From 1871 to 2019 lie more than a hundred years of war and colonialism; north from West Kowloon to the center lie more than two thousand kilometers and deep cultural barriers; between the bedroom bed and the door through which one leaves home stand an angry husband and economic hardship; but from Bilibili’s anime section to an E-Hentai tab, all it takes is a quick flick of the mouse, a matter of millimeters… Before long, what “needed doing” is done. Even the sage’s reflections take on a sly edge.1
Neither in the dead of night, when the cicadas sleep, nor in a moment stolen from the working day, this little stroke of luck comes at just the right time: the tissues have just been cleared away, a new episode of Rail Zeppelin is about to arrive, the Doctor’s Sanity has recovered,2 the QQ group chat brings fresh amusement and news that some “weirdo” has left, and Weibo reports on a police officer’s injuries and the aftermath of an accident. The fragmented subject wanders so naturally among these many things, pouring its unique store of attention into them and writing its personal history. In return, it receives relaxation of body and mind. Surrounded by seductive images, people find solidarity unsettling, while the infighting that takes its place makes bystanders laugh. It seems that, until some heaven beyond our grasp descends, using “leisure” time to find pleasure is already the most rebellious act of all.
Dizzied by the promises of cultural consumer goods, we recuperate within the “enclaves” we maintain. Yet late at night, as we grow drowsy, facing the dim ceiling and confining walls, a subtle disappointment still wells up. We are troubled not only by the impoverished lives we imagine, but also by guilt over the distortions of that imagining. This urgency forcefully summons back the specter of division, compelling us to connect the separate images and stories, the neatly packaged abstractions of human nature, with the contradictions of embodied practice…
Dear readers, writers, members of Lab on Roof, and everyone watching from the sidelines:
Hello, everyone!
This is Zimo. I was Lab on Roof’s director for its third term and now hold the post for its fourth. Time has flown, and we have reached the first anniversary of the collective’s founding. From the initial suggestion among group-chat friends to the work of putting it into practice, I have witnessed Lab on Roof grow and develop, gradually changing from an observer into a participant myself. At present, our Zhihu column has 1,939 followers; our WeChat account has 908; and on Bilibili we have 7,223 followers, 93,000 video views, and 564,000 article views. We have begun to establish ourselves and have gained recognition from Bilibili’s article section. Moved by our achievements and shortcomings over the past year, and at members’ invitation, I write in my capacity as “director” to give a brief account of our development, describe our distinctive features and present strengths and weaknesses, and sketch out plans for the collective’s future. I would like to draw a rough analogy with the “New Angel,” Angelus Novus, discussed by Benjamin, both for this review and for Lab on Roof’s role.3 I mean it to encompass two points. The first concerns the attitude we need to take toward our own past. As the subject is inevitably dragged along by the “great wind of history,” encountering new circumstances and making changes, how it turns its face back will determine the present and the future. In other words, to answer the future, we must return to the past where the future’s possibilities dwell: we must discuss what Lab on Roof holds fast to and what it looks ahead to. The second is to take a serious stand on our values and advocate for them. We are neither neutral nor politically indifferent. In trying to connect the culture of anime, manga, and games with embodied reality, we urgently need to confront the histories that shape otaku self-understanding, and take a materialist stance against the postmodern condition brought by the “great wind of history.” In any case, these thoughts and hopes are only one person’s view. I ask you to judge them for yourselves.
Controversies and Achievements
Lab on Roof began with its founding members’ enthusiasm for a “novel” form of anime criticism. Its most distinctive features are its theoretical and speculative character and its active engagement with a broad range of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, generally seeking to analyze society’s superstructure. Lab on Roof was thus founded with a mission to foster this kind of criticism: to bring a fresh voice to criticism and put the democratization of culture into practice.
