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mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Saturday, August 08, 2009 - 11:13 am: | |
The use of an emoticon seems appropriate to this thread.
I started out by watching an anime called School Rumble after catching a few fragments of it on the web. I have the first three dvds of it. This kind of thing appeals to me. There is a girl at work, an East European, from Latvia, who dreams of going to Japan and having a romance with a Japanese boy/man. I gave her a copy of the first episodes so she could brush up on her Japanese - she is good at languages - but I think they bemused her with their childishness. This question: Is Japanese youth culture hopelessly infantilised; and am I too, in liking these cartoons, an infantilised son of a speak bubble? Call me childish but I like them; at least the non-violent, non-militaristic ones. They interest me more than our own comic books.
Something connected with this. I was looking at robots on the web/you tube; robots are something that the Japanese seem to specialise in. It is interesting the way that subjects associate in these terms. I found I was going from robots to robot women to robot sex; then to protean transformation (as from person into butterfly) then from that to mesmerism and sex slaves. Then I found a particular anime artist who calls himself mesmero007 who specialises in cartoons that are exclusively about hypnotism as the method of 'seduction'. He does amusing inventive vignettes in which endless dainty long-legged pneumatic blonds and brunettes are hypnotised and taken advantage of. I actually found this very witty. Alternatively it is a woman witch who seduces another woman / mature teenager. The themes here are as follows: robots / female robots / sexualised robots / sex objects / TRANSFORMATION / mesmerism / sexual slavery / cartoon sexuality. That seems to be a neat summary of the mythic dimensions of robots. The one becomes the other as easily as turning over a coin. (Incidentally something explored by Asimov in his later books.)
There is the obvious Pygmallion association here. The artist falling in love with his artificial creation. Extraordinary how powerful that myth is.
Looking at these cartoons in certain general non-mythic or immediate terms other themes begin to emerge too.
One is the sky for example. Rendering the sky, the clouds, a beautiful blue day, seems very important to manga and anime. Mood and silence seem very important too. The dot dot dot of thought unheard. And then of course there is the obvious: in short order we have late school days, school girls, short skirts, powerful motor bikes; the supernatural; parks; cherry blossom; and finally an almost continuous urban environment that occasionally switches to the beach or to an island. There is also often a powerful sense of time - of past, present and future - of things knocked down; gone. And of course there are the ideal environments. Places resembling Japanese versions of country houses. Luxury. This gives a window on familiar themes in a new way. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Saturday, August 08, 2009 - 11:40 am: | |
To what extent can one say this: that an anime or manga 'school girl' (they are often well past the sweet school girl stage) is actually often just a sex robot? Illustrating the power of the Pygmallion syndrome? It doesn't matter which way round you think of this. In Metropolis the female robot becomes a real person; but equally, one could have a real (female) person become a sex robot - just as with mesmero007s naughty little stories. (How often does a main character get called a "nasty little pervert" in anime / manga - ? When really what he effectively wants is an accomodating robot?)
(Incidentally, Michael Jackson's obviously infantilised behaviour with Cauley McCaulkin (sp?) as shown on some of Jackson's home movies - one has to wonder whether this is the *same kind* of infantilism as one finds in Japanese culture. I don't think it is at all in so far as - to generalise somewhat - a great deal of anime / manga centres not on children but newly mature adults. They even do gay bare chested 'boys' for girls for example, where the predominent colour is pink. Really all this is about the sexually developed male or female body rather than about the under-developed one.) |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Saturday, August 08, 2009 - 12:04 pm: | |
What makes a myth? If you look at manga it is clear how the threshold or horizon forms a central dynamic. (And with this of course is connected the image of the sky, blue and cloud.) Look for thresholds or horizons: there you'll find the catalysts. So, again, the threshold of sexuality: early days. The shock of desire and the body and the unpredictable routes it takes one down. Spring; cherry blossom. The supernatural. The ancient mage. &c. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 8:29 am: | |
Infantilised culture. Can opera be compared with this? Loud, unrestrained, primal. Based around fairy stories, stories transparently unreal or beyond the scope of probability.
So: Manga = robot opera. Emotion is always operatic. The characters are rendered as strangely shaped mannikins: a kind of 'No' cinema but on paper.
There is something very revealing about our reactions to it as members of a Western culture that also tell us alot about what this kind of art is driven by. I mean in respect of its *embarassment*. It clearly embarasses people when they see it. The infantilised girl on the cover with a little skirt and big boobs. People don't know which way to look. This theme of 'Manga as embarassment' - this of course has echoes in our own forms of embarassment: I mean for example over science fiction. Science fiction as a serious cultural proposition has always had an embarassing aspect for its readers or movie goers. (As maybe opera once had for its early enthusiasts?) After all, the content of science fiction is often deeply silly: childish, utterly improbable. This is less of a phenomenon now but it definitely once existed; perhaps it still exists. Early modern science fiction writers like van Vogt or Ray Bradbury or Robert Heinlien, were intensely excited by the ideas of science fiction and by the possibility of its being written by them - they were charged with a tremendous energy by it - but to a degree this was involuntary; they had no control over it. It had possession of them. They were driven by a compulsion. You can see this in the quality of the writing itself (those fantastic early Heinlien novels for teenagers). They were driven by a compulsion but the compulsion had embarrassing consequences. Namely science fiction itself. (Where does one hide oneself!) Similarly say with Tolkein: here was a serious academic, with a sober and deep knowledge of languages ... and what did he end up writing about? Hobbits. Bilbow Baggins. How embarrassing! But he had to go with the compulsion - the myth making impulse ... Likewise I think with Manga artists and writers. It may be kind of embarassing, but they have to go with the compulsion. They are in the grip of a myth, just as in conventional sf. Let's find out where it takes us. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 10:56 am: | |
Ask this - what is too embarassing to be read on the train? I have gone through periods of refusing to be embarassed by what I am reading but eventually I backslide. I no longer read poetry on the train for instance. I am embarassed to be seen reading it. I do not read science fiction or any form of comic either. What people absorb on the train is dictated by socialised ideas of what it is cool to do. So it is pretty cool to watch a movie on an ipod; or in general to listen to music; playing games is now maybe less cool - certainly less overtly indulged in. A few years ago at one stage you would constantly be annoyed by a beeping coming from somewhere. Some people will read Marvel comics - but only a rare breed. Mostly, it is the Metro, followed by books like Kate Mosse Labyrinth or Alice Sebold's Bones novel. Or maybe a Zero Two Bravo type army novel. Someone was reading the London Review of Books in front of me today. Sorry, but I find it too embarassing. I don't want to be labelled as an intellectual, poet, or any other such thing. I want to remain a blank, anonymous.
