InterCommunication was a web-zine project by the NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] currently located @:

Tokyo Opera City Tower 4F 3-20-2 Nishishinjuku Shinjuku-ku Tokyo, Japan

My objective is to translate as much as possible to English ¹.

Volumes

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Japanese

Feature

• HyperLibrary……From Databases to Post-Databases

• Informedia: The CMU HyperLibrary Project

• “Meme” and Database……An Interview with TANAKA Yuzuru

• Architects and Databases: On the Mediatheque Project in Sendai……An Interview with ITO Toyo

• The Future of Art and Databases

• Database Art……An Interview with Jean-Louis Boissier

• No Such Data Exists…… The Info-Politics of Databases

• Databasing Evil and Art

• Museums as Cultural Databases

• HyperLibrary keyword

Electronic Library, HyperText, Browsing, Multimedia Databases, Massively Parallel Database Server, Data Mining, Digitizing the Contents, Intellectual Property, Education and Databases, Genome Data and Databases

InterCreation

The Shape of Cities in the Future

DIGITAL VENUS Lynn HERSHMAN

GADGET……A time for Iron and Arms SHONO Haruhiko

On the Promise Day NAKAGAWA Masaaki

Untitled Nancy BURSON

InterDialogue

• Dream Music, Dream Spaces The Legacy of Takemitsu Toru and Luigi Nono HOSOKAWA Toshio and ISOZAKI Arata

• Past and Future Cosmologies of Art, Science, and Technology [part 2] Science and Philosophy as Systems……From Dialogue to Integration MURAKAMI Yoichiro and KUROSAKI Masao

CommunicationFrontier

An Introduction to Anti-Methodology in Music [part 19] On the Unfinished Business of Composing TAKAHASHI Yuji

Living Information [part 6]Kyoko HATANAKA Masakazu

Discovery and Interchange [part 9] Something New-ism MURAKAMI Yoichiro

…Dancing All Night, This Is No Dance Theory [part 5] …Moving My Feet So Light ITOH Seikoh, OSHIKIRI Shinichi, and SAKURAI Keisuke

InterReview

Poesy in the Anti-Book Age……Voice Garden by Mutsuo Takahashi and Yuji Takahashi MORINAKA Takaak

InterTechnology

Daniel Flannery & Scenographic Designs Visualising Hollywood Future HIKOSAKA Yutaka

Between Communication and Technology [part 1] Toward the Age of Networked Intelligence TANAKA Kazuo

InterCity

Memories of Monkeys: 12 Monkeys and Chris Marker MINATO Chihiro

Jean-Luc Godard’s “Interiors” ABE Kazushige

Higashi_e

Anime or Something Like it

Author: AZUMA Hiroki

“Neon Genesis Evangelion”

Television animation work. Broadcast by 5 networks associated with TV Tokyo Corp. Wednesday 6:30 p.m. October 6,1995 - March 27, 1996. Altogether 26 episodes. Draft, Scenario, Direction, by ANNO Hideaki Produced by GAINAX Ltd.

Basically this is the absurd story of a meaningless battle that takes place while riding on a puzzling machine against an equally puzzling enemy. The scene is the near future of 2015 in the 3rd City of Tokyo which is located at the foot of Mt. Fuji. The beings called “Angel” who were each crowned as Old Testament angels, relentlessly go on the offensive against the 3rd City of Tokyo. The purpose of the offensive and the true identity of the angels are totally unknown; sometimes the angels are giant creatures, sometimes they are big floating pyramids, and sometimes they are computer viruses, and at other times they are circular rings that emit light. “Evangelions” (nicknamed Eva) giant-shaped living weapons, often drive like maniacs, and because they transcend human technology like the Angels, are the only ones known who can oppose the Angels offensive. There are 3 bodies of Eva, and 14 year old children (Shinji, Rei, Asuka) were chosen as exclusive pilots for each Eva. The story develops centered around 4 people; in addition to the 3 kids there is a 29 year old woman named Misato who appears. Each of them has a trauma and not being adept at communicating with others humans, rather than humanity, etc. they consider internal existential questions such as “Why do we do battle with the Angels?, why do we ride Eva?” more imporant. Therefore the production mainly focuses on character psychology.

In the first half of the TV series, the work progresses like a good science fiction animation. Along the way several riddles are solved and it is becomes clear that the world of the animation has the strong, cult-like flavor referencing Jewish and Christian mysticism. Each of the main characters is positively depicted in their struggle to overcome their painful trauma. However, between the 16th episode and the last half of the series the world of the animation begins to implode. The gruesomeness intensifies with each episode as characters lose communication, get seriously hurt and die. The puzzles in the world of the animation multiply with increasing speed. Observers are pushed over into the abyss like in “Twin Peaks.” It is impossible to summarize the plot of the last half. In the 24th episode the isolated Shinji has a simulated erotic experience with a certain boy. The episode ends just before Shinji - who knows that the boy is the 17th angel - is forced to kill him. With the story suspended here, the last two episodes attempt to represent the psychology of Shinji employing abstract images and metafiction. The sudden abandonment of the narrative conclusion and puzzles of the fictional world that had been constructed up until the 24th episode, brought about an intense shock in animation fans.

At present, it has been announced that the last two episodes will be reproduced in video and laser disk formats. And this March a theater version summaring all the episodes will be opening. Still more, this July “Rebirth II,” a new work featuring a completely original story has been planned.

Although some people claim that it’s part of the recent Japanimation boom, actually right now there’s hardly any so-called Japanese commercial anime that is worth paying attention to. In fact, during the last 12 years (from 1984) there are only 3 anime artists - MIYAZAKI Hayao, OTOMO Katsuhiro, OSHII Mamoru - who should be recognized not only by enthusiastic anime fans, but by a general audience, and yet ironically, the quality of their works seems to have been maintained and supported by a distance from “anime-like” works. (Although here I’m being bold in my use of this vague expression)

What does that mean? For instance, MIYAZAKI’s mainstream path and educational path were determined by his two works “Tonari no Totoro”(1988) , and “Majo no Takkyubin/Kiki’s delivery service”(1989), and both of those paths were established by the suppression of an anime-like and otaku-like imagination; i.e Lolita-Complex like beautiful girls and super hi-tech whose thematics are richly expressed in such works as “Future Boy Conan”(1978), and”Laputa in the Sky”(1986). We can confirm from comments he made at that time that MIYAZAKI intentionally brought about this separation from that Lolita-complex, high-tech style. It’s useful to condider the fact that “Akira”(1988) by OTOMO was produced independently from the situation of Japanese animation, and because his American-comics-style works were opposed to the particular quality of Japanese anime images, the publication of his comic books brought him international fame. To put it another way; although “Akira” is animation; it isn’t anime. Among these three artists, even OSHII, who had been deeply involved in 80’s anime, sporadically made experimental artworks and live-image films after he produced “Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer”(1984) with the intention of making a strong metafiction, and finally he made a complete break from anime-like stories and anime images when he made “Mobile Police Patolabor 2: the movie”(1993). From the second half of the 1980’s, anime artists have been degenerating into a closed-off condition which on one hand produces low quality works of television anime, while on the other hand produces only high-quality images works for enthusiastic anime fans that makes use of the distribution system of OVA(original video animation) that has been rapidly set up. The above-mentioned 3 have just barely been able to make it as high-level creative artists for no other reason than they were able to refuse participation in the closed-off space where producers and consumers come together; i.e. fanzines, computer networks, anime magazines, speciality shops, etc. In other words, overwhelmingly in the last 10 years, when compared to the hugeness of its market, it’s hard to believe how dead and barren Japanese anime as a whole has become.

As the expression of a genre, anime has achieved qualitative subdivisions and quantitative expansion. As is the case in every genre, there is in Japanese anime as well the existence of what can only be called anime-like stories with anime-like images. (For instance there is a small inheritance from 1970’s Japanese science fiction. Despite that, in the last ten years, after around 1984 - the year of the opening of “Nausicaa of the Valey of theWind” - I don’t think that we can come up with anything good that’s anime-like and high-level work. This is astonishing. Anime as a genre is dead.

