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Scan Line: How Cyborgs Feel Thomas Lamarre, McGill University
(draft not for circulation) So often cyborg perception in cinema
and animation appears in the form of a mechanized or technologized
eye moving through the world, as if looking through the viewfinder
of massively enhanced monocular apparatus, which also offers a
broad range of sensory measurement of the environment, from
infrared night vision and zooms to facial recognition and pattern
matches (Fig. 1).1 Such a presentation gives the impression that
there is a seer behind the seeing. You are invited to see with
cyborg eyes (rather, eye), as if perception were primarily a matter
of a seer sitting inside someones head. Thus it is possible for you
to look through their eyes and to hear through their ears. In fact,
cyborg hearing typically gravitates toward voices in the head, that
is, hearing messages from other cyberized entities without their
actually speaking, without emitting sound into their surroundings.
Rather, speech is (one supposes) formulated and transmitted
electronically or digitally (without any initial production of
sound waves), yet is received through an activation of the human
sensory apparatus for hearing, and then heard as if in the
head.
Cyberized transmission and reception of speech is commonly
distinguished perceptually from non-cyberized modalities (people
talking to one another without prostheses) by adding reverberation
to cyber-transmitted voices, as if they were being heard within
something. With both cyborg seeing and hearing, the effect is that
of a perceiver behind the perceiving, a disembodied subject that
may readily move from body to body, while bodies begin to figure as
nothing more than apparatuses for the transmission and reception of
images and sounds, as disposable and exchangeable as cameras or
mobile phones. These examples of cyborg perception are drawn
primarily from animations in the Kkaku kidtai: The Ghost in the
Shell series, which includes Oshii Mamorus two animated films, The
Ghost in the Shell (1995) and The Ghost in the Shell: Innocence
(2004), and Kamiyama Kenjis two animated television series, The
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 1st Gig (2002-3) and 2nd
Gig (2004-5), which was followed by his television movie The Ghost
in the Shell:
-
Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society (2006), and more
recently the first in a series of animated prequel films, The Ghost
in the Shell: Arise (2013), directed by Kise Kazuchika. But cyborg
perception is so consistently staged in this manner across a range
of films and animations produced in various locations around the
world, that it is surely a generally familiar trope for viewers of
other cyborg films and animations. What is striking about such a
staging of cyborg perception is that it seems to confirm the
dualism of mind and body, a divide between perceiver-subject and
perceptual machine-organ. As such, it runs counter to claims made
for how cyborgs signal a rupture with Cartesian dualism, for what
is staged in such instances is the very possibility of a
disembodied subject, of subjective disembodiment. Of course, this
sort of perception is not all that happens in films and animations
dealing with cyborgs. Moving images do not and probably cannot
remain fixated on one sort of perceptual experience. There is, for
instance, a relation between seeing and hearing, which adds a
twist. Still, this twist may be construed in terms of a disjunction
of voice and image and thus an instance of the disembodied
existence of a networked self, as Christopher Bolton does in his
account of Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell.2 In contrast, Hyewon
Shin, dealing with the same animated film, finds that the
correlation of voice and body (image) results neither in
synchronization nor voice-off, which paves the way for a new
understanding our connection with non-human entities in general,
one not based in Cartesian optics and thus subjective mastery.3
In other words, even when persuasive arguments are made for how
cyborgs go beyond the Cartesian ego, it seems that the paradigm of
the disembodied subject reappears, surely because cyborg perception
seeing through the massively mechanized eye and hearing voices in
the head remains a major source of attraction, not only because it
offers a futuristic or high-tech feel but also because it offers a
media problematic, a site of perceptual focus where technologies
seem at once to be holding things together and to be pulling them
apart. This is lure of cyborg perception, so to speak. Nonetheless,
if cyborgs today arouse less theoretical enthusiasm and controversy
than they did in the 1990s, it is because the cyborg problematic
came to an impasse in its reliance on a certain way of contesting
the disembodied
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subject or Cartesian ego. Katherine Hayles explains, for
instance, the importance of Donna Haraways seminal essay, A
Manifesto for Cyborgs, published in 1985: Deeply connected to the
military, bound to high technology for its very existence and a
virtual icon for capitalism, the cyborg was contaminated to the
core, making it exquisitely appropriate as a provocation.4 Yet she
also adds, the cyborg no longer offers the same heady brew of
resistance and co-option. Quite simply, it is not networked enough.
the individual person or for that matter, the individual cyborg is
no longer the appropriate unit of analysis, if indeed it ever was.5
Hayles offers instead the paradigm of the cognisphere, or
computationally distributed cognition, to overcome what she sees as
the impasse of cyborg theory: taking the individual as the unit of
analysis. Still, she finds a solution in Haraways work, in its
general commitment to thinking relation. It is true that thinking
relation presents a powerful alternative, and yet the impasse of
the cyborg problematic lies not so much in its emphasis on the
individual per se as in its recourse to a disembodied subject.
Feminist critics exploring new materialisms called attention to
this problem. Vicki Kirby, for instance, questioned the assumption
that net avatars, for instance, had no materiality, reminding us
that their immateriality meant neither an absence of materiality
nor pure subjectivity.6 Ian Hacking approached the cyborg impasse
from a different direction, and cited this passage from Haraway to
signal a troublesome proximity with Descartes in her take on the
relation between humans and machines: Late twentieth century
machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between
natural and artificial and many other distinctions that apply to
organisms and machines. 7 In other words, as both Kirby and Hacking
suggest, the impasse of cyborg theory comes of a methodology that
posits distinctions and then blurs them. The alternative (thinking
relation) is not, however, merely a matter of turning away from
individual terms to the relationship between them, thereby shifting
attention from the individual to collections of individuals or
interactions between individuals. The result is a displacement of
the disembodied subject into a networked or distributed
subjectivity or cognition. The problem is not simply one of
ignoring materiality (with cognitive or logical structures) but of
ignoring the relation between materiality and immateriality, that
is, the media
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problematic, or mediality. The challenge of thinking relation
lies in attending to relation prior to the
emergence of the two terms (human and machine in Haraway, or
consciousness and computation in Hayle) that at once grounds their
distinction and is produced and changed by their interaction. As
such, it is not a question of looking at how computation
distributes consciousness but of considering what relation
distributes experience into computation and consciousness (or into
human and machine), and how their interaction potentially
transforms that relation. This is what William James refers to as a
pure experience, which operates as a little absolute insofar it is
a primary stuff from which both subjective and objective are
differentiated in this specific universe, our cyborg universe.8
This is precisely the media problematic, the mediality between
materiality and immateriality. Films and animations are good to
think with because they work with and through experience. Returning
to our initial problematic of cyborg perception, we see that an
impasse arises when we accept the distinction between perceiver and
perceived, only to argue that the distinction then becomes blurred
or ambiguous. For we then accept the idea of a disembodied
transcendent subject that undergoes a crisis of identity. We thus
need to work to some extent against the grain of some aspects of
received stories about cyborgs, which often stage such a crisis of
identity on the part of cyborg, reinforcing the idea of a
preexisting subject that is thrown into crisis by technology. In
Oshii Mamorus first The Ghost in the Shell animation, for instance,
there is a general crisis of identity because anyone with a
cyberized brain can have their brain hacked, and thus their actions
controlled, and their memories altered or wiped.
Thinking the relation requires, then, that we move against the
grain of this paradigm of a preexisting identity that is threatened
by technical alteration. Fortunately, The Ghost in the Shell also
offers a genuinely alternative problematic: the ghost, sometimes
also glossed as soul. The ghost is matter of embodied experience
and intuition of the world rather than disembodied subjectivity. It
entails, in effect, feeling rather than perceiving. Where the
perceiver seems to reside in the shell (or in the head) and to
stand outside the world, the ghost feels the world and the self at
the same time, prior to the
-
perceiver being conscious of either. Sharalyn Orbaugh builds on
Teresa Brennans work to highlight this aspect of Oshiis film:
affect does not arise solely or even primarily from within a
self-contained, autonomous body () affect moves between (and into
and out of) bodies in a literal, physical sense.9
Such a ghost offers a speculative counterpart to the
techno-scientific pragmatics of The Ghost in the Shell world: the
pragmatics, for instance, of producing a cyborg body, cyberizing a
brain, transferring a consciousness into a new prosthetic body,
dubbing a ghost. It also hints at a definition of science fiction
as a mode of reading: reading the speculative not in opposition to
the pragmatic but in terms of the contingencies of the
speculative-pragmatic relation. After all, the speculative may well
prove pragmatic if it affords a productive reading of
science.10
The Ghost in the Shell animations offer an experiential analog
to the ghost, the scan line, as the relation between materiality
and immateriality, in the register of infrastructure and self.
