Talk Geometries: Towards Anime’s sensorial vocabularies

Talk Geometries: Towards Anime’s sensorial vocabularies [1]

I wish to put before you a scheme which for some time has occupied my intellectual endeavours. Briefly, the concern is that animation [2] both establishes and maintains a peculiar relation to knowledge production (in art) due to its malleable character and dedication to reproduction and life-ness.
 
The life-ness, reproductive capability, and inherent malleability reveal a resistance to structural coherence, and these things, realities we might say, are best known to the writer who pursues to rationalise animation, that is, to formalise a persistent, linear vision. If there are specific forms of knowledge production hinted at here, I am referring to the current phenomena of idle talk or non-referential curiosity, which can be linked to animation in specific ways. To this line of questions I have devoted the following paper, a largely theoretical exposition in the format of extended image captions.
 
A first reference is to Chris Kraus’ (2011) essay ‘Indelible Video’ where she describes the current state of art as being entirely corrupted by the market and this art being conceptual by nature. In her critical reflection on how the once unique video image has migrated and vanished into the larger category of any-artwork-whatever, the film’s only place and context is now that within the art world. By giving up its agency of autonomy, the video or film (documentary, experimental, activist, or any other form) is “like an artifact, a branded product, viewed through the career of the artist” (Kraus, ibid.). This two-fold displacement of the moving image—displacement of place and of content—two dimensions which as such cannot be singularised as separate fields of enquiry—from its first, so-called authentic and originary context, into a second, text-infused context, clearly follows the logics of conceptual art. From the image (art work, object) as such to the image that is ambiguously, and parasitically intertwined with text and discourse. Kraus (ibid.) reminds us that “The fact of the disappeared object is key to conceptual art, a term that is oxymoronic: all art now, is conceptual, deriving its value only through context, at a second remove.”

If there are video works that escape this strange insistence on a present temporality linked to concept and market value—being hot, hot works, so to speak—they must be found on the basis of giving up their ‘video-ness.’ But the market is not the only measurement of defining the video’s hotness. More importantly, video and electronic media more generally notoriously imply a presence in terms of living time. And it is precisely here where a less reductive analysis reveals and propels other forms of moving image work acting against being forgotten, virtual, overlooked, dead or insignificant.
 
That is to say, working against being interpreted and ‘valued’ by its value as a concept in or for the art market only. As soon as one slips into the presence, the living time of a more remote part of the world (Indonesia or Albania, for example), the moving image work cannot be disconnected from the dynamics and force of cultural difference, it cannot be un-connected from the various and manifold experiences of time, time zones, living time [3]. And it is precisely on the basis of these second, far more discreet present temporalities, Kraus argues, where video or film work can form resistance, perhaps on a microscopic level but nonetheless, resistance to digital disembodiment and the hegemony of the entertainment/media/culture industry. Along these lines, integral to discussing the image/video is not only a concern with the medium and categorisations, but with the shifting and manifold representations of cultural difference and phenomena around what is called the transcultural, which in turn allow to re-imagine social and geopolitical relations and their transforming connection with knowledge space or discursive constructions.
 
Early anime (making use of limited animation specific to Japanese animation) [4] is capable of formulating similar processes of inversion between modes of analysing, interpreting, speculating with regard to the market—sometimes more, sometimes less institutionalised. Osamu Tezuka’s 1963 ‘TV manga’ Mighty Atom (Tetsuwan Atomu; imported to the US as Astroboy), for example, is shot through with economies of movement and motion in terms of image, concept, and its ‘environment.’ Atom animated: lines out of sync, consciously flat image environment, abstracted cityscape, lack of integrity in terms of animate and inanimate (that is, between perceptually stilled and perceptually and experientially brought to motion, and expressing a lively or living quality), lightness, speed, dispersion.
 
