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CHAPTER THREE:

HIGH TECH ORIENTALISM

Space is a practiced place.

--Michel de Certeau (117)

Why cyberspace?

In many ways, this term misleads and misrepresents, for cyberspace is not spatial.

Like telephone conversations and unlike face-to-face ones, electronic communications do

not take place within a confined space: contrary to common belief, you do not meet

someone in cyberspace. Not only are there at least two “originary” places (the sender’s

and recipient’s computer), data travels as discrete packets between locations and can be

cached in a number of places. At most, one could trace the various packet routes and

produce a map of the interchange after the fact. Moreover, the notion of a cybernetic

space—a space of, for, or defined by cybernetics—does not compute. Norbert Wiener

coined “cybernetics” in 1949 to encompass “the entire field of control and

communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal” (11). . Cybernetics thus

internalizes communications engineering and externalizes the central nervous system.

Rather than restricting information theory to communications devices, it treats an

animal’s internal mechanisms as feedback control systems. And rather than restricting

neurons to animals, it treats electromechanical devices as nervous conduction systems.1

1Wiener writes, “we are beginning to see that such important elements as the neurones--the units of the

nervous complex of our bodies--do their work under much the same conditions as vacuum tubes, their

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Thus, cyberneticians have focussed on producing human-like robots, robotic attachments

to humans, and/or information-based “organisms.”2 Combined with systems theory,

cybernetics has also tried to explain and reclassify natural large-scale phenomenon like

plant communities as eco-systems. Hence a space for cybernetics, especially a space

restricted to interactions on the so-called information superhighway, seems nonsensical.3

However, trying to understand cyberspace as the merging of space and

cybernetics and condemning it for misrepresenting “reality” misses the point, namely that

relatively small power being supplied from outside by the body’s circulation, and that the bookkeeping

which is most essential to describe their function is not one of energy” (15).

2 Although the term cybernetician is still used, cybernetics lost most of its caché after the 1970s, except

within the former Soviet bloc. Although cybernetic work continued, it usually became internalized within

departments, rather than institutionalized as a separate field. For example, biology has moved towards

computer modeling, but under the rubric of “theoretical ecology” rather than cybernetics. However, due to

the popularity of cyberspace, cybernetics is going through a new boom, albeit one that remaps its research

interests onto networks rather than single organisms or machines.

3 David Tomas links cyberspace and cybernetics by arguing that “virtual reality is, in fact, a manifestation

of a cybernetician’s ultimate dream: a pure information space which can be populated by a host of pure

cybernetic automatons or, in Gibson’s more precise and less anthropomorphic term, data constructs” (39).

Cyberspace, however, cannot be reduced to virtual reality, especially since virtual reality is still virtual

whereas cyberspace is now realized in today’s Internet. Further, it is unclear how a pure information space

manifests a cybernetician’s ultimate dream given that cyberneticians—at least those before the advent of

cyberpunk—are/were profoundly concerned with the body and with extending/mimicking the functions of

the body. If cyberspace and cybernetics are linked, it is because cybernetics has been transformed in light

of cyberspace, to the extent that “cyber” now serves as a prefix generally meaning “computer.” For more

on cybernetics and cyberspace, see N. Katherine Hayles’ “Boundary Disputes: Homeostatis, Reflexivity,

and the Foundation of Cybernetics.”

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cyberspace alters space, cybernetics and “reality.” Thus, I argue in this chapter that

cyberspace is a heterotopia, rather than a utopia. It is an identifiable yet un-locatable

space that impacts “real” space, while at the same time challenging and inverting

traditional assumptions about maps and space. I also examine the ways in which the

notion of cyberspace as a frontier of the mind manages the potential danger of the

Internet by recourse to a discourse of “rational” subjectivity. If the Internet threatens to

submerge the subject in representation—if it threatens to turn the subject into a media

spectacle—the disembodied subject construct allows people to turn a blind eye to their

own vulnerability. For these dreams of unrepresentability, of foiling visual referentiality

or indexicality, co-exist with objectification stemming from media’s relentless drive

towards representivity. Indeed, these dreams of disembodiment seek to cover the breach

between public and private caused by fiber optic networks by deflecting representation

back onto others, by focussing and producing the conceit of a solipsistic mind. By

insisting that representivity ends with visuality, the myth of the unrepresented and

unrepresentable mind denies that by producing words we produce representations. It

protects the online speaker by insisting that—as a disembodied mind—s/he cannot be

mediatized in the manner that celebrities and other public figures have been. It offers

public exposure without exposure, publicity without publicity. In other words, if in

public we are under the imperative to both produce and be images, being “a mind” allows

us to disengage receiving an image from being an image. However, imagining ourselves

as exceeding pictures requires a single-minded and continuous deflection, since, as

Heidegger has argued, in order “to get the picture,” we need “to get into the picture.”4

4 Martin Heidegger, in “The Age of the World Picture,” argues that:

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In this chapter, I argue that this bodiless model inscribes a logic of Orientalizing

difference—of exoticizing and eroticizing others. Disembodiment, as commonly

understood as mind minus body, relies on another disembodiment, namely the other as

disembodied representation. Cyberspace as world of disembodiment reduces locations

and people to information, while at the same time creating new information-based

geographies. Through a study of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Mamoru Oshii’s

Ghost in the Shell, I examine two different versions of cyberspace as information map:

the former portrays cyberspace as something we jack into, and the latter portrays

cyberspace as that which jacks into us. I show how these two texts, often uncritically

read/viewed as celebrations of cyberspace, offer subtle critiques of disembodiment

precisely through their portrayal of cyberspace as Oriental, while also disseminating

visions of emancipation from the flesh. I choose these texts in order to highlight the fact

that literary and animated narratives about the Internet impact, and to a large extent have

have formed, popular opinions about the Internet. It is not simply that the Internet’s

existence has been mainly rhetorical, but also that the Internet functions rhetorically, and

that cyberspace, in many ways, is a literary phenomenon. I also choose these texts to

investigate “global” imaginings of cyberspace: by placing American and Japanese

cyberpunk side by side, I show how visions of cyberspace work both locally and globally,

and engage fears and dreams of global visibility. In addition to revealing how these texts

to represent means to bring what is present at hand . . . before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm. Wherever this happens, man “gets into the picture” in precedence over whatever is. But in that man puts himself into the picture in this way, he puts himself into the scene, i.e., into the open sphere of that which is generally and publicly represented. Therewith man sets himself up as the setting in which whatever must henceforth set itself forth, must present itself . . . i.e., be a picture. Man becomes the representative . . . of that which is, in the sense of that which has the character of object. (57-8)

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themselves are ambiguous rather than simply celebratory, I show how Orientalist notions

of cyberspace cannot contain cyberspace. Not only are Oriental myths not always

comforting, cyberspace as space cannot be limited to disembodied transactions because it

opens the self to the other in ways that call into question the self. In short, argue that, in

order to fight Orientalist dreams of cyberspace, we must not simply argue that others are

selves too. Rather, we must displace this disembodied binary by examining the ways in

which the self is always compromised.

ENLIVENING FRONTIER DREAMS

Fundamentally untraceable and unlocatable, cyberspace functions as a space in which to

space-out about space and place, to space-out about the difference between space and

place.5 Based on symbolic addresses that are already translations of hexadecimal

numbers that themselves are translated into binary numbers, it simultaneously imposes,

5 Dave Healy argues in “Cyberspace and Place: The Internet as Middle Landscape on the Electronic

Frontier” that cyberspace is “‘middle landscape’ between space (empty frontier) and place (civilization)

that allows individuals to exercise their impulses for both separation and connectedness” (66). He sees us

as “heirs not only of the primitivist philosopher Daniel Boone, who ‘fled into the wilderness before the

advance of settlement,’ but also the empire-building Boone, the ‘standard bearer of civilization’” (66).

However, placing cyberspace as a middle landscape assumes that the Internet is a landscape to begin with,

overlooking the work needed to construct the Internet as a landscape. Rather than mediating between space

and place, the Internet allows us to space-out about the difference between space and place. For more on

the space and cyberspace, see Kathy Rae Huffman’s “Video, Networks, and Architecture”; Chris Chesher’s

“The Ontology of Digital Domains”; and Mark Nunes’ “What Space is Cyberspace? The Internet and

Virtuality.”

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obfuscates and displaces location, address, area and co-ordination. Based on a method

for mapping computer networks, it disengages name from location while offering the

virtue of location. For instance, Princeton University’s UNIX servers are accessed by

connecting to “arizona.princeton.edu” and each specific machine in this system has a

name that designates a city within Arizona, such as Phoenix. Princeton’s system does not

follow geography: Princeton is not located in Arizona, and yet this state-based naming

system makes Princeton’s UNIX system coherent (i.e. there is no machine called arizona,

but one connects to arizona in order to access a specific “city” within this state). Further,

it is not clear that the original UNIX machine, Phoenix, referred to the city rather than to

the mythic bird. However, once Phoenix was incorporated into a system of UNIX

machines, the state-based system was applied. Within arizona, everyone is allocated a

certain disk-space for one’s files. This naming system reveals the fundamental

arbitrariness of geographical names (there is no inherent reason why Arizona should be

called Arizona—only historical ones that it is) and calls into question notions of place

and space. It is not simply, then, that cyberspace is not a space, but also that cyberspace,

deriving from a telecommunications map, translates space in such a manner that

complicates the map it was once supposed to follow.

Although space and place are often used interchangeably (one definition for place

according to the OED is: a two- or three-dimensional space), place designates a finite

location, whereas space marks an interval. Place derives from the Latin platea (broad

way), space derives from the spatium (interval or a period). Because of this, place has

been tied to notions of civilization, while space has been untied and evokes emptiness.

Thus, Dave Healy, quoting from Yi-Fu Tuan’s analysis of the New World, argues that

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“place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to one and long for the other” (57).

Although agreeing that place designates stability or proper relations whilst space has

“none of the univocity or stability of a ‘proper,’ Michel De Certeau argues that space is a

practiced place. Place is on the level of langue; space is on the level of parole. Space

destabilizes place by catching it “in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a

term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present” (117).

Starting from the same premise, De Certeau comes to the opposite conclusion as Tuan:

rather than space being what one longs for while being encumbered in a place, space is

how we negotiate place—it is how we do place. De Certeau argues space is an

“intersection of mobile elements” by pointing to the difference between maps and tours.

Whereas maps once were marked by the itineraries that made them possible, they now

serve as scientific documents that “collate[] on the same plane heterogenous places”

(121). Tours, on the other hand, are a “discursive series of operations” (119). Although

maps and tours are not completely separable, they mark two separate modes of

experiencing space, where the former is totalizing and the latter contingent. If space is a

practiced place, then, cyberspace practices space: it rehearses space. Moreover, it

rehearses it in such a manner that place and space lose their designations.

Consider, for instance, the ways in which one usually “surfs,” or “browses” the

WWW. Both popular browsers, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer

offer a means of navigating the web that rely on directional icons. Netscape features a

lighthouse and a nautical steering wheel, while Explorer features a spinning globe. When

browsing the WWW through Netscape, you are at the helm of the ship, with Netscape

providing your guiding light. Browsing through Internet Explorer, you are spanning the

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globe from space, with Microsoft serving as your Global Positioning System (GPS). In

either case, by typing in an address, or by clicking from location to location, you teleport

rather than travel from one virtual location to another: there is no longer scenery between

sites. In other words, travelling through cyberspace takes out the interval or space

between fixed locations. Cyberspace re-maps the notion of a space: instead of some

spaces being marked as intervals, one moves from decisive location to location, either in

pursuit of a certain site, or in following “related links.” Or, to be more precise,

cyberspace renders that interval between sites into an often unbearable space of time, in

which one anticipates the next page and tries to decipher the page that emerges bit-by-bit

on one’s screen. This movement from location to location marks a new manner of space,

marks a new means by which an itinerary is planned. This teleporting does not mean that

we no longer catch place “in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term

dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present” (De Certeau

117). Indeed, through our surfing, through our moves to “stop” pages before they are

completely loaded, we continue to catch places. Lastly, because cyberspace can always

be added to and changed, because there can be no “final” map of cyberspace, cyberspace

also relies on space as empty, as indefinite interval.

