Machine Narratives and Database Animals

Hiroki Azuma argues in his book “Japan’s Database Animals” that the grand narratives of modernism were replaced, first by multiple small fictions of postmodernism, and more recently by attractive character elements (moe) that emerge from and relate to a database. He calls this process animalization as it constitutes a kind of compulsive affective grazing that does not require or even encourage the construction of narrative. He relates the relative social/political isolation of otaku as a symptom of this animalization.

Partially agreeing with Azuma, and, like him, rejecting a Lacanian model of subject construction in favor of one based on information systems, Thomas Lamarre argues that the database or “distributive field” is not an “infinitely symmetrical material structure without horizon or limits. Material limits emerge in the form of attractors and they emerge with affectively linked cooperators.” The distributive field does not generate subjective asymmetries. Rather it generates affective asymmetries, which, if reinforced over time, can become subjective positions/asymmetries. Or put in the language of Felix Guattari: “Machine is ontologically prior to structure and the subjective asymmetries that may come to inhabit the field.”


If we concur with Lamarre’s idea of subject position emerging from the distributive field (as opposed to being imposed from without) then we see that the distributive field, in so far as it is asymmetrical, is necessarily political. (That is not to say that asymmetries arise in an entirely predictable way. Because they are emergent, the sum is necessarily more than its parts.) I would argue that Azuma’s database animal is the end-position of the human subject in a late-capitalist system. With the bankrupting of the narratives that support the dominant political and economic structures, all that remains is the mechanism for empty/meaningless repetitive consumption, emotional lollipops devoid of historical or even grand fictional flavor.


For Lamarre, the move from grand narrative to database/moe elements does not necessitate the end of narrative, rather, storytelling “is a function that appears upon the distributive field which builds on the emergence of attractor-cooperator asymmetries and tends to settle on characters.” With manga’s exploded view of perception and affect, and action spread across pages, it is the character function that allows for a controlled explosion of the action image. Lamarre relates character to embodiment in the visual realm or form. This is critical, I think, because although the compulsion to construct an ontologically consistent subject position is subverted in limited anime and manga, the embodiment of the viewer remains. Material limits –physical, psychic, political, economic and cultural will determine the asymmetries that exist in the database at any given time. Moreover, attractors connected to the body have a gravitational pull that is difficult to overcome, though not impossible. Illness and pain usually have the effect of constricting the distributive field. In extreme pain, there is nothing but the experience of pain.


In relating otaku obsessions with various moe elements, Azuma is astute to point out that “the desire to remain with a transitional object in PERMANENT transition is precisely realm of perversion.” Perversion as such exists because the Law, which it defies, is acknowledged. Practiced within a social group or privately, it is a form of resistance to the Law. In the database model, reinforcement of multiple lines of sight including narrative, through which other asymmetries emerge, creates transitional or multiple subjects as opposed to fixed, singular, Cartesian subject positions.
It is unsurprising then, that manga and limited anime disrupt the most important of Capitalist/Lacanian subject positions/power relations—that of gender. The anime version of The Rose of Versailles (manga by Ikeda Riyoko, 1972) is perhaps the earliest example. Here, we see Oskar, the beautiful captain of the Queen’s Guard, raised as a man but clearly female, announcing her decision to join the Revolution and to remain with her husband, a fellow soldier.


The phallacy of the Lacanian/capitalist subject position is that the experience of lack is based upon the possibility of and desire for a fully constituted subject. If the idea of wholeness, completeness, that is to say selfhood and self-ownership is abandoned, then what was previously experienced as lack is experienced as ecstatic excess, not too little, but too much. The phallus turned inside out is a space, both receptive and generative. The truth is that an ontologically consistent subject is only one possible asymmetry among many. A viewer-retriever of information follows a sight line that depends on his or her own attraction. If the consistency of a line of sight is maintained, a traditional gendered object/subject may emerge, but this is also not necessary. For Lamarre, “asymmetry begins to implicate perception and imply emergent positions which hover between a viewing position (subject) and sheer delight, terror, disgust, or lust (affect).”



If I analyze my own hybrid media writing in terms of the Azuma/Lamarre database/distributive field model, it’s clear that I am interested in creating a non-random distributive field of information containing an attractor called a story. My predilection for using melodrama and genre codes makes this line of sight apparent while at the same time positing it in an exploded field of information elements. “Reading” the novel, the viewer experiences not lack, but an excess of information (this, in part, because I use an open system of collaboration, in the case of Mayakovsky through links rather than embedded information, and in Queerskins through appropriating objects from virtual communities Youtube and Flickr. ) Just as the filmmaker uses editing to overcome the partial/lacking view provided by the frame, the viewer/reader sews together fragments of text, image and sound-- suturing becomes overt and the spaces between them apparent. Thus, the process allows the viewer to perceive the limits of perception related to embodiment and to his or her own desired subjecthood. In constructing a narrative whole (or not) the viewer becomes aware of his or her decision to pursue certain asymmetries. Continuities of form and action is replaced by multiple possible asymmetries created through resonance, iteration, affinities of affect, media form, character, action, and rhythm (time) which can be followed, or not, according to the reader’s own desires/limitations.

