There’s a constant kerfluffle in the otaku-rhombus, and everywhere in nerddom, actually, concerning criticism. Specifically, many nerds want it kept out of their entertainment — despite the fact they engage in it constantly. Academics have similar kerfluffles, honestly; many’s the time I’ve heard a professor complain about “jargon.” Inevitably only the schools of thought they dislike use “jargon;” their preferred schools of thought don’t engage in it. Anyway, this is the first in a series of entries meant to extend an olive branch in the best way a scholar knows how: through teaching and learning together. In this series, we’ll be describing different “schools” of critical thought, how they work, where they came from, what they do, how they’re useful, and so on. We’ll even apply a bit of the theory to familiar texts to illustrate how this is supposed to work from a literary point of view — and remember, literature is just entertainment, so criticism is simply thinking about entertainment. Why? To be further entertained! This post specifically is part of that most dreaded (as most [un]familiar) world, the post-something-or-other. This time, post-structuralism.

Carl Sagan once posited that many Americans (he not having a lot of experience being a citizen of any other countries) distrust science because it requires background reading. To engage in science one must do the up-front work. Literary criticism is similar: many people avoid it simply because they don’t want to do the background reading to know which post-structuralist said what and what we people think of it now. Of course, really, criticism is simply careful and loving thought about something you love, but the background reading provides a platform of similarity from which everyone can begin.

That paragraph serves to introduce this paragraph, specifically, structuralism. As the name implies, post-structuralism is a response to structuralism (these names are awkward yes, but at this point they’ve stuck). So. Ferdinand de Saussure was a French linguist who lectured on the nature of language. If you only take one thing away from Saussure, it must be this: language is arbitrary.

For us, in the year of our flying spaghetti monster 2010, that seems obvious, perhaps even trite. We’ve likely all had that moment of realization, that a word only means something because we decided it does. If you’ve studied a language not native to you, you almost certainly understood this at some level. However, back in the early 1900s this was a little revolutionary. Linguistics was a branch of history, studying where a word came from — all the way back to Latin or Greek if it’s a respectable word. Most people thought of language worked in the way that’s sometimes called the “Adam” principle. That is, Adam named the beasts and the bird and the seas. So a thing’s name was a part of the thing. Think of any fantasy you’ve read or seen where someone’s true name is a handle to the person. It’s the same principle. Saussure described the system of thought on language that, which, with modification, rules today.

Specifically, language is arbitrary. But also specific. Language isn’t simply “made up” in the way nonsense words are. Language is arbitrary, but at the same time everyone must agree on the arbitrary decisions. Imagine a game where a move counts for three points in player A’s rules, but five points in player B’s. A and B can’t play a game until they agree on one common system.

Saussure used a famous diagram that, as a whole, represents a sign — a sign is a language unit, basically. The signified is the thing to which the word is applied, like a tree. The signifier is the word applied to it, such as “tree” or “ki” or “arbor.” Both together actually make the sign, because when we hear the word we designate as appropriate, we think of a tree. Not some Platonic ideal tree, but a tree, maybe one we’ve seen every day, or a special tree (maybe the one you climbed in as a child, or the one that was blasted by lightning in your back yard).

That’s how an individual sign works. All of them work in a system, where each one means something because it doesn’t mean anything else.

That’ s a little weird, but think on it for a moment. “Tree” means a plant with bark and leaves because it does not mean an animal with four legs that chases cars. Without contrasting words, a single word would be useless, as it could expand to be everything. In fact, that’s why we have so many binaries. “Everything” itself is what isn’t “nothing.”

Now, the sign is fine, as far as it goes. But poststructuralist theorists focus their magnifying lenses upon the signifier in particular, assuming in part that signifiers are all we can really work with. This may sound like an almost existentialist argument, but, in “…That Dangerous Supplement…” (or, more affectionately, “…That Highbrow Essay About Masturbation…” or “…That Essay Titled Kind Of Like an Aria Episode…”), Derrida turns it into a matter of “mere” linguistic mechanics.

The basic idea here is that, in attaching a signifier to a signified, or a sound-image to a concept, or what have you, we’re doing two things: 1. creating a relationship between ourselves and the signified, which can only exist via the supplementary signifier, and 2. creating another “terminal” signified, to which we can only relate with another signifier. Of course, your mileage may vary regarding how “basic” an idea this is, but it’s really not that wild, and we can apply it to many fandom concepts with which we’re already familiar.

Consider, for example, one binary that anime often approaches: life/death. Many of us have encountered the idea that death gives meaning to life, and while the idea as it shows up in anime probably has more to do with Eastern philosophy than with Derrida, it’s a good example of what Derrida means by supplementation. A deconstructionist might tell you that death gives meaning to life precisely due to the arrangement of the two words-and-or-ideas in the life/death binary: life happens for a while, and then death substitutes for (absent) life.

We might lament death as the absence of life (as we might lament writing as the absence of speech, or masturbation as the absence of sex, or absence as the absence of presence). But death is useful insofar as it allows us to conceive of life as a thing with certain qualities; sans death, life simply is, but, in light of death, life is z, y, z, etc. As Derrida puts it, when presence becomes absence, the quality and worth of the absent presence becomes apparent. We often say that people lead good or bad lives, but we can only make such judgments — we can only conceive of such a thing as “a life” — with death in mind. This, I imagine, has much to do with the explorations of mortality conducted by such things as Casshern Sins and Bokurano.

So far the territory we’ve crossed hasn’t gotten too thorny. In fact, this all seems like an extension of Saussure — i.e. things “mean” relative to one another. But here’s the strange part: as absence fulfills its role as absence, it becomes another presence. Simply put, death describes the state of a thing as does life. The problem with death specifically is that we can’t exactly substitute something for it — there is no “post-death” at the end of death — and so it’s hard to say anything about death as such other than that it simply is.

Fortunately the hypothetical world of fiction gives us such things as undeath; we might say of a zombie that it had a foreshortened or interrupted death, a death that wasn’t peaceful. And there’s always religious afterlife, I guess. But I digress, and I really shouldn’t in a post that will be long enough anyway. What we end up with is a great chain of supplementation:

This convenient model can be applied to all kinds of things, and it gets particularly interesting when there’s more than one person doing the conceptualizing. Consider translation:

And, as implied however many hundred words ago, this process bears upon Saussure’s basic signified/signifier model, which is, in a sense, a variation on the presence/absence binary. The thing signified is our idea of a “presence” in the world, and we discuss these presences-as-conceived via signifiers, symbols that imply the “absence” of the signified in collective discursive space. Working with signifiers may be about all we can do, but that’s not the whole of it; we also have to consider that the very existence of the signifier gives us a sense of the “form” of the signified — hence the poststructuralist interest in the signifier.

Of course, one of Derrida’s strangest ideas is about the space between the signifier and the signified. Derrida, in his “Différance,” described what one could describe as what Saussure didn’t bother with: how signs work. That is, the actual mechanism of them.

Essentially, différance is that line in the signifier/signified diagram. Here’s the deal: the word différance combines the words “differ” and “defer.” All words both differ and defer, and in doing so they create meaning.

A word differs because, as we saw earlier, a dog is a dog because it’s not a cat. We have lots and lots of different words for things because that’s part of how language works — each signifier is different from every other signifier. That’s the simple part.

A word defers as it sends you both away and back. When you hear the word “dog” you think of a dog, but a dog is not actually summoned into the room with you. You are thrown back in your memory and call up an image of a dog — perhaps a particular dog, perhaps an amalgamation of many dogs — that is in the past, because it is a memory. At the same time, save in rare occasions, the dog(s) you’re thinking of were not in the room you’re in when you hear the word “dog,” so you’re also deferred out to somewhere else.

Now. It is a joke among academics that only two people ever understood deconstruction (the literary lens that grew out of Derridian post-structuralism): Derrida and Cixous (his wife). This is a common joke because Deconstruction is pretty wild, and we’re never sure if we’re doing it the way it was originally meant to be done. But really it doesn’t matter. So.

You may be able to see already how différance is useful when reading a text. A sign in a text, most often a metaphor, symbol, or such-like, works the same way a Derridian sign does. It both differs and defers. I think first of the famous traffic lights and road signs in anime — my favorite examples are from Kare Kano. They are literally things: a traffic light flashing yellow. It is also a representation of a thing, a signifier, as the thing is actually a real traffic light, the thing we’re seeing actually being a series of drawings of a light, and not the light itself. So we’re being sent out and back to traffic lights in our past, and what that meant to us (to slow down). Slowing down, or the need to, is also the import of the sign on the symbolic level, and so we’re being deferred through our deferral into another signified: danger/caution. But the show uses that series of deferments instead of another. We’re constantly sliding back out of the show into our own lives. Coupled with various other elements in the show, such as the shifting art style, the music, the painstakingly realized (and only mildly cliché-ridden) school setting, we can see the show as something that constantly pushes us farther away, with its method, even as it draws us closer with the story and the characters. We’re positioned always as viewers, never as fellows of the characters. There is, in fact, one possible implication in the way the show slides us, defers us, with the sorts of signs and signifiers it chooses: the show could be implying that we are beyond the problems and the timeframe that the characters live in. We can think of other examples of shows that behave as though they’re for one audience and really deal with another (Nanoha springs to mind). Kare Kano acts as though high schoolers are the entire world it deals with, but the signs are both more complex than usual (the art style) and defer us to places that are out of character for high schoolers (traffic lights only mean something that powerful to us when we’re driving, and the typical high schooler hasn’t driven much).

ALL signs, according to Derrida, function with différance within them — fortunately for Roland Barthes, who, for a while, made a living analyzing the signs of day-to-day French life. Barthes did literature, too — he wrote “The Death of the Author,” for one thing — but his Mythologies is founded largely upon such miscellanea as advertising campaigns and strippers. This may be notable in itself, as it demonstrates that (post)structural practices have applicability beyond strictly-defined art; we might analyze as symbols or signs such things as vendor booths at conventions, anime-related clothing, and yes, even anime blogs.

But this notion isn’t particularly poststructural. Barthes is, in fact, something of a transitional figure; he became more poststructural with every essay (which, really, may just mean that his position became more nuanced — if we reduce it to its essence, poststructuralism is more like an extension of structuralism than a radical reaction). The post- begins to come into play when Barthes points out the contradictions inherent to things.

You may have surmised at this point that, thanks in large part to Derrida, poststructuralism concerns itself with contradiction and paradox in ways that structuralism did not. We see this in such concepts as différance, which, again, relies upon levels of separation, but we might also call contradiction the motive of the poststructuralist — in short, if the meaning-values of things come from the ways that binaries function, we may as well reveal and scrutinize relevant binaries.

Barthes, for example, demonstrated that the striptease is a fundamentally chaste act, reinforcing the distance between erotic dancer and viewer. And this isn’t in spite of the particular features of the act — it’s a direct result of them. Everything from the layout of the typical gentlemen’s club to the final article of clothing that the dancer does not remove suggests separation (or suggested as much to Barthes in mid-20th-century France). Such elements as partial nudity and the sexualization of the dancer may imply intimacy, but there’s more to consider beyond what seems most obvious.

We might say that striptease demonstrates a structural contradiction, that it is, perhaps, the binary of intimacy/separation in action. And, if we’re Derridean about it, these contradictions are fundamental to everything — they are, as we’ve seen, the reason things are able to mean, so to speak.

