Abracadabra
Nothing displays Mamoru Oshii’s genius in Ghost in the Shell (1995) more fully than his full three-minute sequence of “empty shots”: throughout this sequence, all viewers can do is follow the endless objective shots, searching in vain for the “observer”—the source, that is, of Motoko’s and Batou’s auditory hallucinations.
How are we to understand this sequence? The most inept explanation is, of course, to invoke suture, treating these shots as a manifestation of the Puppet Master. First comes an image that gives the viewer immediate (imaginary) pleasure. Next, when we become aware of the frame’s existence—here through the frequent cuts, which never give us an encompassing view—we begin searching for the (absent) big Other who manipulates the images: the Puppet Master. Finally, we get what we wanted, an image that includes the absent one. Through a form of fetishistic disavowal (“I know he is not controlling the shots, but…”), we bring this observer into the story.
It is precisely by handing the shots over to the Puppet Master through this (somewhat despicable) maneuver that we secure our own objectivity, without having to endure Hitchcock’s humiliation of the audience in The Birds (1963): when the birds enter the image from behind the camera, we are suddenly forced to recognize our position as an “evil God.” Yet even as we ridicule this explanation, do Rilke’s lines not come to mind—
For beauty is nothing but
a corner of greatness we can barely bear;
we marvel at it only because it is so gentle
that it disdains to destroy us.
A variation on these lines appears in two of Lacan’s seminars (S7, S11). Antigone’s beauty appears when she “does not give ground on her desire.” By endowing the impossible with “beauty,” we can stop short of reaching—as Antigone does—the endpoint of desire: self-destruction. This is also Lacan’s view of art: art is always constructed around the Thing (das Ding), which marks the impossible. Is this not precisely what cinematic suture does? We need an observer to rescue us from direct exposure to fragmented images and sounds we cannot locate. It is not hard to imagine that, if this sequence were stretched to the length of the eight-minute fight in They Live—a fight jarringly bizarre in every possible sense—some viewers would surely leave before it was over.
Or what if we did not understand these three minutes of empty shots as a traumatic element of modernist art? What if we examined the imagery Oshii presents? (That is, what if we tried to symbolize the Thing in the Real?) We see an airplane (its reflection in the water looks more like a… bird), neon lights, shop-window mannequins (it is hard not to think of Blade Runner [1982]), and so on. Here we must reject a reading that treats these images as metaphors for Motoko’s “personality”: what such a reading misses, we might say, is precisely the images themselves. What we see is a city. And to show this city, we have to endure three minutes of “stasis.” This time lies outside the story’s narration: unlike “logical time,” the cuts follow no “logic” at all.
It is undoubtedly useful here to mention Andrei Tarkovsky, whose influence on Oshii was immense. We can readily connect this city sequence to the images in Stalker (1979): when Tarkovsky’s camera skims just above a pool of stagnant water in the Zone, we experience the same “stasis.” It is as though the mass of the earth—we can, indeed should, speak of “earth” here in a Heideggerian sense—warps the time of the image in the manner of relativity.
This time of the Real, then, belongs neither to the time of the Symbolic (of the story) nor to reality. It also points to the extreme ambiguity of the city in Oshii’s images (we know, of course, that this is a rendering of Hong Kong/Los Angeles, yet as the accompanying music unfolds, we always feel it holds some deeper meaning…). Does it not point precisely to the materialization of the enjoyment/jouissance of objet a? “Time flowing outside the story” points directly to modernist art’s “between the two frames,” first disclosed by Malevich’s Black Square on White Background—that is, to the infant reduced to nothing but fear in Edvard Munch’s Madonna (1893–1894). And the ultimate manifestation of this nonhuman (pure) life brings us back to Kafka and his Odradek:
I ask myself in vain: what will become of it? Will he die? Anything that can die always has some aim in life, something to do, and comes to its end in doing so. But this does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that it will always roll down the stairs, trailing the end of its thread, all the way to my children’s feet, and to the feet of my children’s children? He will do no visible harm to anyone. But the thought that he might outlive me causes me a faint pain.
