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 likewise 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 connections 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 consists 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 description 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, discourses, 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 possible 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 distinctions 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 making 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. There is no script at all”—none except the script of its self-description. Take, for instance, the opening shot of the first episode of Terrace House: Boys & Girls in the City (Fig. 1).

This shot establishes our panel of commentators, who are presented at a slant, their gazes cutting across the screen and thus cutting the show’s opening distinction: inside the screen (whatever it is you are watching this on: a tablet, TV, laptop, etc.) and outside or beyond the screen (whatever it is they are looking at). Strictly speaking, their gaze may be directed toward an audience, other cameras, production staff, cue cards, a blank wall, etc. What concerns us here, however, is how the show formally stages this terminus of their gaze to be a television screen: a second screen outside the screen that displays the show itself,

Figure 1. System formation. From left to right: Babazono Azusa, Tokui Yoshimi, You, Triendl Reina, Mochizuki Ayumu, and Yamasato Ryota.

Jin 379 / sans panelists (I say “outside” because this second screen is never shown). As the inaugural episode unfurls, we learn its rhythm, its leisurely alternation between scenes occurring at Terrace House (the place) and scenes of our commentators speaking to what has “just”12 occurred.

From this back-and-forth gesture, we learn that what our six commentators are looking at, the formalized object of their gaze outside our screen, is the screen displaying the footage of Terrace House, sans themselves. “So let’s watch!” exclaims Triendl Reina (Torichan), one of the commentators, just before the first cut to what might be considered the show proper (“a show about six strangers”). Other spectatorial cues are similarly and repeatedly staged: ruminations on what will happen next, the plugging back in of earphones, the shifting back of eyes and therefore of sightlines. While entertainment programs that present a “credible reality” always include their viewers “as excluded third parties,” invit- ing them to exercise faculties of second-order observation, in Terrace House this inclusion is included. This relation is form and television format as “two-sided distinction” (Fig. 2).13

The construction of this Terrace House “system” thus begins with a distinction that marks one side (the commentators, i.e., observers) and leaves unmarked and undetermined the other (the observed, the screen outside the screen). What follows involves a boundary crossing, a cut from the episode’s first shot (Fig. 1) to its second (Fig. 3) that moves us from the side of the observers to the side of the observed. And from this other side we mark a second distinction, which is

Figure 2. Two-sided distinction. On the left, the six house members have dinner together their first night in the house. After this scene concludes the show cuts to the scene on the right, where we watch the commentators’ give reactions and thoughts.

ASAP/Journal 380 / Figure 3. A proxy for you, the viewer at home. that of self-marking, what Nicole Bae at The Ringer describes as recognizing the commentators’ “crucial role . . . as a proxy for you, the viewer at home.”14

We have here a medium shot, a reorientation of our perspective from a slanted to a frontal view of the panelists. More crucially, this reorientation provides a shot of our commentators from the position that was presented in the opening shot (Fig. 1) as the “other side” (the observed, the screen outside the screen: that is, whatever they were looking at). The “other side” thus becomes marked, and from it we no longer view what was “our side” (that of observers) as “our side” but instead as the “other side of the other side”—which is to say, as the side of observers observed by the observed. This form of self-marking is not the reflec- tion of looking into a mirror (“I am seeing myself”) but the obverse, of looking from inside a mirror out (“I am seeing myself see myself”). Indeed, what you see is, as another kind of script in the lower left corner indicates, “YOU.” You also happens to be the Anglicized stage name of the Japanese celebrity and Terrace House commentator Ehara Yukiko, but if “coincidence” terms and bounds the fact that You and only You recites the script of self-description at the start of each episode, then in another sense it is not coincidence at all, since who else could self-describe you besides you and only you?

Jin 381 / Figure 4. Observers observed by the observed. A house member in episode 7 of Boys & Girls in the City watches an earlier season of Terrace House.

We should keep in mind for the purposes of this essay that such reflexivity is not a special property of individuals—that is to say, of consciousness—but instead a general condition for system formation. Nor is such self-marking a special property of Terrace House, whose two-sided member/commentator format is common to most Japanese reality television. Instead, to approach Terrace House’s reflexive moves as separate from this specific cultural and televisual context is to see a text that finds its place among the multitudes of what Mark Seltzer calls the “official world”: the world (ours) in which “artwork not merely makes the world appear in the world, but too unceasingly marks that it does so.”15 The reflexivity of the official world is thus, as Seltzer puts it, “[r]eflexivity without interiority, and operating on its own . . . an externalized reflexivity that posits a coming together, or assembly, of individuals outside themselves,”16 and this account is, in the most ordinary way, both described by and a description of Terrace House, “a show about six strangers, men and women, living together.” This reflexivity looks, too, something like the opening two images ofTerrace House “proper” (Terrace House displayed on the screen outside the screen, which is of course also just our screen) (Fig. 5).