Our early development benefited from the founders’ offline connections and their considerable ability to get things done, so work went relatively smoothly at first. By April of this year, Lab on Roof had begun to take shape as an online collective, flourishing on all three fronts: WeChat, Zhihu, and Bilibili’s article section. We also won the approval of some ACG—anime, comics, and games—enthusiasts and some formidable humanities and social-science buffs, a few of whom had been big names on the S1 and Bangumi forums. Yet in contrast to the enthusiastic slogan of “bringing theory into anime criticism,” running Lab on Roof was an exceptionally leisurely affair. There were even stretches of several weeks when we could not find a manuscript. My own appointment as director owed nothing to any contribution I had made: no one had applied for the position. My election was entirely accidental. As you can see, our management is very loose. Most of the routine work and writing runs on “love”; when wage-slave life hits a crisis or final exams arrive, the whole operation crashes. The great majority of contributors’ fees come out of the founder’s own pocket, with the rest coming through Bilibili’s “charging” fan-support program.4 So far, we have received at least three offers of commercial collaboration and turned them all down. If we were to define this collective by its characteristics, tight organization and runaway popularity would certainly not be among them. Lab on Roof is “poor” and seemingly too “serious”: not only is its content too obscure for casual readers, but it also politely declines to turn traffic into money.
A light workload, loose management, and theoretical content have always characterized Lab on Roof. Some friends appreciate these qualities; others have criticized them. The reasons are understandable. The motives for wielding academic language without pursuing traffic are often associated with a narcissistic obsession with intellectual purity—like stubborn artists working in isolation, keeping others at a respectful distance. And so, out of nowhere, we are branded “anime Brahmins.”5 Other, more “perceptive” friends seem to have discovered that this reclusive academic language can itself, like Banksy’s paintings, acquire fashionable appeal and become “aestheticized,” helping Lab on Roof gain more symbolic capital. They then leap from objective effects to subjective intentions and accuse us of still pursuing discursive power at heart. Before becoming director, I had already offered a defense against such criticism in an essay on the methodology of anime criticism. Elsewhere, in response to a question about “Why Žižek and Lacan Are So Important to Anime Criticism,” I also offered a preliminary account of our differences through the ontology of ACG works. In brief, our basic principle in criticism is to uncover “residual categories”—not to treat the text as a set and search for leftover elements within it, but to abolish its boundaries, allowing as many interpretations as possible to spring forth between its inside and outside. We must account not only for a work’s themes but also for fractures in ideology; we must account not only for its characters but also for ourselves; we must account not only for images but also for flesh-and-blood existence.
This attitude inevitably brings significant changes to the existing ecology of anime criticism, attracting some potential critics while coming into conflict with others. Those who identify with this method and use Lab on Roof as a platform tend to be more “outward-looking” and more enthusiastic about sociology. They tend to engage actively with present social conditions and to be wary of criticism that wades “crudely” into social and political matters. Criticisms and countercriticisms of the myths of everyday life occur from time to time and have led to some unpleasant incidents. These conflicts have dealt me many blows. I had not anticipated the impact of a Lab on Roof that had only just passed a thousand followers. It also made me reconsider our values and the methods and strategies for achieving both task goals and process goals. Amid the controversy, our content has retained its distinctiveness, making Lab on Roof a new force still worth watching, at least for now.
Over the following months, Lab on Roof continued to put into practice the model of “one platform, three departments” (why do I suddenly sound so bureaucratic?). We have always insisted that Lab on Roof remain a platform. Although we screen submissions according to our ideological commitments, we do not require authors to change their views: they retain authority over their manuscripts. Still less do we bind authors to Lab on Roof. Beyond it, they have their own space for writing and can speak “in a personal capacity.” The three departments, meanwhile, are a planning legacy left by the previous director. Members of the Ideas Team oversee manuscript quality and communicate with authors; the Video Team, which includes video editors and voice performers, turns outstanding manuscripts into videos; and the Translation Team translates outstanding ACG criticism, currently focusing on bringing Japanese and English articles into Chinese. None of the three has a designated head, and membership often overlaps. Most members are enthusiasts who identify with Lab on Roof’s ideas, or even “passersby,” rather than unshakably committed “Roof people.” It is thanks to you that we can offer “content with substance,” attract nearly a thousand readers to our reader groups, and continue along the path of letting a hundred flowers bloom. Here I owe you both thanks and an apology: the prestige Lab on Roof offers still cannot make up for the meager pay. That makes the passion of everyone who believes in us all the more precious.