On a side note, but relevant and significant in relation to the urban image in film/moving image, abstracted cityscape (such as we have with Mighty Atom) and landscape, but specifically landscape film and landscape theory—fûkeiron—which developed in Japan only a little bit later, at the end of the 1960s, one is reminded here of the distinctive Japanese understanding of the nature of landscape and also of cultural theorist Matsuda Masao’s essay ‘City as Landscape’ (1970). At the time he proposes this scheme alongside making the film Ryakushô: renzoku shasatsuma / A.K.A. Serial Killer together with Atachi Masao and Sasaki Mamoru, the “landscape” in the context of Japan was also informed by Western traditions of perspective and pictorial and philosophical legacies–imported to Japan in the late nineteenth century in the era of industrial and cultural modernisation–which may be significant in terms of the transnational space it opened up across creative practices—including anime potentially; the new knowledge space it produced; and the possible distortions of “landscape” on a more general level. A subject–object discourse cannot be excluded from these considerations. Critic Karatani Kôjin (1993: 34) in Origins of Modern Japanese Literature notes on a certain ordering, even hierarchical principle, that is, a dynamic of inversion, inherent in the relation between ‘landscape’ and subject/object: “The philosophical standpoint that distinguishes between subject and object came into existence within what I refer to as ‘landscape.’ Rather than existing prior to landscape, subject and object emerge from within it.” [5]
 
But let us return to drawing and animated space. Atom’s reproducibility and proliferating narrative constructions are inherent to this child size thing. Atom represents an epitome of a post fictional state of creation on which Stephen Wilson (2011: 166) notes: “He[It] is implicitly diagrammed and visually experienced as a subject that is continually integrated into Japanese society from the outset, unlike Pinocchio.” Not only on an abstract but also on a very concrete level: becoming a commodity or having been designed as a commodity and product of circulation and growth, Atom is in a way collapsed or folded into a serialised mode of production and also into a fragmented historical and cultural space (more as follows). His/its liveliness and image are bound with and depend on his reproducible capabilities as character commodity, “based on a series of trans-media migrations of the Astro image and poses,” according to Marc Steinberg (2006: 201), hence somewhat exclusive to the art market, which may have re-appropriated Atom some years later—an interesting phenomenon as such.
 
Let us consider some of the consequences of this serialised mode of production and how it affects processes of rationalising the image, and the investment of rationalisation.
 
What I would like to describe here as a “state of ignorance” towards a unified, singular image (schizophrenically preserved in a single media form created at a particular moment) catapults the ‘post fictional character’ as a transferable and vital body into an enlarged, contested, and borderless space, a space potentially too abstract and diagrammatic to be pinned down or only spatially described—the elsewhere, any-space-time-whatever, without utopian or dystopian associations. Perhaps the reality of Tezuka’s invention then, if there is any, happens on two levels: first, it can be read in relation to a dedication to spatial or environmental abstraction beyond Atom’s abstract-ability in terms of the in/animated image. Second, as being concerned with anime’s tendency to heterogeneity as an image and product, as both material and immaterial entity, which leads directly to the conception of a suitable geometric ‘tool’ and ‘device’ for crafting the promise of an infinitely re-writable body.
 
With a view to gathering evidence bearing on the idea of animation’s structural incoherence in relation to historical continuity and thought processes, it became apparent that the emergence of a discourse of decentralisation corresponds to these concerns—implicit in the lines above.
 
My last paragraphs of the paper intend to pick up on the way cultural movements literally take place side by side (in an expanded knowledge space), possibly ignorant of, or invisible to, each other. The question of side-products is imagined as a question around the visibility or transparency of relations and in what way this visibility or transparency is at stake. Connected to this observation is the issue of the constitution or lack of constitution of a united intellectual consciousness or communal spirit among artists, writers, and scientists. [6]
 
My idea is to think about how Atom (Atom world) and similar characters become a vanishing point as symptoms of the society in which they are generated and which they generate [7], so to address the relation between a central fictional character and (virtual) subjectivity such as Atom, and decentralisation and disappearance; Atom’s structural coherence in terms of his/its being as a product and media economy integrity versus his/its unstable image as one cultural entity among others and as a discursive construction. As a reminder, this is set within the period of the large-scale conversion of the postwar Japanese economy from a secondary to a tertiary economy, including the transformation of consumption which this transition presupposes  (Kusakawa, Steinberg) [8].
 
