Tokyo Cyberpunk Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture

by Brown, Steven T.

• ISBN13: 9780230103603
• ISBN10: 023010360X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-07-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Engaging some of the most ground-breaking and thought-provoking anime, manga, and science fiction films, Tokyo Cyberpunk offers insightful analysis of Japanese visual culture. Steven T. Brown draws new conclusions about electronically mediated forms of social interaction, as well as specific Japanese socioeconomic issues, all in the context of globalization and advanced capitalism. Penetrating and nuanced, this book makes a major contribution to the debate about what it means to be human in a posthuman world.

Author Biography

Steven T. Brown is the Director of Japanese Studies and Professor of Japanese Film & Popular Culture at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Theatricalities of Power: The Cultural Politics of Noh, the editor of Cinema Anime, and the co-editor of Performing Japanese Women, a special issue of the feminist journal Women & Performance.

 

 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Posthumanism after AKIRA	p. 1
Reading Rhizomatically	p. 3
Machinic Desires, Desiring Machines, and Consensual Hallucinations	p. 10
Machinic Desires: Hans Bellmer's Dolls and the Technological Uncanny in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence	p. 13
An Overview of Innocence	p. 14
ôOnce their strings are cut, they easily crumbleö	p. 23
From Puppets to Automata	p. 29
The Uncanny Mansion	p. 32
The Dolls of Hans Bellmer	p. 36
Bellmer/Oshii	p. 44
On the Innocence of Dolls, Angels, and Becoming-Animal	p. 50
Desiring Machines: Biomechanoid Eros and Other Techno-Fetishes in Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Its Precursors	p. 55
The Birth of Sexy Robots	p. 56
After Metropolis, Before Tetsuo: Un chien andalou	p. 60
Giger's Biomechanoids, Erotomechanics, and Metal Fetishists	p. 64
The ôRegular-Sizeö Monsters of Matango	p. 71
Mutating from the Inside Out: The Fly	p. 72
ôLong Live the New Fleshö: Videodrome	p. 79
The Tentacle Motif from Hokusai to Tetsuo	p. 93
Envisioning the Machine-City after Blade Runner	p. 99
Confrontations with the Salaryman Model: Resisting Hegemonic Masculinity and State-Sponsored Capitalism	p. 105
Coda: Co-opting Tetsuo in Tetsuo II: Body Hammer	p. 109
Consensual Hallucinations and the Phantoms of Electronic Presence in Kairo and Avalon	p. 111
Letting In Ghosts, Shutting Out the Sun	p. 113
Into the Mise en Abyme: Spectral Flows and the Forbidden Room	p. 120
The Human Stain: Suicide in the Shadow of Hiroshima	p. 127
Avalon and ôBorderline Cinemaö	p. 132
The Society of the Spectacle	p. 137
The Surrealism of (Virtually) Everyday Life	p. 140
ôWelcome to Class Realö	p. 143
Conclusion: Software in a Body: Critical Posthumanism and Serial Experiments Lain	p. 157
A Shojo Named Lain	p. 161
E-mail from the Dead	p. 162
Doppelgängers in Cyberspace	p. 167
Desiring Disembodiment	p. 176
The Question of Resistance	p. 181
Notes	p. 187
Bibliography	p. 229
Index	p. 247
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.