Articoli di riviste sul tema "Japanese Dialect literature"

This paper examines the representations of the Bavarian and Kansai dialects in contemporary German and Japanese literature in the light of the concept of language ideologies. First, I will present general objectives of sociolinguistic analysis of dialect representation in fictional texts. Next, I will discuss the connection between language standardisation process and social attitudes towards dialect on the example of two countries from different cultural circles: Germany and Japan. Finally, using methods derived both from linguistics and literature studies, I will examine dialect representations in selected contemporary novels in order to establish the influence of language ideologies.

First- and second-person pronouns have been one of the centerpieces of the literature on language and gender differences in Japanese (Shibamoto Smith 2003). Most of our understandings of real (empirical) pronominal use comes from investigations of female speakers of standard Japanese. Our understandings of how dialect speakers and/or men use pronominal forms in daily linguistic practice are not well informed. This article undertakes an investigation of Japanese men’s uses of pronominal forms; each participant was born and reared in the Kansai (western) area of Japan and uses a dialect variety of Japanese (Hanshinkan Dialect). Literature which addresses pronominal usage in Japanese indicates that these forms are risky since they always serve to position speaker and hearer in specific ways relative to one another; as such, pronouns are something to be avoided. The findings of this paper indicate that pronouns are used by Japanese men; however the uses are contextually governed and have little to do with delineating speaker from hearer and have more to do with specific conversational goals.

There is increasing research literature on instructional pragmatics, including work on Japanese, but little research on naturally occurring classroom innovations. This article presents a study of an instructional innovation called Casual Friday, where the professor of a university multi-section advanced-beginning (2nd year) Japanese language course designated certain lessons as spaces for graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) to involve students in using Japanese casual register. Analysis of interviews with instructional staff, student survey results, and classroom and meeting observations, shows how Casual Friday, an organizational transformation of the course, transformed activity systems (Engeström, 1987, 1999, 2003). Transformed TA roles created a pedagogical safe house (Canagarajah, 2004; Pomerantz and Bell, 2011; Pratt, 1991) on Casual Fridays by providing TAs instructional autonomy, stronger horizontal connections with students, and temporary freedom from the restraints of the course-as-usual. The re-organization thus promoted TA innovation, as they creatively used language, designed materials, taught dialect, introduced Japanese youth culture, etc. Triangulation with student surveys confirms findings of the interviews and observations, while also showing that students reported languaculture learning. Results suggest the benefits of carving out spaces within normally textbook-and-grammar-focused courses for TAs to have free rein in presenting and involving students with languaculture.

Abstract: This article examines the works of Kim Yujeong as a contemporary response to Ikaino literature, a subgenre of Zainichi Korean literature that flourished from the 1950s–1980s. Ikaino is the old name of the neighborhood of Osaka that was and remains the area of Japan with the largest population of Zainichi Koreans. Ikaino’s origins as a settlement of Korean migrant laborers in the 1920s and its official erasure from Osaka city maps in 1973 have often been mythologized within Zainichi Korean fiction and poetry. I read Kim Yujeong’s short stories “Tanpopo” (2000), “Murasame” (2002), and “Tamayura” (2015), which feature working women protagonists traversing Ikaino’s borders, as contemporary works of Ikaino literature that interrogate the Zainichi community’s cultural and historical understandings of the entangled geographies of Japan and the two Koreas. I argue that Kim portrays Ikaino landscapes as spaces constituted through their residents’ collective imaginings of Jeju Island and North Korea. Kim also subverts our expectations of multilingualism in Zainichi literature through the use of local dialect in her representation of Japanese residents of Ikaino. Throughout her work, she seeks to both shed light on the multiple structures of oppression that face Zainichi women living in the Ikaino area today, and critique the way those women have been represented in prior works of Zainichi literature.

Passive voice in Northern Khanty is a productive inflectional verbal category which marks re-arrangement in communicative roles of core event participants. A special feature of Khanty passive is its compatibility not only with transitive but also with intransitive verbs and, in particular, with verbs of motion. This study examines the passive voice construction with intransitive motion verbs in the Kazym dialect of Northern Khanty, with the data source being a survey of the speakers living in Kazym village, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Russian Federation (20192020). The aim was to describe the mechanism of motion passivization and to explain the properties underlying the motion and its participants compared with the standard passive construction. It has been revealed that the passive construction of motion verbs is compatible only with goal-oriented motion verbs, i.e. verbs with the meaning of ‘arrival’, ‘coming in’, ‘coming out’ and ‘falling’ and not with other path verbs denoting ‘going’, ‘coming down’ or manner verbs meaning ‘flying’, ‘running’. Syntactically, this construction promotes the goal participant to subject position. Semantically, it raises the animate possessor of the goal which is affected by the motion event and demotes the subject of motion, which is an overtly expressed indefinite or non-referential entity and the source of the effect produced on the possessor of the goal. Typologically Khanty motion passive is similar to adversative passive constructions in Even and Japanese. However, it is less grammaticalized and more lexically restricted and, thus, might be regarded as an intermediate stage of development of such categories.

It is impossible to dispute the fact that China has had an enormous influence on the culture of the entire Korean Peninsula. The writing system, the thoughts of Chinese philosophers, paper, the xylography method and the idea of a movable type – all this came to the peninsula long before the founding of the Joseon State. China was not only the overlord of Joseon, but also a kind of cultural donor. Of course, under such conditions, the Joseon authorities considered contacts with this region as the most important area of foreign policy and trade. In addition, a significant part of various kinds of literature — from Confucian writings to treatises on medicine was acquired in China for further circulation in Joseon. Due to the constant need for official and commercial communication between states, it was impossible to go without knowledge of a spoken language. For this purpose, the textbook titled “Nogeoldae” (lit. “Elder brother from China”) was created. Using the Goryeo merchant’s trip to China (in later editions this became the Joseon merchant) as the key example, the main situations accompanying such trips were examined in the form of dialogues. With the help of this manual it was possible to learn the phrases necessary for communication in the courtyard, conducting trade negotiations, participating in banquets, communicating with a doctor, and so on. The exceptional practical benefit ensured that this manual underwent several systematic reprints, as well as translation into Manchurian, Mongolian and Japanese languages. “Nogeoldae” is a unique written source on the history of the development of both the northern dialect of the Chinese language and Korean in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern times.

