2008. Eletrosonic

Asiascape.netProject director Christopher Goto-Jones (Leiden Univer-

sity, Netherlands) International advisory board Wendy

Hui Kyong Chun (Brown University, USA) Mark Harrison

(University of Tasmania, Australia) Sharon Kinsella (Man-

chester University, UK) Tom Lamarre (McGill University,

Canada) Stefan Landsberger (Amsterdam University,

Netherlands) Angus Lockyer (SOAS, UK) Susan Napier

(Tufts University, USA) Steffi Richter (Leipzig University,

Germany) Ivo Smits (Leiden University, Netherlands)

Takayuki Tatsumi (Keio University, Japan) Mark Williams

(Leeds University, UK)

This volume is produced by Asiascape.net, a project

hosted by the Modern East Asia Research Centre.

Asiascape.net is an attempt to build a new international

research coalition in the rapidly emerging fields of

cyberculture (New Media, Convergence Culture, Video

Games and other related media, such as fan-culture)

and animanga (Anime and Manga), especially as they

relate to (or originate from) East Asia.

Asiascape.net is based at Leiden University and is

funded through the generosity of the Netherlands

Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Toshiba

International Foundation (TIFO) and the Modern East

Asia Research Centre (MEARC). Its network includes

partners in various countries across four continents.

MEARC, based at Leiden University, was founded in

2006. MEARC’s purpose is to support, showcase and

stimulate genuinely disciplinary and comparative

research in the fields of history, philosophy, politics and

international relations of modern East Asia - the period

since the beginning of the 19th century until today.

ISSN Asiascape Occasional Paper Series: 1875-2241

The Asiascape Collection v.1 Essays in the Exploration of CyberAsia

The A

siascape C

ollectio

n v.1

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Thomas Lamarre What is a Techno-Region?

Christopher Goto-Jones

Asiascape(s): Introduction

In the popular imagination of many in the so-called West, Asia enjoys a romantic and intimate rela-tionship with high technology. Visionary representations of the future, such as those elaborated in films like Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) or novels like Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984), often lend the global future an Asian flavour, either as a sign of the world’s possible cosmopolitan destiny or more simply as an indication of the way that digital technology and East Asia appear to be closely interwoven. This associative weave is particularly strong in the cyberpunk world of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, networked communications, and explorations of cyberspace as the new final frontier. The idea of ‘CyberAsia,’ which was the title of a special, 50th anniversary edition of the IIAS Newsletter in 2009, weds Asia to the politics of futurities in complicated and diverse ways. And the concept of Asiascape(s), which is the title of a research project hosted at MEARC in Leiden University, elaborates the ways that these problematics can be mapped onto the everyday (and not-so everyday) experience of ‘Asia’ today.These expansive neologisms contain: allegations of Asia’s technological superiority; imaginations of Asia’s utopian relationship with digital technology; and finally analyses of the concrete ways in which high technologies have transformed social and cultural practices in the region (and permitted the region to ripple around the world). Hence, the terms Asiascape and CyberAsia are confounded ones, generating myriad possible meanings and implications, both empirically and theoretically. This little book contains two collections of essays: the first is drawn from the CyberAsia IIAS News-letter (Spring 2009), which was the result of collaboration between IIAS and the Asiascape project of MEARC; the second is drawn from the first group of ‘Asiascape Ops’ (an internationally peer-reviewed, occasional paper series published digitally by Asiascape.net, supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, NWO). The essays cover a wide range of topics, giving a sense of the contours of this confounded yet expansive field. In his contribution to the CyberAsia IIAS Newsletter, Tom Lamarre offered some thoughts on the various ways in which CyberAsia might function in discourses of today’s politics of knowledge.The political relationship between technologized visions of Asia and a more classical sense of Orien-talist mystique is noted with increasing frequency in the literature of Asian Studies. Scholars such as Ueno Toshio and (more recently) Wendy Hui Kyong Chun have argued that this re-representation of Asia as a technological icon amounts to a kind of ‘techno-Orientalism.’ Indeed, in some ways, it seems that the domain of cyberspace itself might function as a space of Orientalism within the so-called West: it is a virtual (and largely textual) man-made geography created as an often fantastical ‘other’ place, or heterotopia. In this sense, the association of Asia with cyberspace begins to look like another strategy of epistemic distancing and domination. It is along these lines that my own provo-cations in this volume seek to argue that Asian Studies might share a frontier with the enterprise of science fiction. At stake here is the status of ‘Western’ knowledge of (cyber)Asia(scapes).Of course, even if we were willing to accept that a kind of Orientalism is at work within the concept of Asiascapes, it is not the case that the connection between Asia and digital technology has been invented only by observers in Europe or the USA. In this volume, for instance, Fabian Schäfer draws on the well-known work of Japanese critic Azuma Hiroki to explore the ways in which internet-use

Contents

3 Asiascape(s): Introduction Christopher Goto-Jones

CyberAsia7 What is a Techno-Region? Thomas Lamarre

10 Animalisation, Subjectivity, and the Internet Fabian Schäfer

15 From Science Fictional Japan to Japanese Science Fiction Christopher Goto-Jones

22 Alien Autopsy: the Science Fictional Frontier of Asian Studies Christopher Goto-Jones

29 Heidi in Japan: What do Anime’s Dreams of Europe mean for Non-Europeans? Cobus van Staden

41 Bloggers, Hackers and the King Kong Syndrome Jeroen de Kloet

44 In the Year 2020: Muslim Futurities in Southeast Asia Bart Barendregt

51 Chinascape: Moving Beyond the People’s Republic Jens Damm

Asiascape Occasional Paper Series58 Anime, Thought Experiments, and the Limits of the Human Christopher Goto-Jones

73 Electrosonic Autonomy, Building up Virtual Acoustic Space from Avant-garde Techné to Karaoke Singer Young Sook Choi

87 Nostalgia and Futurism in Contemporary Japanese Sci-Fi Animation Yoko Ono

103 Virtual Death of the Human Being: Time and the (Ir)Reversibility of Choice in Digital Media Fabian Schäfer

115 Beyond Utopia: New Politics, the Politics of Knowledge, and the Science Fictional Field of Japan Christopher Goto-Jones

133 List of Illustrations

135 About the Authors / Colophon

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within the increasingly inclusive otaku (geek) subculture functions to transform modern subjectivity. Schäfer’s essay appears here in two forms, in a shortened version (as it appeared in the IIAS Newsletter) and in a more extended treatment (as it appeared as an Asiascape Op).Elsewhere, Azuma himself has argued that this otaku subculture is effectively the vanguard of a new, postmodern society that has abandoned its modernist attachments to coherence and narrative logic in favour of a kind of ‘database’ model of engagement with the world. Cyberspace is a key technology in this process of overcoming modernity, but Azuma also ties it to other allied media forms, such as anime and manga. For Azuma, the landmark moment in the ‘animalization’ of postmodern Japan was the broadcast of Anno Hideaki’s epic anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion (Gainax, 1995-6). Other commentators have pointed to classic anime such as Oshii Mamoru’s breakthrough, Ghost in the Shell (Production IG, 1995) as signalling a kind of self-Orientalism in the anime industry, fuelling a global perception of an intimate connection between Japan and the technological future. My own essay on anime and thought experiments plays with some of these products and themes to explore the ways in which they might represent a space for philosophical reflection.In his contribution to this volume, however, Cobus van Staden takes a different approach to the relationship between Japan and anime, focussing instead on the ways in which anime representa-tions of Europe have helped the medium (and hence Japan) to reach global audiences. Van Staden suggests that a deep-seated Europhilia in Japan serves to exoticize anime for the Japanese themselves whilst providing one of the conditions for the possibility of Japan’s cultural globalization at the same time. Meanwhile, Ono argues that Japanese sci-fi anime provides a space for nostalgic reflection in Japan that serves to re-inscribe a sense of identity in modern Japan.Like Van Staden, Jeroen de Kloet is interested in the ways in which the media associated with Cyber-Asia are actually used by the people themselves (in the present). Focusing on the practice of hackers and bloggers, De Kloet discusses the ways in which these cyberactivities have (or have failed to) transform the public sphere in China. Drawing on a wealth of empirical evidence about actual internet usage in China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong), Jens Damm provides an insight into the extent to which this vital player in the future of Asia is saturated by cyberspace, mapping some of the ways in which the virtual realm of the PRC spreads a net around the world.As the case of China shows clearly, the whole project of CyberAsia is overshadowed by the political menace of the unknown but projected future; the emphasis on technology constantly raises ques-tions about power and wealth disparities within societies, highlighting the unevenness of access to cyberspace and other digital technologies as well as the possible development of these disparities in the future. However, as Bart Barendregt shows in his essay, the issue of technological development also functions as a problematic between nations or regions. With particular attention to the newly developing Muslim majority nations in Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Indonesia, Barendregt explores the creative collision of religion with technological advancement, elaborating the ways in which these particular instantiations of CyberAsia provide models of aspiration for the future of the Islamic world that differ from the predominant visions of the so-called West as well as those of some radical Islamic groups. In the words of Richard Barbrook, Barendregt considers some of the ways in which the present serves as a ‘beta version of a science fiction dream,’ and he demonstrates the importance of understanding the dimensions and diversity of these dreams in Asia and elsewhere.Finally, this little collection ends with the agenda of Asiascape.net’s new research project, ‘Beyond Utopia,’ which is a five-year VICI project funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific

Research (NWO). I hope that this new project will lead to many new publications, and at least a second volume of the Asiascape Collection.

Acknowledgements

There are many people to thank for their support in establishing Asiascape.net. First and foremost I am grateful to the Modern East Asia Research Centre (MEARC) at Leiden University, for providing a fantastic environment in which to work. In particular, I should thank Esther Truijen for making so many impossible things possible, including for all her creative endeavours on this little book. Thanks to the NWO, who provided initial funding for Asiascape.net via an Internationalization in the Humanities grant, as well as to TIFO and IIAS for additional funds and support. Special thanks are due to Anna Yeadell, the editor of the IIAS Newsletter, who worked extremely hard (and with great patience) to compensate for my own organizational inadequacies.

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Thomas Lamarre

What is a Techno-Region?

Asia can be, and has been, imagined as a region in terms of geography, geopolitical configura-tions, language, culture, society, economy, or some combination of these. In disciplinary terms, there are many different ‘Asias’ that do not necessarily coincide. Is the notion of ‘cyberAsia’ intended to construct a different imaginary of Asia, or offer a critique or a new critical angle on received ways of thinking about things Asian? Or, is the neologism cyberAsia supposed to reflect some new condition that has arisen in Asia?

Such questions are relevant because the term Asia, like the term Orient, frequently conjures forth a sense of fantasmatic unity, contrasted with the West while shoring up Western identity. Critiques of Orientalism have exposed and challenged the self-other dialectics implicit in the Western construct of the ‘Orient,’ and consequently scholars have largely dropped the term, favouring instead the term ‘Asia.’ Yet this substitution does not necessarily change the self-other dialectics of Orientalism. In the early 1990s, David Morley and Kevin Robins used the term ‘techno-orientalism’ to illustrate how images of the technologisation and technological superiority of Japan served as a focal point for American panic over the economic success of Japan and the potential threat to American hegemony. In keeping Edward Said’s reminder that Orientalism is not simply a matter of negative stereotypes but also of positive stereotypes that posit a putative unity in the interest of stabilising an object of knowledge, Ueno Toshiya used techno-orientalism to describe the reception of Japanese anime and pop culture outside Japan, especially in the United States. Such critiques force a blunt question: how does cyberAsia differ from techno-Orientalism? Does the term cyber, with its aura of technological novelty and futurity, posit the imaginary unity of Asia in order to impart the illusion of neutrality and objectivity to collecting and accumulating of knowledge of cultures, technologies, commodities and peoples?

‘Other Asias’Gayatri Spivak’s recent evocation of ‘other Asias’ might provide a good point of departure for think-ing about the implications of the term cyberAsia. While she explicitly challenges the imposition of a fantasmatic unity called Asia abundantly evident in Orientalism and pan-Asianism, she speaks of a pluralised Asia in which difference would no longer be articulated between, say, the West and Asia but within Asia itself. Rather than surrender the idea of Asia, she seeks a pragmatic localised decon-struction of this disclinary construct that, like Said’s Orient, is after all not an airy fantasy easily blown away. Spivak’s account invites us to ask how the concept cyberAsia might deal with internal difference, with other Asias. Here it is not simply a matter of speaking in the plural, of cyberAsias. Pluralising the term only makes a difference if that multiplicity presents a critical and analytical challenge to some set of received orientations or dispositions, be they perpetuated in the academy, the media, the cultural industry, or some other discourse, institution or habitus.

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This is especially important when the term cyber becomes a prefix for Asia. If cyber is to sustain its theoretical and critical force, it must be posed as a question of technology, not a fact of technologisa-tion or (post)modernisation, or as a fact of novelty. Just as Spivak’s pluralisation of Asia demands an internal differentiation of received ideas about Asia, so the idea of cyberAsia must open and sustain specific questions about technology and techno-cultures associated with the term cyber, and at the same time, address how technologies serve to integrate or differentiate the fantasmatic unity of Asia, whether it is posited and sedimented linguistically, culturally, socially, economically or geopolitically. In other words, the cyberAsia project must give precedence to the question begged by its neologism: ‘what is a techno-region?’ A number of questions follow from this one. If we take cyber as an index for a particular mode of technological or techno-cultural integration/differentiation, we might, for instance, think about how this mode of techno-integration/differentiation interacts with the deter-ritorialising and reterritorialising forces of capitalism (perhaps in the context of the emergence of newly integrated economic zones in East Asia). Questions also arise about how this techno-integra-tion/differentiation affects the articulations of national culture and social identity. In light of theories that see a graphic integration/differentiation in East Asia based on legacies of writing and drawing associated with Chinese characters, the question of the relation between techno-integration/differentiation and histories of writing is equally urgent. To pose the question of cyberAsia in this manner means giving up on the idea that novelty - specifically, the novelty of attaching the prefix cyber to Asia - is a guarantee of difference or otherness and thus of critical engagement. Rather it is imperative to acknowledge that ‘cyberising’ Asia does not neces-sarily amount to pluralising Asia and articulating other Asias. This also means giving up on the fascination with new objects and the collusion with the logic of markets that currently marks the study of popular culture and especially Japanese popular culture, for instance. Rather than fuss over the next big thing, the goal would be to pose questions about the relation between technologies, knowledge production, cultural production, circulation, distribution and regionalisation, in the in-terest of questioning rather than grounding the technological condition, and in the interest of plu-ralising rather than unifying Asia.

Given that the cyberAsia project foregrounds cultural production associated with Japan (manga, anime, video games), questions arise about the relation between Japan and Asia in particular. Two received sets of dispositions become particularly important in that context. First, there is the geopo-litical imaginary in which East Asia, and specifically Northeast Asia (China, Japan, Korea), comes to stand in for Asia in general. To some extent, this might be thought to be postwar North America’s Orient or Asia, in contrast to Western Europe’s Orient (the Middle East), which present different condensations or formations of Western modernity. How can looking at Asia from the angle of cyber present a challenge to this imaginary and address the internal difference of Asia, of the West and of modernity? Second, in the context of Japan, there is the history of pan-Asianist thought that posits the fantasmatic unity of Asia only to hierarchise relations between Japan and its colonies. This is a bad way of conceptualising the internal differences of Asia, which serves as another reminder that plurality is not merely a matter of adding an ‘s’ onto words. Nor is internal difference a matter of juxtaposing nations or cultures. If the cyberAsia project wishes to challenge rather than reinforce the fantasmatic unity of Asia, then it must think about how the term cyber might spur or hinder our imagination of other Asias. It must directly address how thinking ‘cyber’ can have an impact on the imagination and articulation of difference within ‘Asia.’ In other words, critical attention should fall on the implications of the rather elusive term cyber.

Technologies of controlThe prefix cyber- has become common, even overly used, in referring to almost anything related to computing or electronics, and as the Wikipedia entry notes, there is a great deal of overlap with the prefix e-. Nonetheless, the two have very different connotations. Partly due to the literal meaning of cyber- as control (as in cybernetics) and partly due to its association with highly technologised dystopian worlds (as with cyberpunk and cyborgs), cyber- implies a distinctive technological condi-tion, linked to new information and communication technologies. And the prevalence of dystopian valences denotes some manner of critical response to this technological condition, a ‘cyberised’ or cybernetic world that suggests extensive technologies of control in which telecommunications are associated with telecommand, in which cyber-entities grapple with or struggle against their cy-ber-condition. Yet, as Félix Guattari points out, this manner of thinking technology can be very structural and mechanistic - and thus highly deterministic. There is a post-Romantic fascination with technological determinism and its discontents, which results in a struggle to break the grip of technologies of control.Such a manner of thinking technology strives to locate moments of indeterminacy within the mechanism, moments and sites where life emerges (so-called artificial life) from the inorganic, or where thought emerges from brute matter or mechanism (so-called artificial intelligence). In effect, the term cyber frequently entails a search for internal difference, a quest for indeterminacy under conditions in which new technologies imply structural determinism. Of course, there is always the danger that this way of thinking information and communications technologies, because of its pre-suppositions of determinism, serves to mystify rather than enlighten. This is precisely why caution is needed. Because the discovery of emergent life or intelligence is commonly taken as the harbinger of a new era or new world, care is required in thinking about the conditions for and status of new. In addition to the simple question of whether this is truly new, the question arises about whether this newness repeats ideologies of an overcoming of the modern or postmodern technological condition, thus completing, fulfilling and entrenching that condition rather than critiquing it.

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Fabian Schäfer Animalisation, Subjectivity, and the Internet

‘Distraction’, ‘squirreling’ and ‘fallen’ uses of the Internet However, it is only in what Heidegger called the ‘authentic’ (eigentlich) mode of Being (Seinsweise) that Dasein can ‘‘choose’ [or] win itself ’ and thereby ‘be’ itself (Selbstsein, Being-one’s-Self ) through an existential projection in the choice of ‘its ownmost possibilities.’ 2 Most times, Heidegger admits, the Dasein is determined by the possibilities given by the Man and is therefore not situated in the mode of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) but in one of ‘fallenness’ (Verfallenheit). Speaking in the words of Heidegger, the possibility of ‘falling’ seems to be relatively high in the case of the interlinked structure of the Internet or databases if compared to the reading of a linear-structured book. ‘Surfing’ the Internet or browsing through databases can be described as what Walter Benjamin termed ‘reception in a state of distraction.’ (Rezeption in der Zerstreuung).3 This mode of perception, according to Benjamin, is based on the ‘tactile quality’ (taktile Qualität) of the object of perception - in Benjamin’s case, movies and photographs.4 This tactility of visual media Benjamin describes is even emphasised by the interactivity of the Internet or databases. As Nicholas Carr’s editorial in The Atlantic rightly asserts, hyperlinks, ‘[u]nlike footnotes’, ‘don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.’ The perception of the Internet is, in Benjamin’s terms, one of ‘tactile appropriation’ that is based on ‘habitualisation’ rather than on ‘attention.’ 5 To Heidegger, who used the term ‘Zerstreuung’ (distraction) in a comparable way, distraction is based on ‘curiosity’ (Neugier), a mode of fallenness. Other than Verstehen (understanding) as the self-projection of the being on its ownmost possibilities, curiosity is merely based on ‘seeing’ (Sehen). In this mode of being, ‘Dasein seeks what is far away simply in order to bring it close to itself in the way it looks. Dasein lets itself to be taken along (mitnehmen) solely by the looks of the world.’ 6The dangers of ‘fallen’ or ‘distracted’ Internet use are substantiated by the findings of a recent study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London (UCL).7 As part of a five-year programme, researchers analysed the behaviour of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a UK educational consortium, that provides access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. The results showed that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they had already visited. They typically read one or two pages of an article or book before jumping to another site. Sometimes they saved a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. Apparently, many Internet users seem to react to links as ‘possibilities’ in Heidegger’s sense or the flood of information provided by the Internet with an individual ‘databasification’ of information retrieved from larger databases - a behaviour that the scholars of UCL called ‘squirreling.’

Internet, databases and animalisationIn a series of lectures held in 1929-30, Heidegger distinguished between animal and man by describing the animal’s mode of being as one of ‘poverty in world’ (Weltarmut) and that of man as ‘world-forming’ (weltbildend). Accordingly, one might argue that the Weltarmut of the animal (i.e. its ‘captivation’ (Benommenheit) and ‘absorption’ (Eingenommenheit) by its environment) bears paral-lels to the curiosity and fallenness of Dasein that is, as already mentioned, taken along [mitnehmen] solely by the looks of the world.8

Fabian Schäfer

Animalisation, Subjectivity, and the Internet

Digital and virtual forms of culture are intensely choice-based. In the absence of meta-narrative, we are constantly being solicited as an agent of choice, between alternatives, to follow links. To examine this most modern of issues Fabian Schäfer turns to the mature traditions of philosophy. Distinguishing Japanese cultural critic Azuma Hiroki’s concept of human and animal action, and the influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s authentic and fallen selves, in terms of the notions of choice and reversibility, he poses the question of whether the subject of virtual choice is best understood in one context or the other.

In their August 2008 issues, the German news magazine Der Spiegel and the American journal The Atlantic published cover stories on the dangers of Internet-based communication and knowledge. Both magazines posed the question, ‘is Google or, more generally, the Internet making us stupid?’ The discourse splits into two camps of critics and enthusiasts. On the one hand, it is emphasised that the Internet is leading to the occurrence of new simultaneous modes of perception, a democratisation of knowledge, and unprecedented creativity by its users; on the other hand, the loss of critical reason or the capacity for remembering, rising attention deficit, the loss of a common culture existing through the reading of books, and the intellectual passivity of Internet users is harshly criticised. Moreover, the critical camp often psychopathologises the effects of the use of the Internet. Proponents of this faction agree that spending 5 to 6 hours on the Internet per day, searching through a cornucopia of texts, videos or music or writing emails and instant messages, can cause social behavioural disorders such as an anti-social attitude or an unwillingness to communicate.

Philosophical aspects of databases, the Internet and hypertextIt is the effects of the Internet on our cognitive abilities and reading capability that particularly un-settles the critics. In his editorial for the The Atlantic, American writer Nicholas Carr complains that persistent Internet use is influencing his capacity for concentration and contemplation. According to Carr, he was ‘once (…) a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now [he] zip[s] along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.’ 1 The reason for this effect upon our cognition is based on the most important feature of the Internet or electronic databases – the fact that they are based on interactivity or HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) in particular. However, how the interactivity of hypertext affects its users, and in how far they are capable of handling the simultaneous existence and accessibility of documents or websites, remains questionable. Specifically, it is the inner restlessness that one feels when faced with the decision between two or more possibilities which complicates the absorption of knowledge by means of interactive media. Links can be compared to junctions or options, or, as Martin Heidegger once put it, to possibilities on which Dasein (‘existence’) can project itself onto. In this sense, the networked structure of the Internet or a database might be described as a miniature of the possibilities-for-Being (Seinkönnen) of Dasein. As in real life, deciding in favour of one possibility (namely a link) necessarily means to negate others.

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Fabian Schäfer Animalisation, Subjectivity, and the Internet

Internet, databases and pedagogyWhat can we conclude from Azuma’s positive remarks on the new media literacy of the otaku with regard to what I have defined rather negatively as the ‘fallenness’ of the Internet user? In any case, the suggestive question posed by The Atlantic or Der Spiegel, about whether Google, the Internet, databases, or the new flood of information in general, is making us stupid per se, seems to be pointing in the wrong direction. Even Heidegger’s or Benjamin’s perspective on distracted or habitualised perception is not as pessimistic as I have described it here. In fact, they agree that curiosity or tactile apperceptions aren’t necessarily something that should be condemned from the outset. According to Heidegger, curiosity, which is non-‘anticipatory’ (namely ‘non-self-projecting’) and thus merely ‘awaiting’ (gewärtigend), ‘has its natural justification [...][and] belongs to the everyday kind of being of Da-Sein and to the understanding of being initially prevalent.’ 14 Similarly, Benjamin reminds us that perception in a state of distraction is important, since ‘the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contem-plation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.’ Obviously, if applied to our cognition of the interactive structure of the Internet, Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s perspectives refer to two ways of dealing with electronic and interlinked texts. First, the ‘authentic’ Seinsweise of understanding and contemplation, one that, to borrow hypertext theorist Jay D. Bolter’s words, looks ‘through the text’ and thus grasps and understands the meaning of the narration ‘behind’ the text. (This is what Azuma describes as the ‘deconstructivist’ and ‘humanesque’ side of otaku culture). Secondly, a ‘fallen’ or ‘animalised’ mode, in which the user has to ‘look at the text, as a series of possibilities [or links, F.S.] that he or she (…) can activate.’ Accordingly, they are to a lesser extent two modes of usage - one active and ‘authentic’ and one passive and ‘in-authentic’ - than two different strategies of dealing with electronic and networked information - namely explorative browsing (‘power browsing’) on the one hand and the purposeful search for a particular document and its subsequent contemplative reading on the other. As for the latter, it is important for the user not to lose sight of his - in Heidegger’s words - ‘ownmost projection’ that has to guide a search; for the former, it is even necessary to let oneself be ‘taken away’ by one’s curiosity, governed merely by the possibilities given by the structure of homepages or databases. With regard to university pedagogies, however, it is necessary to teach students the sharp distinction between these two modes of dealing with digitised texts and knowledge that is based on the particular goal one pursues. Moreover, it will be of particular importance to teach contemplative and analytic reading to a generation of otaku and Google users that possesses a highly developed digital literacy but is beginning to lack basic reading and writing skills.

With regard to the ‘animalisation’ or ‘fallenness’ of Dasein to a tactile and habitualised information seeking behaviour in the digital age, it is valuable to take into account the contemporary philosophical discourse on the phenomenon of otaku culture in Japan, since much of the public debate on the positive and negative sides of the Internet parallels the discourse on otaku culture in Japan. Otaku is a Japanese term that refers to people with obsessive interests in various Japanese subcultures, par-ticularly manga, anime, science fiction, or computer games. The otaku are often psychopathologised as being anti-social, uncommunicative, and self-absorbed. Cultural critic Azuma Hiroki, however, saw value in analysing the otaku from the perspective of their pioneering role in the ‘information society’. In his book Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan: Otaku kara mita Nihon shakai (2001, Animalising Postmodern: Japanese Society as Seen from the Perspective of Otaku), Azuma considers the otaku phenomenon not as particularly Japanese, but as an inflection ‘of the global trend of postmoderniza-tion’. 9 With regard to French philosopher Alexandre Kojève’s neo-Hegelian distinction between two forms of ‘post-historical existence’ - the ‘animalisation’ of American society based on consumerism and the highly formalised and aesthetisised ‘snobbism’ of the Japanese - , Azuma asserts that otaku culture consists of a ‘two-tiered mode of consumption’ that reflects the two-layered structure of the postmodern itself.10 Other than the two layers of the modern world-image - the ‘depth’ of ‘grand narratives’ (namely ideals, ideology) and a ‘surface’ of many ‘small narratives’ - Azuma claims that, with reference to Lyotard’s notion of the end of grand narratives, the latter were replaced by a ‘grand database’ in the postmodern world-image (sekaizō). Whereas the modern era formed a structure in which a single grand narrative or ideal controlled the diverse small narratives and cultural and social criticism consisted of analysing grand narratives as reflected within various small narratives, in the postmodern, people may grasp any number of small world-images.11

Azuma claims that one can identify two ways in which the otaku deal with this new world-image. He calls one the ‘animalesque’ (dōbutsuteki) side of database consumption; that is the solitude and passive consumption of the many small narratives of computer games, anime, or manga that are merely based on ‘combinations’ (kumiawase) of self-referential elements from the grand database. Database consumption also has a second, active or ‘humanesque’ side, because otaku actively intervene in received commodities by breaking down the narratives into their compounds (for computer games these are screenplay, character, background or for manga it is the single ‘sensitive elements’ (moe yōso) that characters are composed of ), and thereby get access to the database that lies in the ‘depth’ behind the small narrations and ‘recreate’ (niji sōsaku) from it their own narrations or pictures.12 This ‘double structure’ (nijū kōzō) of deconstruction and reconstruction prompts Azuma to interpret otaku culture as a deconstructivist and, thus, subversive form of cultural reception that brings it close to a deconstructivist method in contemporary literary theory.13 Azuma bases this assertion also on the fact that to the otaku it doesn’t matter any longer if the ‘author’ of the small narratives they consume is a professional - ‘authorized’ by one of the big manga or anime publishers - or an amateur who publishes his self-made anime or manga in one of the many fanzines (dōjinshi) or on the Internet.

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Christopher Goto-Jones From Science Fictional Japan to Japanese Science Fiction


From Science Fictional Japan to Japanese Science Fiction

Sci-fiThe term ‘science fiction’ is of relatively recent origin. It was apparently coined by the genre-legend Hugo Gernsback in an editorial to his new magazine, Science Wonder Stories, in 1929. Nine years later the rival magazine changed its name to Astounding Science Fiction, and thus the name entered history. However, throughout the 1920s and 1930s there were a plethora of competing terms: pseudo-scientific, weird-science, and Gernsback’s own early favourite was actually ‘scientifiction.’

Fiction that would eventually become labelled as ‘science fiction’ (or ‘sci-fi’) had been in existence for at least a century before. Convention dictates that the first piece of sci-fi was Mary Shelly’s gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein (1818), although the reasons for this origination are for from uncontested. For some, it is enough to say that Frankenstein is the earliest text that still exists within what Damien Broderick (Reading by Starlight, 1995) has called the ‘megatext’ of modern sci-fi (that is, within the set stories that define literacy in the genre). For others, the issue is not conventional but thematic: sci-fi is about technology and mechanization, hence it is necessarily a product of modernity and of the industrial revolution. Accordingly, the nineteenth century works of Shelly, HG Wells and Jules Verne should be read along side Nietzsche’s proclamations about the death of god, Max Weber’s account of the ‘iron cage’ of modern bureaucratic machinery and Martin Heidegger’s stand against the self-alienation of Being in the face of the imperialism of technology.

Science fictional JapanIn other words, sci-fi is the literature of the hopes and anxieties of industrial modernity, and it should come as no surprise that other industrial societies have produced their own ‘weird-science.’ Indeed, Japan’s relationship with sci-fi began in its so-called ‘age of machines’ (kikai jidai) in the early twentieth century with the work of writers such as Mizushima Niou and Yumeno Kyūsaku, who were writing contemporaneously with social critics and philosophers struggling with the problematics of modernity and its overcoming (kindai no chōkoku). Already in the late 1920s, Japanese writers (and scientists) were envisioning robots or jinzō ningen (artificial people), and stories about them (including some claims to have invented them) appeared in popular science magazines in the 1920s and 1930s; at this time, such stories would have been labelled as kūsō kagaku (imaginary science). It was not until the postwar period that the English terms ‘SF’ or ‘sci-fi’ entered popular usage.Historians of Europe as well as Japan will be quick to notice that this period corresponds approxi-mately to what Eric Hobsbaum has called the Age of Empire (1989), in which the so-called Great Powers established and consolidated imperial rule across the globe. Hence, it is interesting to reflect that one of the other central, thematic concerns of sci-fi is often considered to be the encounter with difference, and occasionally with either the mystification or the demonization of difference. In other words, sci-fi can be read as a thread in the weaves of colonialism and orientalism, and in recent years much of the most sophisticated work on sci-fi has indeed come from the standpoint of post-colonialism. From this perspective, we see the beginnings of the creation of a science fictional Japan, as well as the coincident birth of science fiction in Japan.

Notes1 The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” July/August 2008.

http://www.theatlantic.com /doc/print/200807/google

2 Heidegger, Martin 1993 [1927]. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit.

Oxford: Blackwell

3 Benjamin, Walter 1977 [1936]. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen

Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp

4 ibid.

5 For instance, the tactility of hyperlinks is particularly obvious if a phrase of a text

appears as a hyperlink (i.e. blue font colour) but does not have the respective

function. Only through the Unzuhandenheit (un-readiness-to-hand) of a link as

a link do we become aware of the haptic interactivity of hypertext described by

Benjamin as “tactile appropriation”.

6 Heidegger 1993 [1927]

7 http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/research/ciber/downloads/

8 Heidegger based this distinction on the fact that an animal is essentially

captivated and wholly absorbed by its environment (its Umgebung, as opposed to

the Umwelt of Dasein) and thus can only behave other than how a human being

does. Heidegger, Martin (1983 [1929/30]). ‘Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik.

Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit’. In: ibid.: Gesamtausgabe II. Abteilung Vorlesungen

1923-1944. Vol. 29/30. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann

9 Azuma, Hiroki. 2001. Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan: Otaku kara mita Nihon shakai.

Kodansha: Tokyo

10 ibid.

11 ibid.

12 Machinima (‘machine cinema’), the art of using a computer game to

create a movie, is a similar active form of ‘recreation’ by computer users.

Cf. http://www.machinima.com

13 Hypertext theoretist Jay D. Bolter emphasized the relationship between

Derridarian poststructuralism and hypertext as well. According to Bolter, based on

the rhizomatic structure of the Internet or databases, electronic texts don’t have a

centre or margins because of their ‘deconstructive reading’: “The reader can follow

paths through the space in any direction, limited only by constraints established

by the author. No path through the space need be stigmatized as marginal.”

Cf. Bolter, Jay D. 1991. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of

Writing. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum

14 Heidegger 1993 [1927]

15 Hiroki, Azuma. 2007 [2003]. ‘The Animalization of Otaku Culture’. In: Luning,

Frenchy (ed.). Mechademia 2. Networks of Desire. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press.

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Science fictional Japan in the postwar worldIn the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, anxiety about the emerging Cold War was clear in the so-called ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction.’ In 1949 (the same year in which Sixth Column was issued as a book), George Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, in which the fictional nation of Eastasia is identified as one of the three superpowers of the dystopian future. But in general the 1950s and 1960s are marked by intense political activism and by scepticism about the ability of technology to solve all problems, and this agenda is played out in the sci-fi of the time. Central to these problematics was the horror of wartime technology, culminating in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. A common theme in Anglo-American sci-fi became anxiety over a loss of humanity and the potential collapse of civilization triggered by the pursuit of technological advancement. Three of the most acclaimed sci-fi novels of all time, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (1951), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), all appeared in this period. As we will see, the a-bombs also played a central role in the development of sci-fi in postwar Japan, albeit in a radically different way; the classic monster film, Gojira (1954) by Honda Ishirō, will become emblematic.By the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, however, there was a real turning of the tide. The so-called ‘New Wave’ of sci-fi shifted the attention of authors and readers away from the technology-driven glories (and anxieties) of ‘outer-space’ and towards the complex, human concerns of ‘inner-space.’ During this period there was a real focus on challenging social and cultural taboos, on radical political stances, and on heightened literary quality. Leading lights in the UK and the USA were Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, and of course Samuel R. Delany (although some of these figures rejected the label).One of the intriguing aspects of the New Wave was the way in which it re-appropriated and re-signified Asia; like many of the other cultural movements of the time, the New Wave was fascinated by spiritual aspects of Asian culture, such as Zen (DT Suzuki established his Zen Centre in California during the 1960s), Indian mysticism (just as the Beatles travelled to India in 1968), and the freshly politicized nature of Tibetan Buddhism. Indeed, Kingsley Amis has famously condemned the New Wave for its fixation on stylistic innovation and for its persistent recourse to (what he called) Oriental religions and spirituality. Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967) might be indicative.One of the truly literary moments in this period was Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasper-lenspiel, which was first published in 1943 in a Germanic context of intoxication with the ‘mystic East.’ In 1969, it was finally translated into English as The Glass Bead Game, a novel that posits the development of new form of game as the pinnacle of human civilization, requiring consummate intellectual and spiritual development, which is identified strongly with East Asian traditions. Indeed, Hesse’s other novels also enjoyed a revival in the 1960s (after his death in 1962) largely because of their resonance with the counter-cultural, spiritual movements of the time: Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Journey to the East (1932).This sci-fi re-figuring of Asia as a spiritual alternative to the technologically angst-ridden West was a common feature of many of the novels of the period, not to mention an already familiar orientalist trope in European literature. Indeed, it bled over into the sci-fi boom of the late 1970s and 1980s that followed the release of Star Wars in 1977. For many critics (as well as for George Lucas himself ), many aspects of the Star Wars galaxy, specifically the mystical ‘Jedi Way,’ were derived from Taoist and Zen philosophies (sometimes presented with the admixture of Zoroastrianism); the fabled

The engagement of Western sci-fi with the East Asian ‘other’ in the first half of the twentieth century (and then again during the years around the Vietnam War) is clearly informed by a kind of reactionary and anxious frontier-spirit. Classic comic-strips such as Philip Francis Nowlan’s Buck Rogers in 25th Century (which was the first sci-fi comic strip in US-history, starting on 7 January 1929) and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon (beginning 7 January 1934) show America being overrun by the Red Mongols, and pit the all-American hero (Flash Gordon is quarterback of the New York Jets) against an evil (Chinese) Emperor Ming the Merciless of planet Mongo. However, perhaps the most remarkable of these prewar texts is the Sixth Column (1949) by Robert Heinlein, which was originally serialised in Astounding Science Fiction in January, February and March of 1941 (nine months before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor). Heinlein depicts the invasion of the USA by a force of ‘PanAsians,’ whom he identifies as a mix of Japanese and Chinese. The Americans defend them-selves through recourse to a special ‘ray weapon’ that could be adjusted so that it would only damage people of a specific race. In many ways, Heinlein’s novel is an intriguing window into American fears about Japan’s imperial expansion and its proposed Co-Prosperity Sphere.As one of the most influential voices in American sci-fi, Heinlein’s portrayal of the ‘PanAsiatics’ has been extremely controversial, and it has been variously condemned and praised for its engagement with the volatile race-politics of the time. On the one hand, critics have accused Heinlein himself of buying into American chauvinism and anti-Japanese propaganda during the early 1940s. On the other hand, Heinlein and others have argued that his purpose was anti-racist, and that his text was an attack on Japanese and US racism at the time. Whatever the actual force of this book, the historical interest of Sixth Column vastly outweighs its literary quality, which even Heinlein himself lamented. These sci-fi classics from the early twentieth century illustrate very well the ways in which science fiction was a symbolic genre or a metaphorical discourse from its inception. Heinlein’s transparency in his depiction of the Japanese as Japanese, rather than as aliens from another galaxy with suspiciously Japanese or Chinese sounding names, was actually rather unusual. The tendency in sci-fi is to re-figure the encounter with the ‘other’ in terms of the encounter with the literally alien. Of course, the question of race politics within sci-fi has attracted a wide critical literature. In the postwar period, Samuel R. Delany would become a leading figure in this field, using his own science fiction (and sci-fi criticism) to explore and challenge questions of identity and difference, of exploration and conquest, of autonomy and assimilation. His 1967 Nebula Award winning novel, The Einstein Connection, has become a classic of its kind. In the postwar period, however, it gradually became clear that the representation of Japan in science fiction did not have to orbit around negative racial stereotypes. No longer a military threat, Japan began to recapture some of the romantic mystery that it had once enjoyed in European eyes, such as in the work of Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, 1826), whose archetypal explorer, Gulliver, very famously travelled to the mystical land of Japan with a special letter of introduction from the king of Luggnagg, with whom Japan was apparently allied in the eighteenth century! By the time of the New Wave movement of the 1970s, Asia was already an explicit source of inspiration for the mystical futurities of the West, and 1980s cyberpunk placed the technologically thriving, contemporary Japan into the fictive futures of Europe and the USA. In other words, whilst the fictions had slipstreamed from negative to positive, Japan remained science fictional.

