Japanese 2-D lovers (25 July 2009)

Call me judgmental and intolerant if you must, but the Japanese guys (described in this NYT article, by Lisa Katayama) who have sex with body pillows with images of prepubescent cartoon characters stenciled on them in lieu of having relationships with human beings seem pretty pathetic. It's like appliantology from Joe's Garage. Judging by the NYT article, these men don't seem mentally ill or neurologically damaged, like the people who get married to roller coasters, but instead seem pathologically ill-equipped to deal with adult sexuality. The way Katayama describes them is fraught with ontological confusion: "Nisan is part of a thriving subculture of men and women in Japan who indulge in real relationships with imaginary characters. These 2-D lovers, as they are called, are a subset of otaku culture— the obsessive fandom that has surrounded anime, manga and video games in Japan in the last decade." What makes for a "real" relationship in these circumstances? Or is real just a gratuitous modifier here, like the word really. If these relationships are real, can there be a fake relationship? A non-relationship? If two living creatures are not necessary for a real relationship, than all the rules are inapplicable. Katayama continues in this vein in describing the 2-D lovers: "Unlike most otaku, though, they have real romantic feelings for their toys." As opposed to fake ones? As opposed to only pretending to be in love with a cartoon pillowcase?

It seems a little too convenient to argue that the 2-D phenomenon is a bellwether for the future of human relations in the digital age, where most of our time will be spent starring at screens of various kinds. And let's hope that that the Japanese "lost decade" of stagnation is not responsible for producing these men, as the U.S. could very well be entering a similar economic cycle. Katayama suggests that a crackpot, quasi-anticapitalist guru may be responsible for the rise of 2-D love:

The guru of the 2-D love movement, Toru Honda, a 40-year-old man with a boyishly round face and puppy-dog eyes, has written half a dozen books advocating the 2-D lifestyle. A few years ago, Honda, a college dropout who worked a succession of jobs at video-game companies, began to use the Internet to urge otaku to stand with pride against good-looking men and women. His site generated enough buzz to earn him a publishing contract, and in 2005 he released a book condemning what he calls “romantic capitalism.” Honda argues that romance was marketed so excessively through B-movies, soap operas and novels during Japan’s economic bubble of the ’80s that it has become a commodity and its true value has been lost; romance is so tainted with social constructs that it can be bought by only good looks and money. According to Honda, somewhere along the way, decent men like himself lost interest in the notion entirely and turned to 2-D. “Pure love is completely gone in the real world,” Honda wrote. “As long as you train your imagination, a 2-D relationship is much more passionate than a 3-D one.”

The logic here is pretty interesting. Since human love has become commodified and plastic, saturated with status implications (as though marriage hasn't always been about status conservation; see Pamela by Samuel Richardson, among a million other examples), it's better to love an actual manufactured commodity, a product. As though marketers never designed products to exploit the insecurities of isolated, alienated individuals (like Honda). Perhaps the idea is that a relationship with a product is always already compromised, so one can't be disappointed or disappointing. And without responsibility to another person, one can indulge the logic of consumer capitalism -- novelty for its own sake -- to a much fuller extent in a more intimate corner of one's psyche. Consider this lover of pillowcases:

“I was steps away from getting married,” he explained earnestly when prodded about his experience. “You have to make sure you don’t hurt a real person; you have to watch what you say, and you have to keep your room clean. In Japan, it’s not O.K. to like another person if you’re already with somebody else. With an anime character, you can like one character one day and a different character the next.”

These people are not resisting the effects of romantic capitalism; they are embracing them more completely. Romantic love began its migration to the center of the individual's consciousness with capitalism's advent in the 18th century or so, redefining the purpose of life for many as the ability to find a soulmate. Romantic love deeply ingrained competitive individualism and became the alibi for authorizing a certain righteous hedonism (expressed in the market through purchases) in the name of discovering who we really are.The 2-D lovers represent the completion of that arc; they have dispensed with the alibi and have moved directly to an open and virtually unashamed love for products instead of people. The complexities of reciprocal love among humans are too inconvenient and stressful, as the communal and civic responsibilities have proven to be for us (better to enact dyadic withdraw, enter the family cocoon, view neighbors suspiciously). A 2-D lover named Momo, the most disturbing of those mentioned in the article, puts it pretty succinctly:

"I don’t care if people understand or not,” Momo said. “I just want them to leave me alone. I don’t have any nostalgia for reality. I’m happy living in the 2-D world.”