But what good does that do us? The life of the fan is, of course, as rife with contradiction as any other sort of life; these contradictions seem to turn up in practically any sustained examination of the fandom, Azuma’s Otaku being a prime example. Azuma (who, by the way, made a name for himself as a Derrida scholar) deals with how fiction can feel more real than reality; he explains how pornographic visual novels really aren’t about sexual gratification; he investigates different parallel ways of engaging with different parts of texts; he even brings up the topic of otaku sexuality, pointing out the gulf between crazy 2D fetishes and relative 3D conservatism. And yet another contradiction emerges in Otaku that the book doesn’t deal with explicitly: the very idea of the postmodern database seems strange when postmodernism is evidently all about doing away with such all-encompassing structures. We could do this all day, really, but the point is that fandom, as anything, is made of binaries — reality/fiction being perhaps the biggest and most visible — and, in revealing and examining these binaries, we stand to learn something about ourselves.

Well then! With poststructuralism out of the way, we’ve handily dealt with the vagaries of mid-to-late-20th-century literary and cultural theory. Haven’t we?

No. No we haven’t. You know we haven’t. For, alas! there’s another feared and reviled body of critical work to consider, one that may prove even more difficult to wrangle than poststructuralism, insofar as it’s considerably vaguer.

I’m speaking, of course, of postmodernism.

…つづく!

Yes, that’s right, ages after Pontifus made that post you surely remember, and my threat to do an AiC, I’m finally here. Woo?

You know the book. Otaku, by Hiroki Azuma. OGT has kindly lent me his copy, and I’ll be doing a series of posts, one for each chapter – hopefully they’ll be reasonably short that way. This is chapter one, “The Otaku’s Pseudo-Japan.”

Azuma covers some of the history, both of otaku culture and postmodernism, and highlights the connection of the two historically, through Japan’s “narcissistic 80s” in which they were the greatest. He also points out that otaku culture is American culture hybridized – in the beginning, at least.

He also also points out that his theory is just as applicable everywhere, and he’s simply focusing on otaku. Something some commentators should have read before trying their hand at claiming this theory solely for the provenance of Japan’s sacred animus.

What’s fascinating about this framing chapter is that Azuma claims that otaku build an imaginary Japan out of elements such as miko, depictions of Edo and other historically appropriate cities, and social structures. All these elements are pre-war, when Japan was Japan, and not the loser of the Great War. Now, whether or not we agree that such a rationalization was or is necessary, it happened. Otaku, then, are in a way nostalgic for a time they never lived in, and much of their entertainments focus on building the image of such a time to inhabit themselves, through decidedly postmodern interactions. We can think of a few he doesn’t speak of specifically – doujinshi, fan writing, forum discussion (one he does mention), etc. Otaku entertainments, then, create an image of a beautiful world and are consumed in such a way that the otaku get to live in this beautiful world. He brings up Urusei Yatsura as Japanese folklore in space, allowing modern views of ancient, Japanese icons such as the monsters, priests, and heroes of legend.

Azuma points out a peculiar claim of the 80s in Japan – that Japan was inherently postmodern because they had never fully incorporated modernity into their culture. That was why the belief propagated that Japan was poised to rule the postmodern world. He equates this formulation – which led to a faddish popularity outside academia for postmodernism – to the pre-war claim that Japan would “overcome modernity.” Both seem fallacious. I haven’t read all the postmodernism – fiction or theory – that I’d like to, but one of the founding stones of postmodernity is the modern phase. One can’t shift into the hyperreal world of copies with no original without first experiencing a world where copies are made with no original. The best example nowadays is the desirability of the ipod – good aesthetic, quality building and support, and they’re all exactly the same. No one has the “first” ipod. People want their iphones early not to get the “real” iphone, the “original,” but to be among the first-wave adopters. The word adopter is used, because it isn’t an obtaining of an item, but membership into a group. Whose ID card is the original, in the club? Yours or mine? No one’s.

So Japan had to experience modernity or there would have been nothing to react against. And of course they have. They have factories, don’t they? Baudrillard, in a strange retcon of postmodern history, claimed that the introduction of the industrial factory marked the beginning, not of modernity, but of postmodernity. Modernism, for him, was simply the beginning of postmodernism.

However, Azuma has pointed out that this postmodern world, with no originals (he goes so far as to describe the production process of early anime, re-using original cels with minor changes for new scenes), is directed toward building a world wherein the consumer feels original. I posited something similar in my piece on Aria, about comfort, but Azuma takes it to the next level, describing the whole of otaku culture as an attempt to build a world. Not a safe world, but a familiar world. The thrust of a postmodern movement is to escape postmodernity.

What about fansubs? Azuma doesn’t talk about them, at least not yet, but I want to. There’s no original in the fansub chain – they begin with a copy of a copy. An episode of, say, HotD, gets sent in to a broadcasting company. Already a copy, because the animation studio isn’t sending their cels or computers to the company. The company broadcasts it, copying it ad infinitum into TVs across the country. Some enterprising person copies his or her specific copy, running it into their computer and encoding it into what we call a raw. This is already a copy multiple times removed from the possibility of an original (which didn’t exist to begin with), but it’s used as an original onto which subtitles are layered. The subtitled version, usually broken into different formats and, now, qualities, is copied out again in farther proliferation.

And yet many of us build a picture of nostalgic originality around this process. Either we watched the raw – the original for the fansubbing process – or we got the subbed version when it dropped – like picking up an iphone on release date. Maybe we have a sub group we prefer, because they’re more “accurate” (in a field where accuracy must always be sacrificed for the field to exist), or we like their font better, or they do karaoke and the other one doesn’t. Out of this variegated field of copies we build a picture of genuineness, of originality, which is no less powerful for being illusory. I stay mostly out of sub group fights, but I hear about them sometimes after the fact from friends who pay attention.

Azuma also mentioned, early on, a problem he had when beginning his book: serious academics were horrified he was interested in otaku, and otaku were horrified that he hung out with serious academics. I don’t want to get into the problem of nerds hating on academics, which makes no sense, but I do want to talk about the reaction of the otaku.

Azuma said this about them: “otaku, who usually display an air of anti-authoritarianism, distrust any method that is not otaku-like and do not welcome discussion on anime and video games initiated by anyone other than an otaku” (5). Does this sound familiar at all? 8C ran into it recently. I talked about it when I wrote about Delany spanking 70s era SF geeks who reacted the same way. Subcultures of all stripes, from goth and emo kids to Fruedian and Marxist academics, tend to distrust any method not born out of their camp. What this means for anime fans is that any attempt to deal equally with anime, to talk about it in the same ways people talk about books and movies, appear to be coming from an alien outside. They’re doing it wrong, it’s often said, when someone seriously considers a theme found in an anime or the patterns of a manga.

Not every method is alien. As Azuma points out, methods seen as originating inside the subculture are OK. You can surely fill in for yourself which methods are stamped with approval within the otaku-rhombus. Mostly they’re formalist in nature, looking at the production methods and internal patterns. Attempts to deal with patterns outside the text itself have gained currency even in the few years I’ve been around and blogging. What was once “doing it wrong” is now, perhaps in the face of Azuma’s database text itself, the best new way to deal with the texts.

It does amuse me to some extent that many people are using a postmodernist theory to construct a “grand narrative,” which it is the mark of postmodernism to explode when found, and deny when asked about. But that’s an aside.

The most distrusted methods of dealing with a text are those that are obviously not from within the otaku discourse itself. What’s called “theory” always has its origin elsewhere: psychoanalytic criticism comes from Freud, not Eva; Marxist theory comes from, well, Marx, and not Aria. The irony is that “theory” means coherent method, and the formalist approach is just as marked by its own history, the theory simply doesn’t use the names of Cleanth Brooks and the other American critics who built it, or the Russian critics who built what the Americans stole and built on more. Dealing with the historicity of an anime is generally kosher, but because that theory isn’t called “Greenblattism,” it’s OK, even though it’s similarly as alien to otaku culture (less applicable? Of course not, it’s delightfully applicable. I would go so far as to say Azuma is really doing postmodernist New Historical readings, especially when he describes something like Saber Marionette J as a microcosm of the 80s).

For Japanese otaku themselves, according to Azuma, this break is between what’s truly Japanese and what isn’t. Interestingly, though, the same image can produce different responses because of the same impulse. He speaks of the miko, whom otaku love, and whom non-otaku are repulsed by when within the confines of anime or manga. The miko is an image of Japanese culture, and for the otaku the miko creates a line that runs all the way from Edo-era “merchant culture” all the way through Sailor Moon. For a non-otaku, though, the non-Japanese SF is alien to the image of the miko; the two can’t be used together, and a disruption occurs which causes the non-otaku to react violently against the miko. The otaku, having created an image of Japan that includes the SF elements as Japanese – the fake Edo of Saber Marionette is one of his examples of this co-opting process – experience no disruption and, in fact, enjoy the fiction of their Japan more. The conflation of the SF (or fantasy, equally alien to non-otaku, according to Azuma) and the miko buttresses the faith otaku have in their “pseudo-Japan.”

It’s an interesting back-and-forth process he’s setting up. I can’t wait to get to more.

I should note that I got this idea after hearing a talk by Mary Beth Oliver, whose work now represents to me what the empirical, quantitative study of art should do. You should dig up her recent work, if you have the means.

The typical like/enjoy graph would look like this:

The assumption here is that anything toward the bottom left is something you just don’t like much at all. I’d try to favor enjoyment, assuming that most people won’t choose media only because it’s “impressive” in some way, but I don’t suppose there’s much point in fundamentally weighting the graph to account for that.

Problems arise when we consider that “enjoyment” may be too much of a catch-all. What does it mean? Pure, narcissistic enjoyment? Favoring good things over bad is not the only kind of enjoyment there is. What of catharsis? Or sympathy? The enjoyment spectrum may warrant a graph of its own.

“Appreciation” here is still a visceral response. But it’s a response that allows for the idea that unpleasant things can make for viscerally enjoyable art. I enjoy Hidamari Sketch and appreciate Bokurano, but I consider both entertaining on an emotional level.

I don’t suppose this notion will shock many of you; I’m assuming you aren’t crusaders against television and video games as purely narcissistic media, if you’ve happened upon one of my blogs (you probably wouldn’t even consider pure narcissistic enjoyment necessarily bad, nor would I). We already pay some attention to the nuances of enjoyment when charting our responses. But it may benefit us to consider how these nuances interact with the spectrum of “liking.”

Today’s quotational magic comes from a 1980 article by the intriguingly-named Robert Zajonc:

• Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. American Psychologist, 35, 151-175.

Zajonc argues against an information-processing model that places cognition before affect (reason before feeling, in other words), positing that, regardless of whether affect literally, temporally precedes cognition, “affect is always present as a companion to thought, whereas the converse is not true for cognition” (154). That is, emotion and subjective judgment confound everything. While Zajonc is concerned mostly with decision-making and interaction, you might rightly assume that such a model (which, as far as I know, has more or less survived the thirty years since the article’s publication) has certain implications for the consumption of art — and for people who write about the consumption of art, i.e. you and I.

Quite often “I decided in favor of X” is no more than “I liked X.” Most of the time, information collected about alternatives serves us less for making a decision than for justifying it afterward. Dissonance is prevalent just because complete and thorough computation is not performed before the decision… (155)

It’s as if he peered into the future and saw the aniblogothing! Beneath oceans of vitriol lies the truth: ultimately we’re writing about how we choose what we like, and not about why what we like is better than what other people like.

But that’s a given, and not really worth going on about at length. What catches my attention here is the idea of dissonance. Certainly we’ve all struggled with shows we find meritorious but not fun, or vice versa. The terms I’ve been using lately are “impressive” and “enjoyable;” others have distinguished between “works one likes” and “works one enjoys” (recent bloggery by Ghostlightning and Digitalboy comes to mind). And this excites my interests in mechanisms and methods — how do we navigate the gulf between impressive and enjoyable? “Differently” would be the short answer, I suppose.