During my term, I also organized our first essay contest, “City · Space”. The response was encouraging, and we received some good submissions (you will be able to read them soon). With this event, I hoped, on the one hand, to give our published articles a measure of thematic continuity, rather than moving from an ontological analysis of Serial Experiments Lain in one article to an explanation of photography and compositing techniques in Sound! Euphonium in the next, making reading feel like a lottery. On the other hand, I hoped to continue practicing the “democratic” pedagogy mentioned earlier, encouraging more readers—even passersby unfamiliar with Lab on Roof—to take part in thinking and writing criticism. I want to draw on everyone’s strengths, to see fresh references from the humanities and social sciences, and even perspectives from outside those fields. More important, though, is expressing your own thought. In Giddens’s spirit, everyone in society is producing theories of their own at every moment; what often separates them from the “stinking ninth category” in the academy is merely reflective distance, an open attitude, and a fair platform.6
Past controversies and achievements have given us direction, but also brought pressure. For a collective and platform whose main offering is anime criticism “with substance,” the content we produce is crucial. To sketch our future development, we need a reckoning with past problems in content and values. The many criticisms include voices from casual onlookers and “rival stations,” as well as from within Lab on Roof and neighboring circles. Taken together, these voices often contradict one another. We have to find a way through the gaps: accepting what should be accepted and rejecting what should be rejected.
“Advance” and “Retreat”
Excellent, searching essays are one of Lab on Roof’s core strengths. We have received more than a hundred submissions so far. The great majority are original work, with a small number of translations by enthusiasts introducing outstanding criticism from abroad. Most original manuscripts are submitted on their authors’ own initiative; a few are commissioned by founding members. The articles generally approach works through social-scientific theory, most notably psychoanalysis and social psychology, though some take perspectives from political philosophy, and individual pieces have also drawn on Nietzsche, Deleuze, contemporary film theory, and media theory. Given the limits of our editors’ time and knowledge, quality control for articles making extensive use of theory still depends mainly on authors’ own conscientiousness. We uphold the principles of “open interpretation” and “creative misreading,” while also accommodating authors and readers who dislike the academic-paper format, so we do not impose citation standards. We accept pretty much everything, provided its use of theory is appropriate, its argument flows, it contains no obvious fallacies, and it neither reaches crude conclusions on social and political issues nor strays too far from our values—through support for social Darwinism or systematic theology, praise of capital, sexism, unconditional affirmation of everyday life and “human nature,” unfounded and indiscriminate denunciation, and so on.
This compromise is somewhat rough. Although it aims to lower the barriers to writing and reading, the objections have not stopped. On one side, some ordinary readers still describe our language as excessively academic and convoluted, even “nauseating.” On the other are humanities and social-science enthusiasts and progressives who follow Lab on Roof. They find some authors’ theoretical grounding inadequate and many manuscripts below expectations. Raising the level of theory and making the language more accessible are not contradictory aims. But we must also admit that criticism cannot accommodate everyone. “Ordinary readers” and “humanities and social-science enthusiasts” may have very different interests in criticism, and a compromise piece of criticism cannot please both sides in the conflicts between these cultural groups. Lab on Roof must hold to its own position and has a responsibility to defend it.
