Azuma Hiroki

Hiroki Azuma es uno de los pensadores sociales más interesantes y lúcidos de nuestra época y sin embargo ha pasado bastante desapercibido en el mundo occidental hasta 2009, cuando Jonathan E. Abel y Shion Kono decidieron traducir a lengua inglesa una de sus obras principales; “Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals”, escrita originalmente en 2001, de la cual aún no existe versión en castellano.
La obra, muy concisa, de menos de 150 páginas, refleja de forma incisiva las particularidades de la sociedad y la juventud japonesas del momento, en concreto de los grupos “otaku”; lo que los anglosajones llamarían “geeks” y los hispanohablantes “frikis”.
Estos colectivos han cobrado especial importancia en los últimos años en todo el mundo y su impacto social puede verse claramente en las tendencias cinematográficas, televisivas, literarias, y en general de ocio a nivel global. Han fomentado nuevas formas de consumo y han colonizado la red como espacio propio. Por todo ello, resulta de especial importancia revisar una obra de estas características, en la
que Azuma nos enseña la base y el funcionamiento interno de este movimiento, en su vertiente oriental.

The aim of this paper is to re-examine the engagement of sekai-kei (world-type) texts with the questions of ethical action through looking at the competing theoretical approaches of deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Although in both its anime and other media forms, such as games, manga and light novels, sekai-kei has often been associated with specific elements of science-fiction iconography, character-types and narrative structures it is also a mode that regularly circles around existential questions of meaningfulness, responsibility and decision. Whilst personal introspection is often foregrounded in the stylistic use of features such as pensive, self-reflective voice-overs, it is also evident in sekai-kei works that any existential problems are inescapably interpersonal through narratives driven by the relation between self and other or self and society.
Although highlighting the philosophical nature of sekai-kei texts is not new in itself, I want to reassert the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory, and more specifically that of a Lacanian-Žižekian inflection, to address the success and failure of these works in approaching such existential questions. Here I want to compare Lacanian approaches with those Derrida-inspired ideas used by Japanese cultural theorist Azuma Hiroki to understand examples of sekai-kei and related works. I also more specifically want to defend the work of Lacan and Žižek against some of the reproaches Azuma makes in his book on Jacques Derrida, Sonzaiteki yubinteki/Ontological, Postal (1998). This is important since despite there only being a handful of explicit references to Derridean concepts in many of Azuma’s subsequent books, the overall trajectory of works such as the ‘Animalizing Postmodern’ series, I would argue, is very much reliant on Derridean thought to provide more positive possibilities for ethical action under the condition of postmodernism nihilism.
However, not only do I want to suggest that Azuma ultimately misreads Žižek, but that this is important for understanding the ineffectual way Japanese theorists of postmodernism have approached the relation between ethical action and the contemporary period of capitalism. Whilst I suggest Japanese critic Uno Tsunehiro provides a useful repost to many of Azuma’s theories, I also examine how Žižek offers a critique of Azuma’s position as a reflection of, rather than a challenge to, postmodern capitalism. On the one hand I want look at sekai-kei as something motivated by the contact with the ‘real’ opened up by Anno Hideaki’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-1996 Japan). On the other hand I wish to consider how despite being conditioned by an encounter with the real, sekai-kei texts typically employ strategies by which any form of radical subversion of the symbolic through a Lacanian act are, in various ways, foreclosed. This also suggests that sekai-kei typically supports rather than threatens contemporary capitalism.

Thought to be far-fetched works of science fiction and fantasy, one of the most recent and significant developments for the field of science, technology, and society has been that of sex robots (also referred to as sexbots).
This paper aims to examine the developing phenomenon of sex robots through a primarily philosophical lens in order to better understand the implications that the existence of these robots can have for society at large in a multitude of ways. Though a topic that can be easily joked about, one of the main aims for the outcome of this paper will be to establish how sex robots, in many ways, embody the Anthropocene era through the complexity of their existence—an existence that is intertwined with ideas of capitalism, feminism, technologism, representation, and moral responsibilities, or lack thereof, by raising questions on the ethics of sex robots such as: What are the moral implications of creating sex robots? What does that say about the state and status of human intimacy? What does the creation of sex robots say about current social thought? Do sex robots hold any potential for solving social and intimacy issues? Is humanising sex robots ethical? And so on.
This paper will attempt to answer those questions by considering three main perspectives: A ethical/moral critique; a feminist/social critique; and a technological critique, referring to works by the likes of John Danaher & Neil McArthur, Donna Haraway, Hiroki Azuma, David Levy, Jean Baudrillard, and others. By doing so, it is hoped that this paper will be able to provide a basic, holistic perspective to the reader, rather than produce a work that is completely biased against the topic, and help the reader to gain an understanding on the topic and perhaps form an opinion over it in order to gauge at the possibilities that the future holds for sex robots, and the consequences that accompany them in their development.
Keywords: Sex robots; sexbots; philosophy; Anthropocene; Donna Haraway; cyborg manifesto; ethics; morality; science, technology, and society.

