Cyborg Self, Android Other: Embodiment, Technology, and Subjectivity in Japanese Science Fiction

Cyborg Self, Android Other: Embodiment, Technology, and Subjectivity in Japanese Science Fiction “In the near future - corporate networks reach out to the stars. Electrons and light flow throughout the universe. The advance of computerisation, however, has not yet wiped out nations and ethnic groups.” – Ghost in the Shell (Kōkaku Kidōtai, 1995, Oshii Mamoru, dir.) Research Topic Overview Technology and Embodiment in SF The animated cyberpunk film Ghost in the Shell opens with the above epigraph displayed on a black screen. The caveat that nationality and ethnicity continue to matter in an otherwise posthuman setting dominated by narrative tropes of disembodied AIs and cyborg replacements for the body signals that, for the creators1 of this text, the science-fictional promise of transcending the (ethnic, national) body rings hollow. Computer technologies, even as they claim to efface the body as a site of inscription for power hierarchies, are themselves human-made, and thus cannot escape the gendered, racial, and ethnic categories by which humans structure society. How does Japanese science fiction (SF)2 deal with the persistence of race in the contemporary world, which has for so long promised to erase such “superficial” bodily distinctions through technological advances and scientific-rational thinking? What futures does it extrapolate from our present, and what alternatives does it limn? The relationship between human society and the technologies it creates is a topic that has been examined by a wide variety of scholars. Posthumanist theorists such as Donna Haraway or N. Katherine Hayles have done much to destabilize the notion that technology exists in a realm of pure rationality, divorced from human bias and histories of oppression. Despite this progress, however, the specific role of embodiment in that relationship has been underexplored. I study this question through the lens of Japanese SF under the 1 The film is an adaptation of a manga written by Shirō Masamune (styled in English as Shirow), and thus it is difficult (and perhaps beside the point) to attribute any of the film’s themes specifically to Oshii or Shirow. The manga was serialized in Kodansha’s Young Magazine in three separate arcs that ran between 1989 and 1996. 2 Throughout this proposal, I use the terms science fiction, sci-fi, and SF interchangeably. Most authors writing about SF have done the same, and as a result, “SF” or “sf” are generally accepted terms within the SF studies field. Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 1 premise that, as a genre concerned with the social effects of science and technology, SF is a focal point for questions concerning the future of technological society. Furthermore, as Japan is a society with a comparatively long history of SF production and has been conceived as a kind of “techno- utopia” in the popular imagination—both inside and outside Japan—throughout much of the 20th century, it provides a rich source of cultural productions taking up technology as a social force, productions that often pointedly position themselves as non-Western. Japanese science fiction since its inception has self-consciously engaged with its Western counterparts in a transnational conversation that affirms and disavows in turn the dynamics of racial and cultural difference in SF production. I propose to study embodiment as it is understood in Japanese SF in order to grasp the ways in which dynamics of racial, ethnic, and gendered marginalization are played out in the realm of techno-scientific material culture, and how critiques of that marginalization are articulated by those whom it would make silent and invisible. Though much has been made of Japan as a high-tech society in popular discourse, and though academic studies of Japan for the last 20 years have privileged analyses of its popular culture, SF as a genre has been generally neglected. Part of this is due to the overwhelming influence of anime media on Western popular and academic perceptions of Japan, with scholars grouping texts by their media form rather than looking at transmedia relationships of genre.3 However, SF’s importance to anime and manga, the two pillars of contemporary Japanese pop culture criticism in Western academia, can hardly be denied, making it all the more pressing to examine it on its own terms. Authors of science fiction such as Abe Kōbō and Tsutsui Yasutaka, as well as film directors such as Kon Satoshi and Fukasaku Kinji, present an array of literary and cinematic approaches to SF that are also woven into Japan’s more canonical media histories. Within science fiction studies, meanwhile, though the growing body of literature on Afrofuturism takes up questions of race, these are questions specifically tied to black identity, either within the countries of Africa or as part of the various African diasporas. With a much different relationship to the West than Africa, I expect Asia (and Japan