Anime and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  If we relate Haraway’s ideas to the cyborgs of Gunslinger Girl, they fail to destabilize conventional ideas about gender. Their characterization sits firmly within, and thus reinforces, traditional ideas about femininity.

  The cyborgs of Gunslinger Girl are unable to reproduce, as most of their internal organs are removed and replaced by cybernetic implants. A new cyborg is created when the Agency requires one. Taking this into account, we might argue that the cyborgs are outside the human concern of reproduction. However, removing the ability to reproduce is not liberating for these girl cyborgs. In one episode, Triela endures severe menstrual cramps, but given that her body is largely synthetic and unable to bear a child, it is both unnecessary and implausible for her to suffer such pain. The possibility of Triela’s future pregnancy is doubly denied, in that the cyborg implants drastically shorten her life expectancy. That Triela is placed in this position of suffering indicates that these characters are not examples of progressive female cyborgs, and their technological advancement does not liberate them from a subordinate position.

  The female characters are persistently depicted as dependent and vulnerable, their bodies and minds altered and manipulated by the often harmful or faulty technology employed by the Agency. The narrative’s central aim sometimes seems to be to highlight the abuse of the cyborgs and evoke pity from the viewer: we frequently see their devoted submission to the harsh demands of their male superiors, and the suffering they experience as a result. In their relationship with their handler, they are loyal and obedient, constantly seeking approval and requiring direction (although Triela, on occasion, is willing to disagree with or disobey a male superior). Neither motherly figures nor external peers are seen to neutralize male dominance. Although the girls do not usually see themselves as dominated or exploited, we the viewers see them as such. In portraying the cyborgs in this fashion, Gunslinger Girl intensifies traditional notions about inequality between genders, wherein women submit to male domination.

  One element of their characterization that intensifies their positioning in a submissive role is their youth. The explanation given in the narrative for making the cyborgs female children is that the cybernetic modifications and conditioning are more effective on younger (but not necessarily female) bodies. As children, the cyborgs not only appear physically weaker (although this is obviously a deceptive appearance), they are also distanced from the maturity or independence that might generally be associated with an older female. The girl cyborgs might be interpreted as an exaggerated expression of the fantasy object and the protective mother figure, bundled into an emotionally stilted, partly artificial young female body. That is, the male can possess and dominate the attractive helpless object; but this object can also protect, be relied upon, and trusted. The female has been reduced to a manageable, non-threatening form.

  As we’ve mentioned, the cyborgs are depicted with typically kawaii features, such as disproportionately large eyes and heads, and thin bodies. Each girl is dressed by her handler in keeping with a particular style. For example, Triela often wears a masculine pants suit with a tie and visible gun holsters, her long, flowing, fair hair tied in pigtails with ribbons. Henrietta alternates between various school uniform styles, including sailor suits, or short pleated skirts, ribbon bow ties and over-the-knee socks. Their cuteness is further enhanced by their belongings (for example, Triela’s collection of teddy bears), and their behavior when off-duty—they share tea and cake, read books, cook, or play musical instruments.

  Kawaii encompasses a multiplicity of meaning. As Sharon Kinsella’s “Cuties in Japan” suggests, in kawaii we can find sweetness, gentleness, and innocence; kawaii also embodies vulnerability and immaturity, both in appearance and behaviour. The cyborgs exhibit an impossible yet cunning combination of sweetness and vulnerability with physical strength and brutality. When they’re not engaged in combat or murder, the Gunslinger Girl cyborgs are adorable and seem utterly innocent, gentle and childlike. When such a pretty child shoots a defenceless, innocent boy without remorse—as Rico does to the hotel porter Emilio—there is a resounding visual and psychological clash. This combination subverts the generally accepted symbolism of cute as good or kind or natural.

  Essentially, the Agency engineers a cyborg that has an attractive feminine appearance, because this makes them useful and powerful as assassins—their cuteness serves as a disguise during operations. However, the Agency discards or alters their interior, both physical and mental. Cybernetic implants make them strong, fast and lethal, and conditioning makes them loyal and obedient, but their technological alterations also render them incapable of reproduction and eventually cause mental and physical deterioration. These female cyborgs are depicted as an object of the male gaze, and as a result, Gunslinger Girl perpetuates physical attractiveness and youth as ideals. Further, disguising their superhuman capabilities with excessive immaturity and adorable appearances highlights their position as psychologically and (externally) physically inferior to their male superiors, again reinforcing a conventional gender role.

  The cyborgs’ vulnerability is stressed by the lack of comicalness in their cuteness. Many manga and anime series rely heavily on the “gag” value of an often-awkward relationship between a female cyborg and her male owner or companion, as exemplified by CLAMP’s Chobits. Like the girls in Gunslinger Girl, the protagonist of Chobits, Chi, exemplifies cuteness. She is socially inept and rather vacuous at the beginning; she is also affectionate and adorable. Her fumbling, sexually-charged owner is a suitable counterpart to the innocent but provocative Chi, and her interaction with her owner is in typical manga/anime romantic comedy style. However, Chi’s comical cuteness is significantly different to the cuteness in Gunslinger Girl: Chi is ostensibly non-human yet possesses her own desire and initiative; she is not manipulated by those closest to her, and the narrative ultimately recognises her unique value to society.