OSHII is probably the one artist who has seriously taken up this problem. In this sense his newest work, “Ghost in the Shell,” was a symptomatic work. In this work that was made through his investment in Oriental cyber-punkimages and frequent deployment of terms from contemporary intellectual thought, he excluded those elements that were anime-like images from the created images on screen, and laoded down with a strategy of attracting critics and audiences abroad (for instance he had U2 compose and Brian ENO produce the last song of the video version of Ghost in the Shell) it is a pretty superficial thing. Despite that, more than OSHII’s earlier masterpieces such as ‘Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer” and “Gosenzosama Banbanzai/Cheers for Ancestors”(1985), “Ghost in the Shell” will probably be critically acclaimed. OSHII understands all that very well, indeed. He ironically acknowledged the present state of affairs whereby nobody wants to watch simple anime like works, on the contrary, people want to watch works that are considered cultural and progressive (they are no longer anime) with some variation of the illustrations and with little interesting niblets scattered around for taste, which was the circumstances within which “Ghost in the Shell” was made. His activities are nothing than comedy which passes by tragedy. While I was watching that particular OSHII last November, I felt more and more acutely that this was the end of Japanese anime.

From within that state of affairs, ANNO Hideaki’s “Neon Genesis Evangelion” suddenly appeared.

It came as a complete shock. It was impossible to predict the ways in which “Evangelion” would transcend standard television anime works, because although the illustrations were very anime-like, the medium was television, and the pre-release propaganda was limited to the specialized anime magazines which made it seem like a simple anime of the giant robot science fiction genre. Perhaps, these expectations were shared even byanime fans. Despite all that, after the broadcast finished it turned into a big “event” in two senses of the word. I will briefly discuss below the meaning of this eventfulness.

As I already described in the other section, “Evangelion” can be divided into two parts consisting of the first half and the second half. The first half is a well made science-fiction anime. At this point - I mean January 1996 - this work has already been called the greatest masterpiece since “Mobile Suit Gandam”(1979-80). For the most part this critical evaluation is correct. It is not only because of the large amount of illustrations and the much more detailed production than standard anime works (although for people who often watch anime, the amount of illustrations and production is at an astonishingly high level, I won’t talk about this aspect in detail) The story and fictional world that it has set up pretty accurately lay out the multiple problems that our society vaguely possesses today in the present. Therefore this work has a power which transcends the small, narrow-minded “anime world.”

I will give only two concrete examples of this anime’s charm; first, the angel is a very idealistic enemy that is ever changing in an extremely abstract fashion, as I already described above. The composition pulls out concrete Godzilla-like images from the main characters own feeling of crisis, and never fails to force their reactions to go round and around in circles. For example the hero Shinji often talks out loud to himself “You can’t escape,” but in fact he has the least understanding of what might cause him to be stressed-out. (For instance, he repeats over and over “Why do I ride Eva?”) It’s fair to say that Evangelion is a story which depicts “anxiety without a cause” which exhaustively ends with a convincing feeling of tension. It’s clear that this kind of feeling is widespread when we look at the AUM incident and its repercussions. On this point, the work has a striking feeling of the present. However, the thing that we should pay closer attention to is the paradoxical whereby feelings of anxiety are always determined materialistically, but for the people who are caught in the center of this kind of anxiety, they can only experience it abstractly. (This is a psychoanalytic question) The anxiety which Anno should depict has to be presented as 90’s-like (concrete) at the same time as it should be shown to be universal (abstract). After all the ability of the artist should be spent in trying to stage this paradox temporarily by whatever fictional means. (For example, like in KAFKA’s bureaucratic machinery) The composition of the angels has reached a fairly high level by installing them with both abstraction and materiality. At the very least this work has transcended the efforts of MURAKAMI Ryu in his recent novel “Hyuga Virus” (What he was trying to get at in the deployment of the virus iturned out to be nothing but a device which expresses that paradox) In the case of “Evangelion”, the Angel transforms into a virus.

The second example is the secondary heroine AYANAMI Rei. This girl who has hardly any feelings of ambivalence, and who is completely lacking in concern for others and in the fear of death; she is shown to be an extremely impressive character thanks to the restrained performance of the voice actress HAYASIBARA Megumi. The room that she lives alone is one unit of a delapidated housing complex. Her unit is completely undecorated with walls of bare concrete, underwear and garbage scattered everywhere, and the curtains are always closed to the outside world. On top of her desk there are first-aid bandages and large amounts of medicine, beakers, and thick foreign books with Post-Its in the pages. She returns to her room for the sole purpose of sleeping. One of my friends who is from Poland described his completely accurate impression of Rei as being related to the problems of post-war, in other words Rei is linked to the problems of Bosnia,etc. At the same time I thought that the room overlaps with a science laboratory, particularly a medical laboratory. Therefore, ANNO intersected images of refugees/ trauma with the “scientific” – this is the only word that can accurately express the situation – motif of stark anti-decorativeness. (After all, this would be linked to questions about AUM, more specifically to the problem of “Satyan,” AUM’s scientific laboratories) Rei’s solitude is grounded in a completely tactile substantiality which gives us extremely realistic images of the discommunication that children of the present face. And these images of discommunication belong neither to Kogyal(“child girl”)-like autism nor to otaku-like autism which has been defined in opposition to Kogyal-like autism. (And these two types of autism are nothing more than the opposing gender extremities of post-modern decorativeness)

Episodes of the first half made an attempt at a salvation narrative (which follows from “Evangelion” coming from evangel). This focus highlights the process whereby the 4 main characters have been trying to open their circuit-lines of communication. Not only this positive emphasis on the attempt at communication, but like the two examples of the Angel and Rei which I gave above, the adeptness at narrative devices and the facility with images gives one the strong impression of a “1995-like” work. Truly the work is an event. As Professor HASUMI Shigehiko and novelist TAKAHASHI Gen’ichiro said before in their debate “works that have the feeling of a certain year” have ceased to exist from the second half of the 1980’s. Since then there has been no generational development of narrative structure. In other words, our narrative imaginations were produced in the first half of the 1980’s and still have not escaped from the format which Professor HASUMI sketched out in “Far from the Novel.” I think that this dry spell has nothing to do with social transformations. It is solely the effect of the poverty and barrenness of the imagiantion of writers. I think that the appearance of “Evangelion” highlighted this. I haven’t seen for a long time generational images and narrative devices equal to those which ANNO has given us of the Angels, Rei, etc.

There is also the question of genre. ANNO is very different from the above-mentioned 3 artists, in that he has no hesitation towards “anime-like” things. Perhaps there is also the fact of a difference of generation. Born in the 1960’s ANNO doesn’t have either the guarded hesitation towards an anime-like/otaku-like imagination or the yearning for a literary sensibility that MIYAZAKI born in 1941 and OSHII born in 1951 have had. When we look at ANNO’s background, we can recognize how he progressed from the “heavy” scene of otaku culture during the 1980’s. He has concerned himself with the problem of the barrenness of anime for a long time. He has now taken advantage of this concern for the barrenness of anime in “Evangelion.” In contrast to OSHII’s “Ghost in the Shell” which - contrary to expectations - was out of fashion because he employed a cyber-punk literary imagination in his work, in “Evangelion” appealing generational images have been taken from an anime-like imagination. Motifs such as charming beautiful girls and hi-tech machines which has strengthened the barrenness of anime, and in the end became important elements in his work. It became crucial to articulate 90’s-like problems through stereotypes and abstract motifs. To begin with “Evangelion” is an extremely otaku-like work which was by lots of details referenced from former anime and science fiction films, from the desing concept of cockpit to the brand of beer (Here in this aspect I don’t have time to treat it, although it’s important) In other words, it can be said that ANNO broke through the literary imagination of the 1980’s by strongly mixing and re-editting the motifs of the anime-like imagination, which had been completely barren for some ten years.