ASAP/Journal 382 / Figure 5. An externalized reflexivity. Screenshot from episode 1 of Boys & Girls in the City.

First, a slow tracking shot of Tokyo’s Rainbow Bridge, and then, a cut to Terrace House’s outdoor pool. The world outside is reflected by the pool outside, both sweeping diagonally across the screen with skyscrapers transmuted into concrete pillars. The suspension bridge—the exemplary structure of modernity that figures reality as “a complex infrastructure stabilized by its own tensions”17—disappears, needing no further architectural figuration since its tensions will now be reflected in the coming together of six individuals outside themselves. That is to say, its tensions are now held by the coming together of six individuals whose reflexive procedures will involve a continual citing of each other’s places and positions within the Terrace House system: in Terrace House the place and on Terrace House the show. When Seina—a Terrace House veteran as it were, having been on the show three times prior to Netflix’s co-revival—returns for a fourth time on Opening New Doors, she responds to another house member’s offer to sit, “You’re welcome to have a seat here,” with a change in deixis. “There?” she replies, “Can I make a selfish request? I want to sit here. I look best from this seat.” Seina, training to be a yoga instructor (an expert of poses), thus marks at once her social position among the other house members, her physical position at the table and in front of the camera, and her position in the Terrace House system. As the commentator Yamasato Ryota (Yamachan) puts it with regard to her return, “Terrace House is playing with us. . . . Seina showing up in the past has seemed to propel the drama forward.” Seina’s literal shuffling of house members and metaphorical shuffling of panelists’ expectations is, in Goffman’s terms, a control move: “it is made relative to a world that has already been generated by the game.”18

Jin 383 / The cut from bridge to pool (Fig. 5) thus draws a distinction between outside Terrace House and inside it such that the “inside” of Terrace House presented is still outside. And we can also note that this staging of the distinction between the inside/outside of Terrace House within Terrace House precisely replicates the formal staging we have seen earlier of the distinction between the inside/outside of Terrace House (the screen and the screen outside the screen) within Terrace House. While there are of course different senses of “inside” and “outside” at work here—the boundaries of different sets of walls, of the TV show, of the screen on which it is watched—their coordination is orchestrated not just by my own abstractions but by the elements of Terrace House itself. When it is revealed that two members of Boys & Girls in the City, Nagai Riko (Rikopin) and Terashima Hayato, have been carrying on a more intimate relationship than they have rep- resented on screen, Yamachan remarks, “they should’ve kept it outside.” “I can’t help but be aware that I’m on TV. I don’t want to think of it this way, but I think of it as work,” explains Rikopin, an aspiring idol. “If you’re going to do it,” replies another member, Bitaraf Arman, “you should’ve done it outside the house. Because we [the other four members] know, we’re forced to play along.” And so “outside” here signifies not just outside Terrace House the place but outside Terrace House the show, and what Arman is “forced to play along with” is precisely the inside/outside distinction in both registers. Which is to say, Arman is forced to play that the inside of Terrace House the place is not outside Terrace House the show, and he is forced to play that he is not playing. And yet, in this “outing” of the deceiving couple, Arman brings the “outside” of the show back “inside” it.

This staging of inside/outside Terrace House inside Terrace House is most visually striking in an extended sequence in episode 34 of Opening New Doors (Fig. 6). In it, Tanaka Yui watches an earlier episode of Opening New Doors, which features her interactions with Koseta Mayu.

“It’d be fine if it were just me watching myself,” says Yui. “But if I were a stranger, I wouldn’t want to be friends with that person.” Aya Matari answers, “I know people say things on Instagram and stuff,” reintroducing the distinction between inside Terrace House the show and outside of it (Instagram comments) back inside Terrace House the show. “It felt very dimensional,” says the commentator Tokui Yoshimi in describing the affective experience of observing the observed observing the observers observing. “My heart was racing,” adds Yamachan. “I’ve never seen myself like that. . . . I look so happy when I’m

ASAP/Journal 384 / Figure 6. Dimensionality. On the left: Yamachan in episode 26 of Opening New Doors. On the right (in order): Matari Aya, Yui, and Ikezoe Shunsuke in episode 34. talking smack about someone.” Terrace House thus not only confronts us with the reintroduction of its various inside/outside boundaries but operationalizes this reintroduction as a way of staging affect as the observation of affect.