Critics have raised many objections about misapplied theory, excessive abstraction, and crude analysis, with psychoanalysis bearing the brunt. Some accuse many of our articles of treating Lacanian psychoanalysis as a universal template, applying it to character analysis across all sorts of anime, while failing in their “duty” to explain particular concepts. Here I have to admit it: this does happen, and it should be corrected. In part, it comes from authors’ insufficient understanding of theory: they readily treat fictional characters alone as subjects of analysis and neglect the psychoanalysis of media. In part, psychoanalysis’s profound explanatory power makes it easy for us to remain in a comfortable cognitive environment, without reflecting on or reckoning with our own episteme, and thus makes it difficult to reach readers across contexts. At the same time, I must point out that psychoanalytic anime criticism predates Lab on Roof. It once brought about a “paradigm revolution” of some significance in criticism on Zhihu, influencing a great many ACG enthusiasts. Our founders and many of our authors were readers of that early psychoanalytic anime criticism. To say they were not influenced by it at all would be sheer nonsense. It is not that Lab on Roof does psychoanalysis for psychoanalysis’s sake. Rather, its emergence gave these enthusiasts a platform for expression, allowing them to keep learning methods of analysis through writing and reviewing manuscripts. This contributed greatly to the formation of our early style. Strictly speaking, psychoanalysis is one of the theories least likely to bore new readers, both because it can stay close to popular culture, family, and everyday life, and because of that aura of mystery which psychoanalysis itself criticizes.
There is, then, a history behind our “glut” of psychoanalysis. As I see it, the fatigue it currently induces does not prove that psychoanalysis is unsuited to criticism. It means that our way of using it needs improvement. I therefore believe that Lab on Roof will not reject psychoanalysis, but must instead set new requirements for variety in analysis, accessibility of language, and caution in conclusions. Of course, many friends have also offered comments on other aspects of our articles. I have gathered below the problems they have brought to my attention, or that I have noticed myself, in the hope of prompting thought.
More Analysis of Content, Less Analysis of Media
Some articles place greater weight on explaining content. With a critique of “reified consciousness” as their axis, they move directly from analyzing characters’ relations of production to criticizing the relations of production of flesh-and-blood people. Or, having brought an analysis of society’s relations of production back into the work, they lose sight of society. This logic of identity makes abstract universality wearisome. The supposed “irruption of the Real” and “suture” amount to no more than the protagonist’s trauma and the resolution of contradictions—or are treated together as the way the text’s ideology operates, repeatedly demonstrating the story’s “reactionary” character. The key point is not that this route of analysis is unworkable, but that it lacks an account of the medium to bridge the transition. In his film criticism, Žižek not only emphasizes the intertextual relations between text and ideology; he also pays particular attention to camera language and uses the concept of “the gaze.” This may deserve our attention. Still more important is the role of the work’s immediate material medium: the visual effects of cel animation’s multiplanar structure, for example, or the way an image’s lines seize our “eyeballs” and our will, suspending our perception. Media analysis moves back and forth between the body and what lies outside it. It can better handle the transition from describing phenomena to critiquing their underlying essence, making criticism more approachable. After all, people tend to respond intuitively to bodily phenomena.
More Discussion of Culture, Less Discussion of Institutions
Most criticism focuses on textual ideology, emphasizing the reciprocal causation between works and culture, but offers little account of the institutional superstructure on which culture depends. Fundamentally, the way institutions are put into operation acts directly on media technology, while the conditions in which media are used are often institutionally controlled. This includes cultural legislation, corporate organizational structures, human-resource management, budget policies, anime project management, production procedures, staff allocation, and the organization and operation of production committees. These involve knowledge from political science and organizational sociology. Institutional analysis also helps broaden our view toward the economic base and the anime market, in turn better informing cultural studies.