Once formed, an evaluation is not revoked. Experiments on the perseverance effect, the strong primacy effects in impression formation, and the fact that attitudes are virtually impervious to persuasion by communication all attest to the robust strength and permanence of affect. Affect often persists after a complete invalidation of its original cognitive basis… (157)

Hence, visceral enjoyment and nostalgia/love-remembering are serious business. I tend to rate those works I associate with a particular “moment” or “movement” in my fandom — Love Hina, Rozen Maiden, Last Exile, Elfen Lied, Haibane Renmei, Macross, even (dare I say it) Aria — higher than I might otherwise, even after repeated viewings. I suspect some of you might do the same.

When we evaluate an object or an event, we are describing not so much what is in the object or in the event, but something that is in ourselves. …Thus, affective judgments are always about the self. They identify the state of the judge in relation to the object of judgment. (157)

We may think that, in our close-reading or sociohistorical interpretation of Pokemon, we’re uncovering the depth inherent to Pokemon. What we’re doing, really, is giving Pokemon depth. It’s worth remembering that textual depth comes from the reader’s depth of experience with the text. But now I’m just using Zajonc as yet more evidence in support of something I’ve been saying for a long time, so I’ll come at this a different way: why do we read anime blogs? I don’t know why you read anime blogs, but I don’t read them for their explications of art; I read them for their explications of their writers, as means by which to experience brief glimpses into how other people do anime, which is something that matters to me.

…[Liking] varies with the objective history of stimulus exposure. With recognition reduced nearly to the chance level, differential affective reaction to the stimuli is obtained as a consequence of mere repeated exposure. Random melodies presented five times were liked better than melodies never heard, even though the subjects could not discriminate the former from the latter for familiarity. (162-163)

This suggests something that makes a kind of sense, but that we don’t really think about: fandom is learned. If I sat my grandmother down in front of Gurren Lagann, she wouldn’t get it — and “getting it” here refers not to intellectual understanding, but to the simple ability to enjoy a thing. We don’t become anime fans overnight — or at least I didn’t. I’ve had to pass through a long series of gateway shows, starting with the Record of Lodoss War OVA, which I liked not because it was anime, but because it was high fantasy. I’d be interested to see how other bloggers evaluate their own acquisitions of fandom; some of that comes through in more nostalgic sorts of posts, but it isn’t always apparent when we look primarily forward.

I found Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals at the university library — seven or so months ago. And, what do you know, it’s due back. Overdue, probably. So I suppose I should annotate this thing at long last, for your benefit and mine.

It’s a short book, but I won’t be entirely exhaustive here. I’ll omit basic overviews of things many of us would find intuitive anyway, and some of the more extreme postmodern/poststructural business, in the assumption that you’ll read the book yourself if you’re looking for that sort of thing. It must be said, though, that, while Azuma got his start as a Derrida scholar, Otaku is very readable even if you aren’t so familiar with Baudrillard, Lacan, and their ilk — and, that being the case, I suppose I ought to make this post more or less readable, too.

For the sake of getting the “proper” citation out of the way (and thereby making myself feel better), it is thus:

• Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Azuma’s thesis here is “that the essence of our era (postmodernity) is extremely well disclosed in the structure of otaku culture” (6). He put this thesis forth during a talk in 2001, the essay-ified version of which he makes available for free on his website; you may want to check that out if you want a more extensive overview of Azuma’s position from the man himself.

…[O]taku, who usually display an air of anti-authoritarianism, distrust any method that is not otaku-like and do not welcome discussion on anime and video games initiated by anyone other than an otaku. … In other words, some people refuse to even recognize otaku, while others believe only a designated group possesses the right to speak about them. It has been extremely difficult to take a position that does not adhere to either of these stances. (5)

Tell me about it, Azuma! I’m not at all surprised that this phenomenon isn’t limited to our English-language sphere of anime blogs, where many of us have encountered it in one form or another. Azuma calls it a “dysfunctionality,” and claims that his work here amounts in part to an effort to circumvent (if not remedy) the factionalism of fans and non-fans (5). The degree to which the book succeeds at this will probably vary somewhat widely from reader to reader, but I didn’t feel at any time that Azuma stacked things entirely in favor of either cultural theory or fandom — he is in turns accepting and critical of both.

The history of otaku culture is one of adaptation — of how to “domesticate” American culture. This process also perfectly epitomizes the ideology of Japan during the period of high economic growth. Therefore, if at this time we perceive a Japanese aesthetic in the composition of anime and special effects, it is also necessary to recall that neither anime nor special effects existed in Japan prior to a few decades ago and that their process of becoming “Japanese” is rather convoluted. Otaku may well be heirs to Edo culture, but the two are by no means connected by a continuous line. Between the otaku and Japan lies the United States. (11)

Japanese history, etc. That otaku artifacts are, on some level, dependent on both technology originally imported from America and “the complex yearning to produce a pseudo-Japan…after the destruction of the ‘good old Japan’ through the defeat in World War II” makes me wonder about the position of the American fan relative to this complex interplay of traditions (13). That is, I don’t think American fans are so interested in the construction of a pseudo-Japan — or, if they are, I doubt it’s out of a desire to “overturn the overwhelmingly inferior status of postwar Japan with respect to the United States,” and more out of an interest in fictitious pseudo-Japan as an object of entertainment (13). It’s likely that postmodern Americans are as likely as postmodern Japanese to turn to narrative fandoms in an effort to make sense of the present world — Azuma notes at several points that his broader theories are not meant to be exclusive to Japanese otaku culture — but certainly the westerner’s relation to the east/west convolution that is anime is distinct, not least because we’re re-importing products dependent to some degree on our cultural exports.

At what point do the cultural distinctions inherent to anime break down? At what point does anime become something akin to what Timothy S. Murphy identifies as a “literature of globalization?”¹ Azuma seems to suggest that the otaku arts aren’t quite there yet, but, insofar as “the impact of otaku culture now reaches far beyond Japan” — a fact of day-to-day life for me and, if you’re reading this, probably you, too — the germination of a truly global genre within anime and manga seems at least remotely possible.

We also have to wonder what will happen when American creators claim significant stake in anime projects, as in the case of Heroman and the other Marvel collaborations. If anime is to some extent and in some cases a reaction to the American cultural elements it appropriates, who is appropriating and reacting to whom in Heroman? Is this an example of the smoothing-over of cultural boundaries, or — in the most extreme case — evidence of American capitalistic imperialism?

At any rate, the notion that acts of adaptation mark the beginning of otaku culture seems significant, given the multimedia adaptation processes at work in the anime/manga industry. Azuma attributes the proliferation of adaptations and derivative works to the postmodern fall of the metanarrative and the death of definitive authority, but if the birth of anime was, in a sense, an act of adaptation to begin with, perhaps a culture of derivation was simply a likely technical and logistical outcome.

[The] prominence of derivative works is considered a postmodern characteristic because the high value otaku place on such products is extremely close to the future of the culture industry as envisioned by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard predicts that in postmodern society the distinction between original products and commodities and their copies weakens, while an interim form called the simulacrum, which is neither original nor copy, becomes dominant. The discernment of value by otaku, who consume the original and the parody with equal vigor, certainly seems to move at the level of simulacra where there are no originals and no copies. (26)

In other words, Vocaloid and Touhou. Azuma’s prime example of this is Di Gi Charat, that franchise born of a store mascot when “the stories and settings that form its world were created collectively and anonymously as a response to the market, after the character design of Digiko alone gained support” (40). And I suppose it’s very revealing of my “brand” of fandom that I can’t really get into those sprawling franchises (I mistyped that “fanchises,” and maybe I shouldn’t have corrected it) without much in the way of authorial frames of reference. I’m not hostile toward or dismissive of fan work at all, nor do I dislike Touhou and Vocaloid; I suppose I have thus far simply failed to understand those fandoms, having cut my fanboy chops on western literature and film.

In otaku culture ruled by narrative consumption, products have no independent value; they are judged by the quality of the database in the background. …

…[O]taku consumers, who are extremely sensitive to the double-layer structure of postmodernity, clearly distinguish between the surface outer layer within which dwell simulacra, i.e., the works, and the deep inner layer within which dwells the database, i.e., settings. (33)

Azuma posits the “database” of story elements — character attributes, fragments of plot, and so on — as a replacement for the “deep inner layer” that presumably guided the reading of modern (i.e. pre-postmodern) literature (32). I’m not sure to what degree I buy that; part of me asks whether we haven’t simply done away with deep layers to begin with, given how poststructuralism rendered the semiotic signified inert, absent, or simply another signifier in disguise. But it is the case that fans of anime and manga concern themselves with very specific traits disconnected from any one character or story, and that creators both professional and amateur draw from an array of these traits — we can probably agree that the database exists, whether or not we grant its status as “grand nonnarrative” or replacement metanarrative (38).

Compared with the 1980s otaku, those of the 1990s generally adhered to the data and facts of the fictional worlds and were altogether unconcerned with a meaning and message that might have been communicated. Independently and without relation to an original narrative, consumers in the 1990s consumed only such fragmentary illustrations or settings; and this different type of consumption appeared when the individual consumer empathy toward these fragments strengthened. The otaku themselves called this new consumer behavior “chara-moe” — the feeling of moe toward characters and their alluring characteristics. (36)

Here, Azuma posits the birth of moe as we know it — that’s some srs bsns, isn’t it? While “moe” as a term evidently came about in the 1980s, Azuma locates the turn away from “fictitious grand narrative” such as that constructed by UC Gundam and toward stories that served as vehicles for the data that were the true foci of fandom in the mid-90s (37). And what franchise do you suppose he suggests is the crux of this shift? That’s right, it’s Evangelion — the very show that, in the U.S., convinced a generation of casual viewers of Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon (myself included) that they were actually fans of a storytelling method capable of conveying deep, meaningful, and consistent narrative experiences. And while we were trying to explain Christian symbolism in the context of Shinji’s journey, Japanese fans were dissecting Rei Ayanami into component parts to be recomposed later (by enterprising, market-conscious creators) into Ruri Hoshino and others (42, 49). Funny how that worked out.

It’s easy to see how contemporary “cute girls doing cute things cutely” shows came to be. People may accuse K-ON! of being “empty” — but, at the end of the day, emptiness is kind of the point. K-ON! represents a distillation of narrative into a pure vehicle for characters, who are themselves constructs of tried-and-true moe elements (moe-golems, if you will), which is what new-school fans sign on for in the first place, or so Azuma claims. The author of the linked Japanator article suggests that perhaps “emptiness” is an invitation to bring one’s personal experience to the viewing (which is inevitable anyway, she says, and I agree), but, if Azuma is to be believed, emptiness as such is practically irrelevant to the target Japanese demographic, whose members aren’t really interested in metaphoricity, cultural relevance, and so on, and whose primary concerns are the core components of cuteness, the manifestations of the database they know and love, which might be disassembled and reconstructed ad infinitum.

Which is not to say that a moe show is doomed to what we might identify as shallowness. Azuma is all about Saber Marionette J as an allegory for the late-90s otaku condition (20). And I can’t help wondering what he’d think of Strike Witches, whose regard for World War II history may be more than superficial. As long as moe shows encourage creativity by making their moe elements readily available to viewers, they can’t be all bad, I figure.

All that considered, can we really hold Chinka (which I guess is for real now?) against Danny Choo? Well, maybe — but if we do, we’re probably delving into the realm of broader issues with moe itself. Should we go after Choo’s studio for being manipulative, or should we take it up with those fans who want to be fed pure, unadulterated moe elements? And if we do, are we really doing nothing more than revealing our cultural bias?

