Forms of Cultural Transmission

Introduction

The preceding chapter, on relationships between fictional characters, outlined two basic types: the “love-triangle model” and the “Byakuyakō model.”¹ It also touched on differences between works aimed at male and female audiences. Whatever form a relationship between characters takes, it must reveal motivations rooted in their personalities that an audience can understand. By the same token, the way we explain relationships can influence how we create and interpret works. Yet love triangles and Byakuyakō relationships are difficult to realize in their pure forms in reality. The “reasons” for this deserve fresh thinking. (“Fantasy is different from reality” is an empty truism. It does nothing to explain the affective force of wanting to “marry a 2D character”—a desire that crosses dimensions. Even when we know it is impossible, we go on imagining it, even becoming obsessed.)

These questions draw our attention to the ideological interplay between works and audiences. When discussing their relationship, then, we should “bracket” the vivid narrative and the surface of the relationships between characters, and investigate the shape of the big Other behind authors and audiences, along with “difference” and “repetition” in textual interpretation. This chapter and the next will likewise seek answers through “relations,” approaching the problem from two directions: 1. How is culture transmitted, and to whom? 2. Taking gender differences as our axis, what culture—what kinds of “human relationships”—is transmitted, and what are its causes and consequences? I treat the first question as an “inquiry into transmission,” examining structurally the various nodes through which works and culture are transmitted. I treat the second as an “inquiry into culture,” examining functionally what is transmitted, its origins and consequences, and offering critical judgments. This chapter concentrates on the first question.

I. The Triad

When discussing a work, we often dwell on its characters, its central meaning, and the various events in its main plot and subplots that revolve around that meaning. In the preceding chapter, we gained a rough understanding of what connects “characters” to “the movement of events”: the social relations between those characters. These relations give rise to different basic structures of character relationships—love triangles, Byakuyakō, and so on—and different basic structures of unfolding events, such as revenge dramas and Disney stories. We will now turn to central meaning, one of the places most likely to provoke a “struggle” between views. First, let us consider the structure through which it is transmitted.

English key to the diagram: Left, from bottom to top: “Frameworks of knowledge / Relations of production / Technical infrastructure” → “Encoding: meaning structures 1” → “Programme as meaningful discourse.” Right, descending: “Encoding: meaning structures 2” → “Frameworks of knowledge / Relations of production / Technical infrastructure.” The second “encoding” reproduces the label in this image; Hall’s corresponding stage is decoding.²

From a cultural-studies perspective, we can isolate three fundamental, indispensable elements in the process from culture’s creation to its consumption: the author, the work, and the audience (the reader). This division establishes a basic position for cultural studies by constructing a model of relations between work and reader. Stuart Hall emphasizes this in “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” presenting communication among media, content, and readers as a triad: production (encoding)—text (meaningful discourse)—reception (decoding). In terms of relational form, each unit has external connections to the others, but they do not follow one another in a deterministic sequence. Put differently, each component of the cultural process has relative autonomy, developing and changing in its own ways. Alongside the external contradictions arising from their connections, these relatively autonomous components therefore also contain internal negotiations and conflicts. The mismatch between encoding and decoding can produce misreadings and obstacles to understanding, making differences in the transmission of information possible. To explain the movement of these relations more simply, I will first take “author–work–reader” as a particular instance of “production–text–reception,” discussing where each component’s relative autonomy lies and how they become connected.

Emphasizing the author’s contribution to a text’s central meaning has a long history and carries institutional baggage: reading-comprehension questions in the gaokao, China’s national university entrance examination, are often framed this way. We generally assume that, even if a work does not reproduce its author’s ideology, its creation involves motives arising from ideologies the author has accepted. These motives often lead readers directly into “misrecognition”—as when they blame the author for some dreadful plot development. Most of the time, this approach does make interpretation easier, and it is also accurate. Understanding the real-life story of “an old hen eating the eggs she herself has laid,” for instance, helps us understand the Dostoevskian gloom in Yōsuke Karabe’s works. Knowing Sugaru Miaki’s existential reflections on death likewise helps us understand the tragic character of his writing. Novels and manga often include an author biography or an afterword before or after the main text—we pick up clues there.

