I, truth, shall speak.
Seek first food and clothing,
and the kingdom of God will come to you of its own accord.
—G. W. F. Hegel, 18071
1
This will be the last article Roof Research Society publishes this year/this decade. By a certain convention, the pages that follow will serve—or be pressed into service—to look back on the past year’s “labors” (perhaps those of the past decade, Roof Research Society’s “pre-history”), or to set out a grand blueprint for the year ahead. What this “convention” perhaps overlooks, however, is what mediates between the two: this “New Year’s address” itself. We therefore need to subject it to a thorough ontological examination: before the “address” begins to speak, it is already a problem.
This brings us to the article’s first question: why do we need an empty New Year’s address, a matter of pure form, to connect 2019 and 2020? In other words, if some major rupture really does occur on December 31 or January 1, what could that rupture be? The answer, of course, is that we have introduced an entirely new calendar—one in which the days gone by have been wiped clean, leaving:
A blank sheet of paper, unburdened, on which to write the newest and most beautiful words and paint the newest and most beautiful pictures.2
And it is here, too, that we encounter Walter Benjamin’s messianic time:
Calendars, then, do not count time as clocks do. They are monuments to a historical consciousness of which, in Europe, not the faintest trace seems to have survived for a hundred years. Yet in the July Revolution an incident occurred in which this consciousness came into its own. On the evening of the first day of fighting, the tower clocks were fired upon, independently and simultaneously, at several places in Paris. An eyewitness, who may have owed his insight to rhyme, wrote at the time:
Who would believe it! They say that, angry at the hour, New Joshuas, at the foot of every tower, Fired at the dials to halt the day.3
Perhaps the point of connection between this article, as a New Year’s address, and Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” lies in how this time shatters the everyday order. It resembles the reign of the “Lord of Misrule” in medieval Europe, under which we overturn every aspect of the social order—from the economy to the governance of life, gender, and so on. In the French Revolution and the countless struggles that followed, the potential displayed in these festivities exceeded the bounds of a mere “joke” and became a genuinely subversive force, much like the counteroffensive that “subcultural” practices launch against the “mainstream.” Reversing this logic, we can also give this “address” of ours an emancipatory meaning, treating it as our wish to remain at this point of rupture in time. Seen in this light, the irony is considerable: an “address” is first of all a war, a war directed at the future (“firing at the hands of the clock”)—a war in which the words we write turn into soldiers charging into battle, armed with a weapon called the past.
2
History and the past occupy a large part of Benjamin’s thought, as they do in the Angelus Novus he has given us: he studied German Baroque drama and nineteenth-century France. At the same time, his observations of the “present” saved him from having to settle for the paltry title of “historian.” To “sum him up in a word,” Benjamin perhaps comes closest to being a critic—as distinct from a reviewer or an essayist. To borrow his own description:
If, by way of a simile, we regard the growing work as a blazing funeral pyre, the reviewer stands before it like a chemist, the critic like an alchemist. Where the former has only wood and ash as the objects of his analysis, for the latter the flame alone harbors an enigma: that of the living. Thus the critic asks after the truth whose living flame continues to burn above the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of lived experience.
Yet this characterization is itself contradictory. Again, in his words:
Fools lament the decay of criticism. Its hour has long since passed. Criticism is a matter of the right distance. It is at home in a world where perspectives and prospects matter, and where taking a standpoint was still possible. Things, meanwhile, have pressed far too urgently upon human society. … Today’s most essential gaze into the heart of things—the mercantile gaze—is called advertising. It demolishes the free space of contemplation and thrusts things dangerously close to our faces, like a car growing to gigantic proportions as it hurtles toward us from the cinema screen. … With this, “objectivity” is finally dismissed. … The warmth of the subject opens itself to him and stirs his feelings. What, in the end, makes advertising so superior to criticism? Not what the red electric lettering says, but the pool of fire it reflects on the asphalt.4
One-Way Street was published in 1928—and we can only acknowledge, with melancholy, that even today we could apply this verdict without changing a word. If there is any difference between the reality we face and his description, it is that we can no longer clearly distinguish “reviewing” from “criticism.” This anti-traditional practice, saturated with imagination, has now become a university discipline. At this point, the way certain people spend their days clamoring about “the imagination of cultural studies” is better described as a kind of hysteria, reminding us that imagination has become the scarcest commodity of all—assuming imagination can even become a commodity in their hands.
Worse still, even “reviewing” is increasingly losing its former efficacy. We need only observe the convergence of today’s reviewers with the things they review: as the ocularcentrism of mainstream cultural products reaches its peak, our reviews, too, must take the form of videos to establish themselves at all. Much review writing has even degenerated further into memes and loud, exaggerated typography. We have reduced the efficacy of words to its lowest point in history—and all merely to turn reviews of artistic and literary works, even “Harry Potter literature,” into restaurant reviews, injecting more capital into a work’s sales and word of mouth.
Living criticism, we might say, has long been dead, replaced by an entire critical machine tainted by academia. In otaku culture, criticism–reviewing is even bound up from the outset with the production, sale, and exchange of works, and exerts an almost unprecedented influence on the formation of its audience’s identities. We must therefore ask: why insist on bringing to ACGN works a perspective that is less academicized, yet still “theoretical”? Why is there still a need for Roof Research Society and its ACGN criticism?
3
To answer this question, we must return to the first section. At the point of rupture in time, our writing–praxis is concerned precisely with the potential lost within history:
The past carries with it a secret index that refers it to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and our own. Our coming was expected on this earth. Like every generation before us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power on which the past has a claim.5
Is this not precisely Benjamin’s point? The past is always a failure, yet future success can be built only on redeeming the failures of the past. What truly matters, then, is the reflective movement of “plunging headlong into the past”—a stance we should maintain without compromise until the true Messiah comes. If this article has any ambition, it can only be this: this “address” will attempt to redeem our criticism, which has already failed and will fail, and to provide a rudimentary outline for Roof Research Society’s writing.
