Otaku Movement
Oct. 10th, 2009 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanetSo the spy-bots at Amazon that track my every purchase have sent me a message. They want me to know that Thomas Lamarre has a new book coming out on October 16th, called The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Thanks, spy-bots! You know me so well. Too well...
Seriously, though, I'm excited to read this book. Along with anime, I'm also a bit of a philosophy/lit theory geek, and Lamarre knows his theory. So today, instead of posting an anime review, I'll post some notes I took on one of his articles, "Otaku Movement" (2006), as a primer to the book. If this kind of stuff interests you, you might want to get the book -or get a library to order it, it costs many dollars. Would Lamarre endorse scanning and uploading it as a form of theory-otaku labour, I wonder? ^_^
Book is here (Canadian link)
Notes are
"Otaku Movement." In Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present. Ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Lamarre’s essay “Otaku Movement” is, as usual, incredibly useful and raises some potentially paradigm-setting issues. He argues that otaku practices like collecting and trading manga and anime, translating, filesharing, and so on are a kind of “communicative labor,” a “nonquantifiable work” that “poses a challenge to received organizations of labor” (362) –namely, big corporations, who call otaku thieves and pirates. Otaku movement is a sort of paradoxical work that is also a “strategy of refusal” of work. It’s more like what Antonio Negri calls “constituent power,” a power that is “immanent to the community,” rather than the “constitutive power” of “centralized forces of command that come from above, that are imposed on a community” (359).
To elaborate this idea, Lamarre looks at how the major Japanese discourse on otaku –the “Gainax discourse” promoted by cultural theorists and artists like Murakami Takashi, Azuma Hiroki and Okada Toshio- leans towards this plane of immanence on an aesthetic level, but falls short of envisioning it historically and politically. He gives an invaluable overview of the ideas about anime and otaku that Murakami, Azuma and Okada all have in common. These include:
1) a canon or genealogy of anime that begins with Tezuka and spans early series like Space Battleship Yamato, Mobile Suit Gundam and Superdimensional Fortress Macross. (365)
2) an “anime aesthetics” of “dense, nonhierarchized visual space” (366) that generates a mode of obsessive re-viewing or watching for details besides the central focus.
3) a “breakdown in the hierarchy of producers” (367) in which otaku follow particular mechanical designers or animators as well as directors or screenwriters, and recognize anime as multiply-authored.
4) a breakdown in the hierarchy of producers and viewers, so that “Producers are, above all, fans; and fans are budding producers” (367).
5) “a radical break with definable subject position” (367) in which “Anime breaks out of its television frame, and the distance between viewer and images collapses into a moment of affect” (368).
Many of these things sound practically revolutionary, what with the “radical breaks” and all, but Lamarre is careful to point out their conservative aspects. He argues that there is “a general bias toward thinking otaku as boys or men,” so much so that even works by women, like CLAMP’s Chobits, only reaffirm the male otaku who seeks fantasy images of women and refuses to make contact with real women (375-6; 381). He also criticizes the extreme postmodern attitude Azuma takes when he sees anime otaku as “posthistorical.” This is a problem, because “Dispensing with origins altogether results in a sense of historical transcendence and overcoming” (387). The result is that Azuma et al. foreclose some of the potential for constituent power Lamarre finds in anime otaku. In the end, though, he still sees Azuma et al. as providing a good start.