Cyberspace’s rehearsal of space is glossed over usually and cyberspace is simply

reduced to a terrestrial version of outer-space. When constructed as an electronic

frontier, cyberspace manages global fiber optic networks by transforming nodes, wires,

cables and computers into an infinite enterprise/discovery zone. Like all explorations,

charting cyberspace entails uncovering what was always already there and declaring it

“new.” It entails obscuring already existing geographies and structures so that space is

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vacuous yet chartable, unknown yet populated and populatable. Like the New World and

the frontier, settlers claim this “new” space and declare themselves its citizens.6

Advocacy groups, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, exploit the metaphor of the

frontier in order to argue that cyberspace is both outside and inside the United States,

since the frontier effectively lies outside government regulation yet also lies within

American cultural and historical narratives. Moreover, cyberspace as a terrestrial yet

ephemeral outer-space turns our attention away from national and local fiber optic

networks already in place and towards dreams of global connectivity and post-

citizenship. Those interested in “wiring the world” reproduce narratives of “darkest

Africa” and of civilizing missions. These benevolent missions, aimed at alleviating the

disparity between connected and unconnected areas, covertly—if not overtly—conflate

spreading the light with making a profit.7 At the same time, cyberspace hides

geographical affiliation by reducing locations to symbolic URLs (Universal Resource

Locations) such as http://www.princeton.edu and to domain names such as

arizona.princeton.edu. Through this re-naming, cyberspace both re-maps the world and

makes it ripe for exploration once more.

The Cyber in cyberspace also strengthens cyberspace’s links to exploration and

naturalizes networks. Cybernetics is a based on the Greek term kybernete (steersman,

governor). Wiener chose the term since cybernetics is all about the art of governing, both

6 For settlers’ claims, see John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Cleo

Odzer, Virtual Spaces and Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community.

7 For Wired’s version of the civilizing mission, see Jeff Greenwald’s “Wiring Africa,” John Perry Barlow’s

“Africa Rising,” Nicolas Negroponte’s “The Third Shall be First,” and Neal Stephenson’s “Mother Earth

Mother Board.”

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in terms of its object of study (control systems that govern actions) and in terms of its

objective (to control control systems).8 Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer take

advantage of this combination of space, steering and control in their names and

trademarks. As I noted earlier, Netscape features a lighthouse and a nautical steering

wheel, while Explorer features a spinning globe. In addition, the merging of the

mechanical and biological effected by cybernetics vitalizes networks: all information, as

the hacker cliché goes, should be free; or, as Marshall McLuhan puts it, networks extend

man, stretching his senses along networks to encompass the globe.9

Such an animation of the network, dependent or not on the human, transforms the

telecommunications network into an eco-system in which information flow takes the

place of the carbon cycle, or into a giant organism, in which digital bits, like DNA,

replicate and mutate. This biologizing extends to online transactions and interactions.

According to Wired media pundit, Jon Katz, a columnist participates in a “hive,” in

which s/he disseminates digital ideas that then “sail[] out from the center like digital bees

across the Net” (5). Such a “Net media ecology,” means that all ideas undergo a process

of survival of the fittest in which they evolve in synch with their environment. Moreover,

this dynamic relationship enables a more perfect dialogue by diminishing the distance

8 Norbert Wiener writes, “In choosing this term, we wish to recognize that the first significant paper on

feed-back mechanisms is an article on governors, which was published by Clerk Maxwell in 1868, and that

governor is derived from a Latin corruption of kybernete. We also wish to refer to the fact that the steering

engines of a ship are indeed one of the earliest and best developed forms of feed-back mechanisms” (19).

9 See Steven Levy’s description of the “Hacker Ethic” in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and

Marshall McLuhan’s description of media networks in Understanding Media.

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between writer and audience.10 The network as giant organism simile similarly places

cyberspace as a sphere of more perfect communications: whereas much DNA still defies

decipherment, digital ones and zeroes are normally decodable.

Cyberspace as frontier and cyberspace as a practicing space structures it as an

“other space,” as a heterotopia.11 According to Foucault, in “Of Other Spaces,”

heterotopias are “like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real

sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously

represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even

though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (24). Cyberspace lies

outside of all places and its location cannot be indicated definitively, yet it does exist.

One can point to documents and conversations that take place in cyberspace, even if

cyberspace makes phrases such as “taking place” catachrestic. Moreover, cyberspace as

a heterotopia simultaneously represents, contests and inverts public spaces and the notion

of site itself. Cyberspace as heterotopia also represents, contests and inverts the notion of

community. On the one hand, cyberspace enables “virtual communities.” According to

10 As I have argued in Chapter Two, this idea of competition as democracy also underlies the narrative of

cyberspace as an effectively enacted public sphere. As the second coming of the bourgeois public sphere, it

promises to dissolve the economic and physical contingencies—the “accidents” of age, race, gender and

infirmities—that “create” inequalities in real spaces.

11 In defining cyberspace as a heterotopia instead of an utopia, I am responding to critics of the Internet,

such as Brook, Boal and Robins who insist that the Internet is not an utopia, and that the mythology of the

Internet must be de-bunked/de-mystified. Whereas they seek to put “sociology before mythology” and

look at its relation to the “real world,” I argue that its mythology is precisely what links it to the real world,

not as a regression or fantasy, but rather as a public space. This is not to say that sociology is not

important. This is to say that it must not be an either/or, but both at once.

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Howard Rheingold, “virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the

Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient

human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (Community 5).

These communities enable one to “feel[] passionately about e-mail and computer

conferences,” and enable one to “care deeply about these people [one meets] through

[one’s] computer” (Community 1). On the other hand, virtual communities facilitate an

escape from the problems of “real” communities by sequestering “human feeling” and

political concerns to online relationships. According to James Brook and Iain A. Boal,

“the flight into cyberspace is motivated by some of the same fears and longings as the

flight to the suburbs: it is another ‘white flight’” (ix ). Whether or not virtual

communities represent flight or haven, they provoke the questions “to what extent are

virtual communities communities?” and “what constitutes community?”12

Thus, even as an “other space,” cyberspace still influences normal spaces; it still

influences our notions of space and place and cannot be safely cordoned off. Foucault

uses mirrors to explain the relation between utopias and heterotopias:

I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to

12 Rheingold’s definition of a virtual community has provoked much debate. See Internet Culture; Virtual

Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspaces; Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real

Histories, Living Bodies; Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet; Allucquere

Rosanne Stone’s The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age; Mazyar

Lotfalian’s “A Tale of Electronic Community”; and Kevin Robins’ “Cyberspace and the World We Live

In.”

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myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected to all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (“Other” 24)

The jacked-in computer screen enables one to see oneself—or at the very least one’s

words or representations—where one is not. In terms of “live chat,” one participates in a

conversation that takes place in the virtual space chat room. In terms of “homepages,”

one makes a home in a place where one physically is not, often inhabiting the home with

imaginary or representative images of oneself or one’s possessions. At the same time,

being in “cyberspace” marks one’s absence from one’s actual physical location: when

one is on a MOO such as LambdaMoo, one is supposedly in a living room, hot tub, sex

room, night club. Howard Rheingold, explaining virtual community, declares that “we

do everything people do when people get together, but we do it with words on computer

screens, leaving our bodies behind” (“Slice” n.p.). This disappearing body enables

infinite self-recreation and/or disengagement. This disappearing body also begs the

question “where am I really?”13 If I am single-mindedly participating in an online

13 For more on the question of “where am I really?” see Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen and Allucquere

Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Many critics have

also critiqued the notion of the disappearing or virtual body. For instance, Vivian Sobchack concentrates on

the ways in which pain reminds us that we are not simply virtual bodies (See “Beating the Meat/Surviving

the Text”). For more on the virtual/non-virtual body, see Anne Balsamo’s “Forms of Technological

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conversation, am I not absent from my physical location? Do I shuttle between various

“windows”—RL (real life) and VR (virtual reality)? Cyberspace reflects reality yet also

compromises it. Like Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage, heterotopias mark a founding by

functioning as points of identification and alienation, totality and lack.14 Unlike Lacan’s

mirror stage, however, heterotopias are spatial and societal rather than individual. Rather

than alienating and establishing the ego, they alienate and establish community.

Most importantly, cyberspace has been marked as a heterotopia of

compensation—as a space for economic, social or sexual redress.15 According to Sherry

Turkle, young adults who inhabit cyberspace often build virtual representations of

economic rewards that have been denied to them in real life. If in real life their college

education has not enabled their entry into well paying jobs, “MUDs get [them] back to

the middle class” (240). As I have argued in Chapter Two, rather than signaling the end

of “difference,” cyberspace enables virtual passing.16 It allows us to compensate for our

Embodiment: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture”; Michelle Kendrick’s “Cyberspace and the

Technological Real”; Katie Argyle and Rob Shields’ “Is There a Body on the Net?”; Theresa M. Senft’s

“Introduction: Performing the Digital Body—A Ghost Story”; and the articles collected in Part I: Self,

Identity and Body in the Age of the Virtual in Virtual Politics.

14 See Jacques Lacan’s analysis of the mirror stage in The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis.

15 Foucault categorizes heterotopias into crisis heterotopias (the boarding school and honeymoon),

heterotopias of deviance (rest homes and prisons), heterotopias of illusion (nineteenth century brothels)

and, most important for our purposes, heterotopias of compensation (colonies).

16 There is a rich body of work on non-virtual passing; see in particular Adrian Piper, “Passing for White,

Passing for Black”; Amy Robinson, “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common

Interest”; Judith Butler’s “Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge” in Bodies That

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own body by passing as others online. This virtual passing promises to protect our “real”

bodies and selves from the consequences of such public participation, from the glare of

publicity. If those “in the public eye” have had to trade their privacy for public exposure,

if they have spread their images at the risk of reducing their entire existence to

proliferating images, cyberspace, by denying imagery, seems to enable unscathed

participation. Such passing enables a flight to a simpler, less encumbered and arbitrary

space in which one’s representation need not mirror one’s actual image or circumstance.

Passing enables an imitation indistinguishable from the “real thing,” yet completely

separate from the real thing—one passes when one’s inner and outer identities cannot or

do not coincide, or when one does not want them to coincide. Through passing in

cyberspace, then, one supposedly escapes from representation and representivity, one

escapes indexicality.

Cyberspace as a heterotopia of compensation follows in the tradition of other

compensatory spaces such as the colonies. Drawing on Puritan societies in New England

and on Jesuits of Paraguay, Foucault argues that compensatory heterotopias represent a

space of pure order. They are “as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is

messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.” They are “absolutely perfect other spaces.”

Foucault describes the Jesuit colonies in South America as “marvelous, absolutely

regulated colonies in which human perfection was effectively achieved…in which

existence was regulated at every turn” (“Other” 27). Foucault, however, glosses over the

fact that this placing of pure order simultaneously obfuscates—if not annihilates—other

Matter; Samira Kawash’s “The Epistemology of Race: Knowledge, Visibility, and Passing,” in

Dislocating the Color Line; and the essays collected in“Passing” and the Fictions of Identity.

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and mediation. However, cyberspace, like all heterotopias of compensation, also gains

place by dissolving place. Heterotopias disseminate what they would eradicate; they

reflect back what they would deny. In the case of cyberspace, cyberspace perpetuates the

differences and contingencies it seeks to render accidental.

Specifically, this single-minded deflection produces high tech Orientalism. By

this, I mean that cyberspace as a frontier of the mind produces a way to orient the self; it

produces a reflexive orientation that depends on the Orientalizing—the exoticizing and

eroticizing—of differences. This orientalizing founds the dream of disembodiment, of

unrepresentability: others must be orientalized in order for the disembodied self to

emerge. The narrative of disembodiment protects the self against the pressing demand to

produce self-representations. It seeks to re-orient—to steer the self—by making it

unrepresentable and by reducing everything else to images. It seeks to re-orient the self

by turning sexual threat into sexual opportunity. Cyberspace rehearses orientalism in all

the meanings of the word orient.

If cyberspace functions as a heterotopia, it draws on the Orient for its own

orientation. Like the Orient, cyberspace serves as a heterotopia for the West, is

constructed as a virtual space, and is a “man-made” geography. To be clear, I am not

arguing that these similarities determine cyberspace’s use of the Orient. Rather, I am

arguing that these similarities enable such linkages so that, combined with the late

eighties-early nineties boom of Japanese and East Asian economies, they explain why the

Orient has been privileged as a means for explaining cyberspace.

First, the Orient serves as an “other space” for the West. According to Edward

Said, “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the

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Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3). The Orient—as defined by

and for the West—is “the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the

source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and

most recurring images of the Other” (1). Even those, such as James Clifford and Lisa

Lowe, who find Said’s analysis of Orientalism at times totalizing and repetitive, agree

that the Orient does serve as an other space.18 Revising both Foucault’s notion of a

heterotopia and Said’s singular history of Orientalism as a history of domination, Lowe

writes:

As much as I wish to underscore the insistence of these power relations, my intervention resists totalizing orientalism as a monolithic, developmental discourse that uniformly constructs the Orient as the Other of the Occident. Therefore I do not construct a master narrative or a singular history of orientalism, whether of influence or of comparison. Rather, I argue for a conception of orientalism as heterogeneous and contradictory; to this end I observe, on the one hand, that orientalism consists of an uneven matrix of orientalist situations across different cultural and historical sites, and on the other, that each of these orientalisms is internally complex and unstable. (5)

Thus, in Critical Terrains, Lowe shows the dynamic nature of British and French

Orientalism. Rather than the Orient always being “a western style for dominating,

restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 2), she argues that authors

sometimes use Orientalism—construct a fantasmatic Orient—in order to critique internal

(i.e. British and French) situations. With respect to Foucault’s notion of a heterotopia, she

argues that heterotropical spaces—these “other” spaces—are multiple and interpenetrable

rather than singularly defined against normal or utopian spaces (15). In other words, the

Orient does serve as an other space (as a space that can be located but does not quite

exist) but, at the same time, the mappings of the Orient are heterogeneous. The Orient,

18 James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” and Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: British and French Orientalisms.

