(in: Monsters and the Monstrous. Myths and Metaphors of Enduring
Evil (ed.) Niall Scott; Rodopi 2007)
Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the ambivalent nature of
Cuteness
Maja Brzozowska-Brywczyńska
Abstract
The paper focuses on the ambivalent power of cuteness and offers a
preliminarily sketched map indicating some of the possible intersections
of cuteness and monstrosity. The main idea is that these two - seemingly
distant and contradicted - realms can be read/understood one through the
other. The basis for such an assumption is to be found both in cuteness’
ambivalent aesthetics and multidimensional ethics. With respect to
aesthetics, cuteness can be found both in the anatomy of a child and a
freak (cuteness involves a certain malformation and exaggeration of
infantile aesthetic diagram). As for ethics, cuteness can be thought of as a
“sweet coating” that makes it easier to swallow bitter pill; it is in other
words able to change meanings of ambivalent and simply negative issues,
like violence or sexuality. Question that arises in the light of the abovementioned inconsistencies of cuteness is: Can we define the nature of
cuteness as transformative - shifting the monstrosity not even to the realm
of beauty (for a cruel beauty is something within the spectrum of
monstrous emanations), but to the very space that is thought of as
absolutely pure and sweet?
Keywords
Cuteness, monstrosity, otherness, popular culture
1.
Words, words, words
According to common-sense definitional coordinates, cute and
monstrous seem to inhabit distant and mutually exclusive realms. The
Alien is by no means sweet and loveable, and you possibly couldn’t call
Winnie the Pooh shockingly cruel. We can tell a monster when we see it.
On the same terms we almost automatically identify the cute. We carefully
separate the monster from the cutie and the very notion of tracing
similarities between the two seems highly improper. Yet what is most
fascinating about cute (and it is this fascination that brought me to the
following notes in the first place) is its ambivalent nature, its certain
hybridity that actually allows to link it to the monster. The very source of
such monstrous potential happens to be the cute etymology.
The word cute is aphetic from acute, and the Latin word acutus which provides an etymological base for the adjective - roughly means
sharp. Thus the first set of cute meanings revolves around sharpness of
senses and of mind, around cleverness and wits. It is not that far from cute
to cunning. And cunningness involves scheming that may be potentially
dangerous. Cute is also attractive, very pretty and charming, yet these
attributes can be manifested not only by innocent, sweet looks and
behaviour, but also - as if synchronizing with the abovementioned
psychical traits - by self-conscious, and even excessive sex-appeal.
Dictionary definition of cute leads us therefore to conclusions quite
contrary to its ostensive counterpart, with puppies, kittens, little chubby
cherubs, and fluffy mascots as the ultimate icons of cuteness.
Maja Brzozowska-Brywczyńska
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The monstrous has also some secrets to reveal. And again starting from the Latin etymology - we embark on a linguistic adventure.
Originally monstrum was a synonym of something marvellous, a divine
portent or warning. It thus first and foremost belonged to the sphere of
sacrum, yet this meaning seems to be obsolete in contemporary
understanding of the monstrous. A typical monster does dwell the realm of
the Unknown, but his sacred potential vanishes from the common-sense
definition being replaced by more down-to earth signs of monstrosity.
Rather than of strange and prodigious, monstrous is equivalent of
immoral, wrong, unusually large and ugly. Still, I would like to use this
marginalised vision of the monstrous in making a comparison between the
monstrous and the cute, which otherwise would be hazardous. And so - in
the light of “porous” structure of definitions - the title-slash separating the
monstrous from the cute, serves simultaneously as a bridge linking these
two. Monstrous cute is - following this trait - a cute as read through its
thesaurus (endearing, loveable, delightful, darling, pretty) and then re-read
through the notion of strangeness and marvel (something that is not as it
seems, something that suffers from innate contradictions); to read cute as
monstrous is - in brief - to read it as an Other.
Such a suspicious (though interesting) linguistic operation can be
possible due to the very nature of definitions. Definitions, originating from
Latin definire: to limit, to describe, to explain, serve both as descriptions
and examples of proper usage of a headword in question and as such can
be deemed legends - literally this what should be read. Definitions yet
work as open texts, and their (only) seeming obviousness/non-paradoxical
nature enables aberrant readings, that question the original descriptions
giving birth to their ambivalent versions.
