This essay won an award at Rags Drum 2021 Pre-Festival.
Abstract: This essay attempts to discuss two common modes of imagination in Japanese anime and manga: the spatialized body and space imagined as a body. The spatialized body refers to superhuman bodies such as giant robots. Space imagined as a body, as the phrase suggests, refers to space that displays bodily properties, as in Cells at Work! or Ghibli’s animistic worldview. This essay seeks to analyze these two modes and, further, to explore the complex and varied ideologies hidden behind them. As this essay sees it, the prototypes of both modes have been latent in Japanese anime and manga from the outset. To put it somewhat crudely, they resemble an opposition frequently discussed today: that between ideals of the non-everyday and concrete life, between abstract universality and concreteness.
I. To Pilot a Robot Is to Produce a Subject: The Spatialized Body
Let us begin with the “spatialized body.” In Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, we meet Agilulf, a knight who consists of nothing but armor, with nothing inside. Figures of this kind seem to have counterparts in Japanese anime and manga: Alphonse in Fullmetal Alchemist, for instance, or Brook in One Piece. What distinguishes them is the elimination of flesh, of all the complex properties of fleshly existence. The character’s body is reduced to a suit of armor or a skeleton—a mechanical entity in its most basic, simple, immediately graspable form. Within this material body, in turn, there is an inexplicable spirit/soul that cannot be reduced to matter. It is this that determines the mechanical body’s actions.
A hollow shell, driven by some soul or will within. To my mind, this may also be a metaphor for the superhuman bodies, such as giant robots, so common in Japanese anime and manga.
As an extension of a character’s body, a giant robot has, first of all, the properties of a shell. This is not only a physical shell but also a conceptual boundary of the body: a shell that distinguishes one body from another. In a sense, it means differentiation, the emergence of distinctions—or of particularity.
Consider the distinction often made in mecha works between mass-production and specialized units: the specialized models come in far more varieties. (Almost every machine that appears in the various Gundam side stories is a specialized unit. No wonder fans keep joking that the Earth Federation’s maintenance department must be hell.) This fixation on specialized machines can be seen as an emphasis on characters’ traits, or on their differences, just as designers in the real world often design a machine to fit its pilot’s characterization. The point is usually not that specialized machines necessarily possess character traits and mass-production models necessarily lack them. It is to establish a binary structure of difference between the particular and the universal—a way of understanding things. Within this structure, one can establish one’s own particularity through “how my machine differs from other people’s machines.” Take the Scopedog, the protagonist’s machine in Armored Trooper VOTOMS: we can readily discern a whole range of character traits in it—toughness, plainness, apparent ordinariness, indomitable persistence… Here, although the machine is mass-produced, its contrast with the specialized machines’ “(universal) flashiness” actually emphasizes the protagonist’s distinctive character. Or think of Kou Uraki’s classic line: “[The GM Custom’s] greatest distinguishing feature is that it has none.”
Drawing these boundaries emphasizes individuality. Such distinctions secure the individual’s stability: one no longer seems merely one among the multitude. Another effect of the shell is the production of an “inner subject.” We might approach the earlier metaphor from another direction: a simple mechanical shell joined to a soul that cannot be seen or touched at all. This looks like a mode of imagination based on a dualism of spirit and flesh. The mechanical body replaces the flesh-and-blood body as that which acts. (Robot anime often does something very strange: robots for repression, robots for repairs, robots for firefighting… Apparently everything calls for a robot. Perhaps this is because the robot is a metonym for the person at work.) Seated inside, the pilot seems to exist only as a will initiating action. Many typical robot anime stage things like this: while the machines fight outside, the protagonists battle it out verbally with their opponents from inside their cockpits. Taken to its limit, this verbal combat becomes Gundam’s Newtype encounters: a collision of pure minds that seems to have nothing to do with the flesh. In other words, piloting a robot manufactures a division between the mental world and the outside world. It separates out an external, mechanical, acting body and a purely thinking consciousness inside the cockpit. Descartes often imagined a little man inside his own eyes who received their signals and judged his daily experience—how close this is to the image of a person piloting a robot in Japanese anime and manga!1 What is the cockpit? As I see it, this is the imagined location of the “inner self,” the protagonist’s inward space. (In Brain Powerd, for example, the cockpit is tellingly positioned where the womb would be in a human body.) What happens here is the production of subjectivity. Put another way, a person piloting a robot is a metaphor for the process of subject formation. To climb into a robot is to be constituted as a subject anew, to establish once more a distinction between subject and object/the outside world. The pilot enters the machine, constructing a division between inner space and the outside world, producing an inward, immaterial cogito—a thinking “I” (the pilot)—and an external, active, fighting mechanical body (the object of that cogito).
