Trans-crypt: the Becomings of Unconscious/Television
*This introduction is a transcription of the author’s presentation The Immanent Concept of The Unconscious and Japanese Television Animation at the Synergies in Communication (SiC 2024) 12th International Conference.
This book is called Unconscious/Television; it is a book that is informed by my discontent with aspects of psychoanalysis, in both its clinical and theoretical dimensions, and the way Lacanian psychoanalysts deal with language. Also, this book aims at posing, because of psychoanalysis, philosophical problems—twisting concepts—that will entangle art and the production of thought. Within the Lacanian framework, practices are too attached to a notion of the unconscious that is structured as language; especially in relation to the Lacanian proposition that followed Sigmund Freud. With structuralism, which highlights and strengthens the division between nature and culture, Jacques Lacan thinks that Freudian concepts, and his positioning of the unconscious as the cause, should be elaborated or reconfigured as language, with language being the structure of the unconscious, representation operating with signifiers within this structure, and the signifier representing the subject to another signifier. Above all, what I have been concerned with is a certain relationship to the Other—that is the symbolic, alienation in language, the master signifier—and how stuck we are with this neurotic comprehension of the clinical and the theoretical, and how we need psychotic or perverse possibilities in order to invent new things, new lives, new bodies and worlds, new concepts and thoughts. I intend to complicate or elaborate certain understandings which Jacques Lacan institutes. In Lacan, we find this notion that is: “there is no Other of the Other”, which can be taken to mean that there is no Other outside of this symbolic realm (mostly, for Jacques Lacan, a neurotic mastered symbolic, with the S1 and a signifier chain) that we are all born into. We conduct analysis in order to grieve the Other and its master signifier. I am in search of actions that are outside of representations, or outside of the striated space of the Other. What is reality outside of the symbolic? What realities do we reach as possibilities in the smooth space? I ask these questions using the weapons of a nomadic war machine against the State (which is itself another instance of the symbolic); weapons that may smooth the striated, weapons of delirious free action.
Language, according to Lacan, is an alienation that builds the unconscious within our bodies, and the body will be an effect of language. So we would always be in relation to some kind of language; it is not linguistic precisely but still pertaining to the idea of language as the medium of our relations. This is a discontentment I have, and reading Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Guattari especially, there are propositions that we should take into consideration on the strength of what they bring to the work with the unconscious. The unconscious is a tool, a compositional tool. Instead of thinking the unconscious in terms of structures, we should think molecularly – this is the ethical approach to the concept that focuses on its cosmic instead of public politics. How do atoms make connections? Instead of thinking that the body is an effect of language, we should try to elaborate on this fusion, where language is a secretion: it is what comes out of the cells in the body, or something produced by the body, by its cells and genetic codes. Isabel Ghirardi says in our conversations: “Language is a secretion”. Language is not structuring something unreachable—the barred Other, as Lacan calls it—language is a production occurring within an ecology.
In regard to this discontentment with Lacan, I started introducing the ideas of Sandor Ferencz, in particular the concept of the Thalassa, which led me to Thomas Lamarre, author of The Anime Machine (2009) and The Anime Ecology (2018). Thinking with Thomas Lamarre, I was trying to see the plans of composition that Japanese Television Animation—Anime—was proposing. Composition, here, not seen only as formal aspects but also as narrative aspects of anime. I then have Thomas Lamarre’s machinic approach to television as the core of all I am writing, as I am trying to elaborate on this other possibility of the unconscious, and how the unconscious, a tool of multiplicity, can operate with the libido—because the libido is part of the body—, the fuel of the drives, as opposed to the treasure of signifiers or the lamella (the myth of Oedipus invading most of our bodies). Other myths may be in and out of our bodies as well. With Lamarre, I was trying to see how anime productions could be talking about a multiplanar unconscious and its ecologies. I was posing problems for the Lacanians by becoming closer and closer to both multinaturalism and signaletic animism.
