Welcome to the NHK

If you have this series on dvd Derridata, could you pl spin it my way at our next meeting? At this rate I'll have to sign up to Twitter! (lol!) Looks like just what I need when trying to also track down Richard Calder's Dead Girls i.e. obvious parallel themes of male protagonists falling victim to their technologically mediated consumption habits which are facilitated by a kind of "pornocracy" (c.f Videodrome).



And yes, of course, there is plenty of scope for feminist critique of Calder, as well as by queer theorists, who fault him for only considering the consequences for heterosexual characters (check the listed reference on Wikipedia). Notwithstanding such critical remarks, the process of being swallowed by this desire for consumption is interesting in terms of how Calder consciously draws parallels with vampirism (Rob Latham comments on this in his study of vampirism and the consumption of youth culture).

Returning to Welcome to NHK for the moment though, this next scene is an outrageous, surreal mixture of horror and humor, which might possibly be used to illustrate Kellner and Best's point that, "Paradoxically, today we find the atrophy of the senses in their hypertrophic extension throughout the sensorium of the spectacle and its images and commodity empires":



This "paradoxical effect" also seems comparable to the theme of vampirism Calder explores, as described by Latham.

In any case, Derridata, if you can find a way to incorporate this into one of your Japanese popular culture seminars, without violating copyright or offending community standards too much, please do so: it is guaranteed to generate a strong reaction from your students! Let me know if it eventuates, although I realise it's probably just wishful thinking on my part.

Techno-mysticism & death in space

Not sure if the "space archaeology" blog has kept abreast of the development of Promession (be surprised if it hadn't). I would expect though that the archaeological remit of that blog would not be particularly receptive to an analysis that could string together religion, mysticism, and technology. I'm not going to couch my discussion in terms of naturalist transmigration theory either. My sympathies are more with the theme of "haunted media" explored by various works of science fiction, which can be found by anyone who cares to perform even a cursory search on Japanese anime (or "J-Horror" for that matter) and "ghosts" (and then trace through the influence on the obvious example from Hollywood i.e. The Matrix).

But I'm not just talking about science fiction and/or Japan: I was happy to interview Steve Fuller about his latest book because it reminds us that [for many people] biology is intrinsically part of the Great Chain of Being- Fuller's characterisation of religiously inclined scientists is echoed by Toshiya Ueno's description of certain philosophers:

That is to say, God, for Feuerbach and other philosophers, was a

center or a nodal point of human relationships (or of a network). 

This is no exaggeration. Historically speaking, religions and mysticism 

have always functioned as informational networks and, indeed, have been media, 

itself. This is clear in the etymological argument that the word "medium" 

originally meant shaman. Of course, as you know, the shaman is always a mediator

 between God (or a transcendent being) and human (or an objectal being). The issues

 of religion, mysticism, fetishism, and so on necessarily bring us face to face 

with the problematics of the spectacle, the spectre, and the mediator. 

Sol Yurick, who is a novelist and critic, argues and analyses these problematics 

in his influential book _Metatron_. (I'm the translator of the Japanese edition of

 this book.) He writes: "Modern capitalism is a great factory for the production of

 angels....The Catholic Church is a communicating organism with an apparatus of

 switches and relays and a communicating language for the input of prayers through

 a churchly switchboard up to Heaven and outputs returned to the supplicant."

Permit me to briefly illustrate these problematiques with a few more sci-fi references. I was thinking of 2001: A Space Odyssey in terms of this more expansive technological sense of a medium, when I happened across Gary Westfahl's Islands in the Sky: The Space Station Theme in Science Fiction. Chapter Five considers "Space Stations as Haunted Houses", which could be construed as a warning about the mysticism and fetishism associated with "the problematics of the spectacle" Ueno refers to. I can think of another example: Alien 3, at least in the unfilmed Vincent Ward version, offered another reminder in its portrayal of a religious community living on a space station, who are in turn decimated by the xenomorph's arrival. In that case, the irony had to do with how the ascetism of the monks prevented them from understanding the true nature of the peril they faced (in spite of how they are in effect living a highly technologically mediated existence-- a space station-- based on an illusion of simplicity; kind of like Brian Aldiss' Non-Stop). So, they too could have benefited from Ueno's paper, which advocates a "bio-morphism", to acknowledge how:

the situation in media (sub)culture, or in any social

terrain, always has been (or will be) "under construction". It is urgent

 that we find the symptoms of "under construction" for our situation, because

 for us,both techno-mysticism and media tribes can become medicine and poison

 at the same time (as pharmakon). It is a"gift" to  us that they will be able 

to become the basis for conservative ideology or critical thought. 

