Editor’s note: I figured we’d skip the headshot of Gi.
Thematically, this seems the most baffling of the three segments.1 It has little in the way of a complete storyline, merely presenting the everyday life of a family of three in a fictional city from a panopticon-like vantage point. Yet it should actually be the easiest of the three to interpret thematically. Given Katsuhiro Otomo’s own thinking, the work is unquestionably connected to reflection after the Second World War. A reading organized around totalitarianism could hardly be clearer.
With so many studies of totalitarianism now available, people can readily objectify this subject shrouded in fog. Especially since Arendt, treating situations in idealized form has offered a neatly complete approach to interpreting works of art. This approach can disregard the vulgar elements of human tradition that have nothing to do with good and evil; it can also disregard the flexibility of a social system’s organizing principles.
And so, in the idealized situation, totalitarianism becomes a satirical animation like Cannon Fodder.
For the family of three through whom our view unfolds, the city they inhabit is perpetually at war with the outside world. Not only is there no information about whom they are fighting; nothing can be known about the city itself or whatever external relations it might have. In the few shots that follow the shells’ impact points beyond the city walls, all we see is desert. An autonomous municipality of this kind is, of course, a simplification made for the animation’s setting. But the intention behind that setting is unmistakable.
First, walls separate the city from the desert outside: the city is a completely enclosed territory. Second, perpetual war means mobilization. And in Cannon Fodder, the war is unquestionably total war, so mobilization is total mobilization.
These two conditions concern the outside and the inside respectively. Together, and through one another, they create an atmosphere that allows movement to continue. War with the outside supplies the inside with a threat, while internal enclosure supplies the potential for mobilization needed to wage war outside.
In the ideal case, the potential inherent in this back-and-forth between mutually dependent internal and external relations is made eternal. This produces the film’s lack of historicity: past and future no longer offer possibilities different from the present. The family at the center of our view, like all the other characters, can be understood by the audience only as present-at-hand beings. They are nonhuman, deprived of all possibilities and choices for existence, of any capacity to break with the existing state of things.
This is not merely a loss of authentic life—or, more properly, original life. More extreme still, the relationship between human beings and things begins to reverse. The work thus ceases to be merely a presentation of one cross-section through totalitarianism or a specimen for theoretical analysis. Analyzing this cross-section of life lets us explore a repositioning of the relationship between beings and artificial objects. The concepts I use here draw on Heidegger, but the subject belongs more to Merleau-Ponty’s concerns (he uses some of Heidegger’s concepts too). My eventual discussion of the relationship between technical objects and human beings draws to some extent on Stiegler’s research (he, of course, also uses Heidegger’s concepts), although I think this work offers a different repositioning.
Within the division of labor under total mobilization, the parents’ daily work provides an important part of our panoramic view of the city’s operations. The father loads ammunition at the giant cannon emplacement in the city center; the mother works on a production line in an armaments factory supplying the war effort. This point of entry reveals a reversal, within an organization operating with great precision, of the relationship between individuals and the work they perform in the division of labor. The tools an individual uses are no longer accorded the status of objects of intentionality; the individual simply follows orders, carrying out a corresponding sequence of actions. At this point, then, the individual no longer holds a tool in hand; there is no space of equipment. Instead, simply executing a sequence of actions under some nonhuman command, the individual becomes the object of the intentionality of a different kind of thing. These objects are nonhuman, neither manifestations of a will to power nor personifications of some sacred legitimacy. They are subtler and more fundamental: they are technical objects. A technical object might be a conveyor belt on a production line or the giant cannon emplacement as a whole. This relationship is no different from that between the individual and society.
People living as the “they” do not live authentically. But this does not mean that all their dealings with other things in the world consist in grasping them as images placed before their eyes or bringing them to hand as equipment. Actual people can readily distinguish other people from things. Grasping the “they” as a concept implies, at least, that subjects recognize one another’s status as beings of the same kind (even though the contradiction of another person’s self arises in the act of objectification). This distinction rests in part on their place within an immense network of relations. That network is not confined to human society: it also encompasses relations between people and things—what Heidegger calls, in his analysis, the totality of involvements. Thus, I can distinguish other people from things because we all encounter things in the same way. And because other people’s relations to things resemble my own, I can regard them as beings distinct from things.
Clearly, once an actual person’s relationship to things is no longer the former relationship between a person and equipment, that person will not only lose the characteristics of their existence and their mineness; they will also cease to maintain the earlier distinction in their relations with others. The predicament here is not merely that of an individual in their ownmost being, but that of the “they.”