This is my MA thesis. I take no responsibility for this work, but some aspects of this may be useful to people researching Murakami Takashi, Yoshitomo Nara, or the early work of Azuma Hiroki... which is why I'm uploading it here.

Real abstract: This thesis is an examination of the concept and the term "superflat" as it is elaborated by the Japanese artist Murakami Takashi in his writings, in the exhibition he curated under the same name, and in his own art. Its aim is to contextualize Murakami's project on one hand in terms of a similar attempt to define a Japanese national aesthetic in the early 20 th century, and on the other in terms of the 1990's tendency to return to Edo Japan to find the "origins" of Japan's postmodernity. Murakami's own art is then turned to in order to both elaborate on and test the aesthetic of Japanese art he calls the superflat. This examination of Murakami's art permits the formulation of an aesthetics of Japanese contemporary art and animation even as it will afford an understanding of the "cultural logic" of the digital age that informs Murakami's argument. Questions important to this project are: Is the articulation of a local aesthetics possible in this globalizing age? What are the aesthetic traits of the digital age? How should the superflat---as both idea and project---be interpreted?

This is the Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics online on 17 January 2019 and in print in May 2020, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21504857.2019.1566155.

Through a gendered close reading, using classical reception studies as a springboard, this article discusses the reception and moe-ification of the female witch, warrior, and monster figures from classical mythology in Japanese seinen and shōnen manga at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It focuses on Flora and Schierke in Berserk (1990–); the Gorgon sisters in One Piece (1997–) and in Soul Eater (2004–2013); and Medusa in Witchcraft Works (2010–), all of whom are named and/or fashioned after Circe, the Amazons, the Gorgons, and Arachne. It points out to the intertextuality between these worldwide popular turn-of-the-century Japanese manga and classical mythology narratives. It discusses the moe-ification of these classical subversive monstrous female figures, formerly demonised and marginalised by the patriarchal discourse. It analyses how their reception in manga contributes to canonising the monstrous female. It illustrates how that offers the female readers of seinen and shōnen manga new ways of expressing and interpreting gender that liberate and restructure the female’s relationship to power.

The rise of digital media and the trend towards more privatized forms of communication and user-generated content have long challenged the traditional idea of a mass-media-based public sphere. More recently, discussions about privacy and surveillance epitomize the ongoing process of reconfiguration and negotiation between private and public, as well as local and global, prompting us to reconsider the quality of the public sphere or spheres, and its significance and function in contemporary society qua universal norm. At the same time, the development of digital technologies itself has contributed to new, technologically based, “semi-public” spaces on Twitter, Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms. These new media forms evade any simplifying categorization into the private or the public. Given the rise of the “connective sociality” (tsunagari no shakai-sei) (Kitada Akihiro) generated by the users of these new media forms, emphasizing the act of communication above communication’s content (i.e., social connections through “re-tweets” and “I-likes” of “memes,” instead of verbalized discourse), it has become necessary to conceptually come to terms with the political status of such “semi-public spheres,” along with their relation to and interdependence with the traditional public sphere. I propose to define this new form of an informal or semi-public sphere – forms of political contestation in particular – from the perspective of their political and mass-mediated (in-)visibility as “latent public opinion” (Shimizu Ikutarō) based on digitally “connected action” (L. W. Bennett and A. Sanderberg), and, thus, as what Azuma Hiroki has tried to grasp as “general will 2.0.” Accordingly, one shouldn’t consider this development as something to be merely criticized, but see it as a possibility not only for the emergence of alternative political spheres but also as an impetus to think of new methodological approaches for sociological and political research into recent forms of political contestation in post-democratic and post-3/11 Japan.

In this article, I contend that attending to the intersections of embodiment and cultural experience is especially fruitful in considering Azuma Hiroki’s postulation of hypervisuality. Putting hypervisuality into dialogue with North American and Western European work on the visual, and senses more broadly, I argue, offers a chance to see how the culturally and historically contextual privileging of sight and processes of representation coincide to help produce a modality of narrative engagement that conflates an individual’s singular reading with the potentiality for such a reading’s universal experience.