I imagine that more of these conversations will take place over time. Of course, it is too early yet to guess the full ramifications for new technologies such as Promession. We don't know whether it will ever become an ongoing concern. But if we are obliged to face up to it as part of what it means to be ecologically responsible, I'm hopeful this "gift" will remain permanently "under construction" in the manner Ueno recommends. Promession could clearly be used on an everyday basis here on Earth, so we shouldn't get too distracted about what it could mean for social relationships in the comparatively rarefied environment of space stations. Irrespective of the setting, any focus on the logistics of simple "waste" disposal can never hide "the inconvenient truth" of haunted media. One need only consider how spiritualism was a utopian response to the electronic powers presented by telegraphy and how radio, in the twentieth century, came to be regarded as a way of connecting to a more atomized vision of the afterlife. Jeffrey Sconce has discussed how the rise of postmodern media criticism is yet another occult fiction of electronic presence, a mythology that continues to dominate contemporary debates over television, cyberspace, virtual reality, and the Internet. It seems possible then that biotechnology will be added to this list in the 21st Century, with "life management" techniques such as Promession becoming central to debates about transcendence through transmission: a metaphysical preoccupation with the boundaries of space and time as the meaning of life and death continues to change. This picture will become more complicated should the technologies to facilitate transhumanism ever become more readily available. So these are some of the issues that will continue to haunt our technologically mediated life cycle long into the future.....

The New Naturalism

What you post here about the video installations got me reflecting back on some of the Taiwanese scholars/artists I've worked with (writing promos for their exhibitions, rewriting academic journal articles, dissertations etc). Mostly what I've found though is an attentiveness to "invented traditions", such as, for example, digitising a famous old painting such as City of Cathay with a view to acquainting a younger generation with its significance through a medium they are more interested and familiar with (which entails giving them avatars so they can walk around in the painting, as it were).

Perhaps your posts are closer in some respects then to Thailand's "Pink Man", which has appeared on this blog. It got me thinking more about the characterisation of a "new naturalism" allegedly permeating contemporary pop culture. I don't mean this in the sense that the Taiwanese works are exemplary of that, but rather how to go about setting a more appropriate context for reading them. I think it's tricky because the Jumpcut article in question is lumping together a number of American programs to buttress its case, but we know that if they are read as a commodity form then this implies a certain serial process of translating difference into equivalency. Those bloggers who talk about "capitalist realism" and the Jumpcut author's thesis of "the new naturalism" would probably converge on this basic point. But how much explanatory power does it have when you consider something like the globalisation of anime culture? Is it simply the embodiment of a Manichean world view or is it irreducible to the tropes of disenchantment presupposed by such an assessment? So I know you have published on anime of course already, but how about that (i.e. the applicability of "the new naturalism" to anime) as the topic of a collaboration? Afterall, there is another tradition which acknowledges how a "turn to the East" [sic] has often served as a tonic of re-enchantment for an exhausted, "nihilistic", Occidental rationality.

The other reason I raise this with you is as a pretext for justifying my guilty pleasures of late, which have been keeping me, along with other stuff I've been doing, away from blogging. I've been watching a bunch of Adult Swim American animation on DVD, and I am stunned by not only the animation techniques themselves, but the quick fire darkly satirical style, which might possibly be described as the "New Naturalism".

For example, I am amazed to watch something such as Metalocalypse, which depicts a black metal band who are so commercially successful that they generate profits larger than the economies of some small Scandinavian countries. There is a surreal juxtaposition in the program between their public image as demi-gods, intermediaries in the Great Chain of Being, and their everyday banality. In one episode, for example, the band stage a concert promotion for a brand of coffee on an epic scale; inviting hardcore fans to a remote location, some of whom carry injuries as a result of the previous concerts they have attended. As night falls, the tribe gather on the plain on a mountain top: the band's military style helicopter drops an enormous cube, which misses its intended target- crushing to death some fans and mutilating others. The sides of the cube fall away to reveal a stage- the band had descended from the heavens like gods from a machine- and so the concert begins, to rapturous applause. Apparently the worship of the commodity form disguises itself as a form of re-enchantment, substituting "rock stars" as its followers subsist in increasingly feudal conditions (as opposed to the representation of spirits in contemporary anime?). Or rather, to quote Matt Stahl:

"The contemporary popular musical performer - as author - embodies a robust form of the labor theory of property as it is codified in copyright law and fixed in the popular imagination. This represents not so much a special creative achievement of authors, or a qualitative difference in the form their labor takes from those of others, but rather their ability to preserve themselves, through fortuitous alignments and alliances with capital and the state, from conditions of appropriation endured by the vast majority of working people in capitalism, conditions that Jason Read has identified as the ongoing process of what Marx's translators call the 'primitive accumulation' of capital".