Beginning with Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell animated film, cyborgs
do not only stand apart from the world as disembodied subjects
perceiving the objective world through technologically enhanced
organs. They also feel the world in scan lines, which are, in
effect, material residues or artifacts of communication and
transmission, which usually tend to escape notice. Yet with the
scan line, the world and other entities in it are in turn feeling
the (individual) cyborg: the relation between individual and
collective is at once being produced and becoming productive in a
mode of affective communication. Communication might thus be
thought of in the sense of building with.11
To situate to the specific affective and speculative functions
of the scan line in Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell, I propose first
to consider it more generally. Disjunctive Synthesis
When a television screen makes an appearance within a movie,
rows of fine lines often appear on the screen, dark narrow bands
traversing the bright image. These scan lines commonly result from
a disjuncture between two media platforms. For instance, the movie
camera is capturing images at a frame different from the frame rate
or refresh rate of the image on the television screen. The movie
camera thus picks up what the human eye does not perceive on
the
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television screen: cathode rays fire half the image at a time in
alternating rows at a rate faster than the human eye can detect.
The movie camera, however, shooting at a faster rate, catches the
interlacing of the two images, and the result is a striping effect
of darker and lighter bands across the image. In effect, we are
seeing an encounter of two different media rates or media
temporalities: if we see the underlying temporality of the
television screens refresh rate, it is only because we perceive the
television screen via the temporality of the movie camera.12
The scan line is thus an almost paradigmatic example of what
Gilles Deleuze called disjunctive synthesis, a notion that Deleuze
and Guattari, in their retooling of Marx and Lacan in Anti-Oepidus,
used to characterize the production of distribution.13 Indeed, scan
lines make perceptible the underlying experience of how
distribution across media is produced: the interface between two
media platforms movie camera and television screen, for instance
does not entail a blurring of distinctions but rather a mode of
holding together and holding apart of differences between media,
which arise in this case in the register of frequencies or
temporalities.
Scan lines also can appear when something recorded at one rate
is replayed at a different rate, which we generally associate with
video playback when the frequency of the screen does not match that
of the video. Footage shot with surveillance cameras commonly is
presented with scan lines to indicate a discrepancy in resolution
between two platforms. Moreover, the first game systems used a
non-interlaced signal and introduced frames with 240 lines for
compatibility with television screens, yet the resulting difference
in frequency produced scan lines on the image, which today are
associated with classic video games.
In sum, scan lines appear for different reasons in different
contexts (and there is the related roll bar effect), but the basic
operation is one of disjuncture between media platforms at the
level of temporality, as rate or frequency. Because scan lines
appeared historically in media practices associated with television
screens that used cathode ray tubes and interlaced images, such as
adapting video games, playing back camcorder footage, and filming
television screens, scan lines have gradually become associated
with the experience of
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television screens in general. As such, even in recent films,
when television screens make an appearance on screen, it is common
to present them with scan lines.
For instance, in recent high-profile American movies such as
Bourne Legacy, Total Recall, Warm Bodies, The Call, and World War
Z, scan lines are prominent on television screens. Such a use of
scan lines is rather surprising, particularly in light of their
emphasis on high-tech media or futuristic technologies. After all,
the use of cathode ray tubes or CRT screens is a thing of the past:
production of cathode ray tubes ceased in 2012, and current
television screen technologies (liquid crystal and plasma displays)
do not interlace images. When filmed, liquid crystal displays tend
to generate a moir effect rather than scan lines. Indeed, in
Kamiyamas The Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex television
series, produced in the 2000s, the effect of filming screens
gradually becomes rendered as geometric crosshatching on the image
rather than scan lines. In the recent reboot of the Space
Battleship Yamato series, ch senkan Yamato 2199 (2013), the media
technology of technologically advanced aliens, the Garmillas, is
characterized by forms of crosshatching on screens, in contrast to
the scan lines appearing on screens used by humans, who are
presented as less advanced technologically. In other words, there
are some signs of a conscious shift away from the scan line in some
Japanese animations, with deliberate characterizations of it
belonging to a prior, lower tech moment. Nonetheless, scan lines
remain the most common way to stage effects of transmission in
films and animations. When crosshatching appears as an alternative,
it is usually in oscillation with scan lines, which suggests a lack
of certainty about whether transition is indeed underway, and
whether it is or can be complete.
Because scan lines today usually are added to the image as
special effect, rather than appearing spontaneously as a artifact
of filming, their continued usage is all the more striking. In
cinema, it is possible today to eliminate scan lines when filming
television screens. In Argo, for instance, in keeping with the
general mission of the film to create the sense of a direct
seamless relation to the past, television screens do not show scan
lines and do not produce an experience of disjuncture.
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In sum, as these examples indicate, the appearance of scan lines
entails something more than a simple and direct artifact of
filming. Conventions have developed around the presentation of
television screens, and in recent films such as Total Recall,
Bourne Identity, Warm Bodies, The Call, and many others, scan lines
apparently were added to television screens in post-production, as
special effects, rather than arising in the process of filming with
a movie camera operating at a different frame rate than the
television screen. In this respect, cinema is hand in glove with
animation.
When scan lines are added as effects to certain images, it marks
them as scanned-transmitted images, that is, images operating
across a disjuncture between what is shown-recorded and what is
transmitted-received. In the films mentioned previously, a contrast
between television and cinema arises, in the form of a contrast
between scanned-transmitted images (television) and
filmed-projected images (cinema). Cinema does not pretend to
provide an invisible or transparent mediation of television: when
scan lines appear, we know were watching cinema and television at
the same time. Nonetheless, there are a variety of ways of
negotiating this effect.
In Total Recall, for instance, marking screens with scan lines
plays into the movies central concern how to distinguish genuine
memory from implanted memory by establishing a firm distinction
between the media world and the real world. Such a distinction may
actually serve to stabilize at the level of media the very
distinctions that the film proposes to destabilize at the level of
plot and action. Marking television screens with scan lines
reassures viewer that at some level there is the possibility of
keeping things straight or, to evoke Thomas Elsaessers notion, of
solving the puzzle upon repeated viewing.14 Similarly, in Bourne
Legacy, scan lines remind us of the constant presence of
information surveillance by indicating that what is seen is being
seen by someone, and potentially recorded and transmitted. In sum,
in such instances, the moment of disjunctive synthesis underscores
an oscillation between two realities that takes on the form of a
puzzle, which holds out the possibility of an answer or resolution,
that is, a determination of which reality is genuine. How you
respond to the film depends a great deal on whether you feel that
the film needs to provide a conclusive answer, or whether
puzzlement itself is sufficient
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entertainment. As already mentioned, Argo goes in the opposite
direction: television screens do not show scan lines nor an
experience of disjuncture, which is in keeping with the films
concern for capturing the year 1980 accurately: there is no
disjuncture between the movie camera and television media. In sum,
scan lines may evoked in a variety of ways. They may also be
construed nostalgically, for instance, as signs of the good old
days of television or the classic era of video games.
As their prevalence in Total Recall and Bourne Legacy indicate,
scan lines are frequently used today to impart an aura of high-tech
telecommunication and information networks. In fact, scan lines
have become a sign of the digital. To impart an aura of high-tech
digital media events, trailers for films frequently increase the
number of images showing screens with scan lines. The Call is a
good example for it not only shows television footage with scan
lines but also imbues its graphics and its look with scan lines, in
order to give the sense of proliferating humming networks of
information, weaving together cell phones, cameras, and screens.
Similarly, books on digital media in Japan from the late 1990s and
early 2000s feature images with scan lines.15
It may seem odd that the scan line, associated with now
out-dated CRT technology and low-resolution video, has forged such
a dominant association with cutting-edge digital and multimedia
effects, rather than functioning primarily as cause for nostalgia.
Yet if we look at what is happening in scan lines, this association
makes perfect sense. At work in the scan line is disjunctive
synthesis, which builds together different modes of media
existence, of capturing, sending, and receiving. The disjunctive
synthesis might even be said to entail a communicating
communication, recalling Niklas Luhmanns dictum, Only communication
communicates.16 Or, put otherwise, only building with builds
with.
At the same time, insofar as the experience of the scan line
derives from the media world of CRT television screens with
consoles or plug-ins (VCR, game consoles, and camcorders), it
reminds us that contemporary media infrastructures have a deeper
history, a history that is not a simple succession of forms but the
transformative prolongation of a diagram or dispositif. Recall that
the refresh rate for computer screens for many years was modeled on
that of the
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television screen, building an analogy between computer and
television screens that was not in any way technologically
necessary. Although today neither television nor computer screens
employ interlaced images, the ease with which computer screens are
used for viewing television is surely due at least in part to this
initial analogy constructed between them. The critical question
with scan lines then is not that of whether they appear or not. It
is one of how and how much the effect of disjunctive synthesis is
deactivated (enclosed or contained within a stable semiotic system)
or activated (amplified and prolonged in experience). Reproducing
scan lines for nostalgic effect, mobilizing them as general
indicators of media interfaces, or using them to stabilize an
underlying distinction between real world and media world these
practices tend to deactivate the scan line. Films with media puzzle
effects such as Total Recall, Bourne Legacy and Inception, are
difficult to gauge, because such films studiously, even laboriously
hover at the tipping point, vacillating between activation and
deactivation. If films with puzzle effects based on staging
disjunctive synthesis via scan lines are becoming more common, it
is surely because there is an increased awareness of scan lines as
an actual effect, as an active force, rather than an artifact to be
tolerated or ignored. Significantly, it is for the same reason
because it does not generate scan lines as an artifact of the
production process that animation actually shows a greater
awareness of them, and a tendency to use them actively, forcefully.