PLAYING WITH AFFECT

As the story goes, the difference between “affect” and “emotion” was first marked by psychoanalysts in order to mark the difference between the observer and the observed: “affect” was reserved for the patient’s feeling as observed and described from the third-person perspective of the psychoanalyst while “emotion” referred to feeling as described by the first-person perspective of the patient.19 However, I am not interested in maintaining a hard division between “emotion” and “affect” (or “feeling”) as a way of offloading the weighty tensions of what Sianne Ngai calls the “subjective/objective problematic” (and neither is Ngai).20 Instead, the conceptual leverage that her account generates for us is its introduction of the roles of observer and observed into discussions of affect. This is not quite Sara Ahmed’s move from constative to performative when she shifts from the question of “what do emotions mean” to “what do emotions do,” but closer to R. D. Laing’s consideration that “[m]etapsychology must begin from somebody’s experience, but it is seldom clear whose experience or what experience.”21 At base, then, instead of speaking to whether affects and emotions are intentioned or not, circulate or not, etc., we may speak to the ways in which affects, emotions, and feelings are observed and reflexively framed as observations.

Jin 385 / Of course, to draw affect into the orbit of reflexivity is nothing new under the affect theory sun. Psychologist Silvan Tomkins, whose work on affect notably influenced Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (along with Adam Frank), mod- eled his theory of the affect system after cybernetic concepts of feedback and noise.22 Indeed, it is precisely because of Tomkins’s interest in cybernetics that Sedgwick and Frank find his theory of affect to be so critically generative, since “valorization of feedback in systems theory is also, after all, necessarily a valorization of error and blindness as productive of, specifically,structure .”23 But we do not need to delve into or even skim the surface of theory to also know that in the most everyday sense, and put plainly (but still properly cited), “one can be excited by anger, disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy.”24 Or if one adds one more affect system (i.e., person) into the mix, as Laing does in his poetry collection Knots:

The more Jack feels Jill is mean to feel he is greedy the more Jill feels Jack is mean to feel she is mean to feel he is greedy to feel she is mean25

Is this not a depiction of “emotions as unusually knotted or condensed ‘inter- pretations of predicaments’ ”? 26—though I suspect many will find something about the above quite usual. Add four more affect systems and we begin to approach something resembling the six-person set-up of Terrace House. But if one expects an even longer string of “he feels she feels,” one will also discover a Möbius strip, a return to one’s starting position. Second-order feeling is always also first-order feeling; “I feel that that you feel” or “I feel that I feel” is always also “I feel.”

Observation makes a distinction, marks one side, and leaves unmarked the other: this is the account of form we carry as we blend Eugenie Brinkema’s formulation that “[a]ffect is not the place where something immediate and auto- matic and resistant takes place outside of language” with Linda M. G. Zerilli’s emphasis on “the aspect of embodied knowing that involves the capacity to take part in the language game of giving and asking for reasons.”27 Affects do not take place outside of observation but instead take part in the game of giving and asking for observations. Accordingly, Brinkema argues for “[t]reating affect as

ASAP/Journal 386 / a problematic of structure, form, and aesthetics,” which Ngai powerfully shows may be done via analysis of a work’s “tone”: “the formal aspect of a literary work that makes it possible for critics to describe a text as, say, ‘euphoric’ or ‘melancholic.’ ”28 Tone then becomes a useful entry point into tracing the affective relations formalized in Terrace House, since much of its positive reception (at least in the United States) has been formulated as a matter of tone.

Take Christine Friar for The Daily Dot:

[T]he best description for Terrace House’s tone is sincere. Housemates are usually earnestly pursuing their dreams, and their conversations with one another tend to be straightforward and free from the normal hijinks you’d associate with reality TV. . . . The joy of watching the show very much comes from that genre-bending sincerity.29

Friar equates Terrace House’s “sincere” tone with the seeming sincerity of its housemates, but this move is a formal operation, one that turns precisely on an understanding of tone as “unfelt but perceived feeling.”30 Now take the following instance of face-to-face interaction from episode 7 of Opening New Doors (Fig. 7).

Figure 7. Face-to-face interaction. From left to right: Haruta Mizuki, Komuro Ami, Nakamura Takayuki (Taka), and Arai Yuudai.