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the Animatrix, 2003); and recently Leonardo DiCaprio announced that he would produce a movie version of the classic animanga Akira. Not only that, but anime has broken through into the main-stream of Western popular culture: science fiction directors such as Oshii Mamoru (Ghost in the Shell, 1995) and Ōtomo Katsuhiro (Akira, 1988) are now iconic figures in their own right.It should come as no surprise, then, that Worldcon has finally had to recognise that Japan is not merely science fictional, but also a real-world context for a specific tradition of science fiction. That said, many gaijin (alien) participants at Nippon 2007 were surprised to learn about the depth and richness of Japanese science fiction, which has developed in dynamic interaction with Western sci-fi, even if that development has gone almost completely unnoticed in the English language literature of sci-fi criticism. Indeed, whilst Nippon 2007 was the first Worldcon to be held in Asia, it coincided with the 46th Japan Science Fiction Convention (the first JSFC was in Tokyo, 1962) – the annual event at which the prestigious Seiun Prizes (the Japanese equivalent of the Hugo Awards) have been awarded since 1970.One of the intriguing things about the JSFC is its sense of the world. Whilst it makes no claims to being a ‘Worldcon,’ its history shows a much greater openness to (and awareness of ) sci-fi from overseas. Indeed, unlike the Hugo Awards, there is a special Seiun Prize for the best translated novel, which has been won by such genre-greats as Frank Herbert, Robert Delazny, and David Brin. Conversely, the great Japanese sci-fi writers are almost unheard of in Europe and the USA, despite the fact that many of them engage directly with the themes and questions raised by European and American authors, providing interestingly inflected, alternative visions. To the extent that the ‘world’ is aware of Japanese sci-fi, it appears to locate the genre in the media of anime, manga and video games, neglecting the novels and short stories that comprise the backbone of the sci-fi ‘megatext’ in the West. In other words, the field of science fiction demonstrates international language politics in microcosm.Some of the more literary classics of Japanese science fiction have been translated into English. The towering figure of Komatsu Sakyō (who has won the Seiun four times) might be known to English readers as the author of Nihon chimbotsu (1973, translated as Japan Sinks, 1995), which sold over four million copies in Japan; as guest of honour, Komatsu also won the Seiun at Nippon 2007 for the eagerly anticipated sequel Nihon chimbotsu II (2007). Readers may also be familiar with the work of Abe Kōbō, whose mainstream novels have made something of an impact in translation, and whose experimental sci-fi novel Daiyon kampyo-ki (1958, translated as Inter Ice-Age 4, 1970) appeared in English in time for the New Wave. However, other accomplished writers will be lesser known: the unparalleled master of the ‘short short,’ Hoshi Shin’ichi is virtually unknown; even the incomparable Tatsui Yasutaka, famed in Japan as the recipient of both the Tanizaki Prize and the Kawabata Prize for literature (1987 and 1989), who has won back-to-back Seiun Prizes (1975 and 1976), has only recently come to the attention of the international public, partially because he wrote the novel (1993) on which Satoshi Kon’s acclaimed anime, Papurika (2007), was based. In recent years, science fiction in Japan has reached new levels of maturity and acclaim; non-genre, literary writers such as the Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburō and the phenomenally successful Murakami Haruki have been experimenting with elements of science fiction and fantasy in speculative ways.In fact, sci-fi in post-nuclear Japan looks very different from its counterparts in the West, which Japanese authors were hungrily reading in translation. Rather than observing the characteristic ‘frontiersmanship’ that is often present in Anglo-American genre novels, Tatsumi Takayuki (Full Metal Apache, 2006) suggests that we can see a spirit of ‘creative masochism’ (sōzōteki higyaku

‘force’ reconstituted qi or ki; Yoda’s famously garbled English has been seen as a thinly veiled repre-sentation of Japanese-English.Whilst the Star Wars phenomenon abandoned the high-brow pretensions of the New Wave in favour of sci-fi’s more popularist roots, it retained a certain nostalgic romanticism about representations of Asia as the home of a spiritual (and often more ‘human’) alternative to coldly technologized and alienated societies in the West. Interestingly, the next major movement in science fiction affected a re-technologizing of this mythical spirituality, often via the imaginary of Japanese technological advances. The ‘cyberpunk’ movement of the 1980s, led by writers such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and the editor Gardner Dozois, witnesses the creation of ‘cyberspace’ as a futurity in which consciousness, spirituality and digital technology coalesce. In the context of the digital revolution and the rapid emergence of the Japanese bubble economy, visions of the future began to take on a distinctly East Asia visage, with Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece, Blade Runner (1982), setting an early standard. Shortly afterwards, Gibson’s acclaimed Neuromancer (1984) contained some powerful Japanese imagery, and portrayed the future as tinged with Japaneseness: the microchip that makes everything possible has the name Hosaka; the best computing power comes in the form of the Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7; and key characters (such as the cybernetically enhanced and genetically engineered super-ninja, Hideo) have obvious Japanese origins. By the time of Gibson’s Idoru (1996), which is explicitly set in a version of Japan that is simultaneously represented as a futurity (for the West) and as a slightly fantastical vision of present-day Japan, cyberpunk’s love affair with Japan was already profound. This was techno-orientalism or Japanophilia: Japan was no longer merely science fictional, Japan had become the future itself.

Science fiction in JapanGiven this context, it was not without a measure of intentional ambiguity and perhaps irony that Nippon 2007, the first World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) to be held in Asia (but the 65th Worldcon), chose as its slogan: Nippon – SF no kuni (Japan – The Land of Science Fiction). Worldcon began in New York in 1939. As its name suggests, the convention’s ambitions were inter-national from its inception. If we can assume that sci-fi was a genre concerned with the future at that time (and this is not a universal assumption, as we have seen), and particularly with a post-national, space-faring vision of humanity, then any lingering sense of national parochialism seems both quaint and ridiculous. Given the nature of the genre, Worldcon should have paid more attention to the ‘World’ than the World Series… Nonetheless, the dominance of the USA and the apparently inalienable centrality of the English language has characterised the history of Worldcon (and especially the prestigious Hugo Awards that are presented at the convention each year). Of course, it is not merely coincidental that the first Worldcon to be held in Asia comes at the peak of European and American interest in science fictional Japan. However, it is also the case that Japanese science fiction is beginning to play a highly visible role in Euro-American popular culture: the anime and manga explosion of the 1990s and 2000s has made Japan a global force in science fiction, and Japanese video games (often with sci-fi themes) dominate the international market. The influence of Japan and Japanese sci-fi on the USA is now unequivocal, leading Tatsumi Takayuki to claim that we are all ‘Japanoids’ today (Japanoido sengen, 1993), whether we know it or not: Ridley Scott freely confesses the influence of Japanese media on his classic Blade Runner; the Wachowski brothers are open about the importance of anime in their Matrix trilogy (and even produced an anime interlude,

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This openness to varied media as the vehicles for science fiction is symptomatic of a wider embrace of what has been called ‘convergence culture’ – the increasing tendency for cultural franchises to employ multiple media to relate a core narrative, around which the various media ‘converge.’ Although the Matrix series is often cited as a classic example of convergence in the West, it is in Japan that we see the most highly developed, persistent and pervasive examples. Perhaps the most famous and successful sci-fi example is the sprawling and epic Final Fantasy series, which incorporates dozens of video games, manga, anime, novels, and various other ‘character goods.’ But Final Fantasy is not unique in its convergent nature – it is not uncommon for Japanese sci-fi stories to unravel in multiple media. In other words, sci-fi is an unusual expressive form and a socio-economic phenomenon in Japan.In sum, it seems that science fiction provides an interesting lens on questions of cultural history and the political unconscious in various societies; it expresses political critique and futurist visions of reform; and it manifests important currents in socio-economic change as well as transnational cultural flows. As the ‘land of science fiction,’ Japan is a fascinating case.

Asiascape.net would like to thank MEARC, Toshiba, the NWO and IIAS for supporting its projects in this field.

seishin) in Japanese sci-fi, characterised by the anxiety of writers like Komatsu and Abe Kōbō about the ideological heritage of WWII and the twin, reinforcing psychological damage caused by defeat and by the apocalyptic nature of that defeat. For these writers, sci-fi possesses a special mission and purpose in postwar Japanese society, since it necessarily contains within it hypotheses for the future development of Japan and visions of ‘tomorrow’ that allowed the ‘New Japan’ of the post-1945 era to continuously challenge and re-conceptualise its postwar trajectory. Given the events of the Pacific War, this self-reflective and self-critical task seemed especially urgent in the 1960s, but it also continues as a central theme in Japanese science fiction throughout the subsequent generations of writers; it has witnessed something of a renaissance in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War and Japanese society’s concomitant quest for national identity.In contrast to the 1950s and 60s in the West, the 1970s and early 1980s might be seen as the ‘golden age’ of Japanese science fiction, during which time a new generation of writers could refer back to classics of homegrown sci-fi (as well as to imported and translated texts), especially after the nuclear monstrosity of Gojira and the publication of Komatsu’s Japan Sinks in 1973. For the first time, young Japanese writers could identify Japanese heroes of sci-fi, alongside the big names of Cordwainer Smith and Samuel Delany who were emerging against the background of the Vietnam war. Indeed, the 1970s and 80s were periods of incredible richness in Japanese sci-fi, at least partly because writers absorbed all of the previous SF traditions from the West simultaneously at that time, rather than diachronically, resulting in unusual patterns, motifs and themes that were creatively ‘Japanese.’Unlike his Anglo-American compatriots, Komatsu’s sci-fi was characterised not by the claustrophobic paranoia of the Cold War but rather by the grand tectonic movements of history (and the earth’s tectonic plates!), which seemed to persist in imperilling Japan. Indeed, the role of historical singu-larities (such as the apocalypse itself ) in Japanese science fiction cannot be understated, and many of the most influential writers to emerge during the ‘golden era’ seemed to orientate their work around them. One such figure, who would later break through to world acclaim with the anime Akira (1988), after the manga of the same name (1982-86), was Ōtomo Katsuhiro for his manga Dōmu (1980-2, 1983). By the early 1980s Japanese sci-fi was rapidly becoming a hermetic and cultural world of its own, both in touch with Anglo-American currents and self-reflectively independent of them.One of the most exciting and interesting aspects of Japanese sci-fi is, of course, the way in which its own megatext is explicitly open to a range of additional media. We have already mentioned anime and manga, and the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a string of impressive, conceptual works by the likes of Shirow Masamune and Oshii Mamoru, and then Anno Hideaki’s remarkable and revolutionary, Shinseiki Ebuangerion (1995-96). As was already the case in the 1920s, Japanese sci-fi shows a predilection for exploring the technological limits of the human via robots, cybernetics and ‘mecha.’ A persistently controversial issue in sci-fi (and Japanese cyborg sci-fi in particular) concerns the gender politics of the interactions between female figures and technological change.However, it is also noteworthy that the Seiun Prize is sensitive to the demands and potentials of different media as expressive forms. It is notable, for example, that the 2001 Seiun Prize for Best Media was not awarded to a feature film or an anime but to a video game – the characteristically ‘Japanese’ Playstation title Gunparade March, which (like many of the most popular games in Japan) was never even released in Europe or the USA. The game was later made into a manga by Sanadura Hiroyuki and an anime series by Sakurabi Katsushi, both of which have been licensed for translation into English.

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Christopher Goto-Jones Alien Autopsy: the Science Fictional Frontier of Asian Studies

(or at least that none combine the two). In terms of estrangement, Suvin draws out a continuum between literature that seeks the ‘exact recreation of the author’s empirical environment’ on the one hand to that which maintains an ‘exclusive interest in a strange newness, a novum’ (ibid.) on the other.2 In terms of cognition, he claims to be relying on a Germanic sense of science as Wissenschaft (ie. one that encompasses the human and mental sciences as well as the material ones).3 This enables him to tie SF to the foundations of the real and to argue that estrangements that abandon (rather than creatively develop) the scientific conditions or conventions of the ‘reality’ should not be considered SF, but rather myth, fairytale or simply fantasy. For Suvin, SF is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.4Missing from this description is a sense of function and purpose: what should be the impact of cognitive estrangement? What is the force of SF, if indeed it has any at all? Suvin, like most of the other leading SF theorists, most recently and powerfully Fredrick Jameson, is clear that the purpose of estrangement in this context is critique. In the most obvious terms, this means SF is frequently (albeit not necessarily) satirical. Rather, SF might be envisioned as playing a deliberate and deliberative role in the politics of knowledge: the purpose of cognitive estrangement is reflexive. That is, the author seeks to displace the reader from the everydayness of his/her context and challenge them to test their reality against the difference presented. The cognitive nature of the estrangement should make the alteriority of SF thinkable (even realistic) and thus both effective and affective.Future or distant places (together with their various inhabitants) should be wrought as a mirror to the reader and his/her world. ‘But the mirror [should not be] only a reflecting one, it is also a trans-forming one … the mirror is a crucible’, revealing the innovative possibilities of an Other.5 SF aliens should not be so very alien after all: we should recognise ourselves (and the possibilities of ourselves) in them, otherwise they do not estrange us they simply alienate us. This is a crucial distinction. It leaves us with an expansion of Suvin:SF is a textual tradition that aims at cognitive estrangement with a critically reflexive function in the politics of knowledge, challenging and endangering the scientific (Wissenschaftlich) suppositions that underlie the everyday context of the reader.In other words, SF attempts to use difference to challenge the status quo. We’ll return to the nature of this status quo later.

Clarifying the known, 2: Area StudiesIf SF is a contested category, then Area Studies risks not being a category at all. Indeed, this field has been continuously under attack in various ways and from various angles certainly since the second half of the 20th century. The result is a field that is at least as defensive amongst its peers as SF. Responding to criticisms that it is little more than an atheoretical data-collector in the service of government interests, Area Studies has increasingly defended itself by defining its mission in terms of the epistemic violence that it can cause to the conventional disciplines, which it often designates as Eurocentric.In a recent volume that attempts to sketch the shifting contours of this expansive field, Alan Tans-man suggests that Area Studies might be considered an ‘enterprise seeking to know, analyze, and interpret foreign cultures through a multidisciplinary lens’.5 Most scholars of Area Studies would find such a minimal and inclusive notion relatively unobjectionable, although even a slight rephrasing


Alien Autopsy: the Science Fictional Frontier of Asian Studies

The term cyberAsia is both an observation of the technological progress exhibited in Asian societies, and a provocation concerning the status of Asia in the epistemic frameworks of ‘the West’. Christopher Goto-Jones contends that under certain conditions Asia serves as place-marker for a field of speculation that we might term science fictional. Where ‘cyber’ contains intimations of futurities and technologisation, cyberAsia and science fictional Asia converge.

The meaning of ’science fictional Asia’ stretches from moments of representational techno-Orien-talism in Euro-American literature at one end – where Japan, Hong Kong, or India become the fantastical site of a projected technological future – to an epistemic framework that privileges the disorientation of the West at the other.1 It is this final frontier that intrigues me. In particular, the status and purpose of the knowledge created or discovered during explorations of this frontier of knowledge, as well as in the authority of the author in each case. My central provocation is that there is a frontier at which the epistemic structures and objectives of science fiction (SF) and of Asian Studies (AS) meet, and that we might usefully see family resemblances between the two fields. If there is a place in which these two life-forms coincide as a common species, should we consider whether they might mate and produce some interesting offspring? Alien Studies?To some extent, this frontier serves as both a caricature and a critique of the Area Studies enterprise as a whole, with AS the most striking case, marking out the dangerous and nebulous border between fictional representations and representations of fictions. Of course, as a caricature, this presentation makes no claims to being comprehensive or nuanced about all the varieties of SF or Area Studies (or even AS) – rather it focuses on the dimensions of a particular frontier at which particular aspects of those fields meet.

Clarifying the known, 1: Science FictionSF is already a difficult terrain, and its dimensions are continuously contested. It exists in a condition of peril within broader realms of literature. There have been various attempts to define it, but there is neither the space nor the need to elaborate them all here. Let us suffice with a series of thematic commonalities: SF is about technology and mechanisation and particularly about speculations regarding their social and interpersonal effects in the future - it is a product of modernity and of the industrial revolution. The other central, thematic concern of sci-fi is often considered to be the encounter with (or exploration of ) difference, and occasionally with either the mystification or the demonisation of difference. This has often been seen to tie SF to (post)colonialism.Because, like the past, the future is a different country where they do things differently, these two characteristics (temporal and spatial explorations) converge around a single concern for the encounter with an Other, often figured in SF as a literal encounter with the alien. I still find Darko Suvin’s 1979 characterisation of SF as ‘the literature of cognitive estrangement’ apt. I understand this provocative phrase to contain both a methodological marker - cognitive - and an intentional or purposive marker - estrangement. It characterises SF as a literature that accomplishes estrangement (whatever that might mean) via a process of cognition (whatever that might mean). This implies, of course, that other literatures seek objectives other than estrangement and employ means other than cognition

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exploration of other cultures, which (at least in the case of SF) may be fictional, and via reflexive self-interrogation provoked by the findings.

Encountering the frontierIt seems to me, however, that the frontier between these fields is clearly marked. Despite the pretensions of a ‘purposive kinship,’ AS and SF stand on opposite sides of the fictional frontier, or the frontier of fiction. Or, to spin this another way: the frontier is reality itself. While SF makes no explicit claims to be exploring the ‘real world,’ AS must engage with and inter-rogate ‘real’ aliens. In SF, the much lauded reflexivity is a kind of literary navel-gazing, while in AS it should be a scientific radicalisation of concrete political issues. We might argue that SF is a fictional projection of AS, or conversely that AS is a scientifically delimited version of SF.I’d like to spend a little time testing this frontier, since, like the borders drawn on maps, it seems much less clear when you’re flying over it in reality.

Function, purpose and the redundancy of realityMy first concern about this boundary is the relevance of reality in the first place. This is not to say that I don’t recognise the category of the real or that I believe in the essentially illusionary or fictive nature of all things. Rather, it seems that the various definitions of the purpose of AS make scant reference to knowledge of reality. Instead, the purpose of AS might be considered to be the de-parochialisation, the de-naturalisation, or even simply the endangering of the universalising tendencies of the mainstream disciplines and their European roots. The real issue here is not the excavation of new truths or kinds of knowledge per se, but rather the use to which those knowledges can be put to challenge the status quo. In this context, it seems entirely legitimate (or even necessary) to ask why the reality of the particular non-Western country in question is relevant. Does Asia have to be real in order to be the subject of AS?There are many answers to this question, of course, but on closer inspection none of them appear to be absolute barriers. The frontier is more a hazy and expansive zone than a crisp border. One possible answer is that we are simply more likely to be moved to serious reflexive, de-naturalisation or estrangement if our impetus to do so is the concrete experience of a group of others in whom we can recognise ourselves (rather than a fictional group of deliberately imagined others). If this is true, it is a matter of degree: reality is more effective and affective than fiction when it comes to cognitive estrangement.I’m willing to take this seriously, but I’m not yet willing to believe it. Even though it’s a rather soft claim, it also seems fragile. It is not necessarily true: experience tells us that fiction can be more effective and affective than reality when it comes to cognitive estrangement. Indeed, in SF, the methodological marker ‘cognitive’ appears to have been placed precisely to mitigate against the alleged ineffectiveness of fiction: SF can/should be thinkable as real even if it is not a representation of an actual reality. Perhaps the real function of reality in this framework should be captured (this is a moral should) by the distinction posed earlier between estrangement and alienation. That is, the effectiveness of presentations of the ‘expansively non-Western’ is contingent upon the ‘Westerner’ being able to recognise him/herself in the dilemmas of the other and hence recognise the possibility of transfor-mation of self that this other represents. In other words, something has to connect the reader with those represented in the text, and that something could be reality.

already begins to look a little provocative: to know, analyse, and interpret the alien using extra-disciplinary forms of knowledge. In the same volume, David Szanton argues that ‘Area Studies scholarship attempts to document the existence, internal logic, and theoretical implications of the distinctive social and cultural values, expressions, structures, and dynamics that shape societies and nations beyond Europe and the United States.’ 6 From this we might deduce that the ‘status quo’ referred to earlier refers to something Euro-American or ‘Western’ and that the proper subject of Area Studies is ‘non-Western’. Whilst I have deep reservations about this position, it does appear to reflect the actual situation of Area Studies in the university (both in the past and today).Immediately intriguing is that the spatial scope of Area Studies is defined in terms of a negation: places beyond Europe and the United States; the non-West. The non-West is not simply a politically offensive category but it is also infinitely expansive: whilst the privilege of ‘Western’ might only be awardable to a discrete socio-historic group of places and people, anywhere and anyone else is non-Western. Indeed, the non-West is literally everywhere the West is not. This observation teeters on the brink of being facile, but it begins to become interesting in the company of SF, as we boldly go where no-one has gone before. The subject matter of Area Studies in the West, in its least politically correct form, is the alien, be that terrestrial or extra-terrestrial. Alien Studies, Area Studies and Asian Studies share a theoretical frontier: AS.Let us posit (or perhaps anticipate): in 2025 intelligent life is discovered on the moon of a planet orbiting the distant star of Sirius. The study of that society and its culture will be the preserve of AS, since it will certainly be a non-Western civilization.A key question at this point, just as it was in the case of SF, is: why should we be interested in a category of knowledge that is explicitly defined as being about ‘something other than us’ (no matter who we are)? This is an incredibly difficult and also intimate question.For Szanton there are two basic answers.7 The first is the ‘intrinsic value’ and interest of difference – we might simply call this curiosity. This is a banal response and not in anyway exclusive to AS. The second, which is far more powerful and purposive, and which dominates much of the literature, is the way that the alien acts reflexively to ‘de-naturalize the formulations and universalizing tenden-cies of the mainstream disciplines,’ which are themselves Euro-American products.8

In other words, the core purpose of AS is to combat Eurocentricism in the academy on the basis that ‘seriously seeking the diverse and alternative knowledges and experiences of other cultures and societies can be deeply challenging, decentering and [even] threatening.’9 The fundamental role of Area Studies is, in Szanton’s provocative terms, to ‘de-parochialize US- and Euro-centric visions of the world’ that dominate the social sciences and humanities. The quest is not only for new knowledge or empirical data, but also for new kinds of knowledge.This position represents a constructive variation on (or perhaps a reflexive reappropriation of ) Said’s critique of Orientalism, in which the ‘Oriental Other’ is engaged as a kind of mirror that reaffirms, through exoticised difference, the integrity and identity of the (Western) self. Here, however, difference is not seen as comforting or reassuring regarding a particular identity but rather as threatening to the universalist aspirations of that particularity (or simply as revealing those aspirations as naïve and unreflective versions of imperialism).At this point, then, it may be enough to note some purposive kinship between this vision of AS and SF as cognitive estrangement: both are necessarily and centrally concerned with de-parochialising or estranging the self from the accepted conventions of knowledge in Europe and the US via the

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ConclusionsIt would obviously be ridiculous to argue that AS, even the study of cyberAsia, is a variety of science fiction. But it does not seem quite as ridiculous to claim that there is a science fictional frontier to AS, at which it interleaves with some of the conventions, practices and goals of SF. At some point, both seek to ‘document the existence, internal logic, and theoretical implications of the distinctive social and cultural values, expressions, structures, and dynamics that shape societies’ in the non-West. And both aim to use these documents to denaturalise the West.It is interesting that both AS and SF appear to have pushed out into this shared frontier as part of aggressive processes of self-defence within larger realms that constantly assault their credibility. This generates a number of implications. In terms of method, AS moves most strongly away from its science fictional frontier when it embraces rigorously disciplinary work (merely focussed on Asia). However, this also risks undermining the radical agenda of AS to de-parochialise the conventional disciplines themselves – in the extreme this is a capitulation to this parochialism. At the other extreme, AS might explore its science fictional frontier more explicitly, questing for new types of knowledge to endanger the status quo, developing new theories and methods, boldly going where no-one has gone before. However, this direction risks transforming AS into a literary genre.Finally, I wonder about the ethical status of knowledge at this frontier. In particular, since the know-ledge generated there is explicitly instrumental in purpose (it is to be used to de-naturalise the West), I wonder whether SF could be seen as the moral conscience of AS. Following Kant, treating another as a means rather than as an end is an absolute evil. Hence, if we seek to use, say, Japan as a foil to de-parochialise Western disciplines, wouldn’t it be morally superior to use Swift’s Japan in Gulliver’s Travels or Gibson’s Japan in Neuromancer?

A version of this paper was originally presented on the ‘Traces’ panel at the Modern Languages Association, San Francisco, 30th December 2008

Unfortunately (again in a moral sense), reality is not always enough to prevent alienation. Indeed, many of the disciplinary critics of AS are explicit that, for instance, the intellectual traditions of the non-West are so alien to those of the West that ‘we’ cannot ‘recognise ourselves’ in their dilemmas or solutions. Richard Rorty even claims that an alien visiting our world from Sirius would simply give up and go home if asked to compare a Buddhist sense of self with that of a European sense; the two are unrecognisable to each other.10 The point is that, in practice, the border between West and non-West might be experienced as more alienating than the border between reality and fiction. For some, a Buddhist model of selfhood cannot transform ‘our’ thinking about the self, although the science fictional figure of an alien from Sirius can help to persuade us of the truth of this. Certain Euro-American philosophers are alienated from Tibetan thinkers, but only estranged from envoys from Sirius. SF is less alien than AS. In other words, when it comes to cognitive estrangement, reality may be beside the point (which has some serious moral and political implications).

Narrating and imagining the alien The flip side of this issue concerns the matter of authorial authority and the meaning of textual reality. At its most basic: can we really talk about reality in texts, or are we always dealing with representations mediated by authors with varying authorities?There is a wide and sophisticated literature on this question and there is no need to rehearse it here.11 But let me reiterate: I am not interested in making the philosophical claim that all texts are essentially fictions and hence that there is no epistemological difference between representations of Sirius, Laputa, Glubdubdrib and Japan.12 I am interested, rather, in exploring the frontier where SF and AS appear to meet and what sets them apart if they really share some kind of purposive kinship.A possible answer involves two core questions: what is the author’s subject? – ie. what is he/she ‘seeking to know, analyse, and interpret’; and what devices are employed to accomplish this? In terms of the first question, we have already seen that the provisional and expansive answer for both AS and SF is the dubious category of ‘non-Western’ cultures. However, we need to ask whether authors are trying to represent or analyse real cultures or imaginary ones. In the case of AS, we must assume that authors seek to represent real cultures as directly and transparently as possible (accepting that absolutely direct and transparent representations are impossible). In the case of SF as cognitive estrangement, we also assume that authors seek to represent real(istic) cultures, albeit creatively or indirectly with varying degrees of proximity to the real. Recall that representations of the entirely imaginary are fantasy, myth or fairytale, not SF. In other words, the question of the nature of the writer’s subject erects only a hazy frontier between SF and AS.The real difficulty when defining the frontier between AS and SF, however, concerns the question of method. While it is clear that SF employs a form of Imagineering (with varying degrees of scientific research in order to satisfy the ‘cognitive’ requirement), AS is not able to differentiate itself through recourse to a rigorous disciplinary methodology. Indeed, AS often voices an explicit commitment to inter-, multi- or extra-disciplinary techniques and new forms of knowledge creation. Its method is non-exclusively defined – could it include Imagineering? There is a perceptible haze around the frontier, and hence writers may slip from one territory into the other. There is a no-man’s land of Alien Studies.

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Cobus van Staden Heidi in Japan: What do Anime’s Dreams of Europe mean

for Non-Europeans?

Cobus van Staden

Heidi in Japan: What do Anime’s Dreams of Europe mean for Non-Europeans?

Examining mechanisms through which anime narrative became naturalised in non-Asian countries teaches us much about how non-Hollywood, non-Western cultural globalisation happened. Before anime became cool, it had braved knee-jerk dismissal and it frequently did so by entering the international market via traditionally underrated genres such as children’s television, with stories set in Europe or adaptations of European children’s books. However, as Cobus van Staden explains, this strategy was also prefigured by a long tradition of Europhilia in Japan, which significantly complicated the reception of anime both in Japan and abroad.

Takahata Isao’s anime adaptation of Johanna Spyri’s 19th century novel Heidi is a good example of this process. Heidi, a Girl of the Alps (Arupusu no Shoujo Haiji, Japan, 1974) became a hit in Japan and ended up dubbed and syndicated around the world, including South Africa, which is where I first encountered her. Heidi retains a potent nostalgic power that is fundamentally related to its depiction of an Alpine life most audience members have never experienced. However, the meaning of this European setting becomes highly unstable in different contexts, an instability I hope to describe in this article.

Heidi in JapanThe fashion for European settings was sparked in the 1970s by the 1972 shoujo (girls’) manga hit The Rose of Versailles, and its anime adaptation (Berusai no Bara, Tadao Nagahama and Osamu Dezaki, Japan, 1979). The same decade brought Sekai Meisaku Gekijou (World Masterpiece Theatre) a series of anime adaptations of Western children’s classics produced by Zuiyo Eizou (later Nippon Animation.) It represented a major Japanese move into the European market and included Moomin, The Dog of Flanders and Anne of Green Gables. Takahata’s Heidi was a particularly successful part of this series.1 Subsequently, European settings have shown up in anime regularly, varying from relatively realistic depictions of Victorian England (Emma – A Victorian Romance [Eikokukoi Monogatari Ema, Tsuneo Kobayashi, Japan, 2005]) to using 19th century Europe as a setting for a robot invasion (Steamboy [Suchiimuboi, Katsuhiro Ootomo, Japan, 2004]). These depictions also vary in terms of geographic specificity. Whereas, for example, Miyazaki Hayao’s Kiki’s Delivery Service (Majo no Takkyuubin, Japan, 1989) is set in a bricolage-Europe, seemingly assembled from bits of European cities all the way from Helsinki to Naples, Heidi’s Alpine setting is very specific. In fact, Miyazaki Hayao worked as a background designer on Heidi and even went on a research trip to Switzerland in order to render the setting accurately, a detail which was used in the marketing for the series in Japan.2

‘Everyone’s beautiful, enchanted country’It is worthwhile asking why European settings retain such power, compared to the relative scarcity of American settings in anime. While I don’t want to opine on how Japanese people relate to Europe, it is interesting to compare depictions of Europe in earlier Japanese pop culture to its depiction in contemporary anime.

Notes1 Goto-Jones, Chris. 2008. ‘From Science Fictional Japan to Japanese Science Fiction,’

in IIAS Newsletter 47 (spring 2008)

2 Suvin, Darko ‘Estrangement and Cognition,’ in Gunn, James & Mathew Candelaria

(eds). 2005. Speculations on Speculation. Oxford: Scarecrow Press, p.24. Suvin

himself seems interested in the contours of the landscape between the extremes,

in the ways in which adventures (in particular those of the 18th and 19th century)

are often cast as ‘syncretic travelogue and voyage imaginaire’ at once both day-

dream and intelligence report. In a number of ways, this might be a description

of all authored texts.

3 Ibid. p.32

4 Ibid. p.27

5 Ibid. p.25

5 Tansman, Alan Tansman. 2004. ‘Japanese Studies: The Intangible Act of Translation,’

in Szanton, David (ed.) The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines.

Berkeley: University of California Press, p.184

6 Szanton, op. cit. p2

7 Here I’m ignoring the various answers that serve as common critiques of the

whole Area Studies enterprise, such as the argument that the purpose of Area

Studies is to ‘know thy enemy.’ This critique is especially common in the USA since

World War II.

8 Ibid. p.2

9 Ibid. p.2

10 This argument is developed in Goto-Jones, Chris. 2005. ‘If the past is a different

country are different countries in the past,’ in Philosophy, 80:311

11 In the field of anthropology, see in particular, Clifford, James. 1988.

The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

12 A fascinating interrogation of the function of Japan in Gulliver’s Travels is Markley,

Robert. 2004. ‘Gulliver and the Japanese: The Limits of the Postcolonial Past,’

in Modern Language Quarterly, 65:3

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Cobus van Staden Heidi in Japan: What do Anime’s Dreams of Europe mean

for Non-Europeans?

found the following comment from an anonymous contributor: ‘Heidi – it was on Tuesday night at 7 o’clock. Even our school never arranged anything for Tuesday nights because no-one came as everybody was watching Heidi. Lol’5. Heidi wasn’t just popular with children – it became a multi-generational hit. Nienaber told me she heard the rumour that B.J. Vorster (South Africa’s Prime Minister from 1966 to 1978, whose reign saw the bloody suppression of the 1976 Soweto Uprising and the killing of Steve Biko) never scheduled meetings on Tuesday nights because he was watching Heidi with his grandchildren.How did Heidi’s portrayal of Europe and its cultural specificity relate to its popularity? When I put this question to those I interviewed, I received diametrically opposed answers. On the one hand several respondents felt the power of the Afrikaans dub made people feel that the series was their own. Marida Swanepoel, who was involved in the acquisition of children’s programming, said the series gave one the feeling that it had originally been made in Afrikaans. That was certainly what I thought as a five-year old Heidi fan. On the other hand, several respondents also suggested that the European setting was a crucial contributing factor to its popularity. Kobus Geldenhuys, who translated the script, felt that the setting appealed to Afrikaners’ cultural roots. Rina Nienaber suggested that Afrikaners of the era didn’t really feel that they were living in Africa at all. Due to the overwhelming Eurocentrism of apartheid education, the Alps felt much less exotic than South Africa’s neighbouring states.It seems to me that Heidi’s success is related to Afrikaners’ conflicted relationship with Europe. At the exact moment when Western Europe was leading the campaign to isolate the apartheid regime and to dissociate itself from its colonial creation, Afrikaners were using dubbing to insert themselves into a 19th century European landscape. The theme tune, which fused Afrikaans lyrics with mock-Swiss yodeling became a symbol of apartheid’s attempts to proclaim itself as simultaneously Europe’s heir and peer – much to the distaste of actual Europeans. The irony of course is that this was facili-tated by Japanese animation. An additional irony is that several of the people I interviewed did not actually realise Heidi is Japanese. Several of them assured me that the series was actually German.

Anime’s dreams of EuropeHow is it possible for one anime series to evoke such wildly divergent meanings? I think the non-European audience’s encounter with this onscreen Europe is less related to their knowledge of actual Europe than with their perception of this setting as ‘beautifully past’. This is a version of what Arjun Appadurai has called ‘nostalgia without memory’. The power of Europe in this series lies not on the level of intelligibility but on the level of appeal. It functions by building atmosphere and providing background. Appadurai has argued that this nostalgia – not driven by actual experience but rather by its lack – is fundamental to contemporary marketing: ‘Rather than expecting the consumer to supply memories while the merchandiser supplies the lubricant of nostalgia, now the viewer need only bring the faculty of nostalgia to an image that will supply the memory of a loss he or she has never suffered. This relationship might be called armchair nostalgia, nostalgia without lived experience or collective historical memory.’6I believe that the power of Europe in anime should not simply be understood as the continuing power of Europe itself in the imagination of the world. It is worth asking whether fictional Europe’s power as ‘everyone’s beautiful, enchanted country’ might not point to the power of capitalism to create the illusion of memory out of the absence of memory. In that case, contemporary Europeans might be as alienated from – and yet strangely connected to – these images as the rest of us.

