(This article came from a spur-of-the-moment impulse while chatting in a group. I will venture to talk about anime criticism from personal experience and share some thoughts and attitudes.)
How This Began
Some time ago, objections emerged somewhere online against major anime influencers on Zhihu. Theory-citing, “deliberately abstruse” anime criticism was casually dismissed as dressed-up monkey business by “anime Brahmins.” Some of the people involved were talking sheer nonsense, some were spectators joining the fun, and of course some prominent critics discussed the issue rationally.
Criticism is criticism, however, and there is still an obvious, almost daily-recurring consensus: at present we do not have, and never can have, a normative conclusion about “how anime criticism should actually be done.” This is partly because criticism is a process in which an author’s subjective perspective encounters the objective work, and is therefore strongly relative. It is also because the “2D” world, as a cultural phenomenon that arose relatively recently, has followed a grassroots pattern of gekokujo—those below overturning those above—since its birth, maintaining a strong aversion to authority. In criticism, rejection of professional perspectives developed into rejection of theory, eventually producing a fragmented critical landscape. Critics who base their writing on immediate sensory experience lose interest in excavating the cultural foundations behind a work; some even refuse to elevate their experience of appreciating a work into theory. I therefore think that most mockery directed at anime criticism today revolves around two things: distrust of theory and a misreading of discursive power.
I. Two Kinds of Rejection and an Analysis
I have no intention of delving deeply into the cultural-sociological propositions behind this rejection. I only want to point out two conditions that helped produce it. First, “2D culture” emerged at the outset as a subculture opposed to mainstream culture. Looking at its development, this marginal “subculture,” in the course of rising toward an intense “counterculture,” was incorporated by the culture industry, becoming one of the sources of contemporary cultural consumerism and losing its practical efficacy. Second, consumer society has dismembered the possibility of grand narratives and dissolved the individual’s desire for them as well. As a subcultural group subjected to implicit repression, everyday experience replaces ideology and occupies the center of the group’s private life; otaku maintain a passive subjectivity through individualized pleasures of desire, thereby avoiding breadth and depth in criticism. This is not meant as criticism of the phenomenon, because, more broadly, it is not only the 2D world that refuses this kind of metadiscourse: everyday life as a whole rejects it, and citing theory itself means accepting the consequences of difficulty, obscurity, and irritating one’s readers. Seen this way, anime criticism is not very special compared with criticism of other arts. Some people like theory; some do not. Rather than deciding who is right and who is wrong, we should ask after the deeper causes of the contradiction instead of constructing an opposition.
On the other hand, criticism itself is a private narrative based on personal experience, so trying to establish a ruling paradigm within a public field of discussion is naturally futile. Yet we should also acknowledge that futility does not mean that the “struggle for discursive power” is itself useless. On the contrary, once anyone writes an anime critique, they cannot avoid establishing a center of conscious or unconscious discursive power. After all, the author who writes a criticism must first believe in the entire labor they have put into it, and the finished product rewards their narcissism and self-satisfaction. The author necessarily exercises power over the author themself—persuading themself—regardless of how large, far-reaching, or profound the influence of that center may be. So long as an author materially participates in the process of reflecting on and understanding the plot, they necessarily combine it with their own inner experience and form new modes and methods of speech. This is the premise of all discussion.
Therefore, when it comes to anime criticism and its methodology, no one can confidently claim that what they say is authoritative in the field, or that their understanding of a work is superior to or deeper than anyone else’s. What a critic can and should ensure, however, is that they establish a relational model between “personal experience” and “the content of the work,” and determine a center of discourse around that model. If this center wins broad recognition, it naturally spreads through the community as an implicit discourse of power. To say that there is no such thing as “discursive power” in anime criticism is both right and not right. It is right insofar as no fixed entity of discursive power actually exists, because its meaning is continually changing and no one can become the authority. It is wrong insofar as the extension of this discursive power is visible everywhere: everyone is spoken of and, at the same time, speaks. To crudely deny the role that a speaker’s speech plays within criticism—that is, discursive power—not only completely misreads Foucault, but also does great harm to the flourishing diversity and contention of the anime-critical field.