This paper considers how prosody in spontaneous Japanese is processed. We have conducted Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) perception experiments on the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ) and investigated how boundaries and prominences are perceived. We recruited three groups of participants from different Japanese dialects and found that (i) F0 is not a strong prominence cue in Japanese, contra Japanese literature on focus prominence (Pierrehumbert & Beckman (P&B) 1988; Kori 1989; Ishihara 2016) and (ii) Japanese allows multi-headed and headless intonation phrases, and P&B’s reset theory, i.e. focal prominence resets boundary phrases, faces empirical difficulties. We also found that (iii) both content words and function morphemes get highlighted in Japanese, and (iv) perception strategies vary cross-dialectally and listeners from different dialects perceive boundaries and prominences differently.

Since the 1990s, a number of plurilingual writers have published works with a heightened consciousness of incorporating different languages in the Japanese text, in the original and/or in translation, resulting in a gradual transformation of the literary topography. This paper will focus on the works by Hideo Levy (b. 1950), On Yūjū (b. 1980), and Yokoyama Yūta (b. 1981). These writers share a deep knowledge of and concern for the East Asian cultural sphere, especially the literature and culture in various Chinese societies. Using different writing and notational strategies, they resist the traditional method of “blending Japanese and Chinese” (wakan yūgō) and immerse themselves in the creative space in between Japanese and Chinese languages and cultures (including dialects and minority cultures), in search of a new language to document a plurilingual self and the world. Their experimentations in writing contributes to the emergence of literature in Japanese (Nihongo bungaku) as a body of work born of a language of hybridity and deeply engaged with plurilingual notations in its creation, written in Japanese by authors who are not necessarily Japanese nationals. With reference to Theodore Adorno’s theory of the “nonorganic nature” of language, Katō Shūichi’s celebration of the culture of hybridity, and Charles Ferguson’s idea of diglossia, this paper examines the potential and limitations of these writing experiments and the changing literary topography they engendered.

This article explores the effect of discourse context and prosody on the resolution of wh-scope ambiguity in Tokyo Japanese, Fukuoka Japanese, and South Kyŏngsang Korean. It focuses on wh-islands in particular. There is little consensus in the literature as to whether wh-island effects are present in Japanese or Korean (Huang 1982, Nishigauchi 1990, Lee 1982, Suh 1987, among others). A production study, in which a scope-ambiguous wh-interrogative was preceded by a disambiguating discourse context, demonstrates that speakers’ scope interpretation is consistent with the preceding discourse context. An additional comprehension study reveals that prosodic wh-scope marking observed in the languages studied improves the acceptability of the matrix scope readings in violation of wh-islands. The experimental results support the view that wh-island effects can be overridden by plausible discourse contexts as well as the appropriate prosodic marking of wh-scope. These results highlight the interaction of grammatical knowledge, contextual factors, and prosody.

In the mid-1940s, Taiwan underwent a change of ruling power from colonial Japan to the Kuomintang Party from China. Both governments implemented monolingualization on the Taiwanese population. In this article, we examine the situation translingual position in a historical aspect, dwelling in detail on the work of the outstanding Taiwanese poet Chen Qianwu. We come to several conclusions that may be useful to researchers in the field of translingual literature. 1. Taiwans translingual poets, born in the 1920s, found themselves in a situation of permanent code switching: using the local dialects of Hokkien and Hakka in everyday practice, they were trained in Japanese and used Japanese in a wider society. 2. Although the switch between one monolingual paradigm and another violated the creative result of translational authors, this did not exclude the experience of multilingual realities and interlingual influences that they experienced from the fragmentation of local identities, especially during the development and formation of Taiwanese linguistic consciousness. 3. The literary intermediaries between the paradigms were: the classical Chinese writing, brought with the first immigrants from China; vernacular Chinese writing, influenced by the New Literary Movement in the 1920s; Taiwanese writing based on the most common dialects, Hokkien and Hakka (the idea of speaking and writing in unison); Japanese writing, which was originally studied in school along with Chinese, but supplanted it. The switch from Japanese, the colonial official language, to Mandarin Chinese, the postcolonial official language, led to a so-called translingual generation of literary writers. While the switch from one monolingual paradigm to another disrupted the creative output of the translingual generation, it did not prevent these writers from developing a Taiwanese consciousness. As illustrated by the poet Chen Qianwu, language crossing experiences strengthened the translingual generations assertion of their local identities.

The name of B. Akunin appeared on the Russian literary market five years ago. The author Grigory Tkhartishvili, a well-known man of letters, translator and a connoisseur of Japanese language and culture, is now known all over the world, and translations of his novels are widely available, including in Norway and Sweden. His novels are out of the ordinary not only as detective stories but also as works of postmodernist literature with intertextual connotations and complex historical and literary associations. The article presents an attempt to analyze certain peculiarities of his working methods, which present specific difficulties for translation into Norwegian and Swedish, such as verbal versatility and intertextual associations which are so important in postmodernist works. The article also deals with different translational strategies chosen by the translators in their rendering of realia, different social and local dialects and, what is most important - the intentional mannerisms of B. Akunin's artistic style.

