ReVisions New Pub on Nov 25 Earl Jackson Published on: Nov 25, 2018 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) ReVisions New Pub on Nov 25 Gender Software and Political Hardware: Serial Experiments: Lain and Ghost in the Shell. Earl Jackson, Jr National Chiao Tung University This essay will explore the cultural significance of contemporary Japanese anime, not by offering a general survey of the canon, but by looking closely at two exemplary works: Serial Experiments: Lain (1997) and Kokaku Kidotaior Ghost in the Shell (Oshii Mamoru 1995). The protagonist in each of these anime experiences a profound doubt about the reality of the world and the real nature of her “self”. Moreover, each of these crises arise from a predominant technology. In Serial Experiments: Lain that technology is the digital communication network. In Ghost in the Shell it is the human- machine fusion of cyborg-science. My reading of these anime will focus on the relations among technology, representation, and subjectivity as well as the politics – and in this case – the sexual politics – that inform and circumscribe those relations. I have been studying such relations for some time now, and in the course of these inquiries I have adopted the term “technopoetics” as a way to characterize both my object and method of analysis. In other words, I study representational technology on at least two levels: on one level, what it does; another level: what it means. The second level encompasses at least two registers of “meaning”: [1] changes in conceptual systems; [2] new metaphorical lexicon. My technopoetical reading of the three anime will be guided by the technopoetical readings the anime themselves perform: one level they depict the functions of technology, and on another they exploit its imagery and the fantasies it elicits and sustains. Moreover, these films evince another level of technopoetic expression in that they use the particular technical capacities and limitations of the animation medium itself, even, at times, in order to instantiate in the spectator crises analogous to those dramatized in the fiction, crises that such technical revolutions like cyberspace foment. Serial Experiments: Lain In the late 1990s producer Ueda Yasuyuki had an idea for a game for Playstation. He gathered a team who collectively developed that idea into Serial Experiments: Lain. Abe Yoshitoshi was responsible for character design, Konaka Chiaki for scenario, 2 ReVisions New Pub on Nov 25 Kishida Takahiro for character design and Nakahara Juji for cgi- programming. As the project neared completion, the team decided to create a multi-episode anime version of Lain. Nakamura Ryutaro was brought in as director and continuity manager. Ironically, although the Playstation game was the original Lain, it was not released in November 1998, while the anime series aired at 1:15 Monday mornings on TV Tokyo from July 6 to September 28, 1998. The series is one of the most audacious and suggestive inquiries into the cybertechnological imaginary produced to date. My synopsis will be highly selective and will in no way cover the entire narrative or its many subplots and themes. I will single out those elements that most pertinent for the argument I wish to make. Serial Experiments: Lain, is the story of Iwakura Lain, a shy middle-school student in Tokyo. She had apparently paid little attention to the Internet until her classmates started getting email supposedly from Yomota Chisa, a student who had committed suicide the previous week. Lain digs out her desktop computer from layers of debris and finds the email. In it the writer claims that, although she did actually kill herself, she is still alive in “the Wired.” Her suicide was only a discarding of the body to enable her to enter the higher order of the network. Reading the letter, Lain asks aloud, “Why did you kill yourself,” to which the email responds, “There is a god in the Wired” (“The Wired” refers to the networked world of the Internet [at least initially]). Lane asks her father for a more powerful computer, in order to “look for a friend.” Shortly after her state-of-the-art Navi computer arrives, Lain finds an anonymous package in her school shoe locker containing a Psyche processor. Upon installing the Psyche, her attitude towards the technology and its capacities changes completely. Sitting at her monitor, she casually tells her father that soon she will be able to enter into the Wired directly, her whole person, thanks to the enhancements she made and the Psyche upgrade. Her father adamantly rejects the notion on both intellectual and ethical grounds, but she seems oddly unaffected. Her confidence is justified, however, as she does indeed enter the Wired directly, but both the source of her ability to do this and its consequences are beyond what Lain could imagine. 