II. A Methodology of Anime Criticism
(1) The Breadth of Anime Criticism—The Stranger’s Perspective and Excavating Residual Categories
I am absolutely not a professional; I have not even reached the doorway of criticism. I cannot presumptuously offer any opinion about “literary criticism.” What I can do is bring my personal experience and professional background into the analysis of a work, both excavating professional value from the work and making that professional value serve its interpretation. In this way, criticism can produce heterogeneity. Here, allow me to introduce the sociologist Simmel’s “stranger” into criticism. The “stranger” is an important concept in cultural sociology: people who define the substance of a group from an external perspective and display “reflection” on or “distance” from the group, thereby forming a complete whole together with it. Two points are crucial to understanding this concept:
- The stranger is not external to the group, but internal to it. It is a group-internal category.
- Strangers may arise from inside the group or come from outside it. What matters is that they carry distinctive personal experience, take root within the group, yet maintain a certain cautious distance from its culture.
Everyone brings different memories, cultures, social backgrounds, and bodies of knowledge, forming a distinctive field and habitus through the interweaving of different cultures. This not only embodies the “stranger’s” subjective interpretation of local culture, but also greatly enriches that culture’s horizons, vitality, and creativity. We might say that otaku play precisely this kind of stranger-group role in relation to the mainstream. They cannot live apart from mainstream populations and must interact with them, yet throughout they maintain a cautious distance from mainstream culture. It is precisely this distance that allows otaku to produce new cultural categories and interpretations. Without mainstream suspicion and distortion, and without resistance to that suspicion and distortion, subcultural groups would not generate their own “indexical expressions” from within (such as 哲♂学). If critics of anime criticism are once again asserting an “orthodoxy,” then where exactly do the “anime Brahmin” critics they denounce stand? Who, after all, is the “Brahmin”?
I do not mean by this to oppose the idea that anime criticism needs some degree of “orthodoxy.” My point is that for a group as unstable in its boundaries as the “2D” world, relying on “orthodoxy” to establish itself is unreliable. Rather than maneuvering within the concept of “orthodoxy,” we should openly embrace more possibilities. First, for anime critics, [neutral evaluation is impossible]: a sensitive observer who cares about emotional entanglements between characters and a hardcore geek committed to sekai-kei analysis will naturally evaluate DITF differently. Second, for anime critics, [“absolute neutrality” in criticism is unreasonable]. We emphasize that anime criticism should have its own style and that prose cannot be incomprehensible scribbling, but the critic’s sensory experience matters far more than a standardized writing procedure, and that experience is tied to the critic’s individual history. Third, for anime critics, [a fixed purpose is impossible], because readers‘ diverse understandings of an article cannot be avoided. We can hope in general that an article does not harm readers but instead prompts thought, yet we cannot specify what thought it will prompt or how much. And if the critic writes for personal amusement, then the relativity of anime criticism must naturally be admitted. Where, then, lies the reliability of the reasons for attacking other forms of criticism?
Anime criticism is the critic’s personal understanding developed around one or more features of a work. It therefore needs breadth. No anime critic can cover everything. There will always be residual categories worth excavating, and so long as an argument is reasonable, criticism from an “unusual” angle should not be rejected. Instead, we should remain open and receptive, criticize reasonably, and together excavate the meanings of works and of the cultures behind them.
(2) The Depth of Anime Criticism—“Structural Thinking”
(A bit of my own hobbyhorse here.)
When otaku encounter theories of cultural studies, especially critical theory, their first instinct is often to refute them. Yes, grand narratives have problems of their own. First, they lack empathy with otaku as a group. Otaku culture is understood as the Other of mainstream culture, and it is simply assumed that because otaku culture is alienated, otaku as a group suffer exclusion. In social work this kind of thinking is called an “oppressor model,” but the problem with the model is that it presupposes that otaku need and want to be saved. Is their life really so unbearable? Has anyone asked how otaku themselves view the 2D world? Second, it treats a fundamental cause as the only cause. Some theorists may believe that markets manufacture cultural garbage everywhere and that aesthetically impoverished audiences are everywhere, and that in the last analysis this is the result of alienation under the logic of capital and consumption. But capital is not the only concrete factor affecting the 2D world. If it were, individual agency—including that of creators—would mean nothing, and even the commercial works we ourselves love would have no value. That is obviously unreasonable.