Anyone with experience of creative work, however, will recognize that authors are not always clear about the central meaning they want to convey. Indeed, in most cases they do not rack their brains in pursuit of a political or aesthetic purpose. They either let the creative process take its natural course or approach these purposes unconsciously—the explanation favored by psychoanalysis. Experiences and cultural conflicts in an author’s life are often drawn upon as material. Suppose, for example, an author depicts a boy winning a girl’s affection through a simple suspension-bridge effect: mistaking fear-induced excitement for attraction. This does not mean the author believes women are simple-minded or their affections easily won. A more likely explanation is that he has seen similar scenes in almost every male-oriented harem work, and so he reproduces them. Doing so can win market acceptance, or it may simply be fun. Severing the connection between a work and reality to just the right degree eases the moral anxiety of readers and authors.

The second node is the work itself. This has also been the principal concern of most of my previous essays. Scholars examining a work concentrate on its textual structure: the arrangement of words and sentences, rhetoric, characters, relationships, plot, and so forth. They do not readily speculate about the author’s identity and purposes. British New Criticism and phenomenological literary theory particularly emphasize this point. We can readily see that a work contains something its author cannot easily control: its setup—the basic configuration of characters, things, and their relationships. The setup often serves as the work’s logos: the intelligible order of the work, its collectively acknowledged “reality.” Once this logos is established—once encoding is complete—it acquires, to a considerable extent, a power exceeding the author’s, opening up the possibility of multiple meanings. At this point, it is often the setup, not the author, that writes the book. The setup both gives the work’s ideology an effective framework in which to operate autonomously and becomes a partner or enemy closely bound to the author. Each work’s logos also supports fan interpretations. Take the light novel A Certain Magical Index, known for the complexity of its setup. How would we compare the power of white-winged Accelerator with that of Acqua of the Back, the “double Saint”? The original never depicts a confrontation between them. Yet the novel’s descriptions of relative power—and, more importantly, our understanding of how “Saints” and “white wings” are defined within its setup—allow us to infer roughly how they would compare. Estimates may differ—“30–70,” “40–60,” and so on—but what makes the discussion possible is precisely the original work’s richly developed system of powers. An author who overturns that system for no reason faces a crisis of “recognition.”

The obstructive force of logos also appears in authors’ relationships to themselves and their relationships with readers. In earlier essays, I called details that authors plant, deliberately or otherwise, and that later become crucial to the plot “symbolic markers”—the “pits” a story leaves to be filled. When too many such markers appear together, they first overload the audience’s “working memory,” making decoding difficult. If these details then receive no payoff at the crucial moment, the unresolved gaps damage the work’s logic—sometimes trivially, sometimes fatally. For the author, the obstacle lies in the contradiction between a self-understanding internalized over time through their own writing and the act of “making a change,” whose consequences remain unknown. For example, after 2005, Gen Urobuchi—affectionately known to Chinese fans as “Old Uro”—was troubled by his inability to write heartwarming stories. It was not that he literally could not write them, but that he could not meet the basic requirements he had imposed on himself. Caught between tradition and innovation, he was at one point driven to hysterical distress. The schema of “dark tragedy” accumulated through his previous writing greatly restricted his creative freedom, producing path dependence.

On-screen credit: Original concept, screenplay, and overall supervision—Gen Urobuchi (Nitroplus).

Discussing the reader takes us toward the general form of the triadic relationship. As the final structural position in the triad, responsible for interpreting meaning, the reader was long regarded as passive, neither creative nor productive. From Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” to Foucault’s deconstruction of the speaking subject, the point from which culture and power were analyzed began to be decentered. Only then did people recognize that the reader was not an isolated receiving point—a class being shaped—but an equal creator. Nor is it rare for “fan works to leave the official creators in the dust.” Readers are themselves heterogeneous and approach works from different perspectives. They therefore carry the genes of power embedded in their own thinking into their interpretations, bringing misunderstandings and narcissistic imaginings with them. In Foucault’s sense, this power can never escape influences from the upper levels of its genealogy: it spreads negatively and passively, while discourse shapes and binds the subject. In Deleuze, by contrast, power is active and creative, continually roaming beyond organizational constraints. It is precisely at the level of absolute difference in discourse that the subject can be established. Their divergence can express two different views we take of subcultural interpretation.

