Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture by Steven T. Brown (review)
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Steven T. Brown, Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ix + 256pp. US$31.00 (pbk).Now four years old, Steven T. Brown's Tokyo Cyberpunk remains one of the two or three best resources in English for those interested in sf anime. The others - Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr and Takayuki Tatsumi's Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams (2007), Brown's own Cinema Anime (2006) - are essay collections, making Tokyo Cyberpunk the only extended study of sf anime to date. Although each of its chapters focuses on a different set of texts, the conclusion pulls together arguments and insights from all of them to reach some large-scale conclusions about how the posthuman is envisioned and theorised in Japanese anime. For in-depth explorations of important anime films and series from the last thirty years, there really is nothing comparable.Brown's study presents sf anime the way most viewers experience it: as part of an sf-inflected discursive field that includes related media forms, such as live action films (especially those in which CGI blurs the boundaries between animation and live action), and visual art, such as the work of Hans Bellmer and H.R. Giger, and related cinema genres, such as body horror and surrealism. Some readers might prefer a tighter focus on the anime medium and the sf genre, but Brown contends in his introduction that to understand the 'lines of flight that [Japanese sf films] set into motion in response to the mechanisms of advanced capitalism, globalization, and emerging imaging and telecommunications technologies' they must be analysed 'through their rhizomatic connections with other anime, other films, other works of art, and other discursive formations' (9). Particularly because of the 'network of small narratives' (8) that characterises most sf anime, he argues that a non-hierar- chical, non-teleological approach is more appropriate than one that attempts to unearth deep meanings or grand narratives.What this sexily theoretical, postmodern-sounding methodology allows Brown to do is, in fact, an old standby of literary studies: a series of close readings of a small number of narrative texts. The majority of the slim volume (185 pages excluding notes and index) is taken up with close readings of selected sf Japanese films and their rhizomatic connections. The chapter on the (live-action) film Tetsuo: The Body Hammer (Tsukamoto Japan 1992), for example, provides detailed plot summaries and scene-by-scene analyses of David Cronenberg's The Fly (USA 1986) and Videodrome (Canada 1993) as well as Tetsuo. With brief but important exceptions, only cursory attention is given to the media characteristics of anime, CGI or live-action film, and there is little analysis of cinematic technique. (Brown does, however, consider the sound design of several of the films under discussion - a heretofore understudied aspect of the cinematic experience.)The recent work of Thomas LaMarre and Thomas Looser insists that an intensive focus on the technology of the medium is a necessary part of any study of anime; all else is characterised as 'book reports'. While LaMarre and Looser do not mention any names, it is possible that Brown's penchant for close readings and relative inattention to details of media technology would cast this study into the 'book report' bin, but this would be an unfair dispar- agement of Brown's approach. Brown's focus is on cultural and philosophical posthumanism - 'posthumanism as critical theorization of analytical or ontological positions' as it 'enters into cultural forms and practices' (159), and particularly the ways those cultural forms and practices transcend national boundaries while also being inflected by specific national histories. Exploring the ways that sf anime (and live-action) films defamiliarise and challenge the philosophical underpinnings of technoscience and global capitalism, as this study does, is surely a worthwhile goal. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it