In the opening scene of “Evangelion” he already inserts a cut of a character which had initially been introduced in the 24th episode. The countless devices of this type means that Anno started the broadcast after conceiving the total structure pretty clearly. Actually, the speed of the narrative development of numerous foreshadowing in the first few episodes indicates that his work was made by reverse calculation of a precise, total construction. The flavor of the episodes of the first half is consistently the same. (Some comical episodes after the 8th episode are considered within this consistency). This story revived the genre of animation and at the same time, clarified the limits of the literary imagination. As I mentioned above, even at only this level it deserves to be called an event. Therfore even if this story had continued and concluded with a happy ending, I would have introduced “Evangelion” here. It would have been worth it.

Despite that I feel now that this work should be judged using entirely different criteria. First, that judgement would be distinguished from the contents of the story. Being shocked by the existence of this work was because of it was at an entirely different level. The beginning composition of “Evangelion” and the episodes of the first half demonstrated sufficiently ANNO’s adeptness (I do think this word is suitable for him) as a fictional author. I will repeat that many contemporary novelists can’t compare with ANNO’s adeptness, but probably it is more important that ANNO exploded his work in process. Anno revived anime. However at the same time he brought anime to a final closure. It is amazing that ANNO condensed the whole process over a period of only 6 months. And then within this condensed process of exploding, ANNO succeeded in pushing the limit of the standards he had set up in the first half of the story to a much higher level, though it takes a different direction. This is a true event.

Now for the last half. As I mentioned in a different section, ANNO abruptly abandoned the savior narrative and conceit of the happy ending. In other words, it means the abandonment of anime-like narrative (actually, here “evangelion” quickly brings about the displeasure of anime fans who usually won’t stand for a story where the main characters are unhappy). Therefore his choice of abandoning brings about a deviation from anime-like things in the mise-en-scene and in the composition. That development from the time around the 16th episode, can be grasped as the deviation which is is more and more radicalized. Therefore it necessarily follows that in the last two episodes we see the extended line of that radicalized movement; i.e. the metafictionalization and the total abandonment of the narrative (actually I feel that there might be an encrypted and hidden 3rd kind of event in the completely empty feeling of the final two episodes, but I won’t touch upon this now because I don’t have room).

According to Anno himself, this change of attitude came about while creating and producing the work. “Evangelion” was received enthusiastically among anime fans. He said that in noticing that autistic, enthusiast reception, he thought he should changed the entire conceptual structure of the work, and in the end that’s what he did. After all of the episodes were broadcast, in what looks like a self-tormenting, auto-destructive critique of anime fans that ANNO would repeat many times in radio interviews, specialty anime magazines, etc., he would clearly reiterate the personal intellectual history of MIYAZAKI and OSHII. All three of them isolated themselve from “anime-like things” owing to their hate of the autism after they achieved overwhelming success among anime fans. But ANNO is completely different from them on two critical points. The first difference occurs in “Evangelion” with its simulataneous deep absorption in the anime-like and it’s distance from it. In Anno’s case the change was terribly compressed. In MIYAZAKI’s case, the change occurred between the time of the success of “Lupin the Third, The Castle of Caliogstro” (1979) and “Totoro,” and in OSHII’s case he took about ten years between the time of the television version of “Urusei Yatsura” and “Mobile Police, Patlabor 2.”

In the second difference, as perhaps an inevitable result of that temporal compression, in ANNO the successful critique of anime was brought about by the logic of acceleration and multiplication, while in the case of MIYAZAKI and OSHII the critique of anime succeeded because of the logic of removal. The last half of “Evangelion” takes the form of a critique of previous anime works through developing all the narrative possibilities and anime-like expressions and pushing them to their limits; in other words producing a totality of the anime-like. Simply put, in the second half of “Evangelion” ANNO produces a super-complicated and super-high speed anime and thereby achieved a qualitative change. Several compositions were made for the purposes of constructing a 90’s savior narrative were rapidly inverted and were instead employed to tear to shreds the interactive communication among the characters. This means that for ANNO, he deliberately cut off communication with anime fans who supposedly can only appreciate works by identifying themselves with and investing their emotions into the characters.

There are no compromises in ANNO’s second half. By employing difficult lines and the omission of mise-en-scene , quick scene shifts, and busy cuts with few frames (in animation this is extremely luxurious because it requires a new illustration for speeds less than one frame-per-second) he manages to condense the narrative which would usually have required several episodes into one. For example, Rei dies in the time of just two minutes. We are overwhelmed by its speed. On the other hand simultaneously Anno will one after another invert riddles in the second part of the story that had been solved in the first half. Therefore, if we only watch an episode only one time, the plot will be almost impossible to follow. (In other words this means that ANNO completely disregarded the age of the viewers who would have been expected to be watching at that broadcast time following the rules of the televisual medium. ) Nevertheless, in the last half of “Evangelion” in a dimension completely separate from that of the narrative logic, he was fairly successful at communicating the feeling of anxiety and the misery of the characters who are one after another wounded to the point of death. How did he accomplish that?

The last half of “Evangelion” gradually loses the co-ordination with the complicated foreshadowing that was installed in the first half and loses the science-fictional, simulational reasonableness of the compostion of the fictional world. (Which is natural given by the change of direction) However, it doesn’t mean that the structure became careless. Instead a density and strange necessity arises. For example in episode #22 there is the unfolding of an incomprehensible story as Eva brings down the angel on a satellite orbit only by the throw of a special spear. A rational explanation is not even provided inside the story. But certainly the unfolding of the story possesses a certain inevitability with the flow of the scenes. That “inevitablity” which exists especially independent from the narrative strategy is the true worth of the last half of “Evangelion.” That inevitability allows for the dissemination of despair and tension. It’s difficult to ask where it comes from. Since I only want to pay close attention to this, we can connect the appearance of this inevitablity with the process of collapse and rebirth of the genre of anime. In this period of ANNO’s he is dealing with some univeral problems.

To put it boldly, from episode 17 until episode 24 (but especially in episode 18, 19, 22, and 23) at the moment when that condensed unfolding reaches its highest point, he several times makes me thing of GODARD. That is not an explanation related to the quality of cinema itself. That doesn’t mean that ANNO tried to cite or parody GODARD. Anybody can borrow stereotypical “Godard-like” images. (Of course ANNO himself does it. For instance using lots of subtitles) The problem is more abstract than that. When I asked novelist ABE Kazushige he explained that the problem is a kind of “density” which ANNO’s mise-en-scene and editing possessed during that period. The feeling of anxiety that is brought about neccesarily owing to that level of condensation, certainly turns him toward the direction of GODARD. The rules of the narrative genre of anime are rapidly spun and twisted to the point of their collapse and whether this is done consciously or not ANNO temporarily achieved a miraculous success. What I would like to call “Godard-like” is that he barely balances all of these things. Therefore that tension provides the sensation of the narrative of the last half of “Evangelion.” The repetitive twist as the collapse of the narrative giving birth to another sensation of the narrative; isn’t that totally Godard-like?

(C)GAINAX/Project Eva./TV Tokyo Corp/NAS

Zizek

Underground, or Ethnic Cleansing as a Continuation of Poetry by Other Means

As we know from philosophical phenomenology, the object of our perception is constituted through the subject’s attitude towards it. An exemplary case of this is provided by a naked feminine body. This body can provoke our sexual arousal; it can serve as the object of a disinterested aesthetic gaze; it can be the object of scientific (biological) inquiry; in extremis, among starved men, it can even be an object of culinary interest… Apropos of a work of art, one often encounters the same problem. When its political investment is too obvious, it becomes for all practical purposes impossible to suspend our political passion and to assume a disinterested aesthetic attitude.

