Playing Between Systems Theory, Affect, and Imitation in the Reality Tv Show Terrace House Jay Jin ASAP/Journal, Volume 5, Number 2, May 2020, pp. 375-400 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760301 [ Access provided at 17 Jul 2020 04:45 GMT from UCLA Library ] Jay Jin PLAYING BETWEEN SYSTEMS THEORY, AFFECT, AND IMITATION IN THE REALITY TV SHOW TERRACE HOUSE his essay is an experiment and not a judgment, to borrow KATHLEEN STEWART’s formulation.1 It is an experiment in method about the T affective intersection between two lives: the life of academic thinking and the life of thinking everything else. Toward that aim, “everything else” is narrowed here to the Japanese reality TV series Terrace House, Netflix’s coproduced revival of Fuji Television’s 2012 Terrace House: Boys x Girls Next Door. As of the writing of this essay, there are three complete JAY JIN is a doctoral candidate in the English department at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent seasons of the show: Boys & Girls publication (beside this one) is “Problems of Scale in ‘Close’ and ‘Distant’ Reading,” Philological Quarterly 96, no. 1 in the City (2015–2016), Aloha (Winter 2017). The article is taken from his dissertation project, State (2016–2017), and Opening which examines the logic of various scalar rhetorics as employed in both literary and scientific discourses across the twentieth and New Doors (2017–2019), and twenty-first centuries. A nascent second research project involves tracking the history of cybernetics and its triple relation to the all three conform to the same format. genre of self-help books, the development of cognitive-behavioral Three men and three women (often therapy, and the institution of ethnic studies departments in the 1960s. Japanese nationals, many of them ASAP/Journal, Vol. 5.2 (2020): 375-400 © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press. multiracial) live in a (rather nice and modern-looking) house together.2 The ages of the house members range from the late teens to the early thirties; many have jobs and must commute to and from the house, sometimes even traveling overseas for work. There are no games or contests to determine who leaves; members can leave the show whenever they choose, and the producers introduce a new member in their absence. And, lastly, there are no “confessional” scenes; members never speak directly to the camera. In addition to the six house members, the show features a panel of six commentators, likewise three men and three women, comprised of Japanese comedians and celebrities. With the exception of one commentator, the panel has remained unchanged across all three seasons. Thus, the viewing experience involves not only watching the house members interact with one another but also watching the commentators react to and discuss those interactions. It also involves watching house members watch themselves on previous episodes of Terrace House, and watching the commentators watch that as well. Terrace House’s particularly explicit reflexive gestures open up to a thinking of affective relations that follows Erving Goffman’s prescription that “the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons.”3 These gestures like- wise conform to Gabriel Tarde’s directive that “[t]he study of social facts can only concern acts relevant to inter-mental psychology. There can only be individual actions and interactions.”4 In these two registers, Terrace House documents and enacts the presentation of affective relations as “social facts” and in doing so affords a conceptual grammar with which to articulate affects Terrace House documents and“ enacts the presentation of affective relations as “social facts” and in doing so affords a conceptual grammar with which to articulate affects as feelings and emotions . and also as observations of those feelings and emotions. ” ASAP/Journal 376 / as feelings and emotions in the most colloquial sense (happy, jealous, hangry, etc.) and also as observations of those feelings and emotions. Such a conceptual grammar thus draws together accounts of affect in terms of transmission, move- ment, and circulation and those in terms of reflexivity, recursivity, and force.5 Indeed, Misha Kavka contends that reality TV as a genre not only transmits and mediates affect between viewer and show but also reflexively “works to catch and represent the reality of watching itself, that is, to catch and represent viewers to themselves.”6 However, whereas for Kavka the project of reflecting on the pleasure of watching reality television caused her to “shift the academic lens from what we can know about television to what we can feel through the TV screen,”7 this essay is an attempt to express something like the reverse: that is, an examination of how the pleasures of watching Terrace House included the pleasure of brief, spontaneous comparisons