I have not yet relinquished my great hopes for what is to come, and so I long to hear the heart’s voice in those with understanding and to behold their inner light. Inner light breaks through darkness; the heart’s voice shuns falsehood and deceit. … What manner of speech is this that fills the world? What manner of affairs occupy its people? The heart’s voice, the inner light—neither is to be found. —Lu Xun. Yes, he really said this.1
Lab on Roof’s second director. Then there’s only one answer—action!
Jingxi:
Hello, fellow members. Unless you’ve dug up the institute’s inaugural statement on Zhihu, this is basically my first time speaking here on Bilibili as myself. I imagine there’s plenty you’d like to know about Lab on Roof and the team behind it, so let me start with an introduction, drawing on our earlier Q&A.
Q: What prompted you to establish Lab on Roof, and what was its purpose? How did the writers come together?
A: The opportunity came when the director’s offline commitments temporarily loosened their grip on him; the purpose was assigned retrospectively. For now, it’s roughly what our profile signature is trying to say. Writers don’t just come together by themselves. The director recruited the initial members from two circles: the Zhanba Humanities and Social Sciences Group, a community he also founded; and his friends from high school and university, along with friends he’d made online. Of course, once the founding members were assembled, our team became open to others.
Q: What’s the researchers’ age range?
A: Undergraduates through PhD students / corporate drones. Sadly, no genius high-school students have joined us.
Q: How have Japanese society and history influenced changes in the content popular in Japanese animation?
A: We’ll soon be publishing a translated article on a related subject. Stay tuned.
Q: What do you make of “virtual kodoku”?2
A: Just a personal take: it’s one sign of virtual idols’ shift from the spontaneous individualism of the Protestant ethic to the stage of corporate trusts. I hope what follows brings better welfare and more rights for the human performers, not the reverse. I only stan Cierra and Fox. I don’t have a thing for white hair; I just happen to like white hair.
Q: What are the shortcomings of Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals?
A: A full assessment would be difficult. See Yuban’s Zhihu essay “The Hystericization of the Postmodern”—a psychoanalytic critique of Azuma.3
Q: Where does Lab on Roof’s name come from?
A: “On the roof…”—Kindred Spirits on the Roof; “cultural research…”—Yamaboshi High School’s Cultural Research Club in Kokoro Connect; “institute…”—from the English “Institute.” A roof also suggests looking down over the landscape; rooftops are an important image in many anime. By “cultural studies,” we actually mean criticism of literature and the arts.
Q: Recommended reading?
A: In theory, I should convene the researchers and have us agree on a reading list, but that’s a lot of administrative overhead. So the director, being sovereign in principle, will offer a list for now with his own favorites smuggled in, for members just starting out in social science and philosophy.4
That wraps up the Q&A. Looking back over 2018: since getting started in late July or early August, Lab on Roof has spent five months establishing a fairly regular publishing schedule and positions on three platforms, with a combined following of about 4,000. The results have been quite a surprise, even to us. The director himself had a certain conviction that the idea was bound to succeed, but of course much of what happened took even him by surprise.
“First engage in a serious battle and then see what happens.”5
In 2019, Lab on Roof will keep working to put out worthwhile articles. Two things should be made clear here. Some of our criticism does leave room for auteur theory: in auteur cinema, for instance, authorship can itself be a very important feature. But if the response to everything we write is “The author would never have thought of that … this article is nonsense …,” all we can do is give those responses the silent treatment—we won’t engage. If you want to criticize a thinker’s views, you first need to understand your subject. If you don’t, and instead stand outside making strange pronouncements, you only make yourself ridiculous. Personally, I think that, at the level of synchronic structure, recognition by the community of university-trained scholars—including polemical engagement—remains a comparatively decent criterion for judging whether an idea has significance / persuasive force. In the longer view, of course, that must be entrusted to communities of readers and the course of history. I’ve gone off on a tangent. That’s my personal view.
Second, Lab on Roof has practically no influence over what authors write or how they write it, let alone any power to compel them. We can offer suggestions about textual errors or minor matters of wording and sentence construction, but we rarely interfere with authors’ ideas and views unless we judge them extreme and liable to provoke an online firestorm. We give authors what freedoms we can in their writing: no deadlines, no compulsory contributions. At bottom, we’re a free association of self-governing writers. So, though this may sound a little underhanded, please distinguish authors’ personal views from Lab on Roof’s function as a screen on which their work appears. It’s rather like the relationship between columnists and a magazine, except that we have much less power than a print magazine.
Of course, life is finite and knowledge boundless. If the authors or I misstate or distort any basic points of consensus, please point it out kindly. We’ll continue to be humble and open-minded.
Before talking grandly about poetry and thinking, remember that certain things begin with wonder and awe.
Editor’s note: Apart from the director, only hep wrote a year-end review. That tells you how loosely organized this outfit is.
“At the time, I just wanted to see what it would look like to have a bunch of people with completely different interests, positions, and values writing things together. As I type this, the group has been around for over half a year (Jingxi’s note: not half a year). To say I’ve found some wonderful sense of belonging or learned anything of lasting value would probably be bullshit. But as the person who suggested writing a review, I really ought to say something, and I do have things to talk about.”
My rambling piece on Persona 5, which was supposed to be the account’s first article, got delayed by my slacking off and ended up appearing after my friend aus’s science-and-magic series. After reading all those interviews, I’d been dipping into various gaming outlets’ P5 articles every now and then, until I couldn’t take it anymore: “Can’t anyone write about something other than Jung?” In the end, of course, perhaps that rambling, all-over-the-place article did achieve the goal I’d set myself: to give anyone still willing to write about P5 a few other directions to try. There are plenty of interesting things besides Jung, and there’s no need to confine ourselves to tracing particular borrowings and the models behind them. Someone is bound to want something even further off the point.
The second piece, on The Garden of Sinners, was basically a practical lesson from my friend Qianshen in turning a write-off of a draft into something at least a little worth reading. When I handed in that first version, admittedly in a slacker’s frame of mind, I had no idea it would turn into this. The period around that article was probably the roughest. It wasn’t that anyone was persecuting me or some big name had singled me out for criticism—nobody knew who we were then. It seemed that whatever we did, no reader would discuss the articles’ content with us (not that they necessarily do now). It felt as though our work was no different from writing an article for a commemorative subtitle; there wasn’t much significance to speak of. I think I at least used it to state where I stand: I have neither the ability nor the interest to give systematic answers to “big” questions like what Evangelion is ultimately saying or what makes Cowboy Bebop good. I’ve only ever written about things I find interesting. The rest was never what I set out to do.
The Revue Starlight article was basically the product of my friend sue’s off-the-cuff riffing. Nietzsche and Revue Starlight are both subjects I tend to get into arguments over. All I can say is that I’m grateful to Zhang, a teacher at Jingxi’s school, for taking such an interest in my humble piece. My recent article on Zombie Land Saga has relied largely on Jingxi’s painstaking work on the wording. After all, I don’t know grammar, and I’ve never thought I absolutely had to make myself understood (I’m working on it, I’m working on it).
I don’t know which anime next year will make me feel I simply have to write something, or whether I’ll suddenly dig out an old show and come up with an interesting topic. I might talk about killers in connection with Boogiepop and Others, or write something about Porco Rosso, my favorite Miyazaki film. I’ll gradually get to the unfinished pieces I’ve left hanging.
I’ll probably post something after The Promised Neverland starts airing, though it may not have much to do with the work itself. It’ll concern a subject that perhaps isn’t quite suited to looking ahead to a new year: a whimper and the end of the world.
So, that’s Lab on Roof’s review of 2018.