Original author credit: Author-kun. This article discusses Isao Takahata, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, and Lamarre’s theory of the anime machine.
A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw; It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora.
…
“What matters is not the age a myth tells of, but the age in which it is told.” All criticism dealing with myth agrees on this, without exception. This proposition repeats itself in a more complex form in the philosophy of technology: technology has already reorganized our bodies at a fundamental level—or, put differently, our perception of time and space.1 When stories from a pre-technological age are retold, then, the spatiotemporal imaginary they contain must also be rewritten. Thus, in present-day readings of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the Orientalist fantasy must also be supplemented by the libertarianism of the Xanadu Project: the spatial distance to “Xanadu” is no longer the physical space between West and East, but (virtual) cyberspace.2
All these discussions are necessary preparation for our entry into the text of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013). As the various readings have already agreed, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, like Ghibli’s other works, chooses a certain “nature” as the answer to its story. This nature must belong to the countryside, and must embrace everything in the countryside without reservation. The countryside does not always exist as an “idyll,” since for most of the time it is poor: at the end of Kaguya’s run there is nothing but a desolate wood. This poverty also affects the peasants’ behavior and even their thinking at the level of “materiality” (Stofflichkeit), and the text does not shy away from this.3 Sutemaru not only has to live by theft in the city; he had already learned to steal even while living in the countryside.
What is needed here is not a simple moral judgment (which is also “impossible”: as we have already noted, this manifest “evil” is so entangled with the rural context that the evil itself acquires an almost guileless quality). If we are willing to appropriate the deeply historicized concept of “poor life,” we can turn our attention to another side of this countryside. In Platonov’s Chevengur, this condition in which “everything around is decaying, and people have come to live here purely out of instinct” points, in turn, to an excess of vitality—the vitality of plants, like the tender shoots the peasant shows Kaguya:
…had found its own destiny. It had already put out tamarisk shoots, while the rest of it had rotted in the soil, preserving the shape of a shoe in the root shoots that would one day grow into a thicket. There was probably moister soil beneath the sole, for many gray-white blades of grass were struggling to push up through it.4
And in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, this vitality finds its most direct expression in Kaguya herself (as a plant/bamboo).
Before we leave Chevengur, we need to point out, one final time, the intertextual relation between these two works: rural/natural vitality necessarily takes the form of a rejection of “technology.” This stance sometimes appears from the other side as a version of “the cares of a family man,” but more often takes the form of refusal: the peasant refuses to become a proletarian, because “the proletariat does not praise nature, but destroys it through labor.”5 On this premise, those who sympathize with industrial labor are portrayed as possessed by a kind of Futurist frenzy (“his body tingled with pleasure at the turning of the train’s wheels and its rapid exhalations; tears of sympathy for the locomotive moistened his eyes”). Likewise, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, like Ghibli’s other works, presents a world in which “technology” is kept out of view as far as possible. Nor is this confined to the text. On the one hand, the film’s images seek a return to Heian-period picture scrolls, rather than to any period in the history of animation;6 on the other, Ghibli also demands in its production process “a minimum of animation technology, especially technologies requiring an elaborate division of labor and elaborate labor relations.”7
This makes the shot near the end of the film in which Kaguya looks back at “Earth” all the more jarring. Kaguya’s face appears in profile on the left; on the right, against a black background (“outer space”), there is unmistakably the familiar “Blue Marble”—a view of the Earth in its entirety. Of course, such an image has become so commonplace for today’s viewers that no critic is willing to point out the irony: the viewpoint from which Earth can be observed as a whole is made possible entirely by technology, and this technology is itself a relatively recent development. It was not until 1972 that Apollo 17 could behold the “Blue Marble” in its entirety.8 Yet in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, an attempt to retell a Heian-period myth, this technologized world-picture simply becomes a presupposition.