Something else needs to be said about the system of involvements inhabited by the “they.” Their relations to things are not all that sustain the distinction between them and things. There is also direct access—that is, an understanding of others’ existence—which enables us to be with others. Being-with is therefore precisely the basis of Dasein (the person in their ownmost being). Although mutual understanding of one another’s existence does not demand that we understand another’s existence (the paradox of the other ego), we inhabit a self-evident world, and our mutual confirmation of the fact that we inhabit such a world is enough to let us understand one another. This understanding in turn provides the basis for subsequent concepts, while also making communication possible. People can utter the same word in an effort to understand one another. Only speech directed toward mutual understanding—not speech deployed strategically, much as we handle equipment—allows individuals to sustain that relation of mutual confirmation.
If we attend to the film’s few moments that seem to stand apart, the moments in which the outline of the lifeworld emerges, observation leads to the same pessimistic result. During the parents’ meal breaks at work, and even in scenes of family life, speech is either closed off by silence or set adrift by nagging. No understanding or access is established among the film’s characters. Only the child’s speech within his own fantasies shows any inclination in that direction.
Here we can be certain. These nonhumans lack historicity and have no possibility of existence. Their circumstances bring into view the judgment Arendt reached in her treatment of totalitarianism. This also accords with postwar continental Europe’s understanding of the Nazi regime as an ideological machine. But lacking historicity does not mean having no historicity; the lack of historicity is precisely a manifestation of historicity. If history can be castrated through the film’s invented setting, interpretive historical research into reality demands the recovery of a grasp of the whole. One of its branches, empirical historical description, will reveal points at odds with Arendt’s analysis—for instance, the fact of corruption within the Nazi regime, as against its nonutilitarianism in Arendt’s idealized account. The point here is not to expose the drawbacks of an inadequate grasp of history. People know perfectly well that Nazism did not emerge from thin air and miraculously enter a state of perpetual movement as a totalitarian ideal type. As a phenomenon, it has its own genesis and structure, naturally carrying remnants from before Nazi rule. By remnants I do not mean the sort of tradition that seeks to monopolize our sense of history, permeating it and obscuring the possibility of looking back (invented tradition, the Weimar Constitution). What remains are precisely those marks that establish for people the fact that “they themselves have already existed.” For example, if Heidegger faced a reproach of conscience when he expelled his teacher Husserl, that reproach would be a remnant of the mutual understanding between them before the Nazi regime.2 Still less, then, can we say that Heidegger, a Nazi philosopher, was already like the individuals in Cannon Fodder who have lost the capacity to understand others.
The crucial point is that, however Arendt’s views may be challenged on factual grounds, this cannot negate the fact that her analysis still constitutes one part—even the most important part—of the hermeneutics of totalitarianism. Arendt herself would of course not have thought she was setting down facts. What she analyzed was a situation, distinct from a scientific explanation proceeding from the objectifying attitude of a spectator. Thus, when she says that people under Nazi rule reached the most extreme atomization through a wariness in which everyone feared for their own safety, we should certainly not take her to mean that the vast majority of Germans during that historical period lived under the pressure of panoptic surveillance. Having lived through it, she of course knew about the interpersonal communication and actual resistance that persisted; she herself also wrote about the benefits of bribery for Jews trying to escape. What matters, then, is that Arendt’s analysis constitutes one cross-section within a hermeneutic grasp of the whole. To a certain extent, this cross-section does find its fullest expression in totalitarianism; in Cannon Fodder, it is magnified, in a more thoroughly idealized form, into a whole. This magnification lets us see more clearly what effects the conditions presented in this cross-section might have on the actual whole.
It is as though we wanted to observe an individual infected with a virus: naturally, our object of observation would be the infected individual as a whole. Yet observing only the virus itself—even in idealized form—can still contribute significantly to studying its effects on the individual and the symptoms it chiefly produces in that infected individual. Ultimately, this lets us grasp the infected individual more comprehensively.
Here we must state at the outset that the cross-section presented by Cannon Fodder is the technical system. This system gains its dominion in the world through gradual invasion. A pessimistic view would even leave the beginning of that gradual invasion suspended at the origin, so that a congenital defect would be a better analogy than a virus. (Correspondingly, the other side of reflection on this predicament of origins is the Rousseauian “human being without history”: a class of idealized individuals who have never encountered the virus. This is entirely different from Heidegger’s sense of being without history.)
Within the technical system, technical objects dominate human beings and other objects autonomously. Human beings no longer treat things as objects; things treat human beings as objects. The loading and operation of the giant cannon offer a particularly clear point of reference.
In the cannon’s operation, the worker responsible for running it can no longer maintain a referential relation with the equipment being operated, no longer sustain a relation with definite content to the objects being handled. Referential relations connect entities within the world to their surrounding world. These relations are mediated by the body, which can carry out virtual actions without having to be actually moved as an object. People can thus realize certain referential relations without deliberate thought—for instance, locating a point on the body where they have been touched.