I am deeply bothered and creeped out by the phrase: "I don't have any nostalgia for reality." It's too easy to imagine a Matrix-like future full of Momos who want nothing more than to be left to their imaginary worlds and imaginary "real" relationships with cartoons, fueled by and sustained through a steady stream of special collector's items mass-produced by various culture-industry concerns. It's troubling that technology has been aimed toward making "I don't have any nostalgia for reality" something a person would even find it possible to say. It has now become conceivable that one can comfortably opt out of reality -- reject the construct of society altogether -- without recognizing the consequences, namely the foreclosure of the possibility of any sort of social change whatsoever.

Maps and legends (20 July 2009)

Recently, as I mentioned before, I re-read the novel Dune, something that felt vaguely shameful to me, so shameful that I feel compelled to mention it again here as a kind of penance. While I was quickly and compulsively working my way through Muad Dib's rise to the godhead, I was too ashamed to take the book on the subway; instead I waited until I got home from work to furtively dive in. Not that the book itself is shameful; it's rightly regarded as a classic. I think my shame came from how much it remind me of myself when I was 12, when I first read it, how much I was indulging a useless nostalgia, as all the innocence was gone from my reading. Whenever I felt myself getting caught up in the story, I found myself adamantly retreating to an analytical distance, seeking in some way to ironize my own engagement.

While I was reading, I found myself frequently and needlessly recurring to the near-incomprehensible map of the planet on which most of the action takes place. It's not like the geography is confusing. But the map is more confusing than anything else, with lots of locations labeled that I don't remember ever being mentioned in the text, with hopelessly geeky names like "the Minor Erg". The glossary, on the other hand, is extremely useful and great for laughs, too. My favorite part is the Pale Fire style references to nonexistent reference works; e.g. the parenthetical in the entry for Krimskell fiber that reads "For a more detailed study, see Holjance Vohnbrook's 'The Strangler Vines of Ecaz.' " I think half the reason you write a science fiction book is to throw in stuff like that. And to produce appendixes that go into utterly gratuitous detail about the fictional universe you've invented. Reading Dune's appendixes made me wonder whether the novel was just an excuse to allow Herbert to publish the appendixes, which seemed to contain the quintessence of his inspiration, still crystalline and impenetrable and inaccessible. Novels like Dune tap into the primordial passion of naming things, or renaming familiar things in some made-up language, and drawing up maps for the sheer pleasure of naive cartography.

What started me thinking about this was a passage in Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy -- a survey of differences between oral cultures and cultures that have writing.

For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Man is the umbilicus mundi, the navel of the world. Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or 'world,' think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast surface or assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be 'explored.' The ancient oral world knew few 'explorers', though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers, and pilgrims.

Michael Chabon's essay about childhood in the most recent New York Review of Books touches on a similar idea. Citing the mental maps he made of his neighborhood, replete with personal landmarks unique to him, Chabon claims that "Childhood is a branch of cartography." He connects this with maps in adventure stories:

People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

Combine with this Ong's argument about adventurers, and you get something like this: A certain species of books, mainly attractive to young adults, seem designed to re-stage that transition from an oral-dominated world of adventure to text-dominated (i.e. mapped) world on a small scale, in the reader's mind. An epic story unfolds on the oral-tradition model, but it's fused to a battery of maps and glossaries and appendices that engulf the narrative and sap its power away, or at least redirects that narrative's momentum and energy. That is to say, perhaps part of the drama of novels like Dune lies in having the adventuresome oral tradition evoked again for readers while allowing them reader to ultimately and triumphantly reject it in favor of textuality, literacy, maps, dictionaries, and so forth. We master the technologies of text as we're reading these otherwise unnecessarily confusing books -- consulting the maps and the glossary -- and experience ourselves transcending the universe of the story as it unfolds. We end up feeling as though we are alongside the creator of the story, in an "adult" world of total comprehension. Then we confirm it by reading the appendix. Eventually we associate with adulthood the idea that we can do away with the fiction and just stick to the facts, presented in as bare-bones a fashion as possible so we can take in more of them. We skip right to the maps in the back; the stories just get in the way.