From here, we need to reconsider the constitution of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. As Sloterdijk has already pointed out, “spheres” (Sphären), of the kind shown in the “Blue Marble,” rather than the phenomenological “world” (Welt), provide the proper description of the age of globalization. The latter is ultimately concrete/variable, belonging to the order of experience on which phenomenology insists; the former “will always be troubled by their inevitable instability… from the moment they exist, they are exposed to risks from every quarter, and are easily shattered.”9 Life within the spheres is therefore represented as destabilized life—that is, Agamben’s “bare life” or Butler’s “precarious life.”
This opens a deep rift between the text’s content and its form. Clearly, natural/rural vitality has no particular purpose (“there is no executive committee, but there are many happy yet useless people”). Not even its own continued existence becomes a purpose (The Tale of the Princess Kaguya casually acknowledges this too: even when the timber runs out, one need only find another mountain). Of course, Kafka has already given us the most vivid description of such purposeless life/creations:
One is tempted to believe that this thing [Odradek] once had some form suited to a purpose, and is now merely a broken object. Yet this does not seem to be the case; …although the whole thing looks meaningless, it is complete in its own way. …Everything that dies has once had some purpose, some activity that has exhausted its energy; this does not apply to Odradek.10
Natural vitality is thus represented as a kind of undying thing that persists. In direct contrast, under conditions of destabilization, death and its possibility are deeply immanent in life. Heidegger calls this “being-towards-death”: death is accepted as the finite horizon that human beings cannot surpass, and in fact becomes Kaguya’s ideal—the moon is not a place of death, but of monotonous non-life. We must acknowledge that what Kaguya hysterically tries to cling to in her final conversation with her parents is by no means rural life (she herself has rejected Sutemaru); neither is it the identity conferred on her by the father figure. Rather, what she maintains to the very end is precisely this stance of refusal, this suicidal stance.11
Within this far from subtle opposition between moon and Earth, the concept of “life” (Leben) has become so broad that the boundaries between “life and death, aesthetics and actual experience, antiquity and the present” begin to blur. In the retelling of old myths, this fascination with death undoubtedly sends us back, uneasily, to the discourse of life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie):
The [German] youths need to learn that death and life are attached to each other, and that life is defined by its moments of great risk. Youth need to grow up to participate in the struggle of life (Kampf des Lebens).12
Or again, in the debates among life philosophers over J. Bachofen in the mid-1920s:
[The mother] gives life but also death—she is the embodiment of fate; the word “nature” means to the romantics the same thing as fate.
One point urgently needs clarification: the life-philosophy movement can by no means be reduced to a Nazi invention. The moment life philosophy emerged—the moment at which it acquired “self-consciousness,” as Yoshimi Takeuchi would call it—was the late nineteenth century, with its “mixture of anxious agitation and dispirited torpor,” or, more specifically, the “fin de siècle.” In Presiding Judge Schreber’s delusions, this fear of degeneration (Entartung) found further support in the figure of the Wandering Jew: Jews and the virus they carried—at the fin de siècle, this virus was syphilis—had long and profoundly corrupted the Aryans.13 “The Cares of a Family Man,” a title otherwise almost unrelated to Kafka’s text, can therefore be explained only through this historical context: the Jewishness Kafka invests in Odradek—jouissance made substance—is the ultimate source of the (European) family man’s cares. Thus, from the very moment it emerged, life philosophy revolved entirely around one fundamental question: how, through an entirely new philosophy (education), to “restore” among Aryans the pre-logos unity between individual and nature. And, as we know, this very motif has returned again and again throughout Takahata’s work: in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, in the earlier Pom Poko (1994), and even in the deeply controversial Grave of the Fireflies (1988).
No less important is the ontological status life philosophy accords the “image” (Bild). In Ludwig Klages’s reading of Nietzsche, (Greek) pre-historical time is organized around ecstasy (Rausch):
It is this keen sensitivity, erotic in nature, to the unthinkable richness of colors, sounds, and smells, that conveys to us the wonders of Eros. In Rausch this wonder is fully realized, introducing the soul carrier to the essential image of the soul of the world.