Popular culture - seen from the poststructuralist perspective as the
site of semiotic battle over meanings - is the most immediate and natural
human environment and it is there, where the creation, reading, re-reading,
acceptance, denial and destruction of most of our everyday definitions
take place. Popular culture can be thought of as a library of texts which
contradict, overlap, enrich, and disempower each other.
Popular culture’s text is a mixture of what R. Barthes referred to
as writerly and readerly textsi - accessible and easy in form but still open
to multitude of interpretations. As such,
it offers itself up to popular production; it exposes,
however reluctantly, the vulnerabilities, limitations, and
weaknesses of its preferred meanings; it contains, while
attempting to repress them, voices that contradict the
ones it prefers; it has loose ends that escape its control,
its meanings exceed its own power to discipline them, its
gaps are wide enough for whole new texts to be
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Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the ambivalent nature of…
produced in them, and it is, in a very real sense, beyond
its own controlii
Such text has two main features - it is excessive and obvious, and
the seemingly paradoxical mixture - of “overflowing semiosis” and refuse
of in-depth analysis - makes popular culture text practically bottomless
well of meanings (within the limits set by intentio operis). My general
assumption is that both the cute and the monstrous can be “read” as such
popular texts. Different and unexpected usages of these two concepts add
to their definitions, challenging the cleanness of the boundary raised
between the cute and the monstrous. How much cute can the monster bear
to maintain his monstrosity and escape from blurring into virtual
nonexistence? How monstrous should the cutie become to turn amusement
into terror and cross the boundary of monsters’ realm? Are the possible
meaning transitions some signum temporis revealing the very ambiguities
of our culture? These are only some of possible questions that the
suggestion of certain cute-monstrous reciprocity evokes. And it may be so
that the specifics behind the popular culture can shed some light on the
curious nature of cuteness/monstrosity.
Common definitions of cutie and monster (as extracted from the
most recognizable icons of both these species - say Hello Kitty and
Cthulhu) reveal the human tendency to assume aesthetic/ethic coherence
and disclose the “innate” inclination to structure the world arranging the
elements of it in sets of binary oppositions. Pure-type monster, though
horrifying and abominable, though occupying the other side of the norm,
the grotesque, impenetrable and dangerous “through the looking-glass”
world, still has got more in common with the order than with the chaos.
By taking place (being placed?) on the edge, on the boundary, the monster
protects us from crossing it by the simple fact of showing (Latin
monstrare) where it lies. Due to the assumed coherence between
monstrous looks and behaviour, monster as such is predictable, mainly
because of his being a portent of danger. The same, though aiming at
opposite direction, applies to cute. Cute is (or maybe should be?)
predictable because its “safe” aesthetics connotes “harmless” ethics.
The openness of cute concept enables us to read its aesthetics, its
surface without linking it to “prescribed” cute ethics. It can be otherwise.
Monstrosity of cuteness may be concluded either on the basis of its
appearance or its behaviour leading - moreover - to disturbing as well as
ironic conclusions (monstrous cutie can be thought of either as a threat or
a trifle). In order to welcome the cute as a multivocal discourse we need a
set of its “readings” where the sacred harmony between looks and
behaviour is hardly ever sustained.
Cute is first and foremost a circular concept. Frances Richards, in
her Fifteen theses on the Cuteiii, noted that as a means of softening,
Maja Brzozowska-Brywczyńska
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neutralizing the sharp, threatening concepts it works inevitably as a sort of
pendulum swinging to and fro, and thus being able to play its role only up
to a certain point, where the sweetness becomes a mock and a pitiful or
ironic alter-ego of itself. Cute can therefore serve as multipurpose
descriptive/interpretative tool endowing its objects either with more
positive or ambivalent connotations. To make cute a multifaceted concept
we need the following instruction:
Draw a circle, and ray out from it the abject, the
melancholic, the wicked, and the childlike. Now in the
zones between add the erotic, the ironic, and the kitsch.
Inter-sperse
the
Romantic/Victorian,
the
Disney/consumerist, and the biologically deterministic.