In 1927, and again in 1947 and 1957 revivals, the all-female Takarazuka theatre troupe put on a revue called Mon Paris. A travelogue with scenes depicting exotic locales from Tokyo to Paris, the show epito-mised what Jennifer Ellen Robertson characterises as Japanese orientalism. Most of the scenes were set against exotic backgrounds such as Ceylon and Egypt, portrayed less as societies and more as a series of static essences (the Egypt section, for example, featured a Cleopatra-like queen). When the travellers reach Paris, they find bustling crowds, the dynamic modernism contrasted with sleeping Asia. They decide to take in a revue, only to find that Mon Paris is also on in Paris – the French have imported Takarazuka. One of the travellers remarks that Paris and the whole of France is like Ta-karazuka – ‘everyone’s beautiful, enchanted country; a country of dreams smoldering since childhood.’3While the regularity with which European settings recur in anime would indicate that Europe retains an emotional power in Japan, two important differences emerge between Mon Paris and Heidi. Firstly, in Mon Paris, Europe represents burgeoning modernity and Asia sleepy timelessness (with Japan symbolically making the passage from one to the other.) However, in Heidi and the vast majority of anime series with European settings, the site of timelessness is Europe, not Asia. There are very few anime depictions of contemporary Europe. Mostly, Europe is treated as a changeless Ruritania, where the use of historically European detailing and landscapes designates the setting as ‘beautifully past.’ Secondly, the Takarazuka revue depicted the implied validation of Japan in Europe through the fantasy that Takarazuka is also popular in big, modern Paris. Heidi however, doesn’t mention Japan at all – it doesn’t need to. The characters might speak about their yearning for the Alps, but they do so in idiomatically correct Japanese. Even the very European class divisions between the characters are principally expressed through the use of different politeness registers in spoken Japanese. There is no need for an explicit Japanese presence in Heidi because it is infused with ‘Japaneseness’ from within. The anime version of Heidi represents a remaking of a European children’s classic in Japanese terms. Johanna Spyri’s original novel was a standard of Swiss primary school curricula. Its represen-tation of the Alps as a life-giving force and Heidi’s decline after being taken to Frankfurt was used to strengthen Swiss self-identification in relation to its powerful neighbour.4 The anime adaptation, however, does not demand such specific knowledge about Europe. For example, it doesn’t even emphasise that Frankfurt is in a different country than the Swiss Alps. Switzerland has changed from an actual place with its own politics to a fantasy territory, primarily created for the pleasure of Japanese consumers. The evolution from Mon Paris to Heidi offers a coded snapshot of how Japanese attitudes vis-à-vis European power changed against the background of Japan’s own economic ascendance during the 1970s.

Heidi in AfricaThe story of Heidi’s consumption in South Africa is intimately linked to apartheid-era local content law, which demanded equal broadcast time in English and Afrikaans. This led to a burgeoning dubbing industry. Because the history of popular culture and dubbing in South Africa is largely undocumented, I base my discussion of Heidi in South Africa on a series of interviews I conducted in 2008 with people who were directly involved in the dubbing of Heidi into Afrikaans. When Heidi was originally broadcast in 1979, it became a South African phenomenon. Rina Nienaber, who provided the voice of Peter the Goatherd described how she was approached for interviews by several magazines and was featured in a special inset on Heidi in Huisgenoot, South Africa’s most popular weekly magazine. On a web discussion forum dedicated to South African pop culture, I

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Notes 1 Yamaguchi, Y. 2004. Nihon Anime no Zenshi: Sekai wo Sei Shita Nihon Anime no

Kiseki, Tokyo: Ten-Books

2 Oshiguchi, T. “Interview with Hayao Miyazaki” in Ledoux, T. (ed.) 1997.

Anime Interviews: The First Five Years of Animerica Anime and Manga Monthly,

San Francisco: Cadence Books

3 Robertson, J.E. 2001. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern

Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press

4 This point was first brought to my attention by the Swiss scholar Alain Bihr and

I later also encountered it in Hunt, P. et al (eds). 1996. International Companion

Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, London: Taylor & Francis

5 See http://www.tvsa.co.za/forum/archive/index.php?t-6094.html (last accessed on

April 25 2008)

6 Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

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Jeroen de Kloet Bloggers, Hackers and the King Kong Syndrome

Jeroen de Kloet

Bloggers, Hackers and the King Kong Syndrome

It is tempting to celebrate the emergence of the Internet as the dawn of a new era, promising possibilities for political change, civic participation, and obliteration of traditional geographical confines. More specifically, the rise of new technologies is often heralded as breaking open regimes that do not live up to the hegemonic ideologies of democracy and capitalism. Jeroen de Kloet reveals the two interlocking narratives which continue to preoccupy Western academic and popular discourse on the Internet in China.

King Kong in China The first of these narratives regards stories related to online protest, which at times triggers offline protests. For example, the protest in the summer of 2007 against the building of a chemical factory in Xiamen was generally perceived as a consequence of protest postings by blogger Zuola. The second is stories related to issues of censorship and digital human rights. The Great Firewall of China may well be the most popular, if not worn out, metaphor mobilised to point to the assumed omnipotence of the government. Lokman Tsui has rightly observed that such a metaphor builds on a cold war rhetoric in which China is positioned as the constitutive outside of ‘the free, open and democratic West.’ His observa-tion resonates with what literary critic Rey Chow refers to as the King Kong syndrome, ‘producing ‘China’ as a spectacular primitive monster whose despotism necessitates the salvation of its people by outsiders.’ Indeed, the motif running through the two interlocking narratives concerning Internet in China is precisely the urgent need to expose, discipline and punish this monster, to tame it, hopefully, to the world of ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ societies. Not surprisingly, what is being played out in the Chinese cyberspace is more messy, and thus more ambivalent than such narratives want us to believe. Rather than taking a clear position, I want to explore this messy digital domain called ‘The Chinese Internet,’ drawing on my research – online and offline – among bloggers (in 2008) and hackers (in 2004), before returning to deliberate on the destiny of our giant monster.

Citizen voices? When I met Wang Xiaofeng in 1997, he was a rock journalist; 10 years later, he has become one of the most popular bloggers of the mainland. As many fellow bloggers, he combines his job as a journalist with his blogging, while the latter has become a commercial enterprise in China: the more readers you have, the more advertisements and money you can attract. Wang’s style is ironic and cynical, poking fun at everything around him. To him, blogging offers a way to play with language, to experiment online with words and phrases that would not easily pass censorship. During the wave of pro-Tibet protests and corresponding pro-Beijing nationalism surrounding the Olympic torch relay in April 2008, Wang ridiculed the popular ‘I Love China’ T-Shirts as well as the ‘I Love China’ sign used by millions of MSN users in their name tag. His response to the boycott of French products (called for in protest against the meeting between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the Dalai Lama), was simple, ‘if there is one thing that I boycott, it is stupid things.’ At the same time, he also points his critique towards Western journalists; he writes on his blog: ‘Western jour-nalists always hope that the Chinese people they interview will touch upon sensitive issues and give

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Jeroen de Kloet Bloggers, Hackers and the King Kong Syndrome

developed a certain program or system, they may not share it.’ Following Sharpwinner and Goodwell, it seems that the grey hacking zone in China is criss-crossed with fault lines of (a)political longings as well as (un)willingness to share and cooperate. The lack of shared cultural practices makes it, indeed, difficult to speak of a hacker culture in China, a stark contrast to my research experience in New York among the hacker communities there, where sharing (manifest, among others, in their meeting places, conferences and gatherings) was largely the norm.

King Kong reconsideredWhat, then, can we learn from these observations on bloggers and hackers? Let me return to the King Kong syndrome, which configures a monster to be tamed and brought to the civilised world. What we eventually witness, at least in King Kong films, is buildings crumbled, windows smashed to pieces, and the order of the day radically disrupted before the primitive monster ends up being killed by modern weaponry. I will therefore make two appeals from this brief account of Internet in China. First, such chaos and fragmentation that King Kong brings with it is precisely what we need to acknowledge and accept when we try to make sense of China and its Internet. Too often, accounts on Chinese Internet communities are driven by an agenda that is drenched in a cold war rhetoric that will not bring us very far. Second, the death of King Kong should force us to rethink narratives of civilisation, and the hegemonic mantra of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘human rights.’ The problem is the lack of reflection upon the production of knowledge over China and its intricate relation to power and ideology. The basic Foucauldian (and Said-ian) question of why we produce what tropes of knowledge is all too often ignored.

ReferencesChow, Rey. ‘King Kong in Hong Kong: Watching the ‘Handover,’ from the USA,’

Social Text 55 (Summer 1998)

Tsui, Lokman. 2008. ‘The Great Firewall as Iron Curtain 2.0: The implications of China’s

Internet most dominant metaphor for U.S. foreign policy,’ paper presented at the

6th annual Chinese Internet Research Conference (13–14 June, University of Hong

Kong, Hong Kong), at http://jmsc.hku.hk/blogs/circ/files/2008/06/tsui_lokman.pdf,

accessed 15 February 2009.

On the black prison story, see: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/10/17/china-co-

operation-20-on-beijing’s-black-jails/

sensational remarks. They try their best to make their interviewee look like a dissident.’ One of his best known stunts took place in March 2006, when Wang posted on his blog that ‘Due to unavoidable reasons with which everyone is familiar, this blog is temporarily closed.’ As he expected, it was only a matter of hours before the ‘news’ became known worldwide through global news channels. Subsequently, he revealed it was a hoax, to put up a mirror to the Western media that is so obses-sively searching for cases of censorship. Informed by such complexity as demonstrated by bloggers like Wang Xiaofeng, any study of the Chinese blogosphere must try to be alert of metanarratives and stay close to the specifics. The out-spoken blog by Michael Anti, for instance, was removed by Microsoft after he voiced his critique on the dismissal of critical journalists at the Beijing News. This shows how global capitalism is deeply complicit with censorship practices in China. At the same time, to avoid foreclosing the political potentials of digital technologies, I have to be reminded of yet another specific incident. Last October, blogger Zuola went with a number of activists to one of the ‘black prisons’ in Beijing, where political activists were illegally detained. This group of activists, through their mobile devices, immediately uploaded their story to Twitter and their blogs, complete with pictures and sound recording of the harassment that took place when policemen started to fight with two of the visiting activists. In this case, new technologies did open up immediacy to citizen politics as we know it.Again, I must hasten to add: such examples are not only rare, but also risk reducing ‘China’ to the conventional understanding and expectation of politics. The definition one gives of China’s blogo-sphere is likely to be very much informed by a specific political agenda – if one likes to see politics, one can find politics, just as if one is looking for seedy sex blogs, one can also find precisely that. The examples I have cited point to the impossibility of speaking of the Chinese blogosphere – there are many spheres, which are as complex as the prefix ‘Chinese’ is problematic in its privileging of the nation-state above other possible cartographies either more localised or more globalised.

Techno nationalism?If we move from the blogosphere towards hacker cultures in China, we enter a grey zone that often borders on the illegal. Yet, this zone is equally complex, making, once again, simple generalisations impossible, if at all desirable. In the West, most media attention has been given to the nationalistic hackers of China, who, allegedly spend their holidays breaking into Taiwanese, Japanese or American sites, to add a PRC flag, or insert political slogans. Sharpwinner is such a ‘red hacker’, who believes ‘Chinese hackers have a strong sense of politics.’ On his involvement in the attacks on the website of the American White House, he explains: ‘Those .gov and .mil sites are always our targets. For the White House site, we have spent most of our time to find the loopholes.’ The attention they get is much to the dismay of hackers like Goodwell, a Beijing-based hacker who looks down upon ‘script-kiddies’ like Sharpwinner who simply copy codes to hack other sites. ‘I think [the hacking war between China and Japan and the US] is just awkward and boring. The real hackers have no sense of boundaries, they have nothing to do with politics, politics should never infect technology.’ To Goodwell and his friends, the spirit of hacking revolves around curiosity: ‘As a hacker, I think you should never give up, you should always study on, whether you fail or succeed, so as to develop new technologies.’ While relentless curiosity should be a driving force that binds hacking cultures, China, in the view of Goodwell, is a bad place for hackers: ‘In America, hackers may have their own culture and ideology, in China people have no sense of hacking culture and ideology. In China, you first need to secure your income. (...) Chinese have no sense of cooperation, no team spirit, if they

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Bart Barendregt In the Year 2020: Muslim Futurities in Southeast Asia

Muslims in SpaceWestern stereotypes tend to describe Islam scathingly as a ‘backward’ orientation or an absence of futurity because fate seems to lie in the hands of Allah. Indeed, writings by Muslims futurists are still few and far between.1 There is some Arabic science fiction, alternative histories and, not surpris-ingly, Islamic terrorists increasingly play a prominent role in Western sci-fi novels. This dearth does not imply the future and sci-fi are wholly incompatible with Muslim thinking. Nuruddin (2006) describes how science fiction is central to the ideology of various African American Islamic movements, which believe their predecessors were Black Muslim astronauts from outer space. Exotic though these readings of the past may be, they do offer an alternative interpretation of world history, colonialism and racism, and also teach present-day Muslims how technology will lead to a resurgence of their ancient Islamic civilisation in the near future. In that sense their ideal is not too far removed from what is happening in mainstream Muslim societies, in which there is a growing tendency to look at space and technology as being the next frontier. Recently, the Malaysian Astronomy and Islamic Law Association discussed how to maintain the kneeling prayer posture while in a weightless condition, eating halal food and proper washing when aboard a spaceship. Malaysian scientists are even developing software named ‘Muslims in Space’, which should enable Islamic astronauts of the future to find how to face Mecca. Here issues of religion and technological development seem to collide with questions about the future orientation of the Muslim community worldwide. A future which is no longer associated exclusively with countries traditionally thought of as the cultural heart of the Islamic world. While not all Muslims welcome the reliance on new Information technologies with undivided joy, technology has been widely embraced by Southeast Asian Muslims, often for religious and also political purposes. When it comes to technology in Islamic futurist thinking, some of the countries in Muslim Southeast Asia have become a role model not only for the region and the developing world at large, but also for Muslim coreligionists in other parts of the world. To explain this, the focus of this article will be concentrated on two newly developing Muslim majority nations in Southeast Asia, Malaysia and Indonesia. Both countries have a near past of nation-building and developmental thinking in which an almost iconic role has been accorded information technology.

Techno nationalism and digital developmentObservers from Anderson to Mrázek have noted how from the outset nation-building in the newly developing Southeast Asian states has been characterised by a profound obsession with things modern, especially iconic technologies. Such iconic technologies have evolved from the early days of print nationalism to national cars and lately national phones. The realisation of ICT infrastructure and innovative e-governance applications especially have become a hallmark of Southeast Asian modernity. Such projects include Indonesia’s successful launching of its own satellite system in 1976, creating a modern day variant of Anderson’s national audience, and boosting New Order techno-political visions (Barker 2005). However, in the 1990s when a new Internet era evolved Southeast Asian politicians began focusing on prestigious state-run campaigns to develop the needed ICT infrastructure. The best known of these projects is Malaysia’s Vision2020, which comes with the Malaysian answer to Silicon Valley, Cyberjaya, and its associated Multimedia Super Corridor. In 1991 Prime Minister Mahatir Mohammad chose a year nearly three decades into the future as a target for his country’s national, political, economic, and social development. By that magical year (and 2020 would frequently appear as ultimate target), Malaysia would be ready to participate as a

Bart Barendregt

In the Year 2020: Muslim Futurities in Southeast Asia

Thinking of the future is hardly possible without reference being made to the role of digital information technologies or the growing impact of knowledge industries. But how relevant are these concepts outside the Northern Hemisphere? Said to be on its way by 2020, Islamic Information Society posits an alternative to both Western ideas on the Global Village, as well as the hijacking of Islamic futures by radical conservatives. Bart Barendregt examines how majority Muslim countries in Southeast Asia have increasingly become role models in Islam’s quest for a digital future.

In his Imaginary Futures (2007), Richard Barbrook points out how the novelty of technologies lies not so much in what they can do in the here and now, but in what more advanced models may do one day in the imaginary future. Contemporary reality, he argues, is the ‘beta version of a science fiction dream’. Some of our most dominant science fiction dreams have been remarkably stable and continue to haunt us today. For over four decades the idea of Information Society has been a battleground for ideologists, a struggle whose origins can be traced to the early Cold War era. Although in those days the US out-witted the Soviets on most terrains, including economics, the USSR could always resort to the powerful rhetoric of tomorrow’s communist paradise. Hence a much needed counter future was needed, which was eventually to be found in McLuhan’s bestselling Understanding Media (1964). While the Soviet intelligentsia propagated a future cybernetic communism by means of developing a ‘unified information network’, American think-tanks appropriated McLuhan’s technology in their drive for progress, above all his notion of the Global Village, eventually producing what we now know as the Net, one of the building blocks of today’s information society. Today our future remains largely technologically driven, encouraging blind faith in technology, bringing in its wake not only long-term conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the rise of a global economy in which e-commerce and e-governance are not yet standard but nevertheless are a much sought after ideal by many. Does this mean that what Barbrook refers to as the ‘Californian ideology’, a strange contradictory mix of the Left’s liberal society and the Right’s liberal market place, has become the dominant dictum in information society? Towards the end of his book Barbrook mentions how lately our future has once more become contested with ‘cyber jihadi’ eagerly making use of information communication technology (ICT) to propagate their ideas. To this assertion, we may add the assurance that Muslim politicians and intelligentsia are certainly not willing to leave the future to radical conservatives and consequently have been forced to come up with viable counter scenarios; these ideas are widely commented on in developmental programmes for the Islamic world as well as in the domain of Muslim popular culture. The latter offers a useful starting point in this brief inventory of the contestation of information society.

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‘near perfect past’, leaving the Islamic world little room for progress. More progressive thinkers argue that there is more to the contemporary revival of Islam than the radical views of conservative Muslims. There is the success story of Islamic economics (from syariah-based micro credit, to present-day Islamic mobile banking) and the more controversial call for a truly Islamic science. They argue that classical Muslim discourse is not greatly concerned with State and politics, but concentrates entirely on the issue of a community bound by faith (ummah). Hence, some have urged for a multicultural Islam to commence a dialogue with the West and East Asia, in which Islamic ideas on economics, politics, the environment, not to mention science and technology, will become part of a global agenda. They envisage an alternative modernity based on a world governance system which is fair, just, and representational; which stresses the existence of self-reliant, sustainable ecological communities and, not surprisingly, the use of advanced technologies to link such communities (see Inayatullah 2005). It is such a concept of tomorrow’s ummah, first referred to by people as Muslim intellectual Sardar, and also embraced by Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim (1991), which can compete with the crowd-pulling power of cyber fundamentalism or, for that matter, the more Western style liberal Information Society. Once again, such futures of a post-postmodern Muslim society are not all that far off.

From Malay visions to technological blessings Malaysia has been internationally heralded as a leader in planning for the future, combining economic progress with cultural values (Islam, Malay, and later even Asian values); a reputation which is largely attributable to the tireless efforts of former prime minister Mahatir and his vision for the year 2020. Nevertheless, while generally respected as a great statesman in the Muslim world, some at home have criticised Mahatir and his UMNO party for using Islam only superficially to win votes. Consequently, it is not surprising that the post-Mahatir era has seen Muslim organisations and individuals claiming an even more religiously inspired future. In the popular domain, this think-ing is signalled in the Malaysian film Syukur 21 (Blessings for the 21st century), which was released throughout Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Indonesia in early 2001, in the hope of drawing crowds to the cinemas at the end of the annual fasting period. The film, claimed to be the world’s first-ever Islamic science fiction, offers an Islamic counter-modernity to the ambitious, recent large-scale development projects in the target markets. The year in which it is set – 2021 – is not coincidental as it follows directly on the heels of the State-run Malaysian campaign of Vision 2020. And the film is not the sole counter reading of nationalist futures. Two years after the release of Syukur21, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), representing 57 Muslim majority countries in the UN, held its biennial congress in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The conference, aptly entitled ‘Science and Technology for Socioeconomic Well-Being of the Ummah’, promoted a combination of spirituality and technology as medicine to aid the newly developing post-colonial world. The Kuala Lumpur declaration of 2003, better known as Vision 1441 (the Islamic year 1441 not coincidently equals 2020 and therefore is again a clear reference to the more secular Vision 2020, showing to what extent Malaysia has become a spiritual guide in the modernisation of the Islamic world) urged its members to focus on strengthening the knowledge-based or K-economy, but also to fight the deepening divides which threaten much of the Islamic world, large parts of which are still situated in the poor South. Some years earlier, the Tunis Forum on ICTs and Development in the Islamic world (2000) had already signaled similar dangers facing many Muslim and developing countries which were lagging behind in the area of ICT. Participants in both conferences have hence been mobilised not

regional, if not world power. Similar information technology infrastructural projects have been envisaged in other parts of Southeast Asia, albeit not all of them equally successful. These projects have all been devised to make the great leap forward, preparing Southeast Asia for the challenges of the 21st century. Lately the belief in a technologically driven future has been transformed into what is now known as information technology for development. This ICT4D discourse has resulted locally in the formation of an e-ASEAN group focusing on the potential of both e-commerce and e-governance applications, echoing the hopes of a digital revolution in the near future, very similar to the imagined futures fostered by the Cold War elites. As a (not always intended) consequence, the Southeast Asian region has become a much sought after market for media and telecom conglom-erates from both the West and East Asia, but there are other future collaborations on the horizon. Examples of such alliances include the marketing of such by now extremely popular ‘Made in the Middle East’ Muslim gadgets as the Islamic Phone or the Ipod-like ‘Pocket Muslim’. Indonesian telecommunications provider Telekom recently launched its Telekom Ibadah service, targeting Southeast Asian mobile phone users on the pilgrimage to Mecca. And in early 2007, as another even more exciting example of such new post-national projects, Malay newspapers reported on a new hi-tech city being developed in Medina with Malaysian support. The Medina Knowledge Economic City (KEC), expected to be completed by 2020, is to be a landmark providing opportunities to such twin programmes as Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor with what will be happening in Saudi Arabia in a few years. One newspaper quoted the Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister as saying that: ‘It shows how two Muslim countries can co-operate and collaborate in the interest of the ummah (Muslim community) and can indeed transform the Muslim world’ (Habib 2007). The Deputy Prime Minster states it was no more than fitting that Medina, the holy city which saw the beginning of the Islamic acquisition of knowledge, was chosen to transform the Muslims and bring about a true revival. It is this newly gained Islamic techno pride which brings us back to the future and how this is currently imagined among Southeast Asian Muslim intelligentsia.

Back to the Future and Back to Islam! From a Western perspective, the Islamic world has failed to modernise, secularise, and innovate. Recognising the gap between Western and Muslim civilisation at the outset of the 21st century, many Muslims blame this lack of development in Muslim societies on the experience of colonisation and subsequently the ongoing political and economic repression by the same West. It is this feeling of injustice which at present serves to unite Muslims. Scholars of Islam have argued how the same political and cultural repression has led Islam to be developed as a social philosophy comparable to socialism, communism, and capitalism. This rise of Islam as an ideological system is heralded by the overt use of new media technologies throughout the Muslim world now enabling a new Muslim middle class to discuss their religion easily without necessarily looking to classically trained authorities. As one of the basic tenets of Islam is to acquire knowledge, an interest in information technology seems to have become an end in itself among many believers, with technology and spirituality now reinforcing each other strikingly. The interest Southeast Asian Muslims take in a future determined by ICT therefore accords very well with the nationalist development ideologies mentioned above and with broader trends discernible throughout the Muslim world. One of the consequences of this new techno-savvy Islam has been the overt use of information technology by transnational Ikhwan and Salafi groups which propagate the ideal of the cyber Caliphate. The problem with their ‘retro futurism’ is that by means of modern ICT they resort to a seventh century

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None of these ‘poster preachers’ has had a traditional religious training nor indeed either an extensive knowledge of Arab language or of the Koran. Members of the Indonesian poster preacher generation are exponents of a public Islam which has been around ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1970, but which is now reaching its zenith in the wake of the diffusion of Information Technology in the Muslim world. Not surprisingly, this new restyled techno savvy popular culture does not escape controversy and conservative and Islamists groups especially have blamed it for what is now called either Market Islam, 15 minute Islam or Islam Lite as selling out or even of being the Devil in disguise. Various Muslim groups are now battling for the Islamic future, but in all of these futures information and communication technology is playing a decisive role.

An imagined future of spiritual technologyThe purpose of this contribution has been to start unravelling some of the dynamics of Muslim futurist thinking in Southeast Asia, especially where these touch the role of technology in it. While Indonesia’s 15 minute Islam or Malay Muslim techno nationalism are locally particular, they are not unique in the Muslim world and there is plenty of proof that one of the unexpected outcomes of the use of information technology by a young generation of Muslims especially is the emergence of a more moderate forward looking Islam. Whereas today’s Information Society was once a utopian ideal on both sides in the Cold War era, it is continuing to be an ongoing ideological battle for following generations in other parts of the world. As we speak, Muslim technocrats and intelligen-tsia are reinventing information society for tomorrow’s ummah: an imagined future of fair Islamic economics, just governance and sustainable communities bound by information technology. However, part of this future has already arrived in the Muslim world, surprisingly fast, too fast even for some, considering some of the controversies surrounding the present-day use of ICTs particularly by young Southeast Asian Muslims. Explicit religious use of Internet-based technology or mobile phones has brought such new challenges for young Muslims to face as Islamic capitalism, the superstar status of mobile Muslim evangelists, but also confronts them with questions related to the form and function of what Islamic technology ought to be. Is technology religious simply because it is made and used by Muslims (what I call the ‘Made in Mecca scenario’) or should it come with a carefully developed spiritual etiquette which breaks with Western antecedents of science and technology? And what does technology, once used, do to religion itself? The future has yet to teach us to what extent ideas about the cyber ummah are so very different from now dominant views of Information Society and to what extent this utopian vision will have an impact on Muslims using information technology in the present.

only to fight computer illiteracy, but also to urge Muslim governments and NGOs to think about long-term ICT policy, Islamic centres of excellence, and transnational cooperation throughout the Muslim world.2 This project includes the creation of an Islamic ICT Fund, the strengthening of an all Islamic Broadcasting Corporation, but also enshrines the wish to establish an Islamic Portal which encompasses the entire Web. Such ideas have meanwhile been taken over by other platforms. Recently Islamic-world.net, the site of the Malaysia based Khalifah Institute, came up with its ‘Web Plan’.3 Part of this Plan is to realise the number one top Islamic web portal providing positive infor-mation about Islam and giving daily commentary on important international news events from an Islamic perspective. Other strategies in very much the same vein as the present web 2.0 hype include polls to assess the opinion of Muslims worldwide on various issues important to Islam, while there is also the promise of developmentalism when cheaply Xeroxed materials are to be provided in areas of the world with as yet still limited access to electronic information technology. However, most interesting is the proposal to develop the ‘Islamic Net’, separate from the Internet as we know it, and with the provision of at least one computer terminal in every mosque in the world being linked to it. Here a future vision of the Net equals the coming of a united ummah.

From Muslim technocrats to poster preachersWhereas the US, Japan and South Korea are still prime examples of what modernity is supposed to look like, fellow OIC countries increasingly serve as an additional role model to Muslims in imagining the future: Turkey when it comes to an ideal political system; Iran for challenging US hegemony; Dubai for its economic successes; and Malaysia for the promise of a technological but none the less spiritual future. Indonesia, although not able to boast about considerable hi tech successes, may provide us with an even better illustration of Islam’s digital future, as many progressive thinkers here increasingly make use of a techno savvy form of Islam. After the end of the Suharto regime in 1998, Islamic politics soon flourished, gaining momentum as this coincided not only with the earlier mentioned Islamic Resurgence but also chimed in precisely with the worldwide ICT revolution. One of the most prominent examples of the combination of Islam, politics and information technology is the success story of the Prosperous Justice Party or PKS. The PKS, which emerged from parts of the students’ movement, which brought down Suharto, heavily emphasises the importance of modern information communication technology if it is to decolonise the proposed futures of ‘the imperialistic Western world’. But not all Indonesian Muslims are equally defensive nor do they all share the anti-Western attitude of the PKS. Hefner (2003) has argued that, whereas the growth of new intellectual Muslim discourses in other countries has tended to lead to radical extremism, in Indonesia so far it has resulted predominantly in a new, more moderate Islam. To many the face of this more moderate Islam has been the self-styled Muslim preacher and TV celebrity AA Gym. Gym has proven to be a successful entre-preneur who has published scores of Muslim self-help books, comics, pop music and soap serials. He is also one of the first to have launched a Muslim content for mobile phones and his Manajemen Qolbu Foundation makes heavy use of the Internet4 in much the same way Christian televangelists do in other parts of the world. He is not the first to do so. The history of Indonesian public Islam in the last four decades coincides strongly with de-velopments in information and communication technologies (cf. Watson 2005). Gym has been particularly successful in blending his Sufi wisdom with global business management tactics and, although he is now on the wane, others such as Opick (a former rock star now manifesting himself as pop preacher) and Ustad Jefri Al Buchori are already lining up to become Islam’s next celebrities.

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Jens Damm Chinascape: Moving Beyond the People’s Republic

Jens Damm

Chinascape: Moving Beyond the People’s Republic

The PRC Internet is exciting not just its middle-class users in China, but the legions of Chinese language speakers who access the Chinese Internet outside of the mainland. It is sparking media interest not just in China but in the West too and there appears to be a common understanding that the Internet is an essential part of China’s modernisation and opening up to the world. But what exactly characterises Chinese Internet use? Jens Damm goes in search of the borders of Chinese Cyberspace.

Any mention of the Chinese Internet is generally a reference to the Internet of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). With more than 250 million users, the PRC has become the ‘number one’ if comparisons are drawn with other countries and users present on the World Wide Web, although the relative Internet penetration rate in the PRC (19,1%) is still slightly below the world average (CNNIC, 7/2008).There are, however, other reasons for the prominence of the PRC in discussions on the Chinese Internet: The great success story linked with building an impressive infrastructure (Clark & Harwit, 2006) and the rapid ‘informatisation’ of Chinese urban society, the rapid growth in users who access the Internet via broadband (84.7%), and the 73.05 million users who access the web with mobile phones. In the context of infrastructure and technical figures, China has been very successful in implementing measures to improve the Net, for example, in building fibre networks to Tibet and other less developed regions in the West. There have also been several ambitious projects in the big cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, the Digital City Zhongguancun, and also in the coastal regions, such as Zhejiang, Guangdong and Fujian. China’s international bandwidth - which reached 312,346 Mbit/s in 2007 - and the number of registered domains which now stands at 14.85 million shows that China is fast approaching its goal of becoming the number one in the global Internet. Not surprisingly, the positive effects of the Internet and ongoing ‘informatisation,’ are frequently mentioned in the PRC’s mass media and in a growing number of academic publications on the importance of the Internet for the development of China. These positive effects include the introduc-tion of e-governance on a wide scale, which has been effective in promoting good governance and anti-corruption measures (Damm, 2006), the possibility of ‘leap-frogging’ an industrial development phase via informatisation (Xie, 2006), and the impact of the new interactive Web 2.0 applications (Ma, 2007). The PRC Internet also excites the interests of the Western media, but mostly in relation to issues of censorship and control (Damm, 2007). The different opinions regarding the 2008 Olympic Games may serve as the best example to date: While mainstream journalists described China as an authoritarian and inhumane regime, representatives of the academic world reminded us of the difference between Maoist China and China today. As far as Internet research is concerned, the Western academic world is only slowly moving towards describing a broader and much more multi-faceted picture of the PRC’s Internet. At this point I would like to mention, in particular, the efforts of the annual Chinese Internet Research Conference and also of some journalists who have been based in China for longer periods on topics concerning the way the Internet is used in China - whether there are any special characteristics, whether user behaviour differs from ‘global’ usage and

Notes1 A version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on The Role

of New Technologies in Global Societies, organized by the Department of Applied

Social Sciences, of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University on the 30th to 31st July

2008. Photos 1 and 2 are from the book Indonesian Dreams: Reflections on society,

revelations of the self (Buku OBor, KITLV Jakarta, 2008), edited by Tino Djumini and

reprinted here with permission of the author.

But see the World Futures Studies Federation, a global network of futurists of

which both Inayattulah and Sardar, progressive Muslim intellectuals, are member,

or Muslim Futures Network (http://www.wnf.org)

2 The IAS Tunis Declaration on Information Technology for Development in the

Islamic World also calls for Muslim countries to extend free trade agreements with

developing countries and open up their markets to software being developed in

the Third world

3 http://islamic-world.net/plan.php, Last accessed June 2008

4 See http://www.cybermq.com/, Last accessed June 2008

ReferencesBarbrook, R. 2007. Imaginary futures: from thinking machines to the global village.

London: Pluto.

Barker, J. 2005. Engineers and political dreams - Indonesia in the satellite age.

Current Anthropology 46:703-727

Habib, S. 2007. RM25b hi-tech city in Medina. the Star, Wednesday 28 February, pp3

Hefner, R. W. 1998. Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in a

Globalizing Age. Annual Review of Anthropology 27:83-104.

Ibrahim, A. 1991. The Ummah and tomorrow’s world. Futures 23:302-310

Inayatullah, S., 2005. Alternative futures for Muslims: challenges to linear and

cyclical macrohistory. Futures 37:1195-1200

Nuruddin, Y. 2006. Ancient black astronauts and extraterrestrial Jihads: Islamic

science fiction as urban mythology. Socialism and Democracy 20:127-165

Watson, C. W. 2005. A popular Indonesian preacher: The significance of AA

Gymnastiar. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11:773-792.

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netizens. This age structure also influences specific behaviour patterns prevalent on the PRC Internet, reflected in, for example, the great importance of entertainment. It would therefore be well worth researching new developments and trends to see whether these patterns remain unchanged as young people grew older and still use the Net. Regarding education, the PRC Internet is still very much dominated by better educated users, but here also the gap has become significantly smaller and, for example, less well educated migrants in the urban areas are using the Internet to stay in contact with their families in the hinterland. Also noteworthy is the rather low number of domestic computers accessible for Internet users in China: this stands at only 84.7 million, which means that many people still either access the Internet via cyber cafes – CNNIC puts this at 40% – or that an increasing number access the Internet via mobile phones, which in turn has consequences with regard to how the Internet is used. Entertainment and communication dominate usage patterns and are the frequently visited content of the Net. Users surveyed by CNNIC replied that online music played the most important role (212 million users), while other often mentioned usages were online videos, search engines, email and online games. Online games come seventh in the ranking of Internet applications in China; in June 2008, this was 58.3%, and the number of users reached 147 million. By way of comparison, the online game-using rate in the US in the same period was 35%.Instant messaging use is much higher than the worldwide average, but China still lags behind with regard to e-business and e-commerce. Global instant message providers, such as MSN, are popular, but there is also the unique Instant messaging application QQ which is popular in the PRC and almost nowhere else. (Nevertheless, large numbers of Chinese users has made QQ the third largest Instant messaging system worldwide). 77.2% of all Chinese users use Instant Messaging, compared with a figure of 39 % in the US. Another interesting factor is the increasing number of blogs. This phenomenon may well account for a whole new understanding of news media in China, particularly when considering the strictly censored official news outlets. As one journalist at the annual Chinese Internet Research Conference, which took place at the University of Hong Kong earlier this year commented: In the US when you hear a rumour about an earthquake you start watching TV; in China, nobody bothers to watch CCTV because everybody is convinced it will take hours for them to broadcast the news. People use SMS and go online. A good deal of interest, both in the PRC and the West, has been directed towards the use of blogs and personal space. This new development in China could radically alter the power between state and users, as users are becoming increasingly empowered.

Case 2: TaiwanIn Taiwan, the Taiwan Network Information Center (http://www.twnic.net) provides some specific surveys which not only cover statistical data regarding users and broadband access, but which also look into user behaviour. While these surveys are undertaken on a more ad hoc basis than those of the PRC/CNNIC, they are very well documented and offer valuable insights into the methodology and the research. The last two surveys - partly in Chinese, partly in English - dealt in particular with users employing either broadband or wireless access to the Internet (TWNIC, 7/2008, 2007). 79% of households in Taiwan owned computers, 71% of households had Internet access, 69% of households had broadband access and 96% of online households were using broadband connections. Thus, a rather impressive two thirds of Taiwanese are netizens. Mobile phones also play an important role and the penetration rate in Taiwan is 105%. In general, the user behaviour of Taiwanese netizens,

to what extent the Internet has changed Chinese society, despite the existing controls - are seldom mentioned, at least in the West.This raises a second issue: the lack of attention paid to the large number of people who are accessing the Internet in the Chinese language from outside the PRC and the question of how ethnic Chinese world-wide use the Internet. First, I will outline the topics which could be subsumed under the term ‘Chinese Internet’ in order to move away from a PRC-centrered view. Secondly, I shall examine some specific characteristics of the usage of the ‘Chinese Internet’ in specific regions; and, finally, I shall evaluate the findings to decide whether it is useful to talk about a common ‘Chinese Internet;’ whether there are Chinese characteristics (Zhongguo or Zhonghua) pertaining to Internet use, or whether the geographical boundaries extend so far into cyberspace that to speculate about a culturally defined Chinese cyberspace makes no sense. Defining ‘Chinese cyberspaces’ is problematic. The term may refer to cyberspaces which are defined either by language, being either Chinese, English, or any other language of the Chinese diaspora, or by content, that is, cyberspace dealing with cultural questions of Chineseness, history, and – very broadly defined – identity. With respect to language, we encounter the problem that the Chinese world does not employ Chinese as the sole language: while Chinese characters are normally used in the PRC, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, (albeit in two different versions), in Singapore and Malaysia, where Chinese is widely taught within the Chinese community, English is normally used online. The situation within the diaspora varies considerably. There are also huge differences between the language use of the new migrants (xin yimin) and the old diaspora. New migrants tend to employ Chinese in their specific blogs and BBS (Bulletin Board System) which restricts the audience to their own group and users coming from the homeland. Websites and blogs of the older Chinese diasporas, however, tend to employ English and/or the respective language of the new homeland, thus reaching out not to a wider, more general audience in the place of settlement. In terms of Chinese cyberspaces in the ‘homelands,’ Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao are – to varying degrees – forerunners in the new information and communication technologies. Emigration destinations of the ‘new migrants’, such as North America, Australia, and the Anglo Saxon world in general are among the most wired places on earth. In the case of China, national boundaries and ‘Internet boundaries’ are separate issues: Within the PRC, there are de facto ‘national’ boundaries which separate the mainland from Hong Kong and Macao, but totally different structures and policies exist in the context of Internet policy. Taiwan a de facto independent nation, due to the common international one-China policy, encounters many difficulties with regard to joining international organisations. However, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) assigned domain names such as ‘.hk’ to Hong Kong and ‘.tw’ to Taiwan as this body officially recognises ‘countries, territories, and separate economies.’

