| Popis: |
This chapter, the only one in Part I, first shows how the discourse of both bureaucrats and intellectuals began to recognize “the people” (minshū) as a “social problem” in connection with the rise of capitalism, riots, social movements, and the ideas of “democracy” and “socialism” in the 1910s. It then describes how subsequent discourses promoted the idea of educating “the people” through cinema and other media into a subject that could serve the community, as envisioned in the 1920s by the term “society” (shakai). Here, the idea of “the people” marked the emergence of the social subject in two senses: first, they were “discovered” as an agent exerting an influence on society and afterward were discursively constructed as a subject that was expected to serve “society” or the state: “discussions of popular entertainment” (minshū goraku ron) and “discussions of social education” (shakai kyōiku ron) flourished during this period, promoting a normative concept of the social subject. These discourses saw cinema as a kind of popular entertainment located in the exhibition district rather than as a mechanical medium of reproduction and modeled the view of cinema audiences on idealized images of self-disciplinary male factory workers whose lifestyle consisted of three activities—work, leisure, and sleep—while also feeling that female consumers threatened this norm of spectatorship. |
