japanese government-led policies, such as the reform of everyday life movements, as well as the store’s own attempts to educate customers into the minutiae of westernized home and interior design. This promoted a new idea of ‘being modern’ and led to the combining of new forms of aesthetic experience with a greater democratization of luxury, which gradually permeated everyday life. Finally the paper analyses the Ryukokai, the Mitsukoshi think tank, which brought together a powerful set of cultural specialists and intermediaries to create a distinctive ‘Mitsukoshi taste’ with its associated the brand image

The Tokyo Olympics 2020 Sport Stadium Controversy: Exploring the Role of Star Architects and Global Brands

The Olympics is a contested site of sovereignty in terms of power balancing between the political (government), economic (global capitalism), cultural (iconic architects) entities and citizens. The paper focuses on iconic Olympic stadia designed by star architects in the era of global capitalism and explores the shifting and multifaceted identities of the iconic architects in global cultural industries. Taking the 2020 Tokyo Olympic stadium as a case study, the paper unpacks the relationship between the material and symbolic infrastructure of iconic architecture, which involves political interests, economic capitals and site-specific memories. The paper argues that the Olympic stadium is an ideal site to examine the strategically constructed images and values of iconic architects and spectacular architecture, and that reveals the narrativisation and commodification of star architects and iconic buildings necessarily make themselves into ‘a global brand’. In this context, the paper concludes that national grand architectural projects, such as the construction of Olympic sport stadia, cannot operate outside the regime of global and local politics, and beyond the logic of neoliberal transnational capitalism

The Meanings of Cookery: Everyday Life and Aesthetics in Meiji Japan

The aim of the paper is to explore the emergence of new women’s domestic narratives of cooking and modern family life which accompanied the growth of consumer culture in Japan. Japanese haute cuisine had been largely produced by professional chiefs who via the patriarchal apprentice system, but began to be democratized in the late nineteenth century. The first Japanese cooking school started in 1882 attracted the higher class women. Cooking began to be seen as a prestigious form of knowledge and status symbol. Around 1887, the influential Meiji reformers and other intellectuals presented the modern family as a sanctuary based on greater intimacy between the couple with the emphasis on the home (houmu or Katei) as opposed to the patriarchal conservative family system (ie). Women became seen as the domestic managers of modern family life with the key duty to produce and maintain healthy citizens, which fitted into the national project. In this sense, cooking become designated as scientific and rational, a part of women’s domestic practice. With the growth of urbanization and industrialization in the 1900s, the new middle class modern family become presented as the ideal consumption unit. At the same time, the expanding commercial women’s magazines started to provide, not only new recipes, but also new knowledge about aspects of food culture and lifestyle. Cooking became commercialised and popularized as systematised domestic knowledge as well as being seen as a form of home entertainment as part of a new consumer lifestyle. I will explore the relationship between wider social and cultural change and the configuration of cooking discourses in order to illustrate how cooking as a domestic banal practice and set of experiences was re- and de-contexualised in the wake of the Meiji Restoration, and the development of consumer culture and the emergence of domestic and vernacular aesthetic sensitivities late 19th century Japan

Body Image and Prosthetic Aesthetics: Disability, Technology and Paralympic Culture

The success of the London 2012 Paralympic not only revealed new public possibilities for the disabled, but also thrust the debates on the relationship between elite Paralympians and advanced prosthetic technology into the spotlight. One of the Paralympic stars, Oscar Pistorius, in particular became celebrated as ‘the Paralympian cyborg’. Also prominent has been Aimee Mullins, a former Paralympian, who become a globally successful fashion model by seeking to establish a new bodily aesthetic utilizing non-organic body parts. This paper examines how the modern discourse of prosthesis has shifted from the made-up and camouflaged body to the empowered and exhibited body to create a new cultural sensitivity of body image – prosthetic aesthetics. Prosthetic aesthetics oscillates between two polarized sensitivities: attractiveness/’coolness’, which derive from the image of a perfect human-machine synthetic body, and abjection/uncanny which is evoked by the actual materiality of the lived body incorporating a lifeless human-made body part