Interesting what hasn't been embarassing but on the contrary actually an important marker for a particular kind of credibility: Harry Potter for example or The Da Vinci Code: both of which explore the definitely improbable or downright silly.
Next up: Manga as game culture. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 11:09 am: | |
But before we go there it might be interesting to explore to what degree Opera was embarassing for its original proponents. Suppose in England round about the time of Purcell, what you had was tavern singing and just plain singing in the streets, alot of it extremely catchy and bawdy. The singing was also competitive I believe. (And of course one can find that right back to Virgil, and beyond: singing as competition.) From such things emerged the Baroque and opera. Dido and Aeneas. An art far more integrated in social terms with its wider culture then science fiction was or ever could be. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 8:33 am: | |
I am currently playing a very realistic flight sim (another 'embarassing' pasttime?), Rise of Flight. Visually, aurally, kinetically, it is stunningly real. For instance on the polish of the underside of the top biplane wing of the Fokker DVII, you can see something of the underneath/above world realistically reflected. Multiply that kind of autentic rendering out to the horizon - and you are virtually, visually, in a real world. I have never experienced such a realistic sense of actually being in the air, up among the clouds. Similarly with sounds. The main sound is the roar of the wind, with the fainter sound of the engines. Then there is the physics ... amazing. After playing this game intensively for a couple of evenings, I am experiencing a curious after effect. One result of playing this game (it has authentically rendered cars, trains, buildings, towns, rivers, lakes etc) is that it creates a sense of time travel. It seeps into your subconscious. You really feel like you have just travelled into the past, seen the beauty of unspoiled French countryside, and the absolute hellishness of the smoke laden, smashed landscape of nomansland in the midst of it, visually covering tens of miles. So travelling on the train this morning I found myself looking at walls and trees and thinking - yes that wall has been there at least 120 years ... seeing the past, being sensitised to it, and also experiencing the feeling of being 'famished' - eager to absorb the textures and appearances of things as though seeing them for the first time, because the game renders them so brilliantly. That sensation of game-playing time travel is of course a central Manga theme. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, August 17, 2009 - 9:34 am: | |
Why are 'superheroes' eroticised? It is not just in anime that one finds that concupisent preoccupation, the fanservice, the titillation, or whatever. Same with Marvel comics and the men as much as the women. This is also usually connected with a concept of transformation in some way. In western graphic novels and comics the transformation is usually simple: from one set of clothing into another. From the city suit to the body revealing skin-tight superhero outfit. Clark Kent gets undressed in a telephone book and reveals himself to be as erotically muscled as it is possible to be.Laurie Juspeczyk becomes the Silk Spectre. Dressed in what is more or less just a form of underwear. Everyone goes around performing fantastic deeds in just their underwear, supplemented by say a cloak and certainly a mask. Anime gives us variants on this. Underwear is on display but more sexualised. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, August 17, 2009 - 2:10 pm: | |
Why is this? Why are the stereotypical figures of fantasy and science fiction comics so emphatically sexualised? Susan Richards (Fantastic 4) has to undress before she can exploit her special power: invisibility. She saves the world naked - if invisible. (One imagines the feel of her invisible skin.)
Teenagers are interested in sex ... is that the answer? On the other hand so are older adults and so are old men of 80 (occasionally). Is it really to be understood as a way of getting the subejct sex out into the open? By a kind of inadvertence? I don't find that a very interesting answer. For instance, there is something of a puzzle in the issue of why superheroes always 'save the world'. Why the very existence of the universe is at stake in many sf stories .. is baffling. I think the answer to that kind of question just as with superhero nakedness or Manga boob obsessions is much more to do with logical implication than random everyday appetites. It is about the logic that life dictates when it is lived as a kind of myth, let's suppose. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 - 8:17 am: | |
I think we will have to go with the 'dull' answer.
