Chapter I Introduction Japanese Anime Has Been Receiving
Chapter I
Introduction
Japanese anime1 has been receiving worldwide attention and interest over the past few decades and several books on Japanese popular culture or on anime in specific have been published.2 The term “anime” originates from the Latin word,
“anima,” which means “given to birth” or “animated.”3 It not only serves as a powerful cultural product that permeates different regions but also possesses discursive potentials that inspire scholars such as Susan Napier and Dani Cavallaro.
Napier describes how Japanese anime has assumed an important position in
Americans’ everyday life: “[T]he Japan of the 1990s began to develop a new export, animated films and videos—anime, a Japanese abbreviation of the English word
‘animation.’ Anime has now entered the American vocabulary as well, to the extent that it has appeared in recent years in New York Times crossword puzzle” (5).
Nobuyuki Tsugata, as a Japanese anime scholar, also recognizes the growing importance of anime and other Japanese popular cultures following the passing of the Contents Promotion Law, which aims to regulate and stimulate contents industries:4
In order to develop our contents industries, inclusive of comics, animation,
and computer games, the House of Representatives passed the Contents
1 The term anime (アニメ) specifies Japan-produced animation. There is no doubt that Japanese anime was deeply influenced by Walt Disney’s cartoons, whereas after the Second World War, Japan gradually developed a unique kind of animation. The first Japanese anime that enjoyed international fame was Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy (鉄腕アトム). 2 Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. (2002), Cinema Anime (2006), Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture H as Invaded the U.S. (2006), and so on. Japanese anime, or Japanese popular culture, has caught the sight of more and more critics and scholars. The recently published books mainly fall on two categories. One is to articulate the unclaimed anime history and by so doing anime can be repositioned in Japanese culture. The other is to account for the economic and cultural impact of Japanese anime on the global scale. 3 For a more detailed picture of the development of Japanese anime, please refer to Yamaguchi’s History of Japanese Anime (Japanese), in which the reader is also given clear definitions of different types of animation. 4 Contents industries refer basically to culture-related industries. Chan 2
Promotion Law in May, 2004. A report by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of
the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology is first
referred in the law, which states that “to construct a society that values
their culture,” it is necessary to extol “the promotion of media arts.” In
addition, the media arts which include animation and computer graphics
are regarded as “the culture that our country can show off to the world,”
and hence the promotion of the media arts is of necessity.” (9; my
translation). 5
Anime, along with games and comics, has hence been acknowledged as one of the most significant culture exports. It is not until 1970s was “anime” rendered a term widely used in America, but now it is almost impossible to find anyone who never hears of it.
When it comes to the relatively short history of anime, two historical events, the
Kanto Earthquake and World War II, brought massive impact on its development. In this chapter, I will offer an overview of anime history in an attempt to justify how and why it should be taken seriously and properly as a global culture phenomenon.
Anime has long been considered a subgenre of movies and is often marginalized in the field of film studies. However, anime, as one of the original forms of cinematography, is actually on the way of claiming its territory nowadays. After a brief introduction of the history of anime, I will narrow the discussion down to
Mamoru Oshii’s works and his filming style. Oshii is now a very important anime and live-action director in Japan, and his anime has attracted worldwide attention due to
5 The original text goes, “漫画、アニメーション、コンピュータゲームを含む「コンテンツ産業」 の保護育成を目的とした「コンテンツの創造、保護及び活用の促進に関する法律」（通称．コ ンテンツ産業振興法）が二〇〇四年五月に衆議院で成立したことを筆頭に、二〇〇二年四月の 文部科学省文化審議会答申「文化を大切にする社会の構築について」では、「メディア芸術の 振興」が謳われ、アニメーションやコンピュータ．グラフィックス（CG ）などのメディア芸 術を「我が国が世界に誇れる文化」であるし、その振興を図る必要性を訴えている.” Chan 3 the great success of Ghost in the Shell released in 1995. Its sequel Innocence is even the only two animes to be in the finalists for the coveted Palme d’Or prize.6 Oshii’s latest anime The Sky Crawlers has just been put on screen in August, 2008, which is based on Hiroshi Mori’s novel of the same title. In addition to this latest anime, Oshii has remade Ghost in the Shell with the aid of 3D CG techniques in celebration of the screening of The Sky Crawlers .7 In the last part, I will give an outline of this thesis and map out the main issues that are going to be raised in the following chapters.
A Brief History of Anime
Nobuyuki Tsugata sketches a clear picture of anime history in his book
Introduction to Animation Studies , which is very helpful to our understanding of the vicissitudes of Japanese anime. Rather than focus on the historical moments that hindered this genre’s development, Tsugata marks the time that contributed most to the rapid growth of anime. In the 1930s, the technique of celluloid animation 8 was first introduced in Japan. A decade or so earlier, it was already frequently in use in western countries, a time when Japanese still adhered to paper animation. 9
According to Tsugata, such belatedness might result from the shortage or inaccessibility of celluloid board in Japan. During the wartime, the reason for
Japanese animation to gain visibility was a political one. The government made great investment in anime industry for propaganda-making. Noted for its visual intensity
6 The Palme d’Or prize is the highest prize given to the winner of the nominated films in Cannes Film Festival. Innocence is described by the festival as such: “the political tone has given way to a philosophical one, a hymn to life. Furthermore, the technical rendering is much more formal, mixing 2D, 3D and computer graphics.” (Please refer to the official site of Festival de Cannes:
The advent of the Second World War put a halt to anime production due to the great loss of animators, since many young people died in war. The lacking of materials such as the celluloid boards made the situation even more difficult, but the industry welcomed its renaissance with the establishment of two influential anime studios in the postwar years: Toei Animation ( 東映動画) in 1956 and
Mushiproduction, Co. Ltd. ( 虫プロダクション) in 1962. Both introduced new production skills, themes and forms of anime, made a groundbreaking innovation in broadcasting style, and played very essential roles in shaping the so-called “Japanese anime.”
Toei Animation brought about a great change to the function of anime. Before the war, anime aimed to cater to political or didactic needs but, after the establishment of Toei Animation, most anime was produced to gain profits. Probably due to the decline of the Japanese political power or a general cry for economic revival, anime turned to satisfy the desires and interests of the public rather than serve the government. As for its themes and audience, Japanese anime has since then been granted with a privilege of flexibility and diversity, compared to the mainly-for-kids western cartoons.
Besides, Toei Animation produced the first featured anime in Japan—The Legend of the White Serpent (白蛇伝) directed by Taiji Yabushita ( 藪下泰司) and it turned out to be very popular. Receiving positive responses from the public, Toei Animation continued to make featured anime, leading Japanese anime to a path diverse from western ones. Interestingly The Legend of the White Serpent is a combination of eastern narrative and western filming techniques. As for the content, the story was adapted from the Chinese folktale of the same title; as for the filming techniques, Chan 5 almost all staff members were trained in foreign countries and they certainly followed the western filming style. However, the importance of The Legend of the
White Serpent is not that it first attempts to present an eastern story with western filming style, but that the form of “featured anime” turns out an essential trait of
Japanese anime production.
Mushiproduction, Co. Ltd., on the other hand, adopted an unprecedented way of anime broadcasting. There had been no anime shown on television in an episodic form all over the world until Astro Boy appeared on screen in 1963. Episodes were shown on television weekly, meanwhile causing problems such as budget constraint and time limitation, as it was almost impossible to make an episode within one week.
In order to solve these problems, Mushiproduction, Co. Ltd. made efforts to lessen the number of frames per second, 10 and finally came up with something called
“limited animation.” The most outstanding difference between “full animation” and
“limited animation” lies in the extent of adjustment on each frame. Disney cartoons, which relatively contain greater agency in action, are good examples of “full animation.” Images on each frame of animation have to be slightly redrawn or adjusted in full animation. Whereas in “limited animation,” only a few images are to be changed. For example, when shooting a teacher teaching a class, the students may remain still through the sequence and only the teacher moves. This saves much time and efforts of redrawing. “Limited animation” has since become one of the important characteristics of Japanese anime.
Apparently Japanese anime has taken up a different path from its western counterparts. After many years, anime succeeds in retaining its unique features and
10 Moving pictures on television are usually composed of 24 frames per second in order to make movement look natural and smooth. However, in Astro Boy ’s case, the number of frames was cut down to 8 frames per second, which might have resulted in awkwardness and discontinuity in action. The studio nevertheless succeeded in overcoming it by means of other filming and editing techniques. Chan 6 surprisingly “stands out as a site of implicit cultural resistance” (Napier, 9), which means, even a good deal anime is now being exported to America, anime is still able to be recognized as exclusively Japanese and resist the influence of western styles and tastes. The uniqueness of Japanese anime can be seen not only from its shooting techniques, but also from its varieties of themes, targeted audience and promotion strategies. The amazing thematic diversity of anime is closely related to the wide range of its targeted audience. In contrast to the mainly-for-kids Disney cartoons (and most European productions), Japanese animation appeals to a relatively large range of audience. 11 Abundant in themes and tackling thought-provoking issues, anime should no longer be considered secondary film-production; it has become a necessary and essential form of cinema.
Mamoru Oshii’s anime
Born in Tokyo in 1951, Mamoru Oshii has been greatly influenced by SF films 12 and fictions since he studied in elementary school.13 Entering high school, Oshii was once involved in the left-wing protest, the Haneda Event ( 羽田事件) in 1967. 14 He
11 Japanese anime can be accessed not only through the screening on television or in movie theater but also through a direct release of OVA version (Original Video Animation). Mamoru Oshii is the one who initiated the making OVA, partly because his films only appeal to a small group of people and his films would have been a disaster if they were to be screened in the theater. However, the OVA form of releasing anime becomes a unique style of consummation. What’s more important, it to some extent expands the range of the audience, because anime forbidden to be shown in public or unable to serve the “taste” of the public is granted with a channel to make themselves seen. 12 The first SF film he watched at the age of three was This Island Earth , directed by Jack Amold and Joseph M. Newman. He watched more than four movies every week at that time since his father was unemployed and had nothing else to do but took him to the movies. 13 His favorite writers of SF novels include Marion Zimmer Bradley, the author of Mists of Avalon , and Robert A. Heilein, one of whose famous works is The Puppet Masters . Their impact on Oshii can be clearly seen in his works. The image of the “puppet master” is central to Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell , and Avalon (1999), a live action movie which explores the experiences of being caught between the virtual world of online games and reality. 14 The Prime Minister of Japan Eisaku Satō planned to visit the countries in Southeastern Asia in 1967, a time when America was fighting in South Korea. The left-wing members in Japan thought this act hinted an assent to American’s invasion of South Korea and thus had armed conflict with the government. Chan 7 was a major of Fine Arts Education but he founded a club of movies at school. Since then he has started to make movies himself. He started to work in an animation company, Tatsunoko Productions, after graduating from college but several years later, he moved to Studio Pierrot in 1980, where he welcomed his first great success in career. Urusei Yatsura2: Beautiful Dreamer (うる星やつら 2: ビューティフル．ド
リーマー), a SF comedy based on Rumiko Takahashi’s manga, made Oshii familiar to the Japanese audience. However, what made him famous was his controversial
“manipulation” of the original manga. Anime directed by Oshii often diverges greatly from the original texts, and he was hence intensively attacked by some of the big fans of Takahashi. 15 But Oshii’s insistence on making something different from the original has been one of his fantastic characteristics.
It was not until 1995 did Ghost in the Shell make him a cult figure in American and European markets. 16 Mamoru Oshii’s works are very unique, hard to understand even to Japanese audience. Being a celebrated film and anime director in Japan,
Oshii has frequently been compared to Hayao Miyazaki ( 宮崎駿) in terms of filming style and subject matters. In contrast with Miyazaki’s good-for-all-age and often-financially-successful fantasies, Oshii’s works are usually characterized as obscure and eccentric, and meant to target just a specific group of audience, who is well acquainted with anime representation and equipped with knowledge about computer and technology. In addition, Miyazaki’s imaginary world is more often depicted as one rooted in nature with a nostalgic overtone, while in Oshii’s anime, nature is hardly represented, and in its place one encounters usually an imagined future city. According to Toshio Suzuki, a famous anime producer of Studio Ghibling,
Inc., although Oshii and Miyazaki approach anime from different perspectives and
15 He even received a blackmail with a razor blade in it. (Shuffle Alliance 238) 16 In America, Ghost in the Shell has been the top 1 in the ranking of video renting shop. Chan 8 deal with different themes, a common concern underlies their works: “How do human beings live from now on?” (Notes 333).17 They both tackle the problem of self and the other. For Miyazaki, the problem may be how to live together with other people and try to seek for the good old days before modernization, before the natural world is contaminated. For Oshii, however, “in order to build up a relationship with others, or to live with others, one has to be positively alone.”18
Therefore, characters in Oshii’s works, especially in Ghost in the Shell and Innocence , convey a strong sense of loneliness, which cannot be pacified by the company of family, lovers, or friends. They instead have to face the modern world alone.
There are some recurrent themes and images in Oshii’s works: technological pervasion underlying the metropolitan life, and the repetitive use of animal images, especially birds, fish, and dogs. 19 Technology and its relationship with human beings have been one of the main concerns in Oshii’s works. Although some people may mistake that Oshii is a utopian technophilia who embraces the computerization and digitalization without hesitation, his attitude toward technology actually remains ambiguous. As Cavallaro has it, “the director [Oshii] exhibits an ambivalent attitude towards technology, critically acknowledging its implementations as simultaneously beneficial and detrimental” (Cinema 24). In Ghost in the Shell , Oshii portrays the possible and positive end (or beginning) of modern technology through the total disembodiment of Kusanagi, while he also points out the dangers of brain-hacking and brain-washing, which may deprive human beings of memories. Innocence can be
17 The original text writes, “宮さんも押井三も、アプローチは違うけれども同じことをやろうと している。実は両方とも、根っこにあるものが似ているなあって感じましたよ。人間はこれか らどうやって生きていたっらいいかということ” (Although the way Miyazaki and Oshii approach [the theme] is different from each other, actually I think they are very similar in nature. A common theme in their works is how human beings live from now on). 18 Taken from an interview with Toshio Suzuki about Innocence , which is included in the DVD box. 19 The images of these three kinds of animals appear so frequently in Oshii’s works that they are nicknamed Oshii’s “Three holy beasts.” Chan 9 viewed as a work about the consequences of technology abuse: the sex dolls go berserk and take revenge on human beings. Oshii is well conscious of both the threats and benefits of technology, and his anime to some extent mirrors these contradictions embedded in technological development.
