Mechademia 3: Limits of the Human

by Frenchy Lunning

Overview

Dramatic advances in genetics, cloning, robotics, and nanotechnology have given rise to both hopes and fears about how technology might transform humanity. As the possibility of a posthuman future becomes increasingly likely, debates about how to interpret or shape this future abound. In Japan, anime and manga artists have for decades been imagining the contours of posthumanity, creating dazzling and sometimes disturbing works of art that envision a variety of human/nonhuman hybrids: biological/mechanical, human/animal, and human/monster. Anime and manga offer a constellation of posthuman prototypes whose hybrid natures require a shift in our perception of what it means to be human.

Limits of the Human—the third volume in the Mechademia series—maps the terrain of posthumanity using manga and anime as guides and signposts to understand how to think about humanity’s new potentialities and limits. Through a wide range of texts—the folklore-inspired monsters that populate Mizuki Shigeru’s manga; Japan’s Gothic Lolita subculture; Tezuka Osamu’s original cyborg hero, Atom, and his manga version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (along with Ôtomo Katsuhiro’s 2001 anime film adaptation); the robot anime, Gundam; and the notion of the uncanny in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, among others—the essays in this volume reject simple human/nonhuman dichotomies and instead encourage a provocative rethinking of the definitions of humanity along entirely unexpected frontiers.

Contributors: William L. Benzon, Lawrence Bird, Christopher Bolton, Steven T. Brown, Joshua Paul Dale, Michael Dylan Foster, Crispin Freeman, Marc Hairston, Paul Jackson, Thomas LaMarre, Antonia Levi, Margherita Long, Laura Miller, Hajime Nakatani, Susan Napier, Natsume Fusanosuke, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Ôtsuka Eiji, Adèle-Elise Prévost and MUSEbasement; Teri Silvio, Takayuki Tatsumi, Mark C. Taylor, Theresa Winge, Cary Wolfe, Wendy Siuyi Wong, and Yomota Inuhiko.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816654826
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	11/05/2008
Series:	Mechademia , #3
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.80(d)

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Mechademia 3

Limits of the Human

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By Frenchy Lunning

University of Minnesota Press

Copyright © 2008 Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8166-5482-6

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CHAPTER 1

Refiguring the Human

MARK C. TAYLOR

We are always already posthuman. The human is never separate and closed in on itself but is always implicated in open systems and structures that expose it to dimensions of alterity that disrupt stability and displace identity. Recent developments in media and networking technologies as well as bioinformatics disclose the inadequacies of taxonomic schemata that have long been used to define the human by distinguishing it from that which appears to be other.

Self/World
Human/Nonhuman
Organism/Machine
Culture/Nature
Information/Noise
Negentropy/Entropy

Far from exclusive opposites, these binaries are coemergent and codependent: each presupposes the other and neither can be itself apart from the other. When fully elaborated and deployed, structures of codependence form complex adaptive networks in which the reciprocal relations issue in co-evolutionary processes that perpetually figure, disfigure, and refigure every identity that seems to be secure (see Figure 1).

The interplay of nature, society, culture, and technology forms the shifty matrix within which reality as we know it is constituted.

All such relational webs have the following characteristics.

1. They are composed of many codependent parts connected in multiple and changing ways.

2. They display spontaneous self-organization, which occurs within parameters of constraint that leave space for the aleatory.

3. The structures resulting from spontaneous self-organization emerge from but are not necessarily reducible to the interactivity of the components in the system.

4. Self-organizing structures are open and, therefore, are able to adapt and coevolve with other structures.

5. As connectivity increases, networks become more complex and move toward a tipping where a discontinuous phase shift occurs.

It is important to stress three important points in this context. First, the structure of these networks is fractal; that is to say, they display the same structure at every level of organization. Since networks are always networks composed of other networks, there is no underlying or overarching meta-network. Second, networks are isomorphic across media. Natural, cultural, social, and technological networks have the same structure and operational logic. Third, and finally, networks are self-organizing — order emerges from within and is not imposed from without. Within the ever-changing web of relations, nothing is fixed or permanent. Patterns are transient, and survival depends on adaptivity to fitness landscapes that are themselves subject to coevolutionary pressures.