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then, like cyberspace, cannot be reduced to a single type of space, yet it nonetheless

functions as an “other space” onto which the limitations and promises of Occidental

societies are displaced, although not in a manner which hermeneutically seals this space.

The Orient as “surrogate or underground self,” also implies that the Orient serves as one

of Europe’s first points of identification, and, as a point of identification also serves to

destabilize the notion of Europe it also grounds. Thus, it is not simply that the Europe

stands as subject and the Orient as object, but also that the Orient haunts Europe and

fissures European identity.19

Secondly, the Orient is one of the oldest virtual and textual spaces. It is virtual in

sense that these texts create a simulacrum that they call the Orient. Rather than simply

describing the Orient, Orientalists have projected an Orient that does not easily map onto

geographies and cultures deemed Oriental. As Said argues, “Orientalism is—and does

not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture,

and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world” (12). More

specifically, he traces the construction of an internally coherent Orient, which may or

may not correspond to the Near or Far East, to Orientalism’s status as a discourse:

“orientalism was a library or archive of information commonly and, in some of its

aspects, unanimously held” (41). Standing as an archive of information—as an archivable

and neatly categorizable phenomenon, the Orient became a “textual universe” in which

“even the rapport between an Orientalist and the Orient was textual, so much so that it is

reported of some of the early-nineteenth-century German Orientalists that their first view

of an eight-armed Indian statue cured them completely of their Orientalist taste” (52).

19 For more on disruptive identifications, see Diana Fuss’ Identification Papers.

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According to Said, the Orient could survive as a virtual space because of the paucity of

interaction between Orientalists and those deemed Oriental. Orientalists “prefer[red] the

schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human”

(93). In so doing, they assumed “that people, places and experiences can always be

described by a book, so much so that the book (or text) acquires a greater authority, and

use, even than the actuality it describes” (93). Thus, like cyberspace, the Orient stands as

an archive of information. And, like the Orient, narratives of cyberspace—as this chapter

will argue—acquire an authority whether or not its authors have spent a substantial time

in cyberspace.

Lastly, the “Orient” is a man-made geography. As Said argues, “the Orient was

Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways

considered common-place by an average nineteenth century European, but also because it

could be—that is, submitted to being—made Oriental” (5-6). Although the name

“Orient” may be catachrestic, it is also performative, creating what it claims to describe,

so that Near and Far Eastern cultures and geographies become Oriental. This

construction of the Orient puts Europe in the position of creator: “it is Europe that

articulates the Orient; this articulation is the prerogative, not of a puppet master, but of a

genuine creator, whose life-giving power represents, animates and constitutes the

otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries” (57). This position of

creator is intimately linked to the need to contain the foreign, to render comprehensible a

“new space:”

In essence such a category is not so much a way of receiving new information as it is a method of controlling what seems to be a threat to some established view of things. If the mind must suddenly deal with what it takes to be a radically new form of life—as Islam appeared to Europe in the early Middle Ages—the

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response on the whole is conservative and defensive. Islam is judged to be a fraudulent new version of some previous experience, in this case Christianity. The threat is muted, familiar values impose themselves, and in the end the mind reduces the pressure upon it by accommodating things to itself as either “original” or “repetitious.” Islam thereafter is “handled”: its novelty and its suggestiveness are brought under control so that relatively nuanced discriminations are now made that would have been impossible had the raw novelty of Islam been left unattended. The Orient at large, therefore, vacillates between the West’s contempt for what is familiar and its shivers of delight at—or fear of—novelty. (59)

Orientalism, like cyberspace, emerges from contact with something new and reduces the

new to previous experiences. This conservative response constructs what it seeks to

explain and control. As a defensive response, Orientalism offers critics of cyberspace a

means to contain cyberspace.

Since the literary founding of cyberspace, then, the Orient has grounded the

narrative of cyberspace as a bodiless and heterotopical space. By this, I am not implying

that cyberspace can only be understood as an Orientalist space. Rather, I am arguing that

cyberspace has been constructed as an Orientalist space. Just as the ground of the Orient

is unstable, so is the ground of cyberspace as Orientalist space. Orientalism does not seal

fiber optic networks. Furthermore, Orientalism as textual interchange, or textual

exchange does not necessarily mean that textual interchanges are “poor cousins” to face-

to-face encounters. Texts always exceed readings precisely because language exceeds

the individual, and precisely because texts consume us as we read them. Moreover, face-

to-face interactions, as the history of colonialism and slavery attest, are not necessarily

more fair or nuanced. The “solution” to Orientalism lies not in making everyone

subjects, since objectification grounds the subject. The key lies in examining the ways in

which subjects and objects cannot be separated and the ways in which the face-to-face

encounter and the human are already compromised. For instance, according to Lacan’s

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theory of the mirror stage, the human is inaugurated not through a meaningful encounter

with other humans, but rather through an identification with its own projected and

inverted image. Thus, the first face-to-face encounter that grounds the human is a self-

alienating identification that separates the infant from its mother and others. The moment

of humanity then relies on a virtual reality and a virtual identification. As I discuss in my

next chapter, this virtual identification opens the door to symbolic communications—to

textual intercourse between humans. Thus, the virtual, rather than closing off meaningful

contact, can inaugurate it. Moreover, the desire to merge with the other, which by no

means is entirely replaced by the symbolic, offers us a means by which to theorize real-

time communications, so that neither subject nor object emerge.

LITERARY INCEPTIONS

Cyberspace, like the Orient, is a literary invention. William Gibson coined the term in

Neuromancer, a cyberpunk novel published in 1984. Preceding the WWW by six years,

Neuromancer has shaped popular conceptions and terminology of today’s Internet, as

well as inspired forays into virtual reality and mind “uploading.” Gibson’s description of

cyberspace as a consensual hallucination, as a means by which one escapes one’s body,

has popularized the conception of the Internet as a frontier of the mind. In Neuromancer,

Case—the console cowboy protagonist—“live[s] for the bodiless exultation of

cyberspace,” and his “elite stance involve[s] a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The

body was meat” (6). Indeed, the two words that Neuromancer has disseminated widely

are “cyberspace” and “meat” (for body), and Case’s elite stance has been mimicked in

cyberpunk fiction and by the so-called cyber-elite who publish in and are publicized by

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magazines such as Wired and Mondo2000. More often than not, these popularizations

reduce Gibson’s cyberspace to a utopian disembodied space. However, Neuromancer

cannot be so reduced. Rather than offering us a utopian disembodied space, Gibson

outlines a solipsistic map-based cyberspace that troubles the notion of cyberspace as a

consensual hallucination, that troubles assumptions about the inadequacies of meat. In

this reading of Neuromancer, I explore the ways in which Japan and Japanese words

disorient and orient the reader, and the ways in which Japan sets the stage for cyberspace

and the American console cowboy. I argue that Gibson’s version of cyberspace—one in

which he criticizes and as well explores computer-based communications and worlds—

rehearses Orientalism.

The basic plot line of Neuromancer is this: after having stolen from one of his

employers, Case is injected by the Yakuza (the mythic Japanese Mafia) with a myotoxin

that makes it impossible for him to jack into cyberspace, which is also called the Matrix.

He then travels to Night City (a subsidiary of Chiba City, Japan) in order to find a cure in

their infamous nerve shops. Unable to repair the damage and out of money, Case

becomes “just another hustler” on a suicidal arc. Before he manages to get himself

killed, he’s picked up by Molly (a female “street samurai” razorgirl/cyborg) who collects

him for a mission directed by Armitage, Gibson’s version of a masked man (his standard,

handsome, plastic features serve as his mask). Armitage fixes Case’s nerve damage in

exchange for his cooperation, and, to ensure his loyalty, Armitage lines Case’s main

arteries with toxin sacs. In order to prevent his nerve damage from returning, Case must

be injected with an enzyme possessed by Armitage. The team first break into Sense/Net

to steal a ROM construct (a program that mimics the mind) of Dixie (Case’s now dead

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mentor) who will help Case break into a T-A (Tessier-Ashpool) AI (Artificial

Intelligence) called Rio but whose “real” name is Neuromancer. Molly physically steals

the construct while Case, jacked into her sense sensorium via simstim, mans the virtual

operation and keeps time. The real boss turns out to be Wintermute, another T-A AI who

wishes to merge with Neuromancer in order to form a sentient being: Wintermute is

improvisation, Neuromancer is personality. To merge, Molly must enter Villa

Straylight—the T-A’s mansion in Freeside (outer space)—and extract the “word” from

3Jane (Tessier’s and Ashpool’s daughter), while Case hacks into Neuromancer in

cyberspace, with the help of a Chinese virus program. Things get complicated, but the

ending is somewhat happy: Wintermute and Neuromancer merge to become the Matrix;

Case gets his blood changed; Molly leaves Case to pursue further adventures.

Throughout, Case flips between “reality,” “cyberspace,” and “simstim.”

Cyberpunk provides a somewhat dystopian view of the future in which

communications technologies have remapped the socio-economic and global political

terrain. As opposed to science fiction and fantasy novels that are set in “other worlds” or

universes, cyberpunk plays with the world as we know it, often offering different

contexts for recognizable places. Orientation and disorientation mark cyberpunk worlds.

For instance, in Neuromancer Boston becomes the endpoint of BAMA—the Boston

Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. As Pam Rosenthal notes, “the future in the cyberpunk world,

no matter how astonishing its technological detailing, is always shockingly

recognizable—it is our world, gotten worse, gotten more uncomfortable, inhospitable,

dangerous, and thrilling” (85). Gibson writes that cyberpunk is “all about the present.

It’s not really about an imagined future. It’s a way of trying to come to terms with the

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awe and terror inspired in me by the world in which we live” (Gibson as quoted by

Rosenthal 85).

Japan plays a key role in marking the near future as dystopian. The future world

“gotten worse, gotten more uncomfortable, inhospitable, dangerous, and thrilling”

invariably translates into the world gotten more Japanese.20 Gibson magnifies the 1980s

burgeoning economic power of Japan so that Japanese trademarks, mafias and

terminology dominate the world as American ones do now.21 As Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro

notes, according to Neuromancer, “the future world does not seem to be able to function

without things Japanese” (18). Whereas Golden Age science fiction incorporated Greek

togas into their sunny futures, Neuromancer incorporates parts of the Japanese past, such

as ninjas, in order to mark the dystopian future. As Lisa Nakamura argues,

“anachronistic signs of Japaneseness are made, in the conventions of cyberpunk, to

signify the future rather than the past” (n.p.). These anachronistic signs of Japaneseness

are not randomly chosen. Rather, samurais, ninjas and shonen draw from Japan’s Edo

period and they confine the Japanese past to the period of first contact between the West

and Japan. Cyberpunk thus mixes images of the mysterious yet-to-be-opened Japan

(which eventually did submit to the West) with the conquering corporate Japan of the

future. In addition, the “near” Japanese past (i.e. the present) is represented by

technological badlands produced through contact with the West. Describing Night City,

Case says that “the Yakuza might be preserving the place [Night City] as a kind of

20 For other “Japanicized” futures, see Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Gibson’s Count Zero, Mona Lisa

Overdrive and Idoru, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

21 For more on eighties hysteria about Japan see David Morley’s and Kevin Robins’ “Techno-Orientalism:

Futures, Foreigners and Phobias.”

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historical park, a reminder of humble origins” (11). But Night City, as the opening page

of Neuromancer makes clear, is filled with gaijin paradises, places where “you could

drink…for a week and never hear two words in Japanese” (3). Night City, the

“deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself,” is not entirely Japanese.

Rather, the past that Night City marks is the moment of fusion between East and West,

the moment of the Japanese adopting and surpassing Western technology.