At the center of this many-spoked wheel lies a
connective empty space. Label it CUTE.iv
2.
Aesthetical incongruity: cute as freak
The aesthetics of cuteness could be identified with the anatomy of
a human (animal) baby, except for the fact, that in the process of making
the cute, this infantile diagram serves as a raw material rather than final
product. Manufactured cute (for this kind of cuteness is of main focus
here) is stylized, perfected (de-naturalized) babyish appearance and
behaviour. Infantile features are often (involuntarily or purposefully)
caricaturized and exaggerated during the process of making the cute and
the outcome is thus at the same time sweet and pathetic, pretty and ugly,
and most of all anatomically incorrect.
It seems that a certain degree of both physical and psychical
weakness and disability can be seen as sub-types of childishness and both
are essential parts of cute aesthetics and general sweet appeal. Cute and
pitiful are often interchangeable concepts, says Sharon Kinsella.
Cute characters like Hello Kitty and Totoro have stubbly
arms, no fingers, no mouths, huge heads, massive eyes which can hide no private thoughts from the viewer nothing between their legs, pot bellies, swollen legs and
pigeon feet - if they have feet at all. Cute things can't
walk, can't talk, can't in fact do anything at all for
themselves because they are physically handicapped.v
Japanese term for cute is kawaii, a derivation of kawayushi principally shy and embarrassed as well as vulnerable, small and darling.
As Kinsella notices, contemporary usage of kawaii reveals some traits of
pity - kawaii applies both to small babies and frail old women - and “the
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Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the ambivalent nature of…
term kawaisô derived directly from kawaii means pathetic, poor, and
pitiable in a generally negative if not pleasing sense.” vi
Daniel Harrisvii goes further linking the aesthetics of cuteness
with that of deformity and dejection. Cuteness - in his opinion - makes a
weird category of mutants and malformed outcasts which deserve our
attention mainly by arising feelings of pity and sympathy. We could
possibly trace numerous similarities between the species of cuties and that
of freaks. In his Pathetic Manifesto, Kurt Brereton stated:
There is a good slice of the pathetic in cuteness.
Wrapped up in the cute are the sentimental appeal and
the abject repulsion. The cute little doll is a watered
down and stylized version of carnivalesque puppet - half
monster half innocent happy face.viii
Freak - an embodiment of monstrosity - is usually recognized by
his unusual physiology that transcends the norms of the body, and is
referred to as lusus naturae. In bodily terms, general attributes of freaks
are: too few (or none) or two many limbs growing out of most
inappropriate parts of the body; the absence or distortion of body
proportion leading to monstrous forms and abnormal size; contradictive
(or unspecified, multiple) genders, and strange colour of skin, eyes, hair.
Now let’s take the absolute cute idol - Hello Kitty, loveable white kitten.
Wouldn’t she be an astoma, a mouthless freak? Couldn’t we interpret her
lack of fingers (claws? hands?) as an actual sign of physical monstrosity?
Wouldn’t her large head be a symptom of hydrocephalus? How can she
see and smell having three dots instead of eyes and nose? One thing leaves
no doubt - no matter how long this litany of questions would be, Hello
Kitty remains an icon of cuteness. And it will rather be a pink, big-headed,
button-eyed and chubby teddy bear, that wins children (and adults) hearts,
than its natural-size, clawed and sharp-teethed counterpart. So more
important than to prove the physical monstrosity of cute (though it seems
an intriguing task and quite plausible argument) is to ask where does the
(nonnegotiable) boundary between cuteness and monstrosity lie? Harris’
statement becomes helpful here - for it is the emotion evoked by cuteness
aesthetics that delimitates Hello Kitty from malformed monster. It is the
disempowering feeling of pity and sympathy (aligned though, as Harris
insists, to that of superiority and even certain cruelty) that deprives a
monster of his monstrosity.
