On Social Contact: the Harassment Discourse in Contemporary Japan

鉴于2019冠状病毒病的破坏性影响在2022财政年度，特别是在头几个月仍然十分明显，该项目遵循了去年部署的类似研究战略。首先，我继续收集和分析在我自己的大学背景下关于有害接触的制度性讨论的“元交际”实例。其次，我探索了大众话语，学术文献，以及关于骚扰，微侵犯，仇恨言论和其他形式的有害接触等问题的法律和制度讨论。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、技术、历史和语言条件。另一个已经浮出水面的关键主题——它可能在这个项目中扮演更核心的角色——是有害接触的元沟通如何与治理形式相关的问题，特别是，可以被称为phatic治理的自由民主想象，自由治理将社会接触的时刻、参与者和物质条件作为其主要监管对象的方式。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它。

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.