II. The Spatiality of the Robot Body: Inside and Outside
We can also examine how the giant robot body constructs an understanding of external space. For Stiegler, technical objects are not merely human tools; they are indispensable to the constitution of human existence. People produce themselves through continual interaction with various technical objects—for example, tools of production or cultural technical objects such as film and television. The technical object itself is an extension of human existence. It preserves a great deal of human culture, experience, and history as a distinctive form of memory outside the flesh. This is precisely what happens in many robot anime: complex social, historical, and political relations are folded into the robot as an artifact. When a pilot enters the cockpit, he also bursts into this complex set of relations. When Amuro climbs into the RX-78 designed by his father, for instance, he changes from a civilian on a neutral satellite into a soldier on one side of a war. He is thereby entrusted with the Odyssean mission of escorting White Base to Earth. By this roundabout route, he becomes an heir to his father’s generation…
We can certainly take this thought further: what technical objects preserve also includes an understanding of space. Something like “extension” in the Cartesian sense is at work here. In these works, space is no longer understood solely as the abstract three-dimensional coordinate space of physics; it also finds concentrated expression in the space occupied by superhuman bodies themselves. The differences among superhuman bodies derive not only from the particularity of their pilots, but also from that of their environments/factions. At Jaburo in the tropical rainforest, there are all sorts of bizarrely shaped underwater-combat mobile suits (MS)—the “four divine beasts of Jaburo.” In the desert, there is the Gouf, a close-combat specialist with a recklessly fierce temperament like the desert itself. Earlier, we noted the differentiating properties of superhuman bodies. As I see it, it is precisely this quality of difference among machines/bodies that constructs spatial coordinates in our understanding. The world of robot anime is a world inhabited by countless superhuman bodies, each differentiated externally, rather than through internal self-differentiation and self-division. This gives them distinct coordinates of existence, scattered here and there like pebbles on a sand table. We have now found the spatial features of superhuman bodies in two directions: first, the inward depth produced by subject formation; second, the outward dispersal of countless subjects through their differences from one another. Hence the “spatialized body.”
Perhaps we can say that this mode of imagination places considerable emphasis on the individual/subject while diminishing nonindividual forces such as ethnic groups and cultures. An example will illustrate the point. Mecha works often portray a complex cast of political actors, with various factions sending their machines to war. By the end of the story, this war often concludes with a vast showdown between machines—the Battle of A Baoa Qu, the battle at Gryps… This is actually somewhat anomalous. In reality, the end of a war does not depend entirely on a single large battle; since the Second World War, it has instead depended more on the interplay of cultural, political, economic, and other forces. This is precisely what makes these works distinctive: although they contain many depictions of political systems, societies, and cultures, all these relations, all these entanglements, are ultimately folded into powerful superhuman bodies. Everything therefore ends with a struggle between those bodies.
Clearly, this fighting between superhuman bodies is not actually war in the usual sense. At least, not entirely. What, then, is it? To clarify this question, this essay will turn to its next subject—the spatialized body.2
III. Space Imagined as a Body: Space for Living, or a Counter to the Spatialized Body
In works such as Cells at Work! and Howl’s Moving Castle, we can see “space imagined as a body.” The space the characters inhabit is conceived as a body-like entity: this area is the heart, that one the esophagus… We should note that, in this conception, space is self-sufficient and relatively closed, with a system of its own. Its interior is orderly, with clearly defined divisions of labor and connections among its various regions; it therefore often contains hierarchical relations. This is especially evident in Spirited Away, where spatial height also implies class position. It is thus easy to see that the point of space imagined as a body is not, of course, precisely which anatomical location each area corresponds to. It is that the areas are naturally, organically interconnected, like bodily organs. Space imagined as a body is therefore space “made relational.” What this mode of imagination emphasizes is not individuals but the connections between them. Or, to put it another way, space here is always a space in which others are present, always concretely associated with some form of sociality. If the first mode imagines individualized space anchored by the characters’ superhuman bodies, this one imagines space belonging to the invisible web of relations between characters. Space in this mode often amounts to a set of social relations. In Cells at Work!, for instance, different spaces are laid out strictly according to their functions; we can see that red blood cells wandering through the human body are really wandering among various social institutions.