The examples which follow are intended to create a common ground for thinking “currency” across diverse cultural movements, from anime to Japanese political cinema of the 1960s, where independent filmmakers, activists, and other cultural agents explored various forms of filmmaking trying to express the precarious sociopolitical climate at that time; and further to artistic practice around 1963 with its shared vocabulary situated in the everyday world, politics, and possibilities for action—resulting in conflicts with museum officials and the state.
 
The link is intended to recognise the intense and vital moment of a multilayered cultural investment at the time, which is also evident in printed form, writing and discourse, and in decentralised production of print media. If Tezuka’s work (arguably alongside Disney’s work) has been exploited to the point of becoming banal, my citation here aims at reorienting the audience to concurrent cultural production in Japan. Ultimately, relevant here is the impulse for giving up ‘centring,’ something that also underlies the motivations of cultural workers during the 1960s, as Adachi Masao and Sakai Takashi emphasise in their conversation on the collapse of perspectives and concentric pattern of thinking (individual, family, tribe, society, state) beyond the collapse of geographic senses [9].
 
The Yamanote event in 1962 took place in Tokyo’s central circular subway line, the Yamanote, where artists in white face paint, carrying strange art objets, performed ritualistic happenings,

dramatising a key everyday space with their artistic critique and practice. Subsequent to the performance, discussions with [artist Genpei] Akasegawa and the editors of a radical art magazine Keisho (Image) led to the theoretical foregrounding of the concept of direct action in their artistic practice, or rather the thinking through of the possible relation between the radical political concept of direct action and art—a focus that encompassed Akasegawa’s [project 1,000-Yen Note Incident] [10].

This work consisted of single-sided monochrome prints of the 1,000–yen note, and invested “currency as an outpost for hidden forms of domination” [11] It also touched on issues of artistic originality and mechanical reproduction.
 
To conclude, the discontinuity and discomfort, perhaps irrationality, of integrating animation-anime in the expanded context of art (and knowledge production in art), creates the condition for ‘futuring’ animation’s geometries. I have touched upon animation’s proximity to text and discursive constructions conditioned by specific politics of knowledge, social production and the status of theory—the prevalence of discourse—and have traced the structural coherence between animation and forms of knowledge production linked to a socio-politically unsettling time. If animation’s growing and proliferating vocabularies and narratives re-write historical sense, perhaps it is this reproductive force [12] which calls for experimental analytical models. Or more particularly, the simultaneous refusal, necessity, and drive for these models—which produce an imaginary realm for such undertakings.
 
I end with a quote by Paolo Virno (2004) who writes on how the “special places” of discourse are dissolving and are replaced by “common places,” or “by generic logical–linguistic forms which establish the pattern for all forms of discourse” (Virno, ibid. 36–7). The latter offer us a standard for orientation—some sort of refuge from the direction the world is going. And on the basis of these new places for intellect we find: “Curiosity resembl[ing] a flying carpet which, eluding the force of gravity, circles around at low altitude above phenomena (without taking root in them)” (Virno, ibid. 92).

Supplement: fragments from Tranquil hills fragile apparatus

Affects of immanent power relations

The landscape [or cityscape] of my interest [13] involves the production of various cinematic image regimes which sometimes contradict each other, emerges with different apparatuses of governing, and lacks a specific formal affinity [14]. Landscape is used to describe modes of inventing (concepts of new encounters), resisting (definite categorisation), and seeing/reading (in the landscape we see/read time).
 
