This essay was a prizewinner at the Rags Drum 2021 Eve Festival.
Abstract: This essay considers two recurring forms of imagination in Japanese anime: the spatialized body and embodied space. By “spatialized body,” I mean a superhuman body such as the giant robot. “Embodied space,” more literally, means a space that takes on the properties of a body, as in Cells at Work! or Studio Ghibli’s animistic worlds. I examine both imaginative forms and the complex, varied ideologies concealed within them. Their prototypes, I argue, have been latent in Japanese anime from the beginning. To put the matter somewhat bluntly, they resemble a pair of oppositions often discussed today: the idea of the extraordinary versus concrete life, and abstract universality versus concreteness.
I. To Pilot a Robot Is to Produce a Subject: The Spatialized Body
Let us begin with the “spatialized body.” Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight features Agilulf, a knight who consists of an empty suit of armor with nothing inside. Japanese manga and anime offer what seem to be kindred figures: Alphonse in Fullmetal Alchemist, for instance, or Brook in One Piece. They have been stripped of flesh and of the body’s complicated material qualities. What remains is the simplest and most immediately legible kind of mechanical existence: a suit of armor, a skeleton. Within this material body, however, resides a spirit or soul that cannot itself be reduced to matter or explained by it. This is what determines how the mechanical body acts.
An empty shell, driven from within by some spirit or will: for this essay, the image can also serve as a metaphor for the superhuman bodies so common in Japanese anime, giant robots above all.
As an extension of a character’s body, the giant robot is first of all a shell. This is not only a shell in the physical sense. It is also an epistemic boundary around the body, the casing that distinguishes one body from another. In a certain sense, it marks the emergence of difference, distinction, or singularity.
Robot-war stories, for example, often distinguish between mass-produced and customized machines, with the latter appearing in overwhelmingly greater variety. Almost every machine featured in the many Gundam side stories is a custom model—no wonder readers keep joking that the Earth Federation’s maintenance division must be hell. This fixation on custom machines can be understood as an emphasis on a character’s traits, or simply on difference. In real-world production, after all, designers commonly tailor a machine to the characterization of its pilot. The important point is not that a custom machine necessarily possesses character while a mass-produced machine does not. What matters is the establishment of a binary structure between the singular and the universal, a mode of apprehending difference. Once we are inside that mode, “the difference between my machine and everybody else’s” can secure my own singularity.
Consider the Scopedog piloted by the protagonist of Armored Trooper VOTOMS. We can readily discern an entire set of character traits in it: tenacity, plainness, an apparently ordinary nature that endures every setback. Although it is a mass-produced machine, its contrast with the “universally” gaudy custom models only accentuates those singular qualities. Or recall Kou Uraki’s famous assessment of the GM Custom: “The mass-produced GM Custom … its lack of distinguishing features is its defining feature, I suppose.”
Drawing such a boundary stresses individuality. Through division and distinction, the individual acquires stability and no longer seems to be merely one member of the crowd. Yet the shell has another effect as well: it produces an “inner subject.” Let us approach the opening metaphor from the opposite direction. A simple mechanical shell is joined to a completely intangible and invisible soul. The result looks very much like an image of mind-body dualism. The mechanical body displaces the flesh-and-blood body as the agent that acts. Robot anime often make this displacement look strangely literal: robots for crowd control, robots for repairs, robots even for firefighting—as though robots were needed for everything. Perhaps this is because the robot is a metonym for the human being at work.
The pilot, seated inside, seems to exist only as a will that issues commands. Many classic robot anime stage a peculiar split: while the machines fight outside, their pilots trade arguments inside their cockpits. Taken to its limit, this becomes the Newtype encounter in Gundam, an exchange between pure minds that seems to have no need of flesh. Piloting a robot thus manufactures a division between the world of the mind and the external world. It separates an outward mechanical body that acts from a pure thinking consciousness enclosed in the cockpit.