Cultural studies habitually uses class, race, and gender as points of entry into the study of difference. But this often leads to overgeneralization, a recurring problem both in qualitative research based on observation and induction and in quantitative research concerned only with representativeness. We can sketch our subjects through a type of identity, but the effort is always incomplete. Some particular identity always emerges, seemingly telling scholars indignantly, “We’re not like that.” Analyses that assign different readers’ identities to particular types thus meet with numerous objections. Sometimes we must move past certain obvious differences to approach a group’s concrete-universal core. It is vital to recognize this: the life experiences that constitute our habits of thought and cultural backgrounds are themselves the products of wider and deeper ideological interactions. Those who take this view tend to concentrate on the “inquiry into culture.”

II. Cultural Transmission

The triad has given us a basic chain of cultural transmission: production–text–reception. Earlier Marxism tended to emphasize that the transmission of class ideology was always one-way. In other words, readers passively receive the inculcation of official ideology. Authors need not recognize their role as cultural agents, yet perform it within an atmosphere of accepted cultural convention. As mentioned above, when authors take male-oriented harem fiction and its “fan service” depictions of cute girls as established conventions, this bears some relation to patriarchal ideology—though many details here deserve further consideration. Structuralist Marxism further points out that such ideological use has no clearly identifiable authorizing subject. Hegemony persists not because it represses groups. On the contrary, it supplies social reality and explanations of that reality, and the masses are thereby interpellated. Seen this way, authors, works, and readers are all products of a wider ideology. Their relationship consists in supplying explanations for one another, forming a reinforced “civil society” that disguises hegemony. In communication studies, Berlo and Schramm drew on Freud’s unconscious and voluntarist thinking to propose that the masses absorb ideology imperceptibly through “hypodermic injection”—another characteristic conclusion of one-way thinking.

From the 1980s onward, however, this view encountered challenges and refinements. Hall recovered from Gramsci’s theory of hegemony something Althusser had played down: struggle at particular stages. Ideological transmission does not always mean those below following those above; Hall’s encoding–decoding process reveals a discrepancy in transmission. Only when the meaning an audience understands coincides with the meaning supplied by the ideological apparatus can we say to what extent hegemony has taken effect. The cinematic apparatus and shots that solicit desire seek to bring this about. Yet the process does occasionally fail, opening negotiations and even conflicts over the text between readers and authors. Each component of the triad can be understood as a site of continual struggle between forces of vastly unequal strength. Creative misreadings that diverge from mainstream ideology let us find openings through which to break hegemony. The Birmingham School provided important inspiration for later cultural theory. Janice Radway investigated how women in a Midwestern American community understood and regarded the romance novels they read—works depicting love between men and women from a female perspective. She found that, although these works could not escape the values and goals patriarchal culture prescribed for women, they contained no shortage of criticisms of masculine identity. Radway judiciously drew on Lacan to describe this phenomenon: the symbolic order systematically represses men’s capacity for love, preventing them from occupying a woman’s position and understanding women, and thus provoking women’s reproach and jealous resentment.³ Romance fiction exhibits a feminist dimension of escape: early in the story, the heroine invariably puts up considerable resistance to the male characters. Granted, the story always ends with the woman gaining a man’s love and relying on him for advantages and achievements. But the hero’s character has changed. By the end of a romance, he has often become a “feminized man,” a subject whose lack is exposed before the reader. The stereotypically insensitive “straight guy” becomes gentle, considerate, and devoted to his family. The “domineering CEO” often loses his aura through his exclusive love for the heroine; some even display a “hysteria” of needing her—and in psychoanalytic terms, this is a symptom of feminization. This example comes from the 1980s. Today, new variations in women’s desires are gradually changing this conventional genre pattern. Even when the dominant ideology has everything under its thumb, “struggle” remains.

Dialogue, right to left: “I’ve put you to some trouble.” “Thank you.”