The currency of exchange in complex adaptive networks is information. In their 1949 groundbreaking book The Mathematical Theory of Information, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver develop a notion of information that differs significantly from the common sense of the term. "The word information, in this theory," Weaver explains, "must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning." Meaning arises at a different level of organization. Information, in the strict sense of the term, is inversely proportional to probability: the more probable, the less information; the less probable, the more information. Gregory Bateson offers a concise definition of information when he claims: "information is a difference that makes a difference." The domain of information lies between too little and too much difference. On the one hand, information is a difference and, therefore, in the absence of difference there is no information. On the other hand, information is a difference that makes a difference. Not all differences make a difference because some differences are indifferent and hence inconsequential. Both too little and too much difference creates noise. Always articulated between a condition of undifferentiation and indifferent differentiation, information emerges along the two-sided edge of chaos. The articulation of difference brings about the emergence of pattern from noise. Information and noise are not merely opposites but coemerge and, therefore, are codependent: information is noise in formation. Noise, by contrast, interrupts or interferes with informative patterns. When understood in this way, information stabilizes noise and noise destabilizes information. This process of destabilization is not, however, merely negative, because it provides the occasion for the emergence of new informative patterns.

Insofar as complex adaptive networks are isomorphic across media, information processes are not limited to either computer and media networks or mental and cultural activities but are distributed throughout all natural and social systems. Biological and chemical as well political and economic processes are, for example, distributed information processes, which have the same structure and functionality as cognitive processes. The isomorphism of these processes is the condition of the possibility of their interoperability. Borders are not fixed, membranes are permeable, and lines that once seemed precise become fuzzy. As opposition gives way to relation, self and other fold into each other in such a way that social and natural worlds come to self-consciousness in and through human awareness, and human consciousness and self-consciousness are realized in and through natural and social processes. The play of differences that make a difference is the infinite process of emergent creativity in which everything arises and passes away.

CHAPTER 2

The Otherworlds of Mizuki Shigeru

MICHAEL DYLAN FOSTER

Shape-shifting foxes, tengu mountain goblins, ITLκITL water spirits, and a panoply of other fantastic beings have long haunted the Japanese cultural imaginary. In contemporary discourse, such creatures are generally labeled "yokai," a word variously understood as monster, spirit, goblin, ghost, demon, phantom, specter, supernatural creature, lower-order deity, or more amorphously as any unexplainable experience or numinous occurrence. Such weird and mysterious things emerge ambiguously at the intersection of the everyday and extraordinary, the real and the imaginary, questioning the borders of the human, and challenging the way we order the world around us. Despite its historical longevity, the notion of yokai is neither monolithic nor transcendent; rather, as has been said of the "monster" in the West, the yokai "is an embodiment of a certain cultural moment — of a time, a feeling, and a place." That is to say, the meaning of yokai is always changing — shape-shifting, as it were — to reflect the episteme of the particular time and place. By interrogating this meaning we uncover some of the hidden philosophies and unconscious ideologies of the given historical moment.

In the following pages, I focus on some of the yokai images created by manga/anime artist Mizuki Shigeru (b. 1922), whose work has shaped themeaning and function of yokai within the popular imagination of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Japan. Mizuki's anime and manga are familiar to nearly every Japanese who grew up watching television or reading manga since the late 1960s, and today he continues to make an impact on a whole new generation: in April 2007, a live-action movie based on his Gegege no Kitaro (Spooky Kitaro) series opened in theaters nationwide, the latest filmmaking venture in a list that also includes the 2005 blockbuster The Great Yokai War (Yokai daisenso) directed by Miike Takashi.

Here I would like to treat not only Mizuki's anime and manga but also some of his writing in other genres. Mizuki researches and writes extensively on yokai and has published numerous illustrated yokai catalogs that recall the Edo-period bestiaries of two hundred years ago. He has also penned several personal memoirs, some recounting his experiences during the Pacific War and his role as a sort of accidental ethnographer of the people he came in contact with in the South Pacific. In all of these writings — memoirs, yokai encyclopedias, and anime and manga like Gegege no Kitaro — we find similar strains of nostalgic longing for a purer, more authentic world. And as Mizuki's personal history becomes metonymic of the Japanese postwar experience, both he and the yokai he describes and produces are implicated in the formation of Japan's identity as a nation.

