High banks become valleys; deep valleys become hills.
Answer: What Is the Relationship Between Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell?
Leave the similarities aside. Let’s talk about the differences.
Both Blade Runner films—the original and 2049—and Ghost in the Shell (1995) address the question of being “more human than human.” Underlying this is an idea of progress rooted in Enlightenment reason: humanity has the potential to improve, to move from imperfection toward perfection. The replicants and Motoko are, in a certain sense, “new humans.”
Blade Runner’s idea of progress is influenced by the German tradition represented by Hegel—or, in other words, the idealist tradition. This tradition takes the group as its point of departure, emphasizing how the group evolves in unison as the human spirit moves from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. With each advance of this spirit, the group’s capacity for reason also increases. Reworked by German Romanticism, this idea gave rise to a series of concepts such as national spirit and national soul. It is more concerned with antagonism between groups: the replicants and humans in Blade Runner, for instance.
By contrast, Ghost in the Shell’s idea of progress comes from the British tradition represented by Spencer and Darwin—or, in other words, the evolutionary tradition. Evolutionary theory is actually a theory of differentiation. It emphasizes discontinuity in individual evolution, or differentiation within the group. Ghost in the Shell has no two sharply bounded, opposing groups of cyborgs and humans; everyone has been cybernetically modified to some degree. Among them, a police officer named Motoko is the first to reach the door to the future. After a moment’s hesitation, she takes the leap and becomes a new life-form.
Thus the replicants’ temple is a pyramid, while Motoko’s is a natural history museum; Blade Runner is more concerned with inequality, Ghost in the Shell with self-identity. The former is more classical, religious in temperament; the latter more postmodern, a kind of residue left by failed salvation. These differences in the underlying design lead directly to the radically different narrative character of the two works. Let’s take them one by one.
Blade Runner has a strongly religious temperament. The Earth headquarters of both the Tyrell Corporation and the Wallace Corporation are shaped like pyramids. The pharaoh who lives inside the pyramid is a “god-king,” human and divine in one. Thus, when Roy addresses Dr. Tyrell as “Father” in the original Blade Runner, he is calling upon his “Heavenly Father”—but even his “Heavenly Father” cannot give him life. When Dr. Wallace says “God remember Rachel” in 2049, he means that he himself will remember Rachael.
More than that, the original Blade Runner reworks the biblical Book of Exodus. Ancient Egypt was the first slave state in human history. Countless slave laborers built the pyramids; in the original Blade Runner, countless replicants accomplish the great enterprise of interstellar colonization. Ancient Egypt saw the most important slave escape in human history, when Moses led his people—six thousand Israelite households—across the Red Sea. In the original Blade Runner, Roy leads three men and three women in an escape back to Earth. Here the replicants appear in pairs, displaying an extraordinarily intense love and attachment to one another. A family narrative underlies this. Roy and the male and female replicants form a family kingdom with clearly defined boundaries, much like the Buendías living in Macondo. When Dr. Tyrell calls Roy “Prince of Technic,” he is likewise saying that Roy is a prince among slaves, just like Moses.
2049 tells what happens after the prophet Moses has been brutally killed. Unable to obtain salvation by praying to their “Heavenly Father”—humanity—for a “Son of God” infused with the “Holy Spirit,” the replicants turn instead to seeking their own “Son of Man.” Thus the “miracle of birth” becomes the core of 2049. This readily brings to mind Büchner’s play Danton’s Death and Robespierre’s declaration as he builds his “moral republic”: if the flesh and blood shed by the “Son of God” are not enough to redeem everyone, then nail me, this “Son of Man,” to the cross in exchange for grace. In the original Blade Runner, Deckard’s search for Roy’s group with a scale from an artificial snake hints that the replicants are “devils.” In 2049, K’s search for Deckard with a wooden carving hints that the old killer is the “father of a saint”—Saint Joseph, Christ’s father in name, was also a carpenter. At the end of 2049, Freysa tells K to kill Deckard: Dr. Stelline, too, is a sacrifice offered to the replicants.
But in Ghost in the Shell, the story is entirely different. There is no longer any salvation for humanity, only Motoko’s own life. Many people like to connect the “rain” in the original Blade Runner with the “rain” in Ghost in the Shell, using it to demonstrate the films’ similarity. In fact, as early as Angel’s Egg in 1985, Mamoru Oshii had already given the “rain” in his images a particular meaning:
The “rain” in Ghost in the Shell is Noah’s “rain,” the “rain” of catastrophe. God promised Noah that “the downpour will cease,” established the “Ten Commandments” with Moses on Mount Sinai, and sent his only son to bring people the gospel. God has therefore always been present in human history. God’s existence promises the ultimate salvation of an imperfect humanity and an imperfect world.