The modern Japanese novel is said to reflect reality vividly (shasei); the otaku novel reflects fiction vividly. The characters and stories that [Ryuusui Seiryouin] depict are never realistic, but they are possible in the world of comics and anime already published, and therefore the reader accepts them as real. (56)

Even the novel is subject to database modes of consumption and production, evidently because otaku readers seek consistency with previous fiction (by way of the database) rather than with reality; “the moe-elements extracted from the subculture database seem far more real than the imitation of the real world for the emergent group of consumers in the 1990s” (78). To some degree I suspect that this has always been the case for all readers; however, Azuma speaks of an extreme, a situation in which “[o]taku print culture as a whole is beginning to obey a different kind of logic, one oriented toward characters rather than individual works” (57). The otaku novel is “[n]either literature nor entertainment,” to the extent to which such a thing is possible; it concerns itself, like anime, with serving as a vehicle for database elements (58). I couldn’t tell you how staunchly I’d stand by this notion, but I can tell you that, as a fiction writer influenced by the storytelling methods of otaku media, I find myself highly conscious of character traits as elements that might anchor readers based on previous fiction consumption.

Games produced by Key are designed not to give erotic satisfaction to consumers but to provide an ideal vehicle for otaku to efficiently cry and feel moe, by a thorough combination of the moe-elements popular among otaku. For example, in Air, pornographic illustrations of all sorts are concentrated in the first half, as if to reject the premise that the goal of girl games is erotic satisfaction. The latter half of the ten-plus hours of playing time does not even contain substantial choices; the player only follows the texts as a melodrama unfolds about a heroine. Even this melodrama is rather typical and abstract, created out of a combination of moe-elements such as “incurable disease,” “fate from previous lives,” and “a lonely girl without a friend.” …

…[T]his kind of game…masterfully grasps all of the fundamentals of moe, from the types of narrative to the details of design. …

Therefore, in most cases when they say “it’s deep” or they “can cry,” the otaku are merely making a judgment on the excellence in the combination of moe-elements. In this sense, the rising interest in drama that occurred in the 1990s is not essentially different from the rising interest in cat ears and maid costumes. What is sought here is not the narrative dynamism of old, but a formula, without a worldview or a message, that effectively manipulates emotion. (78-79)

What we have here is a loaded block of text, and I’d like to tackle it from the bottom up.

You’ll notice, toward the end, that Azuma reveals his priorities as a reader here — or he finishes the revelation that began with his early consideration of Nadesico and Saber Marionette J. Azuma and his otaku subjects evidently disagree on what is “deep;” to the otaku, depth means extensive engagement with the database, while to Azuma, depth seems to amount to engagement with some set of cultural or historical conditions — which makes sense, given that Azuma is a cultural critic by trade. Perhaps Azuma is claiming that, in the database-driven world, such a thing as “depth” no longer exists, but this notion relies on a particular definition of “depth,” and depth of experience is, practically speaking, something that varies from consumer to consumer, from product to product, and from individual consumptive act to consumptive act. What I’m trying to say is that I’m a little wary about how Azuma has framed this section — but, alright, I’ll grant that what he’s ultimately saying (i.e. otaku tend to read for emotion-invoking structural elements rather than metanarrative-based meaning) makes sense.

Essentially, Azuma takes very seriously the conception of Key games as “emotion porn.” And, yeah, I doubt there’s much room for debate over whether Key takes advantage of story elements proven effective at making consumers cry. Of interest here is Azuma’s identification of such elements as components of the database, and the implication that otaku use the database to achieve emotional states or to invoke emotive effects. What “is felt as most real” to the otaku consumer is neither “reality” nor “earlier fiction,” but “the database of moe-elements” — Azuma always seems to liken the movement toward otaku culture to a search for authentic feeling (58). Perhaps needless to say, the database consists of elements that make consumers feel certain ways. As such, database-derivative art focuses not on intellectualizing and explicating metanarratives, but on bringing about emotion in its consumers.

The idea that Air discounts sex as a satisfactory or worthwhile goal may even give us some insight into the tangled mess that is otaku sexuality. But we’ll get into that a bit more momentarily.

…[C]onsumers of novel games can be characterized as having two completely different inclinations toward the surface outer layer (the drama) and toward the deep inner layer (the system) of a work. In the former they look for an effective emotional satisfaction through combinations of moe-elements. In contrast, in the latter they want to dissolve the very unit of the work that gives them such satisfaction, reduce it to a database, and create new simulacra. In other words, in otaku the desire for small narratives and the desire for database coexist separately from each other.

…[P]ostmodern individuals let the two levels, small narratives and a grand nonnarrative, coexist separately without necessarily connecting them. To put it more clearly, they learn the technique of living without connecting the deeply emotional experience of a work (a small narrative) to a worldview (a grand narrative). Borrowing from psychoanalysis, I call this schism dissociative. (84)

I’m not sure I follow Azuma here. That is, I get that consumers have moved beyond the need to connect small narratives (individual works) with some underlying metanarrative. But, again, I don’t know how much I buy that the database occupies the space left empty when metanarrative went away. Wouldn’t small narratives inevitably be connected to the database? Its elements “prove” themselves in small narratives; small narratives are picked apart, and their effective elements are entered into the database. Wouldn’t enjoyment of small narratives and enjoyment of the database have everything to do with one another? Or is Azuma just reinforcing his point that “narrative” as such isn’t really important?

Specifically, Azuma’s talking about the disconnect between the enjoyment of a visual novel for the narrative experience it provides, and the enjoyment of a VN as a collection of images, sounds, and divergent, sometimes contradictory narrative bits. The former is what allows us to enjoy Fate’s three routes as discrete stories, and to compare them in those terms, while the latter is what compels us to play through all three arcs and achieve every possible ending systematically. Azuma gives the hypothetical example of the game that allows the player to choose to pursue a relationship with multiple women, but frames each possible relationship, in its turn, as destined: “although the protagonist is depicted as someone who experiences pure love at each juncture and encounters his ‘woman of destiny,’ actually each of the different encounters that results from the player’s choices is called ‘destiny’” (84-85). Perhaps “there is a vast discrepancy between the drama required by the characteristics of the system and the drama prepared in each scene,” but the discrepancy doesn’t result in a jarring, disjointed experience for the otaku player (85). In this sense I suppose I get where Azuma is going.

Psychiatrist Saitou Tamaki raises the following question in several occasions: Why are there very few actual perverts amongst otaku, even though the icons of otaku culture are filled with all sorts of sexual perversions? … (88)

Just as animal needs and human desires differ, so do genital needs and subjective “sexuality” differ. Many of the otaku today who consume adult comics and “girl games” probably separate these two; and their genitals simply and animalistically grew accustomed to being stimulated by perverted images. Since they were teenagers, they had been exposed to innumerable otaku sexual expressions: at some point, they were trained to be sexually stimulated by looking at illustrations of girls, cat ears, and maid outfits. However, anyone can grasp that kind of stimulation if they are similarly trained, since it is essentially a matter of nerves. In contrast, it takes an entirely different motive and opportunity to undertake pedophilia, homosexuality, or a fetish for particular attire as one’s own sexuality. … (89)

Thus, according to Azuma, getting off to hentai is something one learns. That may seem counter to the more intuitive Madaramean Principle at first, but it’s probably true, to some extent. We know at this point that gender is learned, that it is by no means wholly related to biological sex. And I don’t suppose a hentai picture would trigger sexual arousal in someone whose mind took longer to do with it what the otaku mind is trained to do in mere moments. Obviously I’m way out of my league here (and I get the impression that Azuma is, too) — have there been any psychological studies on this sort of thing?

And regarding Azuma’s pointing out the disconnect between enjoying hentai and being a pedophile — well, what can I say? I just wish people would pay more attention to professional cultural critics and less to fear-mongering news outlets (CNN, I am disappoint) and conservative commentators.

In postmodernity, the deep inner layer of the world is represented as the database, and the signs on the surface outer layer are all grasped as an interpretation (combination) of it. (103)

No, no, wait a minute. You can’t overthrow the Platonic cave only to replace it with the Platonic cave. Just saying.

…[I]n the world of simulacra, a parallel relationship (in which A, B, C, and D are all grasped as a “reading” from the same information) is preferred over a tree-like, hierarchical relationship (in which A defines B, B, defines C, and C defines D, etc.)

…For example, in otaku culture…the reality is that information belonging to different layers exists side by side, such as the individual units of work like an anime or a novel, and behind those the settings and characters in their background, and in turn behind them the moe-elements. All such information is consumed in parallel, as equivalents, as if to open different “windows.” So today’s Graphical User Interface…is a marvelous apparatus in which the world image of our time is encapsulated. (103-104)

Azuma calls this parallel mode of consumption “hyperflatness” (102). And it’s a concept that resonates with me personally — I delve into a franchise expecting to be entertained by blog posts, Twitter reactions, and things like TV Tropes as well as by the franchise’s individual works. A work consists of structural elements (in its text iterations) and readings (socially), and I like being privy to all that at the same time. Maybe that’s why I do this blogging thing in the first place.

Still, I have to wonder about how the parallel small narratives interact. Azuma describes a process of “slipping sideways” that occurs when a consumer, seeking final authority or agency (the “invisible”), brings potential candidates for this agency into view, thereby rendering them “visible” — and, in becoming visible, they become yet more small narratives lacking in authority (105-106). But that’s not really what I mean; what I’m curious about is how consumers organize small narratives. To use Azuma’s earlier example of Rei Ayanami and her many derivatives, do consumers create a “group” or “category” for quiet girls endowed with mysterious power? Does Rei hold relative authority in this group because she provided the database with those elements in a substantial way?

With words such as “postmodernity” or “otaku culture” many readers might imagine the play of simulacra cut off from social reality and self-contained in fiction, but this kind of engaged work [Yu-No] also exists. This book was written to create a moment in which great works such as this can be freely analyzed and critiqued, without distinctions such as high culture versus subculture, academism versus otaku, for adults versus for children, and art versus entertainment. (116)

Does the book succeed? Well, I don’t know; I’m not the best person to ask. I already analyze porn games and canonical literature on the same plane, using the techniques of both theory and fandom; in my case, Azuma is preaching to the converted. But I do consider the book a success insofar as it might prove useful to readers on each side of the binaries he mentions — and if the common experience of Otaku allows inter-faction discussion (something I’m hopeful but not unrealistic about), I suspect that’d be just as planned.

Endnotes

¹Murphy, Timothy S. “To Have Done with Postmodernism: A Plea (or Provocation) for Globalization Studies.” Symploke 12.1-2 (2004): 20-34. Project MUSE. Web. 30 November 2009.

That being: pornography is “violent” media.

As the article in question deals with the effects of violent media generally upon consumer aggression, let’s get this out of the way: mass media affect consumers. They affect different consumers differently, and the most dramatic effects require consistent long-term exposure, and no social scientist worth his or her weight in grant money would claim that media consumption alone is likely to turn your kids into mass murderers…

…[T]he weight of the evidence indicates that violent actions seldom result from a single cause; rather, multiple factors converging over time contribute to such behavior. Accordingly, the influence of the violent mass media is best viewed as one of the many potential factors that influence the risk for violence. No reputable researcher is suggesting that media violence is “the” cause of violent behavior. [Huesmann, L. R., & Taylor, L. D. (2006). The role of media violence in violent behavior. Annual Review of Public Health, 27, 393-415.]

…And, anyway, given that “violent media” includes such necessities as newscasts, and encompasses countless artistic works, it’s better that we adjust to it, rather than impeding our own free expression…

If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said.

The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don’t. This is how the Law is made. [Neil Gaiman, "Why defend freedom of icky speech?"]

…But we can at least say, with the weight of decades of evidence, that media have effects. As such, figuring out what those effects might be may prove worthwhile. Social scientists agree, and, as you may know, media violence is a pet project of many of those types.

Of course, “media violence” (or “violent media”) is about as vague a term as it could possibly be, and nearly every experimental study and literature review defines it differently. Some, it would seem, define it more loosely than others.