Clearly, because such works emphasize sociality, they devote more attention to the characters’ occupations and lives, rather than depicting adventures that break away from established social relations, as works of the “spatialized body” type do—Amuro’s journey, for instance. To consider possible connections between these two modes of imagination, I would like to take one work as an example. It is a slightly unexpected choice: a work born late in the Shōwa era, hugely popular at the time and still resonating today. That work is the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross.
The VF fighters and the mothership SDF-1 correspond neatly to the “spatialized body” and “space imagined as a body”: the former is a character’s fighting body; the latter is normally a space where the characters live, but can transform into a robot in wartime. Looking back over the work, it is easy to notice that, alongside the characters piloting fighters into battle against the Zentradi, the anime devotes a great deal of attention to the details of life aboard the ship: Zentradi infiltrators experiencing Earth culture, the endlessly entangled love triangle between Hikaru Ichijo, Lynn Minmay, and Misa Hayase, etc. In a sense, everyday life is a defining aspect of the mothership—or of “space imagined as a body.” More interestingly, what actually brings the war to an end is not the number of enemy fighters or motherships the protagonists shoot down, but the power of “culture,” represented in the work by Lynn Minmay’s singing. When Hikaru’s machine is wrecked while he is rescuing Minmay, and the two find themselves alone in an interior section of the transformed battleship, beginning a romance, he also completes a transition, as if enacting a metaphor: out of the “spatialized body” (VF-1A) and into “space imagined as a body” (SDF-1).
The Zentradi have been deprived of culture and turned into pure war machines. The protagonists, meanwhile, leave Earth aboard the mothership and go to war against them. This plot arrangement seems to imply an opposition between the spatialized body and space imagined as a body—or between an abstract destructive force and living securely and working contentedly within a community. It is like Heine’s famous saying that three things matter above all: “freedom, equality and crab soup.” According to Žižek’s explanation in Event, without little everyday pleasures such as crab soup, we would be no different from terrorists, implementing ideals such as “freedom” and “equality” without regard for concrete circumstances.3 What the anime seems to be telling us is that crab soup defeats this abstraction: Lynn Minmay’s singing becomes the best antidote to the Zentradi’s war fever. It seems as though, if everyone gave up abstract ideals and threw themselves more fully into everyday life, every conflict would be resolved.
But is that really all there is to it?
IV. The Spatialized Body VS Space Imagined as a Body: Opposition and Connection, or…
Interestingly, even as the work makes its point, it also creates the possibility of subverting that overt message. Let us return once more to the earlier image: the battleship transforms, forcing the two characters to share a transformed area. Here, the mothership’s transformation has a double meaning. First, externally, it enters combat to meet the attacking Zentradi. Second, internally, it directly creates a spatial change that allows the characters’ relationship to change. The television series repeats this situation several times, too—in scenes of time spent with Misa after the ship transforms. In other words, within the SDF-1 mothership’s non-everyday combat activity there is, paradoxically, an everyday dimension that creates events and weaves the characters’ web of romantic relationships.
The argument I want to propose, then, is that everydayness may rest on something non-everyday, rather than simply stand in binary opposition to it. Think of Patlabor 2: The Movie, where the capital region’s prosperity coexists with a ghostly military standoff. Or take an example closer to reality: in today’s globalized world, civilized life under contemporary late capitalism may rest on multiple forms of colonization of underdeveloped peripheral regions. We can readily imagine people going about their everyday lives inside a giant body while the body carrying them fights without end… This situation is, in fact, equivalent to the fighting undertaken by spatialized bodies such as giant robots in the first mode of imagination. The difference lies in where the fighting takes place. In the first arrangement, the world is fragmented, nowhere is stable, and everyone is fighting; in the second, fighting is imagined as taking place along the border of a stable community. Or, in fact, by creating a border for the community, the latter arrangement in turn shifts internal sources of instability outside. Taking this a step further, I argue that these battles are all violence bound up with law.