YOKAI DISCOURSES

In order to grasp Mizuki's place within the cultural imagination of postwar Japan, it is important to know something about his precursors in the discursive history of yokai since the Edo period (ca. 1600–1868). One of these key figures is Toriyama Sekien (1712–1788), a yokai cataloger whose work emblemizes Edo consciousness with regard to fantastic creatures. Between 1776 and 1784, Toriyama produced four sets of illustrated bestiaries that collectively document over two hundred different yokai. These texts represent the coalescence of two modes of expression that were particularly prominent during this period: the encyclopedic and the ludic. The encyclopedic entails processes of collecting, labeling, and cataloging that were influenced by neo-Confucian ideas and led to the publication of numerous natural history texts, pharmacopoeias, and encyclopedias. The ludic mode, on the other hand, denotes a sensibility that values recreation and play, and was manifest in such practices as comic versification (kyoka and senryu) and the spooky tale-telling sessions known as hyaku monogatari. Sekien's yokai catalogs creatively combined the encyclopedic and the ludic modes of expression: each page featured an illustration of a particular yokai, often complete with description just like a natural history text; at the same time, however, the accompanying text and often the illustration itself contained lively word and image play. That is to say, Sekien may have been cataloging yokai, but he and his readers were having fun in the process. In fact, it is likely that Sekien, while clearly knowledgeable about traditional yokai beliefs, was not at all averse to inventing his own creatures to add to the panoply.

Sekien never explicitly questioned the ontological veracity of yokai. During the Meiji period (1868–1912), however, the importation of Western scientific principles inspired bunmei kaika (civilization-and-enlightenment) ideologues to actively interrogate the supernatural and debunk phenomena like yokai. In particular, philosopher and educator Inoue Enryo (1858–1919) created the discipline of yokaigaku(yokaiology) with a specific objective: to rationally explain away supernatural beliefs so that Japan could become a modern nation-state. To this end, Enryo collected volumes of data on yokai-related folk beliefs from around Japan and developed an analytical framework to categorize yokai and systematically filter out "superstitions" from what he defined as "true mystery."

In the early twentieth century, Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) appropriated yokai for his own burgeoning discipline of folklore studies or native ethnology (minzokugaku). One of modern Japan's most influential thinkers, Yanagita did not debunk yokai as superstitions but rather set out to collect and preserve them as disappearing relics of earlier belief systems. One result of this process was "Yokai meii" (Yokai glossary); published over several months between 1938 and 1939, this short text lists and describes yokai from around Japan, with information culled from a variety of local gazetteers and folklore collections. For Yanagita and his followers, the collecting of yokai represented a recognition of their value as cultural commodities evocative of an idealized past. Classifying yokai may have been a way to demarcate an "authentic" Japan, but it also converted them into lifeless historical relics, fossilized specimens from another time. In a sense, yokai were shorn of their living mystery, remaining only as weird premodern forms stored in the folkloric archives of the modern nation.

Although many other voices participated in the discourse of yokai from the Edo period to the present, Sekien's catalogs, Enryo's yokaigaku, and Yanagita's folkloristics are paradigmatic of shifting historical attitudes toward weird and mysterious phenomena. By the time Mizuki Shigeru arrives on the scene, yokai are generally conceived of as nostalgic icons from a purer, more authentic, prewar — if not pre-Meiji — Japan. They are interesting artifacts, to be sure, but ultimately empty and irrelevant to urban and suburban life in modern Japan. Starting in the 1960s, Mizuki would almost single-handedly revitalize the image of yokai in the popular imagination, breathing life into their weird forms so that they would once again playfully enchant children and adults alike, but at the same time retain their nostalgic association with an earlier Japan.