To quantify and analyze mass media reports of the effect of violent media on aggression and violence, we coded every newspaper and magazine article we could find on the topic. All forms of mass media were considered (e.g., television, film, music, video games, pornographic magazines, comic books). [Bushman, B. J., & Anderson, C. A. (2001). Media violence and the American public: Scientific facts versus media misinformation. American Psychologist, 56, 477-489.]

You have to wonder how poor, delicate Drs. Bushman and Anderson would feel if they encountered, by chance or fate, an issue of Comic LO. But I digress (or do I?).

The authors take care to distinguish “pornographic magazines” as a mass medium distinct from other kinds of visual print media — “comic books,” for example, or newspapers, or non-pornographic magazines — and they make sure, via opportune parenthesis and an e.g., that we’re aware that the “medium” of porn belongs beneath that most convenient of blanket terms, “violent media.” Now, I may be pulling a bit of quotational trickery here; maybe I’ve misrepresented the authors’ intentions. Maybe they’re saying that porn is potentially a violent medium, and thus worth researching for that reason. But why distinguish it so thoroughly? Why make a point of searching news databases with the queries “pornograph*” and “erotic*” if those aren’t the sorts of things that fall particularly beneath your definition of violent media, at least for the purposes of your study?

I’ll note that this article was written in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and One, and not by some radical Christian lobby. These are, as far as I’m aware, legitimate researchers. Though, granted, they’re legitimate researchers with an agenda, legitimate researchers who make a point of testifying before government panels and so on. They aren’t wholly without zeal.

Why is porn specifically violent, or, in being porn, rife with violent potential? What is it about we Americans that makes us quake in our boots whenever sex looms on the horizon? Because, whatever it is, I imagine it’s related to that impulse of ours that sends us into a panic when an innocuous nerd looks at cartoon depictions of the deed.

Breaking into the super robot genre has proven difficult for me, so I asked the wise OGT to point me toward a few shows that might help. Among other things, he recommended Gunbuster (aka Top wo Nerae!) — you may already know this, given all the fanboying I did over the show and its sequel. Gunbuster was probably just the sort of thing I needed, tempered as it is by enough drama and pain to sustain my interest through the genuinely awesome moments, which I can in fact enjoy on the level of genuine awesome if I stay interested long enough.

Diebuster, though.

You want to put it into words. You really try. But the last episode explodes your mind, and you’re left with assorted pieces, slightly charred, floating through space. You could leave it at that, but these pieces practically beg to be reassembled, and I’m nothing if not tenacious when it comes to weaving my webs.

So this is a post about Diebuster, ostensibly. But where to begin? “At the beginning,” some would no doubt suggest, but that’s part of the problem: the story’s structure resists that sensible impulse. It’s vexing now that I’m trying to put my thoughts in order, but it’s not something a first-time viewer would notice early on — the beginning seems just fine, and it is, in more ways than are evident from the beginning.

If that makes little sense, you can blame Diebuster’s unusual structure. Things we see in the beginning are parts of larger things that aren’t evident until later; crucially relevant information is withheld. Open an image in your favorite image editor, zoom in as far as you can, and then zoom out slowly, and you’ll get the idea. We could call it “revelation,” but it’s more ubiquitous than a series of run-of-the-mill reveals — plot, characters, setting, et al. (or, specifically, our perception of them, which is what matters anyway) are affected across the board, enmeshed as they are in a structure that’s heavily reliant on strategic obscurity and the unexpected.

It’s atypical, perhaps, but not unique, or even especially new; eighty or so years earlier, the same technique saw use by (you guessed it) James Joyce, particularly in Ulysses¹. Joyce scholar Fritz Senn calls it “circumdation:”

In [Ulysses's] first chapter we will figure out, not in the conventional, expositional order, but by circumstantial links, the setting on top of a historical tower, somewhere near Dublin, at a certain time. The last two chapters, “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” above all put much of what we had taken for granted into a different light. Adjustment takes patience and circumspection, many retracings in an Odyssean progression of trial and error… As often as not we may still be waiting for the final, redeeming “circumdet” that makes everything fall into line.²

It must be said that Diebuster is more comprehensible the first time through than Ulysses. Still, if you compared the point-by-point, beginning-to-end analyses of a first-time viewer and a second-time viewer, you may not find much middle ground. I’ve watched bits and pieces of earlier episodes after finishing the show, and the experience was quite different the second time around, relatively speaking; given how much we learn about Nono, the Topless, the space monsters, and the universe itself along the way, and how much of that information is the sort that’s probably evident to the characters all along even if we aren’t aware of it, the second viewing produces constructs of meaning vastly different from the first. Many stories (maybe all stories) have this quality to some degree, but Diebuster has it in spades — again, it shapes the story’s very momentum.

Since I’ve ended up on the topic of second viewing anyway, consider the first episode on rewatch. We know of Nono’s identity; much of what she does makes a new sort of sense, or assumes altered significance. We know that Lal’c, with all of her baggage (of which we also know), is responsible for the brief voice-over during the opening moments, and we’ve heard the complementary voice-over in episode 6. We know the basis of Tycho’s attitude toward Lal’c. We know more about the antagonists, about the setting, about practically everything. It seems, to me at least, a more profound change in experience than that brought about by simply knowing what will happen in future episodes.

With that said, circumdation isn’t specifically a process that takes place between viewings; it happens all along, and forces us to question our assumptions even during the first viewing. We’re kept on our toes, made to disassemble initial conclusions, insert new information, and reconstruct them as best we can, all while processing plot developments which, in six episodes, don’t have time to pause and give us a breather. It results in a very active, almost hectic reading process — I enjoy it, usually, though I wonder if this would be a basis of complaint for some viewers.

The effect is most evident in later episodes, when revelatory events invoke broad re-imaginings — episode four in particular comes to mind, and the sixth episode affirms that Diebuster’s circumdative nature can reach even Gunbuster, if we let it. Being a matter of basic structure, however, it’s present all along. In the first episode, for example, we aren’t even certain of the setting (that is, Mars) until the latter third or so, when it’s announced outright. Consider the screencaps above, both from the beginning; the predominance of blue, the snow, and the rustic nature of the houses are all deceptive. As the episode progresses, yellow and red come to dominate the palette, technology becomes more evident, and we might, if we’re perceptive, “figure out” (as Senn says) “not in the conventional, expositional order, but by circumstantial links, the setting.” Appropriately enough, the reveal itself takes the form of a literal zoom-out.

Now, I do enjoy examining structure, probably more than I enjoy examining socio-culturo-historico-things in the usual way. But structural nuances, I must admit after a thousand-odd words about them, are not much of a starting point, which is to say that my thoughts on a story don’t begin with the specifics of its twists and turns. Customarily, I’ll try to attach broad identifiers to a thing, but Diebuster even makes that difficult — about which I am thrilled, as any excuse to combine Northrop Frye and mad speculation is a good one.

Diebuster is a mecha show, certainly. It might be postmodern, though I suspect it takes that half-step beyond that hints at postmodernism’s relevance having begun its slow death. Terms like “mecha” and “postmodern,” however, are narrower than the identifiers I have in mind — namely, Frye’s modes and mythoi. It’s possible that these terms are too restrictively Aristotelian; it’s also possible that, when these terms no longer serve our needs as-is (which isn’t necessarily the case, mind you), it’s time to play around with them, and you should know by now that nothing is sacred when I wield my Unlimited Interpretation Works.

We can say one thing with some certainty: Diebuster has irony. I don’t claim that it falls within the range of Frye’s ironic mode (I would’ve said it is ironic); it may, but I’m not yet certain of that. I simply mean that Diebuster is bursting with ironic elements, things that aren’t what they seem they normally would or should be and situations that play out in unexpected ways. Given circumdation, the very structure itself is ironic; one might say irony is its gimmick. And the characters — really, if you’ve seen Diebuster, I doubt I need to explain how the Topless are atypical super robot pilots. Consider Casio, who, despite his hanging around and offering words of wisdom where needed, essentially quit the mecha business out of fear, or Nicola, who, lacking any direction of his own, just rolls with whatever life throws at him. Tycho and Lal’c aren’t what you’d call paragons of awesome, either, until Nono teaches them how to be. And if you figured out what Nono is before the reveal in episode four, you’re probably superhuman, as it’s really just ridiculous (in a good way).

It’s possible, if we’re going with a descriptor that consists of mode and mythos (and we are, because I like to), that Diebuster is “ironic irony,” that it meets the conditions of the ironic mode (the work deals with characters presented as “below” the reader in situation or surroundings) and the ironic branch of the Mythos of Winter (the work applies myth conventions and storytelling methods new and old to realistic, recognizable situations). The latter is likely accurate; despite their capabilities and their surroundings, the Topless are all too human in their mannerisms and conflicts (perhaps it’s the effect of realism on familiar tropes that gives irony its unpredictable nature to begin with). But are they ironic characters in the modal sense? They do, after all, still have those capabilities, and they still inhabit those surroundings; the basic conditions under which their humanity takes place are unfamiliar to us. Consider the climax, during which, for a brief period, the laws of the physical universe don’t apply to Nono at all. Mode-wise, it’s almost mythological.

That in itself isn’t mind-blowing. I’ll borrow Cuchlann’s lovingly hand-crafted illustration:

It’s reasonable to imagine the modes as a cycle, and even Frye speculated in the Anatomy of Criticism that the literature of his time showed signs of moving away from irony and toward myth and romance, citing science fiction specifically. We could stick Diebuster somewhere between irony and myth, and label it transitional, and I’d be okay with that. But something deep in the untamed wilds of my mind insists that there must be more to it than that, that I shouldn’t be so quick to concede to Frye’s cycle as is. It almost feels as though we’re missing something.

Consider the relationship between contemporary “myth” and what we usually think of as myth, stories of gods and heroes and such. Both are basically myth, in Fryean terms, as both involve characters who surpass human beings in kind; whether we’re talking about Zeus or Buster Machine No. 7, we’re dealing with characters whose means fall beyond the comprehension of the humans below them. Those humans may possess the fantastical powers of the romantic mode, but they’re still human, literally speaking, and their abilities, however potent, cannot match those of the myth-figures present.

There is, however, one key difference between mythic paragons old and new. The former are made by older deities, generally, elsewise they simply are. In the beginning, there was Oceanus and Tethys, or Chronos, or Chaos, or Muspell and its guardian Surt, or God who created the heavens and the earth; these deities oversee the creation of other deities (when they allow other deities to exist), the processes of which don’t involve human beings much at all. But consider our alleged contemporary mythology. Nono is a war machine built by humans, one imbued with human-like intelligence and emotion. The Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is raw human potential made manifest. In Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos, those we see gain power over time and space are either human or human-made. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith leverages Martian wisdom with his humanity to reach his state of godliness. The difference, then: we, humans, make the gods — sometimes we are the gods. I don’t believe that’s something we can ignore.

We might call this strategic use of the unexpected, irony in the vein of this ironic age. Or we might not; I’m not sure that it’s expected or unexpected, if that makes any sense. It’s simply a fictional truth that continues to appear in the fiction (especially the science fiction) I consume. It’s not even especially surprising; irony has primed me and others to accept that God is dead, disinterested, or irrelevant, that there is no concrete meaning of life, and that, subsequently, we’re free to fill the meaning-void with whatever meaning we choose, as soon as we stop moping about there being no meaning in the first place (did I mention I usually don’t like postmodernism?). We are creators, in that sense; Heinlein’s aforementioned Stranger in a Strange Land presents that idea with little distillation. It’s as if we’ve been getting it wrong all along — rather than products of gods, we are fledgling gods ourselves. Thou art God, as it were. Please continue being a Messiah.