It is the featureless and diagrammatic landscape that forms the visual content of two films, A.K.A. Serial Killer (Ryakushô: renzoku shasatsuma), and Too Early, Too Late (Trop tôt, trop tard) [15], which, although twelve years apart in their production and geopolitically separate, share a close proximity to certain themes emerging here. A.K.A. Serial Killer is a Japanese film from 1969, made collectively by filmmaker Adachi Masao, anarchist film critic Matsuda Masao (also a former Marxist revolutionary), and the scriptwriter Sasaki Mamoru, during heights of political upheaval and the emergence of fûkeiron, a theory of landscape, at the end of the 1960s. The film belongs to the Movement Films as part of Japanese political cinema developing from the late 1960s, where independent filmmakers or activists and other cultural agents explored various forms of filmmaking that tried to grasp and express the socio-political climate at that time: student revolutions, social and class struggle, precarity, migration, post-war climate, political change, cultural shifts. Radically dislocating a political document on film, associated with presenting actual dramatic scenes of protests, violence, and people’s resistance, the “document” of A.K.A. Serial Killer instead consists of creating an imaginary narrative by re-visiting the journey of Nagayama Norio [16].
 
Following the migratory footsteps of this 19-year old serial killer, who committed four murders in four cities in the fall of 1968 and was arrested in the spring of 1969, the filmmakers undertook a four month trip around the Japanese archipelago, tracing various stages and times of Nagayama’s life. The journey took them from Abashiri City in Hokkaido to Hakodate, Yamagata, Shibuya in Tokyo, Nagoya, Hong Kong, Moriguchi, Kobe, Ikebukuro, Kyoto, and Harajuku, among other locations. A male voice-over sometimes describes facts of Nagayama’s movements and journey; otherwise, the soundtrack is free jazz. What the filmmakers noticed in tracing these seemingly distinctive rural and urban places and environments, was, however, a certain flattening of the land- or cityscapes, where everything appeared similar to the point of the specific places becoming virtually interchangeable with each other. This is perhaps comparable to the current image (without the corporate entities and celebration park quality) of a drive for globalisation; that is, flexibly to internalise difference; the emerging landscape was plain, banal and featureless—it had an everyday quality. There was an unexpected uniformity, and a certain familiarity revealed in unfamiliar places that struck the filmmakers as being a new “image” or strategy laid out in front of them [17]. And importantly, the homogeneity they encountered was precisely found in the filmmakers’ looking for an alternative vision of Japan at the time, one that was conditioned by a rigid class system, mass production, and commodification, which needed to be overturned. As Matsuda describes, they sought to follow the “footsteps of a member of the masses who grew up in the lower-class strata of society, and who had to form his own class position through constant vagrancy as his only state of being; surprisingly or not surprisingly, we ended up discovering a common element that cannot be called anything but landscape, which existed like the end points of a segment of a line” [18]. The diagram or relation to mapping is such that it appears at the moment of recognising a concrete and real homogenous topology, a shared uniform landscape or socio-political formation and mechanism; and subsequently realising one’s vision of a potential, but non-existent alternative—in this case, confronting the lack of heterogeneity or difference [19]. At stake perhaps in this encounter is a question around the production and reconfiguration of subjectivity—even or necessarily on a speculative level—in relation to a spatially extended and socio-political imaginary; therefore, the status of imagination and its “correct,” that is to say “correcting,” translation into, and articulation as, a particular arrangement of images. Whatever claims there are, these must be embedded in the self-conscious dynamic of the multiple socio-political and cultural regimes by necessity.
 
For Matsuda it was clear that this was a shift not only in terms of topological and conceptual description—from “situation (jōkyō)” to “landscape”—but in the very understanding of the nature of landscape itself. At the time the film was made and he proposed this, the ‘landscape’ in the context of Japan was clearly informed by western perspectival traditions and pictorial and philosophical legacies (imported to Japan in the late nineteenth century in the era of industrial and cultural modernisation), which is significant in terms of the transnational space it opened up across creative practices; the knowledge and new knowledge space it produced; and the possible distortions of “landscape” [20]. From a philosophical point of view, this ‘landscape’ provided the means to make a distinction between subject and object, which in the light of collective and minority film making (A.K.A. Serial Killer can be seen as emblematic here), becomes particularly relevant regarding the subject/multitude of resistance (more below). Interestingly, in Adachi’s (2009) view, the relation between his incapacity of categorising, merging with the collapse of perspectives and concentric pattern of thinking (individual, family, tribe, society, state) and the collapse of geographic senses, produced the individual itself as a movement. This was a difficulty to be faced precisely within collective filmmaking at the time.
 