Reading: Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals
Thomas LaMarre, The Anime Machine

Perversion--with a cherry on top

“Structurally, perversion such as I have delineated for you on the imaginary plane,
can only be sustained with a precarious status which, at every moment is contested, from within, for the subject. It is always fragile, at the mercy of an inversion…The fundamental uncertainty of the perverse relation, the fact that it can find no way of becoming grounded in any satisfying action, makes up one aspect of the drama of homosexuality.” Jacques Lacan

I want to suggest that my project to live online as a young gay man is profoundly perverse, it doubles so many losses that within a phallocentric economy, it can only be understood as a form of masochism.

BUT...

the fact is that I do not experience this as masochistic, for I see my double identity as a performative feminist act that questions the very idea that feminine identity is formed through a masquerade that serves heterosexual male desire. I do not deny that this play is an act of radical self destabilization which, if one remains within the dominant hetero male symbolic realm can only be read as a loss of self that is tantamount to castration. But, I think that outside of this system, it is possible to experience loss differently, as a kind of excess, an ecstatic remainder, the piece(s) which can not be incorporated into a whole (because the whole is imaginary.) As in the meditations performed by the beguine mystics this fluidity of identity is experienced as divine.


This doubling of surfaces--the persona of the male homosexual that overlays, but does not replace the female is not a disavowal of castration nor a fetishized femininized male identity but an active rebellion that destabilizes phallocentric structure itself.

When nothing remains...nothing but skin and bones, when bones appear to be nothing...nothing but layers of skin, what once was called "reality" becomes not only unbearably light but impossibly thin. At this point...in this point, the boy is deprived of its substance and appears on the verge of disappearing. The missing body sets in motion the detective story ---in all its (dis)guises. Mark C. Taylor, Hiding

In Irigaray's terminology, I am performing a mimetic act of strategic essentialism, for, "if women's bodies are viewed as multiple and dispersed, women should speak from that position in a playful way that suggests that this view stems from a masculine economy that values identity and unity (e.g. the penis or the Phallus) and excludes women as the other (e.g. lack, dispersed, or "nothing to see"). http://www.iep.utm.edu/i/irigaray.htm

In other words in my world, this “No” is not the threat of the law, in the name of the father, it is the “No” that itself denies a transcendental signification and in doing so, provides a site for embracing other ways of being and communication with an other.

Thus, with Sebastian, I want to create a inner experience that transcribes "loss" and "abjection," into something creative and sacred. If I can do this, it is possible that, Sebastian's own abjection, his act of radical forgiveness (in the face of a brutal beating) which is the central action in the novel, can be read not as act of self-loathing, but as an expression of a divine love: either a compassion for all others (even those that hate) or as love for God (love of the divine.)

How can I transmute a personal mystical experience into something that communicates? How to communicate with all these unknown others. It will require a move from the imaginary to writing much like that attempted by Georges Bataille.


I will not talk about language as fetish because to do so can only bring me back into the economy I am rejecting. Rather, I see Sebastian as a form of poetry. Poetic language resists fetishization through its instability and generosity. In other words, poetry mimics, in material form, the immaterial state of consciousness I am trying to achieve.

Bataille however is not confident that poetry can achieve his aim. He says, "I fear courting poetry. Poetry is a drawn arrow. If I have aimed well, what counts, what I want--is neither the arrow nor the target (but)the moment when the arrow is lost, dissolves into the air of the night, until the memory of the arrow is lost."

Of course, in true Bataillean fashion, he opts to use a metaphor to describe his rejection of poetry. Bataille understands that the moment of (self) negation is a silent moment, it can not speak itself. For this, it requires the resurrection of the body and identity, memory and language.

Thus, "as the site of endless deferral and difference, writing contains asceticism without capitulating to idealistic totalization and the effacement of history. Yet as a present trace through which communication occurs, writing engenders community without necessitating the fetishization of the other." Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy


Moreover, I see Bataille's writing as an early form of hybrid media, one that, anticipates the disembodied world of online presence. "Bataille’s textually generated, always moving, desirous, anguished and annihilated subjectivity replaces the lacerated body as the site of communication, suffering, desire, and identification.” Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy

Bataille, however, (perhaps because he identifies himself as a hetero male and, thus, has more to lose,) continues to revisit a site of trauma that presupposes the transcendental whole. He seems to forget that pain as it is lived is experienced not as trauma, but as pure sensation. It is only when the cognitive consciousness begins telling its stories, connecting that sensation with objects and events and thoughts of past, present, and future, that is, when it is re-inscribed in the body, in time and space, that trauma as such occurs. But, the site of trauma is also the site of "communication, suffering, desire and identification" in other words, it is the site of compassion and identification with the other. (It is emphatically not abstract or dehistorized like Bataille's Chinese torture victim is).


The next post will discuss the work of Derek Jarman whose work, like Battaille's, employs (an) imagistic, non-linear way of working…(that)… disrupts the hierarchies of both medium and narrative and, in doing so, refuses patriarchal logic.” Chrissie Iles, "Derek Jarman" for Serpentine Gallery, London.

This clip from Sebastiane, Jarman's first feature length film demonstrates his creative achievement. The most striking thing about this scene is the radical equality of the beautiful lovers and their lovemaking. Watching it, I suddenly understood that not only was it impossible for such a scene to be filmed between a man and a woman, but that other possible structures for viewing/touching/loving (an)other can and should be sought.

Reading:
Jacques Lacan Seminar XX
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman
Mark C. Taylor Hiding
Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History
Chrissie Iles, Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty
Georges Bataille, Guilty