One could make a case for saying that metaphysics and nudity are necessarily connected but - fortunately or unfortunately - it appears that this isn't so. For instance (going with the nudity thesis): Tintin is an adventurer. He is a kind of anti-metaphysical bulwark. He occupies the concrete ordinary world, rather than some realm in which the super-reality of dreams lies just an inch away from the everyday regularities of offices, houses, ships, cars. He is not a metaphysical creature but, dressed in his Edwardian pantaloon-style tweed and accompanied by his dog and Captain Haddock, rather a precursor to mass tourism. Thus Tintin is not pictured in his underwear. Clothes are a key but are specifically not sexual. He is a teen-age creature in a reverse sense to the teens that we find in typical Manga. (Albeit that the men are generally still in suits.) So Tintin is not metaphysical; his adventures are not about saving the world. Whereas for instance in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya saving the world is the entire story; it even depends on the outcome of a game of baseball that she plays. Haruhi contradicts Tintin, thus. But then the exceptions to this rule appear: e.g. School Rumble. And the case that actually Tintin even so is about saving the world *somehow* ... Then there is science fiction itself, as in Van Vogt or Bradbury. Few instances exist where clothing is especially significant. (But of course the written word is not a visual medium, paradoxically, naturally ...)
We have to factor in the times in which these things were being produced to get a clear picture. Haruhi is contemporary; Tintin is wartime; many of the key adventures were written in conditions of occupation. (Herge being a Nazi collaborator to some degree.) So he could hardly depict a sexuality even supposing that he wanted to. Marvel comics in contrast are post war; as is Manga; it started I think in the late Fifties. So it was very much about seismic changes in manners and values, dress code being a principal key to to such. So quite obviously, and being mainly visual, they pointed in the direction of social disinhibition - although at this stage not explicitly; still in a covert form...So to Manga and its metaphysical panty obsessions. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 - 8:22 am: | |
Haruhi saves the world; Tintin saves the day. (I still find this contrast appealing.)
The first is dressed suggestively; the second is right and proper. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 - 9:10 am: | |
Like a Baroque Glee the inadmissable mix of obscenity and desire ...The conflict of propriety and embarassment in a fantasy life as it is lived .. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 19, 2009 - 8:24 am: | |
The pants are like popcorn. They are an additive to make you feel at home in your local cinema.
Incidentally, there are in fact a surprising number of anti-oxidents in popcorn. (Here one could talk of panty-oxidents.)
... A mythic life because in its actuality - or in its experience - life *is* mythic. Because it seems not to exist, not now, not in a living soul satisfying way but only as the mundane moment. So instead only as an ideal, a 'some other place' that exists just beyond arms reach. Just as for example, the driver of a Ferrari might imagine an ideal stretch of road, say zig-zagging the Meditterranean coast, while in actuality the car only sees the A21, and the roads that go from Bromley around the A205 South Circular across the Battersea Bridge and into Chelsea and South Kensington. This Ferrari driver - getting into his car every morning parked on its suberban street - persuades himself that tomorrow or tomorrow - it will be that Meditterranean coast road that he travels and not the dull Clock House or Shortlands tarmac. (Equally one can imagine someone navigating a Meditterranean coast road every day with the thought in mind of wanting to be in glamorous central London, negotiating the chic Park Lane or Knightsbridge traffic.) |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 20, 2009 - 10:41 am: | |
A cartoon is a generic idiom. That is its very nature. You don't get individuals even in their depiction: but types. In this sense Tintin is not a person but a kind of abstract of individual possibility. Given these dimensions, these characteristics, the cartoonist is saying, logic implies this reality ...
So you have a kind of constructed myth in an age when the very idea myth is impermissable. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 20, 2009 - 11:27 am: | |
Batman is not an individual but a power. He may be inhabited (so to speak) by Bruce Wayne, he may not have any 'superpowers' but he is still the representative of a kind of mythic power.
He has a foot in each world. This one and a world of supertechnology. And to inhabit it of course he must be masked. He must be Batman by not being Bruce Wayne. He becomes a kind of type of or perhaps a dominion of space time: the overlord of a realm (Gotham City). |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 20, 2009 - 11:43 am: | |
Seems to me there is a significant lack of masks in Manga. Not invariably but often. The superheroes are not outsiders but teenagers attending their last years at school. They do not need masks but they do still need to inhabit a world of erotic feeling; so they are identical in this respect. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 20, 2009 - 5:11 pm: | |
Or in regard to masks they occur slightly differently: eg as big floppy bunny or cat ears. There is a good deal of dressing up and of wearing slightly kinky outfits - and obviously this is comparable to Spiderman or Superman or Catwoman but less ostensive ... A cartoon: we might look at the thesaurus terms for "paradigm": e.g. archetype, chart, criterion, example, ideal, mirror, model, original, pattern, prototype, sample, standard.
In this context the logic of the word "original" needs our clear understanding, since any cartoon implicitly exists in the tension between the universal and the particular, in the cartoon identifying the universal. The depiction of a boat *exemplifies* (gives us an ideal of) that boat - in particular ... which is very obvious in Tintin for example. Everything is *exactly* rendered, but generically, ideally. A crane, a docks, a street, a gull, a view of the sea. If in some sense an image is to be seen as the original of a face - for example - what does this require of us if the definition is to be accurate? I mean, given that on the contrary, what is to be understood is the opposite of anything 'particular', it being general - representing idealised form? This is as true in Manga as in western cartoons of course. One sees streets, towns, beaches, houses and so on, and they are all rendered generically, schematically, 'blankly' - fictionally, in short. A car may be a carefully drawn copy of an actual car, being currently manufactured, beautifully detailed, but it is still generic in the sense of its 'carness' ... Same with the grass; same with the trees, the blossom, everything. The particular is banished. So how is anything to be understood as original to itself in these terms? There *is* no 'particular'! This is visually emphatic. (And this is our release.) |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 20, 2009 - 5:22 pm: | |
What I am getting at is this, the idea of originating oneself: of being one's own blueprint or paradigm; this is the driving force of any fiction (or poem, or piece of music, or painting etc): the energetic possibility so to say. Learning how to be that possibility or how to do this this is the challenge. Since this is what the reader learns too. He learns how to come from the fiction: from the image, from the picture itself. Its generic nature allows him to (in this sense) put himself in the picture. Perhaps the simplest example is the superhero mask that we find in Marvel or DC Comics. A mask, that is something that anyone can wear of course: including the reader. The mask grants a kind of permission to enter into the 'self-created' world that he sees. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 20, 2009 - 5:29 pm: | |
(It is the reader who particularises the generic: -
Thus, if I present you with a face e.g. :0)
... it is you, the reader, who in this sense effects the 'particularity' of its expression ...) |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, August 21, 2009 - 7:41 am: | |
One could call ordinary life a form of reverse gaming.
