Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture
Steven T. Brown
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 023010360X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Engaging some of the most canonical and thought-provoking anime, manga, and science fiction films, Tokyo Cyberpunk offers insightful analysis of Japanese visual culture. Steven T. Brown draws new conclusions about the cultural flow of art, as well as important technological issues of the day.
Black Lotus (Sano Ichiro, Book 6)
222–53. To my family, especially Katya, Gabriel, and Guinness, I owe a debt of gratitude for tolerating my rhizomatic engagements more than they should! This book is dedicated to all the students who have taken my Tokyo Cyberpunk seminar at the University of Oregon over the years. Note on Japanese Names and Words. In the text, Japanese names are typically given in Japanese word order (unless they have been Anglicized)— that is, surname first and given name second. All Japanese words have been
normality.” He also recommends “a little S&M [sadism and masochism] . . . to trigger a good healthy series of hallucinations.” Convex explains that in order for the Videodrome signal to sink in, exposure to violent media is necessary, since violent imagery “opens receptors in the brain.”89 Convex leaves and Max proceeds to have a series of vivid hallucinations, including one in which he is administering torture to Nicki Brand inside of the Videodrome room. However, instead of making contact with
it does share the anxieties expressed in Cronenberg’s film concerning “technological penetration and colonization”97 and the voyeuristic objectification of the body through technologies of surveillance and remote control. In Tetsuo, anxieties about being controlled are not linked to any specific corporation, but rather to a specific individual, the metal fetishist, and his telekinetic powers—a topic to which I will return in greater detail in the next section in relation to the tentacle motif.
—Terry Castle I n his study Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television,1 Jeffrey Sconce analyzes the discourses of “electronic presence” enframing the history of telecommunications in relation to the development of telegraphy, wireless technology, radio, television, and cyberspace, which ascribe to the emergence of such new technologies a whole range of fictional qualities, from sentience to ghostly spectrality. “Electronic 112 tokyo cyberpunk presence” is Sconce’s
overcodes the body and even the head, a machine of enslavement overcodes or axiomatizes the earth: these are in no way illusions, but real machinic effects. . . . Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic—perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and semiotic—but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent.”44 Abstract machines