How Is the Rooftop Institute for Cultural Studies Possible?

Lord, it is time. Summer was so grand.
Let your shadow fall on the sundials, and let autumn winds sweep the fields.
Command the last fruits to ripen; give them two more days of southern weather;
Force them to ripen, and turn the last sweetness into strong wine.
—Rilke, “Autumn Day”

It is time to build a house of our own.

It is time to enter the tree-lined avenues and explore existence amid estranged light and shadow.

Hello, everyone. All the members of the Rooftop Institute for Cultural Studies have asked me to write an inaugural statement briefly explaining our aims and activities, so that interested readers can get to know us, take part, and join us.

Q1: What do we study and discuss? How do we go about it?

We examine animation, comics, games, and related cultural phenomena. Depending on our contributors’ interests, we sometimes also turn to film, fiction, cosplay, and other subjects.

As you know, animation, comics, and games are cultural forms whose content is growing richer and whose social influence is increasing. They have recently attracted more and more attention and research. Because of my field, I have even come across reports from securities research departments on the “two-dimensional economy”—further evidence of this development.¹ Film already has film criticism and media criticism (or, one might say, popular culture studies). So it occurs to us to bring these approaches and perspectives to animation, comics, and games. That is what we want to do. In fact, many pioneers in Japan, Europe, the United States, and even China have already undertaken work of various kinds and to varying degrees. We salute them here.

To conduct an inquiry, researchers need to bring enough tools—that is, intellectual resources—to the task. In this sense, they must gain a sufficiently thorough command of these [materials], both their objects of study and their research tools, in light of their purposes. To explain how we conduct our inquiries, then, let us begin with the two areas from which we draw our intellectual resources.

It is really quite simple. In my humble view, we can divide them into two groups: industry and academia. Many of you will know that research in the natural sciences is often divided between work undertaken in industry and work undertaken in universities. For animation, comics, and games, the relevant intellectual resources—concepts and categories—can likewise be divided between those developed and commonly used within the animation industry itself (such as storyboards, layouts, and the associated production processes) and academic thought from outside the industry.

When we speak of intellectual resources from academia, we do not mean a closed, narrowly defined discipline. We mean the broad world of human intellectual activity, including but not limited to philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities and arts. Think of the many different theoretical tools used in film criticism, and perhaps the point will become clear.

In our articles, we aim to take our subjects seriously, approaching them with questions to pursue and theoretical resources to draw on. But we do not intend to hold ourselves to the standards of academic journal articles. That would be unnecessary and no fun. Think of film criticism: joking, mockery, anger, denunciation—any style will do, so long as it has explanatory power. We also ask you, our readers, not to demand too much of our volunteer team.

Q2: Do animation creators and audiences need to draw on theoretical resources from outside the animation industry?

Clearly, a key animator need not know anything about theory to produce, through outstanding skill, work that leaves audiences awestruck.

“Through the wretched, largely negative and fault-finding aesthetic criticism in all manner of newspapers and journals, a kind of ‘half-baked’ culture seeps into the wider public. For those who create, this is a foul miasma, a poison that will utterly destroy every fiber of the tree of creativity, from its green leaves to its heartwood.” —Conversations of Goethe²

We have no intention—and never have had any—of using our research and commentary to influence the animation industry’s production processes or the content it produces. That would be a poison called arrogance. That said, good film critics rarely presume that their criticism will influence directors either. Nevertheless, over cinema’s more than a hundred years of development, critics’ ideas, disseminated through textbooks, have had some influence on some formally trained directors and other filmmakers. At the level of abstract grand narrative, clearly no industry can stand apart from the reciprocal influences linking it to the rest of society.

Of course, our original purpose is still not to help “move the industry forward” in some distant future. Dai Jinhua puts it more plainly in her discussion of Dunkirk: the key to understanding a commercially successful work lies first in the time and society to which it belongs, in the here and now we inhabit, in the larger political-economic logic and the public state of mind surrounding the film. Creative consciousness is often governed by the social unconscious (this is Freud’s term; in Durkheim’s terms, it might be called the collective conscience).³ An artist wholly unable to sense and share the public’s state of mind cannot generate such a wave of popular enthusiasm. In a sense, the purpose of cultural studies, including film criticism, is not to exert influence over works and their industries, but to analyze the social world as a whole.

If we follow the classification offered by the more experienced critic zecy, our focus is perhaps on the social roots of creators’ ideas—primarily those of writers—audience responses, and a work’s popularity. Sometimes we also examine a work’s content in finer detail: “spotting references,” in a sense.