In addition to the technological theme, animal images are also essential in
Oshii’s works since they symbolize the “lost body” of human beings or cyborgs. These animals are often represented as “cyborgs,” which have cybernetic body (fig. 1.) or no body at all (fig. 2.). These animals without organic bodies paradoxically reveals
Oshii’s nostalgic desire for the real organic body, like Batou’s hound. This may seem contradictory that Oshii on the one hand creates an avant-garde character—Kusanagi—with no body at all, and longs so much for the organic body on the other. However, it is worth noting that the body in these two animes bear different implications and meanings. For Oshii, every body is a discursive construction. There is no “real” body after we enters into language:
I think the body of human beings is being produced by language. Language
has made the body. Maybe this is true to every epoch. People are
conscious of their body only through language in the first place. Language
has named the so-called body. However, the real body is the one before
being named by language, and I wonder how to regain the real body in the
age of language. 20 (Notes 329; my translation)
Therefore, in Ghost in the Shell Oshii concludes that it is out of the question to regain the “real” body, and so one possible way out is to do away with the body. That is why
Kusanagi chooses to discard her cyborg body for good, since the body is loaded with
20 “人間の身体って言葉から生まれているんだと思う。言葉が身体を作ったんですよ。たぶん、 いつの時代もそうだった。そもそも人間の身体は言葉としてしか意識されないんだから。身体 という言葉で名づけられたものでしかない。そう名づけられる前の身体が本当の身体やけど、 それをどうやって取り戻そうって言うのか.” Chan 10 so many social and cultural burdens. In Innocence , however, Oshii turns to emphasize the importance of the body, which is different from the “shell” in Ghost in the Shell .
The body in Innocence is actually the posthuman body, which no longer serves to secure human identity and subjectivity but to embody a figure’s (partial or multiple) subjectivity for the time being. The posthuman body allows the emergence of subjectivity, but it does not define, enclose, or construct it.
Literary Review
Mamoru Oshii’s works can be situated in different culture networks. To view them from the western cyberpunk tradition, we can find Oshii’s works simultaneously inherit and betray the conventions of the genre. In Ghost in the Shell , we can easily associate the run-down areas such as “traditional” markets or messy signboards with Chinese characters with the decadent urban space in Ridley Scott’s
Blade Runner , a classic of cyberpunk and tech noir.21 It is almost a convention for cyberpunk to adopt a seemingly multicultural backdrop. The rain-soaked streets, diverse ethnicities, and exotic buildings in Ghost in the Shell as well as in Blade
Runner work together in order to create a dystopian atmosphere of the cybernetic world; however, the overtones in these two works are significantly different.
Compared to the more pessimistic attitude underlying Blade Runner , Ghost in the
Shell portrays a more splendid and intricate embroidery of cityscape. Oshii constructs a cosmopolitan city cast in the image of Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Venice or
Amsterdam at the same time. Ghost in the Shell is mainly modeled on Hong Kong, whereas Innocence includes more elements from other Asian or non-Asian cultures.
And through the complicated and delicate representation of the cyberspace Oshii not only points out the crises of technology abuse but also brings in a glimpse of hope.
21 Tech noir is a subgenre of films, comprising elements peculiar to film noir as well as cyberpunk. Chan 11
Some critics have noticed an interesting interplay between the constitution of cyberspace and the urban cultural imagination in reality. For example, Wang Kim
Yuen illustrates in his article “On the Verge of Spaces: Blade Runner , Ghost in the
Shell , and Hong Kong’s Cityspace” the culture-inclusive potentials of Hong Kong as a colonial city, demonstrates how effectively the cityspace in Hong Kong work in cyberpunk genre by taking Ghost in the Shell as an example, and further contends that the potentials of Hong Kong lies not in “the eroticism of multiculturalism” but in
“the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity” (18). The analysis of Hong
Kong cityspace may also account for the multiplicity and complexity of the urban setting in Oshii’s anime.
Brian Ruh’s Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii gives an accessible yet comprehensive contour of Oshii’s important works from 1980s to 2000. In addition to plot summary, Ruh introduces the images, symbols, themes, and other filming techniques of each work, and further supplements a brief commentary or
(inter)textual analysis. For example, in the chapter of Ghost in the Shell , he reads the story in the context of western cultures, comparing the differences between Oshii’s use of the symbols—such as Kusanagi’s “falling” and the Tree of knowledge on the wall—and their western allegorical implications.
Sharalyn Orbaugh’s “Frankenstein and the Cyborg Metropolis: The Evolution of
Body and City in Science Fiction Narratives” also includes a short discussion of Ghost in the Shell and Innocence . She calls Innocence a posthuman film by pointing out the uncanny elements in the film: “Batō seems able to ‘extend the courage of his desires’ to the extent that he manages to love the uncanny—at least in the form of the disembodied Kusanagi and his artificially produced dog” (102). I will also argue for the posthuman elements in Innocence , yet from a different perspective. Instead of focusing on the emotional attachment or detachment of the characters, I find the Chan 12 doll’s body in Innocence actually corresponds well to the posthuman spirit proposed in Katherine Hayle’s book How We Became Posthuman .
Dani Cavallaro’s The Cinema of Mamoru Oshii: Fantasy, Technology and Politics is a detailed guidebook of Mamoru’s anime, in which she maps Oshii’s cinematic works in chronological order, introduces his peculiar filming style, and attempts to position his works in the context of cinematography. Cavallaro emphasizes the importance of the cyborg body in Oshii’s works as “an electronic system” and “a communications network capable of absorbing information through the senses and of consequently acting upon the information received” (166). She nonetheless does not go further to claim that the body can serve as an interface, which I will go into details in Chapter three. Another note: while Cavallaro does not differentiate Motoko Kusanagi from other cyborg characters either of Japanese or western texts, she does notice a different representation between Kusanagi in films directed by Oshii and Kusanagi in
TV series directed by Kenji Kamiyama ( 神山健治). In fact, Oshii not only represents
Kusanagi differently by de-sexualizing her body, as Cavallaro has observed, but also refashions her into a pioneer of disembodied existence. Kusanaig eludes from the curse of being either a saint or a devil (as Maria and her double in Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis ); she rather assumes an ambiguous state that can never be pinned down by the symbolic system.
This project ventures to explore a new possibility in cyborg as well as posthuman theory as illustrated by the blooming Japanese anime whose influence has swept all over the world. With this ambition in mind, I propose to articulate the changing concepts of cyborgs and posthumanism in Mamoru Oshii’s SF anime: Ghost in the
Shell (1996) and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004). In chapter two, I would carefully analyze these two Japanese animations, investigating in particular their Chan 13 making of cyborg images and argue for the potentials of freedom embedded in
Oshii’s cyborgs. Chapter three will be devoted to the discussion of the posthuman spirits in these two animes. Drawing on Katherine Hayles’ perspective, I find that
Oshii’s Innocence echoes some of the important issues in posthumanism: distributed subjectivity, the decentering of anthropocentric position, and a new way of thinking about human being .
In chapter two, efforts will mostly be spent on the discussion of the representation of cyborgs in anime, and hopefully argue for the potential freedom embodied on the controversial female lead, Major Motoko Kusanagi. Critics of Ghost in the Shell fall generally into two groups. One thinks highly of the female discursive power represented by Kusanagi, which may serve as a way out of the patriarchal system in reality; the other seems more pessimistic about Kusanagi’s being reduced to nothing more than a voluptuous body under the permanent male gaze . These divergent points of view can actually be traced back to the fundamental dichotomy in
Haraway’s manifesto. That is, to use Christopher A. Bolton’s comment on Haraway, cyborgs on the one hand “promis[e] to free the subject from imposed categories of biology, gender and race,” but meanwhile “carry with them the threat of objectification and coercion” on the other (730). The female lead in both anime,
Kusanagi, remains a controversial gendered figure for many anime critics. She is on the one hand believed to be subversive in the sense that she is characterized as a tough, independent and physically powerful figure; on the other hand, it seems that she fails to escape from the traditional social roles designated for women, that is, being a mother as well as a fetish object. Some critics focus on the nudity of Kusanagi, for that renders Kusanagi’s body erotic and voluptuous. While Brian Ruh attests in his book Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii how nudity in the anime serves more as a metaphor of “life” rather than as a sexual icon. As for the maternal role Chan 14 suggested in the reproduction scene (the wedding between Kusanagi and Puppet
Master), Kusanagi does not take up the social role of a mother; by contrast, she is invited to the vast network, entering a world free of categories and social restrictions.
In addition, it may not be accurate to claim Kusanagi a traditional mother. At least she does not give birth to a traditional “child” who is going to pass down the name of father; by contrast, she gives birth to a new “self,” a bodiless entity that is empowered with freedom and power. Inspired by Ruh’s insightful arguments, I am convinced that Kusanagi can be and should be viewed as a figure who has more or less broken down those gender-specific social boundaries and even achieves a state of freedom.
Chapter three will focus on the posthuman elements shown in Oshii’s anime. I contend that the body representation in Innocence in particular embodies the posthuman body in Hayles’ sense. Through an examination of Kusanagi’s disembodied being as well as the dolls in human form, I am going to explore how
Oshii rewrite the body politics in the framework of posthumanism. In addition, the bipolar structure of human beings vs. machines is not adequate to account for the complex cyberpolitics as shown in Oshii’s animations. Therefore, it is necessary to include the third element—“information”—in the discussion. Information plays a very important role in anime, since it broadens the discursive potentials of the so-called cyborg identity. Information contains the most important yet fluid data that are essential to one’s identity: memories, conceptions of the outside world as well as of the self. But if a human being’s identity can be reduced to pure “information,” can it still be qualified as “human”? In order to probe this question, Mamoru Oshii makes it the theme of Innocence . The opening credits of Innocence also lay bare a similar interrogation that is central to the film: “If our God and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then let us admit it must be said that our love is scientific as Chan 15 well.”22 It is obvious that Innocence attempts to put into question two of the most precious and exceptional spiritual qualities—love and innocence—and furthermore to argue for possible love between a cyborg that has a body and one that does not in the context of a cybernetic world. Cyborg in this way is extremely similar to a computer, which is mainly composed of three parts: hardware, software and data.
Likewise, a cyborg comprises the body, the spirit (the ghost), and the data. There might be confusion between the spirit and the data and they indeed seem alike.
While the ghost actually functions more like a container, a site for agency, like the software which executes a series of complicated orders by means of the built-in programs. The data, information, fills in the contents of the input and the output.
The contents, however, are no substantial entity but always subject to changes. The ghost may not be activated if no input (the data) is received. Information thus obtains an essential role of deciding the contents of identity and how it is developed.
The central qualities of human beings—feelings, emotions, rational thinking and so on—turn out to be nothing but the effects of information. This recognition requires a new way of thinking, a new perspective in the possibility of complete disembodiment.
In dealing with the cyborg images in Oshii’s anime, it is inevitable to handle different aspects altogether: a paradigm shift from the traditional myth of either-human-or-machine to a posthuman attitude toward the freed subject forever suspended in between humans and machines.
The oscillation between human and machine has been the common struggle in modernity, while Mamoru Oshii’s anime provide a new vision of cyborgs, or to be more precise, posthuman cyborgs. It is not unusual to draw on binary opposition when talking about cyborg, which is undoubtedly a social product vacillating
22 The quote is taken from a French novel, L’ Ève future , and the Japanese in the anime goes, “我々の 神様も我々の希望も、もはやただ科学的なものでしかないとすれば、我々の愛もまた科学的で あっていけないいわれがありましょうか.” Chan 16 between “thing of nature” and “sign of culture,” to borrow Anne Balsamo’s words
(Technologies of the Gendered Body 3). However, the limitation is inherent in such a two-dimensioned structure, in which we are left with either a permanent tug-of-war or a celebration of it. Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell is facing the same problem. She is in quest for her own identity, and holds no certainty about her history and memory simply because the electric brain can easily be hacked. For a long time Kusanagi has been enchanted with a sense of nostalgia toward the human origin, afraid of being completely objectified. Toward the end of the anime, Kusanagi yet assents to merge with Puppet Master, a symbolic act of “destruction” as well as “reproduction.”
Kusanagi is thus “reborn” by herself to assume a new form of existence, which is neither human nor cyborg. It is rather a postcyborg that goes beyond the constraints of the ghost and the shell.
Echoing Kusanagi’s disembodied being, Innocence turns to emphasize a new body: the posthuman body. It is significantly distinct from the body in Ghost in the
Shell . The posthuman body ceases to serve as a fixed and steady anchor of subjectivity but becomes a temporary information pattern that allows subjectivity to generate from. The posthuman body cannot be pinned down in any structure built in the humanistic framework; rather, it is, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, the body without organs.
Analyzing the different body politics of these two animes are helpful to understand Oshii’s works and their importance in cyborg theories or posthuman studies. Oshii is very sensitive to the social and cultural trends and thus he is always able to detect the underlying problems in contemporary world. Through a careful examination of the cyborg bodies in Ghost in the Shell and further the posthuman bodies in Innocence , we are able to tease out the entanglements of humans, machines, and other forms of creatures. Chan 17
This project hopes to provide a new vision into the studies of Mamoru Oshii’s works. Instead of generalizing the cybernetic body in Oshii’s works under the category of “cyborg,” I consider the conversion of the body politics in Ghost in the
Shell and Innocence more inspiring and fascinating. It is interesting to note the changing concept of the body: from Donna Haraway’s hybridized cyborg body which blurs the line between machines and humans (all the characters in the films are of this kind), Kusanagi’s complete disembodiment of the cyborg body as a revolutionary attempt to do away with the conventional markers by discarding physicality for good, to the emergence of a new body: the posthuman body of innocence .
Chan 18
Chapter II
Going Beyond Gender: Cyborg Representation in Ghost in the Shell and Innocence
Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell and Innocence are epoch-making cyberpunk anime which are brilliant adaptations of Masamune Shirow’s original manga . Oshii has elaborated some of the important issues raised in the manga , such as humanity, body 23 and soul, technology, etc. and yet approaches these themes from a quite distinctive way. It is noteworthy that the representation of Motoko Kusanagi, the female lead in Ghost in the Shell , is significantly different from that in the manga .