For Matsuda, this landscape which replaced situation could no longer be replaced by nature or climate, terms which in our post-industrial and capitalist era have also evidently taken on new meanings and connotations. Without doubt there are deviations and various kinds of proliferations of a so-called “primary nature,” and these are in one way or the other affected by culture and human agency to the extent of culture replacing nature [21]. Late 1960s Japanese landscape film in that sense provides an interesting image to indicate such a shift, and fûkeiron developed precisely from this moment when the landscape became recognised as a concept and discourse.
 
Turning the focus to the recording of homogeneous, blank landscapes, they were seen as a product of immanent relations of power—power synonymous with transportation, mobilisation, and infrastructure. The very structure of state power, in this case the state power defending the emperor system, is mapped in the non-descriptiveness of a landscape or socio-political formation which became the enemy and needed to be destroyed. Rather than confronting an entity (situation) the confrontation was uncannily directed to a mechanism and apparatus (landscape). More precisely, the shift from a primacy of aesthetics to another form of encountering the image/ visuality is found in the dominance of a new formation of power structure which is relational and a mechanism. The visual homogeneity in A.K.A. Serial Killer articulates a function rather than represents; it is supposed to make one see; it distributes and disperses the core event on which a narrative is based into various possible occurrences (these are the layers, tectonics, strata and cracks of the image) [22] and it opposes a totality. As such the image embodies a stratigraphic quality, becomes diagrammatic in a Foucault/Deleuzian sense of exposing relations between forces and particular strategies inherent to a society [23].
 
To recapture a few essential points of Deleuze on the diagram and relevant cinematic aspects further discussed by Tom Conley: in Foucault, Deleuze (2006) delineates a new cartography which he develops in response to Foucault’s (1995 [1975]) writing on Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. In this book Foucault invests the so-called processes of ‘humanisation’ particularly at the beginning of the nineteenth century, including the transformation of the forms and methods, subsequently the conditions, of punishment; ; for example different forms of punishment and dealing with illegality and delinquency, or the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle: former public execution versus the latter time-table. A major part of the book is dedicated to discipline and the focus on the body in disciplinary practices, the body now being caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions. Further discussed are the panoptic structure, prison and clinic, and the institutional. Deleuze (2006: 21) in response highlights, for example, the ‘evidence of a new “sensibility in the art of punishment”.’ In a more general way, he (ibid. 22) maps out the relation between the social field and the emergence of a new understanding of power and the political investment of the body at the time.

Power is no longer centralised and localisable in the same way; rather there are relations between forces which constitute power (Deleuze, ibid. 31). The “diagram” is precisely the display of these relations between forces constituting power. As a map or cartography, this diagram displaying forces is not an abstraction or a kind of archive; it is ‘coextensive with the whole social field’ (Deleuze, ibid. 30). One can visualise this as a sort of networked entity, which proposes a certain formation, plots it out on a horizontal multi-layered plane or screen. Deleuze (ibid. 30) writes,

Foucault gives it the name of ‘“diagram,” that is to say a “functioning, abstracted from any obstacle… or friction [and which] must be detached from any specific use”… It is an abstract machine. It is defined by its informal functions and matter and in terms of form makes no distinction between content and expression, a discursive formation and a non-discursive formation. As a machine it is almost blind and mute, even though it makes others see and speak.’ And finally, ‘every society has its diagram(s) (Deleuze, ibid. 31).

So what Deleuze is proposing here is a mapping of relations indicating a particular social field, with its organising, unstable principle perpetually transforming. And the necessary link to visuality endows the diagram as an abstract machine with a complex, intertwined immaterial and material agency. The emphasis on visuality and speech—the “it makes on see and speak”—emphasises the asymmetrical relation between sensory apparatuses (human agency) and other apparatuses (non-human agency), while at the same time these become less differential, and one embedded in the other or each intertwined with another [24].
 