Apart from Estonian, some other languages – from local dialects to major languages such as German and Russian – have usually also been spoken on the territory of Estonia. As a result, the literary culture of the local (small) language evolved in close contact with some foreign literatures and cultures. However, there is still no thorough analysis of how the historical change in the linguistic situation manifests itself in Estonian literature. Our article aims to draw attention to the multilingual nature of the Estonian literary field by giving a historical survey of the relations, contacts, and intertwining of the languages used in Estonian poetry from the 17th century to the present. To reflect the multiple facets of multilingualism revealed in poetry we mainly use a four-level approach partly based on Jaan Undusk’s typology of Estonian–German cultural contacts, adding the literary field as the level covering whatever is left. Thus, we treat multilingualism as a phenomenon observable within a language, text, author, and literary field. In terms of this study, intralinguistic multilingualism means language mixing in otherwise monolingual poetry, while intratextual multilingualism refers to abrupt transitions from one language to another (code-switching) within a text, and author multilingualism assumes a multilingual poet. Apart from the phenomena just mentioned, multilingualism within literature covers literary subfields in different language variants (for example literature created in South Estonian or Russian, but on Estonian territory). First, we will survey multilingualism in Estonia poetry before the Republic of Estonian was established in 1918, concluding that because German was the major cultural language up to the beginning of the 20th century, all poets, whatever their ethnicity, must have been fluent in two (or more) languages. The second period analysed spans the 20th century. The local Estonian poetry of the Soviet period stands out, with a few exceptions, for consistent use of Estonian, while some expatriate poets would also use English or Swedish. Third, we analyse contemporary poetry, where multilingualism is manifested not only by the use of local minority languages but also through intertwinings with English, Chinese or Japanese, thus giving evidence of an open society. Based on the picture emerging from the article we can say that apart from a historical overview, the multilingualism of Estonian poetry also needs closer poetic analysis.

PURPOSE Highlight the necessity to collaborate with global cancer communities to outreach into immigrant communities to control liver cancer which showed increased mortality in immigrants from regions with high liver cancer burdens. These communities in US were often comprised of recent immigrants who speak English “less than very well”. METHODS We looked into the underlying cause of death data reported by CDC WONDER to assess death caused by liver cancer in race or ethnic groups with high immigrant percentage and with high mortality from liver cancer in their birth countries as reported from GLOBOCAN. We then looked into recent reports from national cancer registries to assess the needs to increase efforts into outreaching these immigrant communities. RESULTS Mortality from liver cancer are higher than white (both Hispanic and non-Hispanic) population in the Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean population in the US, almost on par with the mortality reported in GLOBOCAN in Vietnam, Japan, or Korea. However, there appeared to be lower mortality reported in the Chinese population than the mortalities reported in China. We also observed much lower mortality reported in the black Hispanic or Native American Hispanic population. These data discrepancies might be results of reporting discrepancy that could bias our national investment into resources to address liver cancer control. We need better outreach into these populations. CONCLUSION In order to better outreach into immigrant communities impacted by liver cancer, we need to address the language barriers faced by these communities. We have launched a new patient centered program to convert education and supportive literatures for liver cancer control in different languages/dialects by working with other members of the International Liver Cancer Movement.

Abstract Unlike studies of the evolutionary relationship between languages, the dialect-level variation within a language has seldom been studied within the framework of a phylogenetic tree, because frequent lexical borrowing muddles the evidence of shared ancestry. The phonological history of Japanese is an exceptional case study where the phenomenon called accentual class merger enables the phylogenetic analysis of dialectal pitch-accent systems in a way that is not subject to borrowing. However, previous studies have lacked statistical analysis and failed to evaluate the relative credence of alternative hypotheses. Here we developed a novel substitution model that describes the mutation of pitch-accent systems driven by accentual class merger and integrated the model into the framework of Bayesian phylogenetic inference with geographical diffusion. Applying the method to data on the pitch-accent variation in modern Japanese dialects and historical documents collected from literature, we reconstructed the evolutionary history and spatial diffusion of pitch-accent systems. Our result supports the monophyly of each of three groups of pitch-accent systems in conventional categorization, namely Tokyo type, Keihan type, and N-kei (N-pattern) type of Kyushu, whereas the monophyly of the Tokyo type has been highly controversial in previous studies. The divergence time of the mainland pitch-accent systems was estimated to be from mid-Kofun to early Heian period. Also, it is suggested that the modern Kyoto dialect did not inherit its accent patterns from Bumoki but from an unrecorded lineage which survived from the Muromachi period. Analyses on geographical diffusion suggest that the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all the taxa and that of Keihan type were located in or around the Kinki region, whereas the MRCA of N-kei type was located in northern to central Kyushu. The geographical location of the MRCA of Tokyo type remains unclear, but the Kinki and Kanto regions are the most plausible candidates.

Abstrak Penelitian ini membahas penilaian dari responden tentang fungsi aplikasi tersebut. Metode yang digunakan adalah metode pengembangan ADDIE dan data dikumpulkan dari kuesioner yang diberikan kepada dua puluh enam mahasiswa Sastra Jepang yang aktif dalam perkuliahan di tingkat tiga Fakultas Sastra Universitas Komputer Indonesia. Instrumen penelitian menggunakan kuesioner dan untuk pengumpulan data menggunakan skala likert. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa responden sangat setuju dengan aplikasi pembelajaran Dialek Kansaimo Kansai sebagai media pembelajaran untuk fitur-fiturnya yang menarik, konten yang mudah dipahami, dan pengoperasian yang mudah. Aplikasi ini masih belum sempurna dan perlu pengembangan lebih lanjut. Kata kunci : Multimedia, Kansaimo, Media Pembelajaran, Kansai Abstract This paper discusses the valuation from the respondents about function of the application. The method used is the ADDIE development method and the data is collected from questioners given to twenty six Japanese Literature students who were active in lecture at third level Faculty of Letters of Universitas Komputer Indonesia. The research instrument using questionnaire and to collection data using likert scale. The result has shown that the respondents strongly agree the application of Kansaimo Kansai Dialect Learning as a media of learning for its interesting features, easy to understand content, and easy operation. This application is still imperfect and needs further development. Keywords: Multimedia, Kansaimo, Learning Media, Kansai

AbstractDomestic animal usage remains a key problem in understanding Japan’s premodern economy. Assumptions that religious and other cultural proscriptions limited the use of domesticated animals, and the consumption of meat in particular, from Late Antiquity until Westernisation in the nineteenth century remain widespread. However, the zooarchaeological record from historic Japan is patchy and the scholarly literature often uncritically reproduces state-centred ideas about agriculture and the economy. In this essay we critically review the ways in which historical and zooarchaeological studies of animal usage in premodern Japan have been impacted by broader cultural discourses. We examine animal usage from the Bronze Age to the eve of modernisation, broadly 1000 BC to AD 1850, in terms of a tension or dialectic between promotion and restriction by the state and other authorities. While the utilisation of animals for warfare and official transport was more closely controlled, other uses reflected a complex and often international political ecology that requires further analysis by zooarchaeologists.