  Cuteness is thus a key element in establishing the vulnerability of the girl cyborgs, and again contributes to this narrative’s departure from the image of strong female cyborgs. This concept of cuteness—created, developed, and participated in by so many females in Japanese society—has been used to serve the purpose of a narrative that undermines the concept itself. Such representations of cyborgs diminish any progress made by the independent hybridized female heroines common in many manga and anime (such as Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell and Alita in Battle Angel Alita), who may have eroticized bodies, but also have physical and psychological strength and are able to maintain their autonomy. The cyborg has regressed here; she is fixed in a conventional gender role.

  Looking Inwards

  The fictional cyborgs in Gunslinger Girl do not represent the new possibilities that Donna Haraway envisioned in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”; these cyborgs do not serve as models for either potential boundary confusion or reconstruction. Instead, the portrayal of these fictional cyborgs has a dual function: to position the female in a conventional gender role, and uphold traditional ideals of femininity; but also to reflect the condition of individuals in contemporary (Japanese) society, who may feel trapped or victimized under the pressure of social conformity and hierarchy. Assuming that the target audience of this work is probably male, the possibility of male viewers aligning themselves with the experiences of the victimized cyborgs is real. Such an interpretation might highlight that when gender roles are reinforced, or reconfigured, (even to the limited extent that they are in Gunslinger Girl, where the cyborgs exhibit apparently “masculine” strength and “feminine” appearances ) masculinity, too, is involved, and changed.

  Sue Short writes in Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity that fictional cyborgs, in having to contend with being subject to the authority of others while desiring subjective agency, reflect the experiences of all viewers to some extent. They “not only encapsulate the metaphysical fact of our limited existence, but question our relative freedom also” (p. 195). Although the representation of female identity
in Gunslinger Girl may be problematic, the series allows us to consider some valuable questions about the nature of our existence and our relationships with others.3

  3

  Just a Ghost in a Shell?

  ANGUS MCBLANE

  How can humans interact with machines? This question is at the heart of modern stories that focus on technology. Central to this question is the idea of cyborgs or more specifically, cyborg enhancements. Mamoru Oshii’s cyberpunk masterpiece Ghost in the Shell explores not only the possibility of these enhancements—up to and including full-fledged cyborgs—but also portrays a liminal space in humanism which is sent into crisis when these technologies deeply question the fundamental underpinnings of what it means to be “human.”

  Crucial to the various strands of humanism (renaissance, enlightenment, secular, among others) are notions of human perfectibility, emancipation, progress, control, and rational mastery of the world. Posthumanism not only seeks to orient the world in such a way that agency is not seen as a unique “human” characteristic but one which can be possessed by machines or machinic hybrids (and further extended into the realm of other animals), but also to work through the ideas presented within the various humanist discourses, in order to rewrite humanism into its post, not as a radical break, but as a way which allows a notion of the “human” to be removed from its central place.

  These machinic hybrids or cyborgs are boundary figures that represent in cyberpunk literature and film a transitional place in the development from humanism to posthumanism. Cyborgs serve not only as transitional figures of human-machine hybridity, but also as a representative of this shift if it comes to pass. These figures embody the tensions around technological bodies and the question of embodiment in the technologically focused culture(s) of the contemporary West. The boundary line between natural and artificial in posthumanism is blurred, especially by cyborgs; this promotes a deep questioning of the limits of what is called the “human.” Ghost in the Shell not only deals with this incredibly aptly, but through the film’s paradoxical representations of embodiment, it pushes the limits to their breaking point through the consideration of new modes of being (that which is).

  The cyborg protagonist of Ghost in the Shell, Major Motoko Kusanagi, struggles within the interstitial space between a humanist identity grounded in individual agency and consciousness as a seat of identity (her “ghost”) and a posthuman distributed cognition in which “grounding” of experience becomes expanded and fluid. The “body” and by extension embodiment, are not viewed as mutually exclusive categories. The material body is extended to allow formulations in which a “material” body is not limited to an organic, biological body, but can also be a technological body (a cyborg body) or an informational body which exists in the material representations of data, or, pushing this one step further, simultaneously physiological, technological and informational, with the designator “organic” being increasingly removed. A data “body” is still a body. It is not a purely “immaterial” construct; it is rooted in the informational structures, which underlie the system(s) it inhabits. The film’s cyborg protagonist, Major Motoko Kusanagi, reveals these tensions as they are developed through her struggle with identity, her subjectivity, and her ultimate fusion with the Puppet Master, which solidifies a previously unconsidered mode of being: the informational. The film highlights the tensions between humanism and posthumanism via paradoxical representations of embodiment and subjectivity, which are both equally limited within a humanist framework, by pointing the viewer to different modes of being, or more narrowly being-in-the-world (the as is, as it is in the world), through the different types of embodied beings: the human, the cyborg, and the informational.