Within this grim Japanified landscape in which technology has fused with the

Japanese, the culture and software industries mark the last vestiges of American

superiority. Cyberspace appears to mark a space in which American ingenuity wins over

Japanese corporate assimilation. In “reality,” those who efface their own individuality

and become part of the corporate machinery are rewarded: the Japanese workers who

“work all [their] life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company hymn, company

funeral” (37), or those like Wage who make it as “one of the few gaijin dealers” because

“somehow [he] managed to trace something back, once” (11). Power means

incorporation into a larger organism:

The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory. (203)

Corporate power—power somehow tied to real bodies rather than virtual ones—seems

immortal because power is decentralized, though still hierarchical. Instead of relying on

individual talent or rewarding the individual, power breeds endless replacement parts,

forcing people to accommodate its machine-like rhythm:

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people. He’d seen it in the men who’d crippled him in Memphis, he’d seen Wage affect the semblance of it in Night

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City, and it had allowed him to accept Armitage’s flatness and lack of feeling. He’d always imagined it as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to the hidden levels of influence. (203)

More or less than people, the real bosses are cyborgs who meld together to form a super-

organism not unlike Star Trek’s master enemy, the Borg. Gibson relies on eighties

mythology of Japan as “‘the greatest ‘machine-loving nation of the world,’ a culture in

which ‘machines are priceless friends,’” by portraying the zaibatsus as master-cyborgs

(Morley and Robins, 153). Because of their unnatural love of machines, the Japanese

have fused into a mass organization dominated by machine rhythm and this mass

organism incorporates regardless of race: Wage, aided by his serendipitous discovery,

solidifies his power by mimicking corporate power.22

Cyberspace is usually understood as a Western Frontier that stands against this

world of accommodation and assimilation. The meat-less console cowboy stands as an

individual talent: he paradoxically escapes this machine-organism fusion by escaping his

body—by becoming a disembodied mind—when he merges with technology. Navigating

the digital world and manipulating its code take bravado and skill, and cowboys steal data

for their employers by manipulating ICEbreakers (intrusion countermeasures electronics).

Cyberspace, as a consensual hallucination, as “a graphic representation of data abstracted

from the banks of every computer in the human system,” allows for freelancing (51). As

22 Importantly, Gibson uses the term zaibatsu rather than multi-national corporation. This use of the

Japanese for what seems to be a particularly American phenomenon does not simply imply that only

Japanese corporations assimilate their workers. Rather, Gibson projects this process onto the Japanese

partly in order to defamiliarize his readers: to disorient their assumptions that multi-nationals mean

American superiority.

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a consensual hallucination, as a space in which the body disappears, it rewards anonymity

rather than assimilation. As Pam Rosenthal argues:

The hacker mystique posits power through anonymity. One does not log on to the system through authorized paths of entry; one sneaks in, dropping through trap doors in the security program, hiding one’s tracks, immune to the audit trails that were put there to make the perceiver part of the data perceived. It is a dream of recovering power and wholeness by seeing wonders by not being seen. (99)

In effect, cyberspace allows the hacker to assume the privilege of the Imperial subject—

“to see without being seen” (Fuss 149). This recovery of wholeness and imperialism also

recovers American ideals. As Frederick Buell argues, through the console cowboy, “a

cowboy on the new frontier of cyberspace, he [Gibson] brings a pre-Frederick Jackson

Turner excitement into a postmodern, hyperdeveloped world; if the old frontier has been

built out thoroughly and its excitements become guilty ones in the wake of contemporary

multi-cultural/postcolonial rewritings of western history, try, then, cyberspace in an

apparently polycultural, globalized era” (503, 566). More succinctly, Buell argues that

“cyberspace becomes the new U.S. Frontier, accessible to the privileged insider who

happens to be a reconfigured version of the American pulp hero.”

Perhaps, but not because cyberspace is outside the Japanification of the world;

cyberspace in Neuromancer is not a U.S. frontier and good old American cowboys

cannot survive without things Japanese. Cyberspace, in Neuromancer, does not

unproblematically stand as a separate place of the mind in which real world

circumstances disappear into an unending hallucination of endless opportunity. First,

cowboys cannot access cyberspace without Japanese equipment (Case needs his Ono-

Sendai in order to jack in). Second, cyberspace is still marked with Asian trademarks and

corporations. However, cyberspace—unlike the physical landscape—can be conquered

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and made to submit: entering cyberspace is analogous to opening up the Orient.

Neuromancer counters American anxieties about “exposure to, and penetration by,

Japanese culture,” through cyberspace, through a medium that enables American

penetration (Morley and Robins 139). Cyberspace as disembodied representation

rehearses themes of Oriental exoticism and Western penetration. Consider, for instance,

the moment that Case is reunited with cyberspace:

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky. Now—

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding— And it flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of the Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach. And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face. (52)

Cyberspace opens up for him, flowers for him—a fluid neon origami trick. Reuniting

with cyberspace is a sexual experience: he has tears of release as he enters once more his

distanceless home. As Molly (the all black-clad “street samurai” razorgirl who collects

Case for his mission) notes, “I saw you stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic”

(47). This flowering cyberspace draws on pornographic Orientalist fantasies of opening

Asian beauties. As one pornographic website puts it:

You are welcome to our dojo! Look no further, traveler. You have found the Clan of Asian Nudes, filled with gorgeous Asian women in complete submission. Take them by becoming a samurai. Our dojo houses the most incredible supermodels from Japan, Vietnam, China, Laos, and San Francisco's Chinatown! Their authentic, divine beauty will have you entranced nightly. New girls are added almost every day, their gifts blossoming before you on the screen. (http://www.asiannudes.com/tour1.html)

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Further, not only does cyberspace blossom for the console cowboy, so do Oriental

ICEbreakers as well. When Case breaks into the T-A AI, he uses a Chinese Kuang Grade

Eleven ICEbreaker and this “big mother” “unfold[s] around them. Polychrome shadow,

countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it tower[s]

above them, blotting out the void” (168). The translucent shifting layers surround them

and evoke images of Oriental mystery and penetrability.23 This Oriental big mother blots

out the void, filling it with its shadow and revealing its secret to the Occidental male who

maneuvers it to perform his will. This link between cyberspace and blossoming Oriental

female positions the Western viewer as samurai and contains the “modern” threat of

Japan by remapping Japan as feudal and pre-modern. If, as Morley and Robins argue,

Japan “has destabilized the neat correlation between West/East and modern/pre-modern,”

this feudal portrayal re-orients the Western viewer (here cowboy) by re-Orientalizing

Japan (146). Hence the allusions to Edo and Meiji Japan, which undermine the future

global power of Japan.

Entering cyberspace allows one to conquer a vaguely threatening Oriental

landscape. If the Yakuza—the “sons of the neon chrysanthemum”—have altered his

system so that Case could no longer jack in to cyberspace, by re-entering it, he takes over

their territory—he unites with their flowering mother (35). As Stephen Beard in his

reading of Blade Runner argues, “through the projection of exotic (and erotic) fantasies

onto this high-tech delirium, anxieties about the ‘impotence’ of western culture can be,

momentarily, screened out. High-tech Orientalism makes possible ‘cultural amnesia,

ecstatic alienation, serial self-erasure’” (as quoted by Morley and Robins 154). In

23 For more on layers, Orientalism, and translucent layers see David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly.

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Neuromancer, high-tech Orientalism allows Case to erase his body in orgasmic ecstasy.

Or, to be more precise, high-tech Orientalism allows one to enjoy anxieties about western

impotence. It allows one, as Gibson puts it, “to try[] to come to terms with the awe and

terror inspired in me by the world in which we live” (emphasis mine). That is, ecstasy

may not obliterate the impotence of the cowboy, but rather allows one to make do with it.

It may also point out the limitations of such sexual fantasies and conquest, for this

orgasmic ecstasy constructs cyberspace—the supposed consensual hallucination—as a

solipsistic space.

In cyberspace, Case runs into no other people—or perhaps more precisely no

other disembodied minds: Case’s mind is the only one out there. On the Matrix, Case

communicates with Artificial Intelligences, computer viruses and computer constructs.

This projection, this American superiority, depends on American disembodied brains

combating representations, virtual shapes and programs rather than people. In order to

preserve the cowboy, cyberspace is “a drastic simplification” that not only limits sensual

bandwidth; it also reduces others to code (55). In effect, these others—these codes—that

Case encounters are mimics. The Chinese ICEbreaker does the methodical hacking

work, going “siamese” on the computer defense systems. Glowing and colorful cubes in

cyberspace represent Japanese corporations such as the Mitsubishi Bank of America.

The closest things to sentient beings Case encounters online are Dixie, the ROM

construct of his deceased hacker mentor, Linda Lee, whose ROM construct he encounters

when Neuromancer attempts to trap him, and the T-A AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer.

This empty high-tech Orientalist space parallels the textual construction of the

Orient in early scholarly studies that focussed on ancient civilizations. These studies, as

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Said has argued, treated the Orient as empty; the “real” Egyptians Orientalist scholars

encountered—if these scholars traveled to the Egypt at all—were treated as background,

as relics or as proof of the degeneration of the Oriental race (52). In cyberspace, then, as

in all Orientalist spaces, there are disembodied minds on the one hand, and disembodied

representations on the other. There are those who can reason online and those who are

reduced to information. In cyberspace, there is disembodiment, and then there is

disembodiment. Via high tech Orientalism, the window of cyberspace becomes a mirror

that reflects Case’s mind and reduces others to background, or reflects his mind via the

others it constructs as mimics. High tech Orientalism, like its non-tech version, “defines

the Orient as that which can never be a subject” (Naoki Sakai as quoted by Morley and

Robins 146.). In order to preserve the American cowboy, it reinforces stereotypes of the

Japanese as mechanical mimics (imitators of technology). This is not to say that in order

to portray a more “fair” version of cyberspace, Gibson should have included Japanese

cowboys within Neuromancer (or even more Japanese characters), nor is it to say that

Gibson celebrates cyberspace as Orientalist. It is to say that this influential version of

cyberspace mixes together frontier dreams with sexual conquest: it reveals the

objectification of others to be key to the construction of any “cowboy” and any James

Mitchener-esque American samurai. This is, perhaps, a brilliant critique of Orientalism

in general. Perhaps.

Significantly, though, this reduction of others and other locations is not limited to

cyberspace. Case navigates both cyberspace and Night City through a relentless

paranoia- and drug-induced datafication. When he and Molly play a cat and mouse game

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through Night City, he describes his adventure in terms of his previous experiences in

cyberspace:

In some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh, in the mazes of the black market. (16).

When one finds oneself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary trouble—when the

world no longer makes sense—the virtual and physical landscapes converge. More

specifically, Ninsei becomes the Matrix, a world in which others are reduced to

information or data. Like in cyberspace, these reductions to code enable a certain self-

direction; they enable you to throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid. Parallels

between cyberspace and Ninsei sprinkle Neuromancer: the gray disk that marks Case’s

entry into cyberspace is the color of the Chiba sky (the color of television tuned to a dead

channel). When Case remembers Ninsei, he remembers “faces and Ninsei neon,” a neon

that is replicated in the bright red and green online representations of corporations.

Ninsei people are similarly reduced to light and code. Case always remembers his former

lover Linda Lee as “bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code” (8).24 The

easy codification of things and people breaks down when Case confronts his other

“home,” BAMA; hence, when he is thrown into the metropolis again, when everything no

longer mimics him, Case notes that “Ninsei had been a lot simpler” (69).

24 In his 1996 novel Idoru, Gibson takes this datafication of Asians to the extreme: Rei Teio is a virtual

construct. She “grows”—i.e. becomes more complicated—by absorbing information and mimicking

others. People “see” her as a hologram.

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Ninsei had been a lot simpler because this Oriental space always existed as

information, as code for Case. Case’s experiences of navigating cyberspace inspire his

navigation of Ninsei. Just as the Japanese language becomes reduced to Sony and Kirin,

Ninsei as a whole—not only Chiba City—reduces to code. Ninsei had been a lot simpler

because Ninsei had been just like the Matrix, had been amenable to datafication. In terms

of the genesis of cyberspace, cyberspace has always been Oriental, always been an other

space that is more ordered and orderable. Importantly, Case reveals himself to be a bad

navigator as well. In the high-speed chase I cited earlier, he correctly assesses that Molly

is following him, but incorrectly assumes that she is out to kill him on Wage’s behalf (a

misconception based on faulty information given to him by Linda Lee). Linda Lee, also,

moves from being an easily codified character, to a woman who embodies the complex

patterns of the human body. As well, although Case eventually wins in cyberspace, he

flatlines several times and is almost seduced by Neuromancer into dying there. Lastly,

the neat separation between cyberspace and the physical world collapse at the end, when

Wintermute’s plans go astray and Case must enter the T-A villa to help Molly. In other

words, the cowboy and the datafication of others does not always work; Case’s

rehearsing of orientalism as a means of navigation and understanding does not always

work. If anything, this rehearsal is—to repeat once more—an attempt to come to terms

with awe and terror, not to eradicate awe and terror.