AbstractThe progress of humanity has always, and sometimes even unconsciously, been confronted with the concept of utopia at the social, economic, political, and urban level. The strength of every utopian vision lies in the disruptive factor inherent in the idea of metamorphosis of the status quo. In the urban context, it represents the pillar on which the vision of modern society and its city are based and understood as potential and progress for mankind. Authors such as Bauman, Bloch, Calvino, More, Mumford, Tafuri, and others, have formed the theoretical framework of the dialectic on which this study is based. As we know, the history of architecture and urban planning provides multiple models of utopia that have alternated over time, such as the ones proposed in the 60 and 70 s by Archigram, Superstudio, Yona Friedman or the Japanese Metabolist movement, just to name a few. Starting from these experiences at the urban scale, and supported by contributions from disciplines such as philosophy, literature, and sociology, this research defines a new model of utopia called “Heritagutopia”. It is a new utopian paradigm, and not dystopian as it will be demonstrated, which is based on the symbiosis between urban historical heritage and abandoned industrial areas or run-down infrastructures. The first one, due to the centripetal economic dynamics, leaves its current location to find exile in the second one, through parasitic urban tactics. It is a migration, or an exile in some ways. However, in both cases this new condition allows the two contexts not to vanish and to regain possession of their lost identity, or rather to regenerate themselves, acquiring a new life. It allows to break into custom with a vision that undermines the state of affairs, subverts its factors, by proposing an alternative vision, sometimes dreamlike, but deliberately provocative as every utopia wants to be.

Anomaly: something different, abnormal, peculiar, not easily classified or classifiable; a deviation; a detour. Something out of time and out of place. No longer can we read the anomaly without considering the larger global crisis of COVID-19. Where were we if not out of time during the temporal disjunction – time out of joint, after Shakespeare – of worldwide lockdowns, which coincided with the time of proposal and submission, the time of reading and editing this issue? Where were we, as scholars in North America, if not out of place when we set out to curate a collection of essays in a journal which “originated” down under? A related question: what happens when the anomaly becomes standardised as the norm?Daniel Fineman’s “The Anomaly of Anomaly of Anomaly” inverts the paradigm of scientific expression, opening the “philosophically unassailable” to “metaphysical, political, and ethical challenge” to make a claim about the anomaly as a reflection of global misrepresentation and the prevailing powers of governance. To accomplish this, Fineman returns to the metrics system, the cooptation of the 18th century’s democratic revolutions by “representative” governments, and the so-called “Second Law of Thermodynamics”.What happens, moreover, when anomaly falls back onto social practices, and informs the way academia perceives social formations? Christopher Little raises this issue when reviewing the literature produced on “Chav” subculture, and how the anomalous Chav intersects with race, class, ethnicity, and consumer culture.The ways in which social practices inform and intersect with national patterns of belonging and exclusion have never been more apparent than during the current pandemic. In Michelle Aung Thin’s contribution, the smartphone is read as an anomalous, hybrid, and foreign object with connotations of fluidity and connection, all dangerous qualities in Myanmar, a conservative, former pariah state. Within the framework of recent scholarship on mixed race identification and affect theory, Aung Thin addresses deeply held fears around ethnic belonging, cultural adeptness, and hybridity, tracing these anxieties to the original scene of colonisation. The smartphone, in her essay, acts as a conduit – between pre-colonial Mandalay and contemporary Yangon – and a reminder of historical trauma.In an essay that unpacks the complexity of a music video by Japanese Breakfast, the solo musical project of Michelle Zauner, Runchao Liu posits identificatory ghostly performances as a locus of confrontation between past and present. In her analysis of what she defines as “ghostly matters: the hanbok and the manicured nails”, Liu locates both “the conjuring-up of the Korean diaspora and the troubling of everyday post-racial America”, where the connections between ethnic concerns and anomaly are both discomposed and concretised. Starting from the theoretical premises laid out by Gilles Deleuze, who maintained that computational processes were incompatible with anomaly, Emma Stamm sets out to prove the contrary, grounding her analysis on the work of M. Beatrice Fazi, while applying it to the specific field of live-coded music. Through a close treatment of the improvisational techniques involved in the processes of writing audio computer functions for the production of “sound in real time”, Stamm herself produces a characterisation of the aesthetic dimensions of live coding that problematises the divisions between discrete and continuous media.The anomalous body of the freak, from its early manifestation to its contemporary manufactured exaggeration of contemporary beauty standards, is the subject of Siobhan Lyons’s investigation of the freak as biological anomaly. Drawing on the parallel ascent of “Catwoman” and real-life “Barbie”, the author connects earlier manifestations of the biological freak to the mediatic resonance given to what she defines as “the twenty-first century surgical freak”.Jasmine Chen’s exploration of Pili puppetry, a popular TV series depicting martial arts-based narratives and fight sequences, reveals how this “anomalous media form ... proliferates anomalous media viewing experiences and desires in turn”. Her attention to the culture of fandom and cosplay attends to a broader structural shift: the “reversible dialectic between fan-star and flesh-object”.Shifting this volume’s inquiry from popular culture to architecture, we turn to Patrick Leslie West and Cher Coad, and their close reading of the CCTV Headquarters as “an anomaly within an anomaly in contemporary Beijing’s urban landscape”, due to the collision of classical China and the “predominantly capitalist and neo-liberalist ‘social relationship’ of China and the Western world”. Recalling Roberto Schwarz’s argument, that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53), the authors conclude that the real “site of this unsettlement” is data. We end where we begin, with our featured article by Bronwyn Fredericks, who includes architecture among the practices that have evidenced the fraught relationship between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people, using the University of Queensland and its Great Court as a landscape and a case study. Dismantling the perception of Indigeneity as anomalous, Fredericks articulates the visibility of Indigenous voices and sovereignty, ultimately establishing their presence and power through mixed-media events and collaborative writing productions.Ultimately, our aim for this issue, and the response of its contributions, revolve on this question of power relations, and, indeed, on the politics of presence: to make anomaly visible, not as outlier or aberration, but as meta-textual shift, a symptom of and a reaction to larger conditions encompassing and obscured by the technical processes of logistics and the neoliberal governance that organise our everyday life. We hope that closer consideration to such a performative shift, explored here in its multiple and various facets, might also constitute a critical response.ReferencesSchwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. New York: Verso, 1992.