Both monstrous and cute are concepts susceptible to change. This
change may be understood twofold. It can be seen as the possibility to add
unusual/unexpected/controversial meanings to both of them. Cute
monster, for example, isn’t usually enclosed within the definition of a
typical monster, but a typical definition of a monster can be (in the light of
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numerous examples) enriched with “a creature with monstrous looks and
sweet nature”. Secondly, such hybrids are in position to change other
definitions - monstrous cutie possesses a hard to overlook potential to
change a meaning of cruelty, whereas cute monster adds new meanings to
the concept of goodness. Among various ways of “extracting” the cute
monster (bearing in mind the multiple meanings of monster) the
techniques proposed by H. R. Greenberg make a useful tool. In Heimlich
Maneuvers: On A Certain Tendency of Horror and Speculative Cinema ix
he shows the metamorphosis of unheimlisch (uncanny, distanced) into
heimlisch (homely, intimate) taking form of the following transformations
of “pure” monsters: making them figures of fun, friends/protectors of
children, mascots requiring protection and friendship on the part of
children, and (least relevant) mankind saviours. All these serve as means
of rehabilitating the “coherent” monster.
The work of Australian artist, Patricia Piccinini - The young
familyx can be thought of as another example of combining cuteness and
monstrosity in a way that disturbs common understandings of these
concepts. The title-sculpture depicts a mother lying on her side and
suckling pups. And there would be nothing disturbing in such warm,
touching setting, wasn’t it not for the fact, that the mother belongs to
unknown species, she is a hybrid creature combining human and animal
elements, she is a monster. Yet Piccinini refers to her as beautiful, for “she
is not threatening, but a face you could love, and a face in love with her
family.”xi
The general impression is that though cuteness seems to be above
all an aesthetical phenomena, its definition holds (only?) when it is
embedded in emotional response. Cute is when it instils in the viewer an
impulse to touch it. Cute therefore marks its presence by oozing positive
feelings. Of warmth, safety, innocence and sweetness.
3.
Ethical twist: cute as monster (?)
Sweet side of cute is only one of its multiple faces. Porn cute and
wicked cute - for these two are the most prominent examples of cute
ethical paradox - can be embraced by a more general cute-genre, namely
the anti-cute.xii Anti-cute seems to be more self-conscious, more ironic and
closer to cute original definition (as cunning, clever and not lacking wits)
than its oh-so-lovely kawaii counterpart. Anti-cute is the empowered cute.
Anti-cute reveals the cute in disguise.
The traits of such “malformed” readings of cute can be found in
two main icons of techno: the Lolita and the Peter Pan, which both base
on transgressing the cute/monstrous opposition, stretching the limits,
setting new rules based on ambivalence. Their clothes well fit kawaii
trends, but here the babyish, pastel tee shirts, braids, teddy bears and
dummies do not connote the longing for childhood utopia, but work -
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Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the ambivalent nature of…
paradoxically - as sexual attractors and means of manifesting the maturity
(in various areas of life) via the physically immature body and childish
arsenal.xiii Japanese erotic-porn anime, better known under the hentai term
in the western world, features sweet, cute, big-eyed, lovely-faced girls
turned victims of sexual abuse or sexual abusers themselves taking part in
orgies involving not only men and women of different age, but also
animals and aliens of various kind.
Chucky in Child’s Play could make a paradigmatic figure of
monstrous cute. Gremlins would fit the schema as well. True. Yet the
combination of sweet form (a doll) and monstrous behaviour
(slaughtering) is followed here by aesthetical transformation which
signalizes the ethical change; Malicious and murderous Gremlins, quite
contrary to their cute initial Mogwai from, are scaly, slimy and clawed.
Quite fair. Chucky and Gremlins thus represent the evil potential in
harmless beings. As Richards puts it: “cute emerges as a ritualized and
declawed sublimation of violence, a pantomime or parody neutralizing
mortal threat”.
The “schizophrenic” nature of cute allows it to be used as a
sugar-coating layer for ideas and behaviour overstepping social rules and
entering the realm of this, what is forbidden.
Jamie Rapxiv noticed a very important quality of cute, namely its
being a power of
transforming an object’s emotional power or value as
well as the meaning. This transformative ability allows
cute to act as a whitewash veiling an unfortunate reality
or to comment on social taboos. Cute can also be played
against itself in one form, for example acting as the cute
icon and the scary monster simultaneously.