In addition, because so much animation is produced for television
or for release on video, DVD, or Internet, it frequently shows
increased awareness of these effects that were initially associated
with the experience of small screens, that is, televisions and
computer monitors. The use of scan line effects in animation, then,
should not be considered to be secondary to or merely derivative of
cinematic effects. In this instance, the idea that animation is
operating at a remove from the indexical capture associated with
live-action filming does not imply a diminishment of an original
but rather a sustained engagement with and prolongation of an
effect.
This is precisely what happens in Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell:
the scan line is activated to address the media problematic
associated with cyborg perception: the moments of cyborg perception
in which there seems to be a perceiver behind the perceiving, a
disembodied subject, presents an experience
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in which new technologies (information and telecommunication
networks) seem at once to be holding together mind and body, human
and machine, and to be tearing them apart. In response, Oshiis
animation highlights and expands the effect of the scan line. It
thus invites us to consider how a disjunctive synthesis between
media platforms is the site of a pure experience or little absolute
that at once generates and grounds distinctions between human and
machine, and between mind and body, while being prolonged and
transformed by their interaction. In this respect, Oshiis animation
feels more in touch with the implications of building with media
platforms than do many of the recent films cited above. Expanded
Television
Serialized in Kdanshas weekly manga magazine, Young Magazine,
between April 1989 and November 1990, and released in book format
in Japanese in 1991, and in English in 1995, Shirows Kkaku kidtai:
The Ghost in the Shell presents a series of eleven story-chapters
set between 2029 and 2030. Stories center on Section 9, a highly
secret special ops unit led by Aramaki Daisuke, initially set up as
a anti-terrorism squad under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but
reconfigured by the end of the second chapter, Super Spartan, into
an international hostage rescue unit reporting directly to the
Prime Minister.17 Section 9 is characterized as an offensive
assault unit deploying high-tech power suits or tactical armors,
hence the Japanese title Kkaku kidtai or armored mobile troops. The
central characters, members of Section 9, range from humans with
very minimal prosthetics and cyberization such as Togusa, to humans
with entirely prosthetic bodies and highly cyberized brains such as
Major Kusanagi Mokoto and Bat; gynoid robot operatives referred to
as speakers, and spider-like intelligent mobile tanks called
Fuchikoma.
Chapters consist largely of stand-alone stories, but in the
first volume, a larger storyline emerges across chapters 3, 9, 10,
and 11, in which the Major, the female cyborg Kusanagi Motoko who
is ace squad leader of Section 9, encounters a criminal called the
Puppet Master who is hacking into human cyberbrain ghosts to
control their actions like a puppeteer. He (the manga presents this
AI as male) turns out to be a new form of intelligence,
accidentally generated through
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governmental experiments with AI, which now seeking a way to
prolong its life. Realizing that self-replication will not result
in genuine reproduction (temporal stability across fluctuations),
the Puppet Master develops a plan to fuse with the Major to produce
new entities that will inhabit the Net. This mode of fusion is
presented in terms reminiscent of disjunctive synthesis: fusion
does not result in a blurring of distinctions insofar as both
entities are said to retain their distinctive identities within
their fusion or unification.
Oshiis 1995 animated film follows this storyline fairly closely,
but transforms it into a media problematic by working with
different kinds of images that present distinct media types.
Especially salient is the contrast between computer images and
images of the everyday urban world, that is, between cyberscapes
and cityscapes. Cyberscapes are images resembling what would appear
on a computer screen, which are transmitted directly from computers
to cyberized brains. For instance, computer graphics track the
location of a car upon a grid, allowing section 9 cyberpolice to
pursue their quarry (Fig. 2). Such images are accompanied by
voice-overs that do not function in the manner of voice-over as
voice-across indicating transmission across network channels. Such
imagery may appear crude in design by contemporary standards,
consisting of a black screen with simple geometric layouts in
glowing green, but the idea is contemporary enough: there is a
digital transmission of GPS tracking information directly into the
cyberized brain. Such cyberscapes, with their simplicity of design,
color, and illumination, contrast sharply with the cityscapes.
Oshiis animation was renowned for its use of techniques of
rotoscoping in creating the urban world of The Ghost in the Shell.
Particularly famous is the sequence in which The Major travels
through the city by boat on canal, which, like many other sequences
in the film, was based on camcorder footage shot by Oshii in Hong
Kong. Animators did not digitally paint the footage in the manner
of films like Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), but
rather the footage provided a point of reference for the creation
of what might called video realism. If Oshiis animation is said to
entail greater realism, it is because, on the one hand, its future
world feels lived in, that is, grimy and seamy rather than clean
and glossy, for which the noir-like aesthetics of Blade Runner were
a source of inspiration. On the other hand, realism entails a sense
of
-
accuracy in depicting pocked and pitted surfaces as well as
detailed painting to impart depth to the image. The result is a
world of muted tones, full of depth and detail yet without sharp
corners and boundaries, as if in lower resolution than high-speed
cinematography. Even when brilliantly colored, fully illuminated
advertisements and street signs appear, their hues are somewhat
less saturated than expected due to their brilliant hues and full
illumination, which imparts a tinge of warmth and intimacy (Fig.
3), in keeping with the feel of camcorder footage. This video
realism, with its combination of high detail with somewhat low-res
depth and lesser saturation, contrasts sharply with the geometric
simplicity and bold black-green illumination of cyberscapes.
What is the relation between these two distinct perceptual
experiences, which makes cyberscapes and cityscapes feel like
different worlds?
The story sets up a potentially antagonistic relation between
them. Indeed, following the manga, the film opens with a statement
about the tension between computerization (corporate networks and
flows of information without physical boundaries) and the
persistence of boundaries in the form of nations and ethnic groups.
Put another way, there are two sorts of infrastructure implying
different kinds of experience: the almost oceanic experience of
unbounded flows of information in corporate computer networks, and
the experience of persistent or residual boundedness related to
geopolitical frameworks and legal institutions. The Ghost in the
Shell thus seems to flirt with the notion, dubious yet popular in
the 1990s, that globalization tended to eliminate national
boundaries and ethnic affiliations.18 Significantly, while Shirows
manga situates the action within Japan, Oshiis animation does not
name its location, thus implying a generalized, hybridized global
city in East Asia. As such, the scale already seems to be tipping
in Oshiis version toward a vision of the global city as a site that
is neither globalization nor nation, neither infinite network nor
finite enclave, but some amalgamation of them.
At the same time, in keeping with Shirows manga, Oshiis animated
film displaces the geopolitical question (crisis of national
sovereignty) onto questions of identity and selfhood (crisis in
personal sovereignty). It displaces them especially onto the
Japanese female cyborg, the Major, who seems especially prone to
doubt her identity. In this register, the antagonism returns, in
the form
-
of the Cartesian ego or disembodied subject, which is mobilized
and called into question at the same time: if ones self is
infinitely transferable from one prosthetic body to another, how
does it remain the same self? Such doubts assail the Major,
especially in the wake of two incidents in which the Puppet Master
has hacked into a human cyberbrain, implanted fake memories, and
taken control of conscious person. The sovereignty of
consciousness, of a self-identical conscious self, appears at once
highly desirable and unsustainable. How to know if you are a puppet
or not?
It is possible to tease a conceptual answer to this cyborg
conundrum out of philosophical discourses running through the film,
and Oshiis films are famous for their protracted discussions of
conceptual and geopolitical issues, often accompanied by direct
quotation of an array of major thinkers.19 Yet the genius of Oshii
lies in the transformation of such questions, crises, and
paradoxes, into media problematics. Indeed, protracted discussions
and extended citation always occur in conjunction with sequences
that highlight media and technology. Clearly, conceptual questions
and discourses are not autonomous of media through which they
appear. Moreover, even in conceptual terms, the direction taken by
the Major in Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell hinges on a media
problematic related to perceiving and feeling: she soon realizes
that, if the continuity of the conscious self cannot be guaranteed,
then continuity must be sought at another, non-conscious and even
non-sensuous or non-appearing level, namely, that of the ghost,
which entails an experience of something on the fringes of
consciousness, never quite appearing as such but decidedly present
nonetheless.20
The challenge of shifting attention to the media problematic is
that it is no longer possible to look at the identity crisis in
terms of a problem with an answer, or a contest with a victor.
