Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Twelve: Chapter Twenty: The Spiral Dance of Symptom and Specter
In sum, the VCR in the Video Girl Ai, the PC in Chobits, and the cell phone in Cellphone Girl Heaven bring with them a form of interaction with images that is not based exclusively on perception and perceptual positioning. Touch, dispositions, moods, sensibilities come to the fore. Affect or affection takes precedence over perception. As such, we can make a distinction between the perception-image and the affection-image. I am borrowing these terms from Deleuze’s theory of cinema, and the terms affection and affection-image may sound somewhat awkward in English. But the prior examples from manga provide a more concrete sense of these rather abstract terms.
Previously, at the start of this chapter, I mentioned that affect is a relation prior to the emergence of a distinction between subject and object in which one entity feels the attraction and sway of another entity. But we don’t feel this attraction as subjects separate from an object. Two entities are connected in such a way that each is under the sway of the other — rather like the moment where Ai leaps to life from the video. But the affect is not limited to the relation between Ai and Yota. The affect is the coming to the fore of a continuous material assemblage — in this case, lots of manga effects such as sound effects and action lines swarm into the pages — that overwhelm or undermine the logic of perception. This is a moment of ‘affection,’ of Yota being affected by the material assemblage of the rental video, the TV-VCR screen, the private room, etc., and of readers being affected by the manga image that similarly feels like it is breaking its frames. In a simple way, you might think of affect and affection in terms of a sense of tactility taking over visuality, but it can also be a matter of an auditory impact and other kinds of sensation.
The logic of affect or affection is a source of discomfort for psychoanalytic theory, especially in film and media studies, for psychoanalytic theory tends to focus on the perception-image, on the exchange of looks, and the resulting sense of perceptual positioning that produces subjective and objective shots, subject and object positions. Psychoanalytic theory has thus gravitated toward films that highlight that sort of perceptual exchange, especially noir films. Of course, there are always affection-images and a logic or rhetoric of affect in film, but psychoanalytic theory will tend to subordinate it to the logic of perception.
In animation, it is impossible to avoid the affection-image, and as this detour through manga was intended to demonstrate, when the ‘visual’ technologies in question are VCR, PC, or cellphones, the logic of interaction (both of characters within the manga or anime and of us with the manga or anime) tends to highlight the affection-image.
This shift has consequences for gender. Obviously, gender does not disappear. In fact, the ‘girl who is not one’ and the ‘woman who is not one’ are so important in anime and manga that the question is impossible to ignore. But there are different ways for us to interact with gender in manga and anime. If you pay attention to the logic of perception, you will tend to see a problem of subject-object relations. You will tend to see the female in terms of a continual re-negotiation back into the objective or the ‘not-one.’ You will tend to see the ‘girl who is not one’ as a symptom of male desire.
If you attend to the logic of affect, you will tend to see a problem of materiality. You will tend to see the ‘girl who is not one’ as an attractor within an emergent system. You will tend to see the female as a specter — not of male desire but as a manifestation of technological drives that traverse the social-psychic field.
Because anime and manga always has both perception-images and affection-images, it is impossible to determine, once and for all, that the ‘girl who is not one’ is symptom or specter. As Chobits shows, there is always interplay of perception and affection, and consequently, a spiral dance of symptom and specter.
