Work, Feeling, Robots

High banks become valleys; deep valleys become hills.

That’s the author ↑. The editors have made cuts to this article.

1

The reason we make films about robots may be that there is no longer an “Other”¹ among humans. This is especially apparent in Masaki’s story. Masaki’s problem is not so much that his robot has stopped speaking as his relationship with his father. Yet he never communicates with his father; instead, by resolving the problem of the robot’s silence, he finds substitute satisfaction for his desire to communicate with his father. Here we can see an obsessive compulsion at work: because modern society compulsively configures the family as a place where people who love one another live, family problems cannot be addressed as problems internal to the family (communication with the father), but must be projected onto external problems (communication with the robot), whose resolution provides substitute satisfaction. This satisfaction in turn sustains the continued existence of the “pathological family,” whose problems have been temporarily suspended, further reaffirming the social configuration that “the family is a place where people who love one another live.” Likewise, because an increasing range of universalist ideas configures humans as a homogeneous group, problems arising within humanity increasingly require imaginary satisfaction from outside it. The more firmly we affirm the idea of “humanity,” the more we need robots.

In other words, the more we love kūki-kei (“air-type”), the more we need to seek the “Other” in robot anime (not giant-robot battle shows, but stories about robots as beings other than humans; I’m certainly not saying that kūki-kei fans ought to be into mecha²). By “the more we love,” I mean a trend in popularity; “need” refers to filling a structural gap. That is, once popular kūki-kei configures humanity as a single living whole sharing a common experience, the “Other” can only be placed in “nonhuman” stories about robots, uncanny beings, myths, and so on.

The Other is “existential anxiety.” I say that kūki-kei has no Other because it no longer contains any fundamental struggle over existence. However degraded the master–slave struggle between humans and robots in Time of Eve may be, it is still a struggle between master and slave. In spatial terms, kūki-kei depicts people in the “world around us”: even when a girl falls from the sky, once she has landed she eats, goes to school, and plays games with me every day. Everyone shares a common experience of life; there are no fundamental barriers to understanding, and conflicts are local and easily resolved. Life requires no excessive thought; various kinds of tacit knowledge suffice. Only then is it the everyday: the everyday is an automaton. “Homogenization” here does not mean homogenization at the level of genre, but the homogenization of experience of life. All it means is that nichijō-kei (“everyday-life type”) no longer parcels out difference among its characters within the story: the characters within a given work share a common experience of life, forming a “we,” a collective “air”—though the air still differs from one work to another. Sekaikei (“world-type”), by contrast, still establishes the Other within the work through its characters.

If we take account of differences in what works are capable of, together with differences in their intentions, we should be able to construct a four-quadrant scheme: “(Patlabor 2)—sekaikei—kūki-kei—isekai.”³ What separates “(Patlabor 2)—sekaikei” from “kūki-kei—isekai” is the homogenization of experience of life; what separates “(Patlabor 2)—kūki-kei” from “sekaikei—isekai” is whether a work is built to a formula. At first there is a genuine Other; then the Other is abstracted, turned into an impulse toward the Other (the so-called “false Other”); after that come the other people in the full sense found in nichijō-kei; by the time we reach isekai, or “other-world” fiction, not even other people remain (they are produced to a formula).

The connection between Patlabor 2 and sekaikei comes into focus in our man Makoto Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star. Voices of a Distant Star is set up in every respect just like Patlabor 2, but the end state in Patlabor 2 is one in which war takes up “permanent residence” in the everyday: whether real or virtual, the state of emergency in the everyday is always before our eyes. Voices of a Distant Star, by contrast, tells of war and the everyday “brushing past one another”: the genuine Other has disappeared, but its momentary manifestation has nevertheless left an impulse behind. The heroine portrayed in Voices of a Distant Star is certainly a formulaic “false Other.” We could put this down to our man Shinkai’s lack of ability; but if we overinterpret it a little and take everything the heroine experiences as the imagination of the male protagonist back on Earth, we could also say that the protagonist exposes his own inner poverty—his inability to grasp a genuine Other. From the standpoint of the “false Other,” Voices of a Distant Star, like Time of Eve, has no value. Its value is solely symptomatic: within the work itself, it repeats the author’s inability to give concrete form to his own impulse toward the Other. Sekaikei is a transitional current, and its hollowing-out may also have something to do with kūki-kei gradually “sealing off” the everyday; the same real-world force drives both. There is a similar degradation in the passage from kūki-kei to isekai: by isekai, authors just raid a database of stock settings from anime, comics, and games and churn out other people to a formula.

2

The “world of work” and the “world of feeling”: which sustains which? The existence of the café Time of Eve divides the world into two spaces, the “world of work” and the “world of feeling.” Outside the café is the “world of work,” where robots labor for humans in a rationalized manner, without feeling and subject to discipline; inside is the “world of feeling,” where robots come to live a human life in their time off work. Let us put aside for now how this portrayal of robots unwittingly gets the condition of workers in modern society exactly right. The work’s division of these two spaces does much to expose the relation of exchange between them: the vast majority of robots come to the café to learn how to get along with their masters (humans). It is not that labor in the world of work is converted into a human life in the world of feeling (this is industrial society’s promise of a human life), but that a human life in the world of feeling is converted into the “emotional labor” of serving their masters in the world of work (this, from a neo-Marxist perspective, is capitalism’s exploitation of the human psyche).

Yasuhiro Yoshiura set out to tell a few little stories about being human, yet, ironically enough, he cuts through capitalism’s façade of humane management. Whether it is commercialization of human feeling in Hochschild’s sense or emotional labor in Hardt’s sense,⁴ what both expose is the “colonization” of the world of feeling by the world of work.

Overall, Time of Eve can hardly be called hard science fiction. It does not so much discuss “What is a robot?” as merely tell us, “Robots are like this, you see.” In essence, it is a story about encountering the Other in modern society, wearing an SF skin. But this does not mean we cannot read it as a symptom in the context of modernity, whether in the “human gaze” it bears or its attempt to create the café Time of Eve as a “sanctuary of feeling.” Since this everyday has not been narrated in the mode of the everyday, it may be under pressure from “another everyday”: perhaps it is not that Yasuhiro Yoshiura lacks the ability to imagine robots, but that he lacks the ability to write the Other into the everyday.