Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Eight: Chapter Fourteen: Inner Natures
The multiplication of frames of reference at the level of movement in Nadia extends into and grounds an experience of a constant undermining of stable frames of reference at other levels. The series starts with an unambiguous historical reference: the Paris Exhibition of 1889, exactly one hundred years before the series (1989). Ultimately, however, history is not what it seems, for our received chronologies and periods of progress vanish. Similarly, evolution is not a stable frame of reference. We learn that there has been alien intervention. Intent on producing a species of intelligent servants, aliens first tried engineering cetaceans, and when that effort failed, they turned to primates and produced humans. In other words, there is no human nature outside technology. The human, and all of nature, is technologically produced, engineered, rigged. Humans are alien-engineered primates. It is like ‘divine intervention,’ but there is no God. These aliens who wish to be gods are, in fact, other creatures or beings. There is no Being with a capital B.
In other words, even though Nadia repeats the basic conceits of Castle in the Sky, the sanctity and abiding depth of nature, our earth, doesn’t provide a stable frame of reference. Put another way, everything has been transformed into what Heidegger calls a ‘standing reserve.’ It is ‘enframed’ — engineered, rigged, enclosed, exploited — on a scale and with intensity greater than what Heidegger imagined. This is why I evoke Peter Sloterdijk’s extension of Heidegger’s notion of standing reserve into what he calls Menschenpark, which can be translated as the human park, the human zoo, or the human reserves. I use human park or human reserves to emphasize that the transformation of the human into a standing reserve.
But how does the multiplication of frames turn into enframing of the world and enframing of the human? How does it relate to or follow from flat compositing and relative movement?