I’m not claiming that’s a fact of the natural universe, or even that the idea’s increasing presence in narrative art is evidence of some deep awareness of the idea on our collective part (realistically I might suggest the latter, but that’d make this post much longer than it is already, and I don’t want that). I am claiming that what Frye had in mind when he outlined the mythic mode…

If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god. Such stories have an important place in literature, but are as a rule found outside the normal literary categories.³

…may not describe satisfyingly or with suitable accuracy our new mythology, which, given that, may not be mythology at all. It is at the very least a mythology informed by our having written our way through the entirety of Frye’s cycle and emerged from irony intact, one which acknowledges that, even when gods grow beyond our ability to control, they wouldn’t exist at all if not for us — even from works in which gods exist literally, such as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, and (since this is basically an anime blog, after all) Kannagi, we often get the sense that a god’s power depends in whole or large part on the devotion of its followers. Either we are gods, or we inflict them upon the universe — the two may be basically the same thing. Perhaps, if we’re going to keep the cycle of modes, we should accommodate expansion, turn it into a spiral whose size reflects the experience we accumulate as we travel the modes.

Or perhaps we must acknowledge that the cycle is a result of our oversimplification of an amalgam of modes with no clear demarcations between them. “Fictions,” says Frye, “may be classified…by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same⁴” — but what if, in fiction, our power of action knows no bounds, or if an apparently mythic hero’s power of action is no more or less than what we “mere” humans decide it is? Perhaps we haven’t come full circle, so to speak, but have integrated all modes known thus far into our understanding, in a linear progression — and if that’s the case, what undiscovered modes lie ahead? What happens when self-aware gods write stories about themselves?

Endnotes

¹Not that Joyce invented it singlehandedly, but, to my knowledge, he refined it into something like what we experience in Diebuster. Even very old literature relies on the withholding of information from the audience, but, in this case (and in the case of Ulysses), it’s synonymous with the narrative structure itself, which offers understanding slowly as a series of junctures which broaden setting and characters in steps.

²Senn, Fritz. “Anagnostic Probes.” Joyce, Modernity, and Its Mediation. Ed. Christine van Boheemen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989: 40, 44.

³Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000: 33.

⁴Ibid.

What is art?

Yeah, I went there. Trepidatiously, maybe, but it’s not as if we haven’t talked about it before. Besides, it’s bound to be fun if we pull relevant examples from the reader communities to which we belong. So strap yourselves in, my magnificent comrades; you’re in for some unusual posts.

Each post in this series will begin with a question, and this one seems as good a starting point as any: can an object with a use, such as a tool or a piece of furniture, be considered art?

In the 11,001-word opus I linked above, Cuchlann describes art thus:

A crafted chair can be beautifully wrought, but ultimately it is a tool. … And as such, eventually even the most sensitive person will view it as a chair, to be sat upon. … But art, with no use but to be art, to be “beautiful,” can never be written off as anything else.

And here’s the relevant bit from Oscar Wilde’s introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray:

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

I have a hard time accepting Wilde’s suggestion that a useful thing isn’t worthy of admiration, or at least artistic admiration, by virtue of being useful. Cuchlann’s take is easier for me to digest, as it seems to allow that a tool can evoke an artistic or art-like experience, even if its utilitarian origins are bound to creep in. I get caught up on the question of whether this creeping-in of utilitarian origins weakens or annuls the artistic experience; my immediate, visceral response is no, not necessarily, but then I don’t spend all my time looking at chairs and ornate screwdrivers and such, and I do question the artistic viability of beautifully-wrought weapons, given that a weapon’s most basic purpose is the harming of a living thing. In short, I’m all over the place on this issue.

So let’s back up. If I had to give a definition (and I suppose I do, so you’ll know where I’m coming from), I’d say that art must be human-made, and that it must be capable of entertaining without actively doing anything — that is, one artistically appreciates a novel not because of its potential usefulness as a doorstop, but simply because of those things that come together to make it a novel; one appreciates the crafted form, not the use. The reader is active; the text is not.

To stick with our first example, it’s clear that there are situations in which a chair is active; it actively holds people up. Could someone sitting in the chair in question appreciate the chair as art? Arguably not; after all, the chair is active, asserting its utility to the sitter, not to mention that it’s partly obscured by the sitter’s body. But what about a spectator viewing the chair from afar? Even if the spectator thinks of the chair as a useful thing, the chair is not actively useful. Prompted by the chair’s form, the spectator draws upon knowledge and experience to give it essence; it becomes a symbol, a sign. The chair has done nothing, the spectator everything. If, then, the spectator claims to have been entertained by the experience with the chair, that’s all the proof I need to call the chair art: it’s human-wrought and capable of entertaining someone passively, whatever its alternative uses¹.

It’s possible that, in calling upon personal experience, our spectator runs into something that holds entertainment back. For example, I have a hard time accepting a weapon as art in itself because I’m bothered by its social and historical context enough so that when I look at, say, a sword, I’m generally too preoccupied with what a sword can do to a person to appreciate the craft involved. This is not to say I’m bothered by the use of swords in fiction, or even that a sword can’t be art, by my definition; if someone else can appreciate a sword artfully, it doesn’t really matter that I can’t.

Surely you have your own definition of art, and it might not agree with mine, which is fine, of course; one of the greatest things about art, I think, is that we can all disagree and still be as correct as one another (I like to be positive about it and say we’re all right, but really there is no ultimate truth value to opinions on art²). Keep your definition in mind, whatever it may be, as the connection between my central question here and the rather intriguing image above depends upon it.

Whether we think anime and manga are SRS FKN BSNS or not, I assume that most of us would agree that those staples of our fandom are art. But anime and manga are not the only objects of the fandom; our money and support feed a towering machine that churns out all manner of merchandise and derivative work, some of which surely happens to be art. We might, for example, compare figures and models to statuary. The role of fan work is up in the air, I guess, but I suppose posters, wall scrolls, and the like could serve as visual art in themselves. None of these things really serve much purpose outside of being aesthetically pleasing.

Now, what about something more ambiguous? Something like, say, a body pillow?

It is, after all, a pillow; its use is to be slept or rested upon. But can we take a few steps back and appreciate it as art? I suppose so, assuming we like the illustration thereupon. I wouldn’t know personally, not being a collector of body pillows, but it’s theoretically possible, at least as much so as for a poster. We could always separate the pillowcase from the pillow and appreciate it that way.

But wait! We can’t sum up a body pillow by saying it’s something to be slept upon and it has a pretty picture on it, can we? Look at the art on most of them; body pillows have another purpose, don’t they? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. We’ll get to that in the next post.

Endnotes

¹Speaking of chairs: in the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s fictional analogue, outlines a stance on art drawn heavily from Aquinas and Aristotle. He mentions that he “found [his] theory of esthetic” by answering “questions [he] set himself,” one of which is, “Is a chair finely made tragic or comic?” It doesn’t seem to bother him that a chair is a useful thing. Interestingly, though, he tries to appreciate the chair artistically in literary terms, as literature, he says, is “the highest and most spiritual art.” You might assume that my job as The Equalizer™ (no relation) doesn’t let me agree, and you’d be right. I bring this up because James Joyce is always relevant, but also because I’ll be referring to the Portrait again in the next “What the hell is art?” post.

²The topic of good and bad craft might be exempt from this. That is, there’s certainly a wrong way (or many wrong ways) to write literature; anything that jars the reader from enjoyment is bad. But then, if the nuance in question jars some readers but not others, I’d be hesitant to call it objectively bad. Craft might be best approached from a social angle: what percentage of readers does the nuance jar?

Also, you may wonder whether the outright rejection of objectivity is a cop-out; I’ve wondered this myself, but the more research I do on the reading process, the more it makes sense. At any rate, ousting objectivity from the “literary” approach doesn’t discredit a separate (but not unrelated) sociocultural approach which values works according to the relative sizes of their fan communities, general political impact, and other people-centric factors.

Inspired by the non-shitty shitstorm here at Superfani called ‘twitter philosophy’ [->], I’m spinning the discussion off from lelangir’s epigram:

nihilism is knowledge/power; in most cases, it can only be realized/actualized within capitalist institutions, thus materialism is the means towards idealism, towards the construction of contingent truths, towards a philosophical happiness that grants material happiness.

Responses to this by the commenters abound, but I’ll get to them later. Meanwhile I greeted an important guest that invited himself into my media consumption schedule. I don’t mind because he’s a favorite of mine: the novelist and semiotician, Umberto Eco. He told me to tell lelangir,

“Listen to the fags that contributed to this supposedly non-shitty shitstorm first.”

So I was like, “uh, okay.” Let us then to the relevant responses:

Kaiserpingvin says:

23 March 2009 at 11:42 am

So, in capitalist society nihilism will arise more frequently. This will lead to idealism, since we can scribble what we want on the empty canvas of Everything. Since it has been brought about by knowledge and power, we will be able to realize our ideals, leading to idealism, in it’s own turn leading to material wealth (for… everyone? The nihilists?).

The ‘Empty Canvas of Everything’ Kaiser is talking about refers to my claiming nihilism as a powerful state wherein creation is possible rather than a bleak wasteland of no possibility. I try to build on Kaiser’s point…

ghostlightning says:

23 March 2009 at 8:57 pm

Most people are ‘trapped’ in constructs that they hold to be absolute truths. Nihilism holds none of these ‘truths’ privileged, and allows for power and freedom to create. Deconstructions: Capital/money is not necessarily morally repugnant. We can build a bigger needle within whose eye camels can saunter through – or just genetically engineer nanocamels.

Ideals can be constructed/pastiched/invented – and will not suffer from the hegemony of accepted traditions. Capital, which is coveted by the institutions that foment the accepted traditions is a great leveler.

But I don’t think I can establish a complete causal framework between nihilism and capitalism.

I didn’t think I could, but somebody else sure did:

animekritik says:

23 March 2009 at 11:19 pm

i think that causal connection between capitalism and nihilism is there. simply stated, money buys everything which means it destroys boundaries including boundaries of meanings. For example, last year my wife and I went to Germany and Greece. Let me say that again: last year, I, a simple islander and my thai wife visited GERMANY and GREECE. Our ancestors 100 years ago, not to mention 200 or 500, would have never been able to do so. And what happens? my wife says: oh, I want to go to Egypt next, and so on. The world becomes totally flat, totally accessible. There are no boundaries, and thus we start to realize that all of those amazing “constructs”, cultures are on the same plane. If i can have have anything i want with money, how i can put things and places on pedestals??? I visited Napoleon’s Tomb about 3 years ago. I!! What’s Napoleon now. Nothing. Then nihilism creeps in..

That’s clear enough, and I could totally get behind it after reading the ouvre of Thomas L. Friedman, particularly The World is Flat (2005) [->]. To reduce the points of the novel and consider animekritik’s, it boils down to capital provides access to the exotic and mystic, removing their mythological veneer (for some) — by extension, all the way to nothing (empty and meaningless), as with the artifacts of history that animekritik mentioned. Now lelangir steps in:

lelangir says:

24 March 2009 at 12:48 am

A psychological privilege such as Nihilism can only be enacted/actualized within capitalist institutions (universities) once you’ve accumulated the knowledge necessary to reconstruct your perception of the world. Maybe the pseudo-intelligent believe that there really is such an absolute truth as “equality”, but then why on earth does racism persist to this day?

The relationship between discourses is not hierarchical. A discourse of absolute truths (i.e. rich people are evil) cannot be so easily overturned by a discourse of contingent truths (i.e. rich people are not always evil). It’s amplified here because the discourse of contingent truths is situated in the very substance of the discourse of absolute truths. It’s like a patient in a straight jacket: you think you’re sane, and in your straight jacket, you say “I’m sane! Let me free! I’m sane!” – and the doctors look and say “of course someone in a straight jacket would say they’re sane!”. Thus, a rich person who has the education to say that rich people are not always evil says to a poor person “rich people are not always evil” will surely get some murderous glares from poor people who think that all rich people are evil.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Money and capital, while not the only enabler of education, is very powerful.