Jin 387 / Taka and Yuudai have just entered the room where Mizuki and Ami were already sitting. The previous day, Yuudai and Ami went on a date that con- cluded poorly, or as Ami describes the experience to her friends: “Even when we came back, the vibe was bad. . . . You know how I am. Once I think I can’t, I’m done. . . . I say that a lot, right? ‘I couldn’t take him, so I erased him from my world.’ ” So what happens next? From the shot in figure 7, the camera cuts to a close-up of Ami watching television—we crisply hear Mizuki ask Taka if she can eat the chocolate he has brought, followed by the crinkling of a candy wrapper being opened—and then it cuts to a close-up of Yuudai. His eyes flit back and forth between the television and Ami—an extradiegetic electronic track with heavy bass begins playing at this point—before the camera cuts back to her, her eyes fixed on the television (Fig. 8a). The camera then slowly pans and tilts from Ami to Yuudai, the latter coming into focus as he becomes the center of the shot. We see Yuudai glance at Ami one more time, followed by a slight lowering of his eyes and head, before a cut back to a wider-angled shot of the room. The stretch of diegetic silence is broken when this cut coincides with Mizuki’s declaration, “I don’t know what’s going on, so I’m gonna take a bath. I’m making my escape” (Fig. 8b).

Never are the cameras, microphones, or members of the production crew seen on screen. This careful editing and framing is itself rather shrouded in secrecy and only alluded to by Tsai Lauren, a house member on the Aloha State series, in a now deleted portion of an interview. In that passage, she reveals that film- ing would occur for a predetermined hour during the day, and a few hours at night.31 Yet the point here is not to pull back the veil, which we have always known to be there (i.e., not “look how constructed reality television actually is!”), but to see how the veil gives Terrace House its particular form.32 These camera angles, cuts, pans, and tilts that efface traces of their operation, the diegetically captured sounds and extradiegetically inserted tracks—in short, the various formal elements involved in the production and postproduction of reality television—are what, when taken together, compose the show’s sincere tone, its “feeling” of sincerity. They make up Terrace House’s robust arsenal of “sincerity operations,”33 to borrow a phrase from Laing, and they involve contrasts: the back-and-forth cuts between Yuudai’s and Ami’s faces, the back-and-forth of his eyes versus the relatively static orientation of hers, the absence of any conversation, of even sound from the television, over- laid with the extradiegetic blaring of mid-aughts electro house music. These

ASAP/Journal 388 / Figure 8. Sincerity operations. (a) Cut from Ami to Yuudai back to Ami (b) Pan and tilt from Ami to Yuudai, cut to the room. In the last frame Ami sits in the foreground. Behind her, from left to right: Mizuki, Taka, and Yuudai.

Jin 389 / operations, moreover, pose a syntax of affective relations: affects that are not only rendered to be observable but rendered as acts of observation. Indeed, the protracted exchange of distance at a distance between Ami and Yuudai is, in the most general sense, a tense scene. But whose tensions and feelings are being observed, and who is observing them?

1) On the level of first-order observation, we, the viewers, observe tension and awkwardness “between” Yuudai and Ami (i.e., a “charged atmosphere”). Some of us may also feel awkward and tense watching this interaction unfold, or may laugh and smile at it, or may just feel bored. The track doubtless contributes something—whether or not it “enhances” our feelings of awkwardness watching an awkward scene, or whether we feel amused or perplexed by such a ridiculous choice of music. These affective responses thus follow Teresa Brennan’s description of transmitted affects as states that “come from without.”34 Or as Goffman puts it, “these emotions function as moves, and fit so precisely into the logic of the ritual game.”35 2) We might, following the editing protocols of cinematic suturing,36 be observing the presence of Yuudai’s tension, his feelings of restlessness, awkwardness, shame, frustration, etc. Which is to say, we may observe his observations, formalized for us through the cuts between him and Ami that mimic the cutting of his eyes between her and the television screen. The time of the pan reproduces Yuudai’s temporally distended experience of awkwardness, doubled by the silence in the room (and tripled for us by the house music in our room). It is also thus that after Ami and Mizuki leave the room the show remains with Yuudai and Taka—the scene, in other words, is focalized through Yuudai. 3) We may say we are observing Ami’s, to use her self-cited phrase, era- sure of Yuudai from her world. The two cuts from Ami to Yuudai and back to Ami frame his anxious looking by her “expression-less” expression of nonlooking (or looking elsewhere); and the pan that moves her out of the frame formally anticipates her leaving the room altogether, a forward-looking operation occurring on the level of the episode itself, which is titled “I Erased Him from My World.” We are observing Ami’s observations of Yuudai’s observations. 4) “I don’t know what’s going on, so I’m gonna take a bath” (Fig. 8b): Mizuki’s words break the silence in the room. The cuts and the pan

