ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
The Animalized Postmodern1 introduced two concepts that have since become favorite topics of discussion among otaku: “database” and “animalization.” But “animalization,” a concept developed by appropriating Kojève’s theory of desire, lacks the power to explain the realities of ACG—animation, comics, and games—culture. It is far less illuminating than “database.” Here is how Azuma understands animalization:
What is animalization? In Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Kojève offers a distinctive definition of the difference between humans and animals. The key is the distinction between desire and need. For Kojève, humans have desires, whereas animals have only needs. A “need” is a simple craving directed toward a particular object, which can be satisfied through a relationship with that object. A hungry animal, for instance, can be completely satisfied simply by eating. This circuit from lack to satisfaction characterizes need, and much of human life, too, consists of acting to meet needs.
To be precise, Kojève uses the expressions “human desire” and “animal desire.” Since distinguishing between them is rather cumbersome, however, I have deliberately chosen different terms here, drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacanians reserve “desire” (désir) for human desire, using “need” (besoin) for what Kojève calls “animal desire.” Humans, however, also have another kind of craving: “desire.” Unlike need, desire does not disappear even when the desired object has been provided and the lack satisfied. Beginning with Kojève, many French thinkers influenced by him have been particularly fond of illustrating this craving through men’s sexual desire for women. A man’s desire for a woman does not end even after he has obtained her body; on the contrary, it grows more intense (so they write). Sexual desire is not simply a matter of the physiological satisfaction of orgasm: it also involves the complex structure of craving the desire of others. Put simply, after obtaining a woman, a man wants this fact to be desired by others—he wants to be envied—and also wants to obtain what others desire: he envies them. Desire therefore never ends. Humans differ from animals in possessing self-consciousness and creating social relations precisely because this intersubjective desire exists. Animals’ needs can be satisfied without others, but human desire essentially requires others. Although I cannot elaborate here, this distinction is in fact the foundation and overarching premise of modern philosophy and thought from Hegel to Lacan. Kojève follows the same path.
Thus “becoming animal” here means the disappearance of the intersubjective structure and the arrival of a condition in which each person’s “lack–satisfaction” circuit is closed. What Kojève called “animal” was postwar American-style consumer society. In this context, we can see clearly that the term is not merely impressionistic: it also contains a sharp insight.
Azuma recognizes the line of transmission connecting the concept of “desire” in Hegel, Kojève, and Lacan. What he fails to notice is that Lacan’s appropriation of Kojève is highly original and departs in part from Kojève’s usage. By continuing to view Lacan from Kojève’s standpoint, Azuma misunderstands him to some extent. This very misunderstanding causes Azuma to miss the historical-materialist potential of Lacanian theory—the very theoretical focus that Lacan himself continually elaborated through the “four discourses” in the 1970s.
Lacan’s theory of desire does not consist simply of the binary Azuma describes, human desire versus animal need. It is a triad: need (besoin)—demand (demande)—desire (désir). Demand, the logical starting point for grasping the knot of desire, is precisely what Azuma overlooks.
Lacan’s best formulation of desire, “human desire is the desire of the Other,” tells us this: human desire is always an effect produced when language, external to the subject, acts upon that subject. This explanation cannot be replaced by “human desire is structured by language,” because what language structures directly is not desire but demand. What distinguishes humans from animals in achieving satisfaction through external objects is not merely that humans establish intersubjectivity, but that they establish it through speech. Human demands are articulated through language and are therefore necessarily confined within the framework of language’s signifying order. Yet, as Derrida explains through the concept of différance, the signifier of demand does not point directly to the signified of satisfaction. Instead, it is indefinitely deferred within a metonymic relation that keeps pointing to the next signified. A demand articulated through language is thus always a demand that cannot attain satisfaction. This impasse produces two results. First, the signifying chain retroactively produces the master signifier/need that represents original satisfaction; it serves only as an empty logical form that arrests the signifying chain’s bad infinity. Second, the impasse produces the difference between master signifier/need and ordinary signifier/demand—object a/desire—which logically guarantees the completeness of master signifier/original need.