Umberto Eco would agree with this, it seems. He wrote (speaking about some functions of literature):

What use is this intangible power we call literature? The obvious reply is the one I have already made, namely, that it is consumed for its own sake and therefore does not have to serve any purpose. But such a disembodied view of the pleasure of literature risks reducing it to the status of jogging or doing crossword puzzles–both of which primarily serve some purpose, the former the health of the body, the latter the expansion of one’s vocabulary. What I intend to discuss is therefore a series of roles that literature plays in bout our individual and our social lives.

Above all, literature keeps language alive as our collective heritage. By definition language goes its own way; no decree from on high, emanating either from politicians or from the academy, can stop its progress and divert it toward situations that they claim are for the best. The Fascists triid to make Italians say mescita instead of bar, coda di gallo  instead of cocktail, rete instead of goal, auto publicca instead of taxi, and our language paid no attention. Then it suggested a lexical monstrosity, an unacceptable archaism like autista instead of chauffeur, and the language accepted it. Maybe because it avoided a sound unknown to Italian. It kept taxi, but gradually, at least in the spoken language, turned this into tassì.

Language goes where it wants to but is sensitive to the suggestions of literature. Without Dante there would have been on unified Italian language. When, in his  De Vulgari Eloquentia (On Vernacular Eloquence), Dante condemns the various Italian dialects and decides to forge a new “illustrious vernacular.”

Twenty years of Fascist talk of “Rome’s fated hills” and “ineluctable destinies,” of “unavoidable events” and “plows tracing furrows in the ground,” have in the end left no trace in contemporary Italian, whereas traces have been left by certain virtuoso experiments of futurist prose, which were unacceptable at the time. And while I often hear people complain about the victory of a middle Italian that has been popularized by television, let us not forget that the appeal to a middle Italian, in its noblest form, came through the plain and perfectly acceptable prose of Manzoni, and later Svevo or Moravia.

By helping to create language, literature creates a sense of identity and community. I spoke initially of Dante, but we might also think of what Greek civilization would have been like without Homer, German identity without Luther’s translation of the Bible, the Russian language without Pushkin, or Indian civilization without its foundation epics.

And literature keeps the individual’s language alive as well. these days many lament the birth of a new “telegraphese,” which is being foisted on us through email and mobil-phone text messages, where one can even say “I love you” with short-message symbols; but let us not forget that the youngsters who send messages in this new form of shorthand are, at least in part, the same young people who crowd those new cathedrals of the book, the multistory bookstores, and who, even when they flick through a book without buying it, come into contact with the cultivated and the elaborate literary styles to which their parents, and certainly their grandparents, had never been exposed.

Although there are more of them compared with the readers of previous generations, these young people clearly are a minority of the six billion inhabitants of this planet; nor am I idealistic enough to believe that literature can offer relief to the vast number of people who lack basic food and medicine. But I would like to make one point: the wretches who roam around aimlessly in gangs and kill people by throwing stones from a highway bridge or setting fire to a child–whoever these people are–turn out this way not because they have been corrupted by computer “new-speak” (they don’t even have access to a computer) but rather because they are excluded from the universe of literature and from those places where, through education and discussion, they might be reached by a glimmer from the world of values that stems from and sends us back again to books.

From on literature, (2002)

Did you get that lelangir? Professor Eco seconds your assertion! He used a lot more words, but he said it pretty so I blockquoted him. This post is less about nihilism, than the utility of media/literature/cultural production, which actually means nothing in absolute terms (but not in contingent terms) anyway, so I guess nihilism stands.

I extend Eco’s point to our preferred medium, anime. I daresay that it’s changing people’s behavior outside of Japan, creating sub-sub-sub-cultures that we don’t wholly know or are even aware of. The distribution of anime internationally is never limited to the university setting, but the intellectualization of it, and most media occurs there. Intellectual activity can be located in the universities,  and it is through capital that this is possible: capital pays for labor, that is supplied by the intellectuals by either creating content for books, journals, and other media or teaching the students who can afford the tuition.

On a personal level, I’ve come to realize that I’m no longer in this center ergo my own thinking and work is far from where the ‘action’ is. It is through weblogs, particularly this one where I get an opportunity to intellectualize and reflect. It bears note that the proponents of Superfani are academics to some degree, and some of its participants are still of university/graduate school age. So I take this in and appreciate my good fortune.

My ability to participate is enabled by the university system of which I am a product of, paid for by the compensation for my parents’ labor in a capitalist system.

So with this ability to participate, knowing fully the ultimate meaninglessness of this effort and caring little for that ultimacy, I look at this captured frame:

…and derive that god is dead [->], at least in this image.

Maka says, Read a book! Or she'll take your soul.

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything worthwhile.  I suppose it’s possible that will continue after today, but whatever.  This is a little different from most of the AiC entries, as I’m going to post a piece I wrote for my SF literature class.  It is much in the vein of the AiC posts, sort-of; that is, when he gave us grad. students the assignment (we’re crashing an undergrad. course), he said it was a completely arbitrary assignment that would never be published anywhere.  We’re meant simply to respond to two critical essays he gave us.  I riffed on them in the way I will, sometimes, and have no idea if it’s what he wants to see.  I’m turning it in tomorrow, so we’ll see.  But I just wrote the last paragraph and I’d talked to Pontifus about posting it when it was finished.  It is.  So, uh, woo.  The essays are “On the Origins of Genre” by Paul Kincaid and “Science Fiction and Literature — or, the Conscience of the King” by Samuel Delany.  (Kincaid’s most recent book is up for a non-fiction Hugo this year, by the way.)

In “On the Origins of Genre” Paul Kincaid tracks the movement of science-fiction across its evolution, ultimately coming to the conclusion that the genre has no beginning or end of any significance, and because of that, “science fiction is what we point to when we say ‘science fiction’” (52). We have no single way to identify the genre; there is no fingerprint or DNA matching, only a kind of familial resemblance one might expect from an essay titled after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Kincaid begins the essay by providing a good overview of attempts to define “science fiction,” with entries from critic Darko Suvin to The Oxford Companion to English Literature. He comes to the conclusion that science fiction is too broad and diverse to admit of a definition that would both cover everything readily acknowledged as science fiction and be limiting enough to be of use as a definition. Kincaid ultimately says the act of creating a hard definition will not work.

Similarly John Frow, in his book Genre, suggests that genres provide readers with a “horizon of expectations;” genres use a system of commonly-understood tropes to provide readers with ideas about the work drawn from a kind of pool that already exists (69-70). A work may violate the expectations without becoming another genre. “Genres,” he claims, “are neither self-identical nor self-contained” (71). This process is quite different from using a hard and fast definition (or even one that is not so fast). Frow’s conception of genre is fluid, which in turn allows the text to remain fluid and still use the genre markers it needs to make its meaning. Kincaid and Frow seem to agree on the generic system which draws from a source larger than any one text. I have to wonder if the tradition of attempting to define science fiction is, at least in part, a way to legitimize a genre that still meets occasional resistance from more staid academic circles.

Kincaid also soundly repudiates another habit I have seen in commentators on science fiction: the attempt to find an original science fiction text. On the idea of an “urtext” he says “there is no such thing” (51), unequivocally stating that it is impossible to find a single textual source for the origin of science fiction. I feel this is true of more genres than science fiction. The Gothic genre is often traced directly back to Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. It’s certainly not wrong to do so, just as it is not wrong for Brian Aldiss to trace science fiction back to Frankenstein, but the Gothic was created both before and after Walpole’s novel. Before in the sense that he willfully drew from medieval romances for many of his elements; after in the sense that the Gothic could not be a genre until enough texts existed to group together and form the pool I alluded to above, the one from which readers draw their expectations for a new work participating in the genre. A genre is always made up of more elements than any single work; attempts to get every genre identifier into a work leads to “kitchen sink” stories that almost never read well. Given the inability of any one text to participate in every identifier of a genre (Castle of Otranto can’t even do it, and it is the first Gothic text for all practical purposes), it seems as though the search for an urtext is essentially futile. Kincaid deals with the problem in a relativistic way by claiming, that tracing the “family resemblances” of science fiction elements “does lead, rather, to a series of urtexts” (51). He goes on to claim that individual threads (tropes) could be traced back in this way, and those may originate in individual texts (52), such as the mad scientist, which can be drawn back to Frankenstein, even though Frankenstein cannot serve as an “urtext” for the genre as a whole. Examining elements rather than either the whole genre or the whole text is more useful, as it provides methods for critics and readers to, in turn, examine the themes and issues within the genre and the texts, which strikes me as much more important.

Samuel Delany’s “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’ – or, The Conscience of the King,” in contrast, attempts to grapple with what people do in that process; it is how people of different sorts make meaning when reading. He primarily focuses on the differences between science fiction and what he terms “literature,” or academically-accepted mainstream fiction. The essay suffers an ambivalence that makes it difficult for a reader to understand, at first, who Delany is criticizing. He refers to not knowing important information about the SF field as “certain academic blind spots” right after summing up an episode wherein a well-respected SF editor he knew had no idea what the Hugo awards were (100-101). He also provides examples of academics failing to know important information about SF, but I am left wondering why he believes it is specifically an academic problem when, by his own admission, it is no such thing.

His greater point, concerning the need for readers of all sorts to pay attention to the field, and not just their perception of it, finally comes clear. He claims that “the assumption of most academic critics [. . .] is that somehow the history of science fiction began precisely at the moment they began to read it” (99). while SF readers “deny all existence to the interpretive space around the SF text” and “assume a conscientiously philistine approach” to set them apart from readers of “literary” fiction (114). Both these views reduce the field of SF writing to what the reader wants. These readers do not admit of anything counter to their desires and will alter or misinterpret whatever they need to in order to maintain their views.

These “ruptures” (the term Delany uses throughout to describe these problems) are clearly bad for the interplay of intelligent discourse around SF, but I am forced to worry whether or not Delany alienates more people from his ideas than he gathers to them in this work. His attitude towards academics, those already in place to do what he asks of readers in a significant and influential way, is dismissive at best. He claims “reading literature as if it were ‘literature’ is [. . .] pretty much a waste of time” (117). This statement, while driving home his point about the proper method of reading, insults anyone who has engaged in traditional reading of literature, even if it is not meant to. Meanwhile, Delany, in summing up the views of the “philistine” SF fans, insults them in almost as bald a fashion. It doesn’t seem to me as though it’s a very helpful strategy.

Delany’s views of reading, as stated in this essay, are enormously compelling and probably the most useful portions of it, though his move to call it “reading as though a text is science fiction” perhaps, again, hobbles the effort. Delany outlines the systems mainstream and SF writing use to make meaning: both use words, but in a science fiction novel any metaphorical phrase, such as “her world exploded” could also be literal, and the reader must strive to make sense of the phrase, always keeping in mind that both the literal and the figurative are both lending meaning to the work at the same time (103-104). I agree with this entirely; his study on the ways in which we organize information in this way and the effects of it are effective and interesting.

Delany’s second major idea, that science fiction reading should overtake “literary” reading (as I referenced it before), is interesting as well, but slightly misled. Delany tells the story of a 19^th century literature scholar who began to consume more SF than mainstream fiction; upon going back to one of his favorite novels, Pride and Prejudice, he found himself enjoying it more, and using the book as a way to wonder about what sort of world it created – whereas, beforehand, he read it as an account of the world as it was when Austen wrote (116). Delany commends this method of reading, claiming it is particular to science fiction. And while I agree SF can make a reader more likely to engage in this reading, it is not that field’s particular birthright. In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien describes an alternative to Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief.” He claims that something unbelievable, such as a fantasy, creates a “secondary world” of the fiction, and within that world all the unbelievable events are just as natural as any other. There is no question of belief, as the world contains them (57-68). This idea can be expanded to all literature, not just fantasy (of which Delany’s SF is a kind). Anything read in a book is not reality, which is obvious; however, when a book is realistic most readers don’t notice. A realistic book is experienced in the same way as a fantastic one: it is read, not heard or seen or felt or smelled. The events of a realistic novel, such as Pride and Prejudice, occur in a secondary world as removed from the real world, by virtue of the way in which is is experienced, as any science fiction novel. Delany has described something very valuable, but in claiming it for SF readers he widens a gap that needs to be closed.