Taking a discursive side, for instance, siding with the nation or
ethnicity against corporate information globalization, or vice
versa, resolves nothing. Oshii instead situates us within a media
experience of the problematic, which is salient in the contrast
between cyberscapes and cityscapes.
Cyberscapes offers a tentative experience of disembodiment: you
see what the cyborg sees (computerized imagery) and hear what the
cyborg hears (voices
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in the head reverberating) as if you could occupy that body, as
if a body were but a center of perception. A pattern of shot and
reverse shot may step in to remind you that this is what Bat or the
Major are experiencing. Yet, even with shots that connect
perceptual experience to a particular body, you dont know what to
feel because cyborg faces are entirely impassive, without the
slightest display of emotion. Cyborg faces are thus like the
cityscapes: fleshed out in detail, modeled in depth, implying
possibilities for warmth and intimacy, but somehow floating and
dreamlike in their low-res clarity. The low rhythmic pulse of the
music over the longer sequences increases the detached quality of
the scenery. In one sequence in which the Major ponders the reality
of her self, as the viewing position gradually comes closer to her
face, the layers of background cityscape appear to separate, as if
the city had become unmoored, and voice that does not seem to be
hers speaks, laden with reverberation to signal that its source is
cyber.21 In other words, as you shift back and forth between
experiences of the disembodied subject and images of the actual
world, the video-realism of the actual world does not provide as
strong sense of embodiment as you might expect or desire. The
crisis of the Cartesian subject, then, is not merely in cyberscapes
or cityscapes but in their relation. Within and across cyberscapes
and cityscapes, there is constant desynchronization and
resynchronization of seeing and hearing, reminiscent of Michel
Chions notion of cinema as audiovision, which Massumi describes as
a singular kind of relational effect that takes off from both
vision and audio but is irreducible to either.22 Like the Major,
you may well wonder, what is it that allows these two aspects to
stand apart and to hold together? What is their relation?
If you only pay attention to the action of the film, there is an
accelerating pattern of alternation between the two audiovisual
types, which does afford a certain degree of blurring, as if the
two terms were gradually merging, as the spokes of the wheel appear
to blur when the wheel turns rapidly. Things will somehow cohere,
you feel, provided everything continues to accelerate until the
end. In addition, there are moments in which the cyber-images are
layered into the images of the actual world, usually in the form of
computer displays that appear in luminous translucent green,
projected from who knows where. Yet, at the same time, the languid
pacing of some sequences in The Ghost in the Shell
-
reminds you that at any moment, the distinct terms may
precipitate out of the mix as soon as the stirring slows: the terms
are in colloidal suspense, instead of dissolving into a solution.
The experience of the film is as much one of incipient
precipitation as one of action accelerating to an end. The
pockmarks ripped into the wall by bullets recall the ripples caused
in a puddle as raindrops start to fall. Events are
precipitating.
This is precisely at this point that you might notice something
unusual about the staging of cyborg perception: scan lines.
Horizontal bright and dark bands stripe the screen when you move
into the cyborgs field of perception. The first instance almost
escapes notice: in the opening sequence, the Major sits on the
rooftop of a skyscraper, gathering information about an illegal
meeting, establishing the coordinates and timing for her
intervention (she dives from the building in thermo-optic
camouflage, crashes the meeting from the outside window to kill her
target, momentarily becomes visible, and then fades into her
camouflage again as she falls toward the city streets). As she sits
and gathers data, the sequence alternates between green screen
computer images and video-real cityscapes, but for a moment, when
she looks down into the streets, the screen is striped with scan
lines (Fig. 4). It is easy to miss this fleeting instance of
perception that is neither cyberscape nor cityscape. Later,
however, the film suddenly brings this mode of perception to the
fore. Section 9 learns the whereabouts of the Puppet Master (he is
in the body of a cyborized man who is in turn taking control of a
cyborized man, a garage collector), and the garage man rushes to
warn him. As the cyberized man looks at the approaching garbage
truck, he perceives the world in scan lines (Fig. 5). And in the
subsequent sequence in which Bat and The Major chase him through
backstreets and a marketplace, Bats perception is also
characterized by scan lines (Fig. 6). Finally, in the penultimate
scene in which the Puppet Master and the Major fuse, perception is
consistently, even insistently, rendered with scan lines (Fig. 7).
The scan line is impossible to ignore. In other words, Oshiis The
Ghost in the Shell does not so much build toward a resolution of
conflicts as stage a disjunctive synthesis: two entities merge
without losing their distinctiveness. Because such a synthesis was
always already present in the scan line, the merging or fusing of
the two entities is less a break with the existing order of thing
than its definitive
-
moment. But how does such a disjunctive synthesis work,
concretely and specifically, in The Ghost in the Shell?
First, because the scan lines characterizing cyborg perception
are identical to the scan lines that arise when shooting video
footage, the cyborg is situated as a sort of media platform. The
analogy to the camcorder is especially strong, and in addition, the
constant use of cables to connect cyborgs to the central computer
or to other cyborgs (the plug features prominently when a cyborg
dives into the brain of another) recalls the act of plugging
consoles or peripheral devices into the television or into computer
monitors. As such, the cyborg appears as one media platform in
network of platforms, but this is a specific network
infrastructure. This network is a sort of expanded television, not
only because it highlights the emergence of a new, largely
televisual world, but also because the operative paradigm is that
of hooking peripherals into a television screen, and even the
computer monitor functions like the television screen. In one key
sequence in the film, Aramaki covertly sets up video surveillance
around a house: he uses what looks like a laptop computer, into
which cables are plugged, connecting his computer to other and the
network, reminding us that this is not the era of wireless
connection but of wires, cables, and diverse modalities of hooking
up and jacking in. Second, the surveillance footage appearing
Aramakis computer screen shows scan lines, recalling another
dimension of disjunctive synthesis: when you see the world in scan
lines, whatever you see is being transmitted to someone somewhere,
and thus potentially to anyone anywhere. What you see may be
intercepted, overheard, whether deliberately or accidentally. As
such, when you perceive in scan lines, your perceptual world is
open or exposed to other media platforms. The response to this
situation of disjunctive synthesis can go in one of two directions.
On the one hand, it can lead to paranoid defensive formation in
which you are caught up in a unending game of building new forms of
protection, to assure that your shell is not breached, your brain
not hacked, your memories not stolen or damaged. This is where
personal and national sovereignty are forced into collusion in a
paranoid escalation of preemptive and hence offensive defense in a
world where security is simply more insecurity. On the other hand,
a world in which everything and everyone becomes a
-
disembodied ego sealed within layer upon layer of protective
barriers is ultimately unsustainable, and it effectively eliminates
the self that it is allegedly designed to preserve. In response, at
some point, like the Major and Puppet Master, you will have to run
the risk of exposure to the network and of losing yourself to
survive. Here a distinction arises between the conscious subject
and the experiential self, and the experience of the scan line
turns in a different direction. Rather than being construed as an
invasion of your consciousness by another consciousness, it implies
feeling the world, and the world feeling toward you.
This experience of the scan lines brings us to the third point:
the scan line is not contained with any media platform. It is the
material residue of platforms building with each other. In this
respect, the scan line is important precisely because it does not
lead toward the blur or stain, which tends to sustain an idealist
or psychologistic relationship of the self to media, which claims
that media touches the subject there where its perception becomes
blurred and troubled.23 On the contrary, the scan line is visible,
even tangible, and it has a sonic analog (reverberation, not
distortion). The scan line is not in the brain or in the object,
but in the world. As mentioned previously, a recurring feature of
Oshiis style is the staging of sequences in which characters engage
in a lengthy discussion of one of the key issues in the film, but
they do so while driving along a highway at night. Bands of light
wash over the cars interior and their faces as they pass under the
evenly spaced rows of lights illuminating the highway (Fig. 8). The
sensation of forward motion is lost, and it seems that the car
stands still as the citys lights sweep over them. The city itself
is now scanning them, the city feels them. The scan line is not
confined to the screen, to cyborg perception, or cyberscapes. In
effect, the city has become cyberized and cyberizing.
This is what the coupling of the Puppet Master and the Major
stages as well. Cables are plugged into the remnants of their
cyborg bodies, and connected to Bat as well, making him the witness
and guardian of this marriage. While mismatches or new matches
between body and voice (the Puppet Master speaks from the Majors
body, for instance) may impart the sense of disembodiment, the
insistent use of scan lines highlights that this coupling entails
different media platforms that perceive, record, and transmit at
different frequencies. As such,
-
the experience is one of building a specific infrastructure and
a specific self simultaneously. The human now appears as one media
platform among others, as a mode of temporality that is only
experienced when interlaced with another.