The fascinating metamorphosis of cute into anti-cute reflects the
above-mentioned circularity of the cute concept - for when cute acquires
wicked features it in fact goes to the excess of cuteness, exploiting and
parodying the sweetness to its very limits, poisoning itself while retaining
the artificially loveable texture. Cute becomes grotesque. One question
becomes vital. Is monstrous cute really monstrous? By ridiculing the
possible, potentially present aggression it seems to simultaneously give
rise to dejection and fascination. As such it seduces the viewer using the
very arsenal of otherness as described by Michel Foucault (1967) of
Jeffrey Cohen (1996).
Cute is always about a play.
Happy
Tree
Friends
(to
be
found
on
www.happytreefriends.com) are little, cute, cuddly, funny and
sugary sweet cartoon charactersxv that we are bound to love, but what
Maja Brzozowska-Brywczyńska
9
awaits them in each of short episodes is sudden and terrible yet still
cartoonish death (none of Happy Tree Friends dies for real, they posses a
wonderful ability to regenerate, an ability typical for almost all cartoon
characters). Each cartoon starts with an innocent set-up – we see Happy
Tree Friends playing in the park, shopping, watching movies - safe,
pleasant daily activities. And yet in each cartoon this harmony is
destroyed by some catastrophe, some incident that turns a “Disneytopia”
fable into splutter. Happy Tree Friends’ stories are referred to as “gory and
above all funny situations” including sewing off limbs, decapitations,
burnings, poisonings and hang ups to mention just a few examples of
possible slaughter scenarios. Very often the lethal weapons are of cute
origin themselves – take for example a lollipop or ice cream poked in the
eye. Yet the characters do not hurt each other intentionally. The ruthless
logic of Fate works here most of the time. The stories are set together by
the everyday sayings that parents use on kids like don’t play with matches!
except that here the possible outcome of disobedience is staged.
Happy Tree Friends define death as a funny thing happening to
others. It is a game which rules you accept not necessarily having to
accept the context which gave life to it.xvi Cute engages no responsibility
neither on a part of viewer nor the cute itself. Happy (Freaky?) Tree
Friends’ Smoochies announce: You have just adopted a HTF of your very
own. Love it to death. Literally, to death. Isn’t there - apart from a
sufficient amount of horror - a campish hint of upturning conventions?
The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful. The case of
Happy Tree Friends can also be utilized as a proof supporting Daniel
Harris findings on the curious nature of cute, which - by exactly the same
sweetness that triggers maternal responses - enables a certain degree of
monstrosity on the part of its creator/user/viewer.
Because cuteness aestheticizes helplessness and
deformity, it almost always involves an act of sadism on
the part of its creator, who makes an unconscious
attempt to maim, hobble, and embarrass the thing he
seeks to idolize.xvii
The claim of cutie owner’s monstrous behaviour can be a bit too
far-fetched, but nevertheless it is worth mentioning because the
asymmetric relation between the cute and the owner leaves a potential for
exercising such power. Marco Evaristti’s controversial work, Goldfish in
blenders aptly depicts this paradoxical cute-viewer relation: when there is
an option of turning the blender on, the question arises of power we do
have over animals and other inferiors.
The anti-cute genre, though emerged as a protest against toosweet aesthetics and ethics, a critique of infantilisation of society and
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Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the ambivalent nature of…
reality, seems to end up swallowed by cuteness. For if cuteness is about
surface, appearance, form, it can be read as sweet, innocent and loveable
against ironical artist’s attitude providing a preferred interpretational tool.
Both cuteness and anti-cuteness operate within the frames set by popular
culture. Readings of the anti-cute may thus involve both anxiety aiming at
the fatal consequences of tainting the pure cuteness with violence and
brutality, and a feeling of relief, that the “sacred” sugary-sweet childhoodutopia has been finally breached with the more down-to-earth
understanding of what does it mean to be a child in an instantly
accelerating and ever strange world of contradictions and transgression.
And both these interpretations are important as far as they enable more
profound understanding of the monstrosity’s enduring presence in the
multiplicity of forms.
4.
Scheming Cute
The main source of cute transformative potential seems to lie - as
suggested above - in its aesthetic features, so the main strategies of
evoking/revealing the monstrosity in cuteness will also base on its
appearance. The assumption of the ethic/aesthetic coherence allows here
to create not always cute scenarios telling stories not only about the
monstrosity of cute but also of its creator.