Works Cited

Delany, Samuel R. “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’ – or, The Conscience of the King.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Scarecrow Press, Inc. Maryland: 2005. 95-117.

Frow, John. Genre. Routledge. New York: 2006.

Kincaid, Paul. “On the Origins of Genre.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Scarecrow Press, Inc. Maryland: 2005. 41-53.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy Stories.” The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986. 33-99.

Responding to my last post, IKnight pointed me in the direction of an interesting little theory, and, since I haven’t been able to muster the concentration required to watch Ouran High School Host Club for long periods of time like I’d planned, I figured I may as well see what I could make of mouvance. Come to find out, I can at least ramble on the topic for a little while; this began as a pontif.us post, but quickly outgrew those humble origins.

In short, mouvance was introduced by Paul Zumthor as an explanation of the variability of medieval texts.

Zumthor noted the contrast between the relatively fixed texts found in manuscripts of the works of some named late-medieval French poets…and the much more common medieval combination of authorial anonymity (or near-anonymity) and a high level of textual variation, which might involve not only modifications of dialect and wording but more substantial rewriting and the loss, replacement, or rearrangement of whole sections of a work. He used the term mouvance to describe this textual mobility.

Simple enough, right? Think Arthurian legend. Zumthor describes a relationship between the “work,” which is (I think) at once a combination of the skeins of story that tie adaptations together and a sum of all adaptations, and the derivative manuscripts based on that work (which are in fact parts of the work): the manuscripts are individual texts, which is what I’ve been suspecting; the work, it seems, is something else entirely.

The ‘work’ was not static, a chronological starting-point for the process of manuscript transmission, but dynamic, passing in the course of its transmission through phases of growth, transformation, and decline.

Whether you prefer the Toradora! novels or the Toradora! anime, then, the work that is Toradora! consists of both. I concluded before that it’s quite difficult to keep adaptations from “contaminating” one another during reading, and that it may be futile to really try to do so; perhaps that’s simply the nature of the work, huge mass of signifiers and their sometimes-contradictory signifieds that it is. A multi-adaptation character is always more than it appears to be in any one adaptation (reminds me of Sartre) — while we don’t really need to worry about that when examining one adaptation as a text, or while reading, it’s worth remembering if we ever intend to examine the work as a…whatever it is (and I don’t know if I do intend to do so; I suppose I’ve started to on a few occasions, but I still have to convince myself it’s worth doing).

I wonder, though, how similar the adaptation-rich world of otaku media really is to medieval European literature — and why it’s as similar as it is, for that matter.

Zumthor explained mouvance as a product of the oral culture of the Middle Ages, an ‘intervocal’ (as opposed to ‘intertextual’) network offering access to a variety of possible resources for poetic composition; the different realizations of a ‘work’ reflected a continuing interaction between written and oral culture at each stage of transmission…

Anime, manga, light novels et al. do not, by and large, constitute an oral culture. But texts, it could be argued, interact in much the same way.

Jerome J. McGann, for instance, argued in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (McGann (1983)) that even modern literary works ‘are fundamentally social rather than personal or psychological products’ (p. 43). ‘The fully authoritative text is . . . always one which has been socially produced; as a result, the critical standard for what constitutes authoritativeness cannot rest with the author and his intentions alone’ (p. 75). The role of printers, editors, even friends, in the production of successive stages of a literary work needs to be taken into account; and the printed version of an author’s draft may offer opportunities not only for contamination but for decontamination (‘Authors’ works are are typically clearer and more accessible when they appear in print’, p. 41).

I maintain that even novels, written as they are most often by individual writers, are effectively authored by social constructs — the writer is a translator for a body of knowledge and experience (and that’s not even considering the subsequent influence of editors and such that McGann mentions). Consider that, and then imagine the kind of social dynamic behind a work that is 1. created by a team, such as an animation studio’s production staff and contracted labor, and 2. an adaptation of an earlier work, which itself may have been a team effort. Anime and manga are not products of an oral culture, but they are products of a network of creators and fans kept in contact by high-speed long-distance communication technology — a very vocal network, as I’m sure you know.

Authorial anonymity remains a major difference between medieval oral poetry and anime/manga/etc. — we know for certain who is responsible for the art we consume, probably because it ultimately matters when determining who gets paid what. But considering the sheer sizes of the teams attached to certain anime productions, we can probably say that it’s difficult to figure out precisely who exerts precisely what creative influence precisely where — all the more so when the work in question is an adaptation, as is so often the case — which amounts to a kind of…if not anonymity, then certainly authorial obscurity. Credit rolls notwithstanding, perhaps the nature of the work is such that it actively obscures the authorship of its derivatives/components.

I realize that this post amounts to a few quick observations, but I really haven’t delved into the idea of mouvance beyond the source of all those blockquotes (which you should certainly read if you’re interested). I do, however, intend to use all this as a springboard for later analysis — I’d really like to work Frye in somehow (I have some cursory thoughts about the modes, anyway), but Frye tends to require a fair bit of mental preparation.

You knew she'd show up eventually.

After over two months away — two months of thesis writing and so on — my Adventures in Criticism return.  If you recall from last time, we tackled Frye’s first essay, the “Theory of Modes.”  Or rather, one third of it.  I’m going through the second third now.

There are only two main points from this section that bear heavy-duty attention.  There are also a few bits and pieces here and there…

“The hero [of New Comedy] is seldom a very interesting person:  in conformity with low mimetic decorum, he is ordinary in his virtues, but socially attractive” (44, emphasis mine).  I immediately thought of the typical male anime protagonist; at least, from the “comedies.”  The males from Kanon and Air aren’t exactly ordinary, at least according to the social values espoused by their settings — both could be considered odd, rude, too vocal, and smart-asses.  This is why we love them so.  However, they’re also not comic figures; they’re tragic heroes (most of the time, at least — I’m not convinced the relatively “yay” ending of Kanon qualifies it as a comedy, though perhaps calling it a tragedy isn’t the best plan.  Bear with me here).  The typical male lead heads up a comedy, most times.  Frye points out how, in New Comedy, a new society “crystallizes” around the man and his bride.  This is sometimes literal and sometimes just a shift in perspective, but it’s usually there.  I would say the best shows with the “boring” male leads do this, such as Love Hina, Ai Yori Aoshi, and Tenchi Muyo!  The “new society” is a world in which the “ordinary” virtues are rewarded, whereas in the low-mimetic/ironic world of the beginning, they are punished.

Frye also defines “melodrama” as “self-righteous” (47).  I don’t think that’s how the term is typically used today, but I would support shifting the definition back if I thought it were possible.  A melodrama, according to Frye, fully supports the moral, ethical, &c viewpoints it supposes the viewer to have, never challenging, and in fact becoming self-righteous at the thought of anything else.  Think of any American soap opera — we’re clearly supposed to think the bad people are bad and the good people are good; they rarely try to convince us to do more than sypathize, never to consider that they might be doing the “right thing.”  Melodrama as pitched around by readers and writers today generally means “out of the ordinary events,” which even my obsessed-with-quotidian professor from last semester could see some of that is necessary.  He pointed out, quite rightly, that Shakespeare wrote it.  However, it was never self-righteous in the sense Frye means — and neither is a lot of the modern genre fiction generally labeled “melodramatic” because it isn’t about four people, all artists, sitting in a room and thinking about sex.

According to Frye, comedy typically tackles problems that are “immoral” but not threatening to the society as a whole (48).  I can see that, and indeed think it would at least be productive to examine anything we would usually call a comedy, but that tackles a problem that threatens a whole society, as something else.  Remember that traditionally comedies are about integrating people back into society, rather than fixing the society itself.

Here’s one of the two important points:  the genre signifiers (my term, not his) of a piece can shift and change depending on one’s perspective.  Frye puts it in this way:

The tonality of Antony and Cleopatra is high mimetic, the story of the fall of a great leader.  But it is easy to look at Mark Antony ironically, as a man enslaved by passion; it is easy to recognize his common humanity with ourselves; it is easy to see in him a romantic adventurer of prodigious courage and endurance betrayed by a witch; there are even hints of a superhuman being whose legs bestrid the ocean and whose downfall is a conspiracy of fate, explicable only to a soothsayer.  To leave out any of these would oversimplify and belittle the play.  Through such an analysis we may come to realize that the two essential facts about a work of art, that it is contemporary with its own time and that it is contemporary with ours, are not opposed but complementary facts.  (51)

I think this has a great deal of significance, in general and specifically applied.  The way one can view something can shift, sometimes easily, and all the readings, as they are readings of the same thing from different places (like Monet’s paintings of the same building in different light) are just as accurate, and indeed in some sense should be considered together for a complete picture of the thing itself (I’m glad I read this, it has to do with something I’m thinking of doing for class).  Also, Frye makes the point that this shifting view explains how a work of art can be of its own time and of ours, which at first blush seems paradoxical at best and antithetical at worst.  We simply view the art from our point of view, and understand its contemporaries viewed it from theirs.  My “specific” application I mentioned earlier is instructive for fans of anime and manga — as a member of the otaku-rhombus, that is, non-Japanese fans of anime creating works with roots in aforementioned anime, I view the art from my point of view, which is just as accurate as the native Japanese person’s.  I’m thinking particularly of a recent thing I read (through lelangir’s anitations, so I don’t know who originally said it), which defended the weeaboo’s tendency to insist on using the word “seiyuu” when “voice actor” can suffice.  The general rule for loanwords from other languages is that they only really work if there is no analogue — which was the argument.  I don’t agree.  I think “voice actor” can carry all the important, salient points with it.  If we must explain to someone outside our discourse that there’s a difference between the practices of American and Japanese voice actors, then that’s that.  We would have to perform the same act of footnoting by using the Japanese word, and using something in our language makes us look less like douchebags.  To get back on point — our viewpoint of examining the voice acting pursuit is just as valid, so long as we actively examine the voice acting, rather than something we have constructed to replace it.  All those descriptions of Antony come from the text and are informed by it — Frye is not describing the historical Antony as though that were what was actually in the play.

Here’s the second important one:  if you’d like, refer back to the little circle I drew for the third blog entry, linked above.  Frye refers back to his scale here, where he says that, given the historic tendency of verisimilitude to provide plausibility and “reading forward in history [...] we may think of our romantic, high mimetic and low mimetic modes as a series of displaced myths, mythoi or plot-formulas progressively moving over towards the opposite pole of verisimilitude [away from myth, which doesn't require verisimilitude], and then, with irony, beginning to move back” (52).  Even without considering the historical tendency he describes, this illustrates the movement of mythoi displacing themselves, or being displaced, away from the original, mythic scene through a series of permutations layering on additional plausibility.  It hints at why examining stories in relation to myths can be helpful:  the degree of displacement, pointed out in the text by distance markers, can help position the text for us; and it shows how the displacement continues to relate back and forth through the entire scale, which calls back to the point about Antony and Cleopatra.

So what’s your favorite anime, and how does its displacement work?  I’ve already illustrated the mythic tendencies of one of my favorite anime (Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, predictably a “romance” on Frye’s scale), but I didn’t look too much at how it slips from romance into high mimetic.  I can see the elements of a public figure brought low, and of course the construction of a world different from the one before, that would be boring for us to watch but is a dream for those who fight in the romance-setting toward it.