And therein resides the trouble with Emir KUSTURICA’s Underground. One can approach it as an aesthetic object – insofar as politics involves no less passion than sex. One can approach it as an enjeu in our politico-ideological struggles. It can also serve as the object of scientific interest (to the subject who is able to assume the gaze of a historian and who can study the film in order to learn some background about the Yugoslav crisis). In extremis, it can function as an object of pure technical interest (how was it made?). With regard to the passionate reactions to which Underground gave rise, especially in France, it seems that its role as the enjeu in the political struggle over the meaning of the post-Yugoslav war totally eclipsed its inherent aesthetic qualities. While, in ultima analysi, I accept this perception, my viewpoint is slightly different. The political meaning of Underground does not reside primarily in its overt tendentiousness – in the easy way it takes sides in the post-Yugoslav conflict (heroic Serbs versus the treacherous, pro-Nazi Slovenes and Croats…) – but rather in its very “depoliticized” aestheticist attitude. That it to say, when, in his conversations with the journalists of Cahiers du cinema, KUSTURICA insisted that Underground is not a political film at all but a kind of liminal trance-like subjective experience, a “deferred suicide,” he thereby put on the table his true political cards. But how?

The eminent English Wagnerian John DEATHRIDGE emphasized the remarkable fact that HILTER’s favorite WAGNER opera was neither the overtly German Meistersinger nor Lohengrin with its call to arms to defend Germany against the Eastern hordes, but rather Tristan with its tendency to leave behind the Day – the daily life of symbolic obligations, honors, debts, etc. – and to immerse oneself in the Night, to embrace ecstatically one’s death. This “aesthetic suspension of the political” (to paraphrase KIERKEGAARD) was at the very core of the phantasmatic background of the Nazi attitude: at stake in it was something more than politics, an ecstatic aestheticized experience of Community best exemplified by the nightly rituals during Nuremberg rallies. And my thesis is that KUSTURICA’s Underground stages this same “apolitical” phantasmatic background of the Yugoslav ethnic cleansing and war cruelties. Again, how?

Let us begin with some of the journalistic cliches about the Balkan and post-Yugoslav war. One often hears the warning that, in the case of the Bosnian war, one should avoid the cliche of the demonization of the Serbs. However, apart from the fact that his warning itself (based on the tendency to maintain an “equidistance” towards all sides in the conflict “one cannot put all the blame only on one side; in this fraternal orgy of tribal killing, nobody is innocent”) is one of the main cliches about the Bosnian war, it is interesting to discern, in this ambiguous demonization, the gap between the “official” and the true desire. That is to say, in this very “official,” public condemnation of Serbs and compassion for Bosnians, Serbs are perceived as invincible warriors and winners, while Bosnians are confined to the role of suffering victims, and the main endeavor of the West is to keep undisturbed this underlying phantasmatic frame. For that reason, the moment the Serbs began to lose on the battlefield, the West instantly stepped up the pressure and ended the war. The Bosnians had to remain the victims. The moment they were no longer losing, the perception of them changed into that of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists… The truth of the so-called “demonization of the Serbs” resided in the fascination with their victims, which was clearly perceptible in the Western attitude towards horrifying pictures of mutilated corpses, of wounded and crying children, etc. They were horrified by them, yet at the same time they “couldn’t avert their eyes.”

The other predominant journalistic cliche is that the Balkan people are caught in the phantasmatic whirlpool of historical myths. KUSTURICA himself endorses this view, here, in a quote from his interview for Cahiers du cinema, “In this region, war is a natural phenomenon, It is like a natural catastrophe, like an earthquake which explodes from time to time. In my film, I tried to clarify the state of things in this chaotic part of the world. It seems that nobody is able to locate the roots of this terrible conflict.” What we find here, of course, is an exemplary case of “Balkanism” that functions like Edward SAID’s “Orientalism” – the Balkans as the timeless space on which the West projects its phantasmatic content. Before the Rain by Milche MANCHEVSKI, the Macedonian film that was nominated for an Oscar in 1995, although politically the opposite of Underground, participates in the same attitude. It offers to the Western gaze what it likes to see in the Balkans – a mythical spectacle of eternal, primordial passions, of the vicious cycle of hate and love, in contrast to the decadent and anemic life in the West….

In other words, this mythical image of the “Balkans” is faked, mediated by the Western gaze; it already involves a cynical distance. How does cynicism work today? In one of his letters, FREUD refers to the well-known joke about the newlywed who, when asked by his friend how his wife looks, how beautiful she is, answers, “I personally don’t like her, but that’s a matter of taste.” The paradox of this answer is that, in it, the subject pretends to assume the standpoint of universality from which “to be likable” appears as an idiosyncrasy, as a contingent “pathological” feature which, as such, is not to be taken into consideration. And our point is that one encounters the same “impossible” position of enunciation in contemporary “postmodern” racism. When asked about the reasons for their violence against foreigners, neo-Nazi skinheads in Germany suddenly start to talk like social workers, sociologists and social psychologists, quoting diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, etc. This is what LACAN had in mind when he claimed that “There is no metalanguage.” What skinheads assert is a lie even if, or rather precisely insofar as, it is factually true. Their assertions are belied by their very neutral, disengaged position of enunciation from which the victim is able to tell the objective truth about itself. This impossible position of enunciation characterizes the contemporary cynical attitude: in it, ideology can lay its cards on the table, reveal the secret of its functioning, and still continue to function.

And since the reference to the “deep ethnic and religious roots” of the ethnic cleanser has exactly the same status, one should avoid the trap of “trying to understand.” The main source of mystification of the Bosnian war is that everybody tries to “understand” it. One of the cliches about it is that, in order to explain what is going on, one has to be acquainted with at least the last five hundred years of history, with its bric-a-brac of wars, religious and ethnic conflicts… This compulsive evocation of the “complexity” of the situation serves to maintain the quasi-ethnological gaze on the Balkans, i.e., the distance of the Western observers towards the Balkans as a phantasmatic place. In other words, the events in the former Yugoslavia prove the inherent stupidity of the well-known wisdom, “to understand is to forgive.” What one should do is precisely the opposite; with regard to the post-Yugoslav war, one should accomplish a kind of inverted phenomenological reduction and put in parentheses the multitude of meanings, the wealth of specters of the past that allow us to “understand” the situation. One should resist the temptation to “understand” and accomplish a gesture homologous to that of cutting off the sound of a TV-receiver. All of a sudden, the movements of the persons on the screen, deprived of their vocal support, appear as meaningless, ridiculous gesticulations… It is only such a suspension of “comprehension” that renders possible the analysis of what is at stake economically, politically, and ideologically in the post-Yugoslav crisis, i.e., of the political calculi and strategic decisions that led to the war.

The first thing to do is thus to call into question the innocent gaze of liberal and democratic Europe on the Balkans – this gaze in which the Balkans appear as a kind of exotic spectacle that should either be tamed or quarantined; the place where the progress of history is suspended and where one is caught in the circular-repetitive movement of savage passions; the place where the symbolic link is simultaneously suspended (dozens of broken cease-fires) and reinforced (the old warrior notions of honor and pride). As is always the case with fantasies, our relationship to this place is deeply ambiguous – the strange mixture of repulsion (towards the horrors which occur down there) and attraction (exotic fascination with the spectacle of authentic passions, in contrast to the aseptic and impotent life in the West). As one of my American friends told me not so long ago, “Down there, in the Balkans, it is still possible truly to love and hate. Down there, sex is still true sex, even if it is a brutal rape, while in the United States, more and more, sex is in front of the computer or TV screen, sex with a condom, sex which follows the self-help manuals….

HEGEL said that true Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives evil everywhere around itself. This idea directly concerns the Balkan war – not only the gaze of the “ethnic cleansers” who perceive every trace of cultural or religious alterity as a threat to one’s identity, but also the neutral-rational-liberal-multiculturalist gaze on the Balkans as the place of “nationalist madness,” of the vortex of primitive passions that threaten to engulf the entirety of Europe and of the “ethnic virus” from which civilized Europe was long ago cured. Evil also resides in the neutral gaze which, from its “open” multiculturalist position, deplores the nationalist closure of the Balkan “tribal passions.” In other words, what one should call in question is the entire field of opposition between multiculturalist universalism and nationalist particularism. What these two opposed poles – the Europe of coordination and pragmatic negotiations and the Balkans of primordial passions – both exclude, is simply, the political as such, the antagonisms and social struggles of today’s capitalism.