Of these authors, I’ve only read Murakami before, so I find this a really useful introduction to the Japanese discourse on anime otaku. My only problem with the essay is that even in criticizing how women are overlooked or turned into images in male-centered discourse, Lamarre still doesn’t get at female otaku experience, embodied or virtual. Female otaku may be a minority in Japanese representations, but they're never completely overlooked. There’s the female doujin artist in Otaku no Video, and the two women -cosplayer and yaoi artist- in Genshiken (which I still have to read/see…). If we are really thinking non-hierarchically, being a manga-ka or doujin artist should be no “worse” than being an anime producer, though Lamarre’s footnote on pg. 394 figures manga as mere “materials for anime transformation”, implicitly passive (because female?). I know he’s being critical of this attitude, but when you criticize without giving alternatives, you can end up just recentring the already central discourse. Of course I understand –do I ever!- that you can’t pack everything into one article. But he could’ve at least listed a few shoujo titles as examples of what should be in the anime genealogy, like Rose of Versailles. There’s an entire alternate shoujo genealogy out there: we female fans know it well, even if the Gainax guys don’t. Is this a limit of Lamarre’s male otaku pov as much as Okada’s? Or just a limit of academic publishing?
On that note, what I’d really like to read is an article about how the figure of the fujoshi –the “rotten girl”, the yaoi fangirl- is making it into a lot of anime and manga lately, like Ouran High School Host Club (Renge), Axis Powers Hetalia (Hungary) and Tonari no 801-chan (801-chan). Do these characters replicate the male otaku discourse in seeking phantasmic, objectified bishounen? What does it mean for women to like female anime characters? I’d write it, but it would get so personal so fast…I’m not ready to make my academic work an activity in self-disclosure, not about this, not yet.
Oh, and also, I’m not quite comfortable with Negri’s ideas (though admittedly, I’ve only read Empire, not Insurgencies, which is what Lamarre’s working with). For all the subtle interdependencies between constitutive/constituent power he traces, I still worry that this two-term model will end up being practically used just like every other dichotomous top/bottom spatialized schema, like the strategies/tactics model of first-wave fan studies, or globalization from above/below. Unless I’m really misunderstanding something here…?
Still, I think Lamarre’s essay is great for politicizing a lot of the more aesthetic-focused work on anime. It could become a key reference!
Seriously, though, I'm excited to read this book. Along with anime, I'm also a bit of a philosophy/lit theory geek, and Lamarre knows his theory. So today, instead of posting an anime review, I'll post some notes I took on one of his articles, "Otaku Movement" (2006), as a primer to the book. If this kind of stuff interests you, you might want to get the book -or get a library to order it, it costs many dollars. Would Lamarre endorse scanning and uploading it as a form of theory-otaku labour, I wonder? ^_^
Book is here (Canadian link)
Notes are
"Otaku Movement." In Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present. Ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Lamarre’s essay “Otaku Movement” is, as usual, incredibly useful and raises some potentially paradigm-setting issues. He argues that otaku practices like collecting and trading manga and anime, translating, filesharing, and so on are a kind of “communicative labor,” a “nonquantifiable work” that “poses a challenge to received organizations of labor” (362) –namely, big corporations, who call otaku thieves and pirates. Otaku movement is a sort of paradoxical work that is also a “strategy of refusal” of work. It’s more like what Antonio Negri calls “constituent power,” a power that is “immanent to the community,” rather than the “constitutive power” of “centralized forces of command that come from above, that are imposed on a community” (359).
To elaborate this idea, Lamarre looks at how the major Japanese discourse on otaku –the “Gainax discourse” promoted by cultural theorists and artists like Murakami Takashi, Azuma Hiroki and Okada Toshio- leans towards this plane of immanence on an aesthetic level, but falls short of envisioning it historically and politically. He gives an invaluable overview of the ideas about anime and otaku that Murakami, Azuma and Okada all have in common. These include:
1) a canon or genealogy of anime that begins with Tezuka and spans early series like Space Battleship Yamato, Mobile Suit Gundam and Superdimensional Fortress Macross. (365)
2) an “anime aesthetics” of “dense, nonhierarchized visual space” (366) that generates a mode of obsessive re-viewing or watching for details besides the central focus.
3) a “breakdown in the hierarchy of producers” (367) in which otaku follow particular mechanical designers or animators as well as directors or screenwriters, and recognize anime as multiply-authored.
4) a breakdown in the hierarchy of producers and viewers, so that “Producers are, above all, fans; and fans are budding producers” (367).