Thus, cyberpunk’s twin obsessions with cyberspace and the Orient are not

accidental and cannot be reduced to an endless citation of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner,

or to the rise of Japanese corporations. Rather, the Orient serves as a privileged example

of the virtual. The Orient serves to orient the reader/viewer, enabling him or her to

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envision the world as data. This twinning sustains—barely—the dream of self-erasure

and pure subjectivity. The reduction of the Japanese to mimic sustains the image of the

Imperial subject. Most simply, others must be reduced to information in order for the

console cowboy to emerge and penetrate. The dream of bodiless subjectivity must be

accompanied by bodiless representivity. Since its very inception, then, cyberspace—as

Orientalist heterotopia—has perpetuated and relied on differences that it claims to

erase.25

LOOKING BACK

Cyberpunk, however, appeals to an audience outside America. Most

significantly, cyberpunk has influenced a genre of anime, or Japanimation, by the name

of mecha (a Japanese transliteration and transformation of the word mechanical); through

mecha cyberpunk has gained cult status in nations such as the United States and France.26

Although popular Japanese mecha series such as Robotech and Astroboy predate

cyberpunk, mecha is now most often translated as cyberpunk, with posters for such

popular series such as The Bubblegum Crisis prominently featuring the English word

“cyberpunk.” In this section, then, I turn to Mamoru Oshii’s animated rendering of

25 Although Gibson consistently uses Japanese as mimics, other cyberpunk authors, such as Neal

Stephenson do not, even as they employ Japanese and East Asian geographies. Stephenson’s Snow Crash

is especially interesting since his cyberspace is not empty and characters become avatars online. In effect,

his characters pass as others, rather than as disembodied minds. In Snow Crash, racial stereotypes serve as

prototypes for online avatars such as Brandy.

26 For the “global” popularity of mecha, see http://www.anipike.com and Laurence Lerman, “Anime vids

get Euro-friendly.”

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Masamune Shirow’s comic Ghost in the Shell in order to see what happens to cyberpunk

when it travels home, so to speak.

Anime neither enables a simple Japanization of its audience, nor a simple rejection

of techno-Orientalism. Rather, anime’s cyberpunk engages the image of Japan as the site

of the future and future technology and propagates images that Toshiya Ueno calls

“Japanoid,” since they are “not actually Japanese…[and exist] neither inside nor outside

Japan” (n.p.). According to Ueno, the stereotyped Japanoid image:

functions as the surface or rather the interface controlling the relation between Japan and the other. Techno-Orientalism is a kind of mirror stage or an image machine whose effect influences Japanese as well as other people. This mirror in fact is a semi-transparent or two-way mirror. It is through this mirror stage and its cultural apparatus that Western or other people misunderstand and fail to recognize an always illusory Japanese culture, but it also is the mechanism through which Japanese misunderstand themselves. (n.p.)

In other words, the Japanoid images that circulate in the West (Japanese as machines or

ant-like workers, Japanese as triumphing via high technology) re-circulates to Japan and

affects Japanese self-image. Thus, not only does the West misunderstand the Japanese

through techno-Oriental images it projects, but the Japanese misunderstand themselves

through these images as well. It is not only that the West—in order to come to terms

with the awe and terror of post-Fordist life—projects an image of Japanese multi-national

superiority and the Japanese as mimics par excellence, but also that the Japanese circulate

these images as well (mainly as reasons for Japanese superiority).27 This works with both

positive and negative stereotypes of the Japanese: stereotypes of the Japanese as lacking

indviduality and of them as producing ideal family units; stereotypes of them as

27 For more on this see Ishihara Shintaro’s The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will be First Among

Equals.

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perversely enjoying work, and of them as ideal workers. If, in order to preserve the

American cowboy as all-seeing yet unseen—as disembodied—techno-Orientalist fictions

such as Neuromancer identify/misrecognize/reduce the Japanese to mimics, the Japanese

identify with and misrecognize themselves through the Japanoid image in order to

preserve Japan as the site of the future. This misrecognition provokes an imitation of the

Japanese future that exceeds the West’s identification/misrecognition. If Neuromancer

portrays a Japanese future in order register a “future gotten worse, gotten more

uncomfortable, inhospitable, dangerous, and thrilling,” anime displaces the future sources

of danger and discomfort onto Western technology: the corporations that dominate the

future and destroy humanity are American rather than Japanese. As I argue in this

section, this imitation re-appropriates techno-Orientalist images in ways that maps

technology back onto the West and humanity onto the Japanese. However, since anime is

also consumed in the United States, the success of this re-appropriation is never

guaranteed.

To delve into the ways in which anime re-appropriates and displaces techno-

Orientalism, I analyze arguably the most “westernized” anime, Ghost in the Shell,

directed by Mamoru Oshii and based on a manga by Shirow Masamune that ran from

1989-90. According to Shirow, Ghost in the Shell is a relatively international work that

transcends national boundaries and includes multiple references to both English and

Japanese culture and literature (Ledoux 39). This anime, released in 1995 simultaneously

in Europe, America and Japan, marks anime’s American debut in major movie theatres,

although it is still mainly aired on television through broadcast, cable and video in the

United States. It reached No. 1 on Billboard magazine’s video sales chart and earned the

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rather limited title of New York’s highest-grossing film shown exclusively on a single

screen in one theater (Lazarowitz 1). Ghost in the Shell was a hallmark in anime

production for both aesthetic and corporate reasons: it was “the most expensive and

technically advanced Japanese animated feature yet made,” although it still only cost $10

million—a tenth of that for “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (Lazarowitz n.p.). It was

also co-financed and produced by Japan’s Bandai and Kodansha and Chicago-based

Manga Entertainment.

The plot of Ghost in the Shell parallels Neuromancer—except that, rather than an

artificial intelligence seeking to be free by merging with its better half, an artificial life

form (the Puppet Master) seeks to free itself by merging with the cyborg Major Motoko

Kusanagi. Set in Hong Kong in 2029, Ghost in the Shell follows the adventures of the

Major, who leads Section 9—a secret intelligence agency filled with cyborgs of “a

strange corporate conglomeration called Japan”—as she pursues the Puppet Master. The

Major’s entire body, or “shell” has been replaced by a titanium “Megatech Body.” The

human essence is encapsulated in one’s “ghost” that holds one’s memories. The “Puppet

Master” is so dangerous a criminal because he ghost-hacks people, inserting false

memories, controlling their actions, and reducing them to puppets.

The anime begins in cyberspace and then quickly morphs into real life (see

Figures 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3). The anime immerses viewers immediately into the action and

in cyberspace so that the viewer does not know exactly what is going on. The Major,

perched in a building, is jacked into cyberspace and eavesdropping on a conversation

between a “kidnapped” or asylum-seeking programmer, Mizuho Daita, and a foreign

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Figure 3.1: cyberspace view of two planes

Figure 3.2: cyberspace view of two planes

Figure 3.3: the two planes morphed into normal view

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government official. Section 9 has been brought into this diplomatic dispute in order to

“rescue” the programmer and the Major saves the day by killing the foreign diplomat.

Throughout the anime, Major Motoko anxiously contemplates her humanity and

hears voices, presumably her own ghost’s, but as we find out later, the Puppet Master’s as

well. The Puppet Master and Major Motoko finally meet when the Puppet Master, lured

into a buxom blonde Megatech Body, is hit by a truck and brought to Section 9. That the

Puppet Master has no organic brain yet contains traces of a burgeoning synthetic brain

disturbs the Section 9 cyborgs. When Nakamura, the head of Section 6 (the diplomatic

unit) and an unknown American come to claim the body, they identify it as the Puppet

Master whom they claim is a human programmer whose ghost has been lured into a

Megatech body. In the middle of their explanation, the Puppet Master, who by this time

is a badly mutilated blonde torso, speaks the truth: the diplomatic corps hired an

American AI company to develop the Puppet Master—an Artificial Life program—in

order to assist diplomacy via espionage and other illegal activities. In the course of his

explanation, the Puppet Master appeals for asylum, claiming he is a life-form: moving

through the net, he has become sentient. Since Japan has no death penalty, he cannot be

terminated. In the meantime, Togusa (a Japanese and almost fully human member of

Section 9) has deduced that the diplomatic corps has illegally brought with them attack

personnel hidden by thermoneutic camouflage. The Shell Unit monitors the scene and,

just as the Puppet Master pleas for diplomatic immunity, Section 6 attacks in order to

reclaim him. Section 9 pursues. When Major Motoko—alone—finally catches up with

the men who have taken the Puppet Master, she ends up becoming a badly mutilated

torso as well. Her close comrade/inferior officer, Batou, saves her from complete

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annihilation and, at her request, he connects her and the Puppet Master so that the Major

can discover what s/he really is. During this “dive,” the Puppet Master takes over her

body and proposes that they merge. By merging, the Puppet Master can achieve death

and diversify his program so he may live on through his offspring. Major Motoko can

break through the boundaries that limit her as a person and access the vast expanse of the

net, which their offspring will populate. They merge just before Section 6 planes destroy

the Puppet Master. Major Motoko survives and Batou transplants her newly merged

brain into a little girl’s body. The anime ends with her leaving Batou’s “safe house” to

explore the expanse of the net before her. Although she asks herself, “where shall I go

now?/ The net is vast and limitless,” the “camera” pans through the landscape of Hong

Kong (see Figures 3.4, 3.5, 3.6).

Like Neuromancer, Ghost in the Shell is set in a foreign country—this time Hong

Kong instead of Japan. Ueno argues that “the choice of Hong Kong represents an

unconscious criticism of Japan’s role as sub-empire: by choosing Hong Kong as the

setting of this film, and trying to visualize the information net and capitalism, the director

of this film, Oshii Mamoru, unconsciously tried to criticize the sub-imperialism of Japan

(and other Asian nations)” (n.p.). However, rather than signaling an unconscious critique

of Japan, the choice of Hong Kong orientalizes. Faced with the task of representing

basically invisible networks of information, director Mamoru Oshii chose a location that

could easily be conflated with information. He explains that he chose Hong Kong

because:

In “Ghost in the Shell,” I wanted to create a present flooded with information, and it [Japan’s multilayered world] wouldn’t have lent itself to that. For this reason, I thought of using exoticism as an approach to a city of the future. In other words, I believe that a basic feeling people get perhaps when imagining a city of the near

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Figure 3.4: the “new Major” leaving Batou’s safe house.

Figure 3.5: The Major overlooking the city

Figure 3.6: The last frame; Hong Kong as vast net.

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future is that while there is an element of the unknown, standing there they’ll get used to this feeling of being an alien. Therefore, when I went to look for locations in Hong Kong, I felt that this was it. A city without past or future. Just a flood of information. (“Interview with Oshii” n.p.)28

But, as the last sequence shows, rather than inherently having no past or no future, Hong

Kong's landscape is made into a flood of information in order to represent the vast

expanse of the net. In order to “explain” cyberspace, the city becomes data.

To function as data, the city must also be readable. The “basic feeling” portrayed by

Hong Kong, then, must be an oriented disorientation. The basic feeling that Oshii strives

for, is that of a tourist, rather than a resident: tourists, not residents, stand in a public

space, in order to get used to the feeling of being alien. In other words, it is not simply

that Tokyo is more multi-layered than Hong Kong, but rather that his audience is too

familiar with Tokyo to be adequately disoriented.29 After all, what city—to the tourist—

is not a flood of information? By this, I do not mean to imply that all cities are alike;

indeed, some are more “disorienting” than others. However, when in an unknown city,

one is confronted with the task of navigating it and confronted with both the necessity

and inadequacy of maps. The city both inundates one, and leaves one looking for more

information, for a way to decipher the landscape in front of oneself.

28 The portrayal of Hong Kong as a city with no past or future is problematic for many reasons: first, it

denies the colonial history of Hong Kong; secondly it perpetuates an image of a time-less Hong Kong at a

time when Hong Kong’s identity is at stake. As Ackbar Abbaz argues in Hong Kong: Culture and Politics

of Disappearance, in the period before the 1997 hand-over there was a fast and furious attempt to delineate

a Hong Kong culture—a problematic attempt, focussed on Hong Kong culture as disappearing.

29 Abbaz divides Hong Kong’s architecture into three forms: Merely Local, Anonymous, and Place-less

(79-90).

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In order to effect this paradox of familiar alienation, Oshii relies on street signs: “I

thought that I could express networks which are invisible to all through drawing not

electronic images but a most primitive low-tech group of signboards piled like a

mountain, that this would work well in drawing a world being submerged under

information, in which people live like insects” (“Interview” n.p.).30 Ghost in the Shell

thus relentlessly focuses on street signs that function as literal sign posts for the foreign

audience (see Figures 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9). Oshii glosses over the fact that the street signs’

ability to invoke information networks depends on literacy: a Japanese audience can read

these signs, which are written in Chinese characters and in English. Just as “getting used

to the feeling of being alien” in American cyberpunk depends on Japanese trademarks—

words that have become recognizable and readable in other languages—unalienating

alienation in Ghost in the Shell depends on literacy enabled by historic connections

between East Asian countries via Confucian study and by modernization.31

30 Ridley Scott previously used this technique in Blade Runner. Although Oshii does not comment directly

on his citations of Blade Runner, they are numerous and mostly relate to questions of representing

technology. For instance, the long musical scene in which the Major tours Hong Kong ends with manikins

similar to those that appear in Blade Runner when Deckard tracks down the snake-stripping replicant

Zhora.(see Figure 3.31)

31 Abbaz argues that signs have the opposite effect on Hong Kong city dwellers. If tourists gaze at these

signs and in some way try to read them, “Bilingual, neon-lit advertisement signs are not only almost

everywhere; their often ingenious construction for maximum visibility deserves an architectural monograph

in itself. The result of all this insistence is a turning off of the visual. As people in metropolitan centers

tend to avoid eye contact with one another, so they now tend also to avoid eye contact with the city” (76).