In his Biological homage to MM, Stephen Jay Gouldxviii sketched
the transformation of MM stating that: as Mickey’s personality softened,
his appearance changed. The change at work is progressive juvenalization.
Gould draws on the concept of Kindchenschema proposed by a
German ethologist, Konrad Lorenz. According to this idea, features of
juvenility serve as a trigger releasing the mechanisms for affection and
nutrition in adult humans.xix Among the Kindchenschema releasers are:
a relatively large head, predominance of brain capsule,
large and low-lying eyes, bulging cheek region, short
and thick extremities, a springy elastic consistency and
clumsy movementsxx
The power of Kindchenschema lies in the fact that, apart from its
obvious adaptive function - sort of self-preservation programme for
babies, we tend to seek this set of features not only among the infants of
our own species, but in other animals and inanimate objects as well. xxi The
cute aesthetic being so much dependent on our feelings towards it is thus
easily intersected with cute ethics. Kindchenschema is a code easy to
decipher - cute is in a need for protection and affection. It is subservient,
tame and mute. Oozing cuteness disempowers its source.
When do we most often say “Awww” approaching something
cute? Daniel Harris insists it is when the object of “Awww” does
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1
something stupid and embarrassing, when it will show lack of
coordination, lack of brains - appearing more helpless that it in fact is.
Harris states:
Adorable things are often most adorable in the middle of
a pratfall or a blunder: Winnie the Pooh with his snout
stuck in the hive; the 101 dalmatians of Disney's classic
collapsing in double splits and sprawling across the ice;
Love-a-lot Bear in The Care Bears Movie, who stares
disconsolately out at us with a paint bucket overturned
on his head; or, the grimmest example of the cruelty of
cuteness, the real live fainting goat, which has acquired
of late a perverse chic as a pet (bred with myatonia, a
genetic disorder, it coyly folds up and faints when you
scream at it).xxii
Kindchenschema can yet serve as a manipulative tool revealing
the hidden power of cuteness.
From a Darwinist point of view, cuteness is constructed
as a means for survival, in this case not of genes but of
the object that it has been assigned to: if cuteness is
‘wrapped’ around a certain object that has an image with
unwanted qualities, for example war, it is more likely to
survive a cultural selection process.xxiii
In this reading, cute becomes a deceivingly positive container for
meanings with negative or ambivalent connotation. Cuteness can thus be
understood as a selfish gene, as a virus.
According to Lori Merish cited by J. Raap,
cuteness is a highly conventionalized aesthetic,
distinguishable both by its formal aesthetic features and
the formalized emotional response it engenders.xxiv
It is the softening, the watering down sharp, problematic areas
that - through the work of cutesification - reveals the potential monstrosity
of cute becoming a camouflage for meanings far from sweet, and in
consequence denying, ridiculing, disempowering and disarming the taboo,
the monster.xxv Cutesification is a consequence of realizing the sweet
appeal of cute.
Cute can work as such “one-size” and user-friendly form for
conveying a multitude of diversified information exactly because it seems
an object devoid of any malicious traits as well as potential self-distanced
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Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the ambivalent nature of…
approach taking the form of, say, irony. Cute, a perfectly manufactured
innocent naturalness, happiness and spontaneity, connotes safety. It makes
you hug it and love it. Would any “pure-type” monster be able to evoke
such a response? I very seriously doubt it.
The following may be deemed a linguistic game only, making the
whole monstrous-cute argument a joke. I leave it open to interpretation.
Cute might be thought of as a watered-down version of
pretty; which is a watered-down version of beautiful;
which is a watered-down version o sublime; which is a
watered-down version of terrifying. In this regard, the
cute is akin to the ridiculous, which is a watered-down
version of the absurd, which is again a watered-down
version of that which terrifies. By extension, this
suggests that all representation, whatever its stylistic
bent is tinged with the experience of terror: the terror of
the convincingly ersatz, the killing disjuncture of the
otherized, the pseudoreal.xxvi
5.