I first came across etoy in Linz, Austria in 1995. They turned up at Ars Electronica with their shaved heads, in their matching orange bomber jackets. They were not invited. The next year they would not have to crash the party. In 1996 they were awarded Arts Electronica’s prestigious Golden Nica for web art, and were on their way to fame and bitterness – the just rewards for their art of self-regard. As founding member Agent.ZAI says: “All of us were extremely greedy – for excitement, for drugs, for success.” (Wishart & Boschler: 16) The etoy story starts on the fringes of the squatters’ movement in Zurich. Disenchanted with the hard left rhetorics that permeate the movement in the 1980s, a small group look for another way of existing within a commodified world, without the fantasy of an ‘outside’ from which to critique it. What Antonio Negri and friends call the ‘real subsumption’ of life under the rule of commodification is something etoy grasps intuitively. The group would draw on a number of sources: David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, the Manchester rave scene, European Amiga art, rumors of the historic avant gardes from Dada to Fluxus. They came together in 1994, at a meeting in the Swiss resort town of Weggis on Lake Lucerne. While the staging of the founding meeting looks like a rerun of the origins of the Situationist International, the wording of the invitation might suggest the founding of a pop music boy band: “fun, money and the new world?” One of the – many – stories about the origins of the name Dada has it being chosen at random from a bilingual dictionary. The name etoy, in an update on that procedure, was spat out by a computer program designed to make four letter words at random. Ironically, both Dada and etoy, so casually chosen, would inspire furious struggles over the ownership of these chancey 4-bit words. The group decided to make money by servicing the growing rave scene. Being based in Vienna and Zurich, the group needed a way to communicate, and chose to use the internet. This was a far from obvious thing to do in 1994. Connections were slow and unreliable. Sometimes it was easier to tape a hard drive full of clubland graphics to the underside of a seat on the express train from Zurich to Vienna and simply email instructions to meet the train and retrieve it. The web was a primitive instrument in 1995 when etoy built its first website. They launched it with a party called etoy.FASTLANE, an optimistic title when the web was anything but. Coco, a transsexual model and tabloid sensation, sang a Japanese song while suspended in the air. She brought media interest, and was anointed etoy’s lifestyle angel. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “it was as if the Seven Dwarfs had discovered their Snow White.” (Wishart & Boschler: 33) The launch didn’t lead to much in the way of a music deal or television exposure. The old media were not so keen to validate the etoy dream of lifting themselves into fame and fortune by their bootstraps. And so etoy decided to be stars of the new media. The slogan was suitably revised: “etoy: the pop star is the pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager is the system is etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 34) The etoy boys were more than net.artists, they were artists of the brand. The brand was achieving a new prominence in the mid-90s. (Klein: 35) This was a time when capitalism was hollowing itself out in the overdeveloped world, shedding parts of its manufacturing base. Control of the circuits of commodification would rest less on the ownership of the means of production and more on maintaining a monopoly on the flows of information. The leading edge of the ruling class was becoming self-consciously vectoral. It controlled the flow of information about what to produce – the details of design, the underlying patents. It controlled the flows of information about what is produced – the brands and logos, the slogans and images. The capitalist class is supplanted by a vectoral class, controlling the commodity circuit through the vectors of information. (Wark) The genius of etoy was to grasp the aesthetic dimension of this new stage of commodification. The etoy boys styled themselves not so much as a parody of corporate branding and management groupthink, but as logical extension of it. They adopted matching uniforms and called themselves agents. In the dada-punk-hiphop tradition, they launched themselves on the world as brand new, self-created, self-named subjects: Agents Zai, Brainhard, Gramazio, Kubli, Esposto, Udatny and Goldstein. The etoy.com website was registered in 1995 with Network Solutions for a $100 fee. The homepage for this etoy.TANKSYSTEM was designed like a flow chart. As Gramazio says: “We wanted to create an environment with surreal content, to build a parallel world and put the content of this world into tanks.” (Wishart & Boschler: 51) One tank was a cybermotel, with Coco the first guest. Another tank showed you your IP number, with a big-brother eye looking on. A supermarket tank offered sunglasses and laughing gas for sale, but which may or may not be delivered. The underground tank included hardcore photos of a sensationalist kind. A picture of the Federal Building in Oklamoma City after the bombing was captioned in deadpan post-situ style “such work needs a lot of training.” (Wishart & Boschler: 52) The etoy agents were by now thoroughly invested in the etoy brand and the constellation of images they had built around it, on their website. Their slogan became “etoy: leaving reality behind.” (Wishart & Boschler: 53) They were not the first artists fascinated by commodification. It was Warhol who said “good art is good business.”(Warhol ) But etoy reversed the equation: good business is good art. And good business, in this vectoral age, is in its most desirable form an essentially conceptual matter of creating a brand at the center of a constellation of signifiers. Late in 1995, etoy held another group meeting, at the Zurich youth center Dynamo. The problem was that while they had build a hardcore website, nobody was visiting it. Agents Gooldstein and Udatny thought that there might be a way of using the new search engines to steer visitors to the site. Zai and Brainhard helped secure a place at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts where Udatny could use the computer lab to implement this idea. Udatny’s first step was to create a program that would go out and gather email addresses from the web. These addresses would form the lists for the early examples of art-spam that etoy would perpetrate. Udatny’s second idea was a bit more interesting. He worked out how to get the etoy.TANKSYSTEM page listed in search engines. Most search engines ranked pages by the frequency of the search term in the pages it had indexed, so etoy.TANKSYSTEM would contain pages of selected keywords. Porn sites were also discovering this method of creating free publicity. The difference was that etoy chose a very carefully curated list of 350 search terms, including: art, bondage, cyberspace, Doom, Elvis, Fidel, genx, heroin, internet, jungle and Kant. Users of search engines who searched for these terms would find dummy pages listed prominently in their search results that directed them, unsuspectingly, to etoy.com. They called this project Digital Hijack. To give the project a slightly political aura, the pages the user was directed to contained an appeal for the release of convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick. This was the project that won them a Golden Nica statuette at Ars Electronica in 1996, which Gramazio allegedly lost the same night playing roulette. It would also, briefly, require that they explain themselves to the police. Digital Hijack also led to the first splits in the group, under the intense pressure of organizing it on a notionally collective basis, but with the zealous Agent Zai acting as de facto leader. When Udatny was expelled, Zai and Brainhard even repossessed his Toshiba laptop, bought with etoy funds. As Udatny recalls, “It was the lowest point in my life ever. There was nothing left; I could not rely on etoy any more. I did not even have clothes, apart from the etoy uniform.” (Wishart & Boschler: 104) Here the etoy story repeats a common theme from the history of the avant gardes as forms of collective subjectivity. After Digital Hijack, etoy went into a bit of a slump. It’s something of a problem for a group so dependent on recognition from the other of the media, that without a buzz around them, etoy would tend to collapse in on itself like a fading supernova. Zai spend the early part of 1997 working up a series of management documents, in which he appeared as the group’s managing director. Zai employed the current management theory rhetoric of employee ‘empowerment’ while centralizing control. Like any other corporate-Trotskyite, his line was that “We have to get used to reworking the company structure constantly.” (Wishart & Boschler: 132) The plan was for each member of etoy to register the etoy trademark in a different territory, linking identity to information via ownership. As Zai wrote “If another company uses our name in a grand way, I’ll probably shoot myself. And that would not be cool.” (Wishart & Boschler:: 132) As it turned out, another company was interested – the company that would become eToys.com. Zai received an email offering “a reasonable sum” for the etoy.com domain name. Zai was not amused. “Damned Americans, they think they can take our hunting grounds for a handful of glass pearls….”. (Wishart & Boschler: 133) On an invitation from Suzy Meszoly of C3, the etoy boys traveled to Budapest to work on “protected by etoy”, a work exploring internet security. They spent most of their time – and C3’s grant money – producing a glossy corporate brochure. The folder sported a blurb from Bjork: “etoy: immature priests from another world” – which was of course completely fabricated. When Artothek, the official art collection of the Austrian Chancellor, approached etoy wanting to buy work, the group had to confront the problem of how to actually turn their brand into a product. The idea was always that the brand was the product, but this doesn’t quite resolve the question of how to produce the kind of unique artifacts that the art world requires. Certainly the old Conceptual Art strategy of selling ‘documentation’ would not do. The solution was as brilliant as it was simple – to sell etoy shares. The ‘works’ would be ‘share certificates’ – unique objects, whose only value, on the face of it, would be that they referred back to the value of the brand. The inspiration, according to Wishart & Boschsler, was David Bowie, ‘the man who sold the world’, who had announced the first rock and roll bond on the London financial markets, backed by future earnings of his back catalogue and publishing rights. Gramazio would end up presenting Chancellor Viktor Klima with the first ‘shares’ at a press conference. “It was a great start for the project”, he said, “A real hack.” (Wishart & Boschler: 142) For this vectoral age, etoy would create the perfect vectoral art. Zai and Brainhard took off next for Pasadena, where they got the idea of reverse-engineering the online etoy.TANKSYSTEM by building an actual tank in an orange shipping container, which would become etoy.TANK 17. This premiered at the San Francisco gallery Blasthaus in June 1998. Instant stars in the small world of San Francisco art, the group began once again to disintegrate. Brainhard and Esposito resigned. Back in Europe in late 1998, Zai was preparing to graduate from the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. His final project would recapitulate the life and death of etoy. It would exist from here on only as an online archive, a digital mausoleum. As Kubli says “there was no possibility to earn our living with etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 192) Zai emailed eToys.com and asked them if them if they would like to place a banner ad on etoy.com, to redirect any errant web traffic. Lawyers for eToys.com offered etoy $30,000 for the etoy.com domain name, which the remaining members of etoy – Zai, Gramazio, Kubli – refused. The offer went up to $100,000, which they also refused. Through their lawyer Peter Wild they demanded $750,000. In September 1999, while etoy were making a business presentation as their contribution to Ars Electronica, eToys.com lodged a complaint against etoy in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The company hired Bruce Wessel, of the heavyweight LA law firm Irell & Manella, who specialized in trademark, copyright and other intellectual property litigation. The complaint Wessel drafted alleged that etoy had infringed and diluted the eToys trademark, were practicing unfair competition and had committed “intentional interference with prospective economic damage.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) Wessel demanded an injunction that would oblige etoy to cease using its trademark and take down its etoy.com website. The complaint also sought to prevent etoy from selling shares, and demanded punitive damages. Displaying the aggressive lawyering for which he was so handsomely paid, Wessel invoked the California Unfair Competition Act, which was meant to protect citizens from fraudulent business scams. Meant as a piece of consumer protection legislation, its sweeping scope made it available for inventive suits such as Wessel’s against etoy. Wessel was able to use pretty much everything from the archive etoy built against it. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “The court papers were like a delicately curated catalogue of its practices.