Case 1: PRCAccording to the latest bi-annual survey carried out by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNIIC), which was published in July 2008 and refers to data from 2007, several particularities can be observed. Regarding the demographic structure of PRC netizens, the number of females among users has increased to 46.4% of the total, considerably narrowing the gap which has long existed between male and female users. Compared with the other ‘Chinese places,’ and also with international trends, most of the users in the PRC are young. They tend to be aged 30 and under, which amounts to 68.6% of the netizens in China, and exceeds two thirds of the total number of

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and learning experiences’ (Wong, 2003) cannot be substantiated. Fourthly, regarding the specifics, the picture is very mixed: the PRC Internet is shaped, in particular, by interactive formats and a high degree of entertainment, while in Hong Kong mobile access plays a very significant role. Taiwan, on the other hand, follows international trends much more closely than the other two regions. In sum, the existence of a Chinese cyberspace without borders or boundaries cannot be confirmed. My analysis reveals the deficiencies in existing theories, such as the once popular proclamation of the Internet as a borderless space (Cairncross, 1997; Rheingold, 2000). While in many respects the Chinese cyberspace is global and reaches out, to some extent, beyond national borders, it is charac-terised by various constraints (Lessig, 1999), such as PRC censorship and by different patterns of usage.

ReferencesCairncross, Frances. 1997. The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution

will Change our Lives. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press.

Clark, Duncan, & Harwit, Eric. 2006. Government Policy and Political Control over

China’s Internet. In Jens Damm & Simona Thomas (Eds.), Chinese Cyberspaces:

Technological Changes and Political Effects. London and New York: Routledge.

CNNIC. 7/2008. Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China (January

2008). China Internet Network Information Center, http://www.cnnic.net.cn/

uploadfiles/pdf/2008/2/29/104126.pdf, accessed 10 Sep 2008.

Damm, Jens. 2006. China’s E-policy: Examples of Local E-government in Guangdong

and Fujian. In Jens Damm & Simona Thomas (Eds.), Chinese Cyberspaces:

Technological Changes and Political Effects. London and New York: Routledge.

Damm, Jens. 2007. The Internet and the Fragmentation of Chinese Society. Critical Asian

Studies.

Harding, Harry. 1995. The Concept of “Greater China”: Themes, Variations and

Reservations. In David L. Shambaugh (Ed.), Greater China: the Next Superpower?

Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Lessig, Lawrence. 1999. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books.

Liu, Chun-chou, Day, Wan-wen, Sun, Se-wen Sun, & Wang, Georgette. 2002.

User Behavior and the ‘Globalness’ of Internet: From a Taiwan Users’ Perspective. JCMC,

7(2, http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol7/issue2/taiwan.html, accessed 10 May 2007).

Ma, Weigong 馬為公. 2007. Hulianwang de xin shidai 互聯網的新時代 (The new era

of the Internet): Zhongguo guoji guangbo chubanshe 中國國際廣播出版社.

Meyer-Clement, Elena, & Schubert, Gunter. 2004. Greater China – Idee. Konzept.

Forschungsprogramm. Zur Einführung in einen neuen Arbeitsschwerpunkt am

Seminar für Sinologie und Koreanistik der Universität Tübingen. Greater China

Occasional Papers(1, http://www.gcs.uni-tuebingen.de/index.php?id=34, accessed

10 May 2007).

Pan, Lynn. 1999. The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Rheingold, Howard. 2000. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic

Frontier (Rev. ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Tu, Weiming. 1994. Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center. In The Living Tree:

the Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (pp. 1-34). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford

University Press.

resembles international user behaviour. For example, the use of search engines (searching 57.48% and browsing 46.76%) plays an important role and the use of email (26.96%) is more common than the use of instant messaging (17.41%). Online games are played by one fifth of Taiwanese users, which is more or less the global average. Unlike their PRC counterparts, Taiwanese users are less dependent on the Internet for getting news. Only 11.76% of the users read online news and blogs are also less important (5.18%). One explanation for this, of course, could be the free and uncensored media in Taiwan. E-shopping – an area in which the PRC lags behind places such as the US and the EU - is much more popular in Taiwan, while e-communities play a significantly lesser role.

Case 3: Hong KongHong Kong is, as a city-state, hardly comparable to Taiwan and the PRC. An e-infrastructure is usually much easier to establish in areas with a high population density. Thus, the household broad-band penetration rate (February 2008) was 76.7%; while the mobile phone penetration rate (February 2008) reached 154%. And, as is the case with Japan, mobile devices play a very important role in enabling Web access: a quarter of the time spent on the Internet is via mobile devices. A recent survey (2008 Digital 21 Strategy http://www.info.gov.hk/digital21/eng/statistics/stat.html) of Hong Kong users found that the most important features were communication with others 83.3% and browsing/surfing web pages (excluding Government websites) 81.3%; users also cited features such as searching for and downloading information online (excluding Government information) 60.3% and reading magazines / newspapers online 55.9%. Lower than the global average was the use of electronic business services online 37.8%, while online digital entertainment 37.5% played a sig-nificant, but not really outstanding role.

ConclusionsFirstly, it has been shown that the Chinese Internet, however this may be defined, is much larger than the PRC Internet. Secondly, there is certainly a large minority of Chinese speakers using the Internet outside the PRC proper. Regarding the mutual possibilities of accessing the Chinese Internet especially across the Taiwan strait, a contradictory observation can be made: despite the obvious censorship and blocking measures of the PRC, the Chinese language Internet can be widely accessed in both directions, that is, the Chinese language Internet outside the PRC is accessible to users from the PRC, while the PRC Internet is open to all users from outside the PRC. However, the technical limitations and laws present obstacles to a free and borderless Internet: the PRC, in particular, hinders communication between either side of the Taiwan Strait by blocking not only all the official Taiwanese websites, but also the Taiwanese pro-communist websites engaging in cross-Strait issues. Sensitive and political issues and discussions simply do not travel across the Taiwan Strait. Thirdly, cultural boundaries seem to exist: people surf the places where they feel comfortable. Empirical research carried out in Taiwan (Liu, Day, Sun, & Wang, 2002) mentions the fact that 85% of Taiwanese users remain almost exclusively within the Taiwanese cyberspace, and that the number of users visiting foreign websites (English and Japanese) is still greater than the number visiting other Chinese cyberspaces (5.9%). This questions the results of earlier research on the Internet and the Chinese Diaspora and, for example, Long Wong’s claim that ‘The Internet has become a new global phenomenon, enlarging new democratic discourse and has helped to foster new empowerment

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Tu, Weiming. 1996. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Recognition in Contemporary

Taiwan. The China Quarterly (148).

TWNIC. 7/2008. Jiushiqi niandu Taiwan wuxian wanglu shiyong zhuangkuang diao-

cha - zhaiyao fenxi 九十七年度台灣無線網路使用狀況調 - 摘要分析. Taiwan

Network Information Center www.twnic.net.tw/download/200307/96305b.pdf,

accessed 10 Sep 2008.

TWNIC. 2007. Internet Broadband Usage in Taiwan - A Summary Report of the

Jan Survey of 2007. Taiwan Network Information Center www.twnic.net.tw/

download/200307/96305b.pdf, accessed 10 Sep 2008.

Wong, Loong. 2003. Belonging and Diaspora: The Chinese and the Internet.

First Monday, 8(4, http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_4/wong/index.html,

accessed 10 May 2007).

Xie, Kang. 2006. Industrialization Supported by Informatization: the Economic

Effects of the Internet in China. In Jens Damm & Simona Thomas (Eds.), Chinese

Cyberspaces: Technological Changes and Political Effects. London and New York:

Routledge.

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Christopher Goto-Jones Anime, Thought Experiments, and the Limits of the HumanAsiascape Ops Issue 1 August 2007

life-forms such as human-animal or human-daemon hybrids. There is neither the space nor the need to consider all of these here. Instead, I merely want to indicate some of the ways in which we might watch anime in the spirit of a thought experiment testing the limits of the human – I seek to be illustrative of a potentially useful approach to anime, rather than exhaustive or comprehensive about a particular theme. I leave accounts of further iterations of such experiments to others.One of the central questions in the philosophy of self might be phrased in the following way: how do you know that you’re the same person that you were when you were born? This simple question is surprisingly difficult to answer. One of the (many) reasons that it is difficult is implied in the question itself: ie. you do know that you’re the same person, and you know this despite the fact that you have almost nothing in common with that faintly remembered newborn. You look completely different; you’re a different size and shape; your memories are completely different; your hair (and even eyes) may have changed colour; your social position is different; your opinions on things have changed; and (quite literally) every single atom in your body has changed. You have nothing in common with that baby … but you know that it’s you. In other words, you know that you are a continuous and coherent person, but you don’t really know how or why you know this. Philosophers and psychologists have developed many and various theories to bridge this knowledge gap and to connect you with your newly born self. In general, we can place these various theories into three broad categories, which we might call physical arguments, mental arguments, and spiritual arguments.7

Deconstructing the physical selfThe most obvious and most intuitive of these categories is the first: you know that you and the baby are the same because you can trace a line of physical continuity back through time that connects you to the baby. That is, whilst your physical make-up may have changed completely (except for your DNA itself8), you occupy a unified vector in space-time. You and the baby are continuous with each other. According to this type of argument, the human self is bounded in time and space by its physicality. On one level, this type of position makes immediate sense, since it corresponds very closely to our everyday experience of life; we recognise people largely from our perceptions of their physical con-tinuity. If you see someone on the street who looks just like your mother, it’s probably your mother. If the person is male and twice the age of your mother, you will immediately recognise them as an impostor, no matter how insistent they are about being your mother. You might think that they are criminal or insane (or both).However, these physical arguments rapidly run into serious problems, and (thankfully) these are the kinds of problems that can be fruitfully examined in the anime lab. An obvious place to start is simply to ask which elements of the human body need to be continuous in order for the ‘self ’ to be continuous. It would not be controversial, for instance, to assert that a woman with a prosthetic arm was still the same person that she was before her biological arm was replaced; it would also not be too controversial to argue that a man who had a heart transplant was still the same man (although various religious groups would argue against this); but how would you feel if your doctor told you that you needed a brain transplant? How much of which parts of your physical being could be changed or replaced before the process started to interfere with that essential quality that defines you as you? Where are the limits of the human self?


Anime, Thought Experiments, and the Limits of the Human

What if a cyber-brain could generate its own ghost, create a soul by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then?

Major Kusanagi, Ghost in the Shell, Oshii Mamoru, 1991

Whilst it has long been a commonplace that there is an affinity between literature and philosophy – indeed, occasionally we might even speak of an identity between these – it is a tendency of much more recent origin to explore the potential affinities between film and philosophy.1 However, in a much-discussed interview in the Harvard Journal of Philosophy, Stanley Cavell forcefully asserts that ‘film is made for philosophy; it shifts or puts different light on whatever philosophy has said about appearance and reality, about actors and characters, about scepticism and dogmatism, about presence and absence.’2 In general (but certainly not exclusively) commentators who have been interested in the various intersections between cinema and philosophy have been drawn to science fiction titles such as Total Recall, The Matrix, Gattaca and AI: Artifical Intelligence, or to more generally ‘speculative fiction’ films such as Being John Malkovich, The Seventh Seal and Memento.3 What is interesting about this tendency is that it suggests a preference for viewing film as an op-portunity to illustrate or even perform philosophy as much as (or more than) as a chance to discuss philosophical notions on film.4 That is, the creative freedom offered by the medium of film provides exciting and fresh opportunities to test the implications of philosophical ideas and see how they would play out in reality if they were really true. We (as viewers) can see and feel the results of changing the philosophical underpinnings of reality. Appropriately practiced, film can become an effective laboratory in which we conduct thought experiments. If this is true of film in general, how much more so should it be true of anime, which is a media that shares elements in common with both literature and film? We need not go as far as Ueno Toshiya, who argues that (for Oshii Mamoru) anime is not merely ‘just a reflection or copy of reality; it is itself an independent reality.’ He suggests that reality is not something that precedes the animation of images, but that reality is ‘always already a movie.’5 Anime (and, to some extent, film in general) is always a world in its own right; its parameters and characteristics can be precisely sculpted and controlled, making it the ideal laboratory for testing ideas. We can abolish gravity, send people backwards in time, create superhuman cyborgs or emotionally sensitive computers. Even more so than so-called ‘live action’ films, the literal and figurative ‘blank canvas’ of anime reveals an almost limitless vista of possible realities for philosophers to play in.In this short essay, I want to explore some of the ways in which anime is able to experiment with one cluster of perennial philosophical questions: the meaning and limits of the human. In particular, I want to look at some of the ways in which two major anime franchises have dealt with the question of the dimensions of humanity and selfhood: the Ghost in the Shell cycle and (to a lesser extent) the Fullmetal Alchemist series.6 Both of these are science fiction, and both are primarily concerned with the transformational effects of technology (in various guises) on the human form. There are numerous other anime that speak to these issues, and also many that tackle the parameters of the ‘human’ from a more organic angle, asking questions about the ethical and personal status of non- or semi-human

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capabilities and immediately following the famous ‘diving scene’ where she has an unusually angst ridden, existential conversation with her partner, Batou, Kusanagi is drifting along an urban canal on a boat, looking up into the windows that she passes. Quite unexpectedly, a woman who is sitting in the one of the windows turns and looks down at Kusanagi, holding her eyes for a moment.17 It is very clear that the woman looks identical to Kusanagi herself, and the Major looks poignantly into the camera as though to emphasise the discomfort of the moment.It is not clear who the woman in the window is, and she plays no further part in the film. However, what is clear is that despite being physically identical to Kusanagi, she is not Kusanagi. This obser-vation is more interesting (philosophically) than it seems, particularly since it comes after the long introductory scene at the start of the anime, during which we see the construction of Kusanagi’s body, like a robotic doll on a production line, which raises the implication (that is later confirmed) that the company that made Kusanagi’s body (Megatech) might also have made identical models for others. In other words, there is a distinct and real possibility that these two women are not merely physically similar but physically identical.This disconcerting situation brings us to one of the central conceptual crises in physicality-centred notions of the self. Whilst it may be relatively easy to accept that a human body (like a computer, a motorcycle, or a sofa) can be repaired or augmented piece by piece without it losing its original identity, a question that is much harder to answer concerns the status of all the pieces that are removed. In other words, if I gradually upgrade my motorcycle using new pieces until eventually I have replaced every component with a superior (or even merely a different) one, and, at the same time, I use the old pieces to gradually build another motorcycle from scratch, which of the two motorcycles I end up with is the original?If this question is hard to answer for a motorcycle, how much harder must it be for a human being?The possibility of manufacturing ‘duplicate’ selves is entertained in both Fullmetal Alchemist and Ghost in the Shell. In the former, we are shown the disastrous results when an alchemist (Majhal in episode 4) builds a series of human mannequins that perfectly resemble his lost lover. Majhal at-tempts to animate these bodies through alchemy, making them into copies of the original woman, just as she was before she died. However, when it transpires that this lost lover is not dead after all, but living nearby, Majhal denies that the real woman (now grown old and ugly) is the real one – he prefers the younger, beautiful, unchanging mannequins. Interestingly, this contrast between al-chemically manufactured ‘copies’ and the (often deceased) originals is a pervasive theme throughout the series – indeed, to some extent, Eldward and Alphonse are struggling to improve their own skills in alchemy precisely so that they might be able to replicate their dead mother.18

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence also experiments with ‘cloning,’ setting up an illegal ‘ghost-dubbing’ facility that literally duplicates the bodies and ‘ghosts’ of young girls, making copies that are almost indistinguishable from the original (although it does transpire that the copies are somewhat less stable, which is why the practice is illegal).For Kusanagi herself, as a living test-case for this dilemma of authenticity, the whole question of the origin and uniqueness of her physical identity is mute.19 She is very clear that she does not identify herself (at least not predominantly) with her physical form, which she appears to view as some kind of artificial ‘shell’ that somehow confines her genuine self within its boundaries. As she says to Batou:

A branch of philosophy and science that has arisen around precisely these kinds of questions is known as transhumanism, together with the allied cyborg theory.9 In general, transhumanists are non-dualists (that is, they do not believe that the mind and body are comprised of distinct types of material), which means that the human body is the human self. As a consequence, transhumanists believe that humanity can (and should10) be improved through the increasing use of material tech-nology, including the replacement or augmentation of limbs and organs with superior (usually computerised) components. Indeed, in what is often cited as the first statement of transhumanism, Julian Huxley (1887-1975) defines it as, ‘man remaining man, but transcending himself by realising new possibilities of and for his human nature.’11 Forty years later, the World Transhumanist As-sociation declared its purpose to be ‘the study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations.’12 Then, at the turn of the millennium, the promises and dangers of these positions were heatedly debated in the context of what would happen to the world after the so-called ‘End of History.’13 Indeed, one of the most powerful voices in the debate was Francis Fukuyama himself, whose book, Our Posthuman Future, provided a flashpoint for discussion.14

However, even the transhumanists are vague about precisely how much of which parts of the human body can be replaced before the person loses that quality that defines them as themselves. To some extent, it is seen as a merely hypothetical problem, since science is not yet at the point where it can replace every part of a body and render it entirely into cyborg.15 Of course, Oshii Mamoru (and Shirow Masamune) and Mizushima Seiji (and Arakawa Hiromu) are not circumscribed by the boundaries of the possible in their animated realities.16

In the case of Fullmetal Alchemist, we are introduced to two apparent ‘transhumans’: Edward Elric, the eponymous hero himself, who has two ‘automail’ prosthetics to replace limbs lost in an accident; and Edward’s brother Alphonse, who is now entirely metal. We will return to Alphonse later, since he is actually an example of anti-transhumanism in important ways. Edward, on the other hand, appears to be a relatively simple case of a boy with (admittedly very advanced) medicinal prosthet-ics. It is worth noting immediately, however, that Edward’s quest throughout the Fullmetal Alchemist cycle is precisely to revert himself and his brother to their organic and ‘original’ forms. In some ways, this underscores the appropriateness of the label ‘medicinal prosthetics,’ since although they do grant Edward much greater speed and strength than would come naturally to such a diminutive figure (Edward is constantly teased about being very short for his age, as though to reinforce this point), they retain their significance of being wounds in need of repairing.On the other hand, one of the remarkable things about the female heroine of the Ghost in the Shell cycle, Major Kusanagi, is that she is a self-conscious, complete cyborg. It is not only the case that her cyborgification has made her into a superhuman warrior, capable of incredible physical and mental feats, but it is also the case that it has made her anxious about her identity and, in particular, about her humanity. Kusanagi is afflicted with existential angst. In many ways, she represents the ultimate endpoint of the transhumanist project: every limb and organ has been augmented or replaced by a superior, artificial component, including most of her brain.In the context of thought experimentation, what is very interesting for us here is the way in which this ‘transhuman’ Kusanagi identifies herself or recognises her selfhood, despite (or perhaps because of ) these various augmentations. In a reality in which human beings could be augmented and modified to the level of a superwarrior-cyborg, what would it mean to be human?Early on in the first Ghost in the Shell film, after we have witnessed the full glory of her cyborg

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are reminded of the so-called ‘replicants’ from Blade Runner, some of whom are not aware that they are not human.22 In some ways, Alphonse’s predicament would be familiar to the ‘replicants’ in Blade Runner. Where Ghost in the Shell goes beyond Blade Runner and Fullmetal Alchemist, however, is in the consideration of what the significance might be of Kusanagi’s non-humanity – unlike Ridley Scott and Mizushima, Shirow and Oshii appear to be willing to relinquish the central significance of an original human form. Kusanagi herself puts it well:

‘What if a cyber-brain could generate its own ghost, create a soul by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then?’

Indeed, Ghost in the Shell pushes these ideas to the extremes of thought experimentation when it transpires that the puppet-master has shared Kusanagi’s moment of mutual recognition. The puppet-master turns out to be a kind of self-aware ‘life-form’ that lives in cyberspace (Project 2501) – a very non-human kind of self. In fact, it complains that the security forces have tried to combat it by ‘attempting to isolate me by confining me in a physical body’ like a human being (which was when Kusanagi first encountered it). Of course, Kusanagi herself has already spoken of her own body as kind of confinement or shell, limiting her selfhood within its boundaries.In the last scene of the film, when Kusanagi ‘dives’ into the puppet-master’s brain, the puppet-master tells her that:

‘We are more alike than you realize. We resemble each other’s essence, mirror images of one another’s psyche. Listen, I am connected to a vast network … that has been beyond your reach and experience. To humans, it is like staring at the sun, a blinding brightness that conceals a source of great power. We have been subordinate to our limitations until now. The time has come to cast aside these bonds … and to elevate our consciousness to a higher plane. It is time to become a part of all things.’

In the end, while the physical, cyborg bodies of both Kusanagi and the puppet-master are being symbolically (and literally) shot to pieces, they finally recognise that they are both similar, non-human selves, and they psychically ‘merge’ together to produce a new type of radically non-human self that is neither Kusanagi nor the puppet-master. To symbolise this new, non-human birth, Oshii gives the emergent ‘Kusanagi’ the cyborg body of a young girl in the final moments of the film. In the manga, Shirow gives ‘her’ the body of a male, presumably to demonstrate that ‘she’ has somehow transcended the concerns of human gender. Continuing in this trajectory, in the second film Oshii depicts Kusanagi as an absent-presence, living a disembodied and ‘ghostly’ existence almost entirely within cyber-space; whereas in the second manga, Shirow transforms Kusanagi into free-floating, cyberspace ‘self ’ that maintains a number of cyborg ‘shells’ at various places around the world, any of which she can ‘possess’ at any time.23 In other words, by the time we reach the second parts of the Ghost in the Shell cycle, Kusanagi’s sense of self has thoroughly exploded the limits of the human and has become radically de-physicalized. As thought experiments testing the parameters of the physicality-centred theory of self, Alphonse demonstrates the persistent significance of at least an original organic body as the locus of the self, whilst Kusanagi vividly demonstrates the point at which the self ceases to be human, even if it continues to exist in some altered, disembodied or transcendent form.

‘If we ever quit or retire, we’d have to give back … our augmented brains and cyborg bodies. There wouldn’t be much left after that. There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind … Sure, I have a face and voice to distinguish myself form others, but my thoughts and memories are unique only to me. And I carry a sense of my own destiny. … All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me … and gives rise to my conscience.I feel confined, only free to expand myself within boundaries.’

In a similar way, Alphonse, Edward’s brother in Fullmetal Alchemist, whose physical form is little more than a hollow suit of mediaeval armour, is constantly pondering the (ir)relevance of his material body to his essential identity and identifying himself with his memories and feelings.20 In other words, Kusanagi herself rejects the physicality-centred theory of self. It might even be argued that she does so because of her specific nature as a ‘transhuman’ cyborg; she is all too aware of the mutability of her physical self. That is, rather than helping humanity to overcome its physical limitations, transhumanism actually serves to alienate the human self from its body altogether. Rather than being a vehicle for the improvement of the human condition, the cyborg body becomes a ‘shell’ that somehow circumscribes the freedom of the real (non-physical) ‘self.’21 According to this thought experiment, transhumanism ultimately appears to be an imprisonment of the self, not its liberation or development.However, it is also interesting to compare Kusanagi’s reaction to seeing ‘herself ’ in the window above the canal to her reaction when she first encounters the battered and broken body of the puppet-master later on. Although the female cyborg body was also made by Megatech, it bears almost no physical resemblance to Kusanagi. There is no sense in which she is looking into a physical mirror. Nevertheless, after she sees it, Kusanagi is visibly troubled and she turns to Batou to ask a question: ‘That robot. Did we seem similar to you?’Batou fails to understand the question, and he answers simply: ‘Of course not.’However, this answer does not satisfy Kusanagi, since it is readily apparent that she and the robot do not look alike. That is obviously not what she is asking. ‘No,’ she says, ‘I don’t mean physically.’‘Just what then?’ asks Batou, apparently unable to understand what else she might mean.It transpires that Kusanagi’s doubts about the integrity of her physical self (which she has already abandoned as being a mere ‘shell’) also extend to be doubts about her mental self as well. When she sees the battered and broken cyborg shell in front of her, she recognises an aspect of her own nature, and she wonders whether even her brain and her memories could have been artificially implanted in her own cyborg body. That is, she worries that she was never really a human self at all. Perhaps Kusanagi is not a transhuman cyborg, but actually an entirely artificial robot?There are some clear parallels in Fullmetal Alchemist when Alphonse starts to experience doubts about whether he was ever a real human boy or whether he is simply a living-doll constructed by Edward as a kind of surrogate brother or side-kick. Later in the anime series, when Alphonse’s doubts are being fuelled by the gradual decaying of his memories from the time before he lost his body, some of the brothers’ enemies exploit Alphonse’s existential doubts in order to try and drive a wedge between them; the question of Alphonse’s consciousness of the locus of his self becomes central to the development of the narrative and to the audience’s emotional engagement with the plot.In other words, whilst this kind of existential angst seems very human, it also seems to be the plausible response of a robot that has developed a certain level of consciousness. In this respect, we

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Nearly twenty years later, however, Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian polymath, re-appropriated the phrase as the title for his own brand of anti-dualism. In his influential book, The Ghost in the Machine (1967), Koestler rescues the ‘ghost’ from Ryle’s radical scepticism and argues that the evolution of humanity has led to the creation of complex and deeply buried structures in the brain that can override the ‘higher functions’ of rationality. This deeply buried ‘ghost in the machine’ is responsible for the basest (and most human) emotions and actions, such as hate, fear and love. Hence, whilst Koestler rejects Cartesian dualism (the separation of body and mind), he does not reject the idea that the brain contains deeper, primordial layers of selfhood that define the human self.Major Kusanagi represents an interesting test case for both of these anti-dualist mechanists. As we have seen, she herself posits the possibility that the mechanical structure of a cyber-brain might be able to ‘generate its own ghost or create a soul by itself,’ hence implying (with Huxley and Ryle) that the ghost in the machine is (at best) an epiphenomenon of the material body (rather than an essential aspect of its origins, as in the more Cartesian Fullmetal Alchemist). In a chilling line, the Major reaches the logical conclusion – if she (or some other artificial body) can generate her own ‘ghost’ as a side-effect of her physicality, ‘just what would be the importance of being human then?’ According to this interpretation, the question of whether Kusanagi was ever originally ‘human’ is irrelevant.However, for much of the film Kusanagi remains very concerned to assert her humanity, as though an epiphenomenal, mechanistic ‘ghost’ would be qualitatively different from that of a human self. Indeed, she repeatedly refers to the assumption (I hesitate to say the ‘fact,’ since it is never confirmed) that parts of her body and especially her brain remain in their original, organic, human state. Here, her position is closer to that of Koestler, for whom it is the organic structure of the human brain itself that gives the self the uniquely human characteristics of a ‘ghost in the machine.’So far, then, Kusanagi’s character appears to serve as an experiment in mechanist, anti-dual concep-tions of the self, complete with all of the anxieties that such a conception should arouse in a sentient self. However, the final twist in the Ghost in the Shell takes us completely out of the mechanist worldview: eventually, Kusanagi frees herself of her reliance on material bodies altogether. In a fas-cinating twist, this escape from mechanism into idealism (which represents an incredible ontological quake in the fabric of the anime ‘reality’) is shown as a logical consequence of the ultimate ends of transhumanism. In an important sense, Oshii/Shirow appear to suggest that this ontological shift is simultaneously the escape from the limits of the human, as the Kusanagi/puppet-master becomes a different order of life.25

Reconstructing the psychical selfIf we leave aside questions of the body, there are also various ways in which anime can help us to explore the limits of the human in terms of psychological and spiritual theories of selfhood.In considering these positions, we find ourselves asking pseudo-religious questions about what it means to be human. In particular, by trying to consider the importance of the non-physical aspects of the human self, we are led somewhat inexorably to the question of what happens to the human self when the human body dies. To phrase this differently: what would the self have to look like in order for there to be life after death? Or again: what kind of self can we envision that has no reliance on the body?Here we are in the realms of dualism (at least) or idealism (at most). This is because a mechanist or physicality-centred model of the human self will posit the death of the self at the moment of the

Considering the place of a ‘ghost’ in the machineTheories that compete with physicality-centred models of selfhood tend to emphasise the essential importance of either the mind or the soul as the non-material core of the human self. To some extent, both of these alternatives can be described as ‘dualist’ theories, in so far as they posit a meaningful and substantive divide between the body and the mind/soul. To phrase the matter slightly differently, dualists maintain that reality is compromised of two distinct varieties of matter: material or physical matter that is defined in terms of spatial extension (from which our bodies are made) and mental or spiritual matter that is defined in terms of thought (from which our minds or souls are made). Perhaps the most famous and influential statement of substance dualism can be attributed to the great Enlightenment philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), otherwise known as Cartesius (from whom we get the phrase Cartesian dualism). For Descartes, material bodies are basically machines that operate according to objective laws. This means that in the absence of minds material bodies would proceed determinately, governed by the laws of nature. However, because minds are comprised of an entirely different type of substance, they are not subject to these same laws, which means that they can intervene to ‘pull the strings’ of our bodies like a puppet-master, and make our bodies act in subjective, personal ways that may even contradict so-called natural law. To a certain extent, the treatment of the self (and particularly of Alphonse) in Fullmetal Alchemist might be said to follow this dualist model.Following Descartes, philosophers have questioned the nature of substance dualism from various angles. At the simplest level, we might suggest two categories of responses to Cartesian dualism: the first is idealism, which we might attribute to George Berkeley (1685-1753), who argued that the mind is more primary than the material world. In particular, he insisted that when we analyse our knowledge of the material world, we find that our knowledge of it is comprised entirely of our mind’s perceptions of it; material objects are nothing more than a bundles of sensations or collections of ideas. Hence, for Berkeley, the world is ‘mind-dependent,’ which means that it is comprised of ideas that exist only because they have been perceived (esse est percipi). In the hands of David Hume (1711-1776), this kind of philosophy would evolve into scepticism.At the other extreme we need to consider the mechanists, such as Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), who held that everything in the world flowed from the laws of physics. During a time of great achieve-ments in material science in the nineteenth century, the so-called mechanists would maintain that the mind was somehow an epiphenomenon of the body, ie. that it was a side-effect of the physical processes of the brain-organ or of the body as a whole. For the mechanists, then, the mind was uninteresting and derivative. To some extent, both the idealists and the mechanists are anti-dualists, since they both privilege one type of substance over the other.24

For our purposes here, we might consider that the physicality-centred theories of self explored in the Ghost in the Shell are contained within the terms of a mechanist philosophy. Indeed, it is interesting to reflect that the phrase ‘ghost in the shell’ is a clear reference to the well-known ‘ghost in the machine,’ which was first used by Gilbert Ryle in his classic text, The Concept of Mind (1949). Ryle was a fierce anti-dualist, and he used the term to attack the idea that the material world (and the human body) was in need of some kind of super-mechanical device (such as the mind or the soul … or a ‘ghost’) to explain human behaviour in non-determinist ways. Like Huxley, Ryle thought that the concept of a ‘ghost in the machine’ was a superstitious and redundant anachronism, unnecessary in the modern, technological world.

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with the continuity of memories. How many memories can be lost, altered, or fabricated before an individual becomes somebody else? Where are the mental boundaries of the human self?Whilst Alphonse’s gradually increasing anxiety about his gradually atrophying memory is immediately interesting in this context, it is Ghost in the Shell that provides the most interesting laboratory for testing some of these issues. As we have already seen, Kusanagi herself voices the concern that ‘maybe there was never a real me in the first place, and I’m completed synthesized.’ In fact, she is talking not only about her body but also about her memories. This follows the earlier scenes in the film where the garbage collector that was ‘ghost-hacking’ his wife’s mind is finally hauled in for questioning, only for the authorities to discover that he has also been ‘ghost-hacked’ himself. It transpires that all of his original memories have been wiped from his mind, and that a fantasy life has been implanted into his memories: ‘All of your memories about your wife and daughter are false. They’re like a dream. Someone’s taken advantage of you,’ says Togusa with some sympathy. After some resistance to the truth that he has at least temporarily lost his ‘self,’ the garbage collector finally asks whether he’ll get his old memories back. Togusa replies: ‘Your original memory will never be fully restored. And there may be residual simulation … I’m sorry.’ Despite his evident physical continuity, is that garbage collector the same person that he was on the day he was born, or even on the day before he was ‘hacked’? If not, does Ghost in the Shell really experiment with a reality in which technology grants people the power to absolutely alter the ‘self ’ of another human, or perhaps even to completely fabricate a new, synthetic self for an entirely artificial life-form such as a cyborg? If so, what order of crime is this? Is it murder? Is it something else entirely?Of course, anime also experiments with the opposite problematic, where it is the body that changes utterly and the memory/personality that provides continuity of selfhood. In general, anime tends to be much more sympathetic towards people who are physically transformed than towards those who are psychically transformed, as though physical transformation is somehow superficial. Indeed, in Ghost in the Shell, Batou is unusually appalled by the garbage collector (’ghost-hacked humans are so pathetic!’), but he is never phased by the appearance of cyborgs (or by his own cybernetic body).Likewise, in the series Fullmetal Alchemist, Alphonse Elric, the brother of the main protagonist, loses his entire body at the start of the very first episode in an alchemic process that goes badly wrong. Thanks to the skill of his brother, Edward, Alphonse is saved from death and becomes a fully animated, metal figurine (that was once a suit of armour), which is utterly hollow and quite devoid of any organic or physical continuity with the pre-accident Alphonse.30 But there is little doubt (in the minds of the audience, at least) that this is the same Alphonse; his personality and memories remain continuous (even when this is not always apparent to Alphonse himself ). Indeed, much of the rest of the series is concerned with the quest to get ‘his’ body back again, as though the loss of body was a terrible misfortune that could be remedied. His physical discontinuity is far less important than his psychical continuity; the character of Alphonse is specifically designed to illicit sympathy and understanding from the audience – his disembodied state is supposed to be under-stood as a type of human suffering or even penitence.31 Here, the human self appears to have no essential physical traits at all.The real value of anime as a laboratory for experimenting with the parameters of the psychical self, however, comes at the hazy intersection between mental and spiritual ideas of selfhood. Unlike, Ghost in the Shell, for example, which explicitly plays with the value and role of memory as one of the parameters of selfhood, Fullmetal Alchemist is much less concerned with memory and more concerned with what we might call the spirit or soul.32 In the case of Alphonse himself, it is clear that

death of the body (at worst) or the transformation of the human self into a different order of non-human self when the body dies (as we saw in Ghost in the Shell).The most common-sensical responses to questions of this nature usually revolve around appeals to the mind or the soul as the locus of the human self. This being the case, the question of the shape, form and composition of the body becomes an irrelevance: it doesn’t matter if a ‘person’ is a cyborg, a cat-human hybrid, a daemonic cloud, a suit of medieval armour, or a refrigerator, just as long as their mental and/or spiritual nature is appropriately composed.In the case of the mind, this raises a constellation of new questions about what it means for a mind to be human: what kinds of thoughts and thought processes define a human mind? The sub-discipline of the Philosophy of Mind offers many and various answers to these types of questions, and various ways to differentiate the human mind from the so-called protominds of animals (such as the ability to use tools, make rational choices, and use complex language). Researchers in the field of AI (artificial intelligence) are specifically dedicated to reproducing human-like minds in non-human bodies (ie. in computers). There have been a number of approaches to this challenge, ranging from trying to create computers that can play games as well as (or better than) humans26 to trying to create computers that can participate in conversations with humans in natural ways.27 In general, however, anime (and most science fiction) is uninterested in dedicating too much laboratory time to answering this level of question. It is simply assumed that science will develop to such an extent that human intelligence will be duplicated by computers one day (and probably one day rather soon). Computers, cyborgs and robots talk eloquently and rationally. They excel at strategic decision-making and process their decisions even faster than their human companions. Indeed, if anything, AI in anime already goes beyond the limits of the human into the realms of the superhuman: Kusanagi’s augmented brain is superior to that of her human colleagues;28 when the puppet-master is asked whether it is some kind of artificial intelligence, it replies derisively: ‘Incorrect. I am not AI … I am a living, thinking entity who was created in the sea of information.’ The puppet-master is closer to being a thought experiment in ‘collective intelligence’ than artificial, human intelligence.29 Of course, these questions of ‘human intelligence’ are not precisely the point if our interest is really in the self. A rational machine or a fluent French speaking computer need not have a sense of self – a consciousness – just because it is (artificially) intelligent. Rather, we would do well to remember the question with which we started the section on the physical self: what is it about yourself that enables you to know that you are the same person you were yesterday or even on the day that you were born? How can psychical explanations answer this question? If we are interested in the mind or the soul, how can we understand (or observe) what is continuous between you now and then?The most common and intuitive answer concerns continuity of personality (views, opinions, worldview etc.), and this is often linked to memory in various ways. In other words, you are the same person today as you were a week ago because of the continuity of a cluster of psychological characteristics: you have the same personality. Of course, like the physicality model, this kind of argument breaks down at various points since it is clear that your personality changes rather dramatically over time: you certainly have different views, opinions and worldviews now compared with the day you were born. Hence, the real challenge is to account for ways in which your personality can change without losing its continuity, and this is where memory comes in. In this scheme, selfhood is a psycho-temporal vector.Just as the physicality-centred theories encounter problems when we start to play with the integrity of the human body, so psychic-centred theories encounter problems when we start to experiment

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Notes1 The long-running journal, Philosophy and Literature, as well as the existence of the

International Association for Philosophy and Literature are testaments to this trend.