3 ReVisions New Pub on Nov 25 ejlain1 Figure 1 The Real World, the “Real World,” and the Wired The early episodes of Serial Experiments establishes the Wired as an extension of the Internet of the “real world” of its viewers. The story is punctuated by non-fiction information segments, each one focusing on a moment in the actual history of cybernetics and digital media. There are profiles of Vannavar Bush, John C. Lilly, Ted Nelson, and descriptions of important precursor notions such as Memex and Xanadu.1 ejlain2 4 ReVisions New Pub on Nov 25 Figure 2 These sequences encourage viewer identification between ordinary online experience and Lain’s ultimate adventure. These mini-histories are structured and presented in formats and styles similar to what one might find on the World Wide Web or in a CD-rom. They appear independent of the major narrative, Lain is never shown watching them, although the information in them becomes relevant to her situation. She also indicates knowledge of this material, which encourages another kind of identification between the spectator’s relation to the knowledge conveyed in these segments and Lain’s. These non-fiction insertions in the story give the real world and Lain’s world a common history, and their format models the presentation style of real-world digital media. While their content could be considered equivalent to the data the Lain gathers, their form underscores the radical difference between interface-mediated online communication in the spectator’s world, and Lain’s full immersion navigation of the Wired. In Layer 08: Rumors, certain events have made Lain curious about a company called Tachibana Laboratories. Her curiosity leads her to boot up her Navi, but once logged in, the interface disappears. Lain walks through a multicolored, flickering space and strikes up a conversation with what appears to be a very large female striptease artist. The performer responds to Lain’s questions in a deep, masculine voice while assuming a variety of burlesque poses in iridescent fishnet stockings. ejlain3b Figure 3a. 5 ReVisions New Pub on Nov 25 Albeit an exotic variation, the stripper is apparently a search-engine/database venue, similar in function to those regularly consulted online, such as Lexus/Nexus, or Google. And even the manifestation of that function is understandable: the image of a stripper suggests an agent that reveals what had been hidden; the timbre of the masculine voice (in the patriarchal cultures of both the real and the fictional worlds) suggests authority and thus the assurance of the truth of its information. ejlain3a Figure 3b While the mode of conveyance radically departments from the graphic interfaces of the spectator’s real world, the information the stripper-search provides deepens the connection between real world Internet and the Wired. The search engine informs Lain that Tachibana Laboratories have been developing a new Protocol, Protocol 7. “She” goes on to remind Lain what a protocol is and the series of Protocols preceding the new one. Of course, this information is more for the spectator’s benefit than Lain’s. The informant goes on to remind Lain what a protocol is, a gesture clearly addressed to the spectator. A protocol is the fundamental architecture of any network. It is “a set of formal rules” governing the transmission of data “across a network.” The rules cover the size of bits and bit stream, the formatting of data, the syntax of messages, and the access hierarchies among classes of terminals in a system. The Internet we use went through a series of protocols and has in the past few years operating with rating on IPv6 – Internet Protocol Version 6.2 6 ReVisions New Pub on Nov 25 Since Protocol 7 is brand new, this means that the Wired had been operating on the same number protocol as the Internet of the spectators. This information also allows us to deduce the point at which the Wired most radically departs from the spectator’s real world Internet, and, within the fiction, the point at which the Wired began to intrude into Lain’s “real world.” Paradigm Shift in the “Real World” and the Wired Having established the common ground between the “real world” Internet and the Wired, we can then venture to draw parallels between the effects and affects of our digital revolution and those dramatized in Serial Experiments. Let us recall the paradigm shifts I described in the previous section. Life on line has changed the basic ontological paradigm from a binary opposition between “real” and “unreal” to a tripartite model of “real” “unreal” and “virtual.” Furthermore, the ability to communicate to terminals anywhere from anywhere undermines the ordinary physical understanding of space, just as the freedom to re-present oneself in multiple guises through different screen name, avatars and the like, destabilizes traditional presumptions about identity and “self-hood.” The Wired offers immensely amplified technological capacities that are nevertheless analogous to those of the Internet.