The weak point of the universal multiculturalist gaze does not reside in its incapacity to “throw out the dirty water without also losing the baby.” It is deeply wrong to assert that, when one throws out the nationalist dirty water (the “excessive” fanaticism), one should be careful not to lose the baby of “healthy” nationalism, which guarantees the necessary minimum of national identity, and “excessive” (xenophobic, aggressive) nationalism. Such a common sense distinction is the most dangerous, because it reproduces the very nationalist reasoning that aims at getting rid of the “impure” excess. One is therefore tempted to propose a homology with psychoanalytic treatment, in which the aim also is not to get rid of the dirty water (of symptoms, of pathological tics) in order to keep safe the baby (the kernel of the healthy Ego), but rather to throw out the baby (to suspend the patient’s Ego) in order to confront the patient with his “dirty water,” with the symptoms and fantasies that structure his jouissance. In the matter of national identity, one should also endeavor to throw out the baby (the spiritual purity of the national identity) in order to render visible the phantasmatic support that structures the jouissance in the national Thing. And the merit of Underground is that it unknowingly renders visible this dirty water.

In what, precisely, does this “dirty water” consist? A personal experience revealed to me this “water”, this – to call it by its psychoanalytical name – inherent obscenity of Power, in a most distastefully-enjoyable way. In the 70s, I did my (obligatory) army service in the old Yugoslav People’s Army, in small barracks with no proper medical facilities. In a room that also served as sleeping quarters for a private trained as a medical assistant, once a week a doctor from the nearby military hospital held his consulting hours. On the frame of the large mirror above the wash-basin in this room, the soldier had stuck a couple of postcards of half-naked girls – a standard resource for masturbation in those pre-pornography times, to be sure. When the doctor was paying us his weekly visit, all of us who had reported for medical examinations were seated on a long bench alongside the wall opposite the wash-basin and were then examined in turn. So, one day while I was also waiting to be examined, the doctor was looking at a young, half-illiterate soldier who complained of pains in his penis (which, of course, was in itself sufficient to trigger obscene giggles from all of us, the doctor included). The skin of its head was too tight, so he was unable to draw it back normally. The doctor ordered him to pull down his trousers and demonstrate his trouble; the soldier did so and the skin slid down the head smoothly, though the soldier was quick to add that his trouble occurred only during erection. The doctor then said, “OK, then masturbate, get an erection, so that we can check it!” Deeply embarrassed and red in the face, the soldier began to masturbate in front of all of us but, of course, failed to produce an erection. The doctor then took one of the postcards of half-naked girls from the mirror, held it close to the soldier’s head and started to shout at him, “Look! What breasts, what a cunt! Masturbate! How is it that you don’t get an erection? What kind of a man are you? Go on, masturbate!” All of us in the room, including the doctor himself, accompanied the spectacle with obscene laughter. The unfortunate soldier himself soon joined us with an embarrassed giggle, exchanging looks of solidarity with us while continuing to masturbate… This scene brought about in me an experience of quasi-epiphany: in nuce, there was everything in it, the entire dispositive of Power – the uncanny mixture of imposed enjoyment and humiliating exercise of power, the agency of Power which shouts severe orders, but simultaneously shares with us, his subordinates, an obscene laughter, bearing witness to a deep solidarity… One could also say that this scene renders the symptom of Power – the grotesque excess by means of which, in a unique short-circuit, attitudes that are officially opposed and mutually exclusive reveal their uncanny complicity, where the solemn agent of Power suddenly starts to wink at us across the table in a gesture of obscene solidarity letting us know that the thing (i.e. his orders) is not to be taken too seriously and thereby consolidating his power.

What we have here is a set of unwritten obscenity rules that supplements the public, official discourse of Power. Does one not encounter the same set at the other end of modern history, in the life of English colleges as depicted in numerous memoirs and, among others, in Michael ANDERSON’s film If? Beneath the civilized, open-minded, liberal surface of daily life in these colleges, with its dull but charming atmosphere, there is another world of brutal power relations between younger and elder pupils – a detailed set of unwritten rules that prescribes the ways elder pupils are allowed to exploit and to humiliate in different ways their younger peers, all in an atmosphere pervaded with “prohibited” sexuality. We do not have the public “repressive” rule of law and order undermined by undercover forms of rebellion, mocking the public authority, etc., but rather its opposite. The public authority maintains a civilized, gentle appearance, whereas beneath it there is a shadowy realm in which the brutal exercise of power is itself sexualized. And the crucial point, of course, is that this obscene shadowy realm, far from undermining the civilized semblance of public power, serves as its inherent support. It is only by way of the initiation into the unwritten rules of this realm that a pupil is able to participate in the benefits of school life and the penalty for breaking these unwritten rules is much harsher than for breaking the public rules.

This distance between the public-written law and its obscene superego supplement also enables us to demonstrate clearly where cynicism – cynical distance as the predominant form of ideological attitude of the late capitalist subject, falls short. A cynic mocks public law from the position of its obscene underside which, consequently, he leaves intact. Insofar as the enjoyment that permeates this obscene underside is structured in fantasies, one can also say that what the cynic leaves intact is the fantasy, the phantasmatic background of the public-written ideological text. Cynical distance and full reliance on fantasy are thus strictly codependent. The typical subject today is the one who, while displaying cynical distrust of any public ideology, indulges without restraint in paranoiac fantasies about conspiracies, threats, and excessive forms of enjoyment of the Other.

Here, however, one should be careful to avoid a fateful confusion. This set of obscene unwritten rules has nothing whatsoever to do with the so-called implicit, impenetrable background of our activity, i.e., with the fact that, as Heideggerians would have put it, we, finite human beings, are always “thrown” into a situation and have to find ourselves in it in a way that can never be formalized into a set of explicit rules. Let up recall another film that stages the obscene ritual of Power, Stanley KUBRICK’s Full Metal Jacket. What we get in its first part is the military drill – direct bodily discipline, saturated by a unique blend of the humiliating displays of power, sexualization and obscene blasphemy (at Christmas, the soldiers are ordered to sing “Happy birthday dear Jesus…”) – in short, the superego machine of Power at its purest. As for the status of this obscene machine with respect to our everyday life-world, the lesson of the film is clear: the function of this obscene underworld of unwritten rituals is not to enable the official “public” ideology to “catch on” or to start to function as a constituent of our actual social life. In other words, this obscene underworld does not “mediate” between the abstract structure of symbolic law and the concrete experience of the actual life-world. The situation is rather the inverse. We need a “human face,” a sense of distance, in order to be able to accommodate ourselves to the crazy demands of the superego machine. The first part of the film ends with a soldier who, on account of his overidentification with the military ideological machine, “runs amok” and shoots first the drill sergeant and then himself. The radical, unmediated identification with the superego machine necessarily leads to a murderous passage a l’acte. The second or main part of the film ends with a scene in which a soldier (Matthew MODINE), who throughout the film, has displayed a kind of ironic “human distance” towards the military machine (on his helmet, the inscription “born to kill” is accompanied by the peace sign, etc.), kills, out of compassion, a wounded Vietcong sniper girl. He is the one in whom the interpellation by the military big Other has fully succeeded. He is the fully constituted military subject.