Oshii alters Kusanagi’s image from an erotic figure in the parent text to an ascetic heroine in the anime. 24 Davni Cavallaro also recognizes such a de-eroticized intention in Oshii’s anime:
The film [ Ghost in the Shell ] leaves out the cybersexual dimension
altogether. Moreover, even though the protagonist herself, Major Motoko
Kusanagi, is undoubtedly attractive, she is imparted a far less cute and
substantially more somber mien by the film’s character designer Hiroyuki
Okiura than is ever the case in the parent text. Relatedly, where the manga
humorously indulges in overt representations of nude female bodies that
verge on soft porn and may even be interpreted as concessions to
fetishistic scopopilia, in the film, nudity is employed as a means of
succinctly conveying the main character’s ultimate vulnerability as a
concurrently physical and psychological dimension of her divided being,
and hence an allusion to her inherent humanity. ( Cinema 185-186)
23 Oshii even writes a book Notes on Making Innocence about the body politics in Innocence, in which he explains both the similarities and differences between different bodies: the human, the animal, the doll, and the machine. 24 In the original manga, Kusanagi’s virtual sexual experiences, interestingly with other female cyborgs, are described in details. Chan 19
Cavallaro notices that Oshii approaches the female body in a different way, and argues that the female body serves more as a reminder of mental vulnerability than an erotic object. The gender role taken by Motoko Kusanagi is actually an unconventional one. She is portrayed in the anime not as a sexy female cyborg but as a contemplator of existence. I will later give an elaboration on Kusanagi’s different representations in the manga and in the anime. In the following passages I am going to briefly summarize the two animes, at the same time pointing out some important issues that might be covered in the later chapters.
Ghost in the Shell is set in 2029, a time when all human beings, or to be more precise, all living things, are more or less cyberneticized. Major Motoko Kusanagi and her colleague Batou are agents in Section Nine, an organization that deals with technological terrorism. Section Six 25 , the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, secretly develops a computer program called “Project 2051” to handle unpleasant political problems in a filthy way. However, the program later gets out of control , gains its will and even calls itself “Puppet Master.” 26 Both Section Six and Section Nine are eager to capture Puppet Master, although with different purposes and out of different reasons. Finally Puppet Master is able to contact Kusanagi face to face and it seeks to
“merge” with her for it demands organic components to assure its survival in the long run. As soon as the unorthodox merging is completed, Kusanagi’s body is destroyed by Section Six but Batou succeeds in preserving her brain or “ghost” and reinstalls it into a new “shell.”
In both Ghost in the Shell and Innocence , the flesh-and-bone body is substituted by the cybernetic “shell,” which can be reproduced in factories. In addition, the
25 Section Six is a governmental department which deals with diplomatic issues, and there has been discord between Section Six and Nine. 26 Puppet Master’s claim goes, “I am not an AI…I am a living, thinking entity that was created in the sea of information.” Chan 20
“ghost” in the anime approximately parallels the human soul, to which identity is attached. While human soul is unique to individuals, the “ghost” in the anime can actually be dubbed via technological manipulation. Although the act of ghost-dubbing is technologically possible, it is forbidden by the government since it will cause direct damage to the brain when ghost-dubbed.
By adopting “ghost” and “shell” in the anime instead of more conventional terms like “soul” and “body,” Oshii discloses a necessity to rethink, rename, or even redefine the living and the non-living, the physical and the nonphysical, the machinery and the organism. The “ghost” in Oshii’s works approximately parallels the human soul, to which identity can be attached. But the “ghost” significantly differs from the human soul in terms of its intimate and inevitable connection with modern technology. While human soul is supposed to be a sufficient maker to confirm individual uniqueness and identity, the “ghost” in the anime merely serves as a temporal and unsteady container of identity and is subject to duplication and mutation via technological manipulation.
Likewise, the substitution of the “shell” for the “body” renders identity more elusive since identity is thus torn apart from the innate biological traits which count so much for gender or racial issues, and is forced to undergo a process of mechanization. The shell is no longer valid to be the one and the only container of identity; instead, it signifies a sense of “emptiness” in modern era. The Japanese corresponding word for the shell is “殻” (which can be pronounced as either “kara” or “kaku”), which is a homonym for “空” (“kara”). The shell is emptied out in the anime, making Motoko Kusanagi confused and anxious about her identity as a cyborg at the beginning, yet emptiness turns out to be a new phase, a dynamic state ready for a refill.
Innocence , the sequel of Ghost in the Shell set in 2032, tackles the intricate Chan 21 problem of “ghosts” from a non-humanistic perspective. The leading character in
Innocence goes to Batou, who is in charge of an investigation of a series of gruesome murder committed by the sex dolls produced by the company “Locus Solus.”27 Batou and his partner Togusa visit the CSI lab and have a debate with the agent called
“Haraway”28 on the difference between human babies and lifeless dolls. After that
Batou and Togusa find out the residence of Kim, the software programmer of Locus
Solus and decide to head for his place. There they are caught in the virtual labyrinth created by Kim but with the help of the “guardian angel”29 Kusanagi, Batou manages to break through Kim’s defensive cybermaze and arrest him. In search for more evidence, Batou sneaks into the illegal ship factory and is violently attacked by numerous frenzied dolls. Kusanagi reincarnates in one of the dolls and saves Batou’s life just in time. The mystery of the murder case is soon to be solved. It turns out that
Locus Solus seeks to make their sex dolls more humanlike, and the sex dolls are thus endowed with ghosts dubbed from human children’s. With the help of one of the programmers, the children are allowed to render the dolls frantic and kill their owners. By so doing, the police’s attention would be directed to the illegal act of the doll factory and the children could consequently be rescued. The plot of Innocence , however, is actually not as complicated as the way it is outlined. The diegesis only serves as the backdrop for a philosophical contemplation on the problematic blurring lines between the organic and the inorganic, the body (shell) and the soul (ghost), and the self and the other. Innocence is a sophisticated and artistic piece of work
27 The name of this company comes from the title of a French novel Locus Solus , written by Raymond Roussel in 1914. “Locus Solus” is the place where the protagonist keeps his bizarre and eccentric inventions. This allusion somewhat echoes Kim’s gorgeous palace, which in itself is a great collection of holographic simulation models of reality. 28 The name of this character alludes to Donna Haraway. And Ms Haraway in the anime interestingly insists on the similarities between machines, dolls, and human beings, which to some extent echoes Donna Haraway’s positive attitude toward the hybrid nature of cyborgs. 29 The crucial clue for Batou to detect Kim’s trick is the Hebrew term “Aemeath,” which means “truth” but with the first syllables “ae-” erased the word becomes “meath” (death). See the elaboration of this allusion in Callarvaro, Cinema 206-207. Chan 22 replete with different cultural, religious, and philosophical connotations, which make it flaunty in disguise yet rich in meanings and provocative issues that characterize the modern era.
This chapter aims to explore the different aspects of cyborg representation in
Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell and its sequel Innocence . My discussion will mainly focus on the female lead, Motoko Kusanagi, with an ambition to examine her
(de)gendered body in anime. It is not usual to have a woman be the main character in cyberpunk subgenre, in which woman cyborgs are more often characterized either as a reproduction machine or as an eroticized figure. But in my reading of Kusanagi, she manages to escape from these condemned gender roles and brings about more liberating forces for female cyborgs.
Similarly, Donna Haraway considers cyborg to be a positive hybrid, which accounts for the discursive potentials promised in the cyborg body by at least problematizing and unstabilizing, if not effacing, the traditional dualisms such as man vs. woman, or human vs. machine. Haraway makes it clear that she takes up the cyborg as both a social phenomenon which occurs in daily life and an abstract concept that challenges the conventional distinctions between male and female. She gives a definition of cyborgs in her famous article “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”:
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a
creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived
social relations, our most important political construction, a
world-changing fiction. . . . The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the
boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signaling a
walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly
and pleasurably tight coupling. (7; 10)
Haraway on the one hand suggests that the cyborg signifies women experiences Chan 23 which are continually shaped and changed by the social reality or technological progress, and considers the cyborg as a powerful concept that challenges gender dualism on the other. Haraway digs out a glimpse of hope and freedom in this hybridized creature, which offers women an alternative identity other than a victim such as a sexual object or a child bearer under the symbolic order.
My task in this chapter is to examine Motoko Kusanagi in the context of Oshii’s two animes and hopefully argue for her potentials in being an unconventional and liberatory female figure as promised in Haraway’s discourse. I would like to focus my discussion on Kusanagi’s controversial nude scenes and other body representation in the anime, attempting to tease out the potentials rather than restrictions promised in Kusanagi’s disembodiment.
From Construction to Destruction: Motoko Kusanagi’s (De)Gendered Body
By means of the complicated representation of female cyborgs, Mamoru Oshii artistically demonstrates how Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell and Innocence serves as a new model of cyborgs who turns out to be empowered with liberatory potentials which are not previously allowed for her. In other words, these two animations can also be viewed as featuring a process of Kusanagi’s transforming into a new self.
Critique on this controversial figure usually starts with her body. The link between the body and identity politics is often made, because it is the body on which traces of gender, race, ethnics, and cultures are to be inscribed ever since one is born to the world. Therefore, it is not surprising at all for Allucquere Rosanne Stone to suggest that “[n]o matter how virtual the subject may become, there is always a body attached” (93). However, with the technological advancement, the body has literally and metaphorically undergone many drastic changes so that the concept of body has to be reexamined and refashioned. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, “[i]f bodies are to be Chan 24 reconceived, not only must their matter and form be rethought, but so too must their environment and spatio-temporal location ” (120; original emphasis). Hence, not only the body itself but also the interaction between body and the context deserves a more detailed exploration.
In this regard, I will analyze Kusanagi’s gendered cyborg body (before her total disembodiment at the end of Ghost in the Shell ) to further contend that although her material body seems to fall into categories like a sexual object and a natural mother for reproduction, the way her body is represented in the anime paradoxically signifies a resistance to these traditional roles assigned to women. Some critics take up the issue of body and view Kusanagi as either a voluptuous object or a child bearer, suggesting that she fails to efface the old categories even though her hybrid body seems to promise a kind of liberation. Carl Silvio’s argument is a rather typical one:
“[Ghost in the Shell ] appears at first sight to subvert radically the power dynamics inherent in dominant structures of gender and sexual difference, while covertly reinscribing them.”30 However, Silvio does notice some conventions challenged in
Oshii’s anime. For example, Kusanagi is by no means a traditionally vulnerable female; she is physically as strong, powerful, and independent as male characters in this and other cyberpunk texts. The choice of an Asian cyborg woman also breaks the cyberpunk formula that the hero is usually a white man. Silvio is nevertheless not satisfied with the superficial masculinity of Kusanagi and she regards it as insufficient to account for a radical cyborg model proposed by Haraway. She turns to emphasize
Kusanagi’s nude scenes and argue for a reintroduction of heterosexual reproduction.
However, she fails to contextualize these representations; that is, to position those pictorial images in the context of the animation instead of singling them out as
30 A full version of Carl Silvio’s article is available online:
With respect to Motoko Kusanagi’s nudity, I would like to contend that her nakedness works more as a foreshadowing for her later disembodiment than simply reinscribing the objectification of female body. While I do concede that to some extent her body is visualized as a standardized product: she is a cyborg produced to execute governmental tasks on screen, and she is also a culture product performed in anime. She is an agent belonging to Section Nine so her agency is empowered yet regulated by the government. As a culture product, she is not able to escape from being reproduced as an attractive female character on posters or made into models for sale (fig. 3.). However, it might be too prompt to conclude that Kusanagi is trapped in the old curse of embodying an eroticized figure in anime. In order to refute this claim, I would like to take a closer look at the nude scenes of Kusanagi in the film.
The first nude shot appears at the very beginning of Ghost in the Shell , when
Kusanagi, a Major of Section Nine (a government institute that attacks terrorism and assassins), is about to break into a building to murder a criminal diplomat. She takes off her clothes and uses the thermo-optic camouflage built in her body to make herself invisible to others. 31 The first shot of her nakedness (fig. 4.) is taken from a low angle, and she is thus represented as a heroic figure standing high above. She looks majestic and powerful with her eyes downcast. She is by no means eroticized in this shot, for the low angle shot tends to reinforce a dignified image rather than encourages a voluptuous point of view. In addition, her naked body appears right after Kusanagi’s joke of self-irony, “because I’m having my period,” which lays bare the difference between a common female body and a flawless cybernetic body,
31 So in the assassination, Kusanagi is actually not naked because she is wearing this thermo-optic camouflage, but she nevertheless appears to be naked. Chan 26 between natural birth and technological reproduction. The nudity in this scene can actually be taken as a parody of a natural and frail female body. Her heroic image is established by this shot and is later developed and confirmed by her dauntless act of assassination. However, in these two shots she can hardly be recognized as Kusanagi since her face is obscured by the shadow. In other words, she is represented as a heroine with no face. She is an excellent agent in Section Nine and that is all.
Although she appears to be confident and even wears a slight smile on her face
(fig. 5. and 6.) when she falls off from the building, she is nevertheless a property of the government. Her body is actually a tool and is inscribed with social functions and moral responsibilities. The struggle for a free subjectivity thus becomes one of the most important motifs in this anime.
Certainly Kusanagi’s body in these two shots is captured in the air, signifying her physical and mental instability. Both Dani Cavallaro and Susan Napier detect an underlying vulnerability hidden in Kusanagi’s image in the falling scenes. For one thing, the image of falling is central to Christianity, which is associated with degradation of mankind. So Kusanagi’s falling is interpreted to be deprived of power and freedom. For another, it insinuates an inward fear of falling into emptiness, of finding herself nothing but computer-generating codes. Cavallaro claims that the falling actually implicates Kusanagi’s mental vulnerability:
Kusanagi’s ambiguity is reinforced by the film’s depiction of her physical
appearance in terms of a fairly stereotypical notion of feminine sexiness
replete with alluring curvaceousness, and its concurrent emphasis on the
fact that even when she appears to be nude, she is actually donning
technologically enhanced flesh-colored body suits intended to abet her
performance—and thus again insinuating her latent vulnerability. ( Cinema
191) Chan 27
According to Cavallaro, instead of a play of “feminine sexiness,” the representation of her nakedness here actually signifies something else: the vulnerability of the body. I agree that the cybernetic body in Ghost in the Shell is a symbol of fragility, yet I think the falling scenes otherwise project Kusanagi as a powerful figure at that point. Her posture (fig. 6.) is full of mobility and agency, and a full vision of her voluptuous body is hindered by the shadow. In this scene Kusanagi should not be taken as a sexualized object but as a powerful and even threatening heroine. For example, after the assassination, she disappears by activating the thermo-optic camouflage when she falls into the glamorous city in the background. The first falling shot (fig. 5.) is a close-up of Kusanagi’s face, creating a sense of threat to the audience since Kusanagi seems to crash upon them. Soon after Kusanagi completes her task of assassination, she falls again from the building (fig. 6.), and this shot is interestingly taken from high angle. Generally speaking, characters may look helpless and powerless when captured in high angle shots, since the camera eye from high above assumes a more powerful and judgmental point of view. However, in this high angle shot, Kusanagi is not represented as a victim. She looks firmly, or even provocatively, back to the camera eye. At this moment, the audience may identify with the desperate captain of
Section Six, namely, with the camera eye. Kusanagi is not a victim under the camera eye, but is instead portrayed as a powerful figure who can elude the capture of both the male captain of Section Six and the camera eye by making herself invisible. What follows is again a close-up of Kusanagi, which actually violates the norm of a falling scene. By the norm I mean a sense of falling is usually created through expanding or contracting the falling objects. If it is a high angle shot, a sense of speed would be intensified by making the falling object smaller and smaller. In her falling scene, however, Kusanagi is given a close-up instead; this way Kusanagi is like hovering in the air rather than falling, and meanwhile allows the audience to take notice of the Chan 28 confident smile on her face.