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Figure 3.7: street scene in the first chase scene.

Figure 3.8: Hong Kong signs in the extended musical interlude.

Figure 3.9: signs in English as well as Chinese characters.

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Oshii also juxtaposes past and primitive artifacts with modern architecture in order to

make Hong Kong legible, yet not completely undecipherable. That is, in order to

construct Hong Kong as a city without history, without the complexity associated with

one’s home environment, he also deploys historical images. As in Blade Runner, scenes

of Oriental “teeming markets” punctuate Ghost in the Shell. Just as American

cyberpunk’s vision of Japan mixes together Edo images and ideas with high-tech

equipment, Japanese cyberpunk visions of Hong Kong mix together traditional Chinese

hats and teeming markets with high-tech office towers (see Figures 3.10 and 3.11).32

The Chinese “present” marks a low tech future that enables the viewer to make sense of

this high tech future.

This exoticism of the city of the near future enables the reader to navigate

cyberspace and to view it as a guiding, yet visually poor map. Cyberspace makes

unfamiliar space mappable and understandable. If at first the viewer is confused by the

views of cyberspace that begin the anime, the viewer soon relies on it to understand the

32 Further, to link this to the mixing of high- and low-tech in cyberpunk, Japanese anime often feature a trip

into “Chinatown” or Chinese tea rooms that are marked as inferior or perpetrating bad employment

practices. In the popular “Bubble Gum Crisis” series, for example, the two women bond over a trip to

Chinatown. In the “pre-quel” to the BGC, the AD Police, bad labor practices at a Chinese tea room marks

as the onset of a crisis with boomers. Ranma 1/2—turns into a girl when splashed with cold water—female

Ranma has red hair, and the male Ranma has black hair. As Analee Newitz argues in “Magical Girls and

Atomic Bomb Sperm: Japanese Animation in America,” “Ranma is not only feminized, but also associated

with China, a country invaded and occupied by Japanese imperialist forces several times during the 20th

century. Ranma’s ‘curse’ is in fact a Chinese curse, which he got during martial arts training with Genma

in China. Moreover, Ranma wears his hair in a queue and his clothing is Chinese: at school, the students

often refer to him as ‘the one in Chinese clothing’” (11).

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action; it helps the viewer orient him or herself. The frequent segues between cyberspace

and real space emphasize the ways in which jacking-in serves as a means for navigation,

and the ways in which cyberspace erases local particularities by translating locations into

a universal video player screen (see Figure 3.12). Featured prominently in the chase

scenes—and in fact only in chase scenes—cyberspace reduces the pursuit to game and

hunter, and the game into a green arrow. For instance, when tracking down a garbage

truck driven by one of the Puppet Master’s puppets, the anime morphs from street view to

cyberspace view, in which the foreign street appears as a benign green line. In

cyberspace, one moves from being inundated with information, to being presented with

the bare necessities of direction. Thus, cyberspace and the city of the near future

combine differing versions of Orientalism: they play with both exotic dislocation,

navigational desire, the desire to reduce other locations to navigatable maps. At the same

time, Oshii’s version of cyberspace points to the paucity of orienting oneself: the visual

simplicity of the cyberspace scenes alerts the viewer to the fact that manageable

information is often poor information.

Oshii also uses the Major and the city to represent cyberspace. As he notes,

“networks are things that can’t be seen with the eyes, and using computers, showing a

gigantic computer, would definitely not do the trick. Showing something like a

humongous mother computer would be scary.”33 In order to represent the network in a

less “scary” way, Oshii uses instead a humongous mother figure (see Figure 3.13). In

this image (taken from the Ghost in the Shell movie poster), the Major’s enormous

33 http://www.express.co.jp/ALLES/6/oshii1.html

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Figure 3.10: overhead view of the market.

Figure 3.11: the Hong Kong market, replete with stereotypical Chinese figures and technology.

Figure 3.12: cyberspace view of a car chase.

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Figure 3.13: movie poster for Ghost in the Shell.

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mutilated form blots out the void in the same manner the big mother virus program does

in Neuromancer. The wires attached to her body highlight her network connections and

her broken form reveals her cyborg nature. Her form represents power: she dominates

the scene and the cityscape shrinks in light of her connected body. Her jacked-in bare

body makes cyberspace sexy, rather than completely scary and impersonal. Thus Oshii’s

rendering of cyberspace is both erotic and simplistic, or perhaps erotic in its simplicity.

Thus, like Neuromancer, Ghost in the Shell represents cyberspace by relying on

maps and by reducing others and other locations to information. Both American and

Japanese versions of cyberpunk, that is, rely on other locations that are fictional yet

recognizable in order to render comprehensible their vision of cyberspace. At the same

time, both Oshii and Gibson point out the limitations of such an orientation by also

presenting the ways in which foreign exotic—Oriental—locations exceed such a

reduction. Whereas cyberspace, to use de Certeau’s definitions, reduces these locales to

places (ordered), the disorienting yet orienting near city invokes ambiguity.

TURNING JAPANESE

Although both Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell mark an “East,” crucial to

understanding cyberspace, Ghost in the Shell does not mark Japan as West. Or, if it does

bring Japan and the West together, it does so by making the West Japanese. In this

section, I outline the ways in which Ghost in the Shell engages Japanoid images. I show

how the Japanoid anime characters, which seem race-less, are marked as Japanese in

order to emphasize Japan’s separation from “Asia.” Next, I show how Ghost in the Shell

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protagonists and the seeming fluidity of racial features fascinate and confuse most

Western viewers of anime.35 Because of this, many consider anime as “multicultural,” as

imagining a future in which race does not matter, or as marking a Westernization of

Japanese beauty standards and self-conception.36 In order to view anime as

“multicultural,” though, one must reduce multiculturalism to minorities acting like the

majority, for all these variously raced characters speak and act Japanese. Anime does not

portray a future utopia in which all races and nationalities have melded; it portrays a

future world in which everyone has turned Japanese. As Annalee Newitz argues:

What these anime act out is a fantasy in which people of all races and Japanese people are interchangeable. …. While this kind of ideology might seem satisfying and “right” to Americans raised in a multiculture, we must also remember that the Japanese are not multicultural. The ideological implications of these representations are more complex than something like “racial harmony.” This multicultural fantasy takes place largely in Japan and all the races are speaking and being Japanese. … In a way, the anime want to imply that Americans are Japanese. If Americans are already Japanese, then it should be no surprise to any American that Japan, economically speaking, already owns a large portion of the United States. (13)

According to Newitz, the use of a multicultural “cast” appropriates American notions of

multiculturalism in order to assert the sameness, and eventual economic superiority of the

Japanese. Indeed, what is interesting about “multicultural” anime is that the Japanese

characters are in places of power. Although not recognizable as Japanese except by their

35 See Mark Binelli, “Large eyes blazing, anime offers exotic views” and Jonathan Romney, “Manga for all

seasons: A festival at the NFT shows there is more to Japan’s cult anime movies than misogyny and

apocalyptic animation.”

36 In this manner, arguments made about the cyberspace and anime coincide: cyberspace is often viewed as

a space in which race does not matter, or as a space that America—and the English language—dominate.

Moreover, cyberspace and anime are both mediums in which reference or referentiality are suspended or

can be easily made up. Unlike cinema or television, there are no ties between physical appearance and role.

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names, these Japanese characters are Majors, Chiefs and Section heads. Rather than

offering a vision of multiculturalism, anime would seem to offer a vision of totalitarian

same-ness or harmony that nonetheless seems to challenge “Western” standards of

animation.

Newitz, however, glosses over the fact that the interchangeability of racial

features does not signify an interchangeability of races. More often than not, only the

Japanese characters display racial “ambiguity” evidenced by enormous eyes. Although

the characters in Ghost in the Shell have relatively small eyes in comparison with other

anime characters, they still do not look stereotypically Japanese (see Figures 3.14, 3.15,

3.16 and 3.17). More experienced anime viewers herald Ghost in the Shell as “a

watershed in anime character design. The figures are drawn with truer anatomy: the

heroine no longer has a 12-year-old’s face and a pair of double D’s and long legs. Her

body (naked, of course, because, uh, her camouflage can’t work with clothing) is

rendered proportionally accurate with realistic body movement, as evidenced in a scene

where she maneuvers a perfect roundhouse kick—crack—into the face of her opponent”

(Lee 15). First time anime viewers’ impressions of Ghost in the Shell, however, reveal

the comparative nature of “truer anatomy.” Laura Evanson, for instance, describes Major

Motoko as sporting “the body of a Baywatch babe, the face of a beauty queen and the

soul of a machine” (D3). The female figures in particular retain the large eyes prevalent

in portrayals of both genders in other anime. Regardless, these “Japanese” members of

Section 9 do not look Japanese, with the exception of the Chief, whose wisdom is marked

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Figure 3.14: Japanese console operator and Chief Aramaki, head of Section 6

Figure 3.15: Major Motoko Kasangi

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Figure 3.16: Officer Togusa, the only non-cyborg member of Section 9

Figure 3.17: Ishikawa, member of Section 9

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by an almost Confucian countenance.37 Ishikawa’s hair is brown, and placed next to the

French figure Batou, they are indistinguishable in terms of race.

That Japanese anime and manga characters do not look Japanese is not surprising.

All animations produce images that are not indexical. Non-realist drawings serve as the

basis for most animation and America’s most famous animated big-eyed character—

Mickey Mouse—certainly does not “represent” Americans even though he does so as a

trademark. However, the manner of distortion matters and the enormous eyes stem from

post-WWII Japan. According to Mary Grigsby, “before the Japanese came into contact

with westerners, they drew themselves with Asian features. After contact with the west,

particularly after World War II and the subsequent reconstruction of Japan under the

domination of the United States, they began to depict characters that are supposed to be

Japanese with western idealized physical characteristics: round eyes, blond, red or brown

hair, long legs and thin bodies” (n.p.). However, this adaptation of Western features does

not signal a simple imitation of Western beauty standards, since these new bodies may

not be “Japanese,” but, at the same time, they certainly are not Western: Westerners no

more resemble these characters than do the Japanese. The enormous eye size in fact

parodies the difference between Westerners and Japanese and produces new images that

would defy racial categorization, if they did not simultaneously represent Japanese

characters.

Even though Japanese characters may have Western features or look less visibly

Asian, Chinese characters are portrayed as Hong Kong gangsters reminiscent of

37 His appearance in the anime is a marked improvement over his appearance in the manga. In the manga,

he is given ape-like facial features and referred to as “ape face.”

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American portrayals of the “yellow peril” (see Figures 3.18 and 3.19). Thus, once more,

the East is marked off from Japan in stereotypical form. Moreover, American males are

given a more “realistic” portrayal when they are marked as “Americans” as opposed to

Japanified Americans. The American programmer in Ghost in the Shell, for instance, has

smaller eyes than Togusa and a large protruding nose (see Figure 3.20). The visual

distinctiveness of the Japanese occurs in manga as well as anime:

In the topsy-turvy world of Japanese manga, although Japanese characters are frequently drawn with Caucasian features, when real Caucasians appear in manga they are sometimes shown as big hairy brutes. Chinese and Korean characters are frequently drawn with slant eyes and buckteeth, in much the same stereotyped fashion Japanese were depicted by American propagandists in World War II. (Schodt 66)

Thus, these exaggerations, which seem to mark the erasure or fluidity of race, come to

mark its reinscription. This visual difference between those marked as Japanese versus

Chinese—in a manner that we would recognize as Asian—separates Japan from both

West and East. It is a visual marking that reminds us that: “in this cultural climate, a

Japan imaginarily separated from both West and East is reproduced again and again in

the political unconscious of Japanimation (subculture).”38 As in Neuromancer,

38 Toshiyo Ueno, “Japanimation and Techno-Orientalism.” However, the only putatively American female,

the Puppet Master in a female body, is similarly given enormous eyes and breasts, unlike other anime such

as A.D. Police that give American women such as Caroline Evers smaller eyes and a taller physique. The

similarities between the Major and the Puppet Master may stem from the fact that they both inhabit

Megatech Bodies, which seem to come in two versions: blonde and black haired. The gender bias within

Ghost in the Shell could also reflect the general trend within East Asia for women to exceed the constraints

of their “natural appearance.” Many Japanese, Korean and Hong Kong women, and increasingly women

from mainland China, undergo plastic surgery to produce bigger eyes and more pronounced noses.