5) “a radical break with definable subject position” (367) in which “Anime breaks out of its television frame, and the distance between viewer and images collapses into a moment of affect” (368).
Many of these things sound practically revolutionary, what with the “radical breaks” and all, but Lamarre is careful to point out their conservative aspects. He argues that there is “a general bias toward thinking otaku as boys or men,” so much so that even works by women, like CLAMP’s Chobits, only reaffirm the male otaku who seeks fantasy images of women and refuses to make contact with real women (375-6; 381). He also criticizes the extreme postmodern attitude Azuma takes when he sees anime otaku as “posthistorical.” This is a problem, because “Dispensing with origins altogether results in a sense of historical transcendence and overcoming” (387). The result is that Azuma et al. foreclose some of the potential for constituent power Lamarre finds in anime otaku. In the end, though, he still sees Azuma et al. as providing a good start.
Of these authors, I’ve only read Murakami before, so I find this a really useful introduction to the Japanese discourse on anime otaku. My only problem with the essay is that even in criticizing how women are overlooked or turned into images in male-centered discourse, Lamarre still doesn’t get at female otaku experience, embodied or virtual. Female otaku may be a minority in Japanese representations, but they're never completely overlooked. There’s the female doujin artist in Otaku no Video, and the two women -cosplayer and yaoi artist- in Genshiken (which I still have to read/see…). If we are really thinking non-hierarchically, being a manga-ka or doujin artist should be no “worse” than being an anime producer, though Lamarre’s footnote on pg. 394 figures manga as mere “materials for anime transformation”, implicitly passive (because female?). I know he’s being critical of this attitude, but when you criticize without giving alternatives, you can end up just recentring the already central discourse. Of course I understand –do I ever!- that you can’t pack everything into one article. But he could’ve at least listed a few shoujo titles as examples of what should be in the anime genealogy, like Rose of Versailles. There’s an entire alternate shoujo genealogy out there: we female fans know it well, even if the Gainax guys don’t. Is this a limit of Lamarre’s male otaku pov as much as Okada’s? Or just a limit of academic publishing?
On that note, what I’d really like to read is an article about how the figure of the fujoshi –the “rotten girl”, the yaoi fangirl- is making it into a lot of anime and manga lately, like Ouran High School Host Club (Renge), Axis Powers Hetalia (Hungary) and Tonari no 801-chan (801-chan). Do these characters replicate the male otaku discourse in seeking phantasmic, objectified bishounen? What does it mean for women to like female anime characters? I’d write it, but it would get so personal so fast…I’m not ready to make my academic work an activity in self-disclosure, not about this, not yet.
Oh, and also, I’m not quite comfortable with Negri’s ideas (though admittedly, I’ve only read Empire, not Insurgencies, which is what Lamarre’s working with). For all the subtle interdependencies between constitutive/constituent power he traces, I still worry that this two-term model will end up being practically used just like every other dichotomous top/bottom spatialized schema, like the strategies/tactics model of first-wave fan studies, or globalization from above/below. Unless I’m really misunderstanding something here…?
Still, I think Lamarre’s essay is great for politicizing a lot of the more aesthetic-focused work on anime. It could become a key reference!
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-15 03:02 pm (UTC)Not terribly--I met a lot of people who professed to liking manga, including some fairly serious otaku, but I never got to Comiket *smacks self* or joined any circles, so I definitely didn't meet the serious female fans.
I'm sure you're pretty busy, but we've been looking for a beta Japanese translation volunteer on the OTW translation committee. If you'd be interested, let me know. ^_^
no subject
Date: 2009-10-15 10:21 pm (UTC)I'm so super busy I shouldn't even ask this, but what kinds of things do they need beta'ed?
no subject
Date: 2009-10-16 02:06 am (UTC)Anyway, give it a look-see if you like, and by all means, if you have any reservations on any account, feel free to say no. ^_^ But people at the intersection of fandom + advanced Japanese are rare, so I figured it was better to ask than not.