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Database Animals
Woo, I'm back from Germany! It was a great trip. I had fun and got things done at the same time. One of the things I finally got around to, on my 7-hour trans-Atlantic flights there and back, was reading the new translation of Hiroki Azuma's influential book Otaku: Japan's Database Animals.
So without further ado,
Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.
Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals is as much about philosophy as it is about otaku. And not just any philosophy. We're talkin' French postmodernist high theory, straight from its glory days in the 1960’s-70’s. Alongside Rei and Dejiko, you'll find authors like Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan, and also the 1930’s works of Hegel scholar Alexandre Kojève. The result is a bit heady and a bit retro, but it's worth digging into for people who like to argue about philosophy and pop culture.
The main narrative of postmodernism is the “decline of grand narratives,” and that’s just what Azuma is concerned to show happening in otaku texts and consumption patterns. Before the 1970’s, he says, culture largely operated on the “tree model” of modernism, in which the small narratives of individual novels, films, etc. are underpinned and determined by a grand narrative like “Truth” that gives them meaning. (“This novel gets at the truth of human experience,” blah blah blah.) Since then (somehow) we have switched to the “database model” of postmodernity, in which, like the Internet, “no hidden grand narrative regulates all Web pages” (31). Instead of the grand narrative controlling meaning through texts, users are the ones who “read-up” texts by accessing a database of “settings.” His example is moe game characters, where a database of “moe elements” like cat ears, maid outfits, and cute sticking-up hair can be infinitely recombined into any number of characters, without that database of headgear and frilly skirts actually providing any narrative or meaning itself. So, otaku can easily create “derivative” works like doujinshi, because both the original work and the copy are remixes of elements from the same database, and can be consumed the same way. One of Azuma’s examples is the Evangelion Rei game, and I think the new Eva movies and manga like Angelic Days bear him out completely.
The idea of database consumption links to the title thesis about otaku as “database animals.” To theorize animals, Azuma draws on Kojève, who proposed that “humans have desire, as opposed to animals, which have only need” (86). Animals get hungry, they eat. They get tired, they sleep. But humans have desires that can’t be simply satisfied. They want power, they get it, they want more. Kojève used this basic distinction to describe the societies of the US and Japan, calling America “animalistic” in the way consumer culture instantly, thoughtlessly gratifies needs, and Japan “snobbish” because of the persistence of a sort of conscious formalism, such as upholding codes of honor for the sake of codes of honor.
Azuma argues that today’s Japanese otaku are “database animals” because of the way they consume moe-elements purely for emotional and erotic satisfaction, without seeking larger meanings (or, grand narratives). Even “their sociality is sustained not by actual necessity, as are kinship and local community, but by interest in particular kinds of information” (93). They feel free to “drop out” of such instrumental relationships at any time. As for feelings, “emotional activities are ‘processed’ nonsocially, in solitude, and in an animalistic fashion” (94).
Despite such grim-sounding descriptions, and some comparisons of otaku to drug addicts and people with multiple personality disorder, Azuma’s tone is not really condemning. The intro even tries to make otaku animality seem excitingly subversive, saying “Azuma’s work can be seen as calling into question the very notion of an animal/human distinction in postmodernity. Aren’t we all otaku? Aren’t we all animalized? …Azuma inverts an entire line of Western thought on animality” (xxviii). But personally, I don't see Azuma as so revolutionary on this point. I think he accepts Kojève’s distinction between desire and need as characteristics of “human” and “animal,” and merely -as the intro says- inverts who holds them (Americans or Japanese; non-human or human animals). The problem is that this is just a straight binary reversal, and still doesn’t question the basic properties of desire and need, human and animal, otaku and non-otaku.
To take just one term, look at desire. Azuma’s concept of desire is based on the Lacanian model via Kojève, whose “favourite example of this variety of craving is the male’s sexual desire for the female. The male desire for the female does not end even when the male obtains a partner’s body, but rather swells more and more (according to Kojève and others)” (86). “Becoming-animal” means overcoming this endless deferral of desire and arriving at “a situation in which each person closes various lack-satisfaction circuits” (87). Now, he's a bit ambivalent about this model, as his little parenthetical aside shows, but he still uses it basically as stated. Clearly (as Lamarre says in his essay “Otaku Movement”) this sort of straight-male-centered theory of desire is a huge problem, for animals as well as women. Historically, women were not thought to feel desire; now, animals are the ones reduced to need -or elevated, since animal need, figured this way, is a solution to the deferral of male desire, in some weird, pessimistically utopian way. But what about the desires of animals? And the desires of women? Mightn't they be radically different from either option presented here? Can this kind of theory imagine such a thing?
Well, if I were to keep writing, I would end up with a 20-page paper about Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal” and yaoi, and it would get both very abstract and very personal. So I’ll stop here. Comments appreciated!