Following this assassination scene come the opening credits of the anime, which in a way deconstructs Kusanagi’s female body rather than articulates it by showing the process of making Kusanagi’s shell. It is true that the making of an idealized female body implies a patriarchal desire, a genesis completed not with the hand of
God but with a humanist technological fantasy. And Silvio is right to point out, by citing Katherine Halyes’ words, the sequence of Kusanagi’s production may render
Kusanagi a passive object: “When bodies are constituted as information, they can not only be sold but fundamentally reconstituted in response to market pressure” (42).
Indeed, Kusanagi has a cybernecticized body wholly composed of mechanical materials, and she is sold to the government as well as to the audience either as a public servant or an erotic figure. Nevertheless, Kusanagi’s representation in the anime is by no means a mere objectification or a commodification; this sequence of shell-making actually paves way for the subsequent destruction of such an idealized female image in the latter half of Ghost in the Shell as well as in Innocence . Although the sequence in appearance bears echo to a cyberpunk tradition of making an idealized female cyborg body which possesses human shape and inhuman strength simultaneously, Kusanagi’s disembodiment in Oshii’s anime ends up betraying this tradition: the human shape fails to enclose her self and the cybernetic body proves to be fragile and is finally torn into pieces. Being a product of men’s desires, Kusanagi ironically leaves these desires unfulfilled. When her body is broken into pieces (fig. 7.), she is freed from the desires inscribed on it.
Compared to the original manga written by Masamune Shirow (fig. 7.), Oshii’s portrayal of Kusanagi is subtly and delicately organized in such a way that the intact and flawless body gradually lends way to a fragmented and dismembered torso, which symbolizes the physical and mental vulnerability of the technologically Chan 29 generated shell on the one hand and a betrayal, if not a total breakdown, of gender conventions on the other. Except for the sequence coming along the opening credits,
Kusanagi’s naked body is usually shown in a form of fragments, which reminds us in a symbolic manner of the unsteadiness of her cyborg identity. According to Dani
Cavallaro, Kusanagi’s nude body serves to associate her with the fact that she is fundamentally a human being:
[N]udity [in Ghost in the Shell ] is employed as a means of succinctly
conveying the main character’s [Kusanagi’s] ultimate vulnerability as a
concurrently physical and psychological dimension of her divided being,
and hence an allusion to her inherent humanity. ( Cinema 186)
It proves reasonable and convincing that Kusanagi’s nudity is more likely to function as a reminder of her physical and mental vulnerability. Judging from this view, the destruction of this fragile gendered body at the end of Ghost in the Shell renders gender as a mere outdated marker in a post-gender world.
Apparently, the body gradually loses its ability to anchor femininity as
Kusanagi’s body is represented more and more as fragments or torso rather than as an intact body (fig. 9. & 10.). In fig. 11, instead of shooting the front of the body, the shot presents Kusanagi’s back. It not only demonstrates a shift from erotic attraction to a refusal of it.
If it is true that the so-called masculinity and femininity are “always mechanical and artificial,” which are constructed and programmed by the society, then my point is that Kusanagi can neither be grouped into femininity nor masculinity (Sofoulis 92).
In additional to her physical strength, Kusanagi is rational, independent, and adventurous. Adjectives traditionally used to describe a male character also seem compatible with Kusanagi’s personalities. The traditional dichotomy of femininity and masculinity proves insufficient and problematic on Kusanagi. In Ghost in the Shell and Chan 30
Innocence , it is only when Kusanagi interacts with Batou can the audience sense a trace of femininity. It is rather obvious that Kusanagi is always indifferent to her own nudity, and that is why she never bothers to cover her body after using the thermo-optic camouflage, which makes her appear to be naked on screen. It is always Batou, who secretly loves her, gently puts his jacket on her. Such a
“considerate” gesture actually reminds the audience of the traditional values imposed on women’s body. That is, women’s body should not be exposed to the public. And whenever Batou puts his jacket on Kusanagi, the audience realizes once again that even if Kusanagi is so physically powerful, she is fundamentally a woman.
If so, does Oshii simply reaffirm the conventional views on women only in a different way? Something has to be made clear before answering this question. Batou is actually a cyborg who holds a more traditional and nostalgic attitude toward life and gender, but Kusanagi is not. Batou’s jacket symbolizes protection and love in a conventional sense on the one hand yet paradoxically indicates their malfunctioning on the other. For example, after a big fight with a tank, Kusanagi finally takes her female torso back from from Puppet Master. Since only the upper part of Kusanagi is left after the battle, she decides to hack into Puppet Master’s brain with Batou’s help.
In fig. 13, Kusanagi and Puppet Master are lying on the ground side by side, with
Kusanagi’s body covered by Batou’s jacket. Batou’s jacket serves as a distinction between Kusanagi and Puppet Master: the former is the woman he loves; the latter is the criminal he is chasing after. However, Batou is ignorant of the fact that actually
Kusanagi and Puppet Master have exchanged their shells at the moment, so Batou’s jacket ironically points out his failed attempt to stop Kusanagi from connecting to
Puppet Master. And in the merging scene, Batou is indeed the one rendered most helpless and impotent, since he is excluded from the process completely. In
Innocence , the disembodied Kusanagi downloads part of herself into one of the sex Chan 31 dolls via satellite to save Batou. Recognizing Kusanagi, Batou puts his jacket on her as usual. “You haven’t changed,” said Kusanagi. Batou remains to be a hard-boiled hero, who swears to protect the one he loves and keeps her safe in his cozy little apartment. But Kusanagi is by no means a domestic woman and would not be content with being one. Therefore, in response to Batou’s question “do you consider yourself happy?,” Kusanagi replies: “A nostalgic value, I suppose. At least I am free of qualms.” This statement clearly indicates the differences between Batou and
Kusanagi. The jacket signifies Batou’s unfulfilled wish. Kusanagi does not refuse this good will since she understands well Batou’s nostalgic way of thinking, but she does not accept it, either. She otherwise leaves it there.
The last shot of the merging scene in Ghost in the Shell is a close-up of
Kusanagi’s broken head. Her gendered body is symbolically destroyed and nowhere to be found. Likewise, the climactic fighting scene on the ship factory in Innocence also ends with a close-up of Kusanagi’s face. The two endings echo to each other yet possess different implications. In Ghost in the Shell , the head and the body serve as different metaphors: the former signifies the “ghost,” or the container of self; the latter refers to the “shell,” which is an artificial product. The message conveyed in this close-up is that the ghost is more important than the shell when it comes to identity, since the body is like clothes than can be changed or cast away. However, in
Innocence , the head is actually not Kusanagi’s head; it’s a doll’s head. It is one of the numerous others. The indiscernibility between Kusanagi and the dolls points to a significant posthuman view that subjectivity is fluid rather than rigid, emergent rather assigned. The body thus merely serves as a temporary and empty form that embodies subjectivity. In light of this, the doll’s head can be referred as Kusanagi’s, or any other doll’s. The posthuman view will be further discussed in chapter three.
The gendered body reaches its end at the climactic scene of Kusanagi’s merging Chan 32 with Puppet Master, who is originally a government program but later claims to generate self-consciousness. The symbolic obliteration of Kusanagi’s gendered body implies a demand for new vocabulary or paradigm in a post-gender agenda, in which gender can no longer securely rest on the body, whether organic or artificial one.
Even if Kusanagi’s disembodiment may not be able to efface all the conventional values and categories imposed on females, it at least implies that a new model of female cyborg may spring. Christopher Bolton also holds a positive attitude toward the disembodiment: “The destruction of her [Kusanagi’s] body becomes a physical and social transformation, and also a performance, a staged death that allows her to escape or fulfill the giri [義理; social obligations] of her social role as an agent” (763).
The death of the old body initiates a new stage of living, a form of existence that cannot be subsumed by any exiting bodily framework. It is less the disembodiment alone than a new way of conceptualizing the body that sheds light on the potentials of female cyborgs proposed by Haraway:
Although the female body is subordinated within institutionalized systems
of power and knowledge and crisscrossed by incompatible discourses, it is
not fully determined by those systems of meaning; and although woman is
technologically constructed, her excesses accumulate, assembling the
resources/techniques to signify/construct herself as transgressive of, if not
entirely resistant to, the discourses that seek to contain her. (qtd. in
Balsamo 39)
It should not be misunderstood that the disembodiment of a gendered body is the only way out of the restrictions of gender roles; the disembodiment rather reveals a possibility to free gender from biological determination which draws on dichotomies of male/female, or masculine/feminine.
Kusanagi shows up as a little girl at the end of Ghost in the Shell , implying a Chan 33 rebirth of a new self. The image of a little girl bears significant implications. Being a child is being in an ambiguous status between male and female, and this to some extent allows Kusanagi to escape from an impression of being an erotic figure.
Bolton’s reading of the final scene is inspiring:
The newly young body represents Kusanagi’s rebirth is again subject to a
double reading: her escape from her playboy proportions might signify the
escape from imposed gender categories, or the doll-like body of the little
girl could be seen as a tamed, infantilized version of the female subject.
(764)
Indeed, Bolton views Kusanagi as a free agent who manages to flee from the social constraints and demonstrates how she regains the self after merging with Puppet
Master through a change in voice:
At first Kusanagi speaks in the high-pitched voice of her child body. . . . She
is neither Kusanagi nor the Puppet Master, but some combination of the
two, alive both in body and on the net. . . . Barthes and others saw the
puppet’s shared voice as a sign of the decentered self; but Kusanagi is able
to regain her old voice, seeming to gather it up again from the net. . . . But
the voice more than anything signals a retention of her old self and a bodily
wholeness, while the power to change voices also shows she can find
herself in new places or transform herself in new ways. (764-765)
Kusanagi is not a tamed infant at any rate; she shows confidence and determination when she speaks to Batou with her “old” voice, citing the saying from the Bible, yet giving it a new level of meaning which compounds the cybernetic genesis: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Cor. 13:11). Similar yet different from the religious allusion, Kusanagi does not get “mature” in a traditional sense of Chan 34 growing up but transforms herself into a form of existence that diverts from linear evolution. On the contrary, Kusanagi’s regaining of self can be proven not only by the recovery of her own voice but also by the visual filmic language. The final scene of the new Kusanagi is shot from a slightly low angle. This time her face is clearly seen without being mottled by the shadow. Compared to the openning scene, in which
Kusanagi is shaped as a heroic figure yet under the control of government, the final scene symbolizes the generation of a new form of living, this time without the cybernetic body. Kusanagi disappears in the glamorous metropolis at the beginning, while she is now standing firmly on the hill, her eyes identified with the camera, feeling confident no longer because of the privileges endowed by the government but because of her self-recognition.
In Innocence , the literally disembodied Kusanagi appears only three times, and by downloading her consciousness into different shells, she is able to embody herself in different forms. The first one is when Batou is walking in the traditional Chinese supermarket. Kusanagi shows up as a white-haired, gender-nonspecific person, warning Batou of the lurking danger where he is. The second time she appears as a
“guardian angel” (in Batou’s term) in the grand hall of Kim’s house. This time she looks exactly like the little girl at the end of Ghost in the Shell . The last time she shows herself in the climactic scene, which depicts a battle between cyborgs (Batou and Kusanagi) and crazy ningyō (dolls) on a ship factory. Kusanagi is portrayed as an angel again, who is able to warn Batou beforehand like a prophet, but she is by no means “an angel in the house.” She shows her physical strength in the fighting scene, which makes it clear to the audience that it is not the physical cybernetic body that decides one’s force, since Kusanagi takes control of one of the dolls yet is able to beat the dolls. It is instead the program, the information within the ghost, that makes a difference. Chan 35
Much is left unsaid about Kusanagi’s life after disembodiment, though. Since
Innocence is mainly a work about the male character Batou, it is difficult for him as well as for the audience to imagine the life of Kusanagi as a postcyborg in this film.
Yet from the different cases of her incarnation, it is evident that Kusanagi now possesses a relatively greater freedom than in Ghost in the Shell . She is no longer an agent subordinated to the government or Section Nine, fearing that someday her memories will have to be washed off. Also, she is unbounded from the social roles of being a woman, or even a cyborg in a traditional sense (which has to be attached to a body, a shell). Even if she is not free in every aspect, she is at least empowered with a freedom of form. By the freedom of form I am referring to Mark Dery’s words: “In this age of information overload, what is significant is no longer freedom of ideas but rather freedom of form—freedom to modify, freedom to mutate your body” (303). In the anime, every cyborg seems to possess this kind of freedom of form, since the cybernetic body can be repaired, substituted, exchanged and adjusted if necessary, but the body is actually under extreme surveillance and control by the society.
Kusanagi is so well aware of this restriction on the body that her decision of merging with Puppet Master is no accident. This is the first time she manages to determine her own destiny out of free will. Before the technological marriage, Kusanagi worries that she could not remain to be herself once she merges with Puppet Master when she asks, “What guarantee is there that l’ll remain ‘me’?” This question underlies the anxiety of being or not being an individual in the cybernetic world. While a single and intact self cannot be promised, the Puppet Master explains, “[n]one. But to be human is to continually change. Your desire to remain as you are is what ultimately limits you. . . . But now we must slip our bonds, and shift to the higher structure.”
The meaning of the higher structure is never made clear in the anime, and it is reasonable to assume Kusanagi is not certain of what she is going to become at that Chan 36 moment. She nevertheless makes her choice. Since her body is doomed to be a tool of the government, the fastest way to escape from this social role is to depose of the body. Even if the consequence is unknown to her, she is willing to and dares to take the risk. This pursuit of the self and freedom corresponds to the characteristics of cyborgs, according to Haraway, who “are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (“Manifesto” 13). Kusanagi has strived for an independent self throughout Ghost in the Shell , painfully asking “On what basis then do l believe in myself?” At the end of the anime, she manages to account for herself with certainty and confidence, in her own voice: “Here before you is neither the program called the
Puppet Master, nor the woman that was called the Major.” The transgression embodied in Kusanagi’s disembodiment lies less in the annihilation of the physical body than in her free will of choosing the form of existence.