But what if God had never been present in human history? What if Noah’s “rain” had never stopped? We are each born in the downpour and die in the downpour, still living in an ark upon the ocean. There is no land around us, and no marker to guide us. This is the “rain” of Ghost in the Shell, Oshii’s “rain”: it reveals an imperfect world, a world that will never become perfect.
On the boundless sea floats the debris of a world left after salvation has failed. Fragment after fragment, “simulacrum” after “simulacrum”: this is the postmodern. In fact, wherever Motoko is—Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Japan—it is only an “island” beside a more extensive civilizational mainland, one with greater continuity and coherence.
Motoko chooses to embrace postmodern uncertainty. Where she will go, no one can know. Humanity stands at the apex of the natural history museum’s “evolutionary tree.” What comes after humanity? What are “new humans”? Oshii gives no answer.
But judging by his 2008 film The Sky Crawlers, the outlook is far from hopeful, just as in Angel’s Egg. The angel remains sealed away high in the tree, outside history.
Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell are two different works, two great works—not one work and its continuation.
Answer: What Do You Think of the Anime Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex?
Lately I’ve been thinking of writing something about Mamoru Oshii as a “statist.” Rewatching Ghost in the Shell (GIS), I suddenly realized how different it actually is from Blade Runner (BR). BR has the “subpolitics” of replicant terrorism against commercial syndicates, the “politics of production” of replicant labor in off-world colonies, and the “cultural politics” of segregation and discrimination against replicants. What it conspicuously lacks is “state politics.” This construction of BR fits very neatly with the notion that “cyberpunk is a symptom of late capitalism.” It presents a world in which the state has disappeared, an anarchic world ruled by market society, a world in which the individual is completely exposed to neoliberal governmentality. But GIS is not like this—especially not the Duck-ified S.A.C. of 2nd GIG.1 The state is always at the heart of Duck’s concerns.
What sort of phenomenon is a stand alone complex, exactly? It is a phenomenon of individual atomization and homogenization (synchronization). This is actually what is usually called “massification,” and its result is “mass society.” In Blumer’s definition, a “mass” is a large number of people who neither occupy the same space nor interact directly, yet whose behavior is highly consistent in timing and form. In S.A.C., this means so-called “do-it-yourself resistance by individuals.” Nor is this anything new. By the nineteenth century, at the latest, it was already central to classical sociology; both Marxism and Durkheim discussed it. Sociologists found that in traditional societies, identification and antagonism were always situated: they tended to occur in a specific place, between two groups that interacted directly. In modern society, comparable collective action transcends particular situations. Individuals without direct connections can also form mutually antagonistic, so-called “imagined communities.” How can we explain this shift in collective action from traditional to modern society? Marxism’s concept of “class” undoubtedly occupies an extremely important position. It was the first to identify a mobilizing potential in social “structure” as a mechanism that transcends particular situations: individuals who occupy the same structural position remain a potential group even if their social lives never intersect. These “individualists” (stand alone) can, when necessary, make the transition from a “class in itself” to a “class for itself”—a “complex of individualists” (stand alone complex).
S.A.C., then, asks what gives rise to cyber-society—this society of still more atomized and homogenized individuals (stand alone)—and how collective action (stand alone complex) is possible within it. In other words, the origins and mechanisms of mass society.
There have always been two approaches to explaining the origins of mass society. One is Marxism’s account of its formation through capital: the masses are produced by capitalist production (classical Marxism), circulation (Wallerstein’s world-systems Marxism), and consumption (Baudrillard’s post-Marxism), then re-“structured” through similar economic circumstances—that is, class—into a group capable of action. This is the theory of working-class formation. The other is Tilly’s account of its formation through the state: the masses are produced by continual state mobilizations, which may take the form of democratization (Ortega y Gasset), educational reform (Parsons), and so on. They are then re-“structured” into a group capable of action through their shared identity as members of the nation-state. This is the theory of state formation. The latter view is clearly better suited to Third World countries where capital was underdeveloped from the outset, and also fairly well suited to East Asia. In East Asian countries, the initial accumulation of economic capital was accomplished through the state, and state capital still plays a central role in determining conversion rates between different forms of capital across society.
Seen in this light, the difference between BR and GIS has something of the character of the debate over the “relative autonomy of the state” between Miliband of the British Marxist tradition and the structuralist Marxist Poulantzas. It also has something of the later debate over “state autonomy” between society-centered theorists and the state-centered theorist Skocpol. Classical cyberpunk means declaring war on capital and resisting consumerism’s “little sister”; its subject matter is the labor processes of “posthumans” and commercial conspiracies. But for East Asia—where state power has long overridden the people’s rights, and state and society remain peculiarly stuck together—cyberpunk means declaring war on the state and resisting statism’s “big brother”; its subject matter is the making of state policy and internal upheaval within the state.2 Where the value of the state takes precedence, individual value cannot find independent expression. It can be realized only indirectly, by attaching itself to some reason of state. This produces all manner of statist movements in which “the state (abstract, ideal) opposes the state (actual).” Hence the saying that every crisis “begins with the failure of statism on the government’s side and ends with the victory of statism among the people.”