I am now going to Kawakubo Rei, the designer for the Japanese fashion brand Commes de Garçons (CdG). For her 1997’s Spring/Summer show, she presented a collection titled Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body. What is going to happen in this meeting of what is made—the Dress—with the body? She, here, wants to rethink the body, and to effectively make bodies, with dresses, through this meeting. Production of production. A perspectivist crash that will allow us to rethink the divide between subject and object, a main issue for me in this book, when proposing compositions with the unconscious: after Deleuze and Guattari, we must operate in accordance with multiplicity. Kawakubo made this collection that is pretty much a collection of lumps and bumps, or mutations; something that is very typical in anime plots. She wanted to do something never seen before, saying that this was her least dissatisfying collection. I think this is very interesting because CdG is a global phenomenon and at the time that she made this collection, in ‘97, Japanese fashion designers were very trendy; they were highlights of the Paris Fashion Week. But how does one wear in the street, or buy in a shop, these mutated pieces? Mutation that happens when the dress meets the body and the body meets the dress. What is important here is the way that Kawakubo Rei approached these compositions. She would write a word, and go to the atelier with this word—so for example, in this collection someone could say the word was renaissance; to be reborn in transference. With this approach, with Kawakubo’s process triggering movements in a body yet to be known, composing new bodies to come, we are operating in the neighborhood of Lacan. Nevertheless, the word Kawakubo gives to the pattern cutters will not produce representations to be placed in a signifier chain, her word desires something new, it manifests a force of desire that may produce more desire because of its openness. Kawakubo would give this piece of paper to all of the pattern cutters in the atelier, and then it would be a long process of trial and error where they try to build a collection of these relationships. What I see in Kawakubo is a way of operating with the unconscious and its physicality that is not through speech exclusively; there is a word, but it is just one more element in the process. Action, here, acting outs, cuts and patterns, unpredictable meetings are composing bodies. I see how she is trying to compose bodies with the clothes, with their processes at the atelier. To make things outside of representation, walking things made of meetings. And is not that, for instance, something closer to what we watch in Devilman Crybaby (2018), Yuasa Masaaki’s take on Nagai Go’s famous manga? Characters in the anime are going to say that demons fuse with each other, they merge: and that is how they are going to produce weapons. I see the clothes designed by Kawabuko not as clothes, but as weapons against some kind of symbolic, trying to produce another possibility of Other, of radical difference: one Other of the Other among many Others that we have to deal with. We can elaborate and try to interpret these Others, but always insufficiently—there is not a sufficiency in the interpretation that will allow one to capture the war machine we see in the smooth space opened by Kawakubo’s runway, for instance. And that is my hypothesis here: the unconscious is an immanent concept, a tool, the reserve of chaos, a place of libidinal investments at the same time in the body and outside of it where we can produce weapons against the symbolic, transforming and assembling compositions in this process.
In relation to anime, Thomas Lamarre talks about the idea of the multiplanar image, which is not full animation such as with Disney, it is instead a composition in which we see several landscapes and bodies one in front of the other, and the image does not have this mediated impression of illusion, or cartesian perspective. So the illusion that we see in cartesian compositions—that separate subject and object, allowing understanding—is deceived in anime. Deceiving the illusion with other kinds of movement, with close-ups and repetitions. Breaking neurosis with lines of perversion or psychosis. So we are not inside of the image as a bullet, within ballistics, with a center point-of-view that captures it. Animetism, movement between surfaces, in contrast to cinematism, movement into depth. We are confronted by a multiplicity of things in the layers and intervals of the composition; images that face back the spectator. Images that are much more delirium than representation; much more uncanny than phallic interpretative penetration. I tried to extend an idea of the unconscious that comes from that, from a multiplanar composition: a psychotic mirror of its audience.
In one of the chapters I tried to think about Neon Genesis Evangelion – which is a pretty neurotic TV show, because it is the neurotic family drama, the father and the son, and the mother is the robot. Yet, there is a very interesting episode when one of the angels makes an attack against the pilot that is called Asuka (the same name of Lucifer in Devilman). Asuka is being attacked in her mind with this ray of light which is the angel trying to make contact with the human, and that is very problematic for her, she cannot recover from this attack, an attack that she refuses to withdraw from, disobeying official orders. Asuka is a much more interesting character than Shinji because the way that she disrupts the narrative is not neurotic enough as Shinji’s narrative was. Asuka, by refusing to withdraw, seems to be making an alliance with the angels, with the other species, with the enemy. Evangelion’s neurotic way of writing the narrative was a little bit disappointing because it is too connected to this phantasmatic familiar condition of being the missing piece that is lacking in the Other. Maybe Anno Hideaki works in a very Western way of making narratives, in a way that is perhaps too close to Ingmar Bergman? That was not enough for me, and several other anime scholars criticize Evangelion and its neurotic composition, such as Ueno Toshiya and Christophe Thouny. For this book, in order to think the unconscious with anime, I needed another possibility of composition: so I have written a text on Devilman Crybaby, a reinterpretation of Nagai Go, this time directed by Yuasa. There I could find psychotic/perverse possibilities of composition that were much more interesting: both because of fusions and because Lucifer is at war against God and humanity. God, with René Descartes, as the Other guaranteeing the victory against Lucifer – who could invent their own Other of the Other. René – we are thinking about life and death, about rebirth: the sea of the Thalassa, potentialities, manifestation of forces, desires against laws. Can we call these images death-images, after Susana Viegas and her investigations on film-philosophy?