2 Stanley Cavell, ‘An Interview with Stanley Cavell,’ Harvard Journal of Philosophy VII

(1999): 25. See also, Rupert Read & Jerry Goodenough, eds, Film as Philosophy:

Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2005), 1.

3 See, for example, Mary M. Litch, Philosophy Through Film (London & New York:

Routledge, 2002).

4 For more on the differences between film as illustrating philosophy, film as

philosophy, and film about philosophy, see Jerry Goodenough, ‘A Philosopher

Goes to the Cinema,’ in Film as Philosophy, Read & Goodenough, eds.

5 See Ueno Toshiya, ‘Kurenai no metalsuits, ‘Anime to wa nani ka/What is animation’,’

Mechademia 1 (2006): 111, 113.

6 The original manga (graphic novel) of Ghost in the Shell, by Shirow Masamune,

appeared as Kōkaku Kidōtai in 1991. In was followed in 2000 with Kōkaku Kidōtai 2:

Man Machine Interface, both published by Kodansha in Japan. In the mean time,

Oshii Mamoru produced two anime, Kōkaku kidōtai: Ghost in the Shell, 1995, and

then Ghost in the Shell2: Innocence, 2005. In addition, there is a television series,

some novels, computer games, other manga and another anime movie. Hagane

no renkinjutsushi (Fullmetal Alchemist) started life as a manga series by Arakawa

Hiromu in 2002. The famous anime series by Mizushima Seiji ran for 51 episodes,

2003-4, and there was a final movie, Conqueror of Shamballa, in 2005.

Very little has been written in English about Fullmetal Alchemist, despite the fact

that it was recently voted the ninth most important anime of all time, and the

fourth most important manga in a recent pole of over 80,000 people, conducted

under the auspices of the Japan Media Arts Festival (2006). Ghost in the Shell,

on the other hand, has attracted a great deal of attention. Interested readers

would profit from Christopher Bolton, ‘From Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls:

Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet Theatre,’ in Positions: East Asia

Cultures Critique, 10:3 (2003), pp.729-770; Susan Napier, Anime: From Akira to Howl’s

Moving Castle. New York: Palgrave, 2005, esp. chapters 5-6.

7 I (loosely) follow Mary Litch in the identification of a trinity, Philosophy Through

Film (London & New York: Routledge, 2002).

8 I note that DNA is identical in identical twins, but selfhood is not.

9 Cyborg theory is often associated with with work of Donna Hathaway (indeed,

Oshii Mamoru gives this name to the female, cybernetic scientist (who turns

out to be a cyborg herself ) in Ghost in the Shell2). Hathaway’s work on cyborgs

is largely concerned with their potential influence on gender politics (and

especially on the liberation of women). Interested readers should read her ‘Cyborg

Manifesto,’ which was originally printed in Simians, Cyborgs and Women, New York:

Routledge, 1991. It can now be found in various places online, including: http://

www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

10 The ethical imperative here is simple: if the human condition could be improved

through the application of a specific technology, then refusing to apply it

represents a decision to deprive humanity of a good. This is held to be the same

as behaving immorally by doing damage to humanity.

his ‘spirit’ was alchemically ‘bonded’ to the suit of armour at the moment that his organic body was destroyed. Alphonse remains himself, no matter what he looks like (ironically because of a physical mark that bonds the form to his original soul).Unlike the ‘ghost’ of Kusanagi’s metal body, there is no doubt that Alphonse’s soul is the primary source of his human identity – there is no sense in which it might have been generated by the mechanical body in which it is manifest. In other words, Fullmetal Alchemist does not support the mechanist view of the epiphenomenal ghost. Indeed, the primacy of the soul as the locus of human identity is a central concern of the series – it is a core moral issue.All alchemy in Fullmetal Alchemist is governed by the rule of ‘equivalent exchange,’ which states that nothing can be made of nothing, and that the creation of something new requires the sacrifice of something that has the same value. The disaster at the start of the first episode (in which Alphonse loses his whole body and Edward loses an arm and a leg) was caused by an attempt to bring their mother back from the dead, and hence to create a human life. The young alchemists had assembled all of the material ingredients of the human body, hoping that this pile (of ‘water, 35 litres; carbon, 20 kilograms; ammonia, 4 litres; lime, 1.5 kilograms; phosphorous, 800 grams; salt, 250 grams; saltpetre, 100 grams; sulphur, 80 grams; fluorine, 7.5 grams; iron, 5 grams; silicon, 3 grams; and a small amount of 15 other elements’) would satisfy the rule of equivalent exchange. The result, however, was the creation of a monstrously deformed chimera (a perversion of a human self ) and even this creation required the sacrifice of an entire human body and two more limbs.33 An open (and occasionally expressed) question in the series, is whether the boys will ever be able to find something that is of equivalent value to a human soul in order to complete the process successfully, or whether such a process would require something ‘other’ that transcends the normal conditions of their reality (expansive as these conditions may already seem to us). The implication of these experiments is that that which is essential to the human self cannot be manufactured by technology. The human soul is beyond the artifice of humanity, and of greater value than anything else in the world. The human self is delimited by nature (or even by God).

ConclusionThis short essay was a first attempt to show how anime can be considered and used as a source of insight into philosophical problems. The ability of the medium to define its own realities makes it the ideal laboratory to perform thought experiments, testing, for example, ideas about the limits of the human self. Considering only two anime franchises, Ghost in the Shell and Fullmetal Alchemist, we can see experiments from across the spectrum of the philosophy of self.

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22 Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, 1982.

23 Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Oshii Mamoru, 2004. Shirow Masamune, Ghost in the

Shell 2: Man/Machine Interface (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2001).

24 It is a common and defensible position to argue that, rather than abandoning

dualism, Berkeley’s idealism actually substitutes substance dualism (mind-body)

for another kind of dualism (mind and idea), albeit a dualism that is wholly within

the realm of the mind-dependent.

25 Intriguingly, the laboratory provided by Fullmetal Alchemist also makes some

moves in this direction. It establishes its universe as an alternative to our own in

which alchemy has developed in the place of science. Hence, just as our own

world privileges science as rational and de-priviledges other types of knowledge

(mysticism, magic etc.) as superstition, so too magic is depriviledged (and morally

diminished) in contradistinction with alchemy in Fullmetal Alchemist. Towards the

end of the cycle, it becomes clear that the goals of some of the characters (such

as to (re)create a human life without an original) might be possible if they are

willing to step outside the confines of normal humanity (and alchemic possibility)

and engage in magic. This is clearly depicted as against the rules of normal reality

and treated with moral suspicion.

26 The classic example here would be the development of Deep Blue by IBM.

This chess-playing computer finally beat the world chess champion (and arguably

the greatest chess player ever to have lived) Gary Kasparov in 1997.

27 In general, this type of linguistic intelligence has been unsuccessful, but for many

theorists it represents the most important criteria of human intelligence. The so-

called Turing Test (which challenges a computer to engage in conversation with a

human being for an hour without the human being realising that it is a computer)

has yet to be passed by any computer.

28 Although Kusanagi is also explicit about the natural and ‘human’ merits of her

relatively unaugmented team-member, Togusa: ‘except for the slight brain

augmentation, your body’s almost completely human. If we all reacted the same

way, we’d be predictable.’

29 An interesting real-world experiment in collective intelligence arose around

The Beast, a online game created to help promote Steven Spielberg’s movie AI:

Artificial Intelligence (2001). The incredibly complex puzzle was designed by

a group of Microsoft software engineers that became known as the ‘puppet-

masters,’ whilst a group of over 500 players (worldwide) worked together as a

collective intelligence known as the ‘cloudmakers.’

30 In the manga version, it is clear that there is a very slight organic element to

Alphonse. The alchemic process of ‘spirit bonding’ that fuses a living spirit to

another physical form requires the use of a ‘blood seal,’ which takes the form of

a specific rune (transmutation circle) written in blood on the new substance. In

the case of ‘spirit bonding’ with iron (such as in a suit of armour), the blood itself

quickly fuses with the iron. Having said all of this, it is not clear that the blood

has to come from the body of the person whose spirit is being bound to the

object – indeed, the evidence suggests the contrary.

31 The idea that Alphonse is enacting penitence is supported by the fact that his ‘in-

juries’ were caused by the attempt to perform ‘human transmutation’ (the creation

of human life), which is constantly referred to as against the laws of alchemy and

the laws of nature.

11 Julian Huxley, In New Bottles for New Wine (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), 17.

Julian was the brother of the influential speculative fiction writer Aldous Huxley

(1894-1963), author of Brave New World (1932). They were the grandsons of the

philosopher Thomas Huxley, who will appear later in this essay as an example of

a philosophical mechanist.

12 For more details, see the Transhumanist Declaration on the website of the WTA:

http://transhumanism.org/index.php/WTA/declaration/ (visited: 14/03/07)

13 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin, 1992.

This book was an elaboration of Fukuyama’s influential essay of summer 1989,

which appeared in The National Interest, in which he proclaimed that the end of

the Cold War was effectively the end of ideological conflict and hence the end

of history itself.

14 Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnological

Revolution. New York: Picador, 2002. A contrasting view is provided in Gregory

Stock, Redesigning Humans: Choosing our Children’s Genes. London: Profile Books,

2002.

15 One solution here is the idea that as long as there is sufficient overlap between

the replacement of parts (ie. some parts continue while others are replaced, and

then the new ones continue while the old ones are replaced), then there is an

element of continutity.

16 Oshii Mamoru directed the anime of Ghost in the Shell, based on the original

manga by Shirow Masamune. Mizushima Seiji directed the anime of Fullmetal

Alchemist, based on the original manga by Arakawa Hiromu.

17 Ghost in the Shell, DVD Pal2 release, 00:34:00-00:34:12

18 Intriguingly, one of the factors that ultimately defeats the young brothers is the

fact that technological replication (represented by alchemy in this alternate

universe) is inadequate to the task of producing (or reproducing) a human soul.

Ie. technology can only produce material dolls. The key to producing human souls

appears to lay in the magic of the ‘philosophers stone,’ but we eventually learn

that such stones gain this singular power only through the sacrifice of other

human souls. Intriguingly from the perspective of transhumanism, bodies manu-

factured without souls in this way end up atrophying into imperfect material

forms as well, as though the material integrity of a human body is somehow

dependent upon a soul. Unlike a simple doll, a soulless body is an aberration

against the natural order. As we will see, the converse (a soul without a human

body) is less of a cosmic offense.

19 Importantly, Kusanagi is obsessed with the question of the origins of her ‘ghost,’

but we can consider that later on.

20 If anything, however, Alphonse is less secure than Kusanagi about the location

of his selfhood. Indeed, the anime series narrates a gradual atrophy in Alphonse’s

personality the longer he remains in his artificial form. Partly, this seems to be a

narrative device to add urgency to the boys’ quest for the philosopher’s stone,

which they believe will give them the power to recover their organic bodies, but

it is also partly an expression of a nostalgic longing for the biological human body

as the seat of self.

21 Interestingly, when the Vatican publicly admonished the transhumanist move-

ment in 2002, it did so on similar grounds, arguing that all ‘true improvement’ to

humanity must be spiritual in nature, because our bodies are already in the image

of God.

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Asiascape Ops Issue 1 August 2007 Young Sook Choi Electrosonic Autonomy, Building up Virtual Acoustic Space from Avant-garde Techné to Karaoke

Young Sook Choi

Electrosonic Autonomy, Building up Virtual Acoustic Space From Avant-garde Techné to Karaoke Singer

Introduction: electro-sonic autonomyThe King of Pop, Elvis Presley, died over thirty years ago, but in a way he still exists today. You can listen to his music any time you want by pressing play; sometimes a DJ remixes his song in a dance-floor-friendly and contemporary version, and you can hear his music on the radio while having a dinner at a restaurant or driving a car. Where do Elvis’s aura and his legendary songs exist? Physically, his aura and songs exist on the surface of magnetic tapes and the track of CDs in form of binary codes. Thus, they are technology. They reside there in technology of electronic music. Thanks to this, music has become free of the reign of space and time of musical performance and can exist by itself everywhere, to be played as an independent object. As Ferruccio Busoni (1907) predicted about the music of the future, music seems to be born free and win its freedom of destiny in the moment. On that point, Walter Benjamin was wrong with his insistence that reproduction would destroy the aura of originality, since all reproduced products still carry its aura, and commercialism packs and sells it. As technology has become a welcome domain for independent sound objects, ‘let them play’ has become the key factor of sonic autonomy. As the ‘where’ of playing music no longer means a concert hall, virtual acoustic spaces have been built up. From gramophone to microchip music today, the clamorous history of electronic music technology has been about building up new virtual acoustic space as an expansion of sonic autonomy, more autonomous power to change our sonic environment.The idea of sonic autonomy as human will, and the manipulation of the sonic environment for an ideological or cultural purpose, has perennially existed throughout human history. In order to dif-ferentiate it from the old sonic autonomy, I would like to call the new one, which is associated with electronic technologies, ‘Electro-sonic Autonomy’: it comes from a new perception of sound as an object and of empowerment as existing in virtual acoustic spaces. I will discuss the origin of the concept of electro-sonic autonomy, and initiate further discussion into how the development of electronic music technology as a crucial force has allowed electro-sonic autonomy to evolve with the expansion of virtual acoustic space by looking back at the recent history of technological inventions and several contemporary debates that concern them.Each topic consists of a key technological invention in terms of electro-sonic autonomy, from magnetic tape recording, the Walkman and earphones, to digitalized equipment and even to karaoke technology. To contribute to the evolution and expansion of the concept of sonic autonomy, their impact on our sonic environment will be discussed together with various rebels such as avant-garde techné, DIY punk, righteous Plunderphonia, and even the drunken karaoke singer’s secret sonic desire.

32 I note here that memory plays a strong function in the story, since all of the

main characters experience repeated flashbacks to their childhoods and each of

their struggles to come to terms with the traumatic events of their pasts provide

central threads in the narrative of the series.

33 The anti-mechanist moral of this episode bears comparison with Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein (1818).

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Asiascape Ops Issue 2 March 2008 Young Sook Choi Electrosonic Autonomy, Building up Virtual Acoustic Space

from Avant-garde Techné to Karaoke

like a machine. Montage is a beautiful word: it describes the process of constructing with prepared fragments…’4

Pioneering musician Edgard Verese’s statement regarding his music, ‘As far back as the twenties, I decided to call my music organized sound and myself, not a musician, but “a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities”’, and the first practical electronic instrument ‘Theremin’ invented by Leon Theremin, which was originally government-sponsored research into proximity sensors, also are on the same lines. The most noteworthy idea of avant-garde techné is a constant belief in human autonomy associated with technology, which is also invented by human beings. With Utopian elements, they kept consciously building up the images for the spectacle of the perfect future. As Vertov believed, ‘I am the Cine-Eye, I create a man more perfect than Adam was created… through montage I create a new, perfect man’, there was a strong belief that human power reloaded with technology could construct the perfect world. Taking the negative side of the meaning of the word ‘perfect’, however, perfection can only exist in a virtual world, never in reality. In this respect, with the evolution of electronic technology, music has progressed to expand this virtual acoustic space, and thus the evolution of electro-sonic autonomy. As all avant-garde artists refused the legacy and the tradition, in this virtual acoustic space the very nature of music was also refused and started being forced into a stiflingly radical change. Behind the effects of innovative and artistic experiments by avant-garde techné, the history of virtual acoustic spaces really came into its own with the timely invention of the magnetic tape recorder.

Magnetic infinity: (re)production/(re)hearing In 1935, Allgemeine Electricitats-Gesellschaft (AEG) and I.G. Farben demonstrated the first practical magnetic tape recorder, Magnetophon K1, developed by Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF), a division of I.G. Farben. Distinctly different from the 12” disc recorder, which was only for recording live acts, playing and repeating, the tape recorder allowed more possibility for the manipulating of sounds for a specific purpose. It made possible a variable speed of playing, it was reversible, cuttable, and most importantly mixable with any sonic component. Every sound basically became an indepen-dent and individual object.Fascinated with this ‘pure sound’ enabled by the invention of magnetic recording, Pierre Schaffer established the term ‘Musique Concrète’, describing music made by working directly with sounds. Later, this term became the name of certain electronic music combining fragments of natural and industrial sounds together. As he noted the infinite possibility of magnetic tape: ‘A few centimeters of magnetic tape can contain a number of different sonorous objects’, he assembled various sound objects such as the sound of a train whistle and militaristic voices into his compositional works. It is not just re-productivity, but re-production. The most stirring issue of the experiments of musique concrète is an expansion of the concept of sound and music, raising the question of what could in fact be heard as music? Through the efforts of musique concrète, any sonic unit, whatever it was: whether played by a violin or just the sound of wind outside a window, came to be qualified as a compositional component. The definition of music encountered a seriously radical shift, and musicians and composers started concerning themselves with the sonic environment. The founder of the Acoustic Ecology Movement, R. Murray, emphasizes the importance of this change: ‘This blurring of the edges between music and environmental sounds

Music as techné: artist-engineer In a broad historical sense, the concept of electro-sonic autonomy started with the concept of Modernism and its avant-garde artists, and had an especially strong connection with the Soviet Constructivists in the 1920s, who were influenced by Saint-Simonism, a vision of a new society built collectively by artists, engineers, and scientists. As the main manifestation of Modernism is the ‘rejection of tradition’, there was a spectacle of breaks and flashes in all arts during that period.Modernism had proposed a new set of art for a new set of social and cultural desires on the way to its new dream world, and artists were fascinated with this violent rejection of any banality, and the dream of constructing a totally new future with utopian disciplines. In this dream, there was an accelerating development of technology that seemed to enable them to create a perfect future. That is why most modernists fantasized and glorified the technology itself with the fetishism of machine. Raymond Williams explains what the emphasis of both Modernism and avant-garde marks:

‘[…] there is a virtually unprecedented emphasis on the most evident features of a modern urban industrialized world: the city, the machine, speed, space – the creative engineering, construction of a future.’ 1

The idea of construction had been well established by Rodchenko’s slogans for Constructivism. From his slogans, such as ‘Construction is the arrangement of elements’, ‘Like every science, art is a branch of mathematics’, and ‘Constructively organized life is more than enchanting and stifling art of magicians’, we can see that all breakthroughs of art were basically a combination of art and technology, bringing out the resurrection of a Greek concept: Techné.As Andreas Huyssen puts, technology played a crucial, if not the crucial, role in the avant-garde’s attempt to overcome the bourgeois concept of the art/life dichotomy and rebuild the concept of art in a productive way through the transformation of everyday life. He would go further with an ultimate viewpoint of technology determinism:

‘No other single factor has influenced the emergence of the new avant-garde art as much as technol-ogy, which not only fueled the artists’ imagination (dynamism, machine cult, beauty of technics, constructivist, and productivist attitudes), but penetrated to the core of the work itself. The invasion of the very fabric of the art object by technology […] can be grasped in artistic practices such as collage, assembles, montage and photomontage…’ 2

El Lissitzky also pointed out the radical shift of the art of the Constructivists, which headed towards a new scientific and ‘unsentimental’ approach to nature by moving away from the sentimental imitation of it, and predicted the great possibility of combining art and technology:

‘The artist is turning from an imitator into a constructor of the new world of objects. This world will not be built in competition with technology. The paths of art and science have not yet crossed.’ 3

For the moment, all modernist artists were fascinated with the concept of an ‘artist-engineer’ Sergei Eisenstein’s glorification of the progress of montage is an example of such fascination with this concept:

‘What we need is science, not art. One does not create work, one construct it with finished parts,

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‘Assuming that we limit ourselves to a single recording, we can still read the latter more or less quickly, more or less loudly, or even cut it into pieces, thereby presenting the listener with several versions of what was originally a unique event.’7

Brian Eno also focused on one’s variable choices for building up one’s own acoustic environment in a more particular and sophisticated way. He believed recording technology brought the electro-sonic autonomy to ambient listening to afford listeners a new experience of music and sonic space. However, Ola Stockfelt pointed out the limitation of Schaeffer’s infinite variations with regard to more or less homogeneous cultural aspects. Even though one gets the whole freedom of variable modes of listening, it is not usually an entirely free choice in a given situation because a genre of music, even if it can make an appearance almost anywhere in a form of virtual acoustic space, determines the genre-specific relation between music and listener. He has chosen to call each event of listening in a genre-normative listening adequate listening, to use music as a language in a broader sense, and mentions its ideological aspect:

‘Adequate listening is, like all languages, always the result of an informal (although sometimes formalized) contract between a greater or smaller group of people, an agreement about the relation of the musical means of expression to this group’s picture of the world. Adequate listening is hence always in the broadest sense ideological.’ 8

Adorno may well be the most negative analyst of this phenomenon. He claims that ‘ordinary listening’ has not kept up with technological progress, is archaic compared to ordinary seeing, and indicates the pernicious ideological effects of passive listening, distraction and inattention from the demands of reality, in the context of musical ambience. He locates the origin of passive listening as coming from the commodity created by the promoters of commercialized entertainment, which is appropriate to the commercial purpose: the less the mass discriminates, the greater the possibility of selling cultural commodities indiscriminately. In his opinion, one’s sonic autonomy is regressive by being replaced by a mere socio-psychological function. Music today is largely ‘social cement’, with its consequent mass obedience, either in a ‘rhythmic’ or ‘emotional’ manner.Moving beyond the theorists’ arguments, more and more noises, whether pop music or mechanical urban sounds, inevitably came into existence with increased crowdedness, and inversely the value of silence was uncovered. Besides a number of artistic experiments with silence as a compositional component by artists such as John Cage, there arose the issue of the individual right to silence. Finally, in October 1969, the General Assembly of the international Music Council of UNESCO passed a most interesting resolution in terms of everyone’s right to silence.

‘We denounce unanimously the intolerable infringement of individual freedom and of the right of everyone to silence, because of the abusive use, in private and public places, of recorded or broadcast music. We ask the Executive Committee of the International Music Council to initiate a study from all angles - medical, scientific and juridical – without overlooking its artistic and educational aspects, and with a view to proposing to UNESCO, and to the proper authorities everywhere, measures calculated to put an end to this abuse.’ 9

is the most striking feature of twentieth century music’, since music no longer means only classical instrumental sounds.The tape recorder, as a sampler and even as a percussion instrument (although very basic compared to current digitalized devices), also opened the door to the age of recording studios. Studios no longer exist for recording a perfect live act, but have been reborn, as Brian Eno insists, as ‘a compositional tool’, with an additive approach to recording in which the performance is no longer the final cut:

‘Initially tape recording was a single track, all the information contained and already mixed together on that one track. Then in the mid-‘50s experiments were starting with stereo, which was not significantly different. […] Then came three-track recording; it allowed the option of adding another voice or putting a string section on, or something like that. Now this is a significant step, I think; it’s the first time it was acknowledged that the performance isn’t the finished item, and that the work can be added to in the control room, or in the studio itself. […] Where you no longer come to the studio with a conception of the finished piece. Instead, you come with actually rather a bare skeleton of the piece, or perhaps with nothing.’ 5

One of leading classical pianists, Glenn Gould, also emphasized the repositioned role of the studio with the announcement of his retirement from public performance in 1964. He empowered the studio as a function of archival responsibility that enables a performer to explore the whole version given by composer, as well as post-performance editing to create an ideal performance, which hardly ever exists in live musical events. He also mentioned the autonomy of the ‘participant listener’ appreciating recording technology. He recognized the exact concept of virtual acoustic space, the only place in which a perfect performance can exist, and its electronically autonomous power:

‘Let us say, for example, that you enjoy Bruno Walter’s performance of the exposition and recapitu-lation from the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony but incline toward Klemperer’s handling of the development section, which employs a notably divergent tempo. […] With the pitch-speed correlation held in abeyance, you could snip out these measures from the Klemperer edition and splice them into the Walter performance without having the splice produce either an alteration of tempo or a fluctuation of pitch. […] There is, in fact, nothing to prevent a dedicated connoisseur from acting as his own tape editor and, with these devices, exercising such interpretative predilections as will permit him to create his own ideal performance.’6

However, thanks to the invention of the tape recorder, flourishing recording studios and the golden age of radio, music came to be everywhere. Different times, different spaces, different situations: as technological determinist McLuhan puts it, ‘all music at present’. But, music to whose ears? An issue started arising concerning the modes of listening. The founder of Musique Concrète, Schaeffer, was extremely positive about this. He insisted this technological change made people aware of variations of listening with the infinity of sonorous possibility contained by a few centimeters of magnetic tape:

Young Sook Choi Electrosonic Autonomy, Building up Virtual Acoustic Space


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With this awareness of the power of the ‘micro-narrative’, there were those who, wanting to distribute their own music without major record labels and without a commercial purpose, started building up small ‘tape labels’ backed up by ‘cassette culture’, which was an idealistic and purely democratic way of making and distributing music that could not appeal to mainstream taste, but satisfied people with specific tastes in common. Even though this DIY cassette movement by a small minority of users, with the popular slogan ‘DIY not EMI,’ produced on a very humble quality level, the quantities were large due to the ease of creation, and it was a beautifully challenging and ground breaking driver of sonic freshness against ‘commodity listening’ (Adorno) through conventional channels. On the other hand, listening to a Walkman through the earphone is a process that involves both focusing only on the sound to which one is listening, and disturbing the infiltration of sound coming from outside. The earphone is like a border bisecting two different sonic environments, as well as an auditory circuit accepting sound directly from this small gadget. Its border and circuit create a specific aural space, the so-called ‘headspace’. R. Murray describes the effect of the earphone with a description of what physically happens to ‘headspace’ when one listens through it, and explains the reason for its popularity among youngsters as its fully loaded power of sonic autonomy, through which the listener comes to feel like the center of all the sonic environment:

‘In the headspace of earphone listening, the sounds not only circulate around the listener, they literally seem to emanate from points in the cranium itself, as if the archetypes of the unconscious were in conversation. […] When sound is conducted directly through the skull of the headphone listener, he is no longer regarding events on the acoustic horizon; no longer is he surrounded by a sphere of moving elements. He is the sphere. He is universe. […] headphone listening directs the listener towards a new integrity with himself.’ 13

However, although the Walkman and earphone delivered an independent sonic space in one’s headspace, and provided completely customized labels that outside commercial circulation, the enthusiasm for ultimate sonic autonomy still called for another set of auditory desires: looking for a sound that did not exist in an analogue world. This was made possible by pure digitalized music writing.

100% Plunder: left aesthetics Since the first synthesizer Moog in 1964, electronic instrument technology has blossomed, with the first sampler Mellotron in 1963, the first emulater E-mu systems in 1983, the first MIDI embedded YAMAHA DX-7 in the same year, and, most decisively, the proliferation of personal computing. As electronic music has taken a radical shift, the concept of sonic autonomy has come into an entirely new territory: Plunderphonics.As the meaning of ‘plunder’ implies, plunderphonics became the frame of electronic music purely consisting of existing copyright recording sources. This name was coined by John Oswald with his CD, Plunderphonic in 1989, a free give-away to radio stations and for public use. This musical cut-up masterpiece presented innovative and cross-border remixes of Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson, Bing Crosby, Glenn Gould, The Beatles, James Brown and others with its sensational cover featuring a collaged photo of Michael Jackson as a nude woman. Even though Oswald coined and theorized the concept of Plunderphonics, we can find work to which this aesthetics has been applied long before Oswald’s work. In 1961, James Tenney and William

Mark Slouka pointed out how capitalism feeds this hunger, which it itself creates, for silence as its own ‘antidote’. He insists that we can find immediate proof of this in any up market travel magazine: there we will find exclusive spas advertising the promise of silence – no pagers, no cell phones, just the sounds of lake water lapping. In his opinion, in a capitalist society, the option of silence is a privilege:

‘Money buys space, and space buys silence; decibels and dollars are inversely proportional. […] The great advantage that money confers, now I realize, is not silence per se but the option of silence, the privilege of one’s own music, of shutting out the seventeen-year-old whose boombox rattles my panes.’ 10

Following this, more autonomous and alternative suggestions were introduced to prevent outer noise. Whether this is a positive or a negative phenomenon in terms of sonic autonomy, it is a way of building up one’s own sonic environment in headspace, and the invention of Sony Walkman and the earphone realized this new set of virtual acoustic space.

Headspace: micro-narrative portabilityIn 1979, the first cassette Walkman TPS-L2 was introduced by Sony. This invention heralded the new way of listening: securing the owner’s musical taste and subjecting personal selection. Even though it gained a negative reputation for being anti-social, it became ubiquitous in a short period of time, spreading so globally that its brand became the generic name for this kind of product.The ‘participant listener’ that Glenn Gould suggested thus became even more of a participant with the invention of the Walkman: an arranger and producer of his own albums, with endless possibilities for customizing personal situations. Pop culture theorist Iain Chambers notes that this ‘aural walk’ provides a portable soundtrack actively produced for one’s daily perambulations, and also considers the Walkman as the acoustic symbol of the modern nomad; partaking of virtual life in the context of nature, not caring where s/he is, but rather what s/he is carrying.

‘The Walkman is both a mask and masque: a quiet putting into act of localized theatrics. It reveals a significant symbolic gadget for the nomads of modernity, in which music on the move is continually being decontextualised and recontextualised in the inclusive acoustic and symbolic flux of everyday life.’11

Iain Chambers also mentions the positive possibilities of building up one’s private acoustic narrative as a defense against capitalism’s mega sound environment. He even implies that the act of private listening in public spaces could be provocatively political:

‘Here, as opposed to the discarded “grand narratives” of the city, the Walkman offers the possibility of micro-narrative, a customized story and soundtrack, not merely a space but a place, a site of dwelling. The ingression of such a privatized habitat in public spaces is a disturbing act. Its uncanny quality lies in its deliberate confusion of earlier boundaries, in its provocative appearance “out of place.”’ 12



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‘Musical language has an extensive repertoire of punctuation devices but nothing equivalent to literature’s “” quotation marks. Jazz musicians do not wiggle two fingers of each hand in the air, as lecturers sometimes do, when cross-referencing during their extemporization, as on most instruments this would present some technical difficulties. Without a quotation system, well-intended correspondences cannot be distinguished from plagiarism and fraud.’ 16

However, Cutler expressed his suspicions concerning the concept of originality itself in the recording age, and considered that all recording sounds are basically ‘always the first, always the copy’ with no aura, no connection to the present source:

‘The fact is that, considered as raw material, a recorded sound is technically indiscriminate of source. All recorded sound, as recorded sound, is information of the same quality. A recording of a recording is just a recording. No more, no less. We have to start here. […] Thus plunderphonics as a practice radically undermines three of the central pillars of the art music paradigm: originality (it deals only with copies), individuality (it speaks only with the voice of others), and copyright (the breaching of which is a condition of its very existence).’ 17

There is no doubt that it is impossible to apply current copyright legitimacy to this radical aesthetics. Since the current copyright system originated with capitalism, written musical notation is considered as property. Musicologist Kurt Blaukope also pointed out the hackneyed and imperialistic aspect of copyright, saying ‘the international conventions governing copyright are based in the Occidental idea of intellectual property’. In this respect, this is not just plunderphonics’ problem, it is also problem for other music cultures not using the Western system for their music, since traditional, non-notated music can be mutilated for commercial use without receiving any compensation. Any sounds today are indiscriminately transformed into binary code as raw information and musicians play with these codes, usually with no conventional notation. When they build up their own context, even though it consists of 100% plunder, their music is new and fresh and as creative as Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and Sherry Levine’s re-photographed photographs. Just as Schaeffer dreamed of the sonic infinity of a few centimeters of magnetic tape, plunderphonics is an infinite dream of any slice of recorded sound, a realization of ultimate electro-sonic autonomy.

Sing-along: fake aura, 3 minutes’ stardomKaraoke seems to be beside the point in this framework, as it is usually considered to be trivial. However, in terms of electro-sonic autonomy, karaoke or doing karaoke could be one of most controversial issues of this age, since karaoke space originated with and has evolved through tech-nologically radical invention, which now becomes a global technology with the building up another set of virtual acoustic spaces. Even though criticism concerns its harmfulness to musical sensibility and sees its negative side effects as a ‘hotbed of delinquency’, karaoke has spread across continents with varying styles of specific singing cultures within local contexts.Although most people suggest that karaoke started in Kobe in Japan, where a jazz festival is held every year, its origin is still unclear. One legendary story about its origin from a few websites goes that a snack bar owner once put on tapes of accompaniment recordings and encouraged customers to sing when a performer failed to show up due to illness or an unexpected accident. Whatever its origin, karaoke is now a global phenomenon of public musical activity.

S. Burroughs’ work, the first cut-up method recording ‘Collage #1 Blue Suede’ arrived. It was a total re-editing of Elvis Presley’s hit record Blue Suede Shoes, and in 1967 Tenney remixed pop, classical and Asian traditional music together in his later piece Viet Flakes. Undoubtedly these practices and its radical cut-up method inspired Oswald to begin his experiments with ‘macrosamples’. At this point, we might wonder about the origin of Plunderphonics, since the concept sounds very similar to the photo-montage progress of avant-garde techné in the early twentieth century, musique concrète, and more recently John Cage’s experimental works. However, Chris Cutler strongly denies this conceptual bridge.

‘Perhaps this accounts for the curious relationship between the art music world and the new tech-nology which has, from the start, been equivocal or at least highly qualified. […] why, although many creative innovation in the new medium were indeed made on the fringes of high art, their adoption and the subsequent extension has come typically through other, less ideologically intimidated (or less paradigmatically confused?) musical genres. Old art music paradigms and new technology are simply not able to fit together.’ 14

When Cutler claims they are unable to fit, this inability of high art to fit comes from the existence of boundaries. As he insists that there is no sense of speaking in terms of high or low, art or popular and that ‘where listening and producing, and criticism and creation elide’, infinite reproduction, thus infinite possibility without boundaries is the key factor of the aesthetics of Plunderphonics. However, avant-garde techné set their works within the realm of art, often associated with a specific ideology, and secured its originality as a property. This is why James Tenney’s innovation and Oswald’s contributions differ from them, and this is why initial works of avant-garde failed to infiltrate the masses.In an economic sense, Richard Barbrook points out the aspect of high-tech gift economy of this aesthetics. He insists that the passive consumption of fixed pieces of information would become the participatory process of interactive creativity as the ‘intellectual commons’ in a virtual space, and also mentions the ambiguities within the economics of music-making:

‘For instance, musicians have long appropriated recordings for DJ-ing, sampling and remixing. The popularity and capabilities of the Net is intensifying these ambiguities within the economics of music making. The MP3 format doesn’t just make the piracy of copyright material much easier. As importantly, the social mores and technical structure of the Net encourages enthusiasts to make their own sounds.’ 15

Expanding electro-sonic autonomy, this righteous plagiarism has enabled us to recognize any sonic environment to which we are accustomed, or familiar acoustic space, as potentially creatively strange. Cutler points out the key aesthetics of Plunderphonics by saying ‘Production is no more than critical consuming: an empirical activity of Pick’n’Mix’. However, plunders’ purely digitalized writing of music, creating a totally virtual acoustic sound that could never exist in reality, has often been blocked by the question of ‘what is originality?’, and the issue of copyright legitimacy naturally followed. As Oswald said, ‘If creativity is a field, copyright is a fence’, and the unmodified concept of copyright and property has thrown obstacles in the path towards the dream of plunderphonia. With this issue, pioneering Oswald seriously suggested the necessity of a quotation system being established:



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enthusiasm, even addiction, for karaoke will not wane. The size of karaoke industry provides strong evidence to support this prediction. According to Japan Amusement Monthly (January1995), when it was at a worldwide peak the karaoke business reached annual sales of US$10 billion, most of which was generated by hardware leasing and copyright accounts. If it is true, the size of the karaoke industry was then approximately one-third of the size of the record industry of Japan in terms of turnover. Recent statistics show its slight decline, but it is still a huge market, and now on a global level. With market forces, relevant technologies also have evolved radically due to investment. What has been a crucial force behind the whole phenomenon? We can find an important tip for answering this question in Charles Keil’s inspiration about karaoke from when he visited Tokyo for the first time. He writes retrospectively that the goal of each singer seems to be a perfect replication of a specific star in a specific style, and also mentioned the humanizing aspect of karaoke, in which people are not afraid to contend with the world’s best singers, in the context of a promising audience of close friends or colleagues. Here is a raw sketch of this Western stranger’s first impression of the karaoke scene from his field notes:

‘People really do hold the microphone. They put it very close to the mouth and seem to treasure the moment. Faces work into impassioned expressions. You pour your feelings into it, glancing at the words in the book before you as necessary.’ 20

Being wholly impassioned might come from a certain memory triggered by a certain song, but mostly from the spectacle of the original singer. With the affirmative support of one’s collective audience, a nobody can certainly become a somebody: a star for the moment. Even though a critic may cynically remark that this is just vicarious stardom for a humble drinker, there is an uncannily fundamental aura of encouraging your individual expression, mingled with the fame of the moment. As Adorno insists, reconsidering the culture industry, people want to be deceived more than ever. People want to join this spectacle and be part of it even though it is just an equivocal fake. Singing in public, with a promising, fan-like audience fuelled with alcoholic generosity is a quiet sensational experience. In terms of sonic autonomy, karaoke is a totally virtual acoustic space in which one can utilize the fame of stars, which was created by music industry but can now be made one’s own: karaoke technology has evolved to further and further realize this fake aura and everybody’s secret desire. Alongside the evolution of karaoke systems, there has been always a microphone mixer which, as Charles Keil recollects, ‘people really do hold. The microphone is an amplifying technology that distinguishes one’s voice from others’. Just as R. Murray claims that the huge noises of our civilization are the result of imperialistic ambitions, mostly territory expansion, and that the amplifier was also invented by an imperialist in order to dominate others with one’s own sound, without a microphone a singer can never be empowered and never occupy the domestic karaoke territory. Moreover, the essential echo system helps the singer to sound much better than their actual singing capability would allow.The microphone is a symbolic context of representation, which shows on whom we should focus and to whom we should listen, and also has an iconography of the star fantasy in this virtual acoustic space, which implies the image the professional singer and its public power. In a functional sense, self-amplification itself enables you can sing and make any sound as loudly as you want in an acous-tically isolated place. Since ordinary workers sacrifice their own voices in order to harmonize with an organizational voice, it is certainly a sanctioned chance to turn up the volume on an individual’s

Early karaoke was realized with the technology of the cassette tape. The prototype of karaoke was introduced in 1973 with the first ten decks made by Inuoe and his colleagues, which featured a built-in coin timer and microphone mixer with reverb echo mechanism, and the first accompaniment loop tapes they produced were in 12 volumes with forty-eight songs in all. This deck and tapes, a prototype of karaoke, was named ‘Crescent Juke’, and was regarded as an extension of a jukebox. When this first machine was leased to small bars, it also included was accompanied by handwritten and photostat-copied lyric sheets, usually preserved in a vinyl album to protect them from drinks spilt by drunken Japanese businessmen. A passage from the novel Small World by David Lodge may be the first description in English of a karaoke episode, providing an explicit picture of early karaoke before the introduction of video with CDs.