More Use of Theories in Isolation, Less Interaction Between Them
Some articles rely on too narrow a range of references, remaining confined to a few—or even “one”—overarching theoretical explanations, without bringing them into interaction with other theories addressing the same problem. The reasons naturally include the focus of authors’ theoretical attention, the effort they invest in learning, and their writing habits. But another factor may be more important: some authors tend to fit problems into theories rather than organize theories around problems. These authors, myself included, have used powerful explanatory theories to build complex frameworks of understanding, making previously obscure things and questions clear. This “satisfaction” can easily displace our sense of the questions at stake. As unoriginal, fast-food anime proliferates, we cannot bring new theories together if we cannot uncover fresh questions. We tend instead to force problems into being through old explanatory templates, endlessly drilling against “imaginary enemies.” Yet sometimes the situation is plainly not that “we need to find grounds for radical critique in the stagnant waters of the culture industry,” but that “our predetermined grounds for radical critique prevent new questions from emerging.” Critics intent on interpreting content may thus forget the role of media and institutions.
More Questions Concealed, Fewer Questions Raised
A small number of articles also suffer from a severe “compulsion for completeness”: they tend to resolve every question they raise, making the essay a closed space sufficient unto itself. This often shows in crude conclusions. Whether the cause is blind faith or an obsession with “completeness,” the effects are harmful. When analyzing “hybrids” in ACG works—ghouls, Titans, Kabaneri, people with Oripathy, Devilmen, and so on—we often encounter complex concepts such as “social exclusion,” “stigmatization,” and homo sacer.7 To bring the article to a close, the author consciously or unconsciously appeals to abstract human nature as a way out of the dispute. An essay that began with searching analysis and critique abruptly turns to “universal care” and “common morality.” This puts doubts to rest and prevents readers from thinking further. My response is this: do not write with the intention of solving every problem, or treat that as a measure of an article’s completeness. Lab on Roof’s values certainly do not lie in preaching and prescribing solutions, but in prompting readers to think, even in raising more questions.
I raise these problems chiefly to help all our authors, myself included, identify and fill gaps. I also understand that many of these issues have not simply escaped authors’ notice: sometimes the will is there but the capacity is not, or addressing them lies far outside a writer’s personal interests. The foregoing is therefore both my own view and a proposal for discussion with fellow authors. Change certainly will not happen overnight, nor am I insisting that individuals must change. Earlier modes of criticism retain their place as before. These points can be treated as “reading reminders” for authors and new things to attend to when reviewing manuscripts.
I hope Lab on Roof can continue to broaden its repertoire. That will require not only the efforts of the long-standing authors who support us, but fresh blood too. Our doors remain open to critics of all kinds, and we will continue to offer full explanations of suggested changes and reasons for rejection.
Coda: Our “Obsession” with Values
Finally, I would like to talk with you about Lab on Roof’s values. You will probably have noticed something in the way the preceding pages are written. At the beginning of this letter, I also stressed that we are not an objective, neutral platform. This is both a technical requirement arising from the founders’ ontology of anime and methodology of criticism, and a mission we uphold in our own role as an intermediary. Readers may pick up hints in the references scattered through our articles and in their attention to social issues: Lab on Roof is, on the whole, a radical platform. Although core members differ in their particular values, most agree that criticism needs social concern as well as technical and theoretical attention; they clearly recognize subculture’s reproduction of everyday life and its limits; they respond from a different position to the critiques of otaku made by critics such as Uno Tsunehiro; and they hope to find some means of advancing cultural democracy and social equity.