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Figure 3.18: Kwan, puppet manipulated by the Puppet Master.

Figure 3.19: The “bad guys” who steal the Puppet Master’s body.

Figure 3.20: American AI expert, Dr. Willis.

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“others” must be conspicously marked in order for the self to emerge as unmarked, or

beyond one’s “natural” body. The popularity of Walt Disney is linked to Mickey Mouse

and its cast of animal characters that can travel across cultures without being necessarily

identified as American, while, at the same time, being heavily identified as American.

What animation generally allows for is cross-cultural exchange that seems to exceed the

logic of same-based identification. The popular characters are toys, animals, or even

representations of cross cultural events and alliances, from Pocohantas to Mulan. When

watching anime, one is free to identify with characters one would normally not: with

mice and men, with women and toys. In fact, what are the large Japanese eyes if not a

citation of Mickey Mouse? Or at the very least an attempt at racial obscuring that gives

the Japanese named characters a universalism?

Further, in Ghost in the Shell, Japaneseness becomes conflated with humanness.

The only human characters are Togusa, Chief Aramaki and the director of Section 6

Nakamura (the American, Dr. Willis, has cybernetically enhanced fingers at the very

least). The importance of humanness/Japaneseness becomes apparent in an interchange

between Togusa and Major Motoko. After the Major reprimands Togusa for favoring a

simple revolver over a more powerful weapon, Togusa asks her: “Why’d you ask for a

guy like me to be transferred from the police?” Major Motoko responds that she recruited

him precisely he was a guy like himself:

An honest cop with a clean record. And you’ve got a regular family. With the exception of your cyber-net implants, your brain is real. No matter how powerful we may be fighting-wise, a system where all the parts react the same way is a system with a fatal flaw. Like individual, like organization. Overspecialization leads to death. That’s all.

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Togusa’s difference is his human-ness, his regularity and banality and, in the end,

Togusa’s human-ness or difference saves the day: he figures out that Section 6 is

planning a secret attack against Section 9 and, with his revolver, he plants a tracking

device into the license plate of the escape car, allowing Section 9 to chase after those who

have stolen the “body” of the Puppet Master. Diversity, then, moves from racial diversity

to diversity between cyborgs and humans, where humans who are recruited or needed for

“good” diversity are Japanese. This valuation of diversity, in combination with the

seeming racial diversity in this society, preserves Japan and the Japanese in positions of

power, while at the same time allowing them to propagate the official lines of American

corporate diversity.

If humanness is mapped onto the Japanese, technology and global multinational

corporations are mapped back onto the West. As opposed to Neuromancer, which maps

computer technology onto the Japanese through trademarks, Ghost in the Shell marks

technology—specifically computer technology—as American through loan words. If

Sony comes in to stand for monitors in general in Neuromancer, transliterated words such

as “hacking,” “programmer,” “debug,” “kill,” and “virus” mark computer technology as

American. Moreover, anime itself is a transliteration of animation and heavily influenced

by Disney.39 Corporations such as Megatech and Genotech similarly re-map the source

of threatening multinationals back to America as opposed to zaibatsus. The Puppet

39 As Newitz writes:

Frederik Schodt, in his book Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, writes that Japanese styles of animation are heavily influenced both by Western political cartoons and Disney animation. Famous anime director/illustrator Hayao Miyazaki (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service) is open about his admiration for Disney’s animation style. In other words, anime is itself a product of the American influence on Japanese everyday life, especially after World War II. (10)

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Master is also initially believed to be American and was developed by the American

company, Neutron Corp. Given Japan’s relation to technology as a product of the

West—from the initial Westernization of Japan initiated during the Meiji period to the

atomic bomb (a history made clear by “Neutron Corp”)—this insistence on technology as

Western rather than Japanese makes sense and reverses an aspect of techno-Orientalism.

In fact, many manga, especially those which are mecha or hentai (literally perverted)

have English names, so that anime marked as “perverse” by the West (as well as by the

Japanese) gets marketted as Western. The other name for hentai or perverted anime is

etchi—which is a transliteration of the letter “h.”

However, Ghost in the Shell cannot be reduced to “West equals technology” and

“Japanese equals human,” for the word “ghost” exposes the ways in which technology—

and indeed the West—is assimilated and reworked by the Japanese. This word, which

supposedly encapsulates the essence of a human being (like a soul but not quite) is a

loan word. Since there are many Japanese words to describe one’s soul or spirit whereas

there are not for words such as programmer, ghost would seem to belie the usual use of

loan words to mark technology. In one sense, ghost most certainly refers to ghost in the

machine, given Shirow’s knowledge of Western technology and literature. However

rather than simply alluding to Western theories of ghosts and machines, “ghost”

encapsulates the forms of identification, appropriation and transference involved in

anime’s re-working of techno-Orientalism. The rest of this section argues that the ghost

contained within the shell is an identification with the West. As Diana Fuss argues,

“identification… invokes phantoms. By incorporating the spectral remains of the dearly

departed love-object, the subject vampiristically comes to life” (1). Ghost marks the

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vampiristic creation of the Japanoid subject, a subject that exceeds identification with its

object and also exceeds the object itself. Ghosts result from an incorporation of and

desire for technology. Further, after one has imbibed technology, one’s former self

becomes an “original body,” again marking the fact that Western technology alters in

ways that make impossible a retreat to a pure “Japanese” self.

The question of a “ghost” and its relation to humanity forms a focal point of the

anime. Major Motoko spends a good portion of the movie questioning her humanity, a

humanity unanchored from the human form. After the beginning attack sequence, the

credits begin and are punctuated by images that trace the Major’s bodily creation from

exoskeleton, to womb-like fleshification, to cyberspatial mapping (see Figures 3.21, 3.22,

3.23, 3.24, 3.25 and 3.26). These images focus on her naked form, especially her breasts.

However, in contrast with the initial naked image we receive of the Major as she dives

from the building, this series of pictures emphasizes her difference from “normal” naked

women. Although these images are racy, they also deconstruct her sex appeal by

showing how carefully she is constructed, beginning with an unattractive exoskeleton.

Her breasts are exposed, but they are exposed as the scales fall off her flesh. This

extended sequence, interspersed with credits that appear first as a series of 1’s and 0’s

before emerging into words, visualizes digital creation and provides a narrative for

understanding the Major as a cyborg.

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Figure 3.21: the beginning exoskeleton

Figure 3.22: the adding of flesh under water

Figure 3.23: the breaking of the water and the emergence of flesh

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Figure 3.24: the full human in the fetal position mapped in cyberspace.

Figure 3.25: the finished product.

Figure 3.26: looking at her hand.

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translator’s head are similar to the lines protruding from the Major’s. Making the

Major’s and the viewer’s looks coincide also effectively puts the gaze on display. Rather

than necessarily putting the viewer in the Major’s eyes, this move makes the viewer

aware of the gaze, which in fact moves from character to character like a frisbee

throughout the anime.40 This mirror-effect between the Major and cyborg others is

repeated in the prolonged sequence in which the Major travels through Hong Kong.

Although her gaze is first arrested by an “office girl” who resembles herself, it ends on

manikins in an office tower (see Figures 3.29, 3.30, and 3.31). Major Motoko seems to

be going through a second mirror stage—a mirror stage that will inaugurate a new subject

that is neither human nor machine. Estranged from her body and faced by its lack of

physical uniqueness, she searches for a way to emerge as a unique cyborg subject. The

Major makes her anxieties explicit after she and the Puppet Master’s mutilated form

exchange looks for the first time. In the elevator with Batou, she asks him:

Major: Doesn’t that cyborg body look like me? Batou: No, it doesn’t. Major: Not in the face or the figure. Batou: What then? Major: Maybe all full replacement cyborgs like me start wondering this. That perhaps the real me died a long time ago…and I’m a replicant made with a cyborg body and a computer brain. Or maybe there never was a real “me” to begin with.

40 For more on the gaze on display, see Kaja Silverman’s Male Subjectivity at the Margins.

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Figure 3.27: looking back at the translator

Figure 3.28: the translator who is being “ghost hacked”

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Figure 3.29: The office lady.

Figure 3.30: the Major looking up at the office lady.

Figure 3.31: manikins on display.

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Except for the physical mirroring between herself and the office lady, the resemblances

she sees are invisible to the naked eye. Rather, she bases similarity on general

technological enhancement, precisely because, as a cyborg whose body had been

provided by Megatech, she—unlike most humans—invariably faces identical bodies.

The importance of technology on this “mirror stage” is shown most forcefully in the

scene in which the Major monitors the exchange between sections 6, 9 and the Puppet

Master (see Figure 3.32). In this shot, the camera mediates and indeed produces the

mirroring effect between the Major and the Puppet Master. If the Major is to make sense

of her body as a whole, she will have to do so through the very technology that has

provoked her crisis. Again, this scene places the viewer’s and the Major’s look on the

same line. This time, however, the viewer is looking over her shoulder, which also

provokes the possibility that the Puppet Master mirrors the viewer, rather than the Major.

At the very least, it places the viewer in the Major’s shoes.

Not unexpectedly, then, the Major resolves her crisis—she moves from childhood

towards adulthood—by merging with the Puppet Master. When the Major dives into the

Puppet Master’s body, the Puppet Master takes over the Major’s body. Before they

finally merge, the Major (now seen as the Puppet Master) asks the Puppet Master

(visually herself)—in a question that mirrors Tagusa’s earlier question to her—“why did

you choose me?” S/he replies: “Because in you I see myself” (see Figures 3.33 and

3.34). At this point, these statements are literally true, and the Puppet Master’s response

places the Major’s crisis in a different light: rather than her seeking out images, or

ghosts, for self-identification, ghosts have been pursuing her. The Puppet Master tells her

that “at last I’m able to channel into you./I’ve invested a lot of time into you.” The voice

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Figure 3.32: the Major and the Puppet Master

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Figure 3.33: the Major (as the Puppet Master) asking “Why did you choose me?”

Figure 3.34: the Puppet Master as the Major responding.

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that the Major has been listening to, and assuming was her own, was the Puppet Master’s.

The ghost in the shell, then, is not her own soul, but rather the Puppet Master’s. Their

merging incorporates within the Major the voice that she has been unable to hold without.

When they merge, they are transplanted into a child’s form, which paradoxially

represents maturity, for the new being replies to Batou’s question (basically who are you)

by finishing a Biblical quotation that the Puppet Master whispered to her earlier: “When

I was a child, I spake as a child/ I understood as a child, I thought as a child./But when I

became a man, I put away childish things./For now we see through a mirror darkly.”

This passage, taken from 1 Corinthians 13, aptly represents Paul’s ruminations about love

and incorporation with God. Through this merging, s/he has become a man—or rather a

cyborg. Joining the vast net, she has finally been able to move from a part to a whole.

One can read this merging as a merging between America and Japan that results

in Japanese superiority. Through technology, Japanese and American societies have

become similar to the extent that they can recognize similarities within each other.

Having literally incorporated technology—perhaps the object of desire for both East and

West—into herself, the Major identifies with it wherever she sees manikins and others

who have similarly done so. As they fuse, the Puppet Master—the American Artificial

Life—dies, and the Major survives, but as something very different than before. Through

this merging, the Major takes on the vast expanse of the West, and all this seems to be an

allegory for the Japanese adaptation and surpassing of the West via technology. The

Major in a child’s body—a very recognizably Japanese body—represents the future, and

the future, which is markedly Asian. Since the Puppet Master and the Major are

represented as “love interests,” the incorporation of the other seems to follow the

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male homosexual relationships.43 In addition, popular anime such as Ranma 1/2 and

Birdy feature boys whose bodies become female under certain circumstances. Both

Boshen and Ranma 1/2, however, are not meant to represent actual gay relationships or

men who desire to become transsexuals. They are not written by gay males, but rather by

women; their main market is young girls.44 Ranma 1/2 and Birdy, however, are far more

popular amongst boys in the United States than they are in Japan, probably because

anime in general tends to be a “boy thing” in America.