It is not a game that is being played, and yet the thing sought is akin: for this condition, the condition of 'play', represents an ideal.
So one goes backwards, from the actual to the game that in some form represents but is not the actual. (From war to chess.)
The scheme, the arrangement, the design, the plot. The chosen elements of a composition. There is a wholly transparent *fictional sense*.
Reading the cartoon one attempts to live a mythology through the actual: that is, through the transparently imagined particularity of the story unfolding. The pictorial form of the cartoon encourages this sense of seeing 'the particular in the abstract'. As if it is a game that is being played. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, August 21, 2009 - 8:27 am: | |
We are looking at something of how the particular and the general work in their logic. Think of this: anything seen, known, real, is by its nature particular. It is of that moment, a space time defines it. It is you. You are seeing it - this thing in particular. And yet there is a tension. In a way it isn't satisfying, this particularity. I don't just want to see a street, I want to see THE street. So to say, the *original* of a street. Otherwise it isn't mine; for I share this street - this particular street - with any number of other people. Its being 'particular' in this sense (I mean, in the fact of its existing) makes it not mine - on the contrary, it is everyone's in being no-one's street. So in a way instead of the actual street I want a mythic street ... a street such as is found in a Manga or DC Comic. Wholly generic, wholly schematic - ideal ... *My* street. The thing I originate because in order for it to exist I have to imagine it. This is perfectly transparent: if I don't imagine it then it doesn't exist. I have an ideal because I have a transparent fiction. In this sense, I want to live mythically - in a world that doesn't exist because it is in the world that doesn't exist that *I* most fully am. (Otherwise the sheer weight of fact squeezes me out of the world.) This is the logic: the world that doesn't exist allows me to originate it. So: I seek to 'live the particular through the general' ... The obvious question here is: Is the particular world in which we - in which you or I - live; is the world of fact or of the particular - itself a kind of mythic construct, a kind of generalisation, and is this something sensed too and tried to be brought into reality - that is, even by going to the lengths of doing disreputable and embarrassing things: by reading 'fan service' Manga, or Superman; or singing obscene glees, or reciting poetry or listening to opera or reading space opera or some such - ? By indulging in all this transparently mythic nonsense? After all, isn't that clearly the reason why the science fiction novel compels one? Because it 'reverse games' reality: brings that which it isn't back into what it 'is'?
If life is itself irreducibly mythic then this is a way of realising it, it could be said. It is like a sheen over things: one doesn't directly know it, but this sheen is something that one misses and yearns for, like a baby howling: crying for something that the adult has no idea of. To see again the sheen over things, their mythic status .. that faint sparkle of a wilderness lost tens and tens of millennia ago but still somehow paradoxically existent. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, August 24, 2009 - 9:20 am: | |
"This reality is a mythical reality, it isn't real ..." This is the kind of thing we utter as a criticism when we want to be factual or practical about something. And it can have a validity and can say something important, this argument. But what interests me are those areas of experience and knowledge where it isn't possible to make this kind of contrast. For instance, a robot is both a mythical and a real being - simultaneously. Suppose in ten years I can talk to my computer as I might to a person. It carries on in idiosyncratic speech, it is full of ideas, information, opinion, attitude: I behave towards it in speech at least as towards a real being. But then I tell myself: it actually isn't conscious. It is just an electronically modified glass panel instilled with a virtual personality ... When its face appears as 'at the other end of the line' on a phone system, there is no one actually there. Inevitably this reflects back on me of course. For what am I actually, as a conscious being? Isn't my consciousness just as virtual as the panel's? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, August 24, 2009 - 9:30 am: | |
These are metaphysical questions: questions that cannot be answered by matters of fact that yet present themselves. For instance let's suppose this, that the more that technology is able to mimic us radically, the more that we come to resemble it, so to say the more roboticised we become. In other words, the more technologically mythical. In such terms technological reality is inverse to 'SENSE OF REALITY'. i.e. it makes us more unreal ... |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, August 24, 2009 - 9:34 am: | |
(So one could call Tintin, Manga and DC Comics, e.g. early forms of robot art.) |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, August 24, 2009 - 12:06 pm: | |
We inhabit the paradox of the machine: the myth that isn't.