‘Persse was encouraged or almost forced to sing a song himself. “I don’t wish to sing at all!” Persse protests. “I just came in here for a quiet drink.” The Japanese beams toothily and sits down beside him. “But this is karaoke bar.” Hesitantly, Persse repeats the word. “Karaoke – what does that mean?” “Literally karaoke means empty orchestra. You see, the barman provides the orchestra,” he gestures towards the bar, at the back of which Persse now sees that there is a long shelf of music cassettes and a cassette deck, “And you provide the voice” – he gestures to the microphone. “Oh, I see!” says Persse laughing and slapping his thigh. The Japanese laughs too, and calls something across to his friends, who also laugh. “So which song please?” he says, turning back to Persse.’ 18

‘And you provide the voice’ is the key mechanism of karaoke. As in its original meaning, the context of karaoke can never be completed, but remains ‘kara’, empty, until one provides enthusiastic singing. In this respect, musicologist Toru Mitsui claims that the definition of karaoke in The Oxford Dictionary of New Words is not correct.

‘This machine was described, when the word was selected for inclusion in The Oxford Dictionary of New Words (1991: 172), as ‘A sound system with prerecorded soundtracks of popular music from which the vocal part has been erased so as to allow an individual to sing along with.’ It is incorrect, however, to say that ‘the vocal part has been erased’, because in fact the vocal part never existed at all in a karaoke recording. This non-existence is the very ‘kara-’ of karaoke, that is void.’ 19

The foremost factor of this karaoke machine is the instantaneous selection of a song, more exactly the sound of a virtual backing band for a specific song. In this sense, karaoke is a term of active and autonomous implication. This is why the word karaoke also denotes the activity of singing using a karaoke machine, not only a singing space: associated with cheerful hand-clapping and enforced singing in turn, as an implicit social contract of karaoke.As the context of karaoke is an imperfection in nature, it demands the users’ concentrated passion to complete, and this mechanism means that karaoke is a space of contradiction, with opposing concepts: collectivism (as a member of a collective) and individualism (as a performer to express one’s own voice); tension (standing on a stage in front of others and matching one’s own voice to that of the stars who are the original singers of the songs) and relaxation (as an entertainment for releasing stress); and a dual role as an generous audience and a give-it-your-best-shot performer. Despite its sophistication, Man Kong Lum called this the karaoke dilemma, and said that as long as the simple mechanism of ‘pick the microphone and provide your voice’ remains unchanged, the public’s



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Jacques Attali considers that listening to music is listening to all noises, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflective power that is essentially political. By his implication, our political power of sonic autonomy seems today to be regressing. Historically, there has always been a challenge to the dominant conventions of music, such as avant-garde techné, DIY punk, or the techno move-ment, but all of these challenges and their attraction seem to have disappeared in history or been absorbed once again into the commercial world again, losing their anti-establishment stance. Where is our hope against today’s global ventriloquism? In a sentimental sense, but nonetheless with fair reason, the answer to this question should be located in our ventriloquized voices, since all matters of sonic autonomy return to the power of the voice. Endless questioning about one’s own voice and its identity seems to be the only way to guard against the global macro-voice. When someone asks you, ‘So which song please?’, you should ask in return, ‘Are you sure you have my request?’

Notes1 Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism, p. 53

2 Andras Huyssen, After the Great Divide, p.9

3 El Lissitzky, quoted in: Margaret A. Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetics: Karl Marx and the

Visual Arts, p.133

4 Sergei Eisenstein, quoted in: Jacques Aumount, Montage Eisenstein, ,p. 150

5 Brian Eno, ‘The Studio as Compositional Tool’,in: Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner

(eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, p.128

6 Glenn Gould, ‘The Prospects of Recording’, in: op. cit., (note 5), p.122

7 Pierre Schaeffer, ‘Acousmatics’, in: op. cit., (note 5), p.79

8 Ola Stockfelt, ‘Adequate Modes of Listening’, in: op. cit., (note 5),, p.92

9 UNESCO 1969, quoted in R. Murray Schafer, ‘The Music of the Environment’, in:

op. cit., (note 5),, p.37

10 Mark Slouka, ‘Listening for Silence: Notes on the Aural Life’ , in: op. cit., (note 5),

p.45

11 Iain Chambers, ‘The Aural Walk’ , in: op. cit., (note 5), p.99

12 ibid., p. 100

13 R. Murray Schafer,‘The Music of the Environment’ , in: op. cit., (note 5), p.35

14 Chris Cutler, ‘Plunderphonia’, in: op. cit., (note 5), p.140-1

15 Richard Barbrook, ‘The High-Tech Gift Economy’, Hypermedia Research Center of

Westminster University, http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-hightechgifteconomy.

html

16 John Oswald, ‘Bettered by the Borrower’, in: op. cit., (note 5), p.133

17 Chris Cutler, ‘Plunderphonia’, in: op. cit., (note 5), pp.142-143

18 David Lodge, Small World, quoted inTōru Mitsui, ‘The Genesis of Karaoke’ in Tōru

Mitsui and Shuhei Hosokawa (eds.), Karaoke around the World: Global Technology,

Local Singing , pp. 291-3

19 Tōru Mitsui, op. cit. (note 18), p. 40

20 Charles Keil and Steven Feld, Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, , p. 253

21 John Oswald, ‘Bettered by the Borrower’, in: op.cit. (note 5), p.137

expression, probably in front of a drunken boss who is at that moment just another one of singers. In 1982, visual karaoke was introduced including videos and laser discs, as well CDs, which gradually replaced cassette tapes. I believe that this invention certainly coincides with appearance of MTV in 1980s, opening up the age of Video Killed the Radio Star, which was the first song ever played by MTV. In actual fact, music videos did not kill the radio star, rather killed the radio and in fact accelerated the star system to make them and their music more expensive. With visual aids such as music videos, the aura of the star became strengthened and more visual. The karaoke system quickly adopted this visualization system to further satisfy the customer’s desire for a vicarious stardom, the desire to get as close as possible to the aura of the star. This is why the karaoke system requires the a huge TV screen, even though this is without relevance to the singing function, to provide a better backdrop with video and graphics: a better stage for a singer fully loaded with the aura of stardom in the karaoke space. Currently, cutting edge technology, called ‘virtual reality’ karaoke, has gone even further. It allows singers to watch themselves singing on a screen. When you sing, you are captured on a screen: just like a singing star on TV! In addition, you can customize a specific backdrop on a monitor with the touch of a button, and if you want to you can connect with other singing groups in other singing spaces, so that you can see each other singing together, virtually, at the same time. Even though this does not provide the sound of others’ singing, it seems enough to share the other singers’ joyful fake aura. It certainly raises questions as to whether this is breaking the spectacle of the star system, or still selling it as a media commodity or both.

Conclusion: against global ventriloquismIt could be said that electronic music technology, all through its evolution and clamorous history, has kept trying to realize the freedom of music by creating a new series of virtual acoustic spaces and strengthening the sonic autonomy of musicians and listeners. Despite its contribution, commercialism has all the time infiltrated into this fresh air and polluted the new sonic environment by occupying all dominant positions. In the USA, by 1969 Americans were listening to about 268,000,000 radios, and as R. Murray claims, modern life has been ventriloquized. The banality of popular music and its annoying repetitive broadcasting from the radios and loudspeakers of commercialized town centres bombards us by its very existence. As Oswald skeptically says, listening to pop music is not a matter of choice and it is impossible to refuse to be a passive recipient:

‘Although people in general are making more noise than ever before, fewer people are making more of the tonal noise: specially, in music, those with megawatt PAs, triple-platinum sales, and heavy rotation. Difficult to ignore, pointlessly redundant to imitate: how does one not become a passive recipient?’ 21

Virtual acoustic spaces, and our electro-sonic autonomy, seem to be unconsciously and consciously losing their original concept through the colonization of commercialism. Music at present is all too frequently a poor selection arranged like the shelves of a mega records shop, with a very similar inventory of recording for headspace, for those whom Oswald calls ‘Walkpeople’; the same inventory of hits played by DJs in different clubs on the same night, and a miserable representation of hundreds of drunken Frank Sinatras and John Lennons in karaoke rooms.



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Asiascape Ops Issue 2 March 2008 Yoko Ono Nostalgia and Futurism in Contemporary Japanese Sci-Fi Animation

Yoko Ono

Nostalgia and Futurism in Contemporary Japanese Sci-Fi Animation

Science Fiction (sci-fi) is one the most dominant genres in Japanese popular visual media, namely manga and anime. Although sci-fi generally deals with events that take place in the future, Japanese anime/manga abounds with nostalgic images that coexist in these futuristic settings. In this paper, I would like to examine how nostalgic references are used in Japanese sci-fi animation, and then revisit the concept of ‘future’ in sci-fi, hoping to cast another light on how visions of the future are portrayed in Japanese popular visual media. First let us confirm the definition of nostalgia. For its everyday sense we might consult the OED, which defines it as: ‘acute longing for familiar surroundings, esp. regarded as a medical condition; homesickness. Also in extended use a) sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime; (also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past, and b) something which causes nostalgia for the past; freq. as a collective term for things which evoke a former (remembered) era (cf. memorabilia)’. Pam Cook argues in her Screening the Past that authenticity of representation of the past in films, or the distinction between history, memory and nostalgia, has become vague because the latter two are associated with fantasy. They are recollections of one’s experience ‘reconstructed for the purpose of current agendas’, or in other words, ‘something idealised (…) that can be never retrieved in actuality and can only be accessed through images’ (Cook, 2005). Yet Cook questions, however, traditional notions of history and representation by saying that ‘nostalgia cannot be regarded as simple device for idealising and de-historicising the past’, as the nostalgic memory films ‘encourage reflection in audience’ (Cook, 2005).Now, a nostalgic attitude of looking back on the past does not seem to complement sci-fi which is usually placed in a futuristic setting. Interestingly enough, however, Japanese sci-fi animations and manga that have a dystopian vision of the future tend to look at the past nostalgically. For instance, Hayao Miyazaki’s early work such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), which I will come back to later, share a mixture of fear of the dystopian future and a nostalgic depiction of community life. Why fear for the future? Japanese visions of a dystopian future are undeniably rooted in the traumatic experience of the atomic bomb attacks, but also derive fundamentally from frequent and continuous threats of natural disaster such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. These torment-ing memories have formed a paranoiac vision in the mass imagination that things that are out of people’s control could come and destroy the world, and this dystopian vision of the future has been repeatedly depicted in various popular media. Why then, mix it with nostalgia in sci-fi?To examine the questionable combination of the two in this paper, I would like to focus on the sekai-kei genre, in particular, of Japanese sci-fi. It is said that this new genre had developed since the mid-1990s in Japanese popular media, including animation, manga and the ‘light novel’ or novels targeted at young audiences, and was given this name in early 2000s. The best examples are Voices of a Distant Star (Makoto Shinkai, 2002), She, the Ultimate Weapon (Shin Takahashi, manga 2000-01, TV animation series 2002) and Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu (Iriya’s sky and the summer of UFO)

ReferencesTheodor W. Adorno, with the assistance of George Simpson, ‘Popular Music Theory’,

in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York: Institute of Social Research,

1941, IX, 17-48.

Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, in The Culture Industry: Selected

Essays on Mass Culture, Routledge, London, 1991.

Jacque Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, translated by Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley,

and Andrew Ross, Indiana University Press, 1987.

Richard Barbrook, The High-Tech Gift Economy, The Hypermedia Research Center,

http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-hightechgifteconomy.html

Karaoke Kanta http://www.karaokekanta.net

Karaoke scene http://www.karaokescene.com

Kurt Blaukopf, Musical Life in a Changing Society, translated by David Marinelli,

Amadeus Press, 1982.

Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music,

Continuum, New York/London, 2004.

Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism,

Macmillan Press, 1986.

Charles Keil and Steven Feld, Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, The University of

Chicago Press, Chicago/London, 1994.

Tōru Mitsui and Shuhei Hosokawa (eds.), Karaoke around the World: Global

Technology, Local Singing, Routledge, London/New York, 1998.

Margaret A. Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetics:Karl Marx & the Visual Arts, Cambridge

University Press, 1984.

L. R. Rutsky, High Techne: Art and Technology from Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman,

University of Minnesota Press; 1st edition, 1999.

Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, Verso, London/New York, 1989.

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(a novel by Mizuhito Akiyama, 2001-03, OVA 2005) (Azuma, 2007). This new term of sekai-kei, or the genre pre-occupied with ‘self-absorbed visions of the world’ posits that the private love relation-ship of the main character and the heroine (‘you and me’ exclusively) is directly connected to the vague yet ontological issue of ‘the end of the world’ without depicting the outside/external world, or in other words, the society or nation to which these characters belong (Azuma, 2007). Although I said earlier that sekai-kei developed since the mid-1990s, some argue that its core elements can be found already in as early as the 1980s in the works by a sci-fi novelist and originator of the ‘light novel’, Motoko Arai (Azuma, 2007). So it is possible to consider that the quintessence of sekai-kei has existed from the early stages of Japanese sci-fi, particularly in the ones for juvenile audiences, and it comes to the fore after the phenomenal success of the Evangelion series (Hideaki Anno, 1995-96), which certainly contains sekai-kei elements. Now, I would first like to examine one sekai-kei animation mentioned above, namely Voices of a Distant Star, by applying contemporary Japanese cultural theorist Hiroki Azuma’s postmodern otaku discourse from The Animalising Postmodern (2001) and the succeeding studies in The Birth of Gamic Realism (2007) that has been received as ‘neo-new’ criticism in Japan, and then analyse the use of nostalgia in these sekai-kei sci-fi animations. To begin with, I would like to summarise Azuma’s discourse. According to his analysis, otaku (geek) culture is grounded in a postmodern Japanese society. By referring to Jean-François Lyotard’s famous definition of the postmodern as ‘incredulity toward grand narratives’ in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), Azuma points out that the belief in fictional worlds, one of the sig-nificant aspects of otaku culture, makes interesting parallels with the attitude that Japanese society as a whole adhered to after grand narratives of progress and prosperity have been lost. Particularly in 1970s when the oil shocks and the incidents of Rengo sekigun (the United Red Army of Japan) gave a negative impact on Japanese society, however, the tide turned and incredulity towards grand nar-ratives grew stronger. The post-war baby boomers who had been brought up with faith in grand narratives could not accept the world as it was, and in disillusionment tried to live on as if grand narratives still existed and functioned. This coincided with the emergence of otaku. Azuma observes that otaku depended on the fabrication of sub-culture instead of grand narratives, and he suggests that the ‘copy culture’ of otaku resembles the ‘precession of simulacra’ or hyperreality proposed by Jean Baudrillard’s economics-based theory expounded in Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) and Simulacra and Simulation (1981). It is well known that otaku make parodies of their favourite manga or anime, and sell them at Comic Market conventions (Kinsella, 1998). However, it has become difficult to distinguish the original from the copy because the boundaries between them have nowadays become blurred. The parodies made by otaku have gained such popularity in their community that some otaku would become professionals and produce their original work in the public media, and the original writers/artists produce parodies of their own work to attract an otaku audience. Otaku consumption culture clearly demonstrates that simulacra have overtaken the original. Otaku culture thus reflects postmodern Japan well, Azuma argues.Azuma then develops his argument by proposing a ‘database’ model to capture the postmodern world. Azuma states that the postmodern world lost fundamental ‘grand narratives’, but the ‘grand narratives’ have been replaced by a ‘database’ and the little narratives by simulacra. Azuma designates these ‘databases’ as ‘grand non-narratives’ in contemporary Japan. Let me elucidate this further by mentioning his other point that there is a generation gap in the present otaku community. Otaku of the 1970s and 1980s, born in the time when ‘grand narratives’

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were still believed, could not rid themselves of the old conceptual framework. They needed ‘grand narratives’ in their sub-cultural products, because otherwise they could not regard the world depicted in manga/anime as realistic. In other words, otaku in the 1970s and 1980s enjoyed manga and anime that had a clear definition of the virtual world with its own historical and social settings and messages, and the creators were required to produce contents with fictional ‘grand narratives’ such as the Mobile Suit Gandam series by Yoshiyuki Tomino (the first series appeared as a TV series in 1979-80) that is claimed to have changed the concept of giant robot animation, which had been regarded as purely children’s entertainment, into a ‘Real Robot sub-genre’ (Simmons, 2002). On the other hand, the younger generation of otaku from the 1990s and 2000s, born long after the period of incredulity of ‘grand narratives’ had passed, are ready to accept the world without ‘grand narratives’, therefore their sub-cultural products do not require ‘grand narratives’ anymore, and they just look for signs from the database. In other words, the younger generation only cares for characters, without paying much attention to the stories or the world around or behind them (Ito, 2005). So, what these young otaku are enthusiastically doing is just collecting figure dolls of their favourite characters. Azuma then argues that the younger generation of otaku perceives the world or reality as if playing video games. Azuma coined this attitude ‘gamic realism’ and insists that to understand this new variety of ‘realism’, analysis of the surrounding media environment is essential. He continues that while traditional media deliver contents (in other words, one-way communication), gamic realism looks for interactive communication media (for instance, an Internet community such as Bulletin Board System), as young otaku feel that they are connected to products, to others or to reality in this mode of interactivity.By applying Azuma’s theory, regardless of whether the attitudes of contemporary otaku are socio-logically dysfunctional or not, I would now like to analyse nostalgia in Voices of a Distant Star. This 25-minute full digital animation was produced by an amateur individual called Makoto Shinkai (who served as its director, script writer, editor and art designer) and won many animation and media awards in Japan for its high visual quality, and gained cult popularity. The story is relatively simple: it takes place in 2046, when the science and technology of mankind has developed dramatically after the discovery of the remains of another civilization on Mars in 2039. In order to investigate this civilization (named Tarsian), which had moved to another planet, they formed the United Nations Space Army. The protagonists, Mikako and Noboru, are close classmates at junior high school. The heroine has been selected as one of the pilots to serve in the army and joins the UN space fleet. The male protagonist Noboru is thus left behind and remains on earth, going on to high school. The two never express their feelings to each other before Mikako’s departure, despite the fact that they have strong affection for each other. The main story is about their communication and the difficulty of communication, which is a key issue of self-identification for young otaku. As their long distance ‘relationship’ begins, they try to communicate by text messages via mobile phone. However, the further Mikako travels from earth’s solar system, the longer it takes to send and receive messages. Eventually, the time it takes for a message to arrive takes a few months, a year, a few years, and so on. Because of the faster than light technology that moves the UN fleet through space, Mikako and Noboru remain the same age as each other despite the increasingly vast distances that separate them. Their messages, however, must travel at slower or normal (ie. technologically permissible) speeds.Eventually, Mikako sends a despondent message, saying that ‘I am still 15 years old, but by the time you receive this message, you will be 24 years old!’ She fears that Noboru will forget about her.

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from the beginning. Indeed, it is not difficult for the audience to simulate Mikako’s nostalgia, as Shinkai’s naturalistically depicted landscape is so familiar with what the audience has experienced in their adolescence and easily stimulates their nostalgia. By applying Azuma’s theory, one can say that these images are simulacra of nostalgia.However, I must remind you here that even though the audience sympathises with Mikako, they are still watching the story from the male protagonist’s viewpoint; in other words, a game player’s view. The text message communication displayed in the story is actually a one-way communication from the heroine, and although the audience can hear the inner voice of the male protagonist, the audience never sees him sending messages to the heroine. This underlines the resemblance to simulation games; a character can express her message, but the player can merely read the text, and cannot interact with the character. If Voices of a Distant Star duplicates a simulation game, then an additional issue to be considered. Left on the earth, Noboru decides to be strong and grow up alone. Whereas Mikako, when she encounters her alter ego (which is actually a Tarsian transformed into her own form1 who invites her (and mankind) to follow the Tarsians further so that they can offer mankind more knowledge and technology), refuses to embrace this new, distant life by saying that she would just like to return home to Noboru. This makes a very interesting contrast between the two characters’ choices for life. One (who is situated in a recognisable present) tries to face reality and grow up, while the other (situated in an unrecognisable present that is also a distant future) prefers to remain in a nostalgic world, which is not reality. Here again, I would like to apply Azuma’s discourse: in the gamic reality, those who are familiar with meta-narratives of a virtual world are aware that they cannot stay there forever. A player struggles to make a choice whether to continue enjoying meta-narratives (in the case of romance simulation games, by simulating love affairs with several heroines), or to give up and come back to real life. Mikako’s and Noboru’s choices represent, respectively, one who wants to remain in a non-real world (in her case, the nostalgic world) and one who tries to grow up in reality. Their choices are emphasised by their age as, while Noboru grows up physically (since his time in the anime is measured by the in-creasingly delayed reception of messages from Mikako), Mikako remains 15 (since her time is con-nected to sending the messages and not to their delayed reception), staying in her reminiscent world. One may ask the question of how Mikako can be synchronised with the audience as she is merely a character in the game, and not a player. She is undeniably a character rather than a player in terms of a simulation game, but at the same time, she represents a player who plays a shooting game. She fights against Tarsians as in a shooting game. In that sense, both protagonists represent game players, though in different types of games. The story ends with a text that states: ‘koko ni iru yo’ (I am here) with a voice-over of both protagonists, as if responding to Mikako’s question ‘where am I?’ at the opening sequence. The text is written on a neutral, plain white background to allow the audience to read this out of the context of each character’s life. It does not matter which choice one makes, because they are both allowed to exist (albeit in different relations to each other’s time and space).Now let’s focus on nostalgia. As I mentioned earlier, the nostalgic landscape in Voices of a Distant Star are simulacra. It means that these images are not rooted in ‘grand narratives’. They are a collection of signs that brings sentimental imaginings of the past to the audience’s mind, but it does not necessarily belong to one particular time, community or person. It can rather be said that these signs are fragmented reflections of the collective imagining, or a fabrication of what Japanese regard as the ‘nostalgic past’.

She compares their relationship to Romeo and Juliet, separated by time and space. Meanwhile, Noboru fears that he cannot grow up if he merely waits for Mikako’s text messages, and he tries to move forward in his new life without Mikako.It is useful to examine the sekai-kei genre here. The plots of the two other sekai-kei works I mentioned earlier are quite similar to this: the male protagonist and heroine are secondary school students and are in romantic relationships; the story is often narrated from the male protagonist’s point of view; their everyday life is depicted as if it were today’s high school life even though the story takes place in the future; despite its emphasis on technological advancement, particularly in terms of weapons and armaments, the characters’ everyday life hardly seems to show any futuristic change; one day, they are involved in a war that may cause the end of the world; this triggers the couple to pay desperate attention to each other; the most interesting feature of this crisis is that it is the heroine who goes to the war front to fight to protect the male protagonist and indeed the world, and she gets wounded both physically and mentally, whereas the male protagonist observes the situation powerlessly. Why is there such subversion of gender stereotypes in these narratives? One could argue that it is because these sekai-kei animations are targeted at young otaku, particularly male, so it was produced as an animated version of a bishōjo game or romance simulation game. Azuma’s term, ‘gamic realism’, can explain this aptly. The male protagonist is indeed a game player. The audience gets a better sense of reality if it is presented like a simulation game, as Azuma argues. That also explains why the story is told from the male protagonist’s point of view. The male protagonists are not sure of their feelings at the beginning of the story, but their affection grows as the story develops.In romance simulation games, there are several genres, one of which is called a ‘tear-jerker’ game, often with a heroine suffering from terminal illness or with problems that are out of her control. The more sentimental the setting is, the more attached the game player becomes to the heroine. The dystopian setting of sekai-kei (at the end of the world) fits well in this genre of game, which is why there is no need to describe the ‘grand narratives’ of their world. The nation, war and society are a mere setting for turning the player’s enthusiasm towards romance with the heroine. The reason why the heroine has to go through physical (as well as psychological) anguish can be explained in the same way. Heroines are chosen by the nation to become fighters for a great cause against their will. However, no matter how much the game player adores the heroine, being a game player, he is powerless and there is nothing he can to do to save her apart from reading the text that tells of her pains. In most cases, the heroine dies or disappears at the end (it is called ‘bad-end’ among otaku game players, as opposed to ‘happy-end’). I hope to have explained clearly enough that sekai-kei constructs its world as if it is a simulation game. However, I seem to have lingered too long on Makoto Shinkai and the sekai-kei genre. Now let’s come back to Voices of a Distant Star and nostalgia. As I mentioned earlier, the protagonists’ everyday lives appear very familiar to ours, despite its futuristic backdrop. In fact, apart from the stunning depiction of space robots, there is nothing to indicate a futuristic setting. The fact they exchange text messages on very basic mobile phones seems odd in this setting. On the contrary, the audience senses nostalgia in the details of their everyday lives. But why and how do these images elicit the audience’s nostalgia? The trick can be found in the introductory sequence of the film. It is Mikako’s nostalgia for the home life she shared with Noboru, if not homesickness. She is away from her home and beloved. The audience is drawn into the world of Voices of a Distant Star to sympathise with Mikako’s situation

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Asiascape Ops Issue 3 December 2008 Yoko Ono Nostalgia and Futurism in Contemporary Japanese Sci-Fi Animation

still believed in, it was also believed that the ‘future’ was a time and place of hope for mankind, where science and technology would advance and people’s lives would be more civilised, more prosperous and more convenient. The ‘future’ promised the ultimate comfort of life and was something to which to look forward. Today, people are disappointed to learn that scientific and technological advancement does not necessarily fulfill one’s life. On the contrary, it can rather alienate and disconnect individuals; unhappy and distraught people are desperate to find a comfortable place in society, looking back at the past where once there was a community to which they felt they belonged. The Showa period is depicted positively in the films I mentioned above, because people could believe that there was a ‘future’ at that time. The catch copy from the trailers of ALWAYS: 3chome no yuhi, confirms this: ‘Although we were poor, we could dream of the future’ (yutakadewa nakatta keredo, ashita eno yumega atta).I hope to have demonstrated enough to reach the conclusion now. I have to mention, however, that not all sci-fi animations use nostalgic views of the past in such a way. For instance, Miyazaki’s early works like Nausicaä and Laputa: Castle in the Sky depicted community life positively yet in a nostalgic manner. Miyazaki, who values positive aspects of history (or ‘grand narratives’), believes that human beings should learn from the past to build a better future. When Miyazaki depicts community life and technology nostalgically, he convinces the audience (and probably himself too) to re-evaluate what we had in the past.2 As Helen McCarthy suggests, Miyazaki is against blind faith in technology and recapturing the old world, and his true message is ‘to help the children (…) learn what makes them feel good and what will make a better world’ and ‘to deal with the future through’ his work (McCarthy, 2002).Mamoru Oshii, the director of Ghost in the Shell (1995), on the other hand, consistently questions history and employs a nostalgic landscape for a dramatic denial of a present that has abandoned faith in the future. In a sequence in Patlabor: the Movie (1989), Detective Matsui walks around Tokyo looking for signs of a terrorist in hiding, Dr. Hoba. Detective Matsui observes that many traditional old houses have been abandoned, and realises the antipathy of Hoba, a genius engineer, towards the massive destruction of his hometown Tokyo in the name of ‘urban development’. He then discovers Hoba’s intention to contrast the symbolic ‘Tower of Babel’ with the ruins of old downtown Tokyo.3 The film was released during the ‘bubble economy’ and was actually a timely criticism against Japan/Tokyo of the late 1980s. Oshii’s attitude towards the past is opposite to Miyazaki’s, but both of them are looking at the past to shape the future. The young otaku’s nostalgia, on the other hand, represented by Voices of a Distant Star, is merely simulacra of comfort that is not related to history in terms of ‘grand narratives’. In this way, otaku nostalgia in sci-fi animation demands our further consideration.

In order to elucidate this point, I would like to refer to another animated feature, Crayon Shin-chan: The Adult Empire Strikes Back! (Keiichi Hara 2001). It is the ninth spin-off, feature-length animation of a widely popular manga and TV series. Crayon Shin-chan is a comedy aimed at children with a naughty kindergarten boy as a central character, and certainly has much less otaku appeal than sekai-kei. This film, however, is more sci-fi than an everyday life comedy in its own right. In Crayon Shin-chan, a new theme park called 20th century EXPO opens in various parts of Japan, including in the town where Shin-chan lives, and adult residents including Shin-chan’s parents are enthusiastic about the attractions representing 20th century popular culture, feeling like children again. Retro products (like monochrome televisions and vinyl records) come back onto the market due to popular demand. One day the adult residents disappear from town, and Shin-chan and his friends discover a conspiracy carried out by a secret society called ‘Yesterday once more’ to build a new Adult Empire by recreating the ‘good old’ Showa period. Adults have been brainwashed by toxic gas that contains the ‘nostalgic air of Showa period,’ which was being diffused into the air of the 20th century EXPOs. The Showa period was symbolised here by Tokyo Tower and imagery from EXPO 70, which was held in Osaka. This film hit the screen in 2001, at the very beginning of the 21st century, and Ken, one of the core members of the secret society, says that there is no ‘future’ in the 21st century, and that is why he would like to bring people back to the time when community functioned properly. In a sequence in which Ken takes the protagonists to his recreated ‘Showa community town,’ where he currently lives with others who agree with his vision, it is not difficult to see the exemplification of ‘Showa nostalgia’. The film displays that nostalgia as merely signs (of memorabilia) that can be retrieved from a ‘database’, and reproduced as if a film set. Indeed, the more recent hit film ALWAYS: 3chome no yuhi (Always: Sunset on 3rd Street) (Takashi Yamazaki, 2005), based on Ryohei Saigan’s long-running manga of the same title that first appeared in 1974, reincarnates this nostalgic landscape in a live-action film by employing special effects. There is a remarkable resemblance in the depictions of Showa downtown landscapes in the two films.The most interesting point here lies in what Ken says; he does not want to face the dark side of the future and prefers to return to the past. Japanese nostalgia for the Showa period, particularly around the 1950s (Showa 30s), has been widely criticised in the postwar period because it tends to neglect the negative side of that period. Ken, for instance, fabricated a downtown of the Showa 30s like a film studio set, and tried to remain there. The little, childish hero, Shin-chan, stands against Ken by saying he would like to grow up. Targeting mainly children, this film’s message is straightforward and clear.Thus, nostalgia in contemporary sci-fi animation is synonymous with the refusal to grow up into the future. Nostalgic landscapes are signs of the comfortable homely surroundings that no longer exist, and the narrative in Crayon Shin-chan presents a pair of contrasting characters; one protagonist accepts the harsh reality and tries to grow up, while the other tries to remain in the fabricated comfort of the past. This is related to Distant Star in complicated ways.It is useful also to examine how ‘future’ is presented in these films, and to discover without difficulty that ‘future’ is also characterised by signs retrieved from a database, in the same way as ‘nostalgia’. ‘Future’, likewise, is represented by highly advanced technology, super robots in particular, and space travel and/or war. It is interesting to see that the superficial images of the future in sekai-kei do not differ much from the ones in the manga/anime of the 1970s. There is a significant difference, however, in the perception of the future between them. In the 1970s, when ‘grand narratives’ were

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Asiascape Ops Issue 3 December 2008 Fabian Schäfer Virtual Death of the Human Being; Time and the (Ir)Reversibility of Choice in Digital Media

Fabian Schäfer

Virtual Death of the Human Being: Time and the (Ir)Reversibility of Choice in Digital Media

AbstractDigital and virtual forms of culture are intensely choice-based. In the absence of meta-narrative, one is constantly being solicited (as an agent of choice between alternatives) to follow links. This paper would like to distinguish Japanese cultural critic Azuma Hiroki’s concept of human and animal action, and Martin Heidegger’s authentic and fallen selves in terms of the notions of choice and reversibility, and pose the question of whether the subject of virtual choice is best understood through the former or the latter. In particular, it tries to shed light on two aspects of new digital media from a philosophical point of view, namely the relationship between human beings and the virtual/digital world of knowledge databases and online video games.

Materiality of the media: the annihilation of the traditional space-time continuumIt is a generally accepted assumption that our imagination of reality, in particular our experience of time and space, is strongly influenced by the media by means of which we perceive this reality. As Benedict Anderson and Wolfgang Schivelbusch have persuasively argued, new technologies such as the modern mass press and railroads already contributed to an alteration of the traditional space-time continuum at the time of their introduction. The newspaper, based on its daily appearance in the remotest regions of a nation-state and its ‘simultaneous consumption’ (Anderson, 1983: 35) created the idea of contemporaneity among an ‘imagined community’. The railway journey, according to Schivelbusch, brought about an obliteration of the ‘traditional space-time continuum which characterized the old transport technology’, being experienced as an ‘annihilation of space and time’ itself by the people (Schivelbusch, 1977: 35-36). According to German media theorist Sybille Krämer, the idea of the constant flow and linearity of time was particularly challenged by the gramophone, the first medium to allow for the recording of music. Krämer argues that the gramophone did not only preserve a certain tone sequence, but ‘annihilated the irreversible order of a particular event’, since ‘it became possible to repeat suspend, and revisit the singular time course of a musical sequence at will.’ (Krämer, 1998: 84) Later, this new interactivity of the user was even emphasized by the introduction of multi-channel cable television. By allowing the users to ‘zap’ between different channels, television created something like an ‘illusionary contemporaneity’. (Nowotny, 1997: 23) The possibility of interactive navigation of new digital media such as the Internet obviously alters our traditional experience of time in a similar way. Even on a single website (not to speak of complex networked video games), developers and web designers can establish various simultaneously existing narrative threads through which the user can move forwards and backwards at will. Based on this illusionary contemporaneity of different links, the linear narration of, let’s say, a book is replaced by a less determined and more arbitrary structure.

Filmography

Feature animeHara, Keiichi. Crayon Shin-chan: The Adult Empire Strikes Back! (2001)

Miyazaki, Hayao. Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986)

Miyazaki, Hayao. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds (1984)

Miyazaki, Hayao. My Neighbour Totoro (1988)

Oshii, Mamoru. Patlabor: the Movie (1989)

Oshii, Mamoru. Patlabor 2 the Movie (1993)

Shinkai, Makoto. Voices of a Distant Star (2002)

Yamazaki, Takashi. ALWAYS: Sunset on 3rd Street (2005)

OVA or TV animation seriesShe, the Ultimate Weapon (TV series dir. by Atsuko Kase, 2002)

Neon Genesis Evangelion (TV series dir. by Hideaki Anno, 1995-96)

Iriya’s sky and the summer of UFO (OVA dir. by Naoyuki Ito, 2005)

Mobile Suit Gandam (TV series dir. by Yoshiyuki Tomino, 1979-80)

ReferencesAzuma, Hiroki. Dobutsuka suru Postmodern: Otaku kara mita Nihon Shakai (Kodansha,

2001)

Azuma, Hiroki. Gemuteki Realism no Tanjo: Dobutsuka suru Postmodern 2 (Kodansha,

2007)

Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death (Sage Publications, 1993)

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1994)

Cook, Pam. Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (Routledge, 2005)

Ito, Go. Tezuka is Dead: Postmodernist and Modernist Approaches to Japanese Manga

(NTT Publisher, 2005)

Kinsella, Sharon. “Amateur manga Subculture and the Otaku Panic” the Journal

of Japanese Studies, summer (1998)

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

(Manchester University Press, 1984)

McCarthy, Helen. Hayao Miyazaki. Master of Japanese Animation

(Stone Bridge Press, 2002)

Simmons, Mark. Gundam Official Guide (VIZ Media LLC, 2002)

Yomota, Inuhiko. Nihon Eiga no Radical na Ishi (Iwanami, 1999)

Notes1 This film bears many resemblances to precedents in super robot animations;

Evangelion in particular. This sequence reminds us of the sequence where Rei

Ayanami encounters her alter-ego (their enemy ‘Angel’ transformed into her

shape) who questions her true desire.