Here Klages places his wager on Chronos of Greek mythology: Chronos is the god of time, not of history. This sense of time cannot be measured with the instruments of modernity, but acts directly on the body. Likewise, the experience of reality must be reshaped into the impact of a stream of (dreamlike) images on the senses—images or drives are merely another name for pre-historical time. Such an account, too, is all too familiar to us:
…yet genuinely conveys force and rhythm, and allows us, in the trembling of the lines, to feel complex, chaotic emotions such as anger, sadness, and madness, making this sequence an organic whole. This is very close to what Bergson calls “duration” (durée): “A violent love or a deep melancholy takes possession of our soul: here we feel a thousand different elements which dissolve into and permeate one another without any precise outlines, without the least tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another.” …Might we say that the animator’s experience of the flow of time is conveyed to the viewer—or, in other words, that the body’s intuition and felt apprehension of duration and the flow of life are fed back to the body?14
Perceptive critics have already identified a commonality between the sharply divergent styles of Isao Takahata and Mamoru Oshii: both seek to establish a connection between dramatic time (the time of the Symbolic) and the time of reality. And if we extrapolate from this inquiry, conducted in strict adherence to the images, we can also discern a common feature between Kaguya’s frantic run in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya and the famous city sequence in Ghost in the Shell (1995): by magnifying certain ordinary actions, to the accompaniment of forceful background music, both break away from the story itself, existing purely to display the spectacle of animation/the city. Perhaps we could call this a homage to Tarkovsky’s tracking shots in Stalker (1979): this is inert time, the time of the Real—the product of time drawn toward Heidegger’s “earth.”15 It is here, too, that “the subject enters a dream not when he loses touch with the sensuous material reality around him, but when he abandons his intellect and relates directly to material reality.” This is life philosophy’s ultimate dream, and also the direct implication kept out of view in the images of Takahata or Oshii.
At this point we must return to the crucial conflict we have repeatedly evaded: how can the nature of life philosophy be reconciled with the world-picture shaped by technology, or with Nazism’s industrialized face? An initial answer can be found in life philosophy’s desire to break down the barrier between waking and dreaming. Invoking Klages’s own longstanding, severe insomnia is far from sufficient to explain this fanaticism. On the contrary, we must recognize it as life philosophy’s insight into the form time took at the fin de siècle. Once again, Chevengur offers us a description of this symptom:
…the watchman began to feel time; he felt it as keenly and precisely as he felt sorrow and happiness. Whatever he did, even when he was asleep… as soon as an hour had passed, the watchman felt some warning or desire, whereupon he would ring the bell to mark the hour and then settle down again.
Jameson describes this as “the great initial experience of secular organic time,” yet he plainly cannot explain why the subject divides time into “hours,” rather than “day” or “night.” We therefore need to restate what we proposed at the outset: technology has reshaped our perception of time. Timetables devised for industrial production replaced the traditional, naturally cyclical time used by peasants, in order to “train people to abandon their indolent work habits and identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of complex automation.”16 At the same time, the widespread installation of urban streetlights from the 1880s onward disrupted older forms of sleep through the (prolonged) illumination that lamps provided; waking and sleeping alike had to be unified under the goal of industrial production.17 For the first time, (waking) reality and (dreaming) fantasy became connected: this is the premise shared by life philosophy and its intellectual adversary, psychoanalysis.