  Meet Motoko

  The paradoxical nature in the way Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell presents embodiment alerts the viewer to the critical nature of the tensions caused by interactions between human and machine and the overarching competing frameworks of humanism and posthumanism. Ghost in the Shell depicts a world that can be characterized as posthuman. In the year 2029, Major Motoko Kusanagi is a cyborg working for a secret policing organization known as Section Nine. Motoko’s journey through the film highlights many important characteristics of what has been termed posthuman and provides a paradoxical representation of one of the central themes of posthuman thought: embodiment. Embodiment is seen as one of the quintessential questions pertaining to the development of technoscience and is played out in science fiction and cyberpunk movies and literature. Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell provides a paradoxical view of embodiment through the tensions presented as Motoko struggles for identity in a posthuman world.

  On the one hand, the film uses humanist notions of a search for an essential feature that can be labeled as “human.” Motoko is a full replacement cyborg in that her mindbody4 is nearly one hundred percent technological; the only organic components that remain are the brainstem and certain parts of her brain. Can the “body” then be viewed as the grounding for identity (the body as “shell” which houses the “mind”—consciousness, soul, Motoko’s “ghost”)? What kind of body provides this grounding? Is it only organic or can mechanical or even completely digital “bodies” provide a form of grounding? Or is it the “Ghost” (soul or consciousness), which provides this grounding?

  On the other hand, the film develops posthuman tendencies as Motoko struggles with her identity through the titular “ghost” in her bodily “shell.” As the film progresses she encounters an entity known as the Puppet Master, who potentially provides the answers she seeks. The film never gives a clear answer, but rather provides a paradoxical representation of embodiment, contrasting humanist notions of a Cartesian split between mind and body and consciousness (the “ghost”) as the seat of identity with a posthuman unification of the mindbody via distributed cognition (consciousness as rooted throughout the mindbody - you have as much consciousness in your finger as you do in your brain, and they are distinctly linked together). To pinpoint this paradox, there is a fluidity and flexibility in “embodiment” which can no longer be limited merely to that which is viewed as “natural” or “organic,” but rather can be extended into the “artificial” or “technological.” Multiple bodies, multiple consciousnesses become the norm by the end of the film for Motoko as she evolves via a fusion with the Puppet Master; the posthuman mindbody, as information, as a mode of being, can be “anchored” in everything: material, “immaterial” or both simultaneously.

  Informational Bodies and Distributed Cognition

  In Robert Mitchell and Phillip Thurtle’s edited collection of essays, Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, the contributors are linked by viewing the body as an informational circuit. In their introduction to the collection, the editors seek to depart from what they view as a distinction between the material and the immaterial. Referencing the Human Genome Project, Star Trek and The Matrix, they conclude that:all of these projects and imaginings officially ground themselves on the distinction between immaterial, transcendent information and fleshy, unique bodies. Information, so this story goes, exists between elements, whereas bodies are the elements themselves. . . . Information, in short, operates through the metaphysics of absence, whereas bodies depend on the metaphysics of presence. (p 1)

  Yet information is not something which is necessarily “transcendent” in sharp contrast to “fleshy, unique bodies.” Information works without the boundaries delineated by Cartesian dualism and a humanist conception. Rather, they are linked together in how the body becomes viewed as a circuit containing and composed of coded information.

  The body as circuit, as informational code, links into the notion of distributed cognition. Katherine Hayles (“Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments,” Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information) argues that the informational mindbody is not limited by a Cartesian split or consciousness being viewed as the “seat of identity.” Rather, the informational mindbody forms a unity not only within itself as circuit, but al
so expands to encompasses the environment, either the material environment of physical existence or the so-called “immaterial” environment of digital space. Mitchell and Thurtle isolate this tension by stating “life in our informational mode of development involves a complicated co-constitution of information and bodies” (Data Made Flesh, p 11). Addressing the key issue of embodiment, the problematic notions that arise out of a strictly humanist split between mind and body and the view of consciousness as the seat of identity are central to the film. Motoko is searching for a “real self,” some form of essential core that designates her selfhood. Her “self” cannot be linked to her body because her body is presented as only a “shell,” a swappable “thing,” owned and maintained by Section Nine.

  This co-constitution, however, is not only limited to the relationship between information and bodies, but also via the apparent separation between embodiment and the body. This separation is housed in seemingly distinct notions of the body as an “abstract concept that is always culturally constructed” and embodiment which is also “culturally constructed, but emerges from the physiological structures that have emerged from millennia of biological evolution” (Hayles, “Flesh and Metal”, p 229). The abstract “body” as a culturally created, and therefore a limited, normative “body,” works in conjunction with a physiological based notion of embodiment. Thus, “body” and “embodiment” can no longer be viewed as mutually exclusive categories, but rather, within a posthuman framework they become mutually inclusive, in which an abstract conception of the “body” has no normative basis, and embodiment is removed from its physiological, i.e., biological/organic, bias. Ghost in the Shell works with both a humanist split of mind and body and a posthuman unification.