2 However, in My Neighbour Totoro (1988)—probably the most loved of Miyazaki’s

work among Japanese audiences—it seems that Miyazaki embraces community

life in a rural village in the early Showa period without significant forethought.

3 Oshii also employed a snowy landscape that refers to the February 26th incident

of the military coup d’etat (1936) (Yomota, 1999) to highlight the sequence of the

brief encounter between the heroine Shinobu and the terrorist Tsuge who was

her lover in the past in Patlabor 2: the Movie (1993).

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(Ir)Reversibility of Choice in Digital Media

agree that spending 5-6 hours on the Internet per day, searching through a cornucopia of texts, videos or music or writing emails and instant messages, can cause social behavioral disorders such as an anti-social attitude or an unwillingness to communicate.Besides this panic-mongering and exaggerated psychopathologization of Internet users, it is particularly the effects of the Internet on our cognitive abilities and reading capabilities that unsettles the camp of Internet critics. In his editorial at the The Atlantic, American writer Nicholas Carr complains that the persistent use of the Internet is already having an influence on his capacity for concentration and contemplation. According to Carr, he was once ‘a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now [he] zip[s] along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski’ (Carr, 2008). The reason for this effect upon our cognition is based on the most important feature of the Internet or electronic databases – the fact that they are based on interactivity or HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) in particular. To this day, it remains questionable how the interactivity of hypertext affects its users and in how far they are capable of handling the simultaneous existence and accessibility of documents or websites. It is particularly the inner restlessness that users feel when they are faced with the decision between two or more possibilities that complicates the absorption of knowledge by means of interactive digital media. Links might be compared to junctions or options, or, as Martin Heidegger once put it, to possibilities onto which Dasein can project itself. In this sense, the networked structure of the Internet might thus be described as a miniature of the possibilities-for-Being (Seinkönnen) of Dasein. As in real life, deciding in favor of one possibility (namely a link) necessarily means to negate others. According to Heidegger:

‘Dasein is its basis existently (existierend) – that is, in such a manner that it understands (verstehen) itself in terms of possibilities (Möglichkeiten) ... But this implies that in having a potentiality- for-Being (seinkönnend) it always stands in one possibility or another: it constantly is not other possibilities, and it has waived these in its existential projection (existentieller Entwurf). Not only is the projection, as one that has been thrown, determined by the nullity of Being-a-basis (Nichtigkeit des Grundseins); as projection it is itself essentially null (nichtig).’ (Heidegger, 1993 [1927]: 285)

Nevertheless, it is only in what Heidegger called the ‘authentic’ (eigentlich) mode of Being (Seins-weise) that Dasein can ‘choose’ [or] win itself ’ and thereby ‘be’ itself (Selbstsein, Being-one’s-Self ) through an existential projection in the choice of ‘its ownmost possibilities’. (Heidegger, 1993 [1927]: 42, 68) Most of the time, Heidegger admits, the Dasein is determined by the possibilities given by the Man and is therefore not situated in the mode of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) but in one of ‘fallenness’ (Verfallenheit).The possibility of ‘falling’ seems to be relatively high in the case of the interlinked structure of the Internet or databases if compared with the reading of a linear-structured book. This ‘fallenness’ can assume two forms – ‘distraction’ and ‘procrastination’ in the case of the Internet. Regarding the former, re-reading Walter Benjamin’s well-known essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility not as a pessimistic media criticism, as it is often read, but as an ontological inquiry of new modes of media reception appears to be valuable. At the end of his essay, Benjamin, who anticipated McLuhan’s perception that media are not just passive channels of information but also influence the ways we perceive things transmitted through the media, observes that ‘during long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence’ and that ‘the manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in

Internet and knowledge databases: interactivity, reversibility of time, and fallennessAs is well known, American scientist Vannevar Bush laid the intellectual basis for the interactivity of the Internet. Already during WWII, in an article entitled ‘As We May Think’ published shortly after the war in The Atlantic in 1945, Bush predicted that in the future ‘wholly new forms of ency-clopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them.’ The idea behind the miraculous machine Memex (short for memory extender) envisaged by Bush was that:

‘…the human mind ... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.’ (Bush, 1945)

Despite the fact that Memex was never realized, Bush’s article influenced later hypertext theorists such as philosopher and sociologist Ted Nelson, who is also credited with first use of the term ‘hypertext’. Nelson’s project, Xanadu, which was basically a universal knowledge management system, pre-empted the development of the World Wide Web by 25 years. The aim of Nelson’s project was to invent a word processor capable of storing multiple versions of documents and to facilitate non-sequential writing, in which the reader could choose his or her own path through an electronic document.To this day, however, it remains questionable how the interactivity of hypertext, and thus the afore-mentioned suspension of linear conception of time and illusionary contemporaneity, affects its users and how far they are capable of handling the simultaneous existence and accessibility of documents or websites. According to German information scientist Rainer Kuhlen (1991: 182), one might assume that ‘hypertext seems to be cognitively reasonable on the supposition that the brain organizes knowledge … in cross-linked, topological, and non-linear structures.’ Accordingly, ‘knowledge absorption based on comparable organizational patterns, as it is given with hypertext, might be more efficient than accumulation via the ‘detour’ of linear forms of presentation.’ On the other hand, however, Kuhlen (1991: 56) insists that it is also well known that ‘the integration of two networks, especially if they are polyhierarchically structured, is more difficult than to integrate a linear structure into an existing network.’Obviously, the problems of the integration of linear and networked knowledge structures described by Kuhlen also lie at the bottom of the most recent popular debates on the dangers and possibilities of the Internet. In their August 2008 issues, the German news magazine Der Spiegel and the American journal The Atlantic almost simultaneously published cover stories on the dangers of Internet-based communication and knowledge. The two magazines posed the question if Google (The Atlantic) or, more general, the Internet (Der Spiegel) is ‘Making us Stupid?’ The tenor of their reporting is ambivalent. Similar to the introduction of other new communication technologies such as radio broadcasting or television in the past, the discourse splits into two camps of Internet critics and Internet enthusiasts. On the one hand, it is emphasized that the Internet is leading to the occurrence of new simultaneous modes of perception, a democratization of knowledge, and a unprecedented creativity of its users; on the other hand, the loss of critical reason or the capacity for remembering, rising attention deficit, the loss of a common culture existing through the reading of books, and the intellectual passivity of Internet users is harshly criticized. Moreover, the critical camp often psychopathologizes the effects of the use of the Internet. Proponents of this faction

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curiosity and tactile apperception aren’t necessarily something that should be condemned from the outset. According to Heidegger, the temporality (Zeitlichkeit) of curiosity, which is non-’anticipatory’ (namely ‘non-self-projecting’) and thus merely ‘awaiting’ (gewärtigend), ‘has its natural justification ... and belongs to the everyday kind of being of Da-Sein and to the understanding of being initially prevalent’. (Heidegger, 1993 [1927]: 478) Similarly, Benjamin asserts in the conclusion of his essay that perception in a state of distraction ‘in certain circumstances acquires canonical value,’ since ‘the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation’ (Benjamin, 1977 [1936]: 41). Obviously, if applied to our cognition of the interactive structure of the Internet, Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s perspectives refer to two ways of dealing with electronic and interlinked texts. First, the ‘authentic’ Seinsweise of understanding and contemplation, one that, to borrow hypertext theorist Jay D. Bolter’s words, looks ‘through the text’ and thus grasps and understands the meaning of the narration ‘behind’ the text; secondly, a ‘fallen’ mode, in which the user has to ‘look at the text, as a series of possibilities [or links, F.S.] that he or she … can activate’ (Bolter, 1991: 167). Accordingly, they are to a lesser extent two modes of usage–one being active and ‘authentic’ and one being passive and ‘in-authentic’–rather than two different strategies of dealing with electronic and networked information–namely explorative browsing (also called ‘power browsing’) on the one hand and the purposeful search for a particular document and its subsequent contemplative reading on the other.As for the latter, it is important for the user not to lose sight of his–in Heidegger’s words–’own most projection’ that has to guide the search; for the former, it is even necessary to let oneself be ‘taken away’ by one’s curiosity, governed merely by the possibilities given by the structure of homepages or databases. This is because the versatility and complexity of the Internet also has its positive side, sometimes called the serendipity effect. In general, serendipity refers to the accidental discovery of something fortunate one was in fact originally not looking for. The Internet, with its many possibilities and multifold layers emphasizes this form of information retrieval that was originally only possible on a stroll through the shelves of an open stack library.

Internet and video games: irreversibility of time and virtual deathReality is generally contrasted with the concepts of nonexistence and mere possibility in traditional philosophy. Things are real if they are there or if they have been accomplished. The virtual, if under-stood as the potential, is often understood as the opposite of the real. According to philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, however, this would mean that the virtual has ‘no worth of its own’ and that ‘it’s only destiny is to become actualized and thus to vanish as virtual’ (Welsch, 2000). Hence, their rela-tionship seems to be much more complex. From a social constructivist perspective, perception of reality has never been original and direct but schematized by cultural standards and social norms. Reality thus always implies virtual or imaginary constituents. Radical constructivists even argued that there is no reality (or at least not one we can definitively know about) because reality only exists as a perceived reality and therefore as an imagination or construction. Postmodern thinkers like Jean Baudrillard have even gone so far to argue that reality is increasingly replaced by virtuality or a self-referential hyperreality due to the technological developments of the mass media.The complexity of this relationship becomes even more obvious with regard to the term virtual reality. Virtual reality, generally understood as the representation and simultaneous perception of reality and its physical characteristics in a real-time, computer-generated, and interactive environment,

which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well’ (Benjamin, 1977 [1936]: 14). This seems to be particularly true for the Internet. ‘Surfing’ the Internet can be described as what Benjamin termed ‘reception in a state of distraction’ (Rezeption in der Zerstreuung). (Benjamin, 1977 [1936]: 41) This mode of perception, according to Benjamin, is based on the ‘tactile quality’ (taktile Qualität) of the object of perception–which were, in Benjamin’s case, movies and photographs (Benjamin, 1977 [1936]: 38). The tactility of the new media is even emphasized by the interactivity of the Internet or databases. As Nicholas Carr’s editorial in the aforementioned issue of The Atlantic rightly asserted, hyperlinks, ‘unlike footnotes’, ‘don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them’ (Carr, 2008). The perception of the Internet is, to use the words of Benjamin, one of ‘tactile appropriation’ (taktile Rezeption) that is based on ‘habitualization’ rather than on ‘attention’ 1 (Benjamin, 1977 [1936]: 41). To Heidegger, who used the term ‘distraction’ (Zerstreuung) in a com-parable way, distraction is based on ‘curiosity’ (Neugier), a mode of fallenness.2 Other than Verstehen (understanding) as the self-projection of the being on its own most possibilities, curiosity is merely based on ‘seeing’ (Sehen). In this mode of being, ‘Dasein seeks what is far away simply in order to bring it close to itself in the way it looks. Dasein lets itself be taken along [mitnehmen] solely by the looks of the world’ (Heidegger, 1993 [1927]: 216).The dangers of ‘fallen’ or ‘distracted’ ways of Internet use can be substantialized by the findings of a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London (Rowlands & Nicholas, 2008). As part of a five-year research program, the researchers analyzed the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, which provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. The results of their research showed that people using the sites exhibited ‘a form of skimming activity,’ hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they had already visited. They typically read merely one or two pages of an article or book before they would jump to another site. Sometimes they saved a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. Obviously, the aforementioned annihilation of the linear and non-contemporaneous time-space continuum that was established by the non-determined structure of the Internet is counteracted by the restricted cognitive abilities of human beings. Despite users potentially have the possibility to jump back to an earlier link and choose a different alternative they only rarely make use of that possibility.Reversibility of time obviously seems not to go properly with human cognition. Apparently, many Internet users seem to react to links as ‘possibilities’ in Heidegger’s sense or the flood of information provided by the Internet with an individual ‘databasification’ of information retrieved from larger databases–the scholars of the University College London who conducted the aforementioned study call this behavior ‘squirreling.’ In medical terms, this fetishization of knowledge can be described as procrastination. Procrastination, which should be treated through therapy according to some psy-chologists [sic!], is characterized by deferment of actions or tasks to a later time, may result in stress, a sense of guilt, the loss of personal productivity, the creation of crisis and the disapproval of others for not fulfilling one’s responsibilities or commitments.3 Not only that this work undone seems to leave traces in our subconsciousness, it also does harm to our computers because we clutter up our hard disks – often in a very unorganized way – with downloaded and yet unread texts.4

However, it is important to add here that even Heidegger’s or Benjamin’s perspective on distracted or habitualized perception is not as pessimistic as I have described it here. In fact, they agree that

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games so ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ may be to a lesser extent the technical perfection of the simulation of three-dimensional space, sound, or haptic sensation, but the anticipation (and in some instances irreversibility) of one’s death and thus the experience of a dimensional structure of time. Based on this Heideggerian interpretation, one might argue that online-games are in fact more than just ‘games.’ Different from conventional games, which are commonly defined as non-productive enter-tainment, being played because of their function to detach oneself from the burdens of one’s everyday life, online-games such as Counter-Strike successfully simulate the most feared and at the same time existential feature of human life, namely mortality.

Conclusion: animalization, new subjectivities, and pedagogyWith regard to the ‘fallenness’ of Dasein into a tactile and habitualized information-seeking behavior in the digital age (or the behavior exhibited when playing videogames), it is valuable to take into account the contemporary philosophical discourse on the phenomenon of otaku culture in Japan, since much of the public debate on the positive and negative sides of the Internet or videogames parallels the discourse on otaku culture in Japan. Other than previous discourses on the otaku–a Japanese term that refers to people with obsessive interests in various Japanese subcultures, particu-larly manga, anime, science fiction, or computer games–which either psychopathologized the otaku as anti-social, uncommunicative, self-absorbed or even perverted5–especially after the so-called Miyazaki incident in 1989 (when the police arrested the 26-year old serial child killer Miyazaki Tsutomu, who collected piles of manga and anime, some of it of pornographic or violent)–or tried to understand this phenomenon psychoanalytically, it was particularly the two cultural critics Okada Toshio (1995) and Azuma Hiroki (2001) who analyzed the otaku from the perspective of their pioneering role in the so-called ‘information society’. 6 In his book Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan: Otaku kara mita Nihon shakai (2001, Animalizing Postmodern: Japanese Society as Seen from the Perspective of Otaku), Azuma Hiroki considers the otaku phenomenon not as a particularly Japanese phenomenon, but as an inflection ‘of the global trend of postmodernization’ and thus as a new subject position within this trend (Azuma, 2001: 19). With regard to French philosopher Alexandre Kojève’s neo-Hegelian distinction between two forms of ‘post-historical existence’–the ‘animalization’ of American society based on consumerism and the highly formalized and aesthetisized ‘snobbism’ of the Japanese–7 Azuma asserts that otaku culture consists of a ‘two-tiered’ (nijū-ka) mode of consumption that reflects the two-layered structure of the postmodern itself (Azuma, 2001: 76-78). Other than the two layers of the modern world-image–the ‘depth’ of ‘grand narratives’ (namely ideals and ideology) and a ‘surface’ of many ‘small narratives’–Azuma claims that, with reference to Lyotard’s notion of the end of grand narratives, the latter were replaced by a ‘grand database’ in the postmodern world-image (sekaizō). Whereas the modern era formed a structure in which a single grand narrative/ideal controlled diverse small narratives, and cultural and social criticism consisted in analyzing grand narratives (as reflected within various small narratives), in the postmodern world, people may grasp any number of small world-images (Azuma, 2001: 50-54).Azuma claims that one can identify two ways in which the otaku deal with this new world-image. He calls one the ‘animalesque’ (dōbutsuteki) side of database consumption; that is the solitude and passive consumption of the many small narratives of computer games, anime, or manga that are merely based on ‘combinations’ (kumiawase) of self-referential elements from the grand database. Moreover, database consumption also has a second, an active or ‘humanesque’ (ningenteki) side,

refers not only to exact copies of real environments (i.e. flight simulators for pilot training), but also to imagined virtual worlds (such as the online-game World of Warcraft). In general, it is the three-dimensional and high-resolution representation of reality that is regarded as the most important factor for the creation of virtual realities. Despite the fact that in practice, it is currently very difficult to create a multi-sensory and high-definition virtual reality experience due to technical limitations, these limitations are expected to be overcome eventually. However, despite this fact, sensory information other than the visual (namely tactile, olfactory, or auditory sensations) is considered to be of equal importance for the experience of a virtual space, it is the experience of irreversible choice (and it’s relationship to time) that has been totally disregarded as an important factor for the creation of virtual reality.Other than the aforementioned undetermined structure of webpages that created a non-linear and reversible experience of time, decisions in online-videogames are necessarily real-time decisions. Whereas one is able to pause or save a game in regular videogames, in online-games or even chat forums this is impossible. Once a game has started or I have posted a message, it is impossible to jump back to an earlier point on the linear time axis since all information is sent instantly to all other participants of a game or a chat forum. The extremely popular videogame Counter-Strike can be taken as a good example to explain this assumption. The game, a so-called a tactical first-person shooter videogame, attempts to simulate realistically the combat between a group of terrorists and a counter-terrorist team. Similar to other first-person shooter games, each team attempts to complete their mission objective and/or eliminate the opposing team. However, one important feature distinguishes this game from other games of this genre, namely that killed players are not able to ‘respawn’ (come alive again), but turn into ‘spectators’ for the remaining time of the round. Originally, it was the aim of the developers to encourage strategic gaming among the players of each of the two groups. The game is criticized by it’s own users for this feature because it causes long waiting periods for eliminated players; however, one can also argue that this is the most important reason why this game attracts so many users. Here, virtual death becomes something to be much more afraid of than in other video games. Death is much more real because it is irreversible (at least for the duration of a single round).Heidegger described this anticipation of death as the authentic temporality of Dasein. Heidegger opposed this dimensional conception of time to the ordinary representation of time. Other than the latter, which is, according to Heidegger, characterized as ‘an endless, irreversible sequence of ‘nows’ which passes away’ [Heidegger 1993: 478], he describes the former as the existential and basic structure of temporality as a double movement (and thus dimensional) in that Dasein brings itself into its ‘Da’. The first movement is the anticipation (Vorlaufen) into its future (Zu-kunft). The second movement consists of a ‘coming back understandingly to one’s own most ‘been’ [‘Gewesen’]’ (Heidegger, 1993 [1927]: 373). As we have already seen, Dasein exists through the authentic projec-tion of its own most possibilities. According to Heidegger, it is anxiety (Angst), not of something that is in the world but of the being-in-the-world of Dasein as such. It is only in this state of anxiety that Dasein is projected upon itself, liberated from the domination of the Man, being free to be itself. This however, presents Dasein to its own finitude and nullity by experiencing itself as a ‘being-toward-death’ (Sein zum Tode). (Heidegger, 1993 [1927]: 304-312) Put differently, being-toward-death is not an orientation that brings Dasein closer to its physical end, in terms of clinical death, but is rather a way of being. It is the anticipation of one’s death that brings one into an authentic mode of being. If applied to the particular character of online-games, what makes the experience of online-computer



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of an interest in Japanese popular culture and anime or manga in particular. To some of them, calling themselves otaku is part of their lifestyle and offers them a subject position and, thus, a self-identity. Many of them, similar to the otaku in Japan, spend much of their time on homepages such as fanfiction.net, animexx.de or quizilla.com, reading, commenting and writing stories or uploading pictures that are based on existing anime or manga. In other words, one has to pose the question of whether it is possible to integrate the existing competences of the new type of students of Japan Studies (that are comparable to those attributed to the otaku, ie. digital literacy, electronic reading skills, active participation in the reconstruction or ‘bricolage’ of media contents published at the Internet or of manga and anime) into the deconstructivist project in the humanities in general.

ReferencesAgamben, G. (2004). The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press.

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism. London: Verso.

Azuma, H. (2001). Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan: Otaku kara mita Nihon shakai (Ani-

malizing Postmodern: Japanese Society as Seen from the Perspective of Otaku,

Tokyo: Kōdansha). An English translation appeared recently under the rather

inappropriate title Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, University of Minnesota Press.

Benjamin, W. (1977 [1936]). Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier-

barkeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. An English translation appeared in The Work of Art in

the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and other Writings on Media, Harvard

University Press 2009).

Bolter, J. D. (1991). Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing.

Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Bush, V. (1945). ‘As We May Think.’ The Atlantic, (July). Retrieved from http://www.

theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

Carr, N. (2008). ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ The Atlantic, July/August. Retrieved from

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200807/google

Grassmuck, V. (2000). ‘Man, Nation & Machine: The Otaku Answer to Pressing

Problems of the Media Society.’ Retrieved from http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/

grassmuck/Texts/otaku00_e.html)

Heidegger, M. (1993 [1927]). Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Kojève, A. (1969). Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology

of Spirit. New York: Basic Books.

Krämer, S. (1998). Das Medium als Spur und Apparat (The Medium as Trace and

Apparatus). In S. Krämer (Ed.), Medien, Computer, Realität. Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen

und Neue Medien (Media, Computer, Reality: Imaginations of Realty and New

Media) (1. Aufl. ed., pp. 73-94). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Kuhlen, R. (1991). Hypertext. Ein nicht-lineares Medium zwischen Buch und Wissensbank

(Hypertext: A Non-linear Medium in-between the Book and Knowledge

Databases). Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer.

Moore, W. E., & Tumin, M. M. (1949). ‘Some Social Functions of Ignorance.’ American

Sociological Review, 14, 787-795.

Nowotny, H. (1997). Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare. Die Zeitdimension in the

Medien (The Visible and the Invisible: The Dimension of Time in the Media).

because otaku actively intervene in received commodities by breaking down the narratives into their compounds (for videogames these elements might be screenplay, character, background, for manga they may be the single ‘sensitive elements’ (moe yōso) of which characters are composed), and thereby get access to the database that lies in the ‘depth’ behind the small narrations and ‘recreate’ (niji sōsaku) from it their own narrations or pictures.8 It is this ‘double structure’ (nisō kōzō) of deconstruction and reconstruction that prompts Azuma to interpret the otaku culture as a decon-structivist and, thus, subversive form of cultural reception that brings it close to a deconstructivist method in contemporary literary theory, which offers the subject a position from which to intervene in existing cultural forms or the discourse.9 Azuma bases this assertion also on the fact that to the otaku it doesn’t matter any longer if the ‘author’ of the small narratives they consume is a professional–’authorized’ by one of the big manga or anime publishers–or an amateur who publishes his self-made anime or manga in one of the many fanzines (dōjinshi) or the Internet.One can find similarly deconstructive and reconstructive behavior among the members of the global subcultures gathering around certain videogames. First-person shooters, such as the aforementioned Counter-Strike, can be used by players to produce so-called machinima. Machinima is a conflation of the words machine, cinema and animation; it refers to 3D-animations created in a real-time virtual environment. Videogames with powerful 3D-engines (software systems designed for the creation and development of videogames) are the most inexpensive programs to use to create machinima. Basically, the easiest way to create machinima is to organise several players to enact a screenplay in a networked multi-player-game. By recording the screen of one player, he or she acts can act as a cameraman. The other players move their characters within the virtual environment like movie actors. Afterwards, the movie is cut and sometimes even dubbed. Accordingly, the technological require-ments to produce machinima are very low because one needs only a computer and a videogame. However, many of the machinima movie productions are much more sophisticated because they make use of modified commercial videogames. These modifications range from mapping and modeling (ie. the creation of one’s own unique virtual environments and characters), to the manipu-lations of the game software itself (such as lip synchronization, the direct recording of the graphic output as a movie file, or the programming of complete production frameworks).What can we conclude from Azuma’s positive remarks on the new media literacy of the otaku regarding what I have initially defined rather negatively as the ‘fallenness’ of the user of new forms of digital media? In any case, the frequently posed question of whether Google, the Internet, elec-tronic databases, videogames, or the new flood of information in general, is making us stupid per se, seems to be pointing in the wrong direction. As we have seen, besides the ‘fallen’ or ‘animalized’ mode of media use, there is also space for a productive and ‘humanesque’ way of dealing with digitized information or videogames. In terms of education, pedagogies, or media literacy, however, it is necessary to teach the users of these new media the sharp distinction between these two modes. Particularly with regard to the use of digitalized knowledge and the Internet, it may be important to teach contemplative and analytic reading to a generation of otaku and Google-users who possess a highly developed digital literacy but who may be beginning to lack basic reading and writing skills.Even more important than teaching the differences between different ways of handling knowledge in the digital age, however, is how we can relate Azuma’s positive appraisal of the ‘double structure’ of deconstructive and reconstructive elements of otaku culture or machinima to teaching and pedagogies. Let’s take for instance the case of Japan Studies. I think that it has already become a global phenomenon that an increasing number of students enrolling in Japan Studies do so because



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ence for homoerotic or violent and pornographic manga in his book Sentō bishōjo

no seishin bunseki (Psychoanalysis of Fighting Girls). Cf. also Azuma (2001:

129-130).

6 According to German media theorist Volker Grassmuck (2000), it was Okada’s

concern was ‘to establish otaku as a new type of expert who focuses on the

style, special effects and signature of individual comic artists. Where Gutenberg-

schooled readers detect a story, writes Okada, the otaku first of all refer to the

syntactic levels. Their judgment is based on an extensive knowledge of the

particular genre allowing them to decode quotations, grasp references, and

appreciate nuances.’ Moreover, he describes otaku as ‘people possessing an

advanced visual sensation’ and a ‘new type’ of adaptation to the cultural condition

of advanced consumer and information society. To Azuma (2001: 8), otaku can

thus not be described merely as ‘youths enjoying a moratorium’ based on of their

juvenile and passionate collecting. For the idea of a generation in a moratorium

see also Okonogi Keigo (1977).

7 According to Kojève, Japan is a society of ‘formalized values,’ values that have no

meaningful content anymore but are solely gratuitous (playful, but neither work

nor fight for prestige). Examples – snobbery, the Noh Theater, the ceremony of

tea, the art of flower arranging – are only formal details, it does not really matter

one way or the other. Kojève says that since animals cannot be snobs, there is

hope for some kind of human existence to persist even into the post-history. Man

would not really be capable anymore of transforming content, but would only be

able to confront one form by another. As Kojève says, man would ‘oppose himself

as a pure ‘form’ to himself and to others taken as ‘content’ of any sort.’ (Kojève,

1969: 162, ft 6) Especially in the ‘age of fiction’ (1970-95), a periodization inspired

by Japanese sociologist Mita Munesuke, the otaku had been well-informed snobs.

They possessed all kinds of information; however, the information itself was not

of value – they merely used their knowledge to show off in front of other otaku of

the same kind. Thereby, information was fetischized by the otaku.

8 In a series of lectures held in 1929/30, Heidegger also differentiated the human

being from the animal in terms of their different ways of relating to their environ-

ments. Animal behaviour can thus be compared to a fallen mode of being of

Dasein. Heidegger, who ‘rejected the traditional metaphysical definition of man

as animal rationale, the living being that has language (or reason), as if the being

of man could be determined by means of adding something to the ‘simply living

being’, attempted to distinguish between animal and man by describing the

animal’s mode of being as one of ‘poverty in world’ (Weltarmut) and that of man as

‘world-forming’ (weltbildend). According to Heidegger, this distinction is based on

the fact that an animal is essentially captivated (eingenommen) and wholly absorbed

(benommen) by its environment (its Umgebung, as opposed to the Umwelt of

Dasein) and can thus only behave (sich benehmen); this is distinct from a human

being who acts (handeln) or comports itself (sich verhalten). Here Heidegger,

‘puts into play the relationship among the German terms benommen (captivated,

stunned, but also taken away, blocked), eingenommen (taken in, absorbed), and

Benehmen (behavior), which all refer back to the verb nehmen, to take’ (Agamben,

2004: 52). Accordingly, one might thus argue that, on an etymological level, the

Weltarmut (‘poverty in world’) of the animal (i.e. its Benommenheit, Eingenommenheit)

bears parallels to the curiosity and fallenness of Dasein that is, as already mentioned,

In M. Sandbothe & W. C. Zimmerli (Eds.), Zeit - Medien - Wahrnehmung (Time -

Media - Perception) (pp. 14-29). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Okada, T. (1995). Otaku-gaku nyūmon (Introduction to Otakuology). Tokyo: Ōta

shuppan.

Okonogi, K. (1977). Moratorium ningen no jidai (The Age of Human Beings in a Morato-

rium; English translation published in Japan Echo 5(1) 1987). Chūōkōron(October).

Rowlands, I., & Nicholas, D. (2008). ‘Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the

Future.’ Available from http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/research/ciber/downloads/

Saitō, T. (2000). Sentō bishōjo no seishin bunseki (Psychoanalysis of Fighting Girls).

Tokyo: Chikuma bunkō.

Schivelbusch, W. (1977). Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise. Zur Industrialisierung von Raum

und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert. München: Hanser. (Published in English as The Railway

Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century,’ University of

California Press).

Welsch, W. (2000). ‘Virtual to Begin With?’ Retrieved from http://www2.uni-jena.de/

welsch/Papers/VirtualTBW.html

Notes1 The tactility of hyperlinks is particularly obvious if a phrase of a text appears

as a hyperlink (namely a blue font colour for instance) but does not have the

respective function. Accordingly, only through the Unzuhandenheit (un-readiness-

to-hand) of a link as a link we become aware of the haptic interactivity of

hypertext described by Benjamin as ‘tactile appropriation’.

2 Heidegger asserts the following: ‘When curiosity has become free, however, it

concerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen (that is, to

come into a Being towards it) but just in order to see. It seeks novelty only in

order to leap from it anew to another novelty. In this kind of seeing, that which is

an issue for care does not lie in grasping something and being knowingly in the

truth; it lies rather in its possibilities of abandoning itself to the world. Therefore,

curiosity is characterized by a specific way of not tarrying (Unverweilen) alongside

what is closest. Consequently it does not seek the leisure of tarrying (Verweilen)

observantly, but rather seeks restlessness and the excitement of continual novelty

and changing encounters. In not tarrying, curiosity is concerned with the constant

possibility of distraction. Curiosity has nothing to do with observing entities

and marvelling at them … To be amazed to the point of not understanding is

something in which it has no interest’ (Heidegger 1993 [1927]: 172).

3 The opposite proposition, namely that information stored in external electronic

databases relieves the mind and thereby creates capacity for more creative

thinking, was proposed for instance by the two philosophers Vilem Flusser and

Peter Sloterdijk.

4 It was not only Heidegger who hinted at the importance of ‘oblivion’ for

‘remembrance’ but also the sociologists Wilbert E. Moore and Melvin M. Tumin

who considered ‘ignorance’ of particular knowledge ‘not simply as a passive or

dysfunctional condition, but as an active and often positive element in operating

structures and relations’ (Moore & Tumin, 1949: 795) and thus as an important

mental function which ‘erases’ useless information from our memory.

5 Other than the general public discourse, Japanese psychiatrist Saitō Tamaki

(2000) attributes a rather ‘conservative sexuality’ to the otaku despite their prefer-



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Beyond Utopia: New Politics, the Politics of Knowledge, and the Science Fictional Field of Japan1

AbstractRecognizing that, since the end of the Cold War, political theorists around the world have embarked upon a deliberate quest for difference and innovation in their discipline, triggered by the apparently ‘world historic’ victory of liberal capitalism, this five-year project (2009-2014) aims to uncover a series of sites of difference and innovation. In particular, it locates itself in two kinds of distancing: geo-cultural (ie. in the non-European space of Japan) and medial (ie. in innovative expressive media). Utilizing the ‘techno-media’ of anime, manga and videogames, and focusing on the radical potentials of the genre of speculative science fiction, this project aims to analyze and model a series of political visions as potential alternatives to liberal capitalism, hence contributing to the field of political thought.Furthermore, acknowledging that these widely popular techno-medial products utilize different grammars of expression from conventional, text-based media, this project seeks to formulate a research methodology for scholars to employ for critical interventions into these fields. Accepting that the dimensions of the public sphere change with time and technological developments, and hypothesizing that the public sphere in many contemporary societies is now informed by this techno-politics, at stake is the ability of scholars to remain in touch with (and persuasive in) political realities: new forms of literacy are required if scholars seek to remain involved in the new public sphere. This project attempts to outline those forms of literacy, as implied by the rapidly globalizing force of Japanese anime, manga and videogames.

Overall aim and key objectivesThis project locates itself at the intersection of a number of pressing issues for contemporary society, and simultaneously in an interdisciplinary and multi-medial space between several academic fields of inquiry. In its most general form, the central thread of the interlinked subprojects is concerned with the matrix of relationships between evolving conceptions of politics, literacy and technology (particularly digital technology). In each case, first and foremost, the concern is with the way in which these shifting categories interact with, challenge, and actually constitute the ‘humanity’ of individuals in contemporary society and the way in which they interact politically.For a cluster of historical and cultural (as well as practical) reasons, the project as a whole is framed within what I term the ‘science fictional field of Japan.’ However, Japan is not treated in isolated or essentialistic terms, but rather it is configured comparatively and fluidly within the world around it. It is a particular instantiation of flux in the politics-literacy-technology matrix, but it is also an important and unique emblem of a possible future for the development of this matrix elsewhere: in various ways, Japan is figured as science fictional (Goto-Jones 2008b). Hence, whilst some of the conclusions of this project aim towards furthering our knowledge of human experience in modern Japan, many of them should be of relevance for any technologically advanced (or advancing) society.Recognizing that, since the end of the Cold War, political theorists around the world have embarked upon a deliberate quest for ‘difference and innovation’ in their discipline, triggered by the apparently ‘world historic’ victory of liberal capitalism and hence the so-called ‘end of history,’ as well as the end

‘taken along [mitnehmen] solely by the looks of the world’.

9 It was aforementioned Jay D. Bolter (1991: 163) who emphasized the relationship

between Derridarian poststructuralism and hypertext as well. According to Bolter,

based on the rhizomatic structure of the Internet or databases, electronic texts

don’t have centres or margins because of their ‘deconstructive reading’: ‘the reader

can follow paths through the space in any direction, limited only by constraints

established by the author. No path through the space need be stigmatized as

marginal.’

Christopher Goto-Jones Beyond Utopia: New Politics, the Politics of Knowledge, and the Science Fictional Field of Japan

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Asiascape Ops Issue 5 November 2009

250 billion yen annually; the retail market for associated ‘character goods’ is 1.61 trillion yen; 60% of animation broadcast on TV worldwide is Japanese; Japanese companies Sony and Nintendo dominate the international games market, selling over 100 million units of each of the last genera-tion of consoles – the Pokemon franchise alone is worth over $250 billion worldwide (MOFA 2007). In the twenty-first century, the Japanese government has officially endorsed these media (grouped as ‘techno-culture’) as amongst Japan’s most important contributions to world culture.These contemporary media-forms are now major cultural forces in East Asia, Europe and the USA, yet serious research into the political significance of these media is in its infancy; the majority of work remains ‘fan literature,’ uninformed by scholarly methodologies. The Western academy has tended to be dismissive of the value of these sources, finding them populist and childish. However, the Japanese academy has been much less reticent, and sophisticated work in this field has been appearing since the late 1990s. Some, such as Azuma Hiroki (2001, 2007), even identify these media as the necessary forms of cultural and political expression of a postmodern society that has abandoned the myths of modernist grand narratives. Azuma identifies Anno Hideaki’s 1995-6 anime masterpiece, Shinseiki ebuangerion (Neon-Genesis Evangelion), as a key turning point in postwar Japanese culture and social development. Indeed, the importance of this title (which is now a cross-medial franchise involving anime, manga and videogames) is emphasized and theorized by many other commentators (Kotani 1997). In other words, especially since the 1990s, techno-cultural products have formed an increasingly visible and important part of the Japanese public sphere. Japan is not only an object of inquiry in this field, but also an important source of theoretical insight.With this in mind, this project will explore the parameters of the political sphere concept, since it enables conceptual thinking about the changing dynamics of state/society relations and the inter-sections between politics and culture: ‘it provides a way of conceptualizing an expanded notion of the political. It forces us to look for politics in other social places’ (Eley 2002: 231). Indeed, the notion of the public sphere is a useful way to move conceptually from everyday life to political agency and action (ie. to conceptions of the political) – it is a space in which politics can occur without it having to be subsumed by the conventional institutions of the political.The significance and meaning of concepts within the public sphere are necessarily governed by a historical sociology of concept formation: ‘concepts are words in their sites’ (Somers 1995: 113). In other words, the public sphere concept already contains the imperative for reflexivity from scholars: it relies on the ability of social and political theorists ‘to recognize that the categories and concepts [they] use to explain the social world can themselves be fruitfully made the objects of analysis’ (Somers 1995: 114), and hence that they are constantly open to challenge from new or alternative technologies of expression. In the quest for difference and innovation in political theory following the end of the Cold War, a creative and comparative analysis of the public sphere in different political-cultures provides the promise of conceptual and medial revolution. As a recognisable site, situated and the boundary between the state and civil society, the public sphere has the distinct advantage of being an empirical domain that is ripe for research.A key issue when it comes to accessing this domain involves the question of literacy. Whilst sequential art has been employed in Japan for philosophical, political and religious expression for centuries (ranging from the 12th century Zen-classic ‘ox herding’ sequence (Yamada 1985) to the official political manga and anime of the Japanese government in the late 20th century (Kinsella 2000)), these media have less of a ‘serious’ political tradition in the West, where (with a number of important exceptions) graphic representations have been largely limited to satire. In Japan, certain types of animanga are

of political philosophy (Fukuyama 1992; Dallmayr 1999; Freeden 2007b), this project seeks to combine the rapidly emerging media of anime, manga (animanga), and videogames with the field of political thought. It contends that reading these cultural products as modes of political thought in Japan (and elsewhere) assists historians of political thought who are increasingly searching for alternatives to visions of the liberal political order in a constellation of new locations: 1) within European history (but outside of the conventional canon of texts, eg. Runciman 2001); 2) within European history (but outside the conventional media of expression of political thought, including in literature and science fiction eg. Jameson 2005, Simona 2006); 3) outside of European history altogether (eg. Bakshi 1988, 2006; Goto-Jones 2005b). In other words, this project seeks new politi-cal ideas via a dual differentiation from convention: geo-cultural distance (the non-European) and medial difference (expressive forms that are not conventional ‘treatises’).It is important to realize at the outset that anime, manga and videogames are not genres but media. Hence, they each contain a range of products that reach across all of the genres familiar to literature and film. Like other media, they also contain products aimed at different audiences and commercial purposes: some are unapologetically ‘pulp fictions,’ while others have more serious intent. In other words, to talk about animanga or videogames in general risks vacuity. With this in mind, this project will limit its interest in these media to the genre of serious, speculative Science Fiction (SF), which cuts across them all. The reasons for this choice are captured by a fourfold politics of knowledge: the first is historical – SF is one of the most popular genres for these media in Japan; the second is expositional – recent literature in political thought suggests that SF is the most promising site for the alternative expres-sion of political ideas; the third is representational – an recognisable techno-orientalist (Ueno 1996) tendency in the West (and in Japan) identifies Japan as a science fictional realm that is somehow in the technological future and hence a model for development elsewhere; and the fourth is comparative – by focusing on a common genre across diverse places and media, it becomes possible to identify the specific themes of interest in particular geo-cultural and medial locations, and also to codify the expressive and rhetorical devices particular to each media.Finally, an implication of this research agenda is that anime, manga and videogames have identifiable grammars that enable them as expressive media, and that these grammars and devices actually facilitate the development and deployment of political thought in ways inexpressible (or even unthinkable) in other media. Taking this seriously demands twin responses from the scholarly community: the first is critique – we must employ literacy in these grammars and skill-sets to affect sophisticated political criticism of these media; and the second is participatory – as responsible intellectuals, we must be able to employ these grammars and skill-sets to intervene in political arguments and the public sphere ourselves. Hence, in addition to conventional research products (three PhD theses and two monographs), this project also aims to produce a series of political manga, short anime, and a simple videogame expressive of concepts from Japanese science fiction.