"This is the real world." It is - but it isn't - real. There is something very relaxing about finding what I would call a robot solution to the paradox of the machine. For instance, there is a manga called Gunslinger Girls, set in Chicago, that follows very simple outlines in terms of gangsterish cliches, guns and cars, that very efficiently assembles all the diverse components of a robot myth. Cars are idolised, as are guns, as are women, as is macho prowess. So you have a kind of mechanical world where the wheels and cogs are made out of these simple parts operating against each other. There are no other questions that need answering. This is a self-contained world of crime and the law and the rule of the gun and the what (?) GS500 or something, the Merc. Where of course a car is a kind of robot, and where those who ride in them take on something of the car's characteristics, become the tiny moving parts of the giant mahcine that is Chicago. I read this, and my mind finds itself at home and vindicated. All worries vanish. I feel at peace. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, August 24, 2009 - 3:04 pm: | |
The creation of the deliberately unreal began, in its strange way, on November 14th 1976 in a small ill-lit garage in downtown Chicago. Jim Bean adjusted the cigar in his mouth and narrowing his eyes hunkered down in the inspection pit underneath the rusty busted chevvy ... |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 - 8:12 am: | |
Now you may ask, and I am sure you will given how these comments and questions have so gripped the nation that over the past two weeks services have been affected and the national grid power surges can only be explained by the advent of the new posts appearing, you may ask: why particularly 'robotic'? What is distinctively robotic about cartoons, especially Tintin say? Well, connected with this question is the issue of why, culturally, we are so fond of the 'failed substitute'. Gerry Anderson resorted to puppets in his various children's tv series, Fireball XL5, Stingray, and Thunderbirds, giving us the reason that he simply couldn't raise the cash for the real-life actors, the expensive sets and special effects that would be needed for these far out otherworldly ideas. So he used puppets instead; they seemed palpably sillier, embarrassing maybe, but nonetheless they got the job done. But however these puppets came about they took on a resonance of their own; their appeal was sui generis: they actually added something to the stories. The 'wooden' or virtually expressionless, 'actor' Troy, became a cult figure widely imitated by schoolboys, wood became hero. Likewise Brains. Or think of the impact of Lady Penelope. Or of Parker (perhaps the best of them all. His "Will that be all, m'lady?" is imitated around the globe.) This wasn't just incidental but an intrinsic part of what they meant somehow. For instance in Anderson's later UFO series, which used real actors and sets, the actors basically needed to 'emote' like puppets to make the show work. The actor who plays Ed Straker is emotionally and functionally a kind of robot: rightly so since this is what the part demands. The players are components in an elaborate machine devised for destroying aliens: a machine that incidentally essentially exists as a phantasmogoria in taking the guise of or seeming to be a film studio. (So nothing *is* what it is.) So we have Gerry Anderson's 'series for robots': ... and we also have anime. One could regard anime in the same terms: because real sets and real actors are too expensive, cartoons are made instead, that present the sorts of stories that interest their makers but at a fraction of the cost that 'reality' would entail. So in a way we have, as with Anderson's puppets, what stand as identitical terms of embarrassment: a presentation that calls into question our seriousness, our legitimacy, our intelligence, within the wider human community. Serious people - do not indulge in childish fantasies; do not countenance magic. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 - 8:32 am: | |
A super cool anime like Cowboy Bebop - that must entail a Hollywood budget if it is ever to be filmed, if ever real life actors on real life sets are to be realised - for the cartoon characters on the cartoon sets - well they are much cheaper. The world is saved in cartoon-land but not Hollywood. But the cartoon nature of the series adds something of its own ... and it might even be that the studio prefers to work in this medium as a more artistically interesting and resonant form. As one watches a movie like the Cowboy Bebop full motion picture it is hard not to be fascinated by its renderings of textures and surfaces, or by the focal range of the cartoon's imaginary camera. A clear image in the forground makes for a blurred image in the back ground. A glass shop counter shows the goods inside or underneath the counter but it also reflects the man standing in front of it - convincingly. A cloud is reflected in a puddle, which shimmers in the wind. And so on. In one or another degree special effects render each scene. Far more so than in a typical ordinary movie. So that this becomes a secondary and yet still important interest that grounds the experience that we are confronted with in the film's general story. So that not *real* but *generic* terms come to mediate what we regard as real. They take on their own life. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 - 12:15 pm: | |
A robot is a reverse individual. That is, a robot is not an individual but a type. For instance type LIJ-A is a detective style of robot. It sorts out murder mysteries. So it is already the thing that imagination demands in the requirement that the world inhabited by the person be self-created. (Still with me?) In other words, if it is true that its imagination has to come about through the generic. So for instance in regard to itself, the robot is *already* something that everyday desire is rooted in, in being generic in itself: ie in having to imagine its self as well as having to 'create' everything else. The robot's world is necessarily generic. A tree is a 'tree'. A person is a 'person' - a generic type. The robot's world wholly lacks in individuals; therefore, everything is necessarily its own - an imagined rather than real or individual thing ... Strange conclusion, then! The robot's world is imagined ... |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 - 12:20 pm: | |
Whereas I - me - a real individual - live in a world that is *not* imagined. The actual. Or at least that is how it appears ... |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - 7:29 am: | |
The lighthouse keeper's world is round. The funnel flash - the way it beeps over the edge of the horizon, it reveals a mirror of rain. Step into the scene. Seas explode like crisp packets; the rocks salt black say that's what he said to me at the time. Count them. One two three four count them. Blue with knickers I could not get the two words to sound the same. A sea of wave blue knickers with the sun ascending into a spoon of milk dipped the kite. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - 7:42 am: | |