Aside from being accused of being a gendered figure, Kusanagi is often mistakenly associated with the mother image in the merging scene with Puppet
Master. Carl Silvio argues that although Puppet Master incarnates itself in a female body, it nevertheless has a “male” voice, and such a superficial play of gender role helps little for a transgression of heterosexual reproduction (15). Silvio also suggests that Kusanagi appears to be a passive “mother” during the merging process, that
Kusanagi is entered, pierced by Puppet Master (16). One thing has to be made clear is that Puppet Master is by no means a “male” character; it is rather one with androgynous ambiguity, occupying the gray zone of gender, since it directly “stems from the sea of information” and may not carry any sexed character. The merging of
Kusanagi and Puppet Master is undoubtedly far from being a mergence between male and female, to which Silvio concedes. Trapped by the heterosexual model, Silvio fails to see the transgressive power of this unconventional merging: the absence of Chan 37 heterosexual intercourse and that of penis and vagina during the process free both from the curse of penis envy or castration fear.
In response to Silvio’s contention, I would say that the discussion of who is passive and who is active does not lead us far. It is true that Puppet Master first
“enters” Kusanagi’s body, but actually Kusanagi also enters Puppet Master’s. Instead of having one conquer the other, the scene shows how they exchange their cybernetic bodies. Their conversation is conducted after they have exchanged their bodies through the shot-reverse shot (fig. 17 & 18). It is worth noting that in the scene, Batou, a “male” figure, is also present, but he is helplessly kept out of the merging process, unable to intervene or assume a role in it. It can be argued that the real male character, Batou instead of Puppet Master, seems impotent and misplaced during the integration process. Moreover, the new Kusanagi does not fit in the symbolic structure in the sense that she does not pass down the name of father; in other words, she gives birth to a new self rather than a traditional “child.” Brian Ruh shares the same opinion, acknowledging a possibility of freedom embodied in
Kusanagi:
Kusanagi, while she may in a sense be the “mother” to the new being she
becomes, does not take up the standard social role of the mother in society.
Instead, at the end of the film, we see Kusanagi contemplating the vastness
of the Net, implying that she will be going out into society as she always
has done rather than becoming focused on home and family. There is
nothing inherently weakening or discriminatory about being a mother; the
social role such a person may occupy is, however. (134-135)
Not taking up both the biological and social role of a woman, Kusanagi is also liberated from the role of what Dumit and Davis-Floyd call “secondary by-product,” who struggles between the father and the son (5). In their book Cyborg Babies , Chan 38
Dumit and Davis-Floyd suggest that the female body has long been linked to the image of a defective machine in western discourse. The role of a mother is to produce the important product: the child. “The demise of the midwife and the rise of the male-attended, mechanically manipulated birth followed close on the heels of the wide cultural acceptance of the metaphor of the female body as a defective machine” (4). In the sequence alongside the opening credits of Ghost in the Shell , a process of the “male-attended, mechanically manipulated birth” of Kusanagi is carried out before the audience, whereas the mergence at the end of the film signifies a new branch of technological reproduction which can neither be subsumed nor controlled by traditional gendered discourses. Kusanagi’s body is rendered not as much as a reproductive tool as a temporal container of her ghost, the seat of the
“self.”
Additionally, Silvio criticizes the way Puppet Master addresses Kusanagi— “the bearer of my offspring”—and argues that this choice of words implicates a reinscription of the traditional female role as a mother:
The evocation of this conventional trope of reproduction, the female body
as the bearer of life, profoundly qualifies [sic] the subversive potential of
the film’s ending by transforming Kusanagi’s radically re-coded and
resistant cyborg body into a maternal body, a vehicle for the production of
offspring.
This is not an illegitimate reading, yet this argument is grounded on a misunderstanding resulting from the inaccurate English translation of Puppet
Master’s words. The original line goes, “After the mergence, the new you is going to shed my varieties into the net” (融合後の新しい君は、事ある毎に私の変種をネッ
トに流すだろう; my translation), but the official English subtitle is rather misleading by saying, “After the merging, you will bear my offspring into the net itself.” The Chan 39 original text does not suggest the maternal image at all; rather, it borrows the metaphor of water flow (with 流す meaning to shed or to flow), which is subtly allayed with the fluid trait of the internet. What’s more, instead of applying terms like
“children” (子供) or “offspring” (子孫), which tend to infer a biological inheritance and a traditional sense of childbearing, Oshii otherwise adopts a more biotechnological term 変種(variety), which lays emphasis more on its mutation and divorces from the parent species. Kusanagi does not bear the child of a “father”; she is instead expected to produce new “varieties,” breaking away from the law of the heterosexual reproduction and meanwhile harking back to Haraway’s description of the cyborg:
The cyborg does not expect its father to save it through the restoration of
garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its
completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not
dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without
the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it
is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. ( Simians 151)
The new Kusanagi articulates an alternative to the oedipal project, unbinding the sinful Eve from the ultimate curse of either being a symbol of degradation or being a defective mother who is forever caught between father and son. This time Kusanagi refuses to be a machine of reproduction and escapes from being either a perfect or a defective woman.
Oshii tactfully plays with the image of Eve especially in Innocence . In Ghost in the Shell the allusion to Christianity is relatively opaque. In the battle scene with a huge tank in Ghost in the Shell , the Tree of Life of Darwinist 32 is symbolically
32 The symbol of the Tree of Life is replete with connotations of different fields, but here I consider it more closely related to Darwin’s tree metaphor, which suggests the natural circle of life on earth: “As Chan 40 destroyed by the violent gunshots (fig. 19), it insinuates that Kusanagi’s rebirth does not follow the conventional path of natural evolution. On the other hand, the image of the tree also reminds the audience of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of
Eden. The Tree symbolizes the forbidden knowledge which dawns on human beings the distinctions between good and evil, male and female, honor and shame. It is the original sin for which Eve is condemned. Now the tree is crumbled by the technological force and rendered dilapidated if not abolished. And Eve as a metaphor is redefined in the context of a post-gender era. She ceases to be a rib of Adam, a seduced victim, but a self-satisfied living entity, a “monstrous chimera,” in Haraway’s words, that could not be pinned down by fixed categories. Kusanagi is also invited to have a taste of the forbidden fruit, which symbolizes the unknown world beyond imagination, but this time the fruit is inorganic , and what it promises is not a world grounded on dichotomies but a world unbound from them. Kusanagi does not fall, nor does she ascend to the heaven; she remains a ghost hovering in the ocean of information.
To sum up, Motoko Kusanagi is undoubtedly a complicated character in Ghost in the Shell and Innocence . She can be argued as a pioneer in the sense that she ventures to transform herself into an unknown form of existence out of her free will; she can also be articulated as a liberatory figure that problematicize the conventional roles assigned to female: an erotic figure that embodies human’s desires, a maternal image that is appropriated as a tool for reproduction. Kusanagi is represented as a post-gender model that challenges the dichotomies constructed in a patriarchal framework. For example, biological characteristics of both sexes are thus rendered
buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life , which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications” (154; my emphasis). Chan 41 obsolescent to decide one’s gender, on which identity used to be heavily grounded.
Kusanagi’s new self as a disembodied cyborg calls into questions the traditional categories and simultaneously pleads for a refashioning of gender politics as well as discourses about being and existence. Yet it should always be remembered that
Motoko Kusanagi is not the messiah for human beings; she poses rather as an alternative to the gendered model.
Chan 42
Chapter III
The Posthuman View in Oshii’s Anime
At the very beginning of Ghost in the Shell , following Motoko Kusanagi’s “birth” scene is her waking-up scene. She opens her eyes, slightly bending her fingers, and strives to get up from the bed. Then she rubs her eyes and gets into a trance for a short while. On seeing her natural and human-like gesture or movement, the audience may assume that this is very likely to be the first time that Kusanagi comes into herself after her “birth” or “production.” The point of concern is not whether this is her first waking, however. What is at stake is the common assumption that consciousness, or a sense of the self, is closely related to a perception or control over one’s body. We may not think she is “alive” when her body is still fabricated in the factory, but we believe she comes in to being when we see she moves her fingers and acts as a human being. In Ghost in the Shell , Kusanagi is a philosopher who ponders upon what human beings are. Putting aside the gender issues associated with her physical body, we may find out that her bodily representations excellently manifest this philosophical inquiry. We witness the deficiency of the cybernetic shell in the diving scene since water may ruin her mechanic body; we sense the uneasiness, or even fear, as Kusanagi bumps into the “shell” which looks exactly the same as her and reminds her of being merchandise rather than a unique human being; we see the limitation of the shell in Kusanagi’s fatal fight with the huge tank when her physical body is torn into pieces. The vulnerability of the body as well as the identity crisis leads Kusanagi to doubt what it means to be “being.” The imperfection of physicality or embodied being to some extent foreshadows the complete disembodiment in the end. Although the disembodied existence may not serve as the final answer to Kusanagi’s question, it offers an alternative way of thinking and opens up the scope of the question: from “what human beings are” to “what human Chan 43 beings can be.” The filmic narrative suggests that human identity lies not in the body but in the ghost, or the soul. The disembodiment at the end of Ghost in the Shell can be viewed as a tentative solution to Kusanagi’s quest: while it turns out to be impossible to constitute a unique self with the constrained physical form, a multiple subjectivity may otherwise be generated from the sea of information.
In contrast to the fragmented bodily representation in Ghost in the Shell ,
Innocence turns to present a variety of body images: cyborgs, androids, disembodied existence, dolls, animals, etc. These captivating yet disturbing images overwhelm the filmic narrative and bring the “body” back onto the stage. It seems that in Ghost in the Shell , Oshii has discarded the vulnerable body/shell and rested the subjectivity on the soul/ghost. While in Innocence , the “body” image comes back and takes up a role with an importance that cannot be overemphasized. If we compare the two opening credits of Ghost in the Shell and Innocence , we may find that the two works are about different stories with the same scenario. Both depict the process of “birth” or
“construction” of an inorganic body (Motoko Kusanagi and dolls respectively), but in fact these two stories significantly differ from each other in many ways: the place or setting in which this birth takes place, they way of their bodies are constituted, and how their birth scene is represented. A more detailed discussion on the implications and meanings of these two opening credits will be covered in this chapter. To be brief, the relationship between Ghost in the Shell and its sequel may be summarized as a process going from the “shell” to the ghost, and finally back to the “body.” The
“body” here no longer serves as a synonym with the shell as in Ghost in the Shell ; the
“body” in Innocence turns out to be an interface, whether it is organic or inorganic, that associates or dissociates one’s subjectivity. To understand this new concept of the “body,” we can recall the argument made by Katherine Hayles in her thought-provoking book How We Became Posthuman : Chan 44
[I]t is important to recognize that the construction of the posthuman does
not require the subject to be a literal cyborg. Whether or not interventions
have been made on the body, new models of subjectivity emerging from
such fields as cognitive science and artificial life imply that even a
biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman. The defining
characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of
nonbiological components. (Italics original; 4)
This view on the posthuman is believed to be helpful in elucidating the “return of the body” in Innocence because it proposes that posthuman subjectivity, according to
Hayles, lies not in the physical combination of machinery and organic parts but in the fashioning of the subjectivity.
In Ghost in the Shell , the ground-breaking disembodiment as a new form of existence pushes the film to its climax. Its conclusion can be summarized as a statement like “the body fails to contain our identity.” While in Innocence , the focus is switching back to the body, yet bearing different meanings and implications.
Another question is posed to the audience: “what could our body mean to us?” In this chapter, I will mainly draw on Hayles’ view on the posthuman and aim to explore the tangled relationship between the various “bodies” and posthuman subjectivity by examining how these posthuman bodies, particularly in Innocence, are articulated through new body politics as well as through the philosophical narrations of Oshii’s film language.
Innocent Posthuman Bodies
First I would like to discuss the titles of the two animes, in which the body politics of each are hinted. The title Ghost in the Shell contains two parts—the
“ghost” and the “shell”—and it also indicates the relationship of the two: the ghost is Chan 45 in the shell. They are different in nature and can be separated for this reason. The distinction between the mind (the ghost) and the body (the shell) is not a new story.
René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, claims that reason is “the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts . . . ” (36), and this contention suggests a split between the mind (reason) and the body (instincts). And it is this concept that grounds the disembodiment of Kusanagi. If the body (shell) cannot be divided from the soul (ghost), and if subjectivity cannot be completely hosted in the ghost rather than in the shell, it would be impossible for Kusanagi to discard her physical body yet remain an intact self. In other words, Ghost in the Shell probes the possibility of “ghost getting out of the shell” and even “ghost without the shell.”
As for Innocence , there is no longer a distinction between the ghost and the shell; instead, innocence refers to a state from which subjectivity may spring, a state which belongs to unconsciousness and chaos, a state preexisting or preparing for the formation of pattern and emergence of subjectivity. Innocence is actually named not by Oshii himself but by his working partner, Toshio Suzuki. But Oshii admits that the title innocence perfectly articulates the theme of the film. “Innocence” accounts for the vast unconsciousness, which is by no means a referent to human unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense, but the origin of life, a random status before the intrusion of language. It is also a state that cannot be controlled or determined by human beings. A typical example of innocence is the sex dolls, the androids. Kim once asserts in the film:
The human is no match for a doll, in its form, its elegance in motion, its
very being. The inadequacies of human awareness become the
inadequacies of life's reality. Perfection is possible only for those without
consciousness, or perhaps endowed with infinite consciousness. In other Chan 46
words, for dolls and for gods.
This passage to some extent offers an explanation for the “innocence” of the dolls.
According to the empirical perspective, it is impossible for human beings to experience the objective world, since human beings cannot transgress their sensual limitation. Such a limitation hence results in the “inadequacies of human awareness” and renders the perceivable reality imperfect. Yet it is believed and can be imagined that there is a much larger and unarticulated objective reality, the perfection, the unconsciousness. Or in the film we have another word for it: innocence. The dolls are innocent since they belong to the unconsciousness and cannot be fully articulated in the consciousness. They symbolize the ultimate and immortal dream that can never be attained by human beings; they are the body without organs. 33
Now I would like to take a closer look at the opening credits of the two animes, which may help to further lay bare the different significations underlying the representations of body in the films. We may easily find the “birth scenes” in the two works very similar, whether in terms of pictorial composition or of the production process. However, these two birth scenes actually account for different bodies. For one thing, Ghost in the Shell manufactures a perfect female body for sale, and the production itself is the shaping up of human desires. We can see the production of
Kusanagi’s shell is carefully scrutinized and monitored by male operators (see fig.