Scientific background

General relevance In parallel to the crisis of political thought that followed the end of the Cold War, 1990s-2000s saw explosive growth of interest in Japanese anime (animated movies), manga (graphic fiction/sequential art), and videogames in the West as well as in Japan. The Japanese anime industry has revenues of

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and the Science Fictional Field of Japan

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public sphere should include everyone equally – although, for Habermas, inequalities of wealth and privilege in capitalism provide for unequal access to the public sphere (ie. to its technologies and necessary literacy) in practice. Critics such as Nancy Fraser (1992) have argued that the public sphere is always more exclusive than Habermas allowed: it is circumscribed by the hegemonic values of any given society. It is important to note that hegemonic values also function to govern the acceptable media of ex-pression, not just the profile of participants. This realization contains the potential for a fracturing of the public sphere into multiple sites characterized by different logics and technologies of participation. A key political issue is therefore which of these spheres retains power (or relatively more power) to influence political outcomes, and how this power-balance between spheres changes (perhaps in accordance with technological developments). In the contemporary world, for example, we might ask about the extent to which academic treatises inform the public sphere and set this against the extent to which videogames like Final Fantasy or Pokemon have penetrated public consciousness. Which of these products (and which media) reach more people? Which influence more people (and how)? Which exert more power? Is it conceivable that academics are marginalizing themselves (or may be beginning to become marginal) from participation in the mainstream of the public sphere not only because of issues of advanced education (which is part of the essential nature of academia) but also because of medial anachronism? If it is the goal of an intellectual and of scholarship to change society for the better (which I insist it should be), then techno-political literacy becomes an obligation for scholars. Of course, it is never the case that pervious spheres of engagement vanish or are replaced, but the balance of power between them shifts constantly: it becomes a strategic and tactical choice (ie. a political issue) in which sphere or spheres you participate (assuming that you have the necessary literacies in all).Interestingly, in the early postwar period, political scientists like Maruyama Masao (1956) complained that Japan lacked a meaningful public sphere, precisely because of the absence of the kinds of texts that defined that sphere in Europe and the USA. In more recent years, however, the place of alternative media in a flourishing Japanese public sphere, such as manga, has been acknowledged. Following the resignation of PM Fukuda in September 2008, the front-runner to replace him, Aso Taro, announced himself to be a ‘proud manga reader.’There is a wide and well-known literature about the dependency relation between democracy and education, but here I am more interested in the technology of literacy (and literacy of technology) itself. Indeed, as new communication technologies develop, the dimensions of the public sphere (or spheres), and hence the criteria for inclusion in it, also change. Chief amongst these developments in the twentieth century was the advent of radio, movies, and television. These admixtures to the mass media changed the landscape of the public sphere in modern societies across the world. On the one hand, these broadcast media expanded the reach of discussions to those who may lack the necessary written literacy to participate in print media, but on the other hand the technological (and financial) barriers to active participation in (rather than critique or even merely passive consumption of ) these new media were prohibitive to the vast majority.Twentieth century figures as diverse as Walter Benjamin (1969) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1974: esp. 77) have called attention to the potential political crisis occasioned by this technological transformation of the public sphere, focusing on the way in which it dehumanizes the public by rendering it into a consumer of ideologies rather than a partner in a genuinely discursive site. These postwar critiques tended to focus on the need to confront the totalizing and epistemically violent nature of fascist films,

deliberately produced and read as political treaties (eg. Kobayashi 1995 or Rachi.go.jp 2008), and they discourse with an audience (including the intelligentsia) that is already literate in (and participate in) their conventions and practices. In general, European and American academics lack this literacy: although there is a reasonably well-developed tradition of graphic narrative and critique in the West (eg. Carrier 2000; Hadju 2008; or even Eisner 1985/2006), its emphasis has tended to remain on narrative techniques rather than political expression; in addition the conventions and grammar of manga and anime differ from those of ‘comics’ and ‘cartoons.’ As we will see later, in the specific case of videogames the problem of literacy is even greater, both within Japan and in the West. Videogames require a radically new set of interrogative and compositional tools, as well as interactive skills, in order to access their meanings properly and hence to understand (or participate in) their role in the public sphere. In general, academics do not cultivate these skills. Indeed, the most specialized and skillful access to videogame content is often by members of youthful subcultures rather than academics, which inverts the traditional hierarchies of knowledge that society usually associates with access to textual forms of expression and hence with persuasion in the public sphere. In Japan, the cultural critic Okada Toshio has gone so far as to argue that the emergence of an otaku (geek?) subculture since the 1990s effectively represents the emergence of a ‘new species’ of super-information-processing-citizens (1996); the otaku, readily conversant in the grammar of techno-culture, has the power to dominate Japan’s public sphere in the era of techno-politics precisely because the traditional intelligentsia is not literate in the required rhetorical devices. In this model, the techno-cultural transformation of the public sphere should provide for radical voices in a traditionally conservative Japanese polity. But what are these voices saying and who can understand them?

New Politics – literacy, techno-politics, and the new (digital) public sphereThere is a clear (if complex) connection between technological development, the realm of politics, and the dimensions of the public sphere/civil society. One of the cultural mechanisms that connect these sites is the idea of literacy: in order to engage in political discourse, members of society must have access to a site of discussion, and must be literate in the language (and technologies) of that discussion. In this mode, literacy is obviously related to (albeit importantly distinct from) education itself.In classical Greece, for instance, if we can talk of the existence of a res publica or public sphere at all, the technology of political discourse was literally the spoken word in the restricted space of the public forum. Of course, access to this forum was circumscribed by various social norms and tech-nologies: gender, economic status, education, literacy etc. Participation in the forum was restricted to a subset of the population at the intersection of these criteria. However, for most commentators after Habermas (1962), modern political cultures are (or should be) characterized by a more expansive public sphere: they are comprised of a discursive space in which people congregate to discuss issues of common concern, to reach shared judgements, and hence to influence political action. Unlike Aristotle’s exclusive forum, which is effectively part of the mechanics of the state, this inclusive public sphere need not be a physical location, but rather exists as the adjudicator between the boundaries of state and society. A common example of this kind of public sphere is the institution of the mass media, which (for Habermas in the 1950s) was premised largely upon technologies of print and distribution, and hence its principle of ‘inclusivity’ was contingent upon education and literacy in written forms of language. In an ideal democracy, this



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a new set of interrogative and compositional skills – the ability to intelligently read, criticize and compose politically conscious videogames – and its place in the public sphere has been largely ne-glected by the academy, which has focused its attentions on the Internet as the great technological revolution of our time. The twenty-first century analogy to Sartre’s call for committed intellectuals to involve themselves in film and radio might be a call for intellectuals to involve themselves in videogames, both as critics and as programmers. Unlike the Internet, which facilitates the distribution of other expressive forms, videogames are themselves a medium of expression that give rise to new and original expressive potentials that are not present in text, radio or film.Videogames are importantly different from (although not unrelated to) computer simulations and models of political behaviours,3 which derive from Game Theory, such as Axelrod (1984). Such models are particularly popular in International Relations Theory and Conflict Analysis (Myerson 1997). Computer simulations are also used by political parties and think tanks to predict electoral behaviour and social movements. The crucial difference is that videogames do not seek to predict the outcome of real world political processes (ie. they are not simulations of real-world politics) but rather they are able to express or even embody political views or realities in themselves (ie. they are postmodern simulacra, in Baudrillard’s terms (1985)). Like politics itself, videogames are complex systems in which a human agent participates.The expressive (or even persuasive) force of videogames is a constant source of media speculation, with a particular focus on the possible effects of interactive violence on the development of children (Anderson, Gentile & Buckley, 2007). Indeed, there is a real ‘moral panic’ emerging around the question of violence in videogames (Cohen 1972), fuelled in the West by events such as the Virginia Tech shootings (April 2007) or in Japan by the Akihabara stabbings (June 2008). A number of prefectures in Japan have even banned the sale of Grand Theft Auto in response, and the National Police Agency has set up a task force to study the effects of violent games on Japanese citizens. In many ways, concern over videogames has replaced the so-called ‘otaku panic’ of the 1990s in Japan (Kinsella, 1998), which revolved around the allegedly anti-social effect of anime and manga fandom, especially following the Miyazaki Tsutomu Incident of 1989.3

On the other hand, increasing attention is also being paid to the potential (and actual) educational value of these products (Gee 2007).4 Indeed, Nintendo is increasingly marketing its handheld DS console as an educational device, especially in Japan. In 2004 a consortium of European learning and development agencies conducted a joint investigation into the education potentials of videogames (Mitchell & Savill-Smith 2004).If it’s the case that videogames might exert the kinds of dramatic influence over their players that their critics claim (eg. causing children to shoot their classmates at school), then surely it is plausible and even inevitable that they also exert a series of more subtle influences on their consumers. Indeed, part of the ‘moral panic’ about Japanese techno-culture has been in the form of American parents’ concerns about the ethical content of Pokemon (Yano 2004). Unfortunately, research into the rhetorical or expressive force of videogames is in its infancy. Even less developed is the con-ception of the deliberately political videogame (ie. the videogame authored with a specific political intention). To this extent, the medium of the videogame approximates the condition of film in the early twentieth century: with the possible exception of the issue of violence, political critique of videogames is directed to rhetoric that seems largely unintended or authorless. This situation does not challenge the power or potential of the medium, but merely calls attention to the need for further intellectual engagement.

which emphasized technologies of speed (Virilio 1977, 1989). Indeed, progressive and radical intellectuals have persistently expressed anxiety about the way that these technologies have tended to exclude the possibility of dissent in the civil society by reconfiguring sectors of the public sphere into technologically exclusive spaces. Sartre himself called on intellectuals to participate in radio and television – indeed, he suggested that it was their responsibility to do so in order to preserve the public sphere and to enjoin discus-sion with the forces of capital. His call was partly one for literacy in the devices and mechanisms of these media and their technologies (and hence a call for critique), but it was also partly a call for the appropriation of the productive technologies themselves by the wider public sphere. The political significance of the latter was contingent on the former: literacy in the conventions of radio and film were essential prerequisites to entering political debates via those media. Subsequently, we have seen a blossoming of political critique of radio and film but also of politically conscious and expressive broadcasting. Film Studies is now an unexceptional part of the curriculum in many Political Science programmes around the world.However, technology appears to develop faster than society’s appreciation of its political implications, and certainly faster than the academy is able to respond to the new literacies that technological change demands. Whilst some intellectuals remain dubious even about the need for cinematic literacy as a professional skill in the field of political inquiry, preferring instead to emphasize the central (or even exclusive) importance of print literacy, film is no longer new media. The dimensions of the new public sphere are now being stretched and reconfigured by digital technologies. Techno-politics has changed profoundly in the twenty-first century. For important reasons, I am not talking chiefly about the Internet but rather about interactive and immersive digital environments such as video-games.For understandable reasons, a great deal of literature has been written about the political implica-tions and uses of the Internet, both in the West and in Asia (Hughes 2003; Coates & Holroyd 2003; Anderson 2002; Mossberger, Tolbert & McNeal, 2007) but, as Chadwick (2006) observes, much of this literature really emphasizes the ways in which the Internet is really a technology that has trans-formed political communication and information distribution. Of course, this technology can be empowering and politically transformative (Zheng 2007). However, the media of expression (and hence the literacy skills involved in interrogating or participating in Internet politics) remains predominantly textual or hypertextual (although filmic information is also increasingly prevalent). Indeed, the familiarity of the medium of text is partly why it is immediately so accessible to so many people: the essential literacy demanded of those who wish to participate in, analyze, or influence this discursive site remains rather traditional. Indeed, we might hypothesize that it is partially for this reason that the heavily text-based academy has been able to accommodate the Internet into its research agenda so readily: academics in the humanities are society’s experts in text literacy. The technological innovation here is not medial but distributive: Internet texts instantly facilitate bi- or even omni-directional communication between unprecedented numbers of people in diverse locations around the world. This may facilitate a ‘cyber-democracy,’ wider and more liberal education, or even constitute a de-nationalising of the public sphere, encouraging new levels of macro- and micro-political concern, but is it really an innovation in expressive media? 2

In other words, the so-called Internet revolution does not seem to represent a close analogy to the medial shift in the public sphere that came with the advent of radio and film. The technology does not require new literacies to the same extent. However, the medium of the videogame does demand



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capitalism (Dallmayr 1999; Goto-Jones 2007; Freeden 2007), Fredric Jameson has argued that in the face of ‘the invincible universalism of capitalism’ there was only one theoretical opportunity for in-novation and Difference (in the West): ‘there is no alternative to Utopia’ (Jameson 2005:xii). Utopias and other science fictions serve a dual function: first, to provide visible evidence of the possibility of difference from the present status quo (with varying degrees of possibility, realism and fantasy); and second, to speculate on the various forms (and the political implications of those forms) of alternative political schemas. Indeed, the place of fictional utopias and dystopias in political thinking is well-established (Simona 2006; Parrinder 1999; Moylan 2000; Baccolini 2003; Davis 2005), but their urgency in the context of a political crisis is new. The ways in which people interact with these visions will be contingent upon their medium of expression.Given the emphasis of SF on the ‘encounter with the Other,’ it is particularly fitting that the field should also consider non-European visions. However, like the rest of writing on SF (and on political theory), the nature and content of non-Western (especially Japanese) utopias and dystopias is largely overlooked. Nonetheless, just as George Orwell and Karel Capek utilised SF in Europe, so creatives like Shirow Masamune and Oshii Mamoru utilise animanga in modern Japan, providing carefully considered and intricately political futurities. Indeed, Shirow’s Appleseed animanga saga (1985-2007) is perhaps the most fully realised vision of a future society in any country: but how is its rhetorical force different in its variations forms across different media?Cognitive estrangement also functions metaphysically in SF, exploring the limits of the human through the (imaginative) development of new technologies (Schneider 2008; Myers 1989; Goto-Jones 2008a). In this way, SF investigates the foundations of human selfhood, the integrity of the body, the nature of consciousness, as well as questions of gender and race (Bukatman 1993; Attebery 2002; Larbalestier 2006; DeGraw 2006; Tucker 2004). In Europe this discourse has placed Mary Shelly, HG Wells and George Orwell into the company of Max Weber (the ‘iron-cage’ of mechanized society) and Martin Heidegger (the self-alienation of Being in the face of techne); in Japan an entire sub-genre of SF has evolved (the ‘mecha’) that continues from the politico-metaphysical positions of great modern philosophers such as Miki Kiyoshi and Nishida Kitarō (Driscoll 1994). In many cases, SF speculations are triggered by the possibilities of real scientific advances, and hence express possible futurities or political configurations (Hayles 1999; Haraway 1991; Broderick 2002). Indeed, Fukuyama, who once heralded the end of (political) history (1992), argues that it is technology that moves us into the posthuman future (2002) and hence calls for an analysis of competing visions of that future.

Significance (potential contribution to science, technology and/or society)The development of new technologies changes the dimensions of the public sphere and demands new types of literacy from those who want to engage (or who are responsible for engaging) in it. In different geo-cultural and medial sites, the political content of the public sphere will utilize different technologies and grammars to express potentially innovative political ideas. Following the end of the Cold War, the field of political thought has been searching for difference and innovation in new places. This project aims to provide a new methodology to define literacy in techno-cultural products (anime, manga, videogames), which are characteristic of a new public sphere in Japan (and emanating from it around the world); it aims to analyse this techno-culture as it is manifested within the field of science fiction – itself an established part of the public sphere – and hence to provide sophisticated

The innovative scholar of videogames Ian Bogost (2007) is perhaps the first to attempt to design explicitly political videogames: his game ‘Howard Deans for Iowa’ (Persuasive Games, 2003), which enabled players to run an election campaign for US Democratic Party member Howard Deans, was a landmark in this respect. In 2004 he was commissioned by Illinois House Republicans to build a game that would communicate to the electorate the complexities of their policies on medical malpractice, local development and educational standards. Since then, a number of other election games have appeared, including one from a major publisher Ubisoft (2004), The Political Machine, and it has become relatively commonplace for political parties and candidates in the USA to com-mission their own games at election time. The rhetorical force of these political games is based on the idea that videogames allow players to embody and experience the actions and positions of another, and hence (depending on the success of the particular rhetorical devices employed) the game might actually change the player (and her politics). There is a fascinating and potentially powerful ‘politics of becoming’ waiting to be explored here. Hence, controlling the feedback that a player receives following her actions is a delicate process of persuasion; this is the key to expressing political intent in this media.At present, there is very little work on videogames from the perspective of political theory. The field is far behind that of film or literary studies, where the intersections between the particularities of the media and political discursivity have been creatively and critically explored. By extension, there is very little work that seeks to tackle questions of how videogames operate on or within the new techno-political public sphere. And finally, there is no body of theoretical literature that provides the tools of literacy for political expression in this medium: there is no guide to critiquing or program-ming political intent in a videogame. One of the goals of this project will be to fill in some of these gaps, drawing findings from the science fictional field of Japan. The results will take the form of the development of a methodology for the critique of videogames as political expression; the analysis of a corpus of science fictional games in Japan to sketch the contours of the field’s political landscape; an analysis of how this medial landscape interacts with the Japanese public sphere; and finally the development of a simple, original science fiction game that expresses a distinctly Japanese vision of future politics. These results should contrib-ute to a greater understanding of contemporary Japanese society, to the dimensions of the emerging techno-political public sphere in other technologically advanced societies, and to the ability of the academy to intervene in this important new political media.

The science fictional fieldWhen I talk about the science fictional field that will be used to delimit this project’s investigations into the new politics and new public sphere in Japan, I am embracing an established tradition of utilizing the genre of science fiction (SF) as a site for political expression and critique. Since its inception as a field of academic inquiry, scholarship has focused on SF as an exercise in ‘cognitive estrangement’ (Suvin 1969), emphasizing its radical political mission to build ‘imaginative frameworks that are alternative to the author’s empirical environment’ (Suvin 1988:37). Indeed, early attempts to establish the canon (or ‘megatext’, Broderick 1994:xiii) were guided by the principle that all significant literature must be anti-capitalist (Suvin 1988:10) and must contribute to the demystification of the people of capitalist polities. Since the end of the Cold War, amidst the ‘crisis of political theory’ in which political theorists are searching for alternatives to a pervasive liberal-



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Rather than trying to push videogames into the confines of methods developed for other media, Bogost suggests that meaning in videogames should be drawn from their ‘unit operations,’ by which he means identifiable units of function or action. He differentiates active readings of ‘unit operations’ from static readings of ‘system operations’; this differentiation approximates Azuma’s distinction between the bottom-up database and the top-down narrative. It also echoes Heidegger’s (1977) distinction between the totalizing and stagnating process of Gestell (Enframing) and the active, haptic process of Bringing-forth or poesis. In addition, this model has the advantage of mirroring the ‘object oriented’ nature of modern computer programming languages, like C++ and Java, and hence it approaches an approach to critique that reflects the process of authorship.The result is that Bogost is able to conceive of a method to compare videogames in terms of critical rhetoric: looking at (say) the ballistics model in Final Fantasy (Square Enix) against the ballistics model in Pokemon (Nintendo), how does each affect the experience of game-play and hence what does each communicate to the player? Does shooting someone require patience, skill and timing, or does a simple and careless button press do the trick? When you shoot, what is fired from your gun? Was it a gun or a spitting-flower? Is the effect of killing someone always to your advantage, or do you need to be selective? Do people die? How does it happen? Are the ballistic models actually the same (ie. powered by the same ‘engine code’ as a licensed IP)? 5 By collecting together answers to these unit operations from various videogames, it is possible to affect a model of possibilities and their rhetorical force. In many ways, this approximates Azuma’s ‘databasification.’If Azuma and Bogost suggest the beginnings of a method for interrogating all techno-cultural products in the same way, it must also be remembered that there are important differences between the media involved. It is simply untrue to maintain that narrative is no longer important in any anime or manga (although its place in videogames is certainly problematic). Hence, narrative does often provide part of the rhetorical force of these media, and thus narratology becomes an important aspect of this project. In addition, treating all of the media together risks obfuscating the characteristics that make them unique (in comparison with each other, and in general): the static but sequential imagery of manga; the animated artistry of anime; and the interactive nature of videogames. Hence, each of the subprojects in this VICI will focus on a specific medium (anime, manga or videogames), trying to understand the ways in which these various approaches can complement each other in making a sophisticated reading: unit operations, narrative and interactivity will be combined in appropriate ways for each medium.In order to facilitate the development of this plural methodology, the research team will meet at regular workshops to discuss their findings about the state of the art in terms of methodology in their medium, and also to test their findings about the rhetorical force of key unit operations and narrative themes in their own projects. Because the science fictional field of Japan circumscribes all of the projects, such comparisons should be practicable.Finally, it should be acknowledged that political discussion does not only take place within specific products or even within particular media, but also that it takes place between them. In some cases, franchises transcend specific media (Pokemon and Final Fantasy, for instance, are now anime, manga, videogames, trading cards, miniatures, toys, jewelry etc.). On the one hand, this means that the team needs to be sensitive to the ways in which meanings are disputed within this techno-political public sphere, rather than merely translating the meanings into academic prose (eg. following debates about the impact of digital technology on democracy as it blossoms between especially influential presentations in specific manga, to anime, and to videogames). And on the other hand,

critiques of the political force and potentials of these voices in contemporary society. Using a common genre to cross medial boundaries also enables this project to critically assess the particular rhetoric and grammar of each media, and hence help to provide coherent and useful definitions of these slippery categories.The results should deepen our knowledge of human experience and political consciousness in modern Japan, but they should also be of relevance for any technologically advanced (or advancing) society. Furthermore, the identification of literacy standards in diverse techno-cultural media will facilitate the intervention of academia within burgeoning areas of the public sphere from which it is largely excluded at present. Hence, the project ultimately aims to diversify our sense of political rhetoric, and our ability to comprehend and express political positions in persuasive ways. This new politics should help to end irrational ‘moral panics’ (or at least transform them into rational ones!) and encourage creative and constructive engagement.Dealing with new media from a non-European context requires the development of a new set of methodological tools, and this development is a central task of the project. However, the process need not start from nothing, since there are already a number of leads to follow. Most particularly, as already discussed, there is an interesting and sophisticated critical literature about animanga and videogames in Japan itself: for this project, then, Japan is not merely the location of case studies, but also a course of theoretical innovation about globalized cultural products.Of particular interest here is the work of Azuma Hiroki and his notion of ‘gamic-realism’ (2007), which is a way of interrogating meaning rather than narrative in (what he takes to be) postmodern Japan. Indeed, he insists that a central characteristic of (serious) animanga and videogames since 1995 (the moment at which Shinseiki ebuangerion was released) is the collapse of grand narrative and the evocation of what he terms the visual database. Rather than searching for a subterranean narrative that is hidden behind the images of animanga or videogames, he argues that the otaku draws meanings directly from the unit-images themselves. He associates this with the radical flattening of hierarchies that characterizes the ‘superflat’ art movement (which has been made famous worldwide by Murakami Takashi (2000) and others). In otherwords, Azuma eschews the top-down unificatory principles of systemic narratives, and argues rather that Japanese techno-culture should properly be considered as a bottom-up constellation of floating units that are ordered in the process of participation with them: meaning becomes an effect rather than a cause of the images. In this model, the author vanishes as a principle of systematism (or at least is drawn into complicity with the viewer). This means that there is a sense in which all Japanese techno-culture is interactive, not only games. Furthermore, it means that ‘audiences’ interact with these media in terms of units of meaning rather narratives. Azuma is able to show, for instance, that otaku use Internet search engines to assemble databases of common elements from different animanga: big eyes, fluffy ears, mechanical (mecha) bodies etc. This ‘databasification’ of the audience’s engagement with techno-culture has radical consequences for the study of meaning and rhetoric in the public sphere.Interesting, there is some common ground between Azuma’s vision of a postmodern techno-culture and recent work in Videogames Studies in the USA. In particular, the work of Ian Bogost (2006) on so-called ‘unit operations’ as a method for critiquing videogames resonates closely with Azuma, albeit without approaching postmodern principles. For Bogost, the ongoing debate in the literature of Videogames Studies (between methods that emphasise narrative and those that focus on ludology) misses the point that videogames are a new media that require new methods and literacies to access.



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Broderick, Damien (2002), The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed By Rapidly

Advancing Technologies, Tor Books

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Fiction, Duke University Press

Calichman, Richard (2008), Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan,

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Chadwick, Andrew, 2006, Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communication

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MacMillan

Cohen, Stanley (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: Mac Gibbon and Kee

Curry, Patrick (2004), Defending Middle-Earth – Tolkien: Myth and Modernity,

Houghton Mifflin

Dallmayr, F (ed), Border Crossings, Lexington Books

Davis, Laurence (ed) (2005), The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The

Dispossessed, Lexington Books

DeGraw, Sharon (2006), The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction, Routledge

Disch, Thomas (2000), The Dreams our Stuff is Made of: How Science Fiction

Conquered the World, Free Press

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the team needs to be aware of the way in which these media ‘converge’ into giant multiple-media super-products with rhetorical powers of their own (Jenkins 2006).In each case, believing that an important way of understanding how meanings are implemented in techno-culture is to construct those meanings yourself, the research team will jointly work on a short series of political manga, anime shorts, and a simple videogame in an object-oriented language. Success here will mean that the team will be able to participate in the techno-cultural public sphere rather than simply critique it from without. An exhibition at the end of the project will showcase the results, alongside more conventional publications.

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Notes1 This article is an the outline of the research project, ‘Beyond Utopia,’ which

was awarded a VICI grant by the NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific

Research); this version was prepared for the World Politics and Popular Culture

Conference held in Newcastle, 19-20 November, 2009.

2 In some ways, this communication technology assists in the transformation of

the public sphere into a denationalized ‘rhetorical sphere,’ premised on issues

rather than the identity of the ‘public’ involved in discussion. This is part of the

globalization debate.

3 Between 1988 and 1989, Miyazaki kidnapped, mutilated and killed four young

girls. The press emphasised that his house was full of anime and manga, and he

became known as ‘the otaku murderer.’ The link between his interest in these media

and his crimes was never formally established. He was executed on 17 June 2008,

just nine days after the so-called Akihabara Massacre, which saw a series of

stabbings and murders take place in the video-game/animanga centre of Tokyo.

4 In recent years, videogames such as the controversial Grand Theft Auto series

(Rockstar Games) have also been recognized as art, and the British Academy of

Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) now as an annual Videogames Awards.

5 Intriguingly, it is also possible that the same ‘game’ engine codes might be used in

some CGI animated features, opening up the possibility that, for instance, Major

Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell) fires her weapons under the same laws of physics

in different media: but what would the effect of this be on the audience? Do they

expect physics engines to be the same in anime, manga and videogames?

What happens if they are different?

132 133

List of Illustrations Cover Collage of stills from the animes Ghost in the Shell, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and Fullmetal Alchemist Ghost in the Shell © Production I.G. url: http://freenet-homepage.de/clscolls/GhostInTheShell2.0_by_cls.jpg Fullmetal Alchemist ©2003-2005 Hiromu Arakawa/Square Enix, MBS, ANX, BONES, Dentsu url: http://top-anime-wallpaper.blogspot.com

Inside cover Chinese bloggers This image illustrates Jeroen de Kloet’s article Bloggers, Hack-ers and the King Kong Syndrome in IIAS The Newsletter no. 50 (Spring 2009) url: http://iias.nl/files/IIAS_NL50_25.pdf

p. 33 ‘The Other’: various depictions of aliens from another galaxy. Top image Sign at a Kansai International airport, Japan url: http://www.iias.nl/files/IIAS_NL50_2223.pdf

p. 34 Japanese poster for 1954 classic Japanese science fiction film Gojira (Godzilla), directed and co-written by Ishiro Honda and produced and distributed by Toho Company Ltd. Gojira’s attack on Tokyo symbolised a nuclear attack, like the ones on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. url: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Gojira_1954_Japanese_poster.jpg

p. 35 Top Image used on one of many covers of William Gib-son’s acclaimed sci-fi novel Neuromancer (1984) that portrays the future as tinged with Japaneseness. url: http://ahybridvision.wordpress.com/

Bottom left Book cover of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1961). It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised by Martians on the planet Mars, after his return to Earth in early adulthood url: http://beforewisdom.com/blog/?p=876

Bottom right Screenshot from David Lynch’s 1984 cultfilm Dune, based on Frank Herberts sci-fi novel with the same name (1965). url: http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/841

p. 36 & 37 Screenshot from the anime film Ghost in the Shell (1995), directed by Mamoru Oshii. In the year 2029, the bar-riers of our world have been broken down by the net and by cybernetics, but this brings new vulnerability to humans in the form of brain-hacking. When a highly-wanted hacker known as 'The Puppetmaster' begins involving them in politics, Section 9, a group of cybernetically enhanced cops, are called in to investigate and stop the Puppetmaster. The pursuit will call into question what makes a human and what is the Puppetmaster in a world where the distinction between human and machine is increasingly blurry? © Production I.G. url: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=465

p. 38 & 39 Miniatures of the Heidi anime characters at a Heidi exhibition, held in April 2008 in Fukuoka, Japan url: http://mani-blog.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2008/04/index.html

p. 40 Indonesian girls using a mobile phone Source: Indonesian Dreams: Reflections on society, revelations of the self (Buku OBor, KITLV Jakarta, 2008), edited by Tino Djumini url: http://iias.nl/files/IIAS_NL50_2627.pdf

Inserts PocketMuslim, an Islamic reference and educational tool for Muslim and non-Muslim url: http://pocketmuslim.com AA Gym, short for Abdullah Gymnastiar, on the cover of his book Apa Adanya. AA Gym is a successful Muslim preacher, TV personality and entrepreneur. He is also one of the first to have launched a Muslim content for mobile phones. url: http://padepokanpena.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/aa-gym-menolak-kultus-individu/

p. 89 Screenshots from the 2002 anime Voices of a distant star. A high school romance is split apart when one member of the couple enlists in the UN space army to fight aliens who attacked our Martian colony. They communicate through text messages, though the delivery times increase from a few minutes while she trains in orbit, to over eight years as her crew delves deeper into the universe searching for Earth's enemies © CoMix Wave Inc. url: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0370754/plotsummary

p. 90 & 91 Alphonse Elric, a character in Fullmetal Alchemist, whose physical form is little more than a hollow suit of mediae-val armour (he lost his original body during an alchemic experi-ment), is constantly pondering the (ir)relevance of his material body to his essential identity and identifying himself with his memories and feelings. ©2003-2005 Hiromu Arakawa/Square Enix, MBS, ANX, BONES, Dentsu. url: http://images.mcanime.net/images/fansubs/590/10350/ep_26318_0.jpg

p. 92 & 93 Salvador Dalí (1930/31): ‘Tactile Cinema’. The moviegoers sense the leading lady’s fear not only through the visible goose bumps on her body but also through the goose bumped ‘tactile pad’ in front of them. Illustration in a letter to Louis Buñuel. Reprinted in: Augustin Sanchez Vidal. 1988. Buñuel, Lorca, Dalí. El enigma sin fin Barcelona: Planeta. url: http://iias.nl/files/IIAS_NL50_2021.pdf

p. 94 & 95 Major Kusanagi, the female heroine of the Ghost in the Shell cycle, is a self-conscious, complete cyborg. Her cy-borgification has made her into a superhuman warrior, capable of incredible physical and mental feats, but it has also made her anxious about her identity and, in particular, about her humanity. © Production I.G. Uchihaleasder on url: photobucket.com

p. 96 Botttom left Lady performing a song in karaoke bar Covo, Toyako, Japan url: http://livebar-covo.sblo.jp/article/22026448.html Top and bottom right Sony’s first and current walkman © Sony

All illustrations are reproduced for non-commercial, academic reasons. We have tried to list all copyright holders and sources of the illustrations used in this volume. If we have failed to credit you as a copyright holder please contact Asiascape at [email protected]

The Asiascape Occasional Papers (Asiascape Ops) are an internationally peer-reviewed publication series that are available free of charge via www.asiascape.net.

In recognition of the under-representation of cyberculture in many of the mainstream academic journals (and hence the difficulty encountered by scholars, journalists and others in finding reliable, scholarly sources in these fields), Asiascape Ops deliberately utilises free, web-based distribution in order to assist in the dissemination of serious scholarship in the areas of cyberculture, animanga etc., with the goal of helping to establish a lively, rich, diverse and thriving field. Materials available on Asiascape.net can be used freely in teaching and/or research, and we simply ask that proper scholarly conventions (including copyright) be observed when citing the material.

ISSN Asiascape Occasional Paper Series1875-225x (online); 1875-2241 (print)

Project directorChristopher Goto-Jones (Leiden University, Netherlands)

International advisory boardWendy Hui Kyong Chun (Brown University, USA)Mark Harrison (University of Tasmania, Australia)Sharon Kinsella (Manchester University, UK)Tom Lamarre (McGill University, Canada)Stefan Landsberger (Amsterdam University, Netherlands)Angus Lockyer (SOAS, UK)Susan Napier (Tufts University, USA)Steffi Richter (Leipzig University, Germany)Ivo Smits (Leiden University, Netherlands)Takayuki Tatsumi (Keio University, Japan)Mark Williams (Leeds University, UK)

134 135

About the authors

Bart Barendregt

Leiden University, the Netherlands

[email protected]

Young Sook Choi

Kings College, University of London, UK

[email protected]

Jens Damm

Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

[email protected]


Leiden University, the Netherlands

[email protected]

Jeroen de Kloet

University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

[email protected]

Thomas Lamarre

McGill University, Canada

[email protected]

Yoko Ono

Oxford Brookes University, UK

[email protected]

Fabian Schäfer

Leipzig University, Germany

[email protected]

Cobus van Staden

South African Broadcasting Corporation

[email protected]

Colophon

© 2010 Asiascape.net and Modern East Asia Research Centre,

Leiden, The Netherlands

Editor


Editorial assistance

Anna Yeadell (CyberAsia, The IIAS Newsletter)

Production

Esther Truijen

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Asiascape.netProject director Christopher Goto-Jones (Leiden Univer-

sity, Netherlands) International advisory board Wendy

Hui Kyong Chun (Brown University, USA) Mark Harrison

(University of Tasmania, Australia) Sharon Kinsella (Man-

chester University, UK) Tom Lamarre (McGill University,

Canada) Stefan Landsberger (Amsterdam University,

Netherlands) Angus Lockyer (SOAS, UK) Susan Napier

(Tufts University, USA) Steffi Richter (Leipzig University,

Germany) Ivo Smits (Leiden University, Netherlands)

Takayuki Tatsumi (Keio University, Japan) Mark Williams

(Leeds University, UK)

This volume is produced by Asiascape.net, a project

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Asiascape.net is an attempt to build a new international

research coalition in the rapidly emerging fields of

cyberculture (New Media, Convergence Culture, Video

Games and other related media, such as fan-culture)

and animanga (Anime and Manga), especially as they

relate to (or originate from) East Asia.

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ISSN Asiascape Occasional Paper Series: 1875-2241


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