4
When Zhong discussed psychoanalysis—Lacan–Žižek—as a paradigm for ACGN criticism at our first anniversary, they did not address Lacan’s nearly traumatic first appearance in otaku culture: how Tamaki Saitō’s Beautiful Fighting Girl attempted to defend otaku and their desires. When the book appeared in 2000, the shadow of Tsutomu Miyazaki had not yet faded; we can also observe an astonishing convergence between Evangelion and the Tokyo subway incident in their attitudes toward “apocalypse” and “post-apocalypse.” Saitō’s first priority was therefore to prove that otaku were not perverts:
The tremendous response to beautiful fighting girls perfectly symbolizes society today, particularly the situation of women within it. That may be true … but it holds little interest for me. Such a view is somewhat too naïve: it treats fiction as a “true” reflection of real life, when this is precisely a classic case of confusing fact and fiction.6
We acknowledge that Saitō takes the right position on this question, but he goes astray in developing it. He takes the economy of desire in the otaku–beautiful fighting girl relation to exist for itself, yet at the same time makes it dependent on “the highly contextualized nature of Japanese space”—before ultimately turning to the concept of the “uncastrated imagination.”
Lud’s article has already offered a further response to and critique of this problem, so we may turn instead to another aspect of Saitō’s theory. His writing could almost be called an exemplary description of the mission of today’s psychoanalysts:
It is difficult … to find reasonable ways of alerting the public to problems, but above all without creating panic … Today’s psychoanalysts, theorists of psychoanalysis, should be able to convey to the state, to the state’s representatives … a certain amount of knowledge they possess, knowledge that can genuinely deal with the waves of panic that periodically erupt.7
If psychoanalytic discourse in Freud’s day arose to cure “non-normal” patients, then this “tradition” has arguably been preserved most faithfully by today’s analysts. Through a course of analysis, we can all tell ourselves that we are not “perverts” in any sense, and that we can hold fast to our enjoyment. The same argument can be extended to Tsutomu Miyazaki, or, more recently, Shinji Aoba. First, consider how disgusting it is that they could defend themselves this way; then turn it around and consider how very Miyazaki—or Aoba—this sort of defense is.
This is precisely where Roof Research Society’s insistence on applying psychoanalysis to ACGN criticism begins. Now that Saitō’s attempt has failed and been forgotten, our criticism concerns not only the works “themselves”; it also seeks to open a new path for theory—rather than settling for existing interpretations.
5
Likewise, in responding to challenges to the psychoanalytic paradigm, we can point to the aim of psychoanalysis: traversing the fantasy (la traversée du fantasme):
The most important question is not how to condemn and rationally defeat the enemy—a task that can all too easily strengthen the enemy’s hold over us—but how to break the (fantasmatic) spell the enemy casts upon us. The point of traversing the fantasy is not to dispense with enjoyment, as in the puritanical model of the old Left. Distance from fantasy means that I “unbind” enjoyment-meaning from its fantasmatic frame and recognize it as an indeterminate remainder: neither inherently “reactionary,” a support for historical inertia, nor an emancipatory force enabling us to break the constraints of the existing order.8
Our insistence on this principle, we might say, is also part of our criticism. As cultural products of this era, ACGN works are a part of social and cultural reality that cannot be ignored and deserve our closest scrutiny. To answer how the views and thoughts conveyed in a work come to be accepted by viewers through its form, what we need is not mere empathy and being moved, but a complete set of critical tools, a dissection of the work, and the imagination that arises from it.
6
We have never concealed Roof Research Society’s reflective—or rather, anti-“non-reflective”—stance. On this basis, we question ACGN works as material realizations of ideological state apparatuses, or ISAs, in Althusser’s terms, with something like a conditioned reflex. We question every encomium to “simplicity”:
We reject simple, fetishistic intoxication with ACGN works and their derivatives (the most obvious example: VTubers), especially when we consider their pornographic character;
We reject simply endorsing the values a work conveys. In the vast majority of works, it can be said, the blunt, brainless glorification of family affection, friendship, and romantic love often rests on the very absence of these supposedly “beautiful things” from the order of everyday life, and on the endless defense of—and howling on behalf of—what was never there to begin with, abandoning even the slightest reflection;
…
At this point, we should return to the question posed at the outset: why is there still a need for Roof Research Society and its ACGN criticism? The subject of this question is missing—who/what still needs Roof Research Society? The answer cannot be any so-called “spirit of history.” As Benjamin writes:
A storm is blowing from Paradise. It has caught in the angel’s wings and is so strong that he can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the heap of rubble before him grows toward the sky. This storm is what we call progress.9
Here, our answer is this: Roof Research Society writes for one simple purpose—we wish to pose questions and to inspire more readers to join in questioning every “simplicity.” Our writing does not attempt to solve any problem. As we have already stressed, we know full well that, from the very moment we begin writing, we have always-already failed insofar as “solving problems” or “giving answers” is concerned. On the contrary, we insist on posing questions and have unshakable faith in their power: questions can change how people think and thereby bring about a “paradigm revolution” in Kuhn’s sense. This questioning, whose purpose is to pose questions—negation in Hegel’s sense—is nothing other than the best expression of our reason. On the one hand, it can lead us toward the future; on the other, this journey into the future will necessarily be arduous. In Hegel’s words, it is a journey of “formation,” in which “Spirit silently weaves.”
—Roof Research Society, on the night of December 31, 2019