Yes, I'm interested in how "primitive accumulation" works in conjunction with "the new naturalism", but am just wondering how we might qualify its global representations? Similar questions prompt some other reading I've been doing to follow up on my earlier "Heathen Harvests" post, which can be made more vivid by inclusion of video clips, but alas this post is already taking longer than I had planned, so I have to turn my attention to more pressing matters. Here then is the definition of "the new naturalism" I'm interrogating:

"In this manner, shows like BSG, Enterprise, The Sopranos, Deadwood, and 24, among others, can be called a new genre, the New Naturalism, one marked by a kind of violent ambivalence. In the New Naturalism, no guiding moral tone is taken about dubious characters whose actions grow increasingly suspect. Without a guiding moral tone — which represents, in addition to a potential naiveté or sentimentalism, a courageous decision to put one’s values out there — the series can maintain a detached, neo-Naturalistic outlook on its characters. But as the New Naturalism shows evince, this detachment can be duplicitous and serve as a cover for a highly cynical desire to offer an unremittingly pessimistic social view. Much more troublingly, it can be a deeply hypocritical stance, one that purports to be objective but actually is much more idiosyncratically and commercially driven. These days, despair sells. Watching any number of reality series or fictional ones in the New Naturalism vein, we see people and scripted characters writhe in torment and humiliation. We see human nature at its most “raw,” its most “willful,” in its most “natural” state. This is no less a construction and a fantasy than Star Trek’s prevailing utopian future of peaceful, cooperative humanity. It’s just the cynical and no less adamantly maintained alternative to utopian optimism".

For now I can leave it to Killface to serve as the spokesperson for the New Naturalism...

Toshiya Ueno

Just by way of a quick follow up on my earlier posting on Roger Griffin, palingenesis and electronic music, I've kept pushing, trying to find alternatives to the theory of collective efforvescence broached in that post, as I always try to get some sense of how multifaceted an issue is before I make up my mind of how to conceptualise it. In this interview, Toshiya Ueno criticises the reliance by other scholars on communitas, Victor Turner and so forth. I'd only come at the work of this Japanese techno critic previously through a more indirect route, as he contributes a chapter to Aliens R Us called 'Japanimation:Techno-Orientalism, Media Tribes and Rave Culture', so the comments in this interview were revelations to me.

While the provocative claims in that interview perhaps remain open to debate, I have to admit to a factual error in the palingenesis post. It wasn't actually Tangerine Dream who contributed the "stunning" track to the opening of The Keep. It was a demo by Brian Eno. If you listen to "Mea Culpa" on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, it's possible to hear traces of The Keep. Unsurprisingly then, Tangerine Dream have never covered or performed live the track in question, and this also explains why it hasn't appeared on the official soundtrack. It has apparently surfaced though on a bootleg called Ghosts, which thus far I've not managed to track down.

Some other thoughts unexpectedly came to me reading Dennis Cooper's tribute to Whitehouse. I was less interested in Cooper's personal identification with their libertarian aesthetic, or the mentioning of Bennett's claim that Rip It Up & Start Again mistakenly reports a joke by Steve Stapleton as if it were a factual statement about the band's interest in certain extreme pornographic publications, than in how he reminded me that Paul Hegarty had not only edited a book on Dennis Cooper, but has written a couple of books about noise/music as well.

It also just so happens that I've been listening to Merzbow's 1930 a lot recently, so I'm wondering derridata if you might be able to bring these reflections full circle by answering a question? Have you encountered any commonalities, in theoretical terms and artefacts used as examples, in the respective writings of Toshiya Ueno, Hegarty on Merzbow, and the cultural studies of anime you've been undertaking? Don't worry, I'm not asking you to chase down these authors, but simply wondering if their names have cropped up during the course of your research? If you have any thoughts on the matter, please feel free to hold them till we hook up at the Brian Eno gig. I figure they might have to do with topics such as "techno subjectivity" and, by extension, "post subcultural" spaces or "scenes" in which such identities are enacted/performed/consumed. I'm wondering also whether the existence of any such commonalities could serve to undercut those in the music blogosphere who are focused on divorcing "genre" from "scene"?

One more thing relating to animation, I like how this clip critically comments on not only human motion in general, but more specifically the treatment of "older" women by consumer culture:

Sexual Robots and Plastic Humans

Legendary post-punk musician, artist, biomorphic horror technician and theoretician Philip Brophy offers a very interesting podcast here on representations of technology in anime. I must later archive some of Brophy's earlier music on this blog as well. Unfortunately, youtube is not carrying his short film "Salt Saliva Sperm and Sweat", which would have made an incredible companion piece. Derridata and I saw it on video in about 1990, which seems incredible now, as I was able to get it at the local store, and since then it has become difficult to find. I will also monitor his contributions to the "Cinesonic" seminar series.

Another thought occurs to me; was Phil an influence on Thug and, even further back, how much of a contemporary was he with Jim Foetus????

http://lamp.edu.au/2006/06/07/podcast-sexual-robots-and-plastic-humans/