As in Benjamin’s classic argument in “Critique of Violence,” violence is at the root of law: making law requires violence, and preserving law will inevitably resort to violence too. Why are robot battles staged so much like collisions between ideas—with all those verbal battles, all those quotable lines? Because, fundamentally, they concern how an idea for establishing law prevails. The final showdown is therefore a battle to found law; after the great battle, new rules are laid down for heaven and earth. Think of Turn A, hidden inside a statue of a god after the destruction of the world, or the protagonist at the end of Linebarrels of Iron, who merges with the machine he pilots and becomes the world’s guardian in the shadows—or, to put it more directly, the maker and guardian of the law. Giant robots are the part of the human that exceeds the human, an embodiment of some nonhuman spirit. Why? As I see it, the reason lies in the “spatialization” discussed in section I: the acting person has been replaced by a robot, and the everyday life bound up with that activity has also been stripped away from the person. Or, to put it in a slightly uncanny way, it is like “purification”: once the pilot takes a seat in the cockpit, only the mechanical shell throws itself into battle and interacts with the outside world, while what is inside is “purified” into some supreme, sublime spirit endowed with divinity.
As for how law manifests itself in “space imagined as a body,” we can take Cells at Work! CODE BLACK as an example. In CODE BLACK, it is easy to see that, because the human body the cells inhabit is in seriously poor health, the wage-slave cells often work overtime to keep it going, themselves hovering on the brink of death from overwork. First, then, the body’s condition determines the wage-slave cells’ working conditions. Second, the body’s poor health derives from an external environment beyond the cells’ reach—they cannot change the status quo. In a sense, this is the worst manifestation of “space imagined as a body”: it blocks the possibility of individual action changing the status quo, because everything comes down to the workings of the outside world. What else does this imply? It is the state of emergency at the external body/border that establishes the rules governing the wage-slave cells’ work inside. But this unquestionably locates the problem in the wrong place. The poor health that makes the wage-slave cells work overtime is probably not a problem of some imagined body outside their world. On the contrary, it is the harmful result of the work ethic of constant overtime within that world. Establishing such an “external crisis” once again establishes the rightness of the rules within the body. (Think of the line at the climax of the manga’s first chapter: “This is all we can do [in the face of the crisis].” We should note that the protagonist does not identify with the law, but the urgency of the situation leads him to choose to accept it.)
If we trace this line back through Macross, we can readily find similar arrangements in works from every era: the unified Earth government VS the Zentradi, like the Earth Federation VS the Principality of Zeon, like—like Ultraman VS monsters… The point is that these works may share a pattern of everyday life and its disruption. Or, as I see it, that is space imagined as a body VS the spatialized body: everydayness after law has been founded VS ideals of the non-everyday seeking to found law anew. Think back to the classic impression left by the first episode of the original Gundam: a space of everyday life inside a colony satellite, invaded and shattered by the Principality of Zeon’s giant robots… Extend this line of thought and we arrive at 0080: the Zaku and Gundam’s struggle to the death serves only to give Al, the boy inside the closed world, a fleeting glimpse of the sublime. (Following this line of thought, even 0080 could be classified as sekaikei.)4 In the series, depictions of everyday life usually appear on the Earth side, while depictions of Zeon have a more ritualistic quality—Garma’s grand state funeral, for instance. There is something uncanny about the Principality of Zeon: on the one hand, it is a product of anticolonial struggle; on the other, its theory of anticolonial struggle seems merely to reverse the hierarchy, seeking to establish the superiority of space-dwellers over Earth-dwellers. The new law Zeon seeks to establish through war seems no different from what came before. From this we can see that, in stories of this kind, identifying with either side is meaningless. Their apparent opposition is in fact coexistence; they share a conception of abstract law-founding. We seem able to choose only between an “abstract universality” that always has to sacrifice some people/banish them from the community/exclude some concreteness, and a concrete everyday life stripped of this kind of universal law and also of transformative power. Or, to put it another way, this is the worst turn taken by the spirit–flesh/subject–object dualistic thinking mentioned in section I: ideas for transforming the world are despairingly imagined as mere thought that never touches the ground, unrelated to practice and often at odds with concrete circumstances—spirit stripped of flesh—while living people, in all their richness and fullness, lead cynical lives that refuse all empty, high-flown talk—flesh stripped of spirit. The two therefore necessarily contradict each other; we cannot have both. But is that really so? Here we reach the final step in this line of thought: the moment of “concrete universality.” The point is not to imagine an immaterial idea standing above all individuals. On the contrary, even in the most ordinary, most concrete everyday world, we should discover sparks of an idea being born, glimpse an instant powerful enough to change the world and move us to give our lives for it.