This inevitably makes us something of a laughingstock. Our predicament is no better than that of cultural researchers elsewhere in the world. After all, a stance such as “eliminating inequality” is often closely tied to actual participation in labor, and everyone knows that theory should feed back into practice. Even though postmodern society has given “culture” considerable independence and a capacity to act back upon the economic base, cultural studies remains in an awkward position in many fields. First, researchers are often estranged from ordinary life. Either they despair of mass culture and turn toward a negative elitism, hostile to the public and met with hostility in return; or they ride the wave of postmodern cultural democracy, only to be taken by the public as spiritual leaders and drawn into a circuit of phallic worship. (This is also the predicament Featherstone describes: postmodernists such as Lyotard and Deleuze surrounded by admirers as new cultural intermediaries.) Second, researchers also seem remote from practice. They are co-opted by official institutions and become critics on the state payroll; they also take for granted an approach that moves from phenomena to abstract essence without sufficient attention to basic mediating questions such as redistribution and forms of ownership. If we accept the cultural independence and “schizophrenia” described in accounts of postmodernity, then the politicization and subjectification of “literature” inevitably become objects of ridicule for Bloom, Eco, and others. If, instead, we acknowledge the superstructure’s effects back upon the economic base while emphasizing the base’s priority and primacy, cultural studies comes to be seen as a progressive “placebo”: worth pursuing and taking seriously, but to claim that it can advance equity is simply to bark up the wrong tree. After all, cultural researchers often become trapped in cultural appearances themselves—for example, by treating eroticism as resistance.
Lab on Roof’s persistence is only a tiny step, and it will eventually leave the historical stage when it has fulfilled a particular mission. For now, we need not continually answer difficult questions about our “ideals,” but can focus on the present. A fairly clear contradiction has emerged between the problems of “insufficient purity” and “broadening our popular base.” For the time being, I have chosen to uphold standards through content review and promote our ideas through planned activities, keeping my attention firmly on content while placing relatively few restrictions on the various people involved. Lab on Roof seeks, as far as possible, to turn enthusiasts’ shared convictions into a collective force for moving forward. As we hold fast, our first hope is to break the hegemony of interpretation in cultural criticism and open up the interpretive space between texts and society. Not to instruct readers or preach to them about how to act, but to lead by example and thereby change the environment.
Today, criticism of ACG works and films alike is often caught between “the aestheticization of everyday life” and “the assimilation of the aesthetic to everyday life.” Not only many of our authors, but also literary critics who skillfully use literary theory to seek “human nature,” and aestheticians devoted to analyzing audiovisual technique, are often neglected unless they acquire considerable skill in vernacular expression. Pieces that attract heavy traffic tend to combine disparate phenomena and viewpoints deftly. They begin from empirical reality and stay close to everyday life. They certainly attend to social and political issues, yet find just the right place for them, often returning to hopes for order and justice, sorrow at society’s loss of solidarity, and “nostalgia” for the past. Without everyday life, anime’s beauty would seem not to exist; without such beauty to give misfortune a place, how could anime make up for what is missing in our everyday lives? No wonder some argue that the death of literature in the ivory tower is precisely its rebirth among the public. Yet a move from elitism to populism, from the aristocratic spirit of high culture to a vernacular apologetics of everyday life, may not be wise.
Lab on Roof may continue to be regarded as something of an “outsider,” inevitably becoming an “I am” subject onto which people pour excessive desires, positive or negative. In principle, we need to transform ourselves from an object-like “spectacle” into a relational “event”: from a statue set apart from human life into a mirror that looks after people as social beings, ultimately aiming to prompt an “I think.” What we need to hold fast to over the long term, then, is humility, an organizational form that remains a platform, and uncompromising critical resolve. We must submit our own values and attitudes without reservation to public scrutiny, making no attempt to conceal our stance. I hope our future articles, like this clumsy letter of confession, will be candid about what they can and cannot do, and attend to the critical chain connecting phenomena and essence. Let them prompt thought in more people through questions rather than conclusions—and prompt more questions from more people.
Before I knew it, I had written more than seven thousand Chinese characters, much of it open to the charge of being “false, grandiose, and empty.” But I hope I have conveyed my views clearly. I ask our authors, readers, and friends watching from the sidelines to bear with some of the “seriousness” here. Finally, my thanks again to all of you for your understanding, support, and criticism of Lab on Roof over the past year. Thank you, too, to everyone who has read this clumsy argument to the end. If it can provoke thought and dispute, I will count myself fortunate indeed.
Wishing you progress,
Zhong Zimo
August 10, 2019.