Full Metal Jacket also demonstrates the vocal status of these unwritten rules, as exemplified by the US Marine Corps’ mesmerizing “marching chants.” Are their debilitating rhythm and sadistically sexualized nonsensical content not an exemplary case of the consuming self-enjoyment in the service of Power? Underground also brings to the light of day the obscene “Underground” of the public, official discourse (represented in the film by the Titoist Communist regime). One should bear in mind that the “Underground” to which the film’s title refers is not only the domain of “deferred suicide,” of the eternal orgy of drinking, singing and copulating that takes places in the suspension of time and outside the public space. It also stands for the “Underground” workshop in which the enslaved workers, isolated from the rest of the world and thus misled into thinking that World War II is still going on, work day and night to produce arms sold by Marko – the hero of the film who is also their “owner” and the big Manipulator, the only one who mediates between the “Underground” and the public world. KUSTURICA refers here to the old European fairy-tale motif of diligent dwarfs (usually controlled by an evil magician) who, during the night, while people are asleep, emerge from their hiding places and accomplish their work (set in order the house, cook the meals…), so that when, in the morning, people awaken, they find their work magically done. KUSTURICA’s “Underground” is the last embodiment of this motif, which is found from Richard WAGNER’s Rhinegold (the Nibelungs who work in their Underground caves, driven by their cruel master, the dwarf Alberich) to Fritz LANG’s Metropolis, in which the enslaved industrial workers live and work deep beneath the Earth’s surface to produce wealth for the ruling capitalists.

This dispositif of “Underground” slaves dominated by a manipulative evil Master takes place against the background of opposition between the two figures of the Master. On the one hand is the “visible” public symbolic authority and on the other is the “invisible” spectral apparition. When the subject is endowed with symbolic authority, he acts as an appendix of his symbolic title, i.e., he is the “big Other.” The symbolic institution acts through him. Suffice it to recall a judge who may be a miserable and corrupted person, but the moment he puts on his robe and other insignia his words are the words of Law itself… Therein resides the ultimate lesson of the Freudian myth of parricide – of the primordial father who, after his violent death, returns stronger than ever in the guise of his Name, as symbolic authority. If the real father is to exert paternal symbolic authority, he must in a way die alive. It is his identification with the “dead letter” of the symbolic mandate that bestows authority on his person, or, to paraphrase the old American racist slogan, “Only a dead father is a good father!” On the other hand, the “invisible” Master (whose exemplary case is the anti-Semitic figure of the “Jew” who, invisible to the public eyes, pulls the strings of social life) is a kind of uncanny double of public authority. He has to act in the shadow – invisible to the public eye, irradiating a phantom-like, spectral omnipotence. On account of this unfathomable, elusive status of the kernel of his identity, the Jew is perceived as incastrable. The more his actual, social, public existence is cut short, the more threatening becomes his elusive phantasmatic ex-sistence. Suffice it to recall the anti-Communist right-wing populism that has been recently gaining strength in the ex-Socialist East European countries. Its answer to present economic and other types of hardships is that, although they have lost legal, public power, the Communists continue to pull the strings, to dominate the levers of effective economic power and to control the media and state institutions… The Communists are thus perceived as a phantasmatic entity a la the Jew. The more they lose public power and become invisible, the stronger their phantom-like total-presence and their shadowy effective control…

This phantasmatic logic of an invisible, and for that very reason all-powerful, Master was clearly at work also in the way the figure of Abimael GUZMAN, “Presidente Gonzalo,” the leader of Sendero Luminoso in Peru, functioned prior to his arrest. The fact that his very existence was doubted (people were not sure if he actually existed or was just a mythical point of reference) added to his power. The most recent example of such a Master, qua invisible and for that reason all-powerful, is provided by Bryan SINGER’s The Usual Suspects, a film centered on the mysterious “Keyser Soeze” – a master criminal about whom it is not clear if he exists at all. As one of the persons in the film puts it, “I don’t believe in God, but I’m nonetheless afraid of him.” People are afraid to see him or, once forced to confront him face to face, to mention this to others. His identity is a highly kept secret. At the end of the film, it is disclosed that Keyser Soeze is the most miserable of the group of suspects, a limping, self-humiliating wimp, like Alberich in Richard WAGNER’s Ring des Nibelungen. What is crucial is this very contrast between the omnipotence of the invisible agent of power and the way this same agent is reduced to a crippled weakling, once his identity is rendered public.

The unfortunate Marko from KUSTURICA’s Underground is also to be located in this lineage of the evil magician who controls an invisible empire of enslaved workers. He is a kind of uncanny double of Tito as the public symbolic Master. However, the key question is, “How does KUSTURICA relate to this duality?” Here, the film becomes problematic. That is to say, the problem with Underground is that it falls into a cynical trap and presents this obscene “Underground” with a benevolent distance. Underground, of course, is multi-layered and extremely self-reflective. It plays with a mixture of cliches (the Serbian myth of a true man who, even when the bombs are falling around him, calmly continues his meal). It is full of references to the history of cinema, to VIGO’s Atalanta, and to cinema as such (when the “Underground” war hero – who is presumed dead – emerges from his hiding place, he encounters cineasts shooting a film about his heroic death), as well as of other forms of postmodern self-referentiality (the recourse to the perspective of fairy tales: “there was once a land called…”; the passage from realism to pure fantasy; the idea of the network of Underground tunnels beneath Europe, one of them leading directly from Berlin to Athens…). All this, of course, is meant in an ironic way. It is “not to be taken literally.” However, as we have already seen, it is precisely through such self-distance that the “postmodern” cynical ideology functions. Umberto ECO recently enumerated the series of features that define the kernel of the fascist attitude: dogmatic tenacity, the absence of humor, insensibility for rational argumentation… He couldn’t have been more wrong. Today’s neo-Fascism is more and more “postmodern,” civilized, playful, and involving ironic self-distance…yet for all that, no less fascist.

So, in a way, KUSTURICA is right in his interview with Cahiers du cinema. He does somehow “clarify the state of things in this chaotic part of the world” by way of bringing to light its “Underground” phantasmatic support. He thereby unknowingly provides the libidinal economy of the Serbian ethnic slaughter in Bosnia: the pseudo-Bataillean trance of excessive expenditure, the continuous mad rhythm of drinking-eating-singing-fornicating. Therein lies the “dream” of the ethnic cleaners; therein resides the answer to the question, “How were they able to do it?” If the standard definition of war is “a continuation of politics by other means,” then we can say that ethnic cleansing is the continuation of (a kind of) poetry by other means.

Reminiscences of a Journey with Jonas Mekas KITAKOJI Takashi

Felix Brought Us Candy - In Paris, Gonzales-Torres Serves Up His Art. Help Yourselves Elisabeth LEBOVICI

Machine Snobbery Jean BAUDRILLARD

Dialogue between Art and Science - Random Thoughts on Two Symposiums SAKANE Itsuo

Angel

Where Are the Angels

Erkki HUHTAMO (E.H.): In your presentation, Philippe, you talked about some very profound, important changes–if we think about the ideas of identity, personality, culture in general–that you think are coming along with the spreading of virtual communities. First, a very simple question. You said that there are hundreds of different virtual communities now. Do you see among them any which are really interesting, or really problematic, at the moment?

Philippe QUEAU (P.Q.): When I said that there are hundreds of variations of this concept of “virtual communities,” you have to make a difference, for instance, between groupware techniques, where the emphasis is only on certain aspects of these communities, or trading or networks of academic exchange over the net, and ludic like World Chat, V-Chat by Microsoft, Mundo by Intel Corporation, The Palace etc…

For me, the most interesting virtual communities now are those using virtual avatars with communication capabilities like World Chat, V-Chat, Mundo. This is very interesting because it embeds the contradiction, which I try to underline, between two very important concepts of our classical relationship to others, which is “presence” and “representation.” Because with those avatars you have a sense of presence but it’s not really presence, yet it is presence. So it’s kind of a strange oxymoron.

I think the long-term effect of those communities when they develop–the progress will be rapid and more and more convincing with the development of technologies–will change our relationship to others. It will change our understanding of our own person, our own reality. Exactly like in some tribes of Africa, where the relationship to others depends on the way you own your own visage, your own face. When you get a baby, you have to make a scarification on the face to make it enter in the communities of humans. Maybe, the Cyberspace will evolve like a new Africa, an Africa of cyberspace, where in order to be a member of the virtual community of cyberspace, you have to wear a scarification. It will not be real scarification of course, but only a metaphorical one. For instance, maybe a kind of reduction , an over-simplification or a symbolization of our own human complexity.