Next week I'm going home to the Maritimes for a nice long Christmas break. One of the benefits of not being in classes any more! (Ok, I still have to write my thesis while I'm home...sigh...) I might update, or I might not. If not, see you in the new year! ^^
So without further ado,
Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.
Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals is as much about philosophy as it is about otaku. And not just any philosophy. We're talkin' French postmodernist high theory, straight from its glory days in the 1960’s-70’s. Alongside Rei and Dejiko, you'll find authors like Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan, and also the 1930’s works of Hegel scholar Alexandre Kojève. The result is a bit heady and a bit retro, but it's worth digging into for people who like to argue about philosophy and pop culture.
The main narrative of postmodernism is the “decline of grand narratives,” and that’s just what Azuma is concerned to show happening in otaku texts and consumption patterns. Before the 1970’s, he says, culture largely operated on the “tree model” of modernism, in which the small narratives of individual novels, films, etc. are underpinned and determined by a grand narrative like “Truth” that gives them meaning. (“This novel gets at the truth of human experience,” blah blah blah.) Since then (somehow) we have switched to the “database model” of postmodernity, in which, like the Internet, “no hidden grand narrative regulates all Web pages” (31). Instead of the grand narrative controlling meaning through texts, users are the ones who “read-up” texts by accessing a database of “settings.” His example is moe game characters, where a database of “moe elements” like cat ears, maid outfits, and cute sticking-up hair can be infinitely recombined into any number of characters, without that database of headgear and frilly skirts actually providing any narrative or meaning itself. So, otaku can easily create “derivative” works like doujinshi, because both the original work and the copy are remixes of elements from the same database, and can be consumed the same way. One of Azuma’s examples is the Evangelion Rei game, and I think the new Eva movies and manga like Angelic Days bear him out completely.
The idea of database consumption links to the title thesis about otaku as “database animals.” To theorize animals, Azuma draws on Kojève, who proposed that “humans have desire, as opposed to animals, which have only need” (86). Animals get hungry, they eat. They get tired, they sleep. But humans have desires that can’t be simply satisfied. They want power, they get it, they want more. Kojève used this basic distinction to describe the societies of the US and Japan, calling America “animalistic” in the way consumer culture instantly, thoughtlessly gratifies needs, and Japan “snobbish” because of the persistence of a sort of conscious formalism, such as upholding codes of honor for the sake of codes of honor.
Azuma argues that today’s Japanese otaku are “database animals” because of the way they consume moe-elements purely for emotional and erotic satisfaction, without seeking larger meanings (or, grand narratives). Even “their sociality is sustained not by actual necessity, as are kinship and local community, but by interest in particular kinds of information” (93). They feel free to “drop out” of such instrumental relationships at any time. As for feelings, “emotional activities are ‘processed’ nonsocially, in solitude, and in an animalistic fashion” (94).
Despite such grim-sounding descriptions, and some comparisons of otaku to drug addicts and people with multiple personality disorder, Azuma’s tone is not really condemning. The intro even tries to make otaku animality seem excitingly subversive, saying “Azuma’s work can be seen as calling into question the very notion of an animal/human distinction in postmodernity. Aren’t we all otaku? Aren’t we all animalized? …Azuma inverts an entire line of Western thought on animality” (xxviii). But personally, I don't see Azuma as so revolutionary on this point. I think he accepts Kojève’s distinction between desire and need as characteristics of “human” and “animal,” and merely -as the intro says- inverts who holds them (Americans or Japanese; non-human or human animals). The problem is that this is just a straight binary reversal, and still doesn’t question the basic properties of desire and need, human and animal, otaku and non-otaku.
To take just one term, look at desire. Azuma’s concept of desire is based on the Lacanian model via Kojève, whose “favourite example of this variety of craving is the male’s sexual desire for the female. The male desire for the female does not end even when the male obtains a partner’s body, but rather swells more and more (according to Kojève and others)” (86). “Becoming-animal” means overcoming this endless deferral of desire and arriving at “a situation in which each person closes various lack-satisfaction circuits” (87). Now, he's a bit ambivalent about this model, as his little parenthetical aside shows, but he still uses it basically as stated. Clearly (as Lamarre says in his essay “Otaku Movement”) this sort of straight-male-centered theory of desire is a huge problem, for animals as well as women. Historically, women were not thought to feel desire; now, animals are the ones reduced to need -or elevated, since animal need, figured this way, is a solution to the deferral of male desire, in some weird, pessimistically utopian way. But what about the desires of animals? And the desires of women? Mightn't they be radically different from either option presented here? Can this kind of theory imagine such a thing?
Well, if I were to keep writing, I would end up with a 20-page paper about Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal” and yaoi, and it would get both very abstract and very personal. So I’ll stop here. Comments appreciated!
Next week I'm going home to the Maritimes for a nice long Christmas break. One of the benefits of not being in classes any more! (Ok, I still have to write my thesis while I'm home...sigh...) I might update, or I might not. If not, see you in the new year! ^^