The Thing–jouissance indicated by Odradek can in turn be developed along three dimensions:
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The first is law–ideology. This dimension has already made a teasing appearance in the reading of the city sequence as a “personality metaphor”: we can discern not only Motoko’s personality but also the personality of Hong Kong–Los Angeles as a city/metropolis—if cities can be said to have personalities. Here we encounter the classic Marx–Althusser problem: the enigmatic split (or short circuit) between “superstructure” and “base,” between “ideology” and the “reproduction of the relations of production.” What confronts us is not only the material walled city, rivers, and neon lights, but also a “spirit” that will not stop haunting us. The best example is the proximity of the release of Ghost in the Shell to Hong Kong’s return to China: even though nothing (material) had changed in 1995 (or would change), its inhabitants could still feel profound uncertainty and unease.
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The second is jouissance–sinthome: the wound that will neither heal nor let one die. This troublesome excess, the part “in me more than me,” finds its direct cinematic expression in Tarkovsky’s or Oshii’s replacement of the movement-image with the time-image. Unlike the movement-image, the time-image no longer serves to make something visible or to make the viewer see something; instead, it gives a direct image of time, without appearing as a movement that deviates from narrative. The time-image thus points to time’s production (its productive force), to the movement of time outside the subject. We can readily connect it to the “clock of nature” Lacan mentions in his 1954–1955 seminar, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (S2):
From the moment man thinks that nature’s great clock simply turns by itself and will mark the hours even in his absence, the order of science is born. The order of science depends on man becoming nature’s attentive servant in the very act of presiding over it. He will rule nature only by obeying it. Like the slave, he makes the master dependent on him by serving him.
The time-image thus indicates a different kind of memory or storage, closely bound up with electronic imaging or digital technology. Perhaps we can also connect this “wound” to Deleuze’s machines: how our subjectivity depends on a “desiring-machine,” or on the brain as an infinitely complex machine. The mechanical supplementation of the flesh-and-blood subject is also a development of the human–cyborg motif running from Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) to Ghost in the Shell and Serial Experiments Lain (1998). In the progression from machine as environment, to machine as body, to machine as “spirit,” our subjectivity is called into question step by step. This kind of machine inverts Deleuze’s “body without organs”: it is an “organ without a body.”
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The third is a variation on the second: Odradek as an other—pure life. Continuing the discussion above, our anxiety at the approach of the machine–cyborg is also anxiety at the approach of the abyssal dimension of the “neighbor”: we have seen too much, enough to glimpse the intolerable “inhuman” dimension within the “human.” Can we not read, in Kieślowski’s retreat from documentary to fiction, the reverse trajectory: from Hitchcock (his fantasy) to the Wachowski sisters (their films)? Hitchcock’s ultimate dream was to remove the cinema screen—note the affinity between the screen as a visual technology and Lacanian fantasy—and have a machine directly output joy, anger, sorrow, pleasure… Would we not end up with a Matrix?
Here we need to discuss the paradox of Blade Runner 2049 (2017): the boundary between our embrace of computer technology and our rejection of cyborgs is precisely a symptom of the narrative. It is impossible to draw distinctions between machines, replicants, and AI. And the (neoliberal) tolerance K (we must tirelessly bring up Kafka yet again) shows Deckard also exposes the limits of that tolerance: “Love thy neighbor”—but what happens after that?
The culmination of this “inhuman” dimension is K himself: a “person” who cannot even be sure his memories are reliable, a “person” left with nothing but his body—just as, in Oshii’s handling of the “limited” in “limited animation,” characters’ movements are reduced to the bare minimum. In Marx’s terms, he is a “lumpenproletarian,” a “person” excluded from the process of production (to borrow the terminology of Spinoza and Deleuze, we are speaking here of production on another level—the production of affect, affectus), “less than nothing.” And only by appealing to the death drive of such “pure life,” or homo sacer, can capitalism perpetuate itself—the death drive points precisely to the opposite of death: immortality.