In ‘The Strategist and the Stratigrapher’, Conley (2010) elaborates on the “stratigraphic” image and analyses Deleuze’s sometimes disjunctive or diverting writings on the themes of strata, strategy and stratigraphic, notably through his work on the diagram and the cinema books. In these disjunctions, which the cinematic landscape inherits, he identifies a certain tactic in Deleuze’s approach (informed or effectively produced by the diagram) to the two distinct kinds of landscape—classical versus sedimentary, tectonic, diagrammatic landscape—that appear with the different conceptions of movement-image and time-image. A critique of history and continuum appears where the archive and non-archive are at play, the archive in the sense of an actual landscape or geological formation (relating to the durable, layered, tectonic, diagrammatic landscape); the archive in the sense of the historical, film history—the classical film landscape belongs to early cinema; and the non-archive of the diagram / the diagram as non-archive. To confront this ambivalence, a strange inversion takes place in Deleuze’s manoeuvre of returning to early cinema in order to distinguish the different kinds of images/ landscapes; Conley (2010. 205) notes,

A sense of “tactics” (and of tact and tactility, too) is manifest when he frames his observations about the tectonic landscape under the title of “components” in the contemporary world that reach back to the beginnings of cinema. Through a sublime irony, the project that would distinguish the movement-image [with its classical landscape] from the time-image [stratigraphic, diagrammatic landscape], presented as if it were a strategic operation, finds itself subverted by the tactics of his return to early cinema [25].

Implicit in this debate is how the diagrammatic (film) landscape as a concept and image reinforces a distributive, tactical, stratigraphic mode in order to write/ map it, that is to say, to become “knowledge” [26]. Along these lines, the relative autonomy this landscape assumes is based not primarily on logics of identity/alterity but of expressing creativity [27].
 
Returning to A.K.A. Serial Killer, by articulating immanent power relations and a shift from a non-diagrammatic toward a diagrammatic nature of the image, the visual homogeneity also marks a theoretical expansion. As the Japanese film theoretician Hirasawa Go (2005) notes, albeit on another landscape film from that time, Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (Sekigun-P.F.L.P: Sekai sensô sengen): ‘If we trace the theoretical journey, this film turns from a theory of landscape to a theory of information-media’[28]. While Red Army/PFLP more explicitly presents and articulates the new media networks, information channels, and systems of discursive propaganda (different to A.K.A. Serial Killer [29]), the landscape film in its imagery, strategy, and content always includes—in various degrees and more or less transparently—the network, mediation, data transference, and a kind of relational aesthetics. In that sense visual homogeneity coming forth in A.K.A. Serial Killer proposes two interrelated turns, a visual and a conceptual. And as such the film expresses a dual strategy.
 
The relation between visual register and theory is, however, complex and needs further definition. In ‘Returning to actuality: fûkeiron and the landscape film’ Furuhata (2007: 18) points out that, ‘The films are not just documents, [they] are in fact part and parcel of the larger theoretical practice of analysing the relationship between cinematic visuality and historically specific diagrams of power.’ Here one finds again the duality of visibility/invisibility which appears in Deleuze’s regime of the cinematic, diagrammatic landscape as a discussion of archive and experimentation (see my reading of the relative autonomy of landscape), and more specifically in A.K.A. Serial Killer as the interplay between a photo-realistic “document” and the non-mimetic “diagram” (Furuhata 2007: 356). In fact, a cartographic quality has already been identified by Matsuda as he writes or maps his vision of an alternative Japan, later realised in creating a visual map. This visual map is a film (imaginary, symbolic realm) as a kind of secondary map or subtle protest map, which in this case emerges from recognising uniformity. Furuhata (2007: 355) writes,

The discovery of homogeneous landscapes, which exist like equidistant points of a line that constitutes an alternative “map” of Japanese archipelago, is therefore explained, at least in part, as an antistate cartographic endeavour[VG1] .