While Azuma Hiroki’s Dōbutsuka suru posutomodan: otaku kara mita nihon shakai (2001) has often been considered in Anglophone reception as a work examining a specific Japanese subculture, I turn in this article to his theory of the ‘hypervisual,’ and place it into relation with work on the cultural contours of the visual. Herein, I place such an idea of hypervisuality in relation work that is critical of North American and Western European cultural elevation of the visual as the most valued sense and preeminent way of knowing. Together, I hold, these bodies of work push us further towards an understanding of processes of interpretation and narrative engagement in the present.

The aim of this paper is to critically engage with Azuma Hiroki's prize-winning science-fiction novel Quantum Families (2009), examining its role within the overall development of Azuma theorizing and evaluating its particular perspectives on ethical and political commitment. Despite being a rare example of Azuma's creative rather than critical or theoretical writing, Quantum Families, I argue, plays an important role in Azuma's oeuvre, effectively allowing him to take full advantage of science-fiction's role as a "literature of ideas" to work through many of the theoretical suppositions he had been grappling with in works from Ontological,

Time, the irrevocability of choice and commitment as well as the finality of death are central premises in modern moral and political thinking. This irreversibility is understood to reflect something about the organism, and something about the world.  As culture comes to be mediated more and more by digital architectures in which time can be skipped, reversed, and begun again, it becomes important to revisit these premises. This paper seeks to bring together thinkers across nations and across disciplines to organize the question of time in the digital age. In particular the relationship between human beings and the virtual/digital world of knowledge databases and online video games.

This paper scrutinises and contests the legacy, legitimacy and enduring relevance of a postscript added to a footnote in the second edition of The Introduction to the Reading of Hegel by Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968). In this Marxist and ‘anthropo- centric’ reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the postscript pertains to Japan and the Japanese and speaks to the West, enticing it to foresee its own futural becoming. With the interjection of the Japanese ‘snob’ thesis, I shall analyse the post- script in the sense of the ‘cunning of reason’ which interrupts the linear, grand narrative of Western history. My reading will draw on European philosophy and Japanese cultural theory to explain the disruption to the Fukuyama’s end of history thesis – the much-lauded paean to capitalism made in 1989, a moment in history prior to the deep, endemic recession which currently plagues many of the world’s economies. I conclude by suggesting that while the ‘snob’ thesis is in the end a thought- experiment, it is one which works well when one resurrects and begins to think what is meant by the claim of Nick Land (1992, p.222) that the overman is the cyborg.

本論文では、アレクサンドル・コジェーヴの第２版の作品『ヘーゲル読解入門―『精神現象学』を読む』の中の有名な脚注で、なぜ日本の江戸時代及びオタク文化論に言及しているのかを探求したものである。日本の歴史の終わりという予測と江戸時代の日本的な「スノッブ根性」という概念の相互関係を検討した。問題の分析にあたって重視したのは、オタクは超人への生成過程という観点である。重点的に考察したのは以下の諸点である。
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How can we think about sekaikei, the discourse of Japanese subcultural narrative and contemporary visual art? As a narrative discourse, exemplifying Hong Kong artist's works,  Hasegawa tried to analyse including the post-colonial influence on the Asian artists.
The text is on the Asia Art Pacific web site; http://artasiapacific.com/Blog/TsangKinWahAndSekaikei

In his book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (2001), Japanese postmodern philosopher and cultural critic Azuma Hiroki draws on the Baudrillardian theory of the hyperreal, claiming that the proliferation of both “official” and “unofficial” otaku culture has devalued the notion of canon in Japan, creating a perfect example of a postmodern cultural environment in which the mythical original is no longer desired above the copies and all production is openly hyperreal as a result.  Azuma argues that almost all of Japan’s popular images come from a “database” of these hyperreal simulacra: a sort of collective consumer memory of the recent history and perceived value of elements of popular images in Japan’s mass media.  In this system, everyone is a producer of culture, even the consumers, and all are accessing the same database of information in order to remix elements.  Crucially, however, the scope of the book covers only male fans (otaku) physically or virtually located in Japan; but what of those producing culture elsewhere?  Who are they, and what (or whose) database, if any, are they drawing and remixing from? In this paper I strive to extend Azuma’s database theory beyond the borders of Japan, paying particular attention to the production and consumption of “Japanicized” images in global (though often gendered) online communities like 4chan and Tumblr. The database, itself a remixable simulacrum, makes a useful model for critically approaching all kinds of societies, but it is important to note how the identities of each producing/consuming population impacts the remixing process to create customized “flavors” of Japanicized images unique to each community.