The robot's apple - bite on it, chunky - mmwwwmm mwwmmnnn mmnnwnnw - the robot's apple is a colour of grey black; is not in fact a colour but like - well let's call it slate; it has the taste of slate; just stone. The robot bites stone but it has the taste of an apple; apple appears reflected in its eye and you can see it is green. It can be seen outside its face at least, like a drop of real colour on a mirror; and the taste too, which can be imagined. The flavour of apple. Outside its face. Below those steel eyes. That arrow straight brow. The unforgiving cheeks. Earless. Just two vents, one each side. When the robot hears a noise it is like the sound - intermittent - made by the air conditioning that no one hears, as they wait to get into their station terminus where they will disembark unknowing, not having heard the inside of that sound, its interior, the sort of unit on board a modern train will do - a hum that in fact reminds me of yellow not green, a clock on a white wall, a pond with a single stickleback in it. The sound of that bird singing there, not heard, call it a chaffinch - that sounds to the robot like the air conditioning, the unit such as one hears on a train. I am reminded by it. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - 8:01 am: | |
Suppose: that long buzz-hum. Its duration; it lasts for at least 2 minutes 37 seconds. Possibly longer. Nobody notices it. The sound arrives and goes without comment. It is just the sound of the train, the sound of the air conditioning. I jostle in my seat; the man next to me drinks his coffee. He seems unhappy. Somehow, the way he drinks the coffee, the precise intervals at which he tips the closed paper cup up, the mechanical half suppressed sound of swallowing - somehow this communicates unhappiness. He can barely believe his own life. He is say from Poland. He wears a white patterned jumper. Wen he stands up it is clear that the jumper has somehow lain crumpled, sad, perhaps at the foot of his bed in a dusty studio-flat with a small old fashioned television, that near the centre of it still has a sauce and egg stain that slightly obscures whatever is on the screen. For instance, the announcer's left eye looks past the sauce: or rather through it. The yellow and brown of the egg and sauce renders the eye an overall yellow. But occasionally this changes to blue whenever the announcer moves his head a little to the right or left. The real colour of the eye appears. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - 8:14 am: | |
When the robot feels the surface of the table at which I sit, he experiences, not the smooth plastic wood veneer, the mock oak, but a kind of molecular earthquake. The table is in fact a large alien creature, or at least part of one, that has disguised itself as or taken the form of, the furniture. This is what the robot realises. And of course this is something the alien realises too, its detection by these glass and ceramic fingertips, the awareness that it is no longer alone, unremarked by its user, so that its interminable as it were hibernation, its dormancy, being disturbed, calls forth action: in short order it reassembles itself into a coke machine before the 'startled' eyes of the robot, who flees into the corridor and sets off the fire alarm. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - 8:26 am: | |
"So this coke machine was once a table, you say." |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - 10:48 am: | |
Later .. we find the robot back in the room drinking endless bottles of coke. It can't get enough of the sensation of fizz. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 27, 2009 - 9:49 am: | |
No great mystery attaches to the question of what stands before us here: why the effervescence contained in a bottle of coke should so fascinate it sensorially. Clearly it is a creature of effervescence. The experience of constantly vanishing before its own eyes is - in a manner of speaking - well, this is the all of what it knows. Since it is through the possibility of existence that it must be, a possibility that only arises, for this metal being, through the act of imagining itself: so effervescence is its very soul. The fizz of vanishing; the wave motion contained in a bubble of gas multiplied to the power of infinity so that it expands in all directions simultaneously - however, yet in this dimension being strange: being a wave *wavering*: that is, snaking upwards for in the shade of that black the snake and the apple and the tree that the bubbles are to be found on and the bird singing behind bubbles of leaf: each particle of that machine being but an instrument of fizz engages us in a world of awareness; such that that world wouldn't otherwise be. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 27, 2009 - 1:26 pm: | |
In the last analysis, a robot world is a virtual world.
A virtual world is a robot world.
Thia is where we are headed. Into that: the fantastic ray tracing devices. The instantaneous language translators. Etc. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 27, 2009 - 5:19 pm: | |
I suppose what I am doing is exaggerating this case, which is to say, I am rendering as a metaphysical absolute something which is only partially realisable or real in an everyday context; in the flesh and blood world of actuality we confront the endlessness of experience rather than any sort of simplicity like a man who is a machine. Even supposing that something like the world that I have imagined were to come about, so that for long periods of my day I found myself occupied by the realities of virtual space, still I would sooner or later have to come out of that space. In anycase that is where I am now! What the metaphysical absolute allows us to do is imagine the mythic foundation of the world in which we live in spite of the everyday. I spend all day staring at a computer screen, but this is not something that I notice that I do but like breathing or walking perfectly mundane and as novel as a familiar tree or view of sky: that is, so ordinary is it that it is unnoticable. It exists solely in the realm of tautology: it is what it is. The foundation of modern knowledge is the understanding that everything is a machine. You then get consequences from this. The actual, mundane world that derives from it, in being its living realisation. The intricate world of technological possibility. Because, in real life, something strange happens. That world keeps vanishing. Just a moment past and already its creation is forgotten. I no longer see the screen on which I am writing. When I first saw these screens - well I was fascinated. Were I to have a machine avatar captured in some kind of electronic crystal glass after a week or so that aspect of strangeness so gripping initially, will have vanished. He or she will have become a necessary companion, someone who I have always known. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 27, 2009 - 5:30 pm: | |
In other words, the thrill of being a robot, and of drinking endless bottles of coke and of converting those black sugars that it contains in its superb lather of fizz into energy, in its actual realisation ... reverts to the 'human': to the manga comic. To the DC adventure. To the ordinariness of a man losing his temper of becoming, in a whirl of fury, The Incredible Hulk. In place of the superman robot we find the martial arts queen, the Vixen Warrior! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, September 02, 2009 - 8:22 am: | |