to academic texts, and, too, how the enjoyment of these comparisons prompted and sustained further critical- theoretical inquiry. So while one principal aim in this essay is to articulate a set of conceptual con- nections that stem from the affective experiences of watchingTerrace House, the other is to consider the ways in which those connections are afforded and shaped by the flickers of association involved in that stemming. For example, in episode 28 of Terrace House: Opening New Doors, house member Ishikura Noah informs another, Uemura Shohei, that he plans to ask out their housemate Shimabukuro Seina on a date. By this point in the series, Seina and Shohei have gone on a few dates together but are not “together.” Following Noah’s revelation, the camera cuts to a close-up of Shohei’s face, his eyes averted downward and his right cheek resting on his right hand. “Well, well, well,” stammers Shohei, though the number of subtitled “wells” well undersells his reaction here, which con- sists of thirteen repetitions of the word in the span of three seconds: “So,” he goes on to say, “you’re declaring war.” Is this mundanely apocalyptic moment not perfectly described by Erving Goffman inInteraction Ritual (1967) when he writes of those “naked little spasms of the self” that “occur at the end of the world”?8 Well, not quite, because Goffman’s statement is at once a descrip- tion of gamblers playing slot machines and the conclusion to an essay that develops a specific sociological (and historicize-able) view of “action” in Anglo- American society. But there also exists the context of having watched a scene in Terrace House and having Goffman’s quote immediately spring to mind, of finding the comparison funny and also, from this feeling, pursuing other lines of research. This context is one of affective engagement, of the ways in which Jin 377 / feeling not only precedes the conceptual work of stitching together ideas, dis- courses, and citations but is also foundational to that work. In coordinating these two aims, I am thus also trying to consider the affective experience of seamlessly aligning Goffman’s quote with Shohei’s reaction in conjunction with the academic practice of observing social, cultural, and histori- cal contingencies that would give sound reasons for realignment. This essay takes axiomatically that such realigning is not necessarily “truer” or more conceptually generative than the initial syncing. What systems-theoretical work is made pos- sible from enjoying Terrace House’s dramatizations of second-order observation when they are generically ordinary but experienced in an affectively singular way? (Many Japanese reality TV programs have commentator panels, for instance.) Conversely, what thinking of affect is afforded by a show where the observations of affective relations with and within it are mediated through translation, but are often made as if otherwise? These questions and their distinctions are not only prompted by (at least my) watching of Terrace House but performed within it. And this performance consists of gestures that do not aim to maintain distinc- tions so much as to move across them and back again—in other words, gestures that transform “this side” of affective experiences into the marked form Niklas Luhmann calls “the other side of the other side,” where “perception encounters a contingency that was invisible.”9 I thus acknowledge that I decontextualize many of the concepts and ideas that I quote, though decontextualizing is also recontextualizing.10 This essay seeks to operate in the gaps such procedures open up, to explore them as sites of momentary and felicitous asso- This essay seeks“ to operate in ciation. So in lieu of an intervention or critique: a play of skipping stones, and the earnest effort the gaps . to explore them as of tracking the various propagations, interfer- sites of momentary and felicitous ences, and refractions of their ripples. Or put association. another way, this essay is about the joy of mak- ing connections, and of trying to convince you ” to watch Terrace House. PLAYING WITH SYSTEMS THEORY Described iteratively across the internet as the “reality show for people who hate reality shows,” “a reality TV show like no other,” and “closer to a nature ASAP/Journal 378 / documentary than . reality television,”11—such statements are discardable as assertions of Terrace House’s exceptionalism but instructive as plain expressions of “the other side of the other side,” of naming reality television that is unlike reality television but, with reference to it, less scripted and therefore “more real.” Or as is repeated, like a mantra, at the beginning of every episode: “Terrace House is a show about six strangers, men and women, living together, and we observe how they interact with each other. All that we’ve prepared is a beauti- ful home and automobile.