ASAP/Journal 390 / are the formalizations of Mizuki’s glances and observations, and the feelings of awkwardness and tension are, we observe, hers. Some of us might find her sudden interjection funny, identifying with her confu- sion while at the same time feeling quite the opposite ( joy, pleasure) of what she must be feeling at that moment. Indeed, she might agree with Goffman’s diagnosis, “a person who chronically makes himself or others uneasy in conversation and perpetually kills encounters is a faulty interactant . . . he may just as well be called a faulty person.”37

These four short responses to the questions posed above are not intended to provide a set of fixed readings but instead a catalog of distinctions that fold into, exert pressure on, contradict, combine with, and reframe one another—a pro- cession from frame to frame, form to form that severs the affective world of Terrace House with distinctions and maintains that world by its severance. After all, delighting in or shirking from interactions between house members (sometimes both simultaneously) is, in a basic sense, the very stuff watchingTerrace House is made of. But it is not only the case that these severances reflexively stage the formation of affective relations withTerrace House “in” Terrace House. This reflexivity itself is staged as just another severance, another distinction, which proliferates the frames of plausibly observed feelings. And such prolif- eration does not descend into an infinite mise-en-abyme, since second-order observation is always also first-order observation. We are not traversing Jean Baudrillard’s “desert of the real”—that landscape of empty, self-proliferating signs populated with affectless bodies—but rather, as an internet post written by a feeling body (it seems) on this very episode of Terrace House puts it, “this endless desert of annoying kids and people bitching about them.”38

PLAYING WITH IMITATION

Shortly after Mizuki leaves the room (“I don’t know what’s going on”), Ami follows her out. Yuudai then begins to cry, covering each eye with the ends of two fingers, pointer and middle, extended horizontally and placed flat against his face. As the commentators give their thoughts on the sequence they (and we) have witnessed, Tokui (Fig. 1, second from the left), remarks: “When people abroad see this, especially in the west, they must be like, ‘Why, Japanese people? Why?’” Tokui’s joke refers to a phrase made popular in 2015 by Jason Danielson, a white American living in Japan whose comedy sketch describes,

Jin 391 / in Japanese, the difficulties of learning kanji, and is punctuated with exasper- ated exclamations in English: “why Japanese people? Why?”39 Tokui’s joke also leads into another. Imitating Yuudai’s crying gesture, Tokui apes potential inter- pretations by Western viewers, asking, “Because they use chopsticks? This is how they cry in Japan.” A Japanese comedian joking about the way a Westerner watching Terrace House may mistake “Japanese reality television” for “ Japanese reality” and referencing a joke by an American who transmutes the experienced reality of an “outsider” living in Japan into a performance for Japanese audiences watching live television—this topsy-turvy cutting and recutting of distinctions (described as such) is also just a straightforward jab at Yuudai.40

Moreover, this imitating and reenacting, as depicted through similar cuts and camera angles, is also one of Terrace House’s “sincerity operations,” one that interacts with other sincerity operations. One can be sincere about sincerity, about insincerity, or even about the inability to distinguish between sincere/ insincere, so long as one is observing oneself.41 And while many people, includ- ing those on the panel but also those just out in the world, often question the “authenticity” of various house members, rarely does one find pejorative crit- icisms that the panel of commentators or their reactions are “inauthentic” or “insincere.” Knowing that the panel is comprised of comedians, actors and actresses, and celebrities, and therefore knowing that they too are “playing parts,” does not preclude the “feeling” that they are, as celebrity commentators, sincerely playing their parts as celebrity commentators. Yamachan plays the romanti- cally inexperienced but harsh critic, Tokui the dirty-minded old man, Torichan the pure-intentioned, virginal figure, etc.

The position of sincerity as an exterior posture—which can involve literal positions and postures in the case of the commentators who always sit in the same spots—and not as a description of psychological interiority is what enables sincerity operations to operate on themselves. Consider such self-operating across two scenes from episode 23 of Boys & Girls in the City: in the first, house members Saito Natsumi and Ota Hikaru discuss the potential of planning a date together, and in the second, commentators You and Tokui imitate them (Fig. 9).