Is it that I start as robot and try to become human? Is that what I am talking about? Time is entering us into what we 'are': robots: beings in and of a machine world. It isn't obvious, it is not like in Asimov, exactly, but it is happening. There are modern day equivalents of the Robot Corporation that Asimov imagines but of course these are not exactly parallel or not yet, but for instance the car manufacturers, the General Motors, and the Opels, Volkswagens, etc, - and Intel - these are fully in existence - so here effectively, in nascent form, are our robots... I start as robot and so have to discover what it is to be human - Jim. This could be said to be the artistic project. Pop music: essentially the noise of 'droids. Machines making merry. Breaking by discovering the metaphysical limits of the places we inhabit. Everything begins with cliche. Necessarily. So for instance for the song to be such it has to be about the other: either by being addressed to the other or by the mourning the other, or by the criticising the other - the song has to be about that which it is not; but what are the means to hand and why is this so? It is because all is imagined in strictly repetitive or cliche form: as in: *my baby*. My baby baby baby baby baby - baby. My baby - loves me; loves me not. One of the first big Beatles hits "She loves you yeah yeah yeah" contains pretty much all the vital elements: the idea of 'baby' (girl) and the affirmative. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes!!! (Incidentally David Thomas uses this brilliantly on I think his 18 Monkeys album. There is a song in which he manages to say the word "yeah" about 20 times without a break but each time making it work, intoning it differently .. which is very funny.) The elements are wooden, robotic, mechanical, but the search is to make them vital. When Springsteen sings "Mister I aint a boy, no I'm a man, and I believe in the promised land" he is expressing himself through the creakiest most used up terms imaginable; but so: what gives these words life is the hard delivery, the raw drum sound, the electric guitar. "So I went down to the river, but the river was dry ..." In other words, Springsteen starts as robot but is 'humanised' by (musically) inhabiting that zone, that aura or robot place. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, September 03, 2009 - 9:46 am: | |
If you have ever sat out of eyeshot of a tv and listened to the sounds coming out of it, with an 'untutored' ear, that is, uncued by any kind of visual context, you will know what I mean: the random noises, the voices, the exclamations, the snatches of music, the explosions, bangs, slams, the undertones, the sounds of things being dropped or moved, shuffled, hit. It is possible to see in this cacophony, or to imagine at least, the absence of a reality: of that which reflects the conscious mind; instead what is being shown is that something else is at work. A kind of machinery of consciousness. The sounds emerge as side effects of a visual machinery. Nothing cognitive is actually going on. In a way the people sitting watching the tv have been duped: the tv has engaged directly with the machinery of their minds and in the process bypassed anything that could realistically be called consciousness. It is not of life that one talks when one talks to others of the tv but of a kind of tv modified machinery. It just *seems* that these people, the viewers, are alive. Actually there is just void, with time passing regardless of any sense of what could be recognised as organic or non-mechanical - living - animate life: like the slow-changing irredescence of an oily puddle, that cacophanous 'movement' has no living principle.
This is not to suggest that a Luddite revolt against all things mechanical should be instigated, of course. People have behaved robotically throughout history, regardless of their levels of technology: that is, they have behaved wholly mechanically, incapable of honestly considering the living sense of whatever is before them. (For example burning witches.) It is just that it is interesting how our technology has the virtue (?) of showing us - inadvertently - the degree to which we are robots: not living but mechanical things. As when people grow old for example and find themselves no longer capable of learning new things. Like the proverbial dog that can't be taught new tricks it doesn't matter how hard they try: it can't be done. They have become irrevocably trapped in the machinery of their bodies, to the degree that any further transformation or new life is impossible.
Clearly, at a cultural level, this bears very strongly on our situation as a species regarding our treatment of the planet. Like an old man who can no longer control or disguise the greed with which he covets the objects in the world before him, because his impulses have become too ingrained, too reflexive, too naked, he clutches hold of everything that passes his way - in a form utterly outside the question of whether it makes any sense. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, September 03, 2009 - 10:02 am: | |
Behaviour that we are inclined to call mindless - I am thinking: well perhaps not but is this not what we actually mean? It probably is. Mindless! People who try to get on a train without waiting for those on it, who want to get off, the time to get through the door, and out of their way, they appear to be driven by mechanical impulses that cannot be modified, that the actual facts can do nothing to change. They (and sometimes I am one of them) wont, they can't wait; they wont, they can't, see what the situation is that stands before them, actually, and so respond accordingly; instead, they find themselves impelled to do what they have done and do day after day, get on the train, go in, entering it - mechanically. ("Hey! Do you mind not pushing!") Wizz bang. Whirr. Refil. Recharge. Elevate. Straight. Arrow on. Press button. Watch red blink light. Beep door. Swipe card. Whirr. Bang. Beep. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, September 03, 2009 - 10:16 am: | |
New droids, new voids. Dude. Where's my car? You can reprogram a robot but you can't change its basic design, its engineering valences, the materials out of which it was originally made or the basic purpose for which it was built - no of course not - without a radical revamping of the entire shop floor. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, September 03, 2009 - 11:01 am: | |
So - to theorise, syllogise, talk! in the dark! - ow ow ow meooeiow! - it is possible to see an evolutionary - a living - pattern in the way that we keep adopting any new technology - technology that can more acutely *appear* at least to be closer to the idea of living ... Clearly, the new generations, particularly, the 15 or 20 year olds of the present, find themselves less inclined to passively, baldly sit watching tv like their parent couch potatoes - they want something much more immediately and directly to do with *them*. And what is more interesting than tv? Facebook. Twitter. You tube. This is not a turning away from .. but a perfectly natural adoption. The computer has eaten tv. But again, to what extent is anything actually happening - ? To what extent is there anything that couldn't as easily be replaced by a beep or a whirr if in the process its meaning remains the same?