There is a great quotation from Devilman Crybaby, which is also in the original manga. They say: fusions are weapons invented by demons. Demons change their own bodies into weapons by merging. So there is a possibility of thinking with this concept of the unconscious, that is always active in the body: activated by the body meeting other bodies and elements in the world. Just as the final remark on the importance of Japanese Television Animation to this book, there was, after The Anime Machine—where the discussion of multiplanar compositions arises—a second book written by Lamarre called The Anime Ecology, and in one of the chapters he talks about the Pokemon incident, an ecological – we must not separate nature and culture because bodies are ecologies – event that happened around a particular episode in the first season of Pokemon—before the show even had seasons or was big in the West. In the episode called Electric Soldier Porygon, an episode about this Pokemon called Porygon, they go inside a cyberspace, and there is a whole narrative around being this electric soldier that can transit from the realm of the computer to the real world. At some point, Pikachu attacks—a thundershock—and at the moment Pikachu does this, a number of kids watching the TV show at their homes had epileptic shocks. We have all seen this on the news, it was a very famous incident at that time, more than 25 years ago, and what is important about Lamarre’s reading of the incident is the problem of composition and ecology that changed, even if momentarily, bodies, fluxes, and intensities. That is to say, it is not only the rapidly flickering red and blue coloured frames that triggered epileptic responses, but it is also the moment in time/the year/in their lives that kids were watching, and also because of how the signals of television were broadcast and the reception of the antennas, and how close to the TV the kids would sit, and importantly the narrative of the episode itself, with Porygon, and the characters, crossing between realms. Transversality and becomings. This book was written because of television, on the narratives that are only available because of these screens; influenced by the Pokemon Shock that attacked bodies. In an interview, Thomas Lamarre made the very important observation that Gilles Deleuze’s books on cinema were written after going to the cinema, he saw the films projected somewhere. Nevertheless, the warmth of the TV screen is different from the warmth of the projected screen because the TV has a body: Jean-Luc Godard taught us that in Prénom Carmen (1983), when a character autistically embraces the TV. Here, I am writing in televisual conditions – these are the screens that made this book possible. TV happens in the middle of things. Someone in the family is talking, but you can focus on the show you are watching, assembling something outside of that symbolic, of the household, living in another living room. And debates about the Pokemon incident suggest that to watch anime is not to watch an illusion: there are several intensities moving within these images that alter the materiality of the body. Instead of subjects, we are multiplicities – an object may change the composition.
If we are thinking about the symbolic being structured as language, can we elaborate on another possibility of the symbolic that is closer to ecology? Why, then, to insist on operating with the symbolic? In this book, I am very interested in the alliances between the real and the imaginary, using Lacanian terms. Unconscious libidinal investments are both produced and producing worlds and bodies. Deleuze and Guattari work with the concept of the haecceity, and they discuss this in terms of the composition of things—time, weather, what you have eaten, the word you have heard, the haptic qualities of something like the fabric of the clothes you are wearing—all elements or components are a part of this haecceity. I want to relate this to the unconscious, which is not an internal thing of the body, but a constant möbius strip that is both inside and outside.
To think with television, I also work with another show that is not Japanese Media, but which discusses Japan as well. With Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), more specifically with the episode about the Trinity Test and the consequences of the atomic bomb, an episode that has in its soundtrack the Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1961), by Krzysztof Penderecki. David Lynch and Mark Frost are making a proposition that concerns the atomic possibility of the image and its radioactive forces, capable of producing mutations in the body – for that, I bring the concept of the crypt as another unconscious, calling it cryptonomy: so to highlight libidinal economy. Is there one or several unconsciouses? As Deleuze and Guattari propose, we might imagine working with wolves and their packs. Unconsciouses: wild reserves of chaos.
But now, please, let's read the book.