This coupling also tries to produce an interlacing of gender
identities: after coupling, the Major in Oshiis animation regains
consciousness in a girls body. (In Shirows manga, she winds up in
the body of a youth so beautiful that Bat mistakes it for a girls
body.) Commentators on The Ghost in the Shell have questioned its
vision of gender, calling attention to how womans bodies stand in
for matter, and as such, dont really seem to matter, existing only
to be dismembered and discarded.24 It is true that The Ghost in the
Shell is so intent on reconfiguring ethics and politics in terms of
media others (robots, AI, AL, cyborgs) that it tends not to treat
received forms of alterity (gender, class, ethnicity) as residual
formations. As such, gender trouble, for instance, feels at once
displaced onto and displaced by cyborg trouble. Yet there may be a
challenge here: drawing on the logic of the scan line indicates, we
might also look at the implications of a disjunctive synthesis
holding received forms of alterity together with electronic or
digital information entities. As such, the female cyborg is not
about the blurring of distinctions between woman and machine but
about the specific rate or frequency of an interlacing. In the
Majors instance, this interlacing also takes the form of meeting
with her self: as she slowly cruises through the city, she
encounters other cyborgs with the same prosthetic body. The
interlacing of perception and cityscape takes on temporal rhythm of
encounter, which is, in fact, her.
The final image of the animation is of the Major overlooking the
wired city, into which she will release the progeny of her
coupling. It is a city of towering buildings laced with cable-like
connections that promise to hold it together two kinds of
infrastructure city structures and wired networks (Figure 9). This
is a highly specific vision of infrastructures in which city and
net appear literally plugged into one another. It is worth
recalling that Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell appeared in 1995, the
year associated with the emergence of DVDs, the ascendency of the
Internet, and the rise of digital television. Its cyborg world is
that of a prior infrastructure, of cables and camcorders, of
consoles plugged into televisions and computers. Indeed, Oshiis
animation might be seen
-
as the culmination of the video revolution of the 1980s that
generated both expanded television and a new aesthetic, that of the
Original Video Animation or OVA.
From the early 1980s, production of animation in Japan at once
boomed and become more differentiated in terms of its markets,
formats and genres. With the advent of VHS, a range of new
animations appeared for home video, ushering in the OVA. At the
same time, discourses on information society, prevalent from the
late 1960s, spurred interest in emerging technologies of television
reception, transmission, and of display and interaction (such as
satellite and cable, and VHR and console games), which inspired
teletopia initiatives and made new media the buzzword in
discussions of television in the 1980s in Japan.25 Not
surprisingly, as a consequence, Japanese television animation,
often loosely dubbed anime, often focused attention on the impact
of new computer and television technologies, exploring their
effects in different registers, at the levels of story and art, and
distribution and reception. In fact, anime might well be considered
the new media form par excellence of 1980s, anticipating its surge
to global popularity in the 1990s. OVAs in particular played an
important role in expanding the media purvey of animation. They not
only created a relay between animated films for theatrical release
and animated television series but also generated new circuits of
distribution and new modes of watching.
Significantly, Oshii is credited with creating the first OVA
series, Dallos (1983). More importantly, it was in the context of
such animation that the scan line came to the fore. As animators
found new markets and new budgets for release directly to video,
they began using video or camcorder footage to enhance both the
realism of effects and the media quality of animation, to produce
darker, more conceptual, and more sexually explicit fare. Thus the
scan lines that appear on television or computer screens when
filming with camcorder found their way into animation: the
flickering scan-lined screen in a dark room became something of a
signature feature of OVAs.
Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell is the apotheosis of this world of
expanded television infrastructures and OVA aesthetics. Bringing
that infrastructure to the surface in the form of the scan line,
Oshiis animation shows how media
-
networks are not simply about the reproduction of the
disembodied subject, networked selves, or the distribution of
cognition. It explores the co-emergence of self and infrastructure,
the distribution that is producing the distinction of self and
network, and is prolonged by it. In the form of a media
problematic, it tries to formulate an experience of a
self-in-disjunction that might be capable of responding to the
capacity of media platforms to work together.
Notes 1 In The Scene of the Screen: Cinematic and Electronic
Presence, in Materialities of Communication, eds. Hans Ulrich
Gumbrechts and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1994), Vivian Sobchak looks closely at such effects in terms
of technologically mediated experience, exploring how such effects
prove alienating. My argument is not entirely different from hers
in that I initially emphasize how such effects seem to generate a
disembodied subject, and yet, because I am not treating natural
perception as a baseline, I tend to think in terms of historical
configurations of media infrastructure and their potentiality. As
such, rather than stress alienation of natural or human-scaled
perception, I tend to see in the production of disembodied
subjectivity a form of perceptual disabling that is not at odds
with her analysis. 2 Christopher Bolton, From Wooden Cyborgs to
Celluloid Souls: Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet
Theater, positions 10:3 (2002): 748-49. 3 Hyewon Shin, Voice and
Vision in Oshii Mamorus Ghost in the Shell: Beyond Cartesian
Optics, Animation 6:7 (2011), 13, 21. 4 Katherine Hayles,
Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere, Theory, Culture,
Society (2006): 159. 5 Hayles, Unfinished Work, 159-60. Haraway,
too, resituated the cyborg, albeit in very different terms: I have
come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer
family of companion species. See Donna Haraway, Cyborgs to
Companion Species: Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience in
Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality, ed. Don Ihde and
Evan Selinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003),
-
6 See chapter 5, Reality Bytes, in Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh:
The Substance of the Corporeal (London: Routledge, 1997). 7 Ian
Hacking, Canguilhem amid the Cyborgs, Economy and Society 27: 2
(1998): 202-216; Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in
Simians, Cyborgs and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 152. 8
James writes, the pure experiences of our philosophy are, in
themselves considered, so many little absolutes See William James,
Essays in Radical Empiricism, 134. 9 Sharalyn Orbaugh, Emotional
Infectivity: Cyborg Affect and the Limits of the Human, Mechademia
3 (2008), 165, drawing on Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of
Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 1-2. My
argument differs primarily in that I see affect less as a blurring
or obscuring of the boundary between subject and object or inside
and outside. Rather I see affect as related to a disjunctive
synthesis that at once distinguishes inside and outside and holds
them together, and because affect is related to a material
continuum, it tends to act with and through a holding together of
self and infrastructure, making for a specific kind of self and a
specific infrastructure. 10 I am drawing on Brian Massumis
discussion of the spectulative and pragmatic in Semblance and
Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurent Arts (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2011). 11 There is resonance here with Orbaughs notion of
infectivity, but I wish to emphasize something more like a form of
communicability that is specific to a network infrastructure of
expanded television. 12 The filmed television screen may also
appear brighter. Due to space limitations, I do not here address
this aspect of disjunctive synthesis, although it is important in
Oshiis film. Suffice it to say, this brightening of the screen
signals the intensity of disjunctive synthesis, serving to activate
the scan line. 13 Gilles Deleuze first addresses what he later
calls disjunctive synthesis in the context of the second synthesis
or determination (neither passive nor active) in Difference and
Repetition (NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 82-83; Gilles
-
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oepidus (Minnesota: University
of Minnesota Press, 1983), 4. 14 Thomas Elsaesser, The Mind-Game
Film, in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema,
ed. Warren Buckland (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 13-41. 15 A good
example is the cover for Funamoto Susumus Anime no mirai o shiru:
posuto-japanimshon; kwdo wa sekaikan + dejitaru (Tky: Ten bukkusu,
1998). 16 Niklas Luhmann, How can the mind participate in
communication, in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich
et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), 371 17 The Japanese
edition is: Shir Masamune, Kkaku kidtai: The Ghost in the Shell
(Tokyo: Kdansha, 1991), and the English edition: Shirow Masamune,
The Ghost in the Shell, trans. Frederic L. Schodt and Toren Smith
(Milwaukie, OR: Darkhorse Comics, 1995). 18 Eric Cazdyn, The Flash
of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2002), 252-54. 19 Livia Monnet provides an extensive
interpretation of the impact of Oshiis combination of staging
philosophical debates while remediating a variety of media forms in
her three-part essay on his film Innocence. See especially Anatomy
of Permutational Desire, Part II: Bellmers Dolls and Oshiis
Gynoids, Mechademia 6 (2011), 153-69. 20 I am drawing here on Brian
Massumis discussion of semblance as non-sensuous similarity in
Semblance and Event. 21 For an account of the use of mobile
background, see Stefan Riekeles and Thomas Lamarre, Mobile
Worldviews, Mechademia 7 (2012): 174-188. 22 Massumi, Semblance and
Event, 81-82. 23 Lucas Hilderbrand, in Inherent Vice: Bootleg
Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2009), shows how artifacts of copying videotapes became
associated with transgression and illicit pleasure, in a manner
reminiscent of the Lacanian stain. The logic of the scan line,
however, is very
-
different from the blur or stain. Its prevalence in OVA speaks
to a very different relationship with videotape and piracy. 24 See,
for instance, Livia Monnet, Toward the Feminine Sublime, or the
Story of a Twinkling Monad, Shape-Shifting across Dimension:
Intermediality, Fantasy and Special Effects in Cyberpunk Film and
Animation, Japan Forum 14:2 (2002): 225-268; and Kumiko Sato, How
Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in
the Japanese Context, Comparative Literature Studies 41:3 (2004):
335-55. 25 teletopia; use of term new media; television as new
media
-
Figures and (brief) Captions Figure 1: Bat looks at cyberdogs
and assesses their parameters by drawing on computer data, from
episode 14, Stand Alone Complex Gig 1.