20-22.). In Innocence , although the dolls are considered “products” manufactured in factories, the manual manipulation is completely absent in the birth scene. No
33 Here I appropriate the concept “body without organs” by Deleuze and Guattari to describe the body of dolls. In its literal sense, the dolls in Innocence actually do without the organs; they are only materials that freely connect with each other. In Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, the body without organs means “not an organless body, but a body without ‘organization,’ a body that breaks free from its socially articulated, disciplined, semioticized, and subjectified state (as an ‘organism’), to become disarticulated, dismantled, and deterritorialized, and hence able to be reconstituted in new ways” (Best 90). It perfectly echoes the fission of dolls (see fig. 24), which emphasizes the free combination of different body parts. Chan 47 laboratory, no production line, no manpower can be found during the process.
Instead, the “birth” of the dolls seems to be an automatic formation. Particles meet, associate, connect each other and then a new pattern takes shape from the chaos.
The background of the scene is simply black, with sparkling little dots like stars, reminding us of the great universe (see fig. 23.). And the emergence of (human) form can be read as a metaphor of the law of nature, the inner structuring of the objective reality. Meanwhile, the absence of any upper controller makes the birth of the dolls more an incidence than an artificial outcome.
In addition, the finished product in Ghost in the Shell (Kusanagi) is a perfect simulation of human shape and appearance. It is even hard to tell from the appearance a cyborg from a human being. Human beings in Ghost in the Shell seek their immortal dream from the mechanic cyborg body, only to find it as vulnerable as human flesh. The possible solution thus points to a total annihilation of the material body. That is, the body, whether organic or cybernetic, only proves to be redundant.
However, the body in Innocence is surprisingly reinforced. The film presents the dolls as an uncanny figure that lingers between human and nonhuman, and the dolls’ body becomes the icon that subsumes all the nonhuman imaginations. What makes the dolls’ body nonhuman is exactly the perfection in structure and the emptiness in essence. Oshii was obsessed with the special dolls when he visited Hans Bellmer’s exhibition of dolls in New York. The dolls are noted for their ball-shape joints, which decisively differ from the human shape. Oshii remarks in his book:
Those (body) parts connect each other one by one in a succinct fashion and
in a state of anarchy. They are ball-shape joints which are given no other
specific form. In addition to this feature, the parts weave themselves
together from unexpected angles and in an almost impossible manner.
Being extremely grotesque and strange objects in the first place, the Chan 48
ball-shape parts turn out to be the human parts with dedicate and
complicated structure and embody beauty that goes beyond human
beings. 34 (Notes 34; my translation)
It is very obvious that Oshii makes a clear cut here between the dolls’ innocent body and the human body. Both the human organic body and the constrained cyborg body contribute to a repressed subject who endlessly struggles for one’s uncertain self within the shell. Ghost in the Shell tackles the identity crisis generated from the similarities of the body between cyborgs and human beings, yet Innocence intensifies the decisive differences between dolls and human beings:
When I made the first Ghost in the Shell , I thought about what really
makes your body your body. . . . The conclusion I came to at the time was
your brain, and more specifically, your memory of life.
When I made Ghost in the Shell 2 , my conclusion changed. This time I
thought it’s your body, and it’s not anything specific, like your arm or your
leg, it’s the body as an entire[entity], and more than that, it’s really the
relationships your have with other people.” (Oshii, “Acclaimed Anime
Director”)
This account may seem at the first sight self-contradictory, but I find it interesting if I read it in a posthuman perspective. This shift of focus from the “ghost” or “soul” to the importance of the body is believed to be fundamentally linked with the posthuman views.
In this chapter I am going to elaborate on the posthuman viewpoints made by
Katherine Hayles in her inspiring book How We Became Posthuman and then to
34 The original text goes, “それらひとつひとつのパーツを簡潔に、そして無政府的に連結してい るのが、およそなんの造形も施されていない球体関節なのです。それは球体であるがゆえに、 およそ考えられぬ角度で、ありえない組み合わせで、精妙な造形そのものである人体のパーツ をくみ上げ、本来であればグロテスクきわまりない奇怪なオブジェを、人間以上の美しい形と して現出させています.” Chan 49 examine the posthuman body represented in Mamoru Oshii’s Innocence . I also allow myself to appropriate some of the concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to account for the fluid and distributed subjectivity generated out of the posthuman body.
Before getting into Oshii’s works, it is necessary to first clarify what is posthumanism. The concept of posthuman came out as a branch of European philosophy in the late 20 th century, and it has been a controversial issue inviting academic debates. Ihab Hassan’s famous claim in 1977 has inspired many theories later on, inclusive of Anne Balsamo, Michel Foucault, and Katherine Hayles. Hassan asserts in his article “Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?”:
“We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call post-humanism” (212). Also, the founder of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, claims,
“[w]e have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in the new environment” (46). Likewise, Michel Foucault also implicates that the decisive changes of technology has put the concept of the traditional “human” into question and even draws an end to it: “Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” (371). That is, the traditional sense of human beings has been put into question and refigured along with the development of technology, and it is from this questioning of the idea of “human” that posthumanism springs.
Rather than being a self-sufficient and self-satisfied subject, posthuman suggests a hybrid nature. Michael W. DeLashmutt designates the significance of hybridity in posthumanism when he writes:
It is the belief that, through a union of human technical ability and human
will, human beings will progress toward (or be the progenitors of) the next Chan 50
stage of human evolution, resulting in the posthuman. Posthumanism as
antihumanism argues that human being can be understood only in terms of
hybridization rather than in terms of the “purely” human. (273)
The integration of organism and machine is also the premise of cyborg theories, yet posthumanism embraces such a mixture from a non-humanist perspective.
Technology not only refashions the concept of human but also changes the living world, including living and non-living things. The view is well illustrated in Oshii’s
Innocence , which is about the objective unconsciousness. Oshii even says that
Innocence draws on the tension between the animal and the doll, between living things without human shape and non-living things bearing humanlike characteristics.
The contentions made by Ihab Hassan, and even Foucault, mainly address the historicity or the revolutionary aspect of posthumanism, trying to draw a clear cut between humanist and posthuman views. The debate is quite similar to the permanent interrogation: “Does postmodernity exist?” The attempt to define a starting point or a terminal point of “human” easily leads to a dead end. However, I find Hayles’s book very useful in the sense that she not only offers a historical contour of the three waves of posthuman thoughts, but also attempts to disclose
“the complex interplays between embodied forms of subjectivity and arguments for disembodiment throughout the cybernetic tradition ” along with the laying out of the linear progress (Hayles 7; original italics). Therefore, posthuman view not only concerns the historical changes of human definition but, more importantly, explores the complicated constitution of subjectivity in either embodied or disembodied forms.
In this regard, the prefix “post-” in posthuman does not signify a rupture between human and posthuman but a new way of thinking. “Human” and
“posthuman” do not exclude each other; instead, they “coexist in shifting Chan 51 configurations that vary with historically specific contexts” (Hayles 6). To get to the details of posthuman views, I would like to draw on Hayles’ condensed outline of posthumanism:
First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material
instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is an accident of
history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view
considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the
Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as
an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the
whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the
posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to
manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses
becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born.
Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman
view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with
intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences
or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer
simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology
and human goals. (2-3)
All these descriptive propositions can actually be well illustrated in Oshii’s
Innocence . For the first point, information pattern refers to a self-generating and automatic structuring out of the randomness, the chaos. The concept of information as unsubstantial data is essential in Oshii’s anime in the sense that it undermines the bipolar structures between the shell (body) and the ghost (soul), human and technology, organism and inorganism. With memories stored and preserved somewhere outside the physical body, information makes possible a new form of Chan 52 existence that is completely disembodied. Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell exactly embodies the potential of being a new living form. And this new form of being differs from that in the humanist view in the sense that human beings no longer play the leading role on the stage, and life is but an accident in the universe. In Innocence , although the sexaroids are made by human beings, they seem to generate their own subjectivity. We may get a hint from the philosophical debate scene in the CSI laboratory. Haraway in the anime plays an audio file for Batou and Togusa, and then the repeated voice of “help me” hovers in the laboratory. Since these dolls’ ethics codes are revised, they are programmed to kill their owners. We can never be sure if the crying is also part of the program, but it is interesting to note that the voice over is accompanied by a series of shots of different androids (see fig. 25-28.). They look somewhat sad even if they are not supposed to have any facial expression. It is as if it were they that were crying out “help me” at that moment. This can be an example of the emergence of subjectivity out of the sea of information. The dolls belong to the unconsciousness which is not aware of the existence of “self,” but when they voice out their wish, they show a trace of subjectivity. And this subjectivity cannot be assigned but self-generate. The calling also implies that the dolls, a symbol of innocence, cannot securely sit in human logic and they often deviate from the assigned trajectory.
The second dimension of posthuman views falls on the discussion of consciousness, which has been recognized as a distinctive gift for human beings. This is actually an anthropocentric point of view. However, the ability of free thinking as the privilege to mankind proposed by Descartes is challenged by posthumanism.
Consciousness and reason are but accidental, implying that human species may not be so unique and distinctive as they are expected to.
This point is overtly illustrated in Oshii’s Innocence , which tackles the problem of Chan 53 what it means to be human by featuring instead on the counterparts of human beings, in particular dogs and dolls. By doing this, Innocence comes to an conclusion that
all forms of life—humans, animals, and robots—are equal. In the year 2032,
when this movie takes place, robots and electronic beings have become
necessary companions to people. . . . What we need today is not some kind
of anthropocentric humanism. I hope to reflect upon the uneasiness that
pervades the world today. Under such conditions, what is the meaning of
human existence? (Oshii, “Acclaimed Anime Director”)
Being “equal” does not follow that humans, animals and robots are the same, but they are all incidences, information patterns that spring from the randomness of universe. And this is exactly what Oshii means the “uneasiness,” for the human beings are afraid of being reduced into something uncertain (since it is only a matter of luck for human beings to be human beings), or something purely materialized (so much so that the so-called free will is a mean joke).
Thirdly, Hayles argues that the body in posthuman discourse is already a prosthesis, which justifies the implantation of cybernetic parts in the body as not an invasion but a “continuation of a process.” Oshii’s anime world is mainly built on this proposition. There is no flesh-and-bone body in his anime, and every character, including animals, is more or less cyberneticized in the first place. It is in this posthuman situation that the characters get articulated. But the point of the body originally being a prosthesis bears another meaning. The prosthesis has been considered something different, something from the outside. However, by saying that the body is in its orgin a prosthesis, the formation of subjectivity building on the body or the prosthesis can otherwise be justified. If the body and the soul has been a unified entity since one is born, the consequence is that the relationship between Chan 54 the two is fixed by their innate structure and thus is hard to change. On the contrary, if one is born as a body as a prosthesis and needs to learn to “manipulate” it, it suggests that the body becomes an interface that one learns to develop or generate one’s subjectivity. For example, in Ghost in the Shell , while Togusa is driving a car chasing after the trash truck, Kusanagi shouts, “let me drive.” And we can see
Kusanagi is not “driving” the car in a traditional way; she connects herself to the car system and controls the car directly through her e-brain. The car seems to become part of her body, and this may confuse her perception of her own body because it is continually committed to changes. Oshii acutely points out that the body “is not the fleshy body that can feel pain but something existing on the extended line of feelings”35 (Notes 312; my translation). Oshii believes that technology promises an expansion of feeling but suffocates their lived or sensory experiences simultaneously.
As Gregory Bateson has it, the cyborg body “is not bounded by the skin but includes all external pathways along which information can travel” (qtd. in Balsamo 11). One is able to perceive the world not only with sensual organs but also through the interaction of cybernetic codes.
The changes of the interface will have a direct influence on the constitution of subjectivity. The formation of subjectivity is an on-going process and has much to do with how one is connected and communicated with the outside world or other beings through the body. As in Innocence , Kusanagi’s reincarnation in different characters indicates her multiple subjectivities, each without hierarchy but with equal importance. All the distributed subjectivities contribute to Kusanagi’s being.
Without a fixed shell or body, Kusanagi is scattered in the internet, continually encoding and decoding herself. She becomes a part of the vast net, yet can never
35 The original text goes, “つねったら痛いと感じる、そういう肉体としてのものじゃなくて、自 分という存在としての身体です。皮膚の延長線上にある世界のこと.” Chan 55 achieve a unity and completion with any form. She is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. These features remind me of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call as “body without organs.” In their influential book A Thousand Plateaus they write that a body without organs “is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities to pass or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity” (4).
Kusanagi’s merging with Puppet Master opens up the possibility of more connections with the world and new ways to perceive and be perceived.
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of BwO (body with organs) harkens back to
Hayles’ conclusion that posthuman subjectivity is “emergent rather than given, distributed rather than located solely in consciousness, emerging from and integrated into a chaotic world rather than occupying a position of mastery and control removed from it” (291). The dolls in Innocence embody this kind of distributed subjectivity. They are body parts that joint together in an arbitrary way; they are not fixed forms composed of rigid structure. They look bizarre since they simultaneously remind us of human beings and nonhuman beings. They are amalgam established from the huge innocence. The arbitrary combination or dissection of ball joints is of great importance in terms of the dolls’ distributed subjectivity. Oshii also emphasizes this feature by stating, “you can combine different parts of the body together so it doesn’t have to be head and body and arms and hands. It can be two heads. It could look very grotesque, but something very grotesque can be very beautiful at the same time” (“The Dark Side of Anime ‘Innocence’”). The constitution of the dolls, as the opening credits of Innocence display, serves as a process of deconstructing the norm of human body, resisting the fixed principles and structures.