Emulating machines (25 September 2006)

Science fiction often exploits the fear that we will invent computers that will become smarter than us and then attempt to extinguish our flawed and feeble, morally compromised race. The excellent Battlestar Galactica, whose third season starts soon (expect a like hype barrage like what was recently rolled out for The Wire), does some of the most interesting stuff with this trope, mainly by making the robots indistinguishable from humans and giving them an eschatological worldview. The cylons have a commitment to quasi-spiritual ideals, lending the conflict religious-war overtones have obvious significance for the alleged clash of civilizations currently taking place in reality. The robots' unflagging commitment to their beliefs underscores the way humans waver and are repeatedly vulnerable to betraying one another. We don't ever root against humans -- as we do in Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, in which it slowly dawns on us that the humans are fascists, the real villains of the movie, and the mechanical-looking insects deserve our sympathy -- but we can't fail to see the implication that humankind tends to fracture into warring camps in the face of an implacable enemy. And there's the usual overtones of human hubris and tampering in God's domain and that sort of thing.

But eventually sci-fi will need to evolve a response to a phenomenon that's potentially far more frightening: Rather than robots seeking to eradicate humans, humans become so impressed with the efficiency of machines that they voluntarily seek to emulate them. It's already happening all around us. For example, the book Mind Performance Hacks, recently promoted by BoingBoing, promises "tips and tools for overclocking your brain" and comes fully loaded with a host of other brain-as-processor metaphors. The brain is the hardware and consciousness the output of resident programs. The attraction of computer metaphors is that they seem to solve human problems by allowing us to conceptualize them in a ready-made way that makes them seem easily solvable by the march of technological process. Thus we talk of ideas as computer viruses, taking a biological metaphor that's been technologized and repatriate it for humans. We see our own minds as programmable, controllable, able to be applied to discrete focused tasks. We talk about plugging ourselves into networks and so on. We imagine social life as a massive operating system in which everything has a deliberate function, so that it can seem comprehensible and manageable. By imagining ourselves more like computers, we are to take the value system technology generates -- one almost hegemonic in business culture -- and apply it to our own behavior.

Well, come to think of it, this humans-wanting-to-be-hyperefficient-computers idea crops up even in the sci-fi I've seen (which is not much). There are the hyperintelligent mentats of Dune who drink a special potion to allow them to become human supercomputers. The Matrix depicted Keanu Reeves downloading information directly into his brain that became immediately functional -- a kind of patch or software update, as though the brain ran on third-party programs. The human brain was regarded as passive, alien to the person whose head it was in. It was simply a matter of overwriting it with whatever the person was supposed to experience. One becomes configured as an end-user of one's own brain, a mere consumer of the experiences it can be programmed to spit out. Consciousness is a step removed from the brain, which provides the data that consciousness enjoys, as though it were a film.

The Mind Hacks book takes mind-machinery a step further, promising to make the brain work more like a machine under the user's conscious direction, which implies the user consciousness aspires to be more machinelike, more relentlessly productive. Rather than receiving data the brain spits out, consciousness merges with "subroutines" it can perform to think more mechanically, more efficiently. No doubt these things work -- these kinds of ideas for human perfectibility and increased mental acuity have kicked around before as mnemonics or chisenbop or EST or hypnotherapy, bioengineering, methadrine, etc. -- but what seems new is the insistence on the computer metaphor, as if to be a computer would be to live the dream.

My vague hypothesis about this is the following: that our economy's emphasis on technology as a means to produce perpetual growth and wealth is having the effect of making us think that by becoming more machinelike, we become more human -- we move closer to our human potential by mirroring the methods that have enhanced economic potential and productivity. This seems to fetishize information for its own sake. Information, now an unconquerable ocean, tempts us to master it through heroic feats of navigation, exploratory expeditions made purely for glory. Human potential, human experience may come to seem entirely a matter of information processing -- and the faster your brain processes information, the more life one is cramming into our allotted time on earth. Efforts to absorb all this information can become a kind of flow experience, a way of entering the "zone" associated with athletic accomplishment, and at that point one may seem to merge with the information itself, to become inseparable from its continual transmission. That might be the aspiration anyway, to become the best data you can be, so you still figure in the techno-future world. Social networking sites, which already seek to reduce ourselves (enhance ourselves?) into a flow of routinely updated data, may be the first florescence of this. And the burgeoning popularity of virtual spaces would be the next, integrating the data in a reconsitituted virtual self, bringing people a step closer to having the field for one's identity laid out as a flexible, benevolent operating system, which lets one be ensconced in the safety of programming logic, having shifted existence to a space where inhibiting personal anomalies can simply be debugged.