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) And indeed, legal documents in copyright and trademark cases may be the most perfect literature of the vectoral age. The Unfair Competition claim was probably aimed at getting the suit heard in a Californian rather than a Federal court in which intellectual property issues were less frequently litigated. The central aim of the eToys suit was the trademark infringement, but on that head their claims were not all that strong. According to the 1946 Lanham Act, similar trademarks do not infringe upon each other if there they are for different kinds of business or in different geographical areas. The Act also says that the right to own a trademark depends on its use. So while etoy had not registered their trademark and eToys had, etoy were actually up and running before eToys, and could base their trademark claim on this fact. The eToys case rested on a somewhat selective reading of the facts. Wessel claimed that etoy was not using its trademark in the US when eToys was registered in 1997. Wessel did not dispute the fact that etoy existed in Europe prior to that time. He asserted that owning the etoy.com domain name was not sufficient to establish a right to the trademark. If the intention of the suit was to bully etoy into giving in, it had quite the opposite effect. It pissed them off. “They felt again like the teenage punks they had once been”, as Wishart & Bochsler put it. Their art imploded in on itself for lack of attention, but called upon by another, it flourished. Wessel and eToys.com unintentionally triggered a dialectic that worked in quite the opposite way to what they intended. The more pressure they put on etoy, the more valued – and valuable – they felt etoy to be. Conceptual business, like conceptual art, is about nothing but the management of signs within the constraints of given institutional forms of market. That this conflict was about nothing made it a conflict about everything. It was a perfectly vectoral struggle. Zai and Gramazio flew to the US to fire up enthusiasm for their cause. They asked Wolfgang Staehle of The Thing to register the domain toywar.com, as a space for anti-eToys activities at some remove from etoy.com, and as a safe haven should eToys prevail with their injunction in having etoy.com taken down. The etoy defense was handled by Marcia Ballard in New York and Robert Freimuth in Los Angeles. In their defense, they argued that etoy had existed since 1994, had registered its globally accessible domain in 1995, and won an international art prize in 1996. To counter a claim by eToys that they had a prior trademark claim because they had bought a trademark from another company that went back to 1990, Ballard and Freimuth argued that this particular trademark only applied to the importation of toys from the previous owner’s New York base and thus had no relevance. They capped their argument by charging that eToys had not shown that its customers were really confused by the existence of etoy. With Christmas looming, eToys wanted a quick settlement, so they offered Zurich-based etoy lawyer Peter Wild $160,000 in shares and cash for the etoy domain. Kubli was prepared to negotiate, but Zai and Gramazio wanted to gamble – and raise the stakes. As Zai recalls: “We did not want to be just the victims; that would have been cheap. We wanted to be giants too.” (Wishart & Boschler: 207) They refused the offer. The case was heard in November 1999 before Judge Rafeedie in the Federal Court. Freimuth, for etoy, argued that federal Court was the right place for what was essentially a trademark matter. Robert Kleiger, for eToys, countered that it should stay where it was because of the claims under the California Unfair Competition act. Judge Rafeedie took little time in agreeing with the eToys lawyer. Wessel’s strategy paid off and eToys won the first skirmish. The first round of a quite different kind of conflict opened when etoy sent out their first ‘toywar’ mass mailing, drawing the attention of the net.art, activism and theory crowd to these events. This drew a report from Felix Stalder in Telepolis: “Fences are going up everywhere, molding what once seemed infinite space into an overcrowded and tightly controlled strip mall.” (Stalder ) The positive feedback from the net only emboldened etoy. For the Los Angeles court, lawyers for etoy filed papers arguing that the sale of ‘shares’ in etoy was not really a stock offering. “The etoy.com website is not about commerce per se, it is about artist and social protest”, they argued. (Wishart & Boschler: 209) They were obliged, in other words, to assert a difference that the art itself had intended to blur in order to escape eToy’s claims under the Unfair Competition Act. Moreover, etoy argued that there was no evidence of a victim. Nobody was claiming to have been fooled by etoy into buying something under false pretences. Ironically enough, art would turn out in hindsight to be a more straightforward transaction here, involving less simulation or dissimulation, than investing in a dot.com. Perhaps we have reached the age when art makes more, not less, claim than business to the rhetorical figure of ‘reality’. Having defended what appeared to be the vulnerable point under the Unfair Competition law, etoy went on the attack. It was the failure of eToys to do a proper search for other trademarks that created the problem in the first place. Meanwhile, in Federal Court, lawyers for etoy launched a counter-suit that reversed the claims against them made by eToys on the trademark question. While the suits and counter suits flew, eToys.com upped their offer to settle to a package of cash and shares worth $400,000. This rather puzzled the etoy lawyers. Those choosing to sue don’t usually try at the same time to settle. Lawyer Peter Wild advised his clients to take the money, but the parallel tactics of eToys.com only encouraged them to dig in their heels. “We felt that this was a tremendous final project for etoy”, says Gramazio. As Zai says, “eToys was our ideal enemy – we were its worst enemy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 210) Zai reported the offer to the net in another mass mail. Most people advised them to take the money, including Doug Rushkoff and Heath Bunting. Paul Garrin counseled fighting on. The etoy agents offered to settle for $750,000. The case came to court in late November 1999 before Judge Shook. The Judge accepted the plausibility of the eToys version of the facts on the trademark issue, which included the purchase of a registered trademark from another company that went back to 1990. He issued an injunction on their behalf, and added in his statement that he was worried about “the great danger of children being exposed to profane and hardcore pornographic issues on the computer.” (Wishart & Boschler: 222) The injunction was all eToys needed to get Network Solutions to shut down the etoy.com domain. Zai sent out a press release in early December, which percolated through Slashdot, rhizome, nettime (Staehle) and many other networks, and catalyzed the net community into action. A debate of sorts started on investor websites such as fool.com. The eToys stock price started to slide, and etoy ‘warriors’ felt free to take the credit for it. The story made the New York Times on 9th December, Washington Post on the 10th, Wired News on the 11th. Network Solutions finally removed the etoy.com domain on the 10th December. Zai responded with a press release: “this is robbery of digital territory, American imperialism, corporate destruction and bulldozing in the