MIZUKI-SAN AND KITARO

In many ways the yokai phenomenon comes full circle with Mizuki's yokai catalogs and fictions: like Sekien, he exploits the popular media of his time while also carefully treading the line between ludic (commercial) endeavors and the encyclopedic mode. Of course, the Sekien-Mizuki comparison can only be taken so far, as the radically different historical contexts of the eighteenth and late twentieth centuries endow their yokai with distinct functions and meanings. But one thing is clear: by their promulgation through a variety of media, Mizuki's images and narratives are very much a part of the popular imagination of Japanese children and adults today.

One character who appears frequently in Mizuki's manga is a somewhat comical-looking, bespectacled man who represents the illustrator himself. By inserting this self-deprecating image of himself (often referred to as "Mizuki-san") into his own narratives, Mizuki infuses them with a light-hearted self-referentiality and also contributes to a biographical narrative that has come to be as much a part of his personal mystique as the yokai world he illustrates. Adding to the autobiographical material in his manga and anime, Mizuki has also described himself in a popular series of memoirs detailing his childhood in a country village and his experiences as a soldier during World War II. Together, these texts have created a persona that is intimately linked with the nostalgic image of yokai and Japan's rural past.

Born Mura Shigeru in 1922, Mizuki grew up in the rural village of Sakaiminato in Tottori prefecture. Although his own memoirs (and biographical blurbs on his books) often identify his place of birth as Sakaiminato, apparently he was actually born in Osaka, where his father was employed, returning to Sakaiminato with his mother one month after his birth. This rewriting of his birthplace from a major urban center to a small rural community is a minor point to be sure, but it underscores Mizuki's self-inscription as a person with authentic roots in the yokai-infested countryside. (In the mid-1990s, this association became inscribed in the landscape of Sakaiminato with the creation of "Mizuki Shigeru Road," a street festooned with over one hundred bronze statues modeled on Mizuki's yokai.) During the war, Mizuki saw combat near Rabaul in Papua New Guinea, where he suffered the loss of his left arm. After returning to Japan, he studied at Musashino Art School and worked as an illustrator for kami shibai (picture-card shows) and kashi hon manga, cheaply produced manga that could be borrowed for a small price at shops throughout Japan.

Mizuki first garnered critical acclaim and popular success with his 1965 manga "Terebi-kun" (Television boy), which received the Sixth Kodansha Jido Manga Award. The narrative tells of a boy, Terebi-kun, who can enter into a television set and participate in the world beyond the screen. Appropriately for a period of rapid economic growth, Terebikun's television incursions seem limited to commercials for new products — from ice cream to bicycles — which he is able to acquire before they appear on the market. He does not use his special skills for personal gain, however: he gives many of the objects he acquires to a classmate whose family is too poor even to own a television set. He then disappears for parts unknown, traveling with his portable "transistor" television and providing newly marketed products to needy children throughout Japan.

Although "Terebi-kun" does not concern yokai explicitly, it plays with the notion of another world that interacts with our everyday existence, while also highlighting the intensely commercial nature of the medium. The program captured the tenor of the times with regard to the mystifying new phenomenon of television, and Mizuki's own continued success was tied to the rapidly developing TV industry: in 1968, his manga Gegege no Kitaro was made into a black-and-white animated television series. Subsequent series, in color, ran 1971–72, 1985–88, and 1996–98, with numerous reruns, and a new version starting in 2007. The Gegege no Kitaro narratives concern the adventures of a yokai named Kitaro and his cohort of yokai characters. The progeny of a ghost family, Kitaro looks like a normal boy but for a shock of hair covering his left eye. His name, written with the character for demon (oni), might be translated as "demon-boy," a not-so-subtle reminder of his monstrous origins. As if to compensate for the missing left eye, another character, Medama-oyaji (Papa eyeball), represents the remains of Kitaro's dead father. Portrayed as a small disembodied eyeball with arms and legs and voice, Medama-oyaji serves as Kitaro's protective familiar and can often be found sitting atop his head or shoulder, proffering advice (see Figure 1).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface: The Limits of the Human FRENCHY LUNNING,
Introduction: The Limits of "The Limits of the Human" CHRISTOPHER BOLTON,
Contours — Around the Human,
Companions — With the Human,
Compossibles — Of the Human,
Review and Commentary,
Contributors,
Call for Papers,