Nothing of the sort occurs in the operation of the giant cannon. Here, human beings lose their state of being within the world. First, they act entirely according to instructions. These instructions are not tasks arising from the world in general, because the body is not receiving a task as a factor in the human–world system so as to realize the human being’s capacity for a world. The body realizes its capacity for a world only when, as a phenomenal body, it establishes a referential relation between the person and a workpiece serving as a pole of action. The phenomenal body occupies a spatial position; precisely because of this, spatial objects can appear to the subject and the world can open itself to the subject. The body taken as an object can operate solely at the level of consciousness to carry out virtual actions (you imagine grasping a cup), or it can actually perform abstract movements (you reach out to grasp a cup that does not exist). When the body is treated as an object, movement—whether performed in actuality or in the realm of possibility—cannot be detached from its foundation in the phenomenal body. Thus, although people can perform both kinds of movement, fundamentally it is the activity of the phenomenal body that grounds all activity in the surrounding world.
In the operation of the giant cannon, the workers do not receive tasks arising from the world in general. Every movement they make is precisely prescribed by the technical object. Through the successive stages of unloading and loading shells, unloading and loading gunpowder, pressurizing the gun carriage, and so on, we can see that strict demands are imposed on the workers’ bodies at every step. As a result, every movement treats the body as an object. They are not using a workpiece to carry out some task arising from the world in general. They must not only perform a sequence of actions directed toward an end, but also constantly attend to the precision of their bodily movements. This precision is not necessary to carry out the instructions for the work. Nonetheless, they must attend to the positions of their various body parts in objectified external space, then labor to move those parts along exact trajectories or hold them still. What is lost is the referential relation between person and workpiece. The worker can therefore do nothing but treat their own body as an object according to the technical object’s instructions. At this point, the technical object has achieved autonomy. It is no longer a ready-to-hand workpiece or a present-at-hand object. It becomes that which previously connected with the surrounding world through referential relations and thereby realized its capacity for a world. Here it is the technical object that acquires the standing of a being within the world; the human being is merely its prosthesis (or its pseudopod, if you cannot grasp the two senses of “the invention of the human”).3
Perhaps it is in this more pessimistic sense that we speak of Enframing, of those technologies that gather being. If we move beyond the level of existence and being-in-the-world to that of social institutions, this situation offers a systems-theoretical perspective on the fictional city. Only from this perspective can we understand why totalitarianism can keep its machinery running solely by virtue of its character as movement. In other words, both the driving force and the boundaries of the social system embody this high degree of autonomy. This autonomy is not merely empirical; it is also global in a phenomenal sense (global as opposed to local: this does not mean that the barriers between inside and outside disappear—Luhmann likewise speaks of the coexistence of “world society” and “environment”). In Luhmann’s account, however, individuals remain constitutive factors in the world system. In the exaggerated fictional situation of Cannon Fodder, individuals are merely the prostheses of technical objects.
The operation of the giant cannon’s mounting reveals the atmosphere in which the inhabitants of Cannon Fodder exist. From this perspective, society as a whole is utterly engulfed in the anomie of systems theory. If totalitarianism in reality still retains such factors as utilitarian motives and the leader’s will, then the background of the lifeworld can still support a mode of everyday existence. In Cannon Fodder, however, the lifeworld remains hidden, never showing itself, leaving the functioning of society as a whole without any possibility of social integration. All that remains is system integration: through totalitarianism pushed to an extreme, it throws individuals into blind work that has lost the character of readiness-to-hand. What can outwardly be maintained as a society is thus, in fact, merely the component parts of some colossal thing.
One detail deserves particular attention: the scenes involving the child in Cannon Fodder are exceptions in which the background of the lifeworld emerges. Clearly, because social integration depends on the inscription of traces such as external memory, under normal circumstances it inevitably begins to operate as soon as an individual appears in society. Thus, even within an autonomous system that has completely lost the possibility of social integration, individuals retain that possibility in childhood. In the process of forming his self-identity, the child here still yearns to follow a model, even if the object of his admiration—that indistinct totalitarian leader—is merely a puppet embodying a simulated will, replaceable at any time within the system.
Yet the lifeworld’s concealment does not mean that it has been deformed, still less that it has left the stage. Since actual totalitarianism will never lack a historical and everyday dimension, the lifeworld may always serve as the last possibility of rescue, thereby keeping the condition of existence intact.
This optimistic view will be shattered in Stink Bomb.
Editor’s note:
Stiegler, Heidegger, Arendt. I don’t much care for Arendt, actually. The author said he’d write the next installment, but how many months has he been putting it off now—double digits?