Figure 2: Image of cyberscape from Oshiis The Ghost in the
Shell
Figure 3: Image of cityscape
-
Figure 4: the Majors scan line perception in opening
sequence
Figure 5: trash collector sees with scan lines
Figure 6: Bat chases, seeing with scan lines.
-
Figure 7: scan lines in final scene
Figure 8: rows of lights along highway
-
Figure 9: wired city
-
Companion Screens: Living between Infrastructures Thomas
Lamarre, McGill University [Note: this is a draft, and so the notes
are still rudimentary; the extended discussion of broadcast towers
has also been omitted to cut the length down]
On the evening of August 2, 2013, between nine and
eleven-thirty, NTV (Nippon terebi hsm kabushikigaisha) broadcast
Miyazaki Hayaos beloved animated film, Tenk no shiro Rapyuta
(1986), known as Castle in the Sky in its English release. At about
eleven-twenty, the film reached the climatic scene in which the
heroes, Sheeta and Pazu, together intone Barusu (transliterated as
Balse or Balsus in English), an incantation triggering the
destruction of Rapyuta, the castle in the sky, to prevent the
villain Mooska from seizing it and utilizing it for military
domination. At that moment unprecedented surge of tweets occurred,
143,199 within a single second, or twenty-five times the usual
volume (Figure 1). As The Economist noted, because Twitter
successfully dealt with the spike, the event not only served to
confirm its technological robustness but also helped Dick Costolo,
its chief executive, to further his promotion of tweeting while
watching TV, styling Twitter as a second screen.1
Costolo had already given a talk in Tokyo on the Twitter usage
in Japan, on April 16, 2012 (or 2013) in which he called attention
to a previous Japanese record for tweets per second (11,349), also
during a television broadcast of Rapyuta in 2011.2 Generally
speaking, tweets hit new peaks during big TV events such as the
Super Bowl or in response to mass media events (the announcement of
Beyonces pregnancy).3 But the surges associated with Miyazakis
animated film are more pronounced and concentrated due to this fan
practice of responding to a specific moment in the film. As such,
they imply a specific kind of connection between television
audiences and social media, between the small screen and a smaller
mobile phone screen, which is increasingly pitched as a second
screen, a companion screen, to the television screen.
Mizuiro Ahirus Journal describes the connection between the two
screens in this way: Rapyuta is a wonderful film but surely weve
all seen it enough.
-
And yet this year, the audience ratings went way up. The
motivation behind tweeting Barusu is less a one of watching TV and
shouting Barusu and more one of watching Rapyuta to participate in
the festive event (matsuri) of shouting Barusu with everybody. Even
if people are watching it alone in their houses, Barusu lets them
be with everybody.4
Such a festive event, as this blogger and others were quick to
note in the wake of a report by Twitter Japan, entailed a very
close, even intimate relation (missetsu) between broadcast ratings
and tweeting.5 Above all, it would seem that tweeting had
dramatically improved television ratings for Rapyuta: the audience
ratings had dropped to 15.9% at the time of Rapyuta tweet surge in
2011, while the 2013 broadcast culled an impressive 18.5%. It is
not surprising that the term matsuri (festival or celebration)
appears to describe fan-created connections between the small
screen and the smaller screen, for it often arises in the context
of fan interactions with media beyond one-time consumption of a
product (for instance, the manga market Comiket and anime-related
tourism). What demands further consideration, however, is the aura
of success and happy synergy that surround the responses to the
recent Rapyuta tweet surge. It seems that everybody was delighted.
Technicians responded beautifully, assuring that the surge did not
affect Twitter service negatively. Television broadcasters garnered
higher ratings, which translates into advertisement revenues.
Twitters CEO saw his promotional strategy perfectly realized: the
smaller second screen acted synergistically with the television
screen, compounding the success of both. Fans found new recognition
of their collective force. Media remediation here appears as a mode
of reciprocal intensification, of synergy, convergence, and
resonance rather than rivalry, divergence, or interference. Whats
not to celebrate?
Interesting enough, Rapyuta tells a very different story about
networks, calling for the destruction of the castle in the sky, and
not only because it operates as a weapon of mass destruction, a
militarized satellite, but also because it functions as part of a
highly advanced telecommunications system that works at a distance
from the earth, thus distancing human experience from the earth.
The threat of the castle in the sky is at once technological
(capable of destroying cities from the air) and perceptual or
aesthetic (capable of producing an image of
-
the world and thus reducing the world to its picture).6
Ironically, however, at the moment when Sheeta and Pazu in the
animated film intone the word that destroys this militarized
telecommunications satellite, fans are bouncing electronic signals
off of satellites and communications towers in celebration. Are
they celebrating the destruction of big media or its
ascendency?
Probably fans, and indeed people in general, do not think of
mobile phones as big media or mass media, despite the increased
construction of large-scale infrastructures to support service. The
notion of the horizontal, leveling force of telecommunications and
televisual media, first associated with television (as with
McLuhans global village) and then with Internet and wireless
networks, so dominates the contemporary imagination that television
and social media are commonly assumed to present a force that acts
in opposition to the threats embodied in Miyazakis castle in the
sky, namely the techno-aesthetic massification implicit in mass
media and mass destruction. Television and social media are felt to
have already blown the castle from the sky, and to have brought
mass media down to earth. (Maybe small-screen people are already
living in the utopian, post-massified world of Rapyuta, in little
pastoral media villages.) Consequently, vertical or hierarchical
integration does not come under much scrutiny in the context of the
Rapyuta tweet surge. Yet there are already signs of one kind of
hierarchical integration at work in the reporting of the event:
somehow the collective force of fans (their little village, as it
were) has been equated with Japan, with the masses of people living
in the nation. In this instance, the synergy of the smaller
companion screen with the bigger television screen seems to
encourage a conflation of subculture with national culture, erasing
any tension between them.
This synergy is precisely what I wish to contest, not because it
is not real but because it is not all that is really happening
between television and smaller screen media. While the discussions
of the Rapyuta tweet surge tend to assume that people were at home
watching television and tweeting (thus introducing a bias toward
paradigms connecting house and state), I propose to take the
companion screen out of the house and put it in motion. In fact,
the horizontality of social media is commonly associated with the
mobility and personalization of smaller screens. The use of mobile
phones in the context of commuting time thus
-
provides a good site of inquiry. My goal is not, however, to
provide a full sociological account of the use of mobile phones, or
rather, as they are called in Japanese, keitai, a term that Mizuko
Ito glosses as something you carry with, a connotation to which I
have been alluding with the term companion screen. My goal is here
to consider the relation between broadcast television and its
mobile companion, a relation that is more and more frequently
staged or enacted in Japanese animation or anime made for expanded
television (broadcast, DVD, BR, streaming). The Production of
Distribution Mobile phones appear everywhere in Tokyo, but their
presence seems especially palpable on commuter trains, with
commuters thumbing out messages, scrolling through web pages,
lingering on images, reading, watching, sending flows of signs, or
dashing through wickets (Figures 2 and 3). The dominant company in
Japans keitai market is Docomo, formed in 1991 as a subsidiary of
the telecommunications company NTT, which launched its mobile
Internet service in 1999, and whose rapid and widespread adoption
inaugurated a mobile revolution. The rubric Docomo, derived from
the phrase do communications over the mobile network, also means
everywhere, which aptly captures something of the ubiquity of
keitai. In addition, as Mizuko Ito notes, [i]n contrast to the
cellular phone of the United States (defined by technical
infrastructure), and the mobile of the United Kingdom (defined by
the untethering from fixed location), the Japanese term keitai is
not so much about a new technical capability or freedom of motion
but about a snug and intimate technosocial tethering, a personal
device supporting communications that are a constant, lightweight,
and mundane presence in everyday life.7 Still, the distinction
between keitai, mobile phone, and cell phone is not categorical. It
is a matter of contextual emphasis. Indeed, as the example of
Rapyuta attests, when anime stages a relation between television
and keitai, it shifts easily from everydayness to technological
infrastructures and to a sense of mobility and dislocation.