Descartes repeatedly imagined a little person inside the field of vision who received the eyes’ signals and judged the experiences of each day. How close this is to the Japanese anime image of a person piloting a robot. What, then, is the cockpit? For this essay, it is the imagined location of the “inner self,” the protagonist’s interior space. Brain Powerd makes the implication strikingly explicit by locating the cockpit around the position of the womb in a human body. What takes place here is the production of subjectivity. In other words, piloting a robot is a metaphor for subjectivation. To climb aboard is to become a subject again, to reestablish a division between subject and object, or subject and outside world. Once the pilot enters the machine, an interior mental space is separated from an exterior world. The result is an inward, incorporeal cogito—the pilot—and an outward mechanical body that fights and acts as the cogito’s object.
II. The Spatiality of the Robot Body: Inside and Outside
We can also ask how the giant robot’s body organizes our knowledge of external space. For Bernard Stiegler, a technical object is not merely a tool but an indispensable component of human existence. Human beings produce themselves through continual interaction with technical objects: tools of production, for example, as well as cultural technologies such as film and television. The technical object is itself an extension of human existence. It preserves great quantities of human culture, experience, and history as a special, noncorporeal form of memory.
This is precisely what happens in many robot anime. Complex social, historical, and political relations are folded into the manufactured object called the robot. When the pilot enters the cockpit, they also enter that intricate mesh of relations. Amuro climbing into the RX-78 designed by his father means that he ceases to be a civilian on a neutral space colony and becomes a soldier for one side of a war. He is entrusted with an Odyssean mission: escorting White Base to Earth. By this circuitous route, he inherits the preceding generation.
We can carry the argument further. What a technical object preserves also includes a way of apprehending space. In something like the Cartesian sense of “extension,” space in these works is no longer only the abstract, three-dimensional coordinate system of physics. It is condensed into the very space occupied by a superhuman body. The differences between such bodies do not derive only from the singularity of their pilots, but also from the singularity of the environments and forces to which they belong. In the tropical rainforest of Jaburo, we encounter every imaginable shape of amphibious mobile suit—the “Four Sacred Beasts of Jaburo.” In the desert, there is the Gouf, a machine specialized for close combat with all the desert’s rough valor.
As noted above, the superhuman body has a differential character. Here, I would argue, the differences among machines and bodies construct the very coordinates by which space is apprehended. The world of robot anime is a world inhabited by innumerable superhuman bodies. Each is differentiated externally rather than through an internal process of self-difference or self-division. Each therefore acquires its own distinct coordinates of existence, like stones scattered across a sand table. We have now found the superhuman body’s spatial character in two directions: an inward depth produced through subjectivation, and an outward dispersion produced because countless subjects differ from one another. This is the “spatialized body.”
One might say that this imagination places great emphasis on the individual or subject while weakening nonindividual forces such as groups and cultures. Robot-war stories often depict complicated political ensembles, with different forces sending machines into battle. Yet at the end of the story, the war often concludes with a vast showdown among machines—the Battle of A Baoa Qu, the Gryps Conflict, and so on. This is, in fact, rather unusual. In reality, the end of a war is not determined entirely by a single large battle. Since the Second World War in particular, it has more often depended on a many-sided struggle among cultural, political, and economic forces.
This is what makes such stories distinctive. Although they offer extensive depictions of political systems, societies, and cultures, all these relations and entanglements are ultimately folded into powerful superhuman bodies. Everything ends in a struggle between those bodies.
Clearly, the combat of superhuman bodies is not war in the ordinary sense—or at least not entirely. What is it, then? To answer that question, I will turn to the next object of discussion: embodied space.
III. Embodied Space: Living Space, or the Anti-Spatialized Body
Works such as Cells at Work! and Howl’s Moving Castle present us with “embodied space.” The space in which their characters live is imagined as a kind of body: this region is the heart, that region the esophagus, and so forth. What matters in this conception is that space is self-sufficient, relatively closed, and organized as a system in its own right. Within the system, everything has its place. Different regions possess clearly divided functions and are linked to one another; consequently, a hierarchy often emerges as well. Spirited Away makes this especially vivid, since differences in physical elevation also imply differences in social rank.
It is therefore easy to see that the point of embodied space is not to identify the anatomical organ to which every particular area corresponds. Rather, the point is that all these areas are organically connected as though they were physiological organs. Embodied space is relationalized space. This form of imagination emphasizes not the individual, but the ties between individuals. Its space is always a space in which the other is present, a space concretely bound to some kind of sociality. If space in the first imaginative form is anchored by a character’s superhuman body and thus individualized, space here belongs to the invisible web of relations between characters. Such space frequently coincides with a set of social relations. In Cells at Work!, for example, every space is arranged according to its function. When a red blood cell wanders through the body, it is also wandering among social institutions.