E.H.: One of your important hypotheses is that the traditional distinction between the concepts of presence and representation is melting away with these new forms of virtual community. Virilio, in one of his books, reminded us of a story related to Galileo Galilei and his telescope. When Galilei introduced his telescope, it was the era of the Counter-reform in the Catholic Church, so it posed a very important question: under what conditions would it be possible to use the telescope to actually participate in the community rituals of the Church, the mass? This is an ethical question, but it is also related to the essence of telecommunication: you are physically away but you are also a participant by means of the telescope. Isn’t this also related to the connection between representation and presence - “the telescope” obviously had something to do with the Renaissance sense of the visual as well?P.Q.: Yes, I would like to make a similar comparison with the idea of Virilio. I would like to quote the famous words by Thomas d’Aquino, the famous theologist from the Middle Ages, the 13th century. He asks the question: “Where are the angels?” And the answer is: “Angels are not where they are but they are where they act; they are where they love. That’s the answer. We too could ask the same question–for instance, about virtual surgery. Where is a virtual surgeon? Where is he physically? In New York? Where does he act as surgeon? For instance, in Africa, through networks? The answer in this case would obviously be: Surgeons are, where they do act, because it is there where they express their finality. They are what they act. So, the question today, with the spreading of cyberspace on those distance/telepresence systems, is: “Where are we?–Are we where we are sitting or are we where our mind is exerting its own strength?

I think it is going to make the conception of “being somewhere” much more complex, much more entangled with other aspects. It is not only a question of where we do things but also the problem of how we are made of, what we are made of. That is the question because the more the technology of representation through avatars uses some part of our real face and some part of synthetic models the more we’ll lack in criteria of the understanding of what is real and what is virtual, because we will be more and more blurred or blended together.

Then the danger is confusion. Confusion or difficulties to distinguish or clarify the levels of reality, the levels of virtuality, because the blurring will be more and more sophisticated. My only concern in this is the danger of confusing the minds of the new “illiterate people”, the illiterate of the virtual, because they will lack in possibilities, in mental understanding of the levels of reality. It’s a big problem, I guess. The Reform–you mentioned the Counter-reform–by Luther is for certain people, including myself, related to the printing press. There is a strong relationship between the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg and the spreading of the ideas of Reform by Luther, and maybe more importantly their actual practice, by personal access to the Bible rendered possible.Today we are witnessing the development of a new printing press, which is digital technology, virtual technology. I guess there will be a new Reform which will be necessary, and perhaps a new “alphabetism” will also be needed. We don’t understand very well what kind of Reform will be necessary yet. We also need to push forward more…

E.H.: If I go back for a second to my example about Galileo and the telescope, obviously it was very much a social and political question for the Church, because even the hypothetical idea that people would start using a telescope to “go” to the church threatened very important values of the Catholic Church. When the people were physically present in the church building they could be controlled, provided with exactly the same “word of God” by the priest, and so on. Now, if people would be in remote locations, it could be a potentially disruptive factor for the unity.

Today, we can also think about a totally different example. I have heard that in Japan there are still many companies that insist that all important decisions have to be made in physical meetings.Even though remote connections and telecommunications can be used in preparing all kinds of decisions, the really important things still have to be decided in such a way that everybody is physically present. The idea of a virtual meeting is not yet accepted. What does this tell about our contemporary attitudes?

P.Q.: For Japan, maybe it’s the problem of adaptation to a new era. I have heard that when you trade some financial operation, you need to be present to sign the trading order in Japan. But in other countries like America and Europe, you don’t necessarily need to be present physically, you can send a fax. So, it is really a question of necessary adaptation. Maybe we won’t have time to be present, maybe being present will no longer be an essential condition to be efficient.What I would like to say about that is: there will be a variety of attitudes, of conditions, of possible actions, mixing different levels of reality or virtuality, mixing different levels of being more or less present. What I think will come is more complex time, where there will be a variety of being more or less present physically, more or less present virtually. There will be different attitudes possible out of those different hybridization. Of course for ludic activities it will be much less important than for war game activities.

Let’s think about this massacre in Cana, Southern Lebanon. There were shots on the United Nation’s camp by which more than one hundred people were killed and we have the proof now that there was a drone, a little spy plane observing. This spy is without any pilot, a small plane with very precise observation technique. So, some brain was behind this, some brain out there behind the line, which was in, virtually in the drone. And you can generalize this. Of course, it is not only for war but it is also for financial operations. It’s not a brain with eyes but it’s a brain with computing capabilities, like observing the state of the planet with financial instruments, a technique of analysis of the flow of money throughout the world.

All those techniques are virtual in a sense, they imply a sense of virtual presence, at least a mental presence. Now, we have a variety of being-present-virtually but it’s very difficult to understand that. In our “pre-cyber era” it was so simple: there was absence or presence. It was either one or the other. But now we have to consider a new state of mind, a new state of humanity: being absent but present (laughs).

E.H.: Maybe one of the important symptoms of this change is this burning down of the Credit Lyonnais’ headquarters in Paris. The next day all the functions were actually OK, so the newspapers began to ask: “Why did they actually need the physical headquarters with its 2500 workers if the bank was perfectly operative virtually?” How do you see the significance of this discussion about the Credit Lyonnais’ affair?P.Q.: Well, more and more companies are becoming virtual companies now. Credit Lyonnais could operate on the following day because they had a back-up computer operating system somewhere else: they no longer needed any offices in the center of Paris. They can operate their virtual network from any point, they can also operate from any country. Now more and more companies are suppressing office space. For instance, IBM in France have no longer any offices for the vendors and marketing officers: they go on their commercial territories with a groupware technique on laptop and cellular telephone line and that’s it.

The relationship to this discussion is that more and more human communities–for instance, commercial communities and professionals communities–are also becoming sort of virtual. But what we lack is an instrument of intelligibility of what it means to be virtual in the context of being a professional of financial operations, of being a professional of surgical operations; or to be virtual in terms of spying or making wars or making games. All those different activities imply different types of being virtual and different types of responsibilities for possible mistakes.

Do you remember the famous mistake of the downing (of a civilian aircraft) by an American warship called Vincennes during the Iran-Iraq war? They downed it by mistake. A civilian Airbus full of civil passengers was downed by a missile and, after an analysis of the case, it turned out to be a mistake on the computer radar, computer screen. They mistook the echo of the Airbus for an echo of a MIG21. So, it means that the modern technologies of virtual representation, which are for war but also for economy or for groupware: all those types of virtual representation are virtual instantiation of the “real” reality.

My hypothesis is that the more we develop virtual representations of what we think is “reality”, which is true for many things, the more it will affect reality itself because it is not independent. Reality is what we think is reality–like the value of yen is what we think is the value of yen. But there is no essential value: it’s just a social construction. If it is true of yen, it’s also true of the war. It’s also true of the poverty situation in some critical countries; it’s also true of many other problems.So, we have a very big problem facing us, which is only facilitated by the development of virtual technologies–not only virtual representation in terms of realistic rendering but also in terms of modeling the reality through mathematical models.

E.H.: Let us go back for a little while to your idea of “avatars” in terms of the different traditional forms of masks. The mask is always a representation but, at the same time, it means “hiding something”, “hiding behind the mask.” So, it has these two sides: expressing certain identities, belonging to a social group, social or symbolic values, while it also means that you are hidden behind it. Could you describe these two sides of culture in relation to avatars? In which sense are people expressing themselves as avatars? In which sense are they hiding behind the mask of an avatar in computer-generated virtual environments?

P.Q.: Well, the human face is a mystery, because it’s actually a kind of nakedness–there is nakedness or nudity. It has a depth that is endless. But when we take a photograph of somebody, when we take a television shot of somebody, or now when we make a computer avatar of somebody, we have a reduction of this infinity, of this infinite depth of human face. So, I would say that–like a television image, like paintings, like photography–this new form of representation–“computer avatar”–will affect deeply our own image of ourselves.

