It—truth—does not speak. I am a love-spreading, unidentified flying object.
The word “aesthetics” naturally means different things in different contexts. Statues, poems, novels, paintings, plays—we should avoid lumping them all together when discussing aesthetics. Film aesthetics is an emerging field, and we need to remember that cinema, as an art form, does not have a much longer history than erciyuan.1 To my mind, we absolutely cannot simply equate erciyuan works made through the medium of film [original editor’s note: animated films] with cinema [original editor’s note: live-action films]. That confusion is like treating a film adapted from a novel as an extension of the novel.
There are plenty of theoretical books on film aesthetics. Take Bazin’s What Is Cinema?, which did not exactly bowl me over—apart from its hefty price and dreadful layout. Then there is Balázs’s book, published in Chinese as Film Aesthetics,2 which I have not read, though judging by the title it does indeed seem to discuss film aesthetics. Erciyuan, by contrast, has not received the attention it deserves within aesthetics: there is relatively little research and relatively little discussion. Now that erciyuan has entered the aesthetic mainstream, we need to pay more attention to these questions. This essay is one such attempt.
The Aura of Erciyuan
This essay will quote Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” extensively and shamelessly. First, we need to look at a concept. Once I have quoted and explained it, I will show how it relates to erciyuan.
What, then, is aura? Described in terms of space and time, it is the unique appearance of something that lies at a distance yet feels so close. […] The decline of aura arises from two circumstances … namely, the desire of the modern masses to make things more readily “approachable.”3
Aura signifies a kind of immersive spiritual communion. Its most conspicuous feature is distance: an object of worship necessarily produces a sense of unapproachability, and this sense is also a religious feeling. We can see Benjamin himself explaining aura through sacred images.
By Walter Benjamin.
In Benjamin’s view, artworks in the age of mechanical reproduction have already lost their aura—put simply, they have lost their sense of distance. We can, of course, regard aura as a kind of objet a (1. the cause of desire; 2. an imagined object of desire). The modern collapse of the Name-of-the-Father (roughly equivalent to the traditional legal order) sets off a chain reaction, preventing objet a from being successfully extracted. This is also the fundamental cause of the psychotic writing found in Futurism and Surrealism.
We can see how the mass reproduction of films and photographs makes the location of an artwork irrelevant. These artworks are now everywhere, within easy reach. Chuck Palahniuk once pointed out in his masterpiece Choke that where a work of art is placed, and at what angle, matters more than the work itself. This neatly illustrates how aesthetic ideology operated before the loss of aura. But once this mode of operation is discovered, the artwork’s replaceability is laid bare. Aura is a discourse, a mode of knowledge. It can function normally only under the supervision of the Name-of-the-Father.
Benjamin stresses that cinema is something enjoyed collectively, and that it is fascism’s favorite. With the advent of cinema, the other arts gradually become cinematic. We should note that the Dadaists took the offensive, sticking buttons and bus tickets onto pictures to destroy what little aura remained. Meanwhile, writers such as Calvino and Vonnegut cannot wait to close the distance between themselves and their readers, becoming ever more engrossed in textual games that turn back on themselves.
Cinema causes distraction: this is Benjamin’s view. He argues that its succession of images prevents people from becoming absorbed in thought, which is entirely consistent with the definition of modernity. In Benjamin’s view, cinema is like a tentacle monster, tugging at people’s sense of touch and leaving them unable to concentrate. There is a resemblance here to McLuhan’s idea of touch that can be heard. We must take note of the rapid transition from silent to sound film. Audiences at the time eagerly wanted that sense of distance—aura—to be shortened still further.
The object of worship has shifted from the Virgin Mary to the film actor. One thing is certain: it is much easier to have relations with an actor than with a sacred image. Actors can be approached, photographs can be licked, films can be watched anywhere.
But with erciyuan, the situation is entirely different. Let me start with the conclusion: erciyuan restores aura. In other words, erciyuan establishes a sense of distance. This sense of distance is structural: it is Lacan’s “third form of foreclosure” (a constitutive exclusion).
The distance of erciyuan is clear enough in the rather ironic expression “2D waifus” (two-dimensional wives): we are three-dimensional people, and with the technology available today, making contact with the two-dimensional world is still very difficult.
It is precisely this difficulty of contact—one might even say its impossibility—that produces the worship of erciyuan as though it were a sacred image. The beautiful girls of erciyuan do not smoke, take drugs, drink, or go clubbing. They are forever perfect. Even if those little booklets4 try to “defile” them, it is all in vain. For erciyuan’s followers can distinguish between different simulacra (when otaku chat, they do not confuse the plots of those fan comics with the main storyline). There is a primary simulacrum (the one in the work) and secondary simulacra (those in derivative works and fan creations). In this respect, erciyuan’s “hyperreality” remains incomplete. You cannot just treat Baudrillard as a formula and stuff any old rubbish into it.
From this standpoint, moe-addled fans are more perceptive than the so-called fandom Brahmins.5 “Erciyuan is my faith” has long been a refrain we’re sick of hearing. In fact, it is a very “natural” thing to say. Don’t believe me? Replace “erciyuan” with “cinema”: “Cinema is my faith.” Sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? Of course it does. Because there is no distance between cinema and anyone’s life. Erciyuan, on the other hand, is structurally and absolutely different (in dimension) from everyone’s life. Only erciyuan has both cult value and exhibition value, while also being founded on mass delusion (just like sacred images in religion).
It is this performative moment that is the moment of real change. The Brahmins clearly exhibit a fetishistic disavowal here: “I know very well … but I am going to do it anyway.” In other words, these Althusserian (or Pascalian) materialists, who take part in all sorts of rituals while insisting that they have no faith, have forgotten that faith is something material. Faith is nothing but ritual, and has little to do with whether you believe.
Now we can see that there is not much difference between a hopeless otaku kneeling before a Love Live! itasha6 and a believer kneeling before a sacred image. The primary simulacrum of Love Live! comes from the Love Live! anime, while sacred images must obviously be chalked up to religious classics. They (sacred images or Nico) first have an (imaginary) image. Then, when this image is given substance in the symbolic order on an immense scale (Kant’s dynamical sublime), aura returns in the form of the repressed.
Editor’s Note
Well said.