To quote Lacan in Écrits:2
Through a reversal that is not simply a negation of the negation, the force of pure loss emerges from the residue of an annihilation. Desire replaces demand’s unconditionality with an “absolute” condition, one that can in fact resolve what sets proof of love at odds with the satisfaction of need. This is why desire is neither a craving for satisfaction nor a demand for love, but the difference obtained by subtracting the former from the latter: the very phenomenon of their splitting.
The simple formula for desire is .3 Demand, however, has logical priority. Need is a reflexive compensation for demand’s internal lack, while desire is the nowhere-to-be-found remainder that makes up for what demand lacks. The subject, as a subject of desire, is therefore a remainder castrated by language. Only on this level can we understand why, for Lacanians, “human scum” is a genuine compliment: it means you are the genuine article—a “human being as such.”
Let us briefly turn away from Lacan’s theory of desire and return to The Animalized Postmodern. Azuma identifies the disappearance of the intersubjective structure and the extinction of desire as characteristics of consumer society. But here he neglects to examine “consumer society” in terms of political economy. Consumer society became the social model adopted across the advanced capitalist societies after the war precisely because it squanders vast quantities of excess output through consumption. This ensures that capital can continue to develop, accumulating profits through ever-expanding production, rather than disintegrating in an economic crisis of underconsumption. Buying and using consumer goods in a consumer society is by no means equivalent to what Kojève calls the “last man” freely and playfully using the products of labor. Rather, it is marked by a compulsion that cannot be ignored. Azuma’s theory of “animalization” cannot explain why otaku culture, as a consumer culture, must maintain ceaseless reproduction if desire has disappeared. Nor can it explain why the grand narratives of modernity cannot satisfy otaku’s animalized needs, and why the shift must instead be to the database model of the “grand nonnarrative.”
If we now reconsider Lacan’s theory of desire, isn’t the political-economic problem of otaku culture that Azuma cannot answer readily solved? Object a, the object-cause of desire, intimates a need beyond articulable demand, a need representing original satisfaction. In pursuing object a, the subject produces a succession of ordinary signifiers/demands. What makes these signifiers merely ordinary is that, compared with need, they always fall short: they are not good enough. This leads the subject to develop hysterical symptoms, producing still more ordinary signifiers/demands in the hope of satisfying desire. But what makes desire desire is precisely that it can never be satisfied. Object a is nothing but the very fact of lack in the signifier given positive form. Master signifier/need can never truly point to original satisfaction. Like a “hotel with infinitely many rooms,” it can ultimately be nothing but an empty signifier, crowded with ordinary signifiers yet never full. But it is precisely the inexhaustible drive to pursue desire that sustains the unending consumption, profits, capital accumulation, and reproduction of capitalist society. Far from being animalized, “pseudo-Deleuzian” postmodern society nominally lifts every prohibition on desire and celebrates “the subject’s attainment of unlimited fluidity.” It is exhausting compulsory enjoyment; it is aristocratic aesthetics brought to the masses; it is identity politics waiting for the right price; it is “being different” built on an accumulation of spectacle; it is a “technology of the self” for freely constructing subjectivity through tasteful—and, of course, not inexpensive—consumer goods. In short, in the postmodern condition inhabited by otaku, desire has not disappeared: it has erupted violently inside the boiler of capital’s operations.
Otaku hope to satisfy desire through continual consumption, only to confront the infinity of desire and the infinity of consumption. Thus, as long as we continue to regard otaku culture as a consumer culture, the dimension of desire cannot truly disappear from otaku, because it is what drives their continual consumption. At the same time, grand narratives must wither and give way to the “grand nonnarrative,” because the latter possesses an openness the former lacks and is always ready to produce a series of new demands to offer desire a consumerist form of substitutive satisfaction. Otaku are not animals. They are “human scum,” subjects—subjects who indulge desire to the utmost yet never attain bliss, hysterical subjects. The most fitting title for a book about otaku culture is therefore, of course, not The Animalized Postmodern, but The Hystericized Postmodern.
Editor’s note: Scum’s Wish. (?)4 An early piece sparked by Yuban’s chat-group banter, this is somewhat rushed.