Hikaru asks Natsumi if she would like to go to dinner sometime, to which Natsumi offers, “Then tomorrow.” “Tomorrow?” he replies, turning his head

ASAP/Journal 392 / Figure 9. “Life may not be much of a gamble, but interaction is.” 42 On the left, Natsumi discusses the possibility of a date with Hikaru. On the right, Tokui in the middle of imitating the conversation with You. to look at her. “Yeah,” she says, “I’ll cancel everything and take the day off.” Hikaru laughs and reiterates: “We can see what day works, and we can do dinner.” Regardless of what feelings one might attribute to them here (how interested are they in each other, are they flirting or skirting?), their conversation evinces a syntax of evasion: gestures, pauses, and phrasings that ricochet around a logistical commitment without committing anything at all.

What You and Tokui imitate, then, is this syntactical form of exteriorized affect—not: from this interaction what do we think Natsumi and Hikaru specifically feel? but: from this interaction what feelings are made abstractly observable? Or phrased a little differently, You and Tokui’s imitative act is an act of exteriorizing affect:

You: It was like a scene from a bar. Things like that happen every night. “Do you go out to dinner pretty often? After work?” Tokui: “Well . . . tomorrow . . . do you have work? No?” You: “No, not really.” Tokui: “Just gonna chill?” You: “Yeah, just taking it easy. You?” Tokui: “Tomorrow? I work at night so . . .” You: “Oh, I see . . .”

What “moves” through the screen from the pair of Hikaru and Natsumi to You and Tokui are observed feelings of attraction, embarrassment, politeness, and

Jin 393 / What “moves” through the“ screen . . . are observed feelings of attraction, embarrassment, politeness, and sheepishness, even if, and this is crucial, these feelings are not actually felt by anyone. ” sheepishness, even if, and this is crucial, these feelings are not actually felt by anyone. It is the syntactical form of the conversation and interaction (enacted by the former pair and imitated by the latter) that affectively sticks the four of them together, not the attribution of felt feelings to individuals. Their act of imitation is also affect mediating itself. You and Tokui are not just observed to be imitating the conversation between Hikaru and Natsumi but to be imitating past conversations (imagined or real) as well. As Yamachan puts it plainly, “when you guys do reenactments, it’s totally from personal experience. It’s too real.” Thus, a glue that sticks but also sticks to itself: as Ahmed writes, “Stickiness then is about what objects do to other objects—it involves a transference of affect—but it is a relation of ‘doing’ in which there is not a distinction between passive or active.”43 To this concise account we can add that stickiness is also about what affects do to other affects, and whatthat doing does to the objects and signs involved in the transference (i.e., an imitative relation). And if the image of affect as a viscous self-sticking glue threatens to reduce interaction and feeling into an undifferentiated mass of goo, we might also invoke the little (very little) figure of the “gluon,” the subatomic particle that not only mediates one of the four fundamental forces of the universe but also uniquely participates in its own mediation.

Although the examples of imitation have been explicitly of parody or reen- actment, I also mean to draw on a more capacious concept of imitation as articulated by Gabriel Tarde, a French sociologist working during the fin de siècle, and a principal opponent to Émile Durkheim. Where Durkheim advo- cated a sociology that, following the models of the natural sciences, looked to collective forces to explain individual actions and behaviors, Tarde argued for a sociology that would take individuals as causes (and not effects). Between the “vague idealism” of Durkheim’s large collectivities and the “vapid individualism which consists in explaining social changes as the caprices of certain great men,”

ASAP/Journal 394 / Tarde attempted to navigate a third way he called imitation: “every impression of an inter-psychical photography, so to speak, willed or not willed, passive or active . . . wherever there is a social relation between two living beings, there we have imitation in this sense of the word.”44 Tarde’s insight was not just to emphasize the world of the individual, the infinitesimal, the “monad,” but to return to that world a vibrant primacy, one rooted in the production of diversity and difference, in part via imitation:

look to the social world to see monads laid bare, grasping each other in the intimacy of their transitory characters, each fully unfolded before the other, in the other, by the other. This is the relation par excellence, the paradigm of possession of which all others are only sketches or re- flections. By persuasion, by love and hate, by personal prestige, by common beliefs and desires, or by the mutual chain of contract, in a kind of tightly knit network which extends indefinitely, social elements hold each other or pull each other in a thousand ways, and from their compe- tition the marvels of civilization are born.45

Thus, “each fully unfolded before the other, in the other, by the other”: this is a description of affect circulating among, transmitting between, and gluing together signs, texts, bodies, and individuals through imitation, chaining and sticking among themselves, and in this chaining/sticking, recirculating, retrans- mitting, regluing . . . so on and so forth.