On the other hand, the “doll” in Japanese is ningyō (人形), meaning “the human form” literally. It is interesting to note that the “human form” in Innocence embodies Chan 56 different social and culture implications. What does “human form” mean to human beings themselves as well as to nonhuman? “Why are humans so obsessed with recreating themselves?” This is a question asked by Ms. Haraway when having a debate with Togusa. They are apparently divergent in their perspective toward human and nonhuman. Ms. Haraway tends to take up a point of view that children and ningyō are basically the same thing, for both of them “endure in the chaos preceding maturity” and although they “obviously have human form,” they “differ profoundly from ‘humans’” in Descartes’ definition, which lays its focus on the free will and rational thinking of mankind. By saying children are the same as the dolls,
Ms. Haraway assumes that the body (human form) is not qualified to be the signifier of human identity. On the other hand, Togus insists on a more traditional dualism between the organic and the machine, a clear distinction between humans and dolls, exclaiming that “children are not dolls!” I tend instead to read the human form as a trace of failed attempt to return to the perfection, the innocence, the unconsciousness. The unconsciousness always eludes the expected routes and principles, like dolls and children. Oshii skillfully makes a connection between the two in the scene of dolls burning (see fig. 31). A girl doll’s head is burned and in a few seconds, the head is not burned ashes; rather, it returns to the original condition, bearing striking resemblance to the head of a human baby (fig. 32.). In the last scene of Innocence , it is quite obvious that Oshii suggests an interflow between the doll and children. Figure 33 is a shot of Togusa’s daughter and the doll. Togusa’s daughter is wearing an unnatural smile, and the wry face makes her look like a doll. After this shot is a close-up of the doll’s face. In the previous shot the doll has lips close, but her facial expression changes in the close-up shot: she grins (see fig. 34.). The equation of the doll and the child points to a possible conclusion that human beings are not only cyborgs in the sense that they are mixture of organism and mechanism Chan 57 but also dolls in the first place, since they are just different forms or patterns embodied from the randomness and limitless unconsciousness.
The various kinds of body in Innocence , including inorganic and holographic image of animals and human beings, the organic hounds, the dolls hovering between life and death, actually share the same origin, the limitless unconsciousness that can be perceived yet can never be subsumed by human consciousness. Oshii delineates how posthuman body is intricately and intrinsically associated with the emergence of subjectivity through Kusanagi’s different incarnations and the arbitrary assemblage of the dolls. For Oshii, the posthuman body is not a fixed site that locates subjectivity but serves as an interface that connects subjectivity (the information pattern) and the unconsciousness (the randomness), and continually weaving new changes into posthuman subjectivity.
Information Leading the Way to Innocence
Information plays an important role in Oshii’s anime because it underlies the situation in which different kinds of living forms are able to be articulated, and it also assumes a pivotal premise in the posthuman discourse. Information is the summation of the unsubstantial data in the universe, lingering outside the dichotomy between body (shell) and soul (ghost), meanwhile continuing to disturb and problematicize it. Wiener “conceptualize[s] information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it. From this formulation, it was a small step to think of information as a kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between different substrates without loss of meaning or form” (qtd. in Hayles xi). This suggests a separation between information and its container, which is, in Oshii’s anime, the ghost.
In order to make clear the complicated relationships between information, the shell and the ghost, I would like to borrow the metaphor of computer. In short, a Chan 58 computer is basically composed of three parts: the hardware (CPU), the software that executes orders, the data that can be transferred and stored up. By analogy, the shell in Ghost in the Shell is like the hardware that serves as the temporal site that allows actions to occur. The same action can actually be carried out somewhere else, so the shell is not able to account for the self. Accordingly, the ghost functions as the software in a computer, which arranges, organizes, or scrambles the information, and it subsumes not only the fixed rules and patterns that run the data (information) but also the possibility of a violation of those rules. Hence, the shell (body) is the container of information, and the ghost (soul) determines the conditions that activate information.
Posthuman scholars tend to think that information enjoys a freedom of form. As
Susan Napier puts it, information “can be transferred from one medium to another while still remaining intact,” which is the presupposition of posthuman discussions
(116). The medium here can be illustrated by the shell in the anime. Kusanagi is the character that embodies this freedom of form or even the annihilation of form. After her mergence with Puppet Master and her transformation into an information-based living entity, she can incarnate herself in different shells yet still remain herself.
Kusanagi’s disembodiment is one possible way to get out of the fixed form (the shell owned by the government).
In addition to the potential of freeing the self from a confined body, information renders the binary opposition between the body and the soul obsolete. Rather than breaking the shell and the ghost apart, the introduction of information connects them in a new way—namely, through their interaction with the outside world, the environment. Wiener once addresses the intimate relationship between information and the environment:
Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer Chan 59
world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process
of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the
contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within
that environment. (17-18)
The self that is defined by information thus turns more fluid and elastic since it is greatly influenced and influence the outward environment. This point is taken up by
Oshii and spoken out through Batou’s mouth, as he flies above a Far East area with
Togusa: “If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems and a metropolis like this one, simply a sprawling external memory.” This statement implies that life, memory, and self are all made up of information, and that memory (both the individual and collective) can be stored up in other devices, as small as the brain and as big as the city. Likewise, the last scene in Ghost in the Shell conveys a similar message. “The net is very vast and limitless,” says Kusanagi. Her new form of existence predicated by information designates the advent of a new concept of life and a new relationship with the others.
Unbounded yet not totally detached from the restricted body, the self invites a more open and inclusive interaction with the “limitless” environment.
With these potentials promised in “information,” however, information is often attacked as reducing human existence into a machine, a pure inorganic object.
However, this is to insist on the traditional values and definitions of human beings, which is a very humanist way of thinking. A posthumanist would probably argue back,
“We are already machines at the very beginning.” Kusanagi’s representation in the two animes actually show the possibility of being an informationalized entity. This, however, does not mean that information per se is equal to the self; instead, the self obtains its expression and pattern through the intersection and correlation of numerous information. Chan 60
Now I would like to take Oshii’s anime as a model and see how information changes the conception of human and therefore shapes the posthuman subjectivity. I am led to contend that information is characterized as transmittable and fluid promises. It make possible new connections in the posthuman contexts but meanwhile also brings about the danger and crisis of self-identity. Likewise, Bolton indicates the two sides of information, “in the anime thoughts too are subject to invasions of technology, and this reduction of the self to disembodied information produces both the freedoms and the threats as Haraway predicts” (734). As information is closely related to the (de)construction of memory, it problematizes the concept of self, which is sustained through the stable memories.
As mentioned before, Ghost in the Shell is grounded on Oshii’s belief that the self lies more in the mind (the ghost) than in the body (the shell); Innocence , on the contrary, tends to associate the self more with the body as forms that constitute one’s subjectivity. The focus of Ghost in the Shell as such is more on the ghost, which is believed to articulate the self. This emphasis on the ghost as a referent of identity does not erase one’s anxiety of being a cyborg, however. The fluid information not only promises a free self embodied by Kusanagi but also predicates a crisis of the self.
For example, in Ghost in the Shell , the trash car driver is a victim suffering from fake memories. He thinks he owns a family but it turns out that he has been single for years and never gets married. Since ghost is composed of information pattern and obtains meanings and individualities from it, the ghost is actually subject to manipulation, distortion and control because of the flux of information.
In both anime, information penetrates into and connects the diegetic reality and the virtual reality contrived inside the film in such a way that there is no clear line between the two. Oshii talks about the indistinctions or the impossibility of distinctions between reality and the virtual reality in one of the interviews: Chan 61
Hollywood movies which talk about virtual reality always draw a clear line
between the game world and reality. This is to make it easier for the
audience to accept or to understand. The formula that the main character
finally returns to reality is one of the most acceptable endings. . . . But I
don’t think it this way. Whatever one feels or experiences is real, whether it
occurs in the game world or in reality. 36 (Notes 215; my translation)
This is Oshii’s opinion about reality and virtuality (the illusionary) when he talks about his live-action movie Avalon .37 It is also evident that in Innocence , the distinction between reality and virtual experiences is blurred. When Batou and Togus are to investigate Kim’s house, their e-brains are hacked so that they (and the audience as well) experience three times the so-called cybermaze set up by Kim.
They are prevented from seeing the real Kim and getting to the core of truth (if there is one). What helps Batou to break through Kim’s defensive wall is a hint from his
“guardian angel,” the disembodied Kusanagi. Each virtual reality is seamlessly connected to another one, and there seems to be no way out of the cybermazes but for the help of Kusanagi. She is represented as a “non-living” image in this scene (or
“three scenes”), kneeling in the grand hall and pointing to a card on the ground. The word on the card reads “aemeath” (which means “truth”) and then with the first syllable erased it turns into “maeth” (“death”). And Batou succeeds in decoding the message: “truth is dead,” and breaks away from the cybernetic illusion. However, the encoded message itself corresponds to the inseparability of reality and virtual reality
36 The original text goes, “ハリウッドなんかで作っているバーチャルリアルティ物というのが あって、そういう映画の中では、おおむねゲームの世界と現実というのは、お客さんにすごく 分かりやすいようにきっちり分けられている。で、最終的には現実に帰ってくるっていう形が、 一番お客さんが納得できるお話の構造なんですね . . . でも、それはやっぱり、ちょっと違う んじゃないかって僕は思うんです。自分が受け取る感覚として、どちらがリアリティがあるの かと考えた時にね。” 37 Avalon is a movie that talks about virtual experiences of the game world. Oshii does not make any clear distinction between reality and virtual reality so that the audience feel trapped as if they were in the cybermaze created by Kim in Innocence . Chan 62 in the anime. “Truth is dead” not only means that there is no truth in the cybermaze but also indicates the inaccessibility of truth; or, there is no truth at all. Even if Batou successfully escapes from the labyrinth, there is no guarantee that the “reality”
Batou and Togusa return to is necessarily “real.” Togusa, Batou’s partner, portrayed as a cyborg with a humanist perspective, shows anxiety about the blurring between reality and fantasy, asking, “Are we actually back in physical reality?” Batou’s answer refers back to Oshii’s assertion that there is no way to distinguish between the two.
Batou and Togusa awake from a virtual illusion only to find out that they get into another one. Therefore, Togusa, a character that stays with more traditional and humanistic values, feels uneasy. Batou’s answer to Togusa’s inquiry does not seem to be satisfying to Togusa: “My ghost is whispering to me.” Batou is the one who believes in his own “ghost,” even though he knows that his ghost may not be a reliable one (his e-brain has been hacked before, in the supermarket scene). However, this complicated laying out of virtual reality indicates Oshii’s intention to break down the boundary between virtuality and reality, the past and the present.
Neither the characters nor the audience can be sure of the “truth” in the anime, since there might not be one originally. As Deleuze and Guattari propose, there is no such thing as real or unreal; everything is real in a sense.38 Such a point of view differs from Plato’s concept of the ideal, which aims to extract an essence out of the being in appearance. What Deleuze and Guattari suggest is that there is no absolute disruption between the two; instead, they can penetrate into each other and even exchange positions. The multiple virtualities in Innocence bear echo to Deleuze and
38 When Deleuze and Guattari mention the virtual image in Chapter 4 of Cinema 2 , they refer to the memory, a flashback of the past. And here I am using this term in its broad sense. The reason why the boundary between the real and the virtual collapses here is that the virtual, although beyond the sensory perception of human beings, is nevertheless real and can have interaction with reality. For example, when people are playing computer games, what happens in the game world is considered “virtual reality,” yet the moves of the fingers, the emotions stimulated by the characters in the game are reactions happening in the real world. They are real in a sense. Chan 63
Guattari’s “indiscernibility” of the real and imaginary, as they account in Cinema 2 :
[T]he actual image itself has a virtual image which corresponds to it like a
double or a reflection. In Bergsonian terms, the real object if reflected in a
mirror-image as in the virtual object which, from its side and
simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real: there is “coalescence”
between the two. . . . on the broader trajectories, perception and
recollection, the real and the imaginary, the physical and the mental, or
rather their images, continually followed each other around a point of
indiscernibility. (69)
What Batou and Togusa experience in the cybermazes is not illusionary or unreal; rather, it is a virtuality actualized that has influence on them in reality. In other words, the virtuality is connected to the reality in intricate ways. If Batou and Togusa die in the cybermazes, their body in reality may die, too. There is a dynamic flow and reflexive force going on between the virtuality and reality, which allows the two continually to change, to articulate, and to modify each other.
On the other hand, it is worth noting that when Batou walks into Kim’s house for the first time, he is led to a room full of still images. The camera captures the room in a very special way. Firstly, two seagulls are seen to fly in the blue sky (fig. 35).
Then with the camera zooming out, the audience is given a full view of the scene and realizes the lifelessness of the birds and humans in the frame (see fig. 36.). At that moment, we may assume that it could be a photograph or a painting, for the figures in it do not move at all. It is a copy of reality, a simulacrum of life. However, the next moment we see Batou “walks into the picture,” and becomes part of it (fig. 37.). And this is the exact moment of how a virtual image is brought into reality, or in Deleuze’s term, a virtual image is actualized. We can also say the opposite, that Batou (a real figure) is building up new relationship with the virtual world and is to some extent Chan 64 virtualized.
The breaking down of the boundary between reality and virtuality may well be considered as one of the consequences of total informationalization. It is information that promises a free flow between the two. In other words, there is neither reality nor virtuality; there is only different information pattern articulated in different contexts and endowed with different expressions.
The Dilemma of Being Posthuman
One of the reasons why Innocence is not easy to understand falls on the perplexing and obscure philosophical quotes. I am not going to discuss all of them, for it denotes a scope of research not allowed here. What I would like to do is to tease out some of the issues related to the posthuman view discussed in this chapter.
Oshii claims that he is an optimist himself, who does not praise human beings for what they are now but is still willing to believe in the possibility of a better end, or perhaps a better beginning:
I think humans are, by all means, no good. They need to change. They need
to accept that they are no good, and they need to accept the fact that they
need to move on. So, in that sense, I am very positive in terms of humans
having to change in order to survive. (Oshii, “The Dark Side of Anime
‘Innocence’”)
On reading this, we may come up with a question, “If human beings need to change, then into what are they expected to change?” I think the possible answer may be posthuman. If the organic body seems to fail to fully articulate one’s identity or subjectivity, it is because the body is viewed as an innate bearer of biological, social and cultural inscriptions. Oshii actually came to the same conclusion when he was making Ghost in the Shell . And hence Kusanagi’s disembodiment seems to be a Chan 65 consequential ending for that obsolete body. However, disembodiment may not be the only solution. It is never discussed that what life would be like after the disembodiment simply because it is beyond description at this point. Therefore, Oshii turns to bring out another possibility, which I contend as the posthuman body. His works actually show a predicament of posthuman: posthuman is well aware of the limitation of human consciousness and yet trying hard to understand or even to articulate the unconsciousness, the innocence. To put it in a broader sense, the film
Innocence per se embodies this attempt. It is a film that endeavors to account for the limitless world of unconsciousness, but this goal can never be reached since unconsciousness is denied a representation within the consciousness. If so, is
Innocence a failure and does it push itself to a dead end? Not really. It could be rather meaningful if we put the focus back to the cyborgs, and investigate how the posthuman body continually rewrites itself through its interplay with the outside world. And I am going to demonstrate how to read that philosophical quotes in
Innocence in the context of posthuman view.