III. The Media Revolution and Intertextuality

In the present context, the three elements no longer remain confined within specific conceptual boundaries in the way Hall discussed. The media revolution has accelerated this change by breaking down the barriers that separate production from consumption and place them in temporal sequence. First came the gradual shift from mass media as ideology’s “spokesperson” toward self-media—online media produced by individuals or independent groups. As the internet and online games developed, the earlier books-and-television model gradually gave way to MUDs (text-based multiplayer worlds), chat rooms, 2ch, and Baidu Tieba. The ability to comment on one another’s contributions played an enormous role: readers were no longer satisfied with “receiving” and “interpreting”; they wanted to “create.” During this period, small-scale forums, chat rooms, and massively multiplayer online games began to form separate, independently run “virtual communities.” Members agreed on their community’s values and recognized common boundaries; the communities also had basic functions for producing and managing content. Later, more powerful self-media platforms linked different virtual communities through their public spheres—the various “circles” on Weibo, for instance. Meanwhile, “wandering individuals” began to pour in. Most would not stay put in a particular group, but moved across cultural circles, forming dense actor-networks. The internet’s exceptional advantages in transmitting information enabled them to overcome spatial and temporal constraints, transforming them overnight from bohemians into “tourists” taking in the sights at a glance. Danmu systems—comments superimposed on a video at points along its playback timeline—make commenting on anime quick and easy, while also creatively “adapting” it. Joke-comments that play on phonetic mishearings of opening-song lyrics are acts of both production and consumption. Explanatory danmu, meanwhile, function as “structural holes,” opening a channel of communication between “tourists” and hardcore fans; they can even become an essential part of how audiences understand a work.⁴

These changes are accompanied by an extension of real space and a breaking of its boundaries. The physical space we know has itself become informational. Yet it differs from imagined space. Anime conventions and fan-work gatherings are heterogeneous spaces shot through with ideological struggle. We stand there physically: information conveyed by directions, signs, and sounds passes through our synthetic a priori concept of space. Yet the convention’s arrangement is romanticized and spiritualized, continually investing the existing spatial system with meaning. Stage performances and distinctive stalls proclaim the particular theme of a particular convention. Objects originally unrelated to that theme acquire new meanings where the two spaces overlap. Consider a patrolling security guard: he is an unfamiliar other or third party, yet he is precisely one of the convention’s constituent parts.

An approach that analyzes conventions through a binary division between the imagined space their culture generates and the physical space people occupy is already outdated. When people enter a convention in costume or simply as visitors, those we watch are also being seen and sensed by others. A particular field brings particular rules for its environment; people internalize these rules as a habitus with productive capacities. The balance of “Thirdspace” is carefully sustained by the convention’s regulations and the transgressions of its erciyuan visitors—participants in the Chinese “2D” cultural sphere of anime, manga, games, and related fiction. It rejects reality, yet it is not lawless. Within this space, transmission, negotiation, and struggle among encoding, work, and decoding continually occur at the same time. The meaning-laden “text” and the “person” interpreting it become almost identical.

These interactive “revolutions,” particularly prominent in erciyuan culture, have transformed the triadic process, bringing “intertextuality.” First comes the “disembedding” of this activity—its flight from and betrayal of traditional space and time. Two danmu comments may have been posted a very long time apart, yet linger over the same visual image, achieving simultaneity and creating a pseudo-real-time effect. Second comes a shift in where creation takes place: through decomposition and recombination, viewers deconstruct the intentions embodied in film and television and construct an apparatus of their own consciousness. In short, discourse shapes subjects, and subjects also shape discourse. As actors translate others, those others, themselves subjects, translate them in turn. This constitutes a richly meaningful actor-network. (For this reason, in the next chapter’s discussion of “people and culture,” I will sometimes equate “authors” with “readers.”) It also points to a dimension in which fan creation exceeds the author’s narrative hegemony. As Re:CREATORS shows, the “power of recognition” itself reflects the struggle between authors’ and readers’ systems of meaning, while resting on the work’s internal logos. The strongest character, paradoxically, is the one who lacks logos: collective creation directly supplies its own justification. In the process of fan creation, all manner of extravagant aesthetic appetites and dark curiosities find satisfaction.