Framed Cute
The domain, where most of the definitional play and counter-play
take part is popular culture, or - more correctly - various cultures of
popular culture seen as a heterogenic whole, an open text, a pleasure
machine. Much has been said about popular culture, but what I would like
to stress as a possible trait in grasping the paradox of cute/monstrous
division, is that its nature is that of parasite in an endless search for a new
feeder. It sounds like a cliché that postmodern culture is all about
transgression and ambivalence, but these two come not only as a threat.
The elements of social life exorcised so frantically beyond the boundaries
of shared - comprehensible - community, are now welcomed back. The
uncanny, the unthinkable, the other, the paradoxical seem to construct a
strange whole becoming a method of copying with the reality (quite
similar in nature).
The most natural environment of monstrous readings of cute
seems to be a culture of alien-nation.xxvii It emerges as a result of
fascination with strangeness, freakiness, otherness and ambivalence. It is a
site of combining together this, what seems to be mutually exclusive, of
“familiarizing” this, what cannot be neither understood nor accepted
within the existing socio-cultural frames. Still, it would be a mistake to
equal these techniques of embracing otherness with a birth of new global
morality. The “reading” of alien-nation culture as a cultural crusade
against intolerance and xenophobia is only one of the possibilities and not
necessarily the most correct one, because
Maja Brzozowska-Brywczyńska
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alien-nation culture is as much a political culture of
general tolerance and love, as a decadent popular
culture, that exploits the motif of the Other and
simultaneously reduces it to the aesthetical
dimension.xxviii
The notion of reducing the otherness to the surface is an
important one. The very essential ingredient of postmodernity, the
aesthetization - as described by Mike Featherstone – is in position to turn
the reality we inhabit into configurations of signs which can be perceived
without any ethical afterthought and gazed at with the eyes of flâneur,
who is always just passing by, lured by the new and unexpected,
devouring the images as they flow.
This fascination with transgression and ambivalence can be read
as Jeffrey Cohen (1996) reads the culture - through the monsters it gave
life to. His proposal goes along the lines of Michel Foucault’s idea of
negative structure of society - finding answers to such questions as “whom
does the society reject? Whom does it exclude? What is the system of
prohibition?”xxix
This refusal to participate in the classificatory ‘order of
things’ is true of monsters generally: they are disturbing
hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist
attempts to include them in any systematic
structuration.xxx
The extraordinary is the fabric of the most fundamental legends
we base our ordinary world on. Curious mixture of fascination and
repulsion defines foucouldian seduction and this seduction best describes
the status of the Other. Due to its “borderland” ontology, it threatens to
break structuring and sense securing binary thinking while simultaneously
promising transgression which catapults us from one-dimensional world to
the realm of Uncanny and Unexplored. If monsters should be indeed
treated as indicators of our conditio as a culture, would the presence of
hybrids such as cute monsters and monstrous cuties explain the
transgressive and ambivalent faces of postmodernity? The cute (especially
as cho kawaii) and the monster are both Others not belonging to the realm
of This, What Is Normal. The transformative nature of monstrous
cute/cute monstrosity is deeply embedded in its power to shift and even
annihilate the binary distinctions separating the well known orbis interior
from the orbis exterior of Them, whatever they are. Monster incorporates
the Out There, yet thought of in terms of Lovecraftian Outer Dimensions
where nothing good awaits us. Cute - on the opposite side of the
1
4
Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the ambivalent nature of…
continuum - serves as a tangible extension of another, intangible
Outerspace - the fluffy, light-hearted, sugary childhood (purged from
bogeymen and monsters).
The ambivalence is the word that makes it possible to position
both cute and monstrous in one dimension, the space that Michel Foucault
called heterotopia, the place outside the norm, the site of revolutionary
potential to change, to pose an alternative order, where the coherence
between words and reality is no more possible, where the paradox is the
structuring rule. The fifth principle of heterotopias: “heterotopias always
presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and
makes them penetrable.”xxxi
Beware the Cute.