What ultimately appears in Duck’s GIS, then, is a whole range of actors laying competing claims to the state’s “justice” and attempting to rebuild its “ethical character.” “State politics” overwhelmingly prevails over the “politics of production.” This is, in fact, a cyberpunk experience firmly rooted in East Asia.
After Reading Kojin Karatani…
By Kojin Karatani.
Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx.
I’ve leafed through a few pages of Karatani over the past couple of days, and only now realized that Patlabor 2: The Movie really is a film made by postwar Japanese people—and a film only postwar Japanese people could have made.3
Because of the “peace constitution,” Kantianism’s influence on postwar Japan really does run extraordinarily deep. This is a country founded entirely on Kant’s Perpetual Peace. Foucault once distinguished three kinds of “war.” “War between states,” or “international war,” hardly needs discussing: postwar Japan long ago renounced its right to wage external war. But before war became a “right” belonging exclusively to the state, there were two other kinds of war, private forms of war now concealed from view.
The first is “race war.” Race war originates in this fact: in early states, rulers and ruled often belonged to different peoples and did not intermarry or share a culture or laws. The formation of the modern nation-state involves an internal “leveling”: communities large and small within the state are destroyed, their members extracted and made to stand alone, then given a new collective identity through being granted the status of “nationals.” Thus the modern state nominally contains only one “community”: the community of nationals/the nation. Early states, however, were not so internally homogenized (or synchronized). They contained ethnic communities large and small, including dominant and dominated groups, and hence race war. This “race war” continues to this day within the nation-state in a suppressed form: the various forms of racism and xenophobia. Take imperialist America: we can hardly call it a country without “internal war.” It exists in a state of virtually perpetual ethnic conflict.
By Foucault.
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended.”
The other is “class war.” Class war is actually a derivative of race war. If the nation-state presupposes Parsons’s model of social equilibrium—the state as a highly integrated “society” whose functions are coordinated—then race war presupposes a Marxist model of society based on coercion: the state as a deeply divided, conflict-ridden “society” in which one group suppresses another. When this model of understanding shifts from kinship groups to economic groups, it produces class war on the model of race war. This “class war,” too, leaves remnants within the nation-state: social-democratic struggle, the fellahized remnant of workers’ revolution.4 Thus Foucault joins “race war” and its derivative, “class war,” under the name “race-war schema.”
But no such situation exists in postwar Japan. We might even say that postwar Japan is the only place where it does not exist. Postwar Japan is an exceptional case, which is why Patlabor 2 is a postwar Japanese film. Postwar Japan renounced its right to wage external war through its peace constitution. Postwar Japan is, in ideological discourse, one of the world’s very few monoethnic states, with no second people within its borders. The postwar Japanese left suffered complete defeat; at least in the Japanese left’s own view, it failed to establish a universal revolutionary subjectivity. Thus postwar Japan has, at least nominally, no interstate war, race war, or class war: it is a thoroughly “peaceful country.” Only in postwar Japan do you have a “peace” that needs defending.
But is this “peace” just? Perhaps, as Karatani says, postwar Japan’s condition is neither mode of exchange D nor X: it is not a “sublation” of earlier modes of exchange, but their mere “cancellation” and “repression.” That is why Karatani says that “peace” may be unjust and “war” may be just. War brings precisely the return of the repressed, in order to realize “Socialism” on a higher plane.
So the real subject of Patlabor 2 is not “peace” but “war,” and this subject extends into Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG (the second season of the Ghost in the Shell TV series). I don’t know how much of a role Duck played in GIG, since Kenji Kamiyama wrote the scripts for all the final episodes. But in the last episode, Gōda explicitly says that postwar Japan, although it calls itself capitalist, is actually an “idealized Socialist state.” I don’t know how Kamiyama understands “Socialism” here, but I instinctively feel that this “Socialism” already bears a very strong resemblance to Karatani’s “associationism.” Take Kuze’s own account, too: the revolution he envisages is actually a movement with a religious character. This also fits Karatani’s claim that Buddhist/Christian religious movements were the repressed form taken, in early states, by mode of exchange D, which constitutes Socialism/associationism. Karatani’s influence is very clearly visible in GIG—or rather, his influence on postwar Japanese intellectual life.