I want to start with a repeated quote from Max Weber’s Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden : “One need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar.” 39 This points out the basic tone of Innocence : it’s difficult to know the unknowable. 40 The unknowable is embodied in the image of dolls in the film. Some of the philosophical quotes affirm the posthuman view that human beings originate from a randomness of life and mirror humans’ fear and uneasiness toward the nescient unconsciousness.
Kim’s epigraph goes, “Life and death come and go like marionettes dancing on a table.
Once their strings are cut, they easily crumble.” 41 The choice of the word “crumble”
39 The original German text goes, “nicht Cäsar sein, um Cäsar zu verstehen.” 40 This also reminds me of what Confucius says, “know the the impracticable nature of the times and yet will be doing in them” (知其不可而為之). 41 The original text goes, “生死去來／棚頭傀儡／一線斷時／落落磊磊.” This is taken from the Chan 66 further indicates the fear of returning to the meaningless and chaotic unconsciousness. However, the correspondent expression of “crumble” in Japanese—
磊磊落落(rairairakuraku )—actually signifies a little more than the fear and anxiety.
The phrase means “a tolerant and broad mind that is free of demur.”42 It does not bear a derogatory sense as the English term does. The return to the emptiness, the limitless unconsciousness, is something that Oshii favors. If dolls easily crumble, they can also easily be incarnated in other dolls. And maybe it is when they crumble that they look even more beautiful because at that time they are rid of human control
(the strings) and they are no longer forced to perform as humans.
Similarly, at the end of the film, Kusanagi says, “‘We weep for the bird’s cry, but not for the blood of a fish. Blessed are those who have voice.’ 43 If the dolls could speak, no doubt they’d scream, ‘I didn't want to become human.’” I think there is a reason for this comment to be made by Kusanagi rather than by any other character.
She is actually trying to explain what the dolls might think, and because Kusanagi’s life is most closely related to the unconsciousness, it is more persuasive for her to remark on the dolls’ situation (although it can never be correctly understood or articulated). And Kusanagi’s words also subvert the formula that almost all nonhuman characters in Japanese anime have a desire to become human, which is also an anthropocentric perspective. Moreover, we can never be sure whether it is lucky or unlucky to have human voice. “Blessed are those who have voice” is simply a judgment based on humanistic view.
On the other hand, some of the quotes in the film seem irrelevant to the plot, works of a Japanese playwright, Zeami Motokiyo ( 世阿弥; 1363-1443). 42 A definition taken from online Japanese dictionary: “心が非常に大きく、小さな事にこだわらな いこと” (my translation). 43 The original text goes, “刀を鳥に加えて、鳥の血に悲しめども、魚に加えて魚の血に悲しまず、 声あるものは幸福也.” This is a poem written by a Japanese poet Ryokū Saitou ( 斉藤緑雨; 1868-1904). Chan 67 and they even seem to have no other function at all than confusing the audience.
One repeated image brought up by the quotes is the “mirror, ” and I discover that these quotes about mirror are indeed central and significant to the theme of
Innocence . These three quotes account for different degree of understanding the vast unconscious world. The first quote goes, “It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is askew.”44 It is easy to understand that this quote reveals a perfect correspondence between reality and the virtuality. In other words, the mirror loyally reflects what is being mirrored. The mirror is believed to be a neutral media that merely “reflects.” However, the other two quotes offer a different standpoint. One goes, “The mirror is not an instrument of enlightenment but of illusion.” 45 This quote suggests that the mirror betrays human’s expectation. The mirror is an invented tool used to distort reality. It does not simply reflect but generates illusion. The illusion points to an anthropocentric perspective. One looks in the mirror, and only sees what s/he wants to see. 46 This statement also suggests a recognition of such an illusion that human beings can rule the world and control everything with the aid of modern science and technology.
Similarly, the other quote signifies the dynamic power of the mirror and intensifies the correlated and mutual relationship between human beings (reality) and the reflection (the dolls, simulacrum, virtuality): “Who can gaze into the mirror without becoming evil? A mirror does not reflect evil, but creates it. Thus, a mirror
44 The original text is “自分の面が曲がっているのに、鏡を責めてなんになる,” which is taken from Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol’s (Russian writer; 1809-1852) play Ревизор (The Revisor). 45 The original text goes, “鏡は悟りの具ならず、迷いの具なり,” which is also taken from Ryokū Saitou’s Ryokū maxims published in 1991. A full text of the book is available online. Please refer to
鏡を把りて、魔ならざる者ある。魔を照すにあらず、造る也。即ち鏡は、瞥見
す可きものなり、熟視す可きものにあらず.” While the English translation suggests that everybody is supposed to turn evil when looking into the mirror, the first sentence actually means “somebody holds a mirror, and s/he does not become a devil.” Since the following sentence implies that the mirror per se can actually create evil, the mirror is therefore bestowed with a power to change the contents of its reflection. In light of this, I am led to compare the mirror image with the posthuman body, since they both serve as an interface that influences the forming of the image or subjectivity. On the other hand, the reason why the mirror can “bear a glimpse” but “not scrutiny” can also be referred back to the posthuman view. A “glimpse” can be viewed as an unintentional act without specific focus, while “scrutiny” is more associated with concentration on a target and enacted with a set of judgmental values and regulations. Therefore, to glimpse is to allow a quick and partial representation, but to scrutinize is to systematically compose a whole picture. When it comes to the reflected image, the devil may also be a symbol of the unconsciousness. God and devil represent the unknown dimension that human beings either desire or fear; they are actually the two sides of the same coin. In fact, there is only emptiness in the mirror, but devil or god may emerge due to the interaction between the mirror (the posthuman body) and the material body. The quote actually delineates the complicated relationship between the material body in reality, the mirror as the interface, and the reflected image of the body.
47 This quote is also taken from Ryokū Saitou’s Ryokū maxims . Chan 69
Engaging with ravishing visual images and profound philosophical debates,
Innocence is a film addressing the meaning of human and the arbitrary emergence of subjectivity. The film is saturated with posthuman view in Hayles’ sense. Human beings no longer assume the central position and are not superior to other living things and non-living things. In view of this, they should rethink the nature of their body as hybridized prostheses at the first place and so the body can be unbounded from the fixed relation with subjectivity, which will be continually adapted to social and conceptual changes caused by technology.
Chan 70
Chapter IV
Conclusion
Mamoru Oshii has enjoyed worldwide fame by directing the two fascinating works: Ghost in the Shell and Innocence . With the aesthetic and intricate articulation of the cyborg and the cybernetic world, with the thought-provoking debates on human and nonhuman existences, with the glamorous and dedicate visual images,
Mamoru Oshii has become a cult figure in Japanese anime. There are tons of
Japanese animations, old or new, talking about robots and cyborgs and androids, but
Oshii’s works stand out to be very special among them. From the well-known robot series Gundam 48 that continue to write the history of Japanese anime and mark the changes of culture imagination to the more recent Neon Genesis Evangelion (aka.
EVA; 1995), the themes are always about saving the world or the human species and the leading roles are regarded as the heroes. However, the reason why Oshii’s works look strange to most Japanese audience at the beginning may be that they are not stories about fighting for the whole world but about personal struggles to live.
Mamoru Oshii’s cinematic works are fascinating in the sense that they always bring up something new yet leave nothing behind. My reading of Oshii’s animes is to see how far they can lead us to an imaginary future world: from a more traditional concept of Frankenstein’s model to a disembodied existence hovering in the Internet, and finally to a posthuman body that enables multiple, partial, and distributed subjectivities to emerge. This seems to be a dream (or nightmare) promised by modern technology. Yet Oshii’s works can also be interestingly read as a new version of old stories. Some critics have read Oshii’s works from the perspective of traditional
48 The Gundam series started in 1970s ( Mobile Suit Gundam ) and have had great influences on the anime genre. Gundam series are characterized by the gigantic robots that are manipulated by human beings and political conflicts among countries or between the Earth and satellites (outerspace colonies or planets). Chan 71
Japanese religions like Shinto and Buddhism,49 others find in them connection to other Japanese culture forms. For instance, Christopher Bolton suggests that Oshii’s animated works to some extent harken back to the Japanese puppet theater. And he demonstrates how Motoko Kusanagi’s cyborg body resembles the puppets of the puppet theater in terms of its resistance to dichotomies (life vs. death; machine vs. human). Oshii’s anime may also be compared with the more traditional Japanese musical drama Noh (能), which is characterized by a split between the body and the voice. 50 In view of the connection Oshii’s works have with Japanese traditions, there seem not to be a necessary split between the old and the new, the nature and the technology in the films; instead, all these could coexist and have a dialogue with each other. In short, Oshii’s animes should not be just about the high-tech future; they are also tales of the becoming present and the ancient past. This project has accomplished to argue for Motoko Kusanagi’s (de)gendered body, offer a possible link between the various “bodies” and posthumanism, and the intertextual reading of the shift of body polities of the two animes. The posthuman spirit embodied in
Oshii’s works deconstructs the anthropocentric point of view and the structuring of
49 Religious elements are quite obvious in Oshii’s works, especially in Innocence . For example, rituals of Gods’ parade and dolls-burning bear significant connection to the Shinto belief that everything has deity. And that is why dolls are regarded as “alive.” Japanese people believe that dolls ( 人形) serve as a temporary “container“ for the lingering ghosts, and so it is a taboo to cast away the dolls at will. The only way to get rid of the dolls is to burn them to ashes. On the other hand, the theme songs of both Ghost in the Shell and Innocence are sung by female singers and those songs associate more with the ancient past than with the present, as Brian Ruh suggests in Stray Dog of Anime : The lyrics for the main theme song of the film [ Ghost in the Shell ] were composed in the ancient Yamato language and speak of a god descending from the heavens. The song displays a strong Shintō influence sun goddess Amaterasu [ 天照大神], who is the mythological source of Japanese civilization. (135) Likewise, the theme song “The Ballade of Puppets; Flowers Grieve and Fall” of Innocence also follows the rule and yet interestingly compounds and contrasts the dolls and gods. 50 Oshii’s anime is very unique in the sense that his characters barely have any facial expression, which is quite different from other animes in which characters have exaggerative emotional expressions. It seems that all the characters in Oshii’s works are wearing masks, and thus the audience can only perceive their feelings and emotions through the voice and body movement. Likewise, in Noh , characters wear mask and in most of the case they tell the plot through singing and bodily performance. Chan 72 human beings in a traditional sense on the one hand, and inspires us to ponder upon the world as a whole, including the conscious and unconsciousness, and try to figure out how to live up with it. To be brief, Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell and Innocence problemize the traditional values and definition of human beings and introduce a refashioning of the body politics in the posthuman contexts. The complexities of
Oshii’s films will continuehaunting the audience, reminding them simultaneously of how anime as a genre, also as a medium, is gradually inscribing new elements into the category “cinema” and of how anime serves as a cultural text to allow different discourses to get articulated.
Chan 73
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Her beautiful and attractive figure is highly emphasized, and her facial expression is far more feminine than that in the anime. It is interesting to note that Kusanagi is often depicted as a physically attractive woman cyborg in comic and its related products, while in anime Mamoru Oshii obviously chooses to portray her as a female cyborg that barely shows femininity. © 2006 Masamune Shirow (士郎正宗), Kōukaku kidōtai (攻殻機動隊) /Production I.G/Kōdansha ( 講談社) Chan 77 fig. 4. Motoko Kusanagi is standing on the top of a building. fig. 5. Motoko Kusanagi is falling from the top of the building in order to shoot the targeted criminal diplomat dead. fig. 6. Finishing her task, she activates the thermo-optic camouflage and renders herself invisible. fig. 7. This image is taken from the cover of Shirow’s comic. Kusanagi is leaning on a certain kind of machine, with her sexy body beautifully arching on it. Chan 78 fig. 8. The genesis of a standardized woman cyborg, Motoko Kusanagi. fig. 9. Kusanagi is violently attacked by a tank and torn into pieces. fig. 10. The final shot of the merging scene ends with a close-up of Kusanagi’s face. fig. 11. Kusanagi uses the thermo-optic camouflage again and her naked back is again visible. Chan 79 fig. 12. Kusanagi is changing clothes on the boat in the diving scene. fig. 13. Kusanagi is communicating with Puppet Master. Batou’s jacket on Kusanagi’s body ironically gives him away as an ignorant outsider, since it is Puppet Master that temporarily harbors in Kusanagi’s shell. fig. 14. Kusanagi downloads herself into one of the dolls, and Batou covers her naked body as usual. fig. 15. After the puzzle of the muder case is solved, Kusanagi leaves the temporary shell and the doll collapse on the floor. (Innocence ) Chan 80 fig. 16. The new Kusanagi represented as a little girl leaves Batou’s place and starts her new life as a disembodied living entity. It is noteworthy that this shell of a little girl simply serves as a temporal container of her ghost (which Batou secretly buys from black market), since her old “shell” is destroyed and her e-brain needs to be preserved in a shell in order to restart fig. 17 & 18. the shot reverse shot in the merging scene fig. 18. Chan 81 Fig. 19. The tree symbol is rendered porous in the battle scene. Chapter 3 fig. 20-22. The opening credits of Ghost in the Shell. The background is set in a laboratory where Kusanagi’s cybernetic body is produced. The process of production is strictly supervised by male operators. fig. 21. Chan 82 fig. 22. fig. 23. The constitution of the dolls’ spine, which look similar to humans’ yet are made up of different components. fig. 24. The arbitrary and free combination made possible by the ball-shape joints. fig. 25-28. A series of shots that accompany the cry, “help me.” Chan 83 fig. 26. fig. 27. fig. 28. Chan 84 fig. 31. Shortly after the festival scene comes the ritual of burning dolls. It’s said that Japanese people dare not throw away dolls since they believe dolls have souls. They only way for them to get rid of them is to burn them. fig. 32. The head of the doll resemble that of a human baby. fig. 33. At the end of Innocence, Togusa’s daughter is holding a doll, a gift from her father. The shadow on her face makes her look strange and similar to the doll. Chan 85 fig. 34. A close up of the doll’s grinning face. fig. 35. It seems like the seagulls flying in the blue sky at first sight, yet it turns out to be a pained ceiling. fig. 36. The holographic image looks like a realistic painting. Chan 86 fig. 37. Batou walks in the virtual image, suggesting a breaking down of the boundary between reality and virtuality.