Which is to say, for us, Tarde does not offer an ontology founded on difference (like for Gilles Deleuze), or some (old) radical social theory in which the small contains the large (like for Bruno Latour);46 he simply offers, in a local- ized sense, a way to begin thinking about having emotions, affects, and feelings without reproducing psychologism or a uniform, bounded subjectivity. Ahmed posits emotion as neither psychology’s “inside/outside” model of affect (I feel inwardly, then communicate outwardly) nor sociology’s “outside/inside” model (I feel the mood of the room, the atmosphere of the crowd), which she takes from Durkheim, but as the very thing that produces the inside/outside distinction in the first place.47 With Tarde, we may substitute sociology’s “outside/ inside” model with another “inside/outside,” different from psychology, and note, playing systems theory, that the cutting of inside/outside always has to occur inside. “Each monad [read: affect, imitative act, gluon] draws the world to itself, and thus has a better grasp of itself,” and at the same time, they “always

Jin 395 / belong only by one aspect of their being to the world they constitute, and by other aspects escape it. This world would not exist without them.”48 Was this not what Luhmann said, the maintenance of the world “as severed by distinctions, frames, and forms and maintained by its severance”?49

Yet it would be misleading to suggest that Terrace House exemplifies some Tardean version of affect theory without acknowledging, or really without placing front and center, the fact that these observations are also acts of imitation, mediated by affect, and brought together by watching and greatly enjoying a Japanese reality television show about six individuals brought together. How else can we understand the following passage from Tarde, which seems to speak not just to our discussion of self-mediating affect and second-order observation but also to the very affective impulses and interpretive moves that have ani- mated this essay:

If these persons end by becoming examples themselves, this also is due to imitation. Suppose a [person] should imitate his medium to the point of becoming a medium himself and magnetising a third person, who, in turn, would imitate him, and so on, indefinitely. Is not social life this very thing? Terraces of consecutive and connected magnetisations are the rule.50

Social life in the sense of the everyday (Tarde speaks of the individual who takes in the sounds in the street, the sights of window displays) but also academic life and their multitudinous, sometimes unpredictable intersections. Tarde’s “persons” were those living in large Western cities at the dawn of the twentieth century; ours are not so many, but include Terrace House members and commentators, affect theory scholars like Ahmed and Ngai, sociologists like Goffman and Tarde himself, etc. And out of various imitative acts, out of them and their observations becoming “examples themselves,” is an account of affect that looks something like particles circulating among and mediating between subjects, and reflexively participating in that very mediation. It looks something, too, like a specific and peculiar conjuncture between the life of academic thinking and the life of watching Terrace House that does not frame the former as a frame for the latter. After all, in what context can the relation between Tarde’s “terraces of consecutive and connected magnetisations” and Netflix’sTerrace House be anything more than a curious coincidence of terms except this one, where the vernacular of Terrace House, or more accurately, the vernacular of one’s affective

ASAP/Journal 396 / relations with it—“this scene is so funny,” “I can’t believe they just ate all of his food without him”—makes such playing between systems theory, affect, and imitation possible in the first place.

Notes

1 See Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 1. 2 Aloha State is set in Hawaii, while the others are set in Japan (Boys & Girls in the City in Tokyo, Opening New Doors in Nagano). 3 Erving Goffman,Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1967), 2. 4 Gabriel Tarde, “A Debate with Emile Durkheim,” in On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers, ed. Terry N. Clark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 138, 140. 5 See, respectively, Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) and Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 6 Misha Kavka, Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy: Reality Matters (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 48. See also Kristen J. Warner, “They Gon’ Think You Loud Regardless: Ratchetness, Reality Television, and Black Womanhood,” Camera Obscura 30, no. 1 (2015): 140. 7 Kavka, Reality Television, x. 8 Goffman,Interaction Ritual, 270. 9 Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (1995; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 30. 10 See Niklas Luhmann, “The Paradoxy of Observing Systems,” in “The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II,” ed. William Rasch and Cary Wolfe, special issue, Cultural Critique 31 (Autumn 1995): 39. 11 Respectively: Joshua Rivera, “Terrace House Is the Netflix Reality Show for People Who Hate Reality Shows,” GQ, July 6, 2018, https://www.gq.com/story/terrace-house -is-the-netflix-reality-show-for-people-who-hate-reality-shows; Sam Byford, “Netflix’s Terrace House: Opening New Doors Is a Major Return to Form,” The Verge, March 13, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/13/17114364/netflix-terrace-house-opening-new -doors; Troy Patterson, “The Genial Voyeurism of the Japanese Reality Show ‘Terrace House,’ ” The New Yorker, March 19, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on -television/the-genial-voyeurism-of-the-japanese-reality-show-terrace-house. Praise for Terrace House positioning it against reality television at large conforms to Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer’s broader point that “television can be legitimated as art only if it is distanced from the medium of television itself.” Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton

Jin 397 / Palmer, introduction to Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, ed. Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 11. 12 This “justness” resonates with Misha Kavka and Amy West’s account of how reality television generates social and emotional intimacy via markers of temporal immediacy. See Misha Kavka and Amy West, “Temporalities of the Real: Conceptualising Time in Reality TV,” in Understanding Reality Television, ed. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (London: Routledge, 2004), 136–53. 13 Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (1995; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 60; Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 65. 14 Nicole Bae, “What Makes ‘ Terrace House’ Such a Delightful Netflix Binge,”The Ringer, July 11, 2017, https://www.theringer.com/2017/7/11/16077832/terrace-house-japan -netflix-real-world-338b1e3804bb. 15 Mark Seltzer, The Official World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 7. 16 Ibid., 8. 17 Ibid., 6. 18 Erving Goffman, Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), 13. 19 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 25. 20 Ibid., 27–28. 21 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 4; R. D. Laing, Self and Others (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971), 25. 22 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 93–121. 23 Ibid., 107. 24 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 19. 25 R. D. Laing, Knots (New York: Vintage, 1970), 53. 26 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 3. 27 Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, xiv; Linda M. G. Zerilli, “The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment,” New Literary History 46, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 269. 28 Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, xvi; Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 28. 29 Christine Friar, “Netflix’s ‘Terrace House’ is Japan’s Addictive Answer to ‘Real World,’ ” The Daily Dot, March 14, 2018, https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/netflix -terrace-house-review/. 30 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 28. 31 therealcharlie, February 20, 2018 (12:28 a.m.), comment on “Lauren Tsai Exposes the ‘Realism’ of Terrace House Aloha State,” Oh No They Didn’t!, February 19, 2018, https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/109662360.html.

ASAP/Journal 398 / 32 Randall L. Rose and Stacy L. Wood show how “[v]iewers of reality television need not find authenticity embedded in the programming text but rather coproduce it in order to consume a hyperauthentic product.” Randall L. Rose and Stacy L. Wood, “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television,” Journal of Consumer Research 32, no. 2 (September 2005): 295. Paraphrasing Georg Simmel: “people look at one another as if through a veil. This veil does not simply hide the peculiarity of the person; it gives it a new form.” Georg Simmel, “How Is Society Possible?,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), 11. 33 Laing, Self and Others, 52. 34 Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 3. 35 Goffman,Interaction Ritual, 23. 36 See George Butte, “Suture and the Narration of Subjectivity in Film,” Poetics Today 29, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 277–308. 37 Goffman,Interaction Ritual, 135. 38 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (1981; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1; happyquincy, February 8, 2018 (7:51 a.m.), comment on “[SPOILERS] Terrace House Opening New Doors Part 1 Episode 7 ‘I Erased Him From My World’ Discussion,” Reddit, February 5, 2018, https://www .reddit.com/r/terracehouse/comments/7vfa5b/spoilers_terrace_house_opening_new _doors_part_1/dtxgz74/. 39 Jason Danielson, aka “Potato Jason,” YouTube video, from a performance televised in 2015, posted by “kaie mori,” September 6, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gBcJXETGi3Q. 40 This crisscrossing of national and cultural frames as inflected by finding something funny echoes Bertha Chin and Lori Hitchcock Morimoto’s observation that “neat socio-political critique of trans/national fandom is fundamentally haunted by the ‘messy’ world of affect.” Bertha Chin and Lori Hitchcock Morimoto, “Towards a Theory of Transcultural Fandom,” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 10, no. 1 (May 2013): 97. 41 See Luhmann, Reality of the Mass Media, 62. 42 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 243. 43 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 91. 44 Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parsons (1895; Gloucester, MA: Henry Holt, 1903), xiv. 45 Gabriel Tarde, Monadology and Sociology, ed. and trans. Theo Lorenc (1893; Melbourne: re.press, 2012), 56.

Jin 399 / 46 See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (1968; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 313; and Bruno Latour, “Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social,” in The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, ed. Patrick Joyce (London: Routledge, 2002), 117–32. 47 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 8–10. 48 Tarde, Monadology and Sociology, 57, 47. 49 Luhmann, “Paradoxy of Observing Systems,” 44; emphasis in original. 50 Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 84; emphasis in original.

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