To underline the unresolved, elusive relation between the different kinds of visibility invisibility, a relation which possibly recurs in distorted ways in recent debates on regimes of visuality and knowledge production: if there is a claim for an intrinsic link between theory and the visual register in or with A.K.A. Serial Killer, it is seen by Furuhata as a confrontation between form (what is actually seen) and the discourse that in fact co-produces, envelops, and supports it. In order to see, that is, to understand the landscape film in its potential of a material agent, its encounter is essentially based on a reading/thinking, which involves diversion and re-orientation—and a sort of détournement [30]. The spatial dimension in Deleuze (1994: 245) is indicative; ‘disconnected, unlinked fragments of space’ that need another way of being approached by and perceived; ‘In short, what we call reading of the visual image is the stratigraphic condition [état stratigraphique]… To read is to relink instead of link; it is to turn, and turn round, [re-turning], instead of to follow on the right side: a new Analytic of the image.’ In other words, when thought is immersed in the moving image and vice versa as outlined here, it demands the very participation in creating the political film. This is where knowledge becomes a knowledge of the people, accumulative, relational, and decentralised. It happens in the image’s capacity to express its potential for creating a public space, where ideas are yet unformed and come into being through the people. The tendency towards forming a virtually new public and sociability [31], however illusory or real, in this different public sphere which keeps reinventing itself, is apparent when the images one encounters break with established ways of seeing/ reading, and, subsequently, thinking. This supposedly has taken, or takes, place with the cinematic diagrammatic landscape. In this logic visual homogeneity, heterogeneous thought, and knowledge as a field of forces, form a synthesis and are interdependent in this landscape film. They also indicate a passage or the movement of a becoming political [32].
 
I will now return to landscape film and conclude by way of a detour to the political scientist and theoretician, Maruyama Masao (1992) [33], who explores how significant socio-political change, in this case the modernisation process in Japan with the new Meiji government established in 1868, affects the individual consciousness in relation to understandings and forms of loyalty and rebellion. Elaborating on the inner tensions the country experienced during that period of extreme shifts and renewals, he discusses for example the extreme case of the Southwestern War, since the Meiji era the biggest and last Japanese civil war in 1877, as one instance of Japan’s modernisation process by which “feudal loyalty” and its basis were dissolved, simultaneously dissolving the dynamic of “rebellion” intrinsic to it (Maruyama 1997: 56). The first attempt to invest the meaning and implications of these experiences from a paradigmatic point of view, whereby the traditional categories of loyalty and rebellion were rationalised and discussed, was undertaken by Meirokusha, Japan’s first modern group of intellectuals founded in 1873 (Maruyama, ibid. 56–7) [34]. Further topics include the influence of religion on mobilising loyalty for secular power; the relation between political and religious authority in Japan in comparison with Europe and its constitution of state and state loyalty (Staatsloyalität) which finally gained its domineering position in real life in the nineteenth century; or the different viewpoints on the question by various intellectuals and writers.
 
More particularly, Maruyama traces the individual’s behaviour when confronted with transforming, objective principles during a major period of change, and highlights the increasing conflictual dimension on the level of the “I” that leads to a displacement of loyalty. Especially when confronted with a pluralistic choice for loyalty, the “I” experiences a major inner tension. Importantly, from his point of view, loyalty and rebellion are contraries, but not contradictions. Rebellion is a particular form of expression of non-loyalty. For Maruyama however what becomes most unsettling is not a concentration on either loyalty or rebellion or their relativity—first suggested by the Japanese author, critic educator and publisher Fukuzawa Yukichi—but the phenomenon of political apathy in Japan’s modern history, which can possibly also be transferred to present problems within so-called democratic societies. Analogous to Maruyama (1992) then, the question is not to affirm or criticise the historicised categories and terms of loyalty and rebellion (a photographic Negativ), but to read them in today’s actions, responsibilities, and artistic practices, as a Positiv, as a condition and prophecy. The landscape film, such as A.K.A Serial Killer [and Too Early Too Late], empowers its images to be encountered as documents that point to this process.

Notes

Article copyright Verina Gfader.

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