Precisely because they stress sociality, works of this kind tend to give greater weight to their characters’ occupations and everyday lives. They do not primarily depict adventures detached from established social relations, such as Amuro’s journey. To explore the possible connection between these two imaginative forms, I want to turn to a work that may initially seem surprising: a tremendous hit born near the end of the Shōwa era, one whose reverberations are still with us today. That work is the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross.
The VF fighter and the mothership SDF-1 correspond neatly to the “spatialized body” and “embodied space.” The former is the character’s body in combat. The latter is normally the characters’ living space, yet in wartime can transform into a robot. Looking back over the series, one readily notices that the anime devotes as much care to everyday life aboard the ship as it does to the characters’ fighter battles against the Zentradi: Zentradi infiltrators encountering Earth culture, the endlessly tangled triangle among Hikaru Ichijyo, Lynn Minmay, and Misa Hayase, and so on. Everyday life is, in a sense, the very substance of the mothership—of “embodied space.”
More interesting still, the war is not actually ended by the number of enemy fighters or capital ships the protagonists shoot down. It ends through the power of “culture,” represented in the story by Minmay’s singing. When Hikaru’s machine is damaged while rescuing Minmay and the two find themselves alone inside a section of the transformed ship, beginning a romance there, he also completes a transition at the level of metaphor: he leaves the “spatialized body” of the VF-1A and enters the “embodied space” of the SDF-1.
The Zentradi have been deprived of culture and reduced to pure war machines. The protagonists, meanwhile, leave Earth aboard the mothership and go to war against them. The arrangement seems to imply an opposition between the spatialized body and embodied space—or between an abstract destructive force and the peaceful conduct of life within a community. As Heinrich Heine’s famous line has it, “The most important things for man are freedom, equality, and crab soup.” In Event, Slavoj Žižek explains that without the small, everyday pleasure represented by crab soup, we become indistinguishable from terrorists, putting ideas such as “freedom” and “equality” into effect without regard for concrete circumstances. The anime appears to say that crab soup defeats abstraction: Minmay’s singing becomes the best possible antidote to the Zentradi’s war fever. If only everyone would relinquish abstract ideas and devote themselves to everyday life, it seems, all conflict would be resolved.
But is that really all there is to it?
IV. Spatialized Bodies vs. Embodied Spaces: Opposition, Connection, or …
The fascinating point is that even as the work advances this proposition, it produces a possibility that subverts its apparent message. Let us return once more to the preceding image: the ship transforms, forcing two people to inhabit its rearranged interior together. Here, the transformation of the mothership has a double meaning. Externally, it enters combat and confronts the attacking Zentradi. Internally, the same transformation directly remakes the space in which the characters’ relations can change. The television series repeats this situation more than once, most notably when transformation creates occasions for Hikaru to spend time with Misa. In other words, the extraordinary combat operations of the SDF-1 contain an everyday capacity to produce events and weave a romantic web among the characters.
I therefore propose that everyday life may rest upon something extraordinary, rather than simply standing opposed to it. One might think of the coexistence of metropolitan prosperity and ghostly military confrontation in Patlabor 2: The Movie. Or, to take a more immediately realistic example, under globalization, the civilized life of the contemporary world of late capitalism may rest upon several forms of colonization imposed on underdeveloped peripheral regions. We can readily imagine people conducting their everyday lives inside a giant body even as the body carrying them remains locked in ceaseless combat.
That combat situation is effectively the same as the struggle performed by giant robots and other spatialized bodies in the first imaginative form. What differs is the space in which battle occurs. In one case, the world has broken into fragments; nowhere offers stable shelter, and everybody is caught in combat. In the other, battle is imagined as occurring along the boundary of a stable community. Or perhaps the latter produces a communal boundary precisely in order to displace its internal instability to the outside. I would therefore go a step further: all these battles concern the violence of law.
Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” offers the classic claim: violence stands at the origin of law. Lawmaking requires violence, and law preservation must likewise appeal to it. Why are robot battles staged so consistently as clashes among ideas? Why so many verbal duels and memorable declarations? Because, at bottom, they concern which idea of lawmaking will prevail. The final battle is a battle to found the law; after the great war, new rules are established for heaven and earth.
Think of the Turn A hidden inside a divine statue after the destruction of the world. Or think of the conclusion to Linebarrels of Iron, in which the protagonist merges with the machine he pilots and becomes, in secret, the guardian of the world—or, more bluntly, both lawgiver and protector of the law. The giant robot is the part of the human being that exceeds the human, the manifestation of a certain inhuman spirit. Why? I would locate the reason in the “spatialization” discussed in the first section. The human agent is replaced by the robot; at the same time, the lived dimension of action is extracted from the human being. Or, to use a rather strange expression, it is “purified.” Once the pilot enters the cockpit, only the mechanical shell goes into battle and interacts with the outside world. The interior is “purified” into a supreme and sublime spirit with something divine about it.
For law as it appears in “embodied space,” consider Cells at Work! CODE BLACK. The cells’ body is in a state of severely compromised health, and so the salaried-worker cells charged with maintaining it must labor overtime, constantly approaching death from overwork. First, the state of the body determines the working conditions of the cells. Second, the body’s poor health arises from an external environment that the cells cannot reach and cannot alter.
This is, in a sense, embodied space at its worst: it blocks the possibility that individual action might change the situation, since everything is attributed to the operation of an outside world. What else does this imply? A state of emergency affecting the external body—the communal border—establishes the laws governing work in the interior. Yet this is an obvious displacement. The poor health that forces the salaried-worker cells into overtime is hardly caused by some imaginary bodily problem outside their world. It is, rather, the bitter fruit of the overtime work ethic within that very world. By establishing an “external crisis,” the story once again confirms the correctness of its internal laws. Recall the climax of the manga’s first chapter: “This is all we can do.” The protagonist does not identify with the law, but the emergency leads him to accept it.
If we trace the line of Macross further back, we can readily find comparable arrangements in works from every period: the Unified Earth Government versus the Zentradi; the Earth Federation versus the Principality of Zeon; Ultraman versus the kaiju. The point is that these works may share a single pattern of everyday life and its destruction. In the terms of this essay, that is embodied space versus the spatialized body: the everyday life after law has been founded versus the extraordinary idea that seeks to found law anew.
Think again of the classic impression left by the first episode of Mobile Suit Gundam: the lived space inside a colony is invaded and shattered by the Principality of Zeon’s giant robots. Extended further, this logic leads to Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, where the mortal combat between Zaku and Gundam serves only to produce a fleeting experience of the sublime before the eyes of the boy Al, enclosed within his small world. On these terms, one might even classify 0080 as sekaikei. Throughout the series, depictions of everyday life tend to belong to the side of Earth, whereas the Zeon side appears in a more ritualized register—Garma’s grandiose state funeral, for instance.
The Principality of Zeon is uncanny. On the one hand, it is the product of an anticolonial struggle. On the other, its theory of anticolonial resistance seems merely to reverse the hierarchy and place space-dwellers above Earth-dwellers. The new law that Zeon seeks to establish through war does not appear very different from the old one.
This tells us that, in stories of this kind, identification with either side is meaningless. Their apparent opposition is actually a mode of coexistence. Both share a conception of abstract lawmaking. We seem to be offered only a choice between two alternatives: an “abstract universality” that always sacrifices some people, exiles them from the community, or excludes part of the concrete; and a concrete everyday life that has removed both universal law and the transformative force that accompanies it.
This is also the most disastrous development of the mind-body or subject-object dualism introduced in the first section. The idea of changing the world is imagined in despair as an ungrounded process of pure thought, detached from practice and often at odds with concrete circumstances: spirit with the flesh removed. The rich fullness of living people, meanwhile, becomes a cynical life that refuses every grand and empty declaration: flesh with the spirit removed. The two must therefore contradict one another, with no possibility of reconciliation.
But must that really be so? Here we arrive at the final moment of the argument: concrete universality. We should not imagine a bodiless idea standing above every individual. Instead, within the most ordinary and concrete world of everyday life, we should discover sparks from which an idea might be born and glimpse a moment capable of changing the world—a moment for which we would be willing to be shattered.