For audiences, encountering different perspectives on a work is also an experience that may help them see it “more clearly.” And isn’t seeing more clearly itself a good, an end in its own right? As a rule, people who are nearsighted do not ask what further purpose clearer sight is supposed to serve. Seeing clearly is a good in itself. Obviously, those familiar with literary theory will know that an author’s own intentions matter, but this does not preclude further interpretations by critics. “Authorial authority” is not beyond question. The many readers deeply poisoned by reading-comprehension exercises in Chinese-language classes may recognize this with some lingering resentment.

Finally, we must emphasize that we continually remind ourselves to take knowledge developed within the animation industry—production processes, creators’ techniques, and so on—seriously whenever our research calls for it. We should do less of the kind of criticism that never gets to grips with its subject. Still less will we take pride in being loftily aloof: we will try to convey what we mean in accessible language, not language that defies understanding or reason.

Q3: What kind of team are you? What if I want to join?

We are a team armed with freedom and reason. We encourage individual initiative while preventing the team from becoming any one person’s domain or a closed clique. If members go astray, we will undertake self-purification in accordance with our written rules. We seek the cooperative efficiency of a division of labor, but resist the hierarchies it produces—the wise above and the fools below. We persuade through arguments and reasons.

We place enormous importance on self-education. We schedule weekly study days devoted to the animation industry and the humanities and social sciences, and encourage participation (though this amounts to going through the motions). Each month, we compile a document of study materials, recording the articles, videos, and platforms shared that month.

We aim for a degree of commercialization, so that we can extend our reach and give contributors reasonable compensation. We unanimously agree that our undertaking does not exist for profit itself; this does not conflict with the possibility that we might happily accept a profit. We will work across as many platforms as possible, including but not limited to WeChat public accounts, Weibo, QQ public accounts, Zhihu columns, Bilibili, and LOFTER. Please follow us.

We hope prospective members will bring at least one of the following:

1. Familiarity with and love for animation, comics, and games and their histories, perhaps even experience writing criticism of particular works.

2. Some knowledge of the broad intellectual world of philosophy and its branches, the social sciences, and the humanities and arts.

3. Some acquaintance with film criticism or popular culture studies, perhaps even experience writing in these fields.

4. Skills in video production and editing, laying out written material, or drawing.

For now, while we are making no profit, friends who share our aims are welcome to help power the project with love.⁴

A Few Unnecessary Words

I am well aware that the unusual nature of our work makes it liable to attract criticism. I therefore apologize in advance for any difficulties in understanding caused by the hard-to-avoid mistakes in our work. When commenting on works, we do not generally address particular individuals, groups, or their views for purposes outside our research. What we usually address is a social fact or a socially shared attitude. Please bear this in mind. As for slander arising from people taking such criticism personally, we can only brush it away like cobwebs.

As a matter of strategy, we will take extreme care to avoid “immediate” intervention when controversial works are caught in ongoing battles. If an event is genuinely worth analyzing, what harm is there in leaving it for a year? We will do our best to revise extreme or socially unjust views and wording in submissions; maintain a degree of separation between individual contributors and the team; and answer challenges forthrightly and with humility, always taking a position that benefits the overwhelming majority of creators and audiences.

We will remain humble and unassuming, and always acknowledge the limits of our views—in substance as well as in form. We do not believe that the further we move beyond the public’s understanding, the more exalted we become or the more valuable our work is. Even so, we will not sacrifice accuracy in what we say for the sake of accessibility. We ask your understanding on this point. We ask practitioners and scholars to guide us and correct our possible mistakes and shortcomings. We welcome well-intentioned discussion and criticism.

We will pursue an independent policy of peaceful relations, conducted with courtesy and restraint. Whether outside forces seek to interfere through money or popularity, we will first take truth as our teacher.

I know very well how difficult everything discussed above will be. To be honest, I’m almost ready to cry, “万策尽きた—We’re out of options!”⁵ But let me close with a passage from a speech by Weber!⁶

All historical experience proves one truth: the possible cannot be attained unless you persist in seeking the impossible in this world. … Even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must forge a heart strong enough to endure the shattering of all their hopes. They must do so now; otherwise they will not even accomplish what is possible today. A person must be certain that even if the world seems unbearably stupid and base, wholly unworthy of their devotion, they can still remain without regret or resentment; even in the face of this, they must still be able to say: “Wait and see!”