"I feel like an umbrella today!" "Dude, the mewl of Wallace is fortitude." "My cat!" "Here I am parked in front of the building."
But again, I am exaggerating. Something of the idea of 'the robot learning to live' is to be observed here.
Maybe this is connected with why I find the special effects of anime (and of video games too) so appealing. The way that textures are rendered, surfaces, reflections, shadows, these things are thrilling somehow (for me genuinely thrilling): that allow this entry into the transparency of a visual machinery. Things that make the world transparent allow us to go out into it. Where of course, that is what Facebook does. (For example.) Suddenly you have a kind of transparent electronic membrane between you and another person, or between you and the outside world, in which any number of different possibilities can be explored and exploited to some sort of creative effect. Likewise with the reflection in a window in an anime, where in fact that window is not in any sense outside you as the observer of it but purely a figment of the eye: the eye becoming its own outside: its own creation. In other words, where what this does is make the idea of imagining the world transparent, obvious, as a real-world thing. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, September 04, 2009 - 8:06 am: | |
But why can’t a robot be an individual? (Possibly an answer? ... But think of the terms in which we would say that a VW Golf was ‘individual’: the car is customised... it has a uniqueness but it is still finally at the last just a 1.6 with a few fancy (questionable) add-ons; and we would say the same of anything potentially or in principle infinitely reproducible that it lacks uniqueness in principle. A soul. (Which we don't?)
.................................................. ............
The question seems to be: can machines be conscious? But the issue that interests me is: can we be conscious? What is it for us to be conscious?
There is an answer to the central issue; that is, to the question of machine consciousness in what it is and how it exists: that it is all a matter of simulation rather than of actuality; that there is no *real* consciousness. But this leaves the intuitive hole remaining: namely, what is consciousness if it isn’t machinery? We are often highly mechanical behaviourally. How is it that we aren’t just machines, and so why can’t machines go the whole hog and do more than mimic us, actually do better what we do? And of course there is the idea too that it is just a matter of time before a machine can so perfectly show human responses, either through some sort of virtual interface, or actually mechanically, and yet organically, as in an artificially created flesh and blood being (for example), or even just in metal and ceramic and latex form. Were we to be confronted in such an idiom, with a ‘someone’ towards whom it would be (let’s suppose) ordinarily impossible to ‘catch out’, how could we not react as if this thing, this ‘it’, is a living person? But in any case, besides all that, there is the observation that culturally and technologically we are heading into a robot world. We are in these terms becoming like robots even if we aren’t robots: we are becoming the same as machines even if it is still possible to make the distinction.
... Talk about it in these terms ... A robot is not and cannot be an individual but is necessarily a type, like a VW Golf or Polo. A type is something of which there can be more than one .... so are we to include twins in this definition? And what about clones? The same individual indefinitely reproduced?
... Suppose: watching the players in a game of dominoes: their actions are so mechanical! Every thirty seconds: Bang! Like a piston coming down
…………………………………………………………………………..
Doesn’t hypnotism show that we are as robots – that consciousness is an illusion?
Here one thinks of concepts of volition, of will, and intention.
How a machine can only consist in components that taken in themselves are foreign to all intention. – “if they have a kinship – it is with accident.”
"She sails well." - "You are anthropomorphising a mere boat; an object." (But as opposed to what for example? What don't we anthropomorphise?)
[Last post on this topic I think.] |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, September 04, 2009 - 12:02 pm: | |
One last one, honest! .. I watch ants in an ant colony making their way across the concrete in the yard outside my door, their movement stimulated by the sunlight. There are no individuals here. "Pretty much, an ant is a robot" I tell myself. (It even sort of looks like one.) They are completely unlike human society in terms of the absence of individual behaviour and in the degree of their organisation. So I wonder: "Is an ant really conscious? Does it really and truly exhibit conscious behaviour - it is hard to believe." (After all, where is the pay-off for an ant, what sort of job satisfaction is there; in being a kind of slave what can it possibly get out of all that, what it does: a component in an endless machine of dust and dirt pellets - it really seems like the last thing I would want to be: an ant ... But here is another story. For a summer vacation job I help out a psychotherapist with the endless tapes he has made in interviews with patients: they need sorting out; categorising, date ordered; split into male and female, labelled according to their general themes and different subject-matters, and so forth. There are alot of tapes. At first it makes for fascinating listening. I can listen in to the private lives of a wide spectrum of different individuals of different ages and tempraments and levels of experience. Should be interesting! But as I listen to these steady outpourings, to the problems, the fears, the issues, the sex troubles, the difficulties with parents, something unexpected starts to emerge. After hours and hours of listening to these voices, often fraught and gloomy, depressed, THEY ALL START TO SOUND THE SAME. In fact it is worse than this: THEY ALL START TO SOUND LIKE ME! After a while I can't tell the difference: are they talking about their lives or my own? |
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