Radicals also object to taking conflicts generated by these network relations as a point of entry into cultural conflict, because this can lose sight of the structure of ideology as a whole. Suppose intertextual relations are an ongoing, dynamic process, and the subjects—the bodies—participating in it are unorganized individuals in the Deleuzian sense. Conflict then continually arises among culture’s endlessly proliferating minutiae, consuming effort in vain. Struggle becomes the piecemeal struggle of subjects of negative liberty. Take the fixation on recognizing or denying an identity such as “erciyuan”—on what it means to belong. To put it in familiar terms, the erciyuan community is infinitely divisible. Precisely because it is infinitely divisible, boundary-drawing tribal wars often flatten conflict into disputes over a concept’s meaning: “I think erciyuan is xxx”; “what they call erciyuan nowadays is xxx.” Once confronted with the ultimate impasse of discursive politics, people either retreat into self-enclosure, entering Levinas’s ontological predicament, or multiple individuals generate new shared values, break away from the original great clan, and form antagonistic cultural tribes. This local, relational politics replaces a comprehensive, coordinated politics, obscuring the traumatic kernel we actually need to address. Thus, in an information age that conceals the “face of the Other,” some call for a return to the seriousness of a politics of the whole. We must attend to the negative side of the “body without organs.” The places overshadowed by ideology are precisely those from which the subject believes itself absent—does the fleeing body never return to the very domain it fled? This nomadism of desire is caught precisely in the constitutive impasse of drive. Unless we confront how it is “in fact present in its negative aspect,” we will inevitably witness its capture by abstract elements—erciyuan incorporated into capital. The danmu discussed earlier likewise cannot avoid incorporation into capital. Once technically put to use in the “open-source” processes of video portals and even film-production companies, they cease to be a wholly free dimension of creation. One phenomenon is becoming increasingly common: companies use danmu feedback to analyze users, identify what has the greatest market potential, and then dictate a direction to creators, sometimes bringing pressure to bear.

To address the dimension of struggle in encoding–work–decoding, we cannot neglect the genealogical process. If transmitting culture—as discourse—is a transmission of power, we can approach the problems in a work through an understanding of power. We can also look beyond an individual work to examine the ideology reflected across a particular type of work. This clarifies the work–person relationship: erciyuan cultural products in the narrow sense share a common core with rules and institutions in the broad sense. Culture’s existence enters a dimension of being-in-itself, continually misread and continually opposed to people. Advanced capitalist industry has made it possible for authors to create through extensive reading and viewing rather than taking their own experiences as a template. Cultural iteration may therefore take place in a nonhuman domain, passing through people only as mediators—within capitalist structures, for instance. In the narrow sense, as discussed earlier, a work’s setup writes its “reality”; in the broader sense, culture’s “setup” also writes human “reality.” Erciyuan makes this especially evident: its characters plainly differ from real human beings, so why do we step down into two dimensions to appreciate them? And why, paradoxically, do we distinguish them from reality as though the two had nothing to do with each other? Our criticism should target what is productive here—the ideational content, the way we regard fictional characters and fictional relationships. This will help us consider where it comes from.

Conclusion

To sum up: this chapter has sought to step outside the relational analysis of works for the moment and explain the routes and processes through which popular culture is transmitted. First, to make transmission through the triad understandable, I offered the relatively concrete chain of “author–work–reader,” discussing its three components and their connections. Second, I turned to the route of cultural transmission—the chain itself—and presented traditional Marxism’s view of “overall one-way transmission” alongside neo-Marxism’s view of “localized struggle.” Finally, through the media revolution, I discussed intertextuality and the problems it leaves unresolved, returning to a radical perspective.

The next chapter will address a question left unresolved by the analysis of character relationships, one that interests us all. How do we absorb and reflect on fictional characters’ relationships in real life? In other words, what is the content being transmitted—what exactly is the cultural big Other behind it?

(Thank you for reading.)

Brief Reading List

• Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory (chiefly Chapter 4).
• Lu Yang and Wang Yi, An Introduction to Cultural Studies [《文化研究导论》].
• Stuart Hall, Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.
• Wen Jun, Western Sociological Theory: Classical Traditions and Contemporary Turns [《西方社会学理论：经典传统与当代转向》] (the sections on Althusser and Gramsci; the section on Bourdieu).
• Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace.
• Yang Junxiao, “On Danmu: The Power of Software Architecture and Modular Culture” [《弹幕论——软件结构的权力与模块化的文化》].
• Wang Min’an, ed., The Cultural Politics of the Body [《身体的文化政治学》].