specifically) to produce science fiction that deals with racialized embodiment in very different terms than its Afrofuturist counterparts, yet there is very little scholarship that takes up Asian SF production. Having been both an imperial 3 A notable exception is Katherine Page-Lippsmeyer’s recent dissertation taking up the Japanese periodical SF Magazine. See Page-Lippsmeyer, “The Space of Japanese Science Fiction.” Her project nevertheless diverges from my own in her narrower focus on the emergence of the subculture of SF fandom in Japan, which she analyzes through a primarily art- historical lens, using SF Magazine as her main case study. My research seeks to widen the historical scope of inquiry beyond the 1960s and ‘70s, as well as looking at publications other than the industry-produced SF Magazine. Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 2 power and also a state that endured occupation by the United States at different moments in history, for example, Japanese culture has a very complex relationship with histories of colonialism, a fact that has already been analyzed with regard to “the uncanny” in Japan’s mystery fiction (often named as SF’s progenitor). While the field of scholarship on Afrofuturism provides a helpful starting point for considering race and science fiction, scholars must nevertheless attend to the specificity of East Asia in considering these texts, and it is here that the Japanese case continues to hold valuable contributions for analyses of science fiction. The basic structure of the dissertation takes up these questions in three key moments of confluence between media-historical watersheds and ethnically- and racially-charged politics in Japan. In the 1920s-1930s, the domestic film industry was exploding at the same time as the meaning of the term “domestic” itself was in flux in the context of Japanese imperial expansion. With a colonial consciousness of both the colonies and of the Western powers with whom relations were becoming critically strained, this moment presents a fraught scene for considerations of embodiment and modernity just as SF’s “pre-history” was being written in detective fiction and horror novels. In the 1960s, I will read the tensions of the Cold War against the advent of television to examine notions of transnational cosmopolitanism. With the first “true” Japanese SF4 being created at the turn of the 1960s, and its first “Golden Age” occurring over the course of that decade, a wealth of material was produced in which Japan’s place in the Cold War world system was contested. Finally, in the 1990s and 2000s, Japan’s post-bubble economy was placing its hopes in popular cultural productions marketed with “Japanese cool” in the same moment that the internet was gaining ubiquity and becoming the target of a variety of social anxieties. Through an analysis these three historical moments, I will examine the ways in which SF media negotiated changes in both geopolitical landscape and material culture in its considerations of embodiment. SF does not limit its articulations of embodiment to the space of narrative, however, and multiple reading strategies will be required to bring these valences to light. Methodologies borrowed from media studies, film studies, and literary studies will all be necessary to grasp the texts’ views of embodiment not only within their own fictional worlds but also in their contemporary moments, as mediated by the media object of the text itself. I plan to position the visions of embodied subjectivity found within SF narratives against the broader discursive environments in which these 4 In this periodization (found in many histories of Japanese SF production), “true” is largely equated with the subgenre of “hard SF” in the mold of Stanislaw Lem or, in the Japanese case, Komatsu Sakyō. Many histories see the first example of domestically-produced SF in this mold in Abe Kōbō’s Inter Ice Age 4 (1958), with its attention to computer technologies and biological experimentation in the far future. Brian White – Do not cite or circulate 3 narratives appeared. For example, in discussing SF novels and short stories that originally appeared in SF magazines, in addition to standard close readings of the narratives, I will look at the object of the magazines themselves, analyzing their cover designs, columns from the editors, advertising layout, and so forth. I will do this to reconstruct the discourses and debates surrounding the body in which these narratives were participating both implicitly and explicitly. While it may be impossible to fully reconstruct the moment of reception on the part of any given historical audience member of an SF narrative, my aim is to avoid treating these texts as self-contained wellsprings of meaning. Instead, in recognizing the posthumanist assertion that meaning—and indeed the subject itself—can only be understood relationally, I intend to analyze the contents of individual SF narratives relative to the other elements of their contemporary media environments.

Load more