We know perfectly well that our love of the 2D world is simply “love”; we do not confuse reality and fiction as a certain advertisement for Mr Love: Queen’s Choice depicts. Yet I used to feel troubled quite often: why can’t the things I love be realized in reality? Why can’t the things I love create greater influence? This contradiction is not exceptional. On the one hand, we admit that the 2D world is merely a place where we settle our desires and we reject vulgar intrusion; on the other hand, we crave a sense of recognition outside the group. This dialectical tension appears in the fact that our pursuit of culture always occupies the side of the sublation of reality. As in Simmel’s description of the landscape of cultural modernity, culture is always something that exceeds reality.
As noted above, the deeper external factors behind this contradiction might be understood as follows. The culture industry incorporates 2D subculture into the logic of production and consumption, forcing the boundary between subculture and mainstream to “implode” and exposing the contradictory sides of the 2D community. On the one hand, the circle we insist on no longer exists: large amounts of mainstream content have invaded our “space of expression,” leaving almost nowhere for our “commitments” to settle. To continue maintaining distance from the mainstream, we begin to pursue the “hardcore,” retreating toward positions the market has not yet touched. We re-anchor ourselves through how much we have watched, the games we play, the obscurity of the anime we watch, and the difficulty of understanding them. On the other hand, more of our living space is exposed to the real logic of production and consumption, subjected to mainstream discipline. When facing 3D social relations, we become noncommittal about our “2D attributes” and find them difficult to justify. This process eventually means that distinguishing subculture from mainstream culture is nowhere near enough. The safest method is to give up consciousness of subculture itself—to give up subcultural self-awareness: no longer probing concepts such as “subculture,” “otaku,” or the “2D” world, and no longer anchoring oneself as an “otaku.” Amid complaints and curses, one practices a fragmented philosophy of existence (“I’m just someone who watches cartoons...”), constructing a superposition state of 2D and non-2D personhood to cope with the split between the mind’s need for beauty and the dull 3D reality in which the body lives.
Therefore, when we fall into the myth of “trash audiences and trash production mutually constructing one another,” I think the key to breaking out is not simply to demand that audiences improve their aesthetic judgment, or to call on producers to make animation they themselves regard as excellent, but to use anime criticism to establish aesthetic “structural thinking (Structured thinking)”: the ability to view a work holistically, plurally, and synchronically, and to consider its elements together from relational and developmental perspectives, going beyond a simple analysis of the functions of elements or of characters‘ emotions. It should not only notice a work’s homogeneity and heterogeneity in relation to other works, but also use reading as a reflexive practice, bringing our attention back to the fact and relation that the subculture we love and mainstream culture are at once close and distant, and to the problems produced by that relation. I venture to call this “otaku self-awareness,” as a counterpart to the “subcultural self-awareness” proposed by Stuart Hall, thereby emphasizing both the commonality of subcultures and the specificity of otaku culture. This critic is by no means the ideal anime critic, but is the “idealist” I hold in mind. Of course, whether an individual chooses this path is up to them; I have no intention here of making any wishful demands or recommendations. I simply love this culture, and appreciate every serious and conscientious anime critic—whether a meticulous explorer of details or a theorist who ranges through the classics.
Finally, based on my shallow knowledge and understanding, I have presumptuously constructed two little contraptions: a “category schematic” and an “axis of dimensions in anime criticism.” Their purpose is to express the plurality and relativity of criticism. The dimensional axis summarizes only four “ideal types.” A formidable critic might well cover all four, or even address all four dimensions in a single essay, and there may of course be criticism that exceeds these dimensions entirely.
Our attitude toward “anime criticism” should contain more tolerance than denunciation. I hope even more that we can summarize theory while taking experience into account, and attend to the culture behind a work while still attending to the work itself—as well as cultivating some degree of awareness of this identity of ours.
**Written on impulse, with limited ability, I will stop here. Thank you for taking the trouble to read; corrections are welcome, and you have my thanks. 。