Likewise, life philosophy’s hostility to corruption (brought by Jews) took the same path as fin-de-siècle scientific/medical research: confronted with modernity, the body could not accommodate this rhythm of labor, and fatigue and illness consequently became manifestations of the body’s stupid resistance to modernity. Ever since Helmholtz described the second law of thermodynamics in 1847, preventing the depletion of labor-power’s energy has been an ambition of researchers across different fields. The entire world is drawn equally into a thermodynamic system, in which relations between people, or between humanity and nature, appear as dynamics of energy. Descartes’s distinction between humans and animal-machines in Discourse on Method (1637) no longer has any meaning, since the presence or absence of a soul makes no difference to this universal exchange of heat.18 The universe of life philosophy thus appears as a profoundly mechanistic universe, although its language rejects this: clumsy bodies are remade to fit the workings of the world. In a Foucauldian reversal, sexual indulgence (and the virus it brings)—that premodern jouissance brought by the Wandering Jew—must be abandoned, while the body, now subjected to the rule of the new biology, in turn attains ecstasy.
We can now respond to Lamarre’s argument. Lamarre draws a line between Ghibli and GAINAX according to their differing attitudes toward technology: the former rejects technology, or calls for its minimization; the latter chooses to embrace it.19 Yet behind the (proto-)fascist ideology of Ghibli’s works is the technologized world that their life philosophy presupposes—and this is precisely what Lamarre misses. When Kaguya looks back at Earth through an astronaut’s eyes, the Earth she sees is the very Earth that produced the Zero fighter in The Wind Rises (2013). And in Grave of the Fireflies, as the fireflies’ glow gradually gives way to the lights of a prosperous postwar city, even the barest refusal of technology finally vanishes altogether, yielding to the myth of national character and industry. What corresponds in Foucault’s system to technology as understood by Heidegger (the Nazi philosopher) is the apparatus (dispositif): that is, the objectification of nature and of society. The latter leads naturally to biopolitics or, more broadly, to control over persons. This is also the final step in the critique of Ghibli’s works: the price of embracing the ideology of life philosophy while refusing to represent the world of life philosophy is that death not only appears in viewers’ interpretations as a symptom of the works, but also returns in the production process as what is repressed in the text-commodity.20 Far too little attention has been paid to Yoshifumi Kondō’s accusation: “Mr. Takahata wants my life.”21 Ghibli’s technology, overlooked by Lamarre and other critics, manifests itself not primarily in the images but in the sphere of production, then asserts its presence in the commodity as a ghost: this is the limit of critique, and also where critique begins.
Editor’s Note
The “technology” criticized here is of course not—or not only—technology in the engineering sense. I understand this technology as an ideology of modernity, in the article’s terms: “What corresponds in Foucault’s system to technology as understood by Heidegger is the apparatus (dispositif): that is, the objectification of nature and of society.” In other words, Lamarre’s distinction, in which Ghibli “rejects technology, or calls for its minimization,” becomes invalid, since it presupposes a “technology–nature” binary. As an aside, this also means that pointing to images of technology—airplanes—in films such as The Wind Rises cannot prove that Ghibli favors or opposes “technology”: technology in the one sense is not simply “technology” in the other. (Of course, I also think The Wind Rises’s stubborn fetishistic fixation on a military creation like the Zero fighter is just plain awful. You cannot cancel that out by having a few characters deliver some toothless lines about how “aircraft technology was put to bad uses, whereas I had originally hoped…”)
Setting these technological images aside, we can instead analyze the values of life philosophy embraced by Ghibli’s texts. On the surface, they adopt the rhetoric of “celebrating life (and vitality), praising nature”; in substance, however, their response to modernity takes the form of mechanistic, biological rule. For example, in the manga version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, “killing off the old humans who use the new humans as guinea pigs, and opening up a future of the new humans’ own” seems to amount to a rejection of technological control and a celebration of human vitality. Yet this very practice of classifying, eliminating, and governing people has undoubtedly already assumed the form of a “technological apparatus.” (The interesting thing, of course, is that the new humans themselves are artificial—technological too; there is no authentic, primordial “nature.”) This is a small extension of the article as I understand it.
Finally, to quote the author’s addendum: “Even within the texts, there is no non-technological nature. Technology is the overarching premise, so Lamarre’s distinction is wrong. And the form this technology takes is continuous with life philosophy; it therefore also affects how life is represented in the texts. This is the article’s approach.”