Dedicated to Basia Pawłowska and Morelka
Maja Brzozowska-Brywczyńska
Institute of Sociology
Adam Mickiewicz University
Poznań – Poland
Maja Brzozowska-Brywczyńska
1
5
Notes
Readerly text is - in brief – essentially passive, receptive, and
demands acceptance of the meanings provided, although is quite
undemanding of its reader, while the writerly text challenges its reader to
make sense out of it on his own, to try to decipher it, to take part in the
meaning construction. John Fiske refers to popular culture texts as
producerly texts; John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
(London&New York: Routledge, 1995)
ii
Ibid, 104
iii
Frances Richards, “Fifteen theses on the Cute”, [article on line]
Cabinet Magazine 4 (2001), accessed 14 February 2005; available from:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/4/cute.php
iv
Ibid
v
Sharon Kinsella,“Cuties in Japan“, [chapter on line] in Women,
Media, and Consumption in Japan, eds. Lise Skov and Brian Moeran
(Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1995), accessed 14 February 2005,
available from: http://www.kinsellaresearch.com/Cuties.html
vi
Ibid
vii
Daniel Harris, “The cute and the anti-cute”, [article on line]
Harper’s Magazine, July 1993; accessed 14 February 2005; available
from: …
viii
Kurt Brereton,“The Pathetic Manifesto“, 2000, (15 April 2005).
<http://www.kurtbrereton.com/pdf/patheticmanifesto.pdf>
ix
Harvey Roy Greenberg,“Heimlich Maneuvers: On A Certain
Tendency of Horror and Speculative Cinema“, PSYART: A Hyperlink
Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, 1 October 2001 (31
December
2001).
<http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2001_greenberg04.shtml>
x
www.patriciapiccinini.net
xi
Linda Michael, We are family
xii
More examples of anti-cute: Jamie Raap, Cute: a container
insensitive
to
content
and
context,
2004 (14
February
2005).<http://www.zeitguised.com/wear/work/cute/cute.html>
xiii
See: Marek Krajewski, Kultury kultury popularnej (Poznań:
Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2003)
xiv
Raap
xv
Though two of them are thieves, one plays a playboy, other is
psychopath, yet another suffers from terrible dandruff; one happens to be
completely nutty and has a glass eye, other has serious dental problem,
and yet another – seemingly mechanic – lacks hands, although is equipped
with most necessary tools. Cruelty? Camp? Funny? Freaky?
i
1
6
Monstrous/Cute. Notes on the ambivalent nature of…
xvi
People watching HTF are often aware of the ambiguity of this
cartoon gore/splutter, but equally often express the following opinions: it
is so unreal and the cartoons don’t die for real, so why worry; it’s funny
seeing maltreated Cuddles, no one will cry for him after all, it’s just a
parody of nice, neat Disney fables. People watching HTF supposedly
aren’t a group sadists or psychopaths. It is (again supposedly) the ironic
gaze, knowing the game’s name and distanced attitude towards reality that
makes it possible to laugh at eyeballs dangling from the sockets, scorched
fur and twisted limbs. Or isn’t it?
xvii
Harris
xviii
In: Stephen Jay Gould, Niewczesny pogrzeb Darwina. Wybór
esejów (Warszawa: Prószyński I S-ka, 1999)
xix
I (following Gould’s argument) leave aside this presentation the
issue of whether or not this affectionate response to babyish features is
truly innate or learnt through the process of socialization. It is suffice to
say that the so called “cute response” applies to most of us.
xx
Ibid, 261
xxi
Unfortunately the issue of selling cute is to complex and dense to
be sensibly encompassed within this short sketch, but it is worth stressing
that a whole “fancy goods” industry exploits the emotional response the
cute things achieve from their viewers and owners - for it has the potential
to change an act of buying into an act of adopting the cute product. And
this shift has important consequences. See e.g. Jamie Rapp, Sharon
Kinsella and Daniel Harris (references)
xxii
Harris
xxiii
Raap
xxiv
Ibid
xxv
Which, when confronted with the title: “myths and metaphors of
enduring evil” makes a very promising metaphor indeed and a very
dangerous transformation of monster and its definition.
xxvi
Richards
xxvii
Krajewski, 105
xxviii
Krajewski, 105-106
xxix
Michel Foucault, Filozofia, historia, polityka. Wybór pism
(Warszawa-Wrocław: PWN 2000), 78
xxx
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster culture (Seven Theses)” in
Monster Theory: Reading Culture ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (Minneapolis &
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 6
xxxi
Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces “, Diacritics, 31 (1986): 27
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1
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