フォコニエ&ターナーせんせい,「イメクラ」を考える


先生なにやってんすか.

The latest inventions and twists in cultural sexual practices are reported routinely in newspapers as if they were mere curiosities. Under the title "A Plain School uniform as the Latest Aphrodisiac," a New York Times article described "several hundred" bordellos (called "image clubs") in Tokyo in which the rooms are made to look like schoolrooms, complete with blackboards, and the prostitutes, chosen for their youthful looks, dress in high-school uniforms and try to act like apprehensive teenagers, while the customer takes the role of a teacher. Because sexual issues and sexual fantasy are very familiar, even if not talked about, we may find such examples mundane, but the imaginative construction of emergent meaning in this instance is astounding. The inputs to the blend are the scenario with an imaginary high-school student and the real situation involving both the man in the "image club" and the prostitute (who, in the specific case reported in the Times, is actually twenty-six years old). But the blend has a teacher and a high-school student.

Since neither the customer nor the prostitute is deluded, why should this make-believe have any power or attraction at all? The answer is that while the customer can of course have sex with a prostitute, he can't have sex with a high-school student, except in the blended, which he can inhabit mentally without losing his knowledge of the actual situation. These are mental-space phenomena, about which we have more to say later. Mental spaces can exist routinely alongside incompatible mental spaces. When we look in the refrigerator and see that there is no milk to be had, we must simultaneously have the mental space with the milk in the refrigerator. The customer in the image club similarly has at the same time the mental space with the experienced and trained prostitute, the mental space with the imaginary and unattainable high-school student, and the blended mental space with the woman in the club as the attainable innocent high-school student. The high-school student is projected to the blend from the imaginary input, while the actual sexual act that takes place is imported from the material reality linked to the mental space with the prostitute. The blend has the essential new structure: sex with the high-school student.

Far from just mixing the features in free-for-all fashion from two situations -- the classroom and the bordello -- blending demands systematic matches between the inputs and selective projection to the blend according to a number to constraints that we will discuss in depth in this book. The teacher's privileges and responsibilities in the classroom do not, for the most part, project to the blend: The customer is not supposed to demand that the prostitute learn how to factor polynomials. Many other projections are equally inappropriate. Just as in the Iron Lady example we had to match U.S. and British political domains, here we must match classroom and house of ill-repute. The matching is not obvious and preconstructed. It is driven by the intended blend, not by any obvious analogy between the school and the whorehouse. Also, as in both the Iron Lady and Skiing Waiter examples, there will be only partial projection from the inputs, but the resulting blend must have integrated action and meaning, on the one hand, and enough disintegration that the participants can connect it to both of the inputs, on the other. In the Iron Lady example, we do not want to get lost in an escapist fantasy about an imaginary life for Margaret Thatcher, forgetting that the point is to make projections back to the real U.S. political situation. In the Skiing Waiter example, we do not want the skier to start believing that he has the job of delivering food to other people on the slopes. And in the Image Club case, the customer is not supposed to turn himself to the police for hiving assaulted a high-school student, but he is supposed to pay her, in keeping with the prostitution input.


(Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, Basic Books, 2002, pp.28-29)