As you know in the Bible it is said that man is made as “the image of God.” But this is a metaphor, of course! Metaphor of what? Metaphor of “infinity.” But representation has a series of drawbacks–at least, the representation we use technically now. The drawback is the suppression of possible infinity of the meaning of a face.So, the big risk I can see with avatars is a philosophical risk: it is an oversimplification of what we think is reality; oversimplification of what we think is the other person; oversimplification of what we think is ourselves. It’s really a new mirror–it’s not only a real mirror but a mirror of our own representation. You have the risk to be attracted, like Alice, beyond the mirror.

E.H.: If we think about the idea of corporate communication, for instance, people often say that physical presence is necessary because so much of the communication is subliminal. So, people communicate not by actual words, they say, but by very small gestures, for instance, in very important business negotiations. Now considering a situation where this kind of negotiations would use avatars, like in cyberspace–you were just speaking about the way in which this infinity of details is reduced at the stage of developing avatars–what do you think about the development of the avatars? Will it ever get closer to the kind of “infinity” which you were describing in relation to the human face, or does it lead to some other direction?

P.Q.: I think there would be immense progress to make in terms of realism, but realism is not the only problem, the only dimension to solve. I think that even if we had a totally realistic avatar, it will lack some depth, too. Though it will be very realistic, it will always lack some depth because the representation by a computer is only a representation. The real presence–like being there or being here–is something much more magical in a way. There is magic in being present.

The big risk we are going to have with avatars is that we will make very strong, very interesting progress in realism. But this will stay superficial because the progress is not really in realism but in the understanding of it. The real understanding will not necessarily be related to the progress of realism. Maybe it’s the contrary that will arrive, that will happen, that the emphasis on the technological side of the problem will be paid by a heavy price in a lack of real human development. Obviously, all this is open.

What I can say as an observer of the research and the development of the technologies of computer communication or computer-generated communication is that there are many projects led by engineers. What we need now is a much deeper understanding that should be related to ethnography, arts, religion–religion has always had some relation to masks and visages.I have mentioned in this talk the Africans: you don’t have a face; they don’t see your face unless it has some human appropriation. This human appropriation is religious. You have to have a scarification. A scarification is not just any scarification: it’s very personal, it’s the trace of the cry or it’s related to death. So, a baby has to have a scarification because it is the way it is inscribed on the time when it’s being born, the time of its possible death at the end of his life. This is another level of understanding the life, you know.

This of course seems maybe a little bit strange for us which are for instance modern, but it is, however, very deep. It is maybe the only question that is worth asking: what do we do here on earth? It’s not just for making groupware. What is the real state of our exchange with people? It is not just to have corporate meeting, you know. The only concern I have with the development of avatar is that they are perfectly fit for extremely narrow activities, in fact, such as games or maybe very simple transactions. But for anything really human, then, they are not fit at all or they are more dangerous than we think because they have a tendency to pervert our relationship to the essence of being real. To make a straightforward conclusion, the development of virtuality pollutes our understanding of reality.

E.H.: So, Philippe, if I go back once more to your talk, one of the really interesting things in it was the way in which you presented Husserl and his concept of epoche as a possible philosophical solution to the split that exists in the actual situation between presence and representation. Could you say something about how you bring this concept from Husserl into this relationship?

P.Q.: As you know, the concept of epoche is the central concept of phenomenology. The idea I would like to suggest is that we have a problem of confusion between presence and representation, as I already mentioned. Maybe the epoche could be used as a methodological tool. Epoche as you know is suspension of belief in the world, as a methodology, as a training tool, to make a distance between us and what we are confronted with. That is the phenomenological reduction, as Husserl says.

Now we have this confusion, growing confusion between different levels of reality, different levels of virtuality. The epoche as a tool would be like taking some distance or avoiding to enter too quickly into any of those levels of reality or virtuality. In a way, representation is the epoche of presence. Any representation is a distance, as is clearly understandable in French or English: “presence” and “representation” are contradictory to each other. Representation is like “renewed” presence.To go into that line of thought, “present” has a double meaning both in French and English. It means “now” and also “gift.” This duality of meaning is very interesting to analyze in fact because being present, being fully in position of feeling presence is a very real gift. What I would like to say is that epoche is a necessary access to get out of too simple feeling of being there, which will only be an illusion. It’s just a necessary research to get out of the illusion of representation.

E.H.: Can you imagine such avatars, which were in a way expressions of this feeling or sense of epoche; avatars which would help in network communication to keep the distance and the suspension of belief? It is not always necessary to go from philosophical concepts to practical realizations, but I know that you are working not only on the theory of avatars but also practically on avatars. With avatars we get easily to a situation which is in a way the contrary of that. You said that Husserl’s concept can also be a methodological idea. How do you apply this idea to designing avatars?

P.Q.: One aspect of the epoche in terms of avatars would be not to be attached to one’s own representation but maybe to be able to fly into the eyes of one’s counterparts. With fuzzy avatar technology you can not only be in your own viewpoint, but you can fly from your own viewpoint to the viewpoint of the others. By creating those kinds of tools, you would be put in a very interesting social situation, where you would not only see the world of cyberspace through your own virtual eyes, but would also be given tools–suspension-of-belief tools in fact, epoche tools–to fly to the viewpoints of the other persons you work with in the cyberspace. And it’s a methodological tool, too, not to ever forget that it’s all illusions. Maybe this kind of “social protection methods” would be very helpful to avoid taking oneself too seriously. (laughs)

E.H.: Yes, I think it’s a wonderful idea. Think about an “epoche toolbox,” which would be a necessary utility for people developing these forms of representation in network communications. A new concept. (laughs)

P.Q.: And there is also another idea of epoche tools. You know, you can augment your own face expression by special boosting muscular techniques. That is, when you detect the movement of the eyes or muscles, sometimes it’s a little bit filtered out act by the algorithm of image processing. So, you need to boost the signal to make it more expressive. But if you go into that line of thought, you could have over-expression, so you would act like a kabuki actor, for instance, by boosting the expression. It would be a embedded epoche tool because you cannot believe that this guy is over-expressing himself. I think it’s interesting to get to this level of exigence because it will be necessarily the ultimate frontier of “putting oneself in parenthesis” as I would quote Husserl. The suspension of belief is like putting oneself in parenthesis, to make an abstraction of one’s own viewpoint.E.H.: I think we have to finish now but I like this idea of an “epoche toolbox.” Actually, it’s a very interesting philosophical helper concept. It could be developed into something, really.

[In Kyoto, on May 13, 1996]

Burning the Interface - Longing for the Public Computer Lionel DERSOT / Translation: OGAWA Naoya

Sonar ‘96 - Between Ecstasy and Idleness Erkki HUHTAMO

In Memoriam: Timothy Leary, Medium of Cybernetics TAKEMURA Mitsuhiro

Excerpts from a Travel Diary ASADA Akira

InterForum

The Rules and Roles of Network Society [part 4] “Experience Resources” Called The Net NTT Forum on Information and Culture

InterScience

Linked Articles [part 6] Matter as Seen via Renormalization Group - In Search of New Protean Models OGATA Masao

Monograph

The History of Art & Technology [part 16] Dematerialized Mannerism - Light and Environmental Art MORIOKA Yoshitomo

Hypermedia Revolution [part 2] How Words in Print Have Reorganized Our Minds SHIGA Takao

Philosophy and Media [part 9] Virtual Reality and the Present Moment KUROSAKI Masao

InterProject

Christian Moller - Experimental Architecture as Interface SHIKATA Yukiko

Creating A New Competence - The Design of Relations in Space Marco SUSANI / Translation: SUZUKI Keisuke

Electronics Meets Design - Marco Susani’s “Smart Tools Project” Presentation TODA Tztom

Footnotes

1. Mostly machine translated. ↲