way of the 19th century.” (Wishart & Boschler: 237) RTMark set up a campaign fund for toywar, managed by Survival Research Laboratories’ Mark Pauline. The RTMark press release promised a “new internet ‘game’ designed to destroy eToys.com.” (Wishart & Boschler: 239) The RTMark press release grabbed the attention of the Associated Press newswire. The eToys.com share price actually rose on December 13th. Goldman Sachs’ e-commerce analyst Anthony Noto argued that the previous declines in the Etoys share price made it a good buy. Goldman Sachs was the lead underwriter of the eToys IPO. Noto’s writings may have been nothing more than the usual ‘IPOetry’ of the time, but the crash of the internet bubble was some months away yet. The RTMark campaign was called ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. It used the Floodnet technique that Ricardo Dominguez used in support of the Zapatistas. As Dominguez said, “this hysterical power-play perfectly demonstrates the intensions of the new net elite; to turn the World Wide Web into their own private home-shopping network.” (Wishart & Boschler: 242) The Floodnet attack may have slowed the eToys.com server down a bit, but it was robust and didn’t crash. Ironically, it ran on open source software. Dominguez claims that the ‘Twelve Days’ campaign, which relied on individuals manually launching Floodnet from their own computers, was not designed to destroy the eToys site, but to make a protest felt. “We had a single-bullet script that could have taken down eToys – a tactical nuke, if you will. But we felt this script did not represent the presence of a global group of people gathered to bear witness to a wrong.” (Wishart & Boschler: 245) While the eToys engineers did what they could to keep the site going, eToys also approached universities and businesses whose systems were being used to host Floodnet attacks. The Thing, which hosted Dominguez’s eToys Floodnet site was taken offline by The Thing’s ISP, Verio. After taking down the Floodnet scripts, The Thing was back up, restoring service to the 200 odd websites that The Thing hosted besides the offending Floodnet site. About 200 people gathered on December 20th at a demonstration against eToys outside the Museum of Modern Art. Among the crowd were Santas bearing signs that said ‘Coal for eToys’. The rally, inside the Museum, was led by the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping: “We are drowning in a sea of identical details”, he said. (Wishart & Boschler: 249-250) Meanwhile etoy worked on the Toywar Platform, an online agitpop theater spectacle, in which participants could act as soldiers in the toywar. This would take some time to complete – ironically the dispute threatened to end before this last etoy artwork was ready, giving etoy further incentives to keep the dispute alive. The etoy agents had a new lawyer, Chris Truax, who was attracted to the case by the publicity it was generating. Through Truax, etoy offered to sell the etoy domain and trademark for $3.7 million. This may sound like an insane sum, but to put it in perspective, the business.com site changed hands for $7.5 million around this time. On December 29th, Wessel signaled that eToys was prepared to compromise. The problem was, the Toywar Platform was not quite ready, so etoy did what it could to drag out the negotiations. The site went live just before the scheduled court hearings, January 10th 2000. “TOYWAR.com is a place where all servers and all involved people melt and build a living system. In our eyes it is the best way to express and document what’s going on at the moment: people start to about new ways to fight for their ideas, their lifestyle, contemporary culture and power relations.” (Wishart & Boschler: 263) Meanwhile, in a California courtroom, Truax demanded that Network Solutions restore the etoy domain, that eToys pay the etoy legal expenses, and that the case be dropped without prejudice. No settlement was reached. Negotiations dragged on for another two weeks, with the etoy agents’ attention somewhat divided between two horizons – art and law. The dispute was settled on 25th January. Both parties dismissed their complaints without prejudice. The eToys company would pay the etoy artists $40,000 for legal costs, and contact Network Solutions to reinstate the etoy domain. “It was a pleasure doing business with one of the biggest e-commerce giants in the world” ran the etoy press release. (Wishart & Boschler: 265) That would make a charming end to the story. But what goes around comes around. Brainhard, still pissed off with Zai after leaving the group in San Francisco, filed for the etoy trademark in Austria. After that the internal etoy wranglings just gets boring. But it was fun while it lasted. What etoy grasped intuitively was the nexus between the internet as a cultural space and the transformation of the commodity economy in a yet-more abstract direction – its becoming-vectoral. They zeroed in on the heart of the new era of conceptual business – the brand. As Wittgenstein says of language, what gives words meaning is other words, so too for brands. What gives brands meaning is other brands. There is a syntax for brands as there is for words. What etoy discovered is how to insert a new brand into that syntax. The place of eToys as a brand depended on their business competition with other brands – with Toys ‘R’ Us, for example. For etoy, the syntax they discovered for relating their brand to another one was a legal opposition. What made etoy interesting was their lack of moral posturing. Their abandonment of leftist rhetorics opened them up to exploring the territory where media and business meet, but it also made them vulnerable to being consumed by the very dialectic that created the possibility of staging etoy in the first place. By abandoning obsolete political strategies, they discovered a media tactic, which collapsed for want of a new strategy, for the new vectoral terrain on which we find ourselves. Works Cited Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. Continuum, London, 2003. Warhol, Andy. From A to B and Back Again. Picador, New York, 1984. Stalder, Felix. ‘Fences in Cyberspace: Recent events in the battle over domain names’. 19 Jun 2003. <http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.php>. Wark, McKenzie. ‘A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]’ 19 Jun 2003. http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. Harper Collins, London, 2000. Wishart, Adam & Regula Bochsler. Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com & Other Battles to Control Cyberspace Ecco Books, 2003. Staehle, Wolfgang. ‘<nettime> etoy.com shut down by US court.’ 19 Jun 2003. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.html Links http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.htm http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.html http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Wark, McKenzie. "Toywars" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>. APA Style Wark, M. (2003, Jun 19). Toywars. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>