If we return to Tarkovsky at this point, the ambiguity of the “nomadic proletariat” stands fully exposed. This fidelity to “earth” and “time (of the Real)” (another example might be Kieślowski, whose insistence on the Real also led him back to fiction films offering “redemption”) tipped over, in Tarkovsky himself, into religious obscurantism and the meaningless self-sacrifice of Nostalghia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986): desperate attempts to establish a distance from the Thing. Yet we can also connect the Stalker’s stance to the master’s discourse: at the junction of the clamor of natural sounds and the background music, we see even a Leninist act of decision, establishing an entire structure of belief out of “stupid” persistence… And the “nomadic proletarian” himself also wavers between two extremes: either becoming the “night of the world,” directly accusing the symbolic order of injustice—from those who lived through the concentration camps to the prisoners at Guantánamo—or becoming a link in the violent state apparatus (we have even seen, just recently, how rulers collude with organized crime).
The same interrogation should extend to Oshii: how do his works confront this society? Is mere “resistance through rituals” enough—appealing to the cooperation, resistance, and struggle between subcultural and mainstream cultural discourses to achieve “resistance to consumerism within consumerism”? I think we should bravely—though painfully—acknowledge this fact: even after Patlabor 2: The Movie, in which his political position was most exposed, Oshii’s texts failed to bring change—or even reflection—to any link in the chain of otaku culture, otaku, and Japanese society. On the contrary, what we can see is the animation industry’s incorporation of his “stillness.” Oshii’s decline—his utter defeat in The Sky Crawlers (2008), his capitulation to romantic love—is already discernible in Ghost in the Shell: just one more step and he would follow Tarkovsky into the intolerable mysticism of Lain, abandoning the physical body to pursue an LCL-like sea of jouissance.
Perhaps this is also a metaphor for the politics of the Japanese Left (Oshii included): the students who fought in the 1960s could not sustain the radical position behind their violence. In later assessments, most participants wanted only a “happier everyday life”—just as Lain, at the story’s end, merely restored a “harmonious family.” After the movement’s defeat, the students either abandoned their former beliefs (one of the most striking examples is how Haruki Murakami portrays “Storm Trooper” in Norwegian Wood [1987]) or succumbed to hysteria: the United Red Army on the road to the Asama-Sansō siege, and later, *****.
But what we must finally say in defense of Oshii and his Ghost in the Shell is this: faced with that step, he held to a form of materialism. Motoko does not answer Batou’s question, offer a false guarantee of his continuity, or appear in human form like Shinji and Lain. Instead, she becomes a free-floating voice—is the voice not the ultimate organ without a body, the ultimate “symptom”? She constantly reminds us of the unreliability of our subjectivity today, of people reduced to “discourse” in cyberspace and… the existence of the remnants of those “voices” that the big Other cannot endow with meaning. Admittedly, this cannot provide a convincing interpretation—or one that makes us “happy”—of the irreparable split between Oshii the auteur and Oshii the left-wing youth. But this, too, is a responsibility we must shoulder: we offer no stupid compromise of the positive-psychology variety (as the “letter” Oshii leaves us in Patlabor 2 says: “I came not to bring peace on earth, but a sword”). To heal this wound/rid ourselves of this “excessive” organ, we must become the wound/organ itself. “Where it is, I must follow” (Wo es war, soll Ich werden).
Editor’s note: The author says that what concerned her while writing this essay was not, in fact, Oshii, but… Slavoj Žižek. It is not hard to see that she almost deliberately leaves Žižek unnamed while retaining his arguments almost in their entirety. Perhaps Žižek, too, is the object of the essay’s final interrogation—and defense. Is the split between Žižek’s theory–practice and his own attitude toward Slovenia, Europe, or the capitalist world merely “a mistake” (as Heidegger’s followers would have it), or has it been internal to his theory all along (like the ambiguity and wavering of Oshii in this essay)? Perhaps this question, too, must be left to the reader.