Although keitai are largely used for retrieving information and
sending messages (initially email and now text messaging), they are
integral to a
-
dramatic transformation not only in telecommunications (how,
when, where people communicate) but also in media consumption (how,
when, where people receive, consume, and interact with media forms
ranging from newspapers and magazines to video games, music, manga,
animation, cinema, literature, to name only some obvious forms).
The distinction between communication and media consumption is not
strict insofar as messages include images, links, speech, written
text, and other media types. It is because keitai are personal,
portable, pedestrian, or as Fujimoto Kenichi puts it, like shikhin,
recreational consumer products, or objects of recontextualization,
relocation, and actual media objects,8 that the distinction is not
clear. This is also why keitai invite us to think in terms of
active, personalized, and even productive consumption: such media
objects truly call for user agency, activity, and productivity. The
Rapyuta tweet surge is an obvious case in point. As a consequence,
such media objects can encourage the overall impression of a
decentralized and dehierarchized participatory media world, in
which flows are entirely horizontal, and the agency and
productivity of media users or consumers is on par with that of
media owners and producers.
It is true that market forces and technological innovations have
contributed to decreasing the gap between production and
consumption, commonly articulated in terms of supply and demand, in
a number of domains. The hallmark of Toyotaism, for instance, was
the idea of having a car roll out of the factory personalized to
the buyers taste as soon as the buyer could express her
preferences. A similar logic informs the keen interest of the big
manga publishers in djinshi, in the worlds of amateur or coterie
production they follow coterie production because they wish to
react as swiftly as possible to changing tastes, which means close
attention to what people are doing, what they are making, in their
daily lives as it were. Still, despite the increase in measures
that speed up the rapidity of the response of production to
consumption and vice versa, to the point of blurring the
distinction, there remains an asymmetry or unevenness. It is worth
noting, as Kohiyama Kenji does in the context of keitai, for
instance, that one of the secrets to the success of NTT Docomos
i-mode service was that it already had a national network for
-
packet communications.9 As such, the personalized and the
nationalized are linked as if so naturally and inevitably that any
asymmetry seems to disappear.
When I state the problem in this manner, I may give the
impression that my concern is for separating the personal and the
national, for creating a divide between self and society, or the
individual and the state. Yet, given that a strict separation would
be impossible, something else is at stake: who is asked to sustain
this link, and at what price (physically and psychically as well as
economically)? And what kind of life is it? This is why I begin
with a rather stark contrast between television broadcasting on the
one hand, and horizontal networks, personalization, participatory
culture, and repurposing on the other. I wish to explore the ways
in which everyday practices and experiences not only inhabit such
polarized infrastructural tendencies but also do the work that
makes syncretism possible, to produce a forced assemblage in daily
life. In many areas of Tokyo, when you exit the maze of the metro,
you will see looming on the horizon the very embodiment of another
dimension of media happening alongside the increased flattening and
decentralizing associated with mobile phones and social media
(Figure 4): Tokyo Sky Tree, at six hundred and thirty-four meters
the worlds tallest broadcast tower, completed in 2012, with a
complex of services woven into it, observation decks, restaurants,
train lines, and stores (Figures 5 and 6). Built as part of a major
initiative to phase out analog broadcasting by providing complete
digital terrestrial television (DTT), Tokyo Sky Tree is the very
symbol and enactment of vertical media integration, initiated and
founded by the most powerful television broadcasters, with Nippon
Hs Kykai (NHK) in the lead, working with corporate interests (Tobu
Railway Company, Ltd). As such, it is an integral of the bid to
assure the continued ascendency of NHK and other major media
producers, owners, and distributors, while appealing to national
values, unity and identity. The contrast between Tokyo Sky Tree and
use of mobile media on commuter trains and in the streets implies a
distinction between tendencies toward what might be called vertical
or hierarchical media integration (a tendency more pronounced in
broadcast TV) and horizontal or heterarchical media differentiation
(a tendency more pronounced in mobile social media). Looking at the
relation between television and the keitai companion screen in
-
terms of such tendencies allows for two shifts in emphasis.
First, it highlights the importance of distribution alongside
consumption and production. Accounts of consumption have tended to
stress the productivity and activity of consumers, calling
attention to sites where the distinction between production and
consumption appears to collapse, while distribution and circulation
are downplayed or completely ignored. Such an approach, however
unwittingly, risks adopting the standpoint of the liberal or
neoliberal political economy so roundly critiqued by Marx, because
it acts as if increased circulation or distribution produces
greater economic evenness insofar as it flattens hierarchies. The
hallmark of Marx was to show that, on the contrary, unfettered
circulation increases unevenness. Second, insofar as these
polarized tendencies (vertical hierarchical integration and
horizontal heterarchical differentiation) are associated with
infrastructures, they also invite us to reconsider the intensive
life of infrastructures, and thus the politics of experience.
In one of his rare comments on the impact of communications in
Capital, Marx remarks, A relatively thinly populated country, with
well-developed means of communication, has a denser population than
a more numerously populated country, with badly-developed means of
communication.10 His remark calls attention to a population effect
that is not reducible to population figures, to a headcount. The
measurable magnitude of the population does not determine its
effect. Similarly, measuring the scale of communication networks
will not capture their effect, for the effect is a function of two
variables, distribution of people (populations) and distribution of
signs (communications). The effect then is intensive, not
extensive. There is a relation between population and
communications that makes for an intensity of distribution
(denseness or thinness). In other words, Marx is drawing attention
to something that is (logically speaking) both prior to population
and communication (because common to both) and after them (as an
effect). This is in keeping with Marxs focus on, and critique of,
production, but he is here addressing the production of
distribution. The extensive (population, communication networks)
may be clearly delineated and readily measured, but as soon as it
is, productivity and efficaciousness must then be increased through
intensification. Thus when the workday is fixed, production must be
intensified through cooperation and
-
technological improvement, for instance. Intensification also
happens between these well-delineated measurable extensions, which
might also be called infrastructures.
The intensification that happens between infrastructures may be
conceptualized as a society effect (Althusser), or socius (Deleuze
and Guattari), or the social (Foucault).11 These commentators
remind us that Marx tends to situate production as what happens
between and before different infrastructures, rather than speaking
of the infrastructure. The society effect or socius may thus be
thought of as an overall mode production entailing a forced
assemblage of these specific modes of production. Deleuze and
Guattari, for instance, speak of Marxs interest in three modes of
production: production of production, production of distribution,
and production of consumption, whose forced assemblage generates
the socius. The socius, or the social, is not a bounded expanse
that corresponds point by point with a region, nation, city, or
some other territory. It is a matter of intensity between and
before extensities. We may think of such an intensive social effect
in terms of subjectivity. But care is needed with the term
subjectivity. If the analysis of subjectivity has become less
common in recent years, it is because the term subjectivity has
come to imply an idealist form of psychoanalysis in which the
mechanisms of subject formation appear to be indifferent to
material conditions, as if ideology always preceded materiality. In
the context of considering the lived experience of infrastructures,
then, the challenge lies in considering subjectivity (or the
intensive social effect) not only in terms of molar formations
(codes and ideologies) but also in terms of molecular practices
(lived rhythms and daily activities).12 In sum, Deleuze and
Guattaris variations on Marx call attention to what happens between
infrastructures at two levels, molar formations and molecular
practices. But it is not simply a matter of a neutral mixture of,
say, vertical integration and horizontal differentiation. Instead
there is a forced assemblage that may or may not prove workable or
desirable. The initial example of the Rapyuta tweet surge presented
an apparently happy, workable, highly productive assemblage between
television infrastructures and keitai infrastructures, both at the
molar subjective level (subcultures in agreement with
-
national culture) and molecular affective level (everyday
rhythms of television viewing and tweeting or messaging). In this
instance, tweeting accompanies broadcast television: people sitting
in their living rooms watching TV and sending tweets. Keitai is
indeed like a companion screen here. In fact, everything seems to
pulled toward broadcast television in this instance: Miyazakis
animation Rapyuta, originally a theatrical release, has been
reformatted for expanded television viewing many times, for VHS and
DVD releases and for broadcast, to the point that it has almost
become inseparable from television anime. The tweet surge thus
underscores and mimics the continued power of broadcast television
to integrate diverse media and audiences. Yet there is also the
mobilism of keitai, which feels quite different from broadcast TV.
Keitai seems to lend itself as readily to either tendency: its
infrastructures for wireless reception (towers, satellites, etc)
echo those of broadcast television yet enable forms of mobilism
with very different implications. Thus I propose to turn to
commuting networks to develop further the contrast between two
media infrastructural tendencies. Although I will initially stress
the differences between each infrastructure, my interest ultimately
lies in what is produced between them, and the subjective effects
that then appear to be producing them, through affective feedback.
