On Social Contact: the Harassment Discourse in Contemporary Japan

由于COVID-19的破坏性影响在2022财年仍然广泛可见，特别是在最初的几个月，该项目遵循了去年部署的类似研究策略。首先，我继续收集和分析我所在大学中关于有害接触的机构性谈话的“元认知”实例。第二，我探讨了关于骚扰、微攻击、仇恨言论和其他形式的有害接触等问题的流行话语、学术文献以及法律的和制度性讨论。这些研究揭示了该项目需要进一步参与的几个关键主题：例如，“言论自由”问题及其法律的、技术、历史和语言条件。另一个已经浮出水面的关键主题--这可能在项目中扮演更核心的角色--是有害接触的元接触如何与治理形式相关的问题，特别是，可以被称为自由民主的应酬治理想象，自由治理将社会接触的时刻、参与者和物质条件作为其突出的监管对象。这是一个尚不成熟的想法，但我希望通过今年的研究活动进一步阐述这一点。

With the debilitating effects of the COVID-19 still widely visible during the fiscal year 2022, especially during its first few months, the project has followed similar research strategies deployed in the last year. First, I have continued to work on the collection and analysis of "metacommunicative" instances of institutional talk about harmful contact in the context of my own university. Second, I have explored popular discourses, academic literature, and legal and institutional talk about issues such as harassment, microaggression, hate speech, and other forms of harmful contact. These lines of research have revealed several key themes with which the project needs further engagement: for example, the issue of "free speech" and its legal, technical, historical, and linguistic conditions. Another key theme that has surfaced -- which could probably assume a more central role in the project -- is the question of how metacommunication of harmful contact relates to forms of governmentality, in particular, what might be called the liberal-democratic imaginary of phatic governance, the way in which liberal governance takes moments, participants, and material conditions of social contact as its salient object of regulation. This is a still inchoate idea, but I hope to further elaborate on it through this year’s research activities.