In sum, the basic task is twofold: to consider the experience or
intensive life of these two infrastructural tendencies (mobilism
and broadcast) and to consider the intensive life that arises
between them. Commuting Time The contrast between the Tokyo
commuter train network and the newest symbol of the dominance of
broadcast television, Tokyo Sky Tree, calls to mind a now familiar
distinction made by Michel de Certeau, between the tower and
labyrinth. The Sky Tree fairly exemplifies de Certeaus
characterization of the towers tendency toward panorama and
spectacle: not only does it offer the ultimate panoramic views of
the city but it also includes a variety of high-end shops and
restaurants, providing a combination of tourist destination,
shopping mall, and consumer spectacle. In contrast, even a glance
at the map of the Tokyo commuter network attests to its
labyrinthine qualities (Figure 7). As Michael
-
Fisch writes, To live in Tokyo is to live on and by the commuter
train network. Its web of interconnecting commuter and subway lines
dominates the urban topography, providing the primary means of
transportation for upward of 20 million commuters a day.13
Fischs account of the commuter network calls attention to
another facet that has traditionally been associated with the
labyrinthine: crowds. As he explains, What makes Tokyos train daiya
[short for traffic diagram] exceptional is the incredible attention
that network operators devote to it as a means of transporting
daily a number of commuters far beyond the infrastructural
capacity. In tangible terms, the latter condition means that a
train car designed for a maximum capacity of 160 people will
typically be crammed with between three and four hundred commuters.
What is more, to accommodate the citys commuters, especially on
main lines, train companies need to stream one train after another
with an absolute minimal gap between them, sometimes as little as
one minute and fifty-eight seconds between trains.14 Precisely
because train lines must run overcapacity, with cars overcrowded
and timetables tightly compressed, the operation of the commuter
network builds in a margin of indeterminacy that builds in quick
responses to fluctuations and disturbances, including suicides,
euphemistically glossed as human accidents. Fischs account thus
traces a shift from thinking the commuter train network as an
active or determinate apparatus to perceiving it as a responsive,
interactive technology.15 The labyrinthine quality of the commuter
network thus differs significantly from the illegible compositions
of everyday life that de Certeau wished to valorize in contrast to
the tower when he wrote: The ordinary practitioners of the city
live down below, below the threshold at which visibility begins.
They walk an elementary form of this experience of the city; they
are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the ups and downs
of an urban text they write without being able to read it. The
networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold
history that has neither author nor spectator.16 The train suicide
is, in effect, a text that is written by commuters, but, if they
cannot read it; the commuter network can, only to erase it as a
fluctuation. Fisch nicely sums up the situation as one in which a
logic of the
-
vanishing gives way to one of emergence. Put otherwise, this
labyrinth becomes a source of fluctuations and modulating
responses. Such fluctuations are not illegible, nor are they
exactly legible as de Certeau imagines legibility: they register as
signatures of nervous energy that fuels an infrastructural system
of modulation. Thomas Looser, Superflat and the Layers of Image and
History in 1990s Japan, in Mechademia 1: Emerging Worlds of Anime
and Manga (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006),
92-101
The Tokyo commuter network thus puts a quintessentially modern
distinction in crisis, for the tower and the labyrinth cannot be
held apart.17 But that distinction is everywhere in crisis: every
labyrinth becomes somehow legible, and conversely every spectacle
seems to afford a labyrinthine structure with wandering,
intersecting, manifold iterations, which nonetheless lead back to a
commodity world as in the case of convergence culture.
Nevertheless, even if the tower and labyrinth no longer appear to
stand apart as they once did, they do not hold together naturally
or spontaneously through some pre-established urban or postmodern
harmony. They still afford distinctive experiences, which happen
within and through different infrastructures, and which must be
forcibly assembled. Rather than a rupture between a modern
condition and a postmodern condition, the example of the commuter
network implies intensification in the forced assemblage of
different infrastructural dimensions of daily life.
Like Fisch, I wish to track the signatures of nervous energy
associated with the commuter network, but from the flipside, from
the side of everyday experience. To Fischs analysis of suicides,
which are posed as obstacles of external limits to the commuting
network that become folded into it, becoming internal limitations
and thus sources of potentialization, I propose to add another kind
of experience: that of the human body in its routine adjustments to
commuting time. Thus I will first focus on the corporeal sensations
associated with commuting, with the goal of understanding a
different kind of different limit-experience, frequently associated
with commuting in anime and manga: apocalypse. Apocalypse is
imagined, however, not as utter annihilation of the world, but as
destruction of daily life that is equally revelation of it. As we
will
-
see, apocalypse tends to happen where the tower is forcibly
assembled with the labyrinth where mobile phones do not merely
bring anonymous horizontal linkages but ordering and programming.
National train lines and the city commuter network are inextricably
intertwined, which allows the Tokyo to mobilize national rail
almost as an extension of its commuter network, with workers even
commuting to work by Shinkansen. Nonetheless the two
infrastructures are different in function and in effect. The
commuter network serves primarily to get workers from home to their
place of work, and by extension, to get students from home to their
schools, and consumers to sites of consumption. As such, while
commuter networks entail a physical link between home and work,
they afford an experience of something that is neither work nor
home, and at the same, feels like both. Commuting time is not
recompensed, and yet if youre commuting long hours in crowded
trains, it certainly feels like work, and in fact, however long or
short your commute, you need to calculate it into your workday or
school day. At the same time, commuting time is less structured and
disciplined than work or school, and even if it is not exactly
leisure, there is a sense of proximity to leisure, echoed in the
advertisements colorfully announcing events, products, and
opportunities at every platform, train, and station, and in the
ubiquitous kiosks selling magazines, candy, snacks, tea, coffee,
and other sundries. Its time to relax, and it also is not. One of
the best-selling kiosk drinks gives you a shot of caffeine, and a
major dose of dietary fiber. Commuters bound for work or school are
already appointed carefully in the appropriate attire, for
instance, suits and uniforms. Students may adopt accessories
forbidden at school, or deliberately skew or shifts aspects of
their uniform. Those bound for home may allow themselves to look
more rumpled and creased, sometimes loosening clothing. Yet
everything conspires to assure that, even if they are not at work,
they are not at home either. As Fisch stresses, commuter trains
generally operate over capacity, and as such they are usually not
merely crowded, but jam packed, which adds another degree of
intensity to this suspension between work and home, or between work
and leisure, making for bodies suspended between tension and
relaxation, like soldiers at ease, in a state of relaxed tension or
tensed relaxation. At the same
-
time, commuting schedules tend to be highly routine, with
commuters using the same train at the same time each day, usually
encountering many of the same people. The dictates of courtesy are
such that you do not address those whom you see on your train day
after day: you acknowledge their presence by not acknowledging it.
Similarly, while overcrowding means you may be pressed tightly,
uncomfortably, against other commuters, the general comportment
assures a sense of contact without contact. Commuting demands above
all tact, that is, ways of touching without contacting, seeing
without recognizing, communicating without speaking. While it may
be tempting to construe such tact in terms of characteristically
Japanese sense of restraint or politesse, such practices address a
more urgent problem in this context, that of preventing commuting
time from becoming a social hell, that is, an infinite play of
social recognition, response, and obligation. In effect, work and
home etiquette are both evoked and suspended in tactfulness, a
combination of physical tension and relaxation, which allows for
commuting time to remain suspended between labor and leisure.
Such tactfulness explains the difficulty in responding to chikan
or gropers, men who exploit the physical proximity afford by
crowded situations to grope young women (Figure 8). It is already
awkward for women to call attention to gropers because in doing so
they call attention to themselves, and the packed situation of the
commuter train heightens this sense of awkwardness: it is as if the
social effect would be rapidly propagated through the surrounding
bodies, destroying tactfulness itself, which would paradoxically
amplify the experience of contact. Thus women often ignore the
violation, taking refuge in the ambiance of tactfulness, in which
contact seems not to be actual contact. Such a response is a cruel
amplification of the general disposition adopted by commuters that
might be described an experience of distance in proximity. It is
not exactly that you ignore your body or retreat into it. There is
a sense of mineness or self (not selfhood) that derives from your
sense of balance and proprioception, of holding yourself together
under conditions of tilting, jostling, swaying and moving, while
becoming impervious to external tactile cues. What is in fact very
close to you is thus placed at a distance, for touch has been
transformed: it comes to operate not as sensation or affection that
places you in
-
direct material contact with your surrounding, but as perception
that constructs an experience of distance between you and what lies
at hand. The tiny insignificant distances between bodies become
experienced as larger significant distances by turning sensation
into perception, contact into tact, skin into eyes and ears. What
arises then at the level of sensation and affect is a more internal
proprioceptive sense of selfness, attuned to its world at the level
of fine corporeal adjustments. Such a molecular experience of the
body also responds to the molar level of experience: to repeat,
this is not exactly leisure, not exactly work, which results in a
mixture of physical tension and relaxation. You may relax only
insofar as you sustain a certain degree of tension, of
self-vigilance. In effect, the molecular