So why women and transgendering? Annalee Newitz explains the predominance

of female cyborgs in anime through the rubric of reproduction. According to her, “bodies

manipulated by mecha science are merged with pieces of technology in order to ‘give

birth’ to new creatures….Female bodies and sexuality are therefore ‘best suited’ to

mecha—and male bodies and sexuality are disfigured by it—precisely because it is

related to reproduction and giving birth” (9). Cyborgs do, in a sense, give birth to new

bodies: in Ghost in the Shell, the Major gives birth to offspring that populate the net and,

in Bubble Gum Crisis and other mecha anime, women bond with mechanical outer shells

to become new creatures with extraordinary fighting powers. However, linking

everything back to the issue of reproduction and the birth of new machines overlooks the

connection between feminism, or perhaps more precisely postfeminism, and

technological empowerment. Further, such a narrative cannot account for the fact that, in

43 See Sandra Buckley, “‘Penguin in Bondage’: A Graphic Tale of Japanese Comic Books.” Homoerotic

relationships have been a staple of girls’ comics for years, starting with stories that featured cross-dressing

women, then beautiful boys in boarding schools falling in love with each other, and so forth….nowadays

girls’ comics with a gay theme sell, and those without one don’t” (Schodt 185).

44 See “Interview with Rumiko Takahashi.”

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Ghost in the Shell, the sex scene—the reproductive act that produces the offspring—takes

place between two female shells, even if one is putatively “male” (although exactly how

an Artificial Life form gains a gender is unclear; according to Section 6, they decided

arbitrarily to call the Puppet Master a man and his voice is recognizably male).

Technological empowerment draws from and maps itself onto narratives of

feminist empowerment. At about the same time that Donna Haraway called for feminists

to embrace technology in “Cyborg Manifesto,” technology companies have been calling

for and embracing feminism. From Apple Computer’s female runner in the 1984

commercial to MCI’s marked spokespeople, technology corporations have embraced the

figure of the woman as representing the underdog, who, with proper technological

enhancements, overcomes her differences in order to become a fully functioning “equal.”

The belief that women need technological “extras” because they are inherently, or

perhaps naturally weaker, underlies this narrative of technology as great equalizer. This

enhancement, however, comes at a price: rather than the reproductive organs

representing the importance of women in anime, they usually are the price paid for

empowerment. These women, as “equals,” become men with breasts. The Major, after

she has been technologically enhanced, cannot reproduce and her lack of sex organs

becomes a joke: when Batou tells the Major that there is a lot of static in her brain, the

Major replies that it is that time of the month.45 The similarity in situation between

45 The loss of reproductive organs via technological replacement and then their ghostly reappearance is in

fact the theme of the first two files of AD Police. The first concentrates on how replicants or Boomers with

mechanical female sex organs go crazy—how passion and emotions are fused onto these entirely

mechanical beings via ovaries. In the second file, an American woman Caroline Evers has her reproductive

organs cybernetically replaced in order to get a promotion (she is denied her first one because her male

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“geeky” boys and anime females does not mean that the audience identifies

unproblematically with these women. The narrative of technological enhancement makes

these women understandable and enables a sympathetic connection, but does not

adequately explain the relation between otaku and cyborgs. Analyzing the “camera

work” that enables such a connection, though, opens up the specificity of this connection.

Oshii, in trying to represent a networked society, links every scene and camera

angle through a look or a sound, so that, like a game of tag, someone is always “it.” At

the same time, the “camera” often highlights the viewers’ presence. When asked why he

uses the “fish-eye” effects in anime, Oshii replied: “If you pressed me, you could say that

these are the ‘eyes’ that look at the world of the film from the outside—that these are the

eyes, in fact, of the audience” (“Interview” 139). The eyes of the audience, though,

often coincide with the Major—enabling the viewer to see through her eyes—but, even

more often, this coincidence enables the viewer to see more, enables the viewer to see

over her shoulder. This effectively puts the gaze on the screen, so that, more often than

not, the viewers are identifying with the gaze, rather than with specific characters. As

Kaja Silverman argues, “fantasy is less about the visualization and imaginary

appropriation of the other than about the articulation of a subjective locus—that is ‘not an

object that the subject imagines and aims at but rather a sequence in which the subject has

competitor produces a graph which shows that her productivity falls with her period). After she has her

reproductive organs replaced her work becomes flawless and she becomes president of the company. She

eventually marries her competitor who then cheats on her with prostitutes and tells her that “real women are

better.” She kills him and then starts killing prostitutes whenever she gets menstrual cramps from her

phantom period. Her cramps take her over, and she wakes up with a knife in her hands and an irrepressible

urge to disembowel prostitutes.

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his own part to play” (6). The viewer’s role is made explicit in the last scene, when the

camera comes online again after fading out with the Major going “offline.” When it does

come online, instead of offering us a view through the Major’s eyes, we come online as

an audience with an entirely new line of vision that does not coincide with anyone else’s.

In the over the shoulder shots, as I have discussed earlier, the gaze sometimes skips over

the Major to rest on the viewer. In Figures 3.33 and 3.34 for instance (the dialogue

between the Major and the Puppet Master), the Puppet Master could be addressing the

audience when says, “For in you I see myself.” In this manner, the viewer’s role can be

portrayed as another cyborg, as a ghost who haunts the screen.

At the same time, the viewer’s role as voyeur has a precedent within cyberpunk

fiction itself, namely in Case’s relationship with Molly. Case literally “jacks into” Molly,

seeing what she sees and feeling what she feels. Similarly, the viewer “jacks into” the

Major and the portrayal of the Major’s connections to cyberspace makes this explicit: in

Ghost in the Shell, jacking-into cyberspace is not portrayed as ejaculating into the system

or penetrating the net. Rather, the trodes emerge from the other and penetrate the Major

(see Figures 3.35, 3.36, and 3.37). Unlike Gibson’s version of merging with the net,

Ghost in the Shell portrays a feminine connection where the cyborg is the female

connector and the computer is the male connector. And indeed the camera becomes the

network connection—when we look over the Major’s shoulder we are literally in the

position of the net/console cowboy logging into her and seeing what she sees. This

“jacking in” functionally parallels “passing” on the Internet. Rather than offering people

an opportunity for others to lose their body or to understand others to “be” whoever or

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Figure 3.35: Movie Poster for Ghost in the Shell

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Figure 3.36: The “female connectors” at the back of the Major’s head.

figure 3.37: Cyberspace “jacked-into” the Major.

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whatever they want to be,” cyberspace offers simstim—the illusion of jacking into

another being, seeing what they see and pretending to be who they are. There is always

an option of jacking out, of leaving whenever things get too uncomfortable or difficult,

yet also the illusion of being the person you take on. Again, as in Neuromancer, there is

the ability to see what they see, to be treated as they are treated, but not access their

minds and their emotions.

So, what happens when one jacks into an anime, especially when one is

American?46 Newitz argues that American boys are feminized by watching anime and

46 The socio-economic, age and gender of mecha are similar on either side of the Pacific. As the director

Mamuro Oshii rather facetiously noted at an anime conference, there seemed to be very little difference

between his Japanese and American audiences: “both groups show a notable lack of females, and both

seem to be the ‘logic-oriented’ type” (Horn 139). Specifically, both groups identify/are identified as otaku,

which in Japan has become a derogatory term.46 Akio Nakamura first used the term otaku to describe

attendees at a Komiketto (comic) convention. He writes that “they: all seemed so odd…the sort in every

school class; the ones hopeless at sports, who hole up in the classroom during break…either so scrawny

they look like they’re malnourished or like giggling fat white pigs with silver framed glasses with sides

jammed into their heads…the friendless type” (Akio Nakamura as quoted by Frederik Schodt, 44). In the

United States, however, otaku has come to signify insider nerd-cool: Wired magazine’s first cover featured

the word otaku written in Japanese with no English translation. In fact, American marketing strategies

conflate anime with edgy cool. Eleftheria Parpis, in Ad Week, declares that “Japanimation is edgy and

cool—and shops love it” (18). Analyzing Blockbuster’s use of anime in its 1998 Christmas advertising

campaign, she argues that “the ad targets the video game-playing-cartoon-watching 18-34-year old set; for

them, Japanese animation is shorthand for insider cool” (20). Indeed, although anime in Japan stretch from

historical drama feature films to children’s television series, anime popular in the American market

“generally fall into two broad categories: children’s films and science-fiction adventures” (Soloman 10).

According to Matt Nigro of Manga Entertainment, “most of our movies take place in the 21st century,

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placed in a capitulatory position to Japanese culture. They submit to that which they view

and are overtaken by another’s culture. Such a view assumes a completely identical

position between viewer and audience, and ignores the fact that the viewer jacks in, rather

than gets jacked into. Newitz, however, also suggests that translating and viewing anime

may be a means by which viewers “convert a Japanese product into a uniquely American

one. What might be satisfying for Americans about this is that it essentially allows them

to ‘steal’ Japanese culture away from Japan” (3). This conversion supports the notion of

anime producing a “Peeping Tom” or spying effect. Indeed Antonia Levi, who argues

earlier that anime enables a great cultural exchange,47 later argues that anime enables a

penetrating view into Japanese society:

anime can show you a side of Japan few outsiders ever even know exists. Unlike much of Japanese literature and movies, anime is assumed to be for local consumption only. That’s important, because most Japanese are highly sensitive to outside pressure…They write for and about Japanese. As a result, their work offers a unique perspective, a peeping Tom glimpse into the Japanese psyche…. But be warned. What you learn about Japan through anime can be deceptive. This is not the way Japanese really live. This is the way they fantasize about living. These are their modern folk tales, their myths, their fables. This is not a peep into the conscious Japanese mind, but into the unconscious. (16)

The viewer, looking over the Major’s shoulder, peeps into the Japanese unconscious,

penetrating to the very ghost in the shell. Similarly, Schodt, who earlier argues for anime

follow futuristic sci-fi story lines and are geared towards 17- to 28-year-old males and females whose

interests include music, comics, virtual reality, Internet surfing and computer games” (Allstetter J1).

47 According to Levi:

The new generations of both Japan and America are sharing their youth, and in the long run, their future. However much their governments may argue about trade and security in the Pacific, American’s Generation X and Japan’s shin jinurui will never again be complete strangers to one another. The connection is not only with Japan. Anime has already spread across most of Asia. Future social historians may well conclude that the creation of the American otaku was the most significant event of the post-Cold War period. (1-2)

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as a rosetta stone for mutual understanding,48 argues that anime allows one to see beyond

“the surface or tatemae level of Japanese culture” (31). The great mirror, or illusion, of

anime gives the impression of looking beyond surfaces, to what really is.

Thus, as Susan Pointon notes, unlike other forms of Japanese entertainment, such

as Power Rangers, that are aimed at American audiences, “what is perhaps most striking

about anime, compared to other imported media that have been modified for the

American market, is the lack of compromise in making these narratives palatable” (35).

Although, in revamping the ever-popular television series Sailor Moon for an English

audience, the main character’s name Usagi (bunny) was changed to Serena so that it

would not offend female viewers, these anime do not go through an intensive

Americanization before they hit the market. Indeed, amongst hard-core fans, the less

mediated the better and subtitled versions are valued over dubbed ones. This fetishizing

of the other and the emphasis on imcomprehensibility has not been lost on anime and

manga creators. Takahashi, the creator of Ranma 1/2, speculates that the popularity of

anime in America may stem from exoticism:

Because I consciously feature Japanese life such as festivals and the traditional New Year’s holiday, rather often in my manga, I sometimes wonder if American readers understand what they’re reading. Maybe they just like the comics because they’re exotic. (Horibuchi 18)

Exoticism and authenticity do appeal to viewers, but again, these are benign forms of

otherness.49 Translation, however frugal, also appropriates another culture even as it

48 Frederik Schodt argues that:

Ultimately, the popularity of both anime and manga [Japanese comic books] outside of Japan is emblematic of something much larger—perhaps a postwar “mind-meld” among the peoples of industrialized nations, who all inhabit a similar (but steadily shrinking) physical world of cars, computers, buildings, and other manmade objects and systems. Patterns of thinking are still different among cultures, and different enough for people to be fascinated by each other, but the

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establishes a bridge between them. In a translation, materials are domesticated—at the

very least they must be rendered in one’s domestic language. Through domestication, a

domestic subject gets inserted into the translation.

In order to effect such an insertion, anime viewers turn to cyberpunk fantasies

about the Orient already in place, invariably a pre-requisite to anime fandom. If,

“through fantasy, ‘we learn how to desire,’” through cyberpunk fantasies such as Blade

Runner and Neuromancer, the viewer learns to desire and enjoy anime. The viewer

identifies with protagonists such as Case and Deckard, who are faced by a world

dominated by technology and all things Asian. The uncompromising nature of anime, the

sense of being thrown into another culture and not being able to completely understand

the situation, again reiterates Case’s position in Neuromancer. The arbitrariness of the

trouble one finds oneself in, combined with the green cyberspace view that makes things

comprehensible in terms of a cat and mouse chase (again an American theme), is exactly

what anime offers its American viewers. The inability to comprehend Japanese and to

read all the signs afforded him, rather than alienating the viewer, places him a position

structurally mimicking cyberpunk heroes. The viewer in anime puts into place lessons

learned from Western cyberpunk. Moreover, the position of the viewer—who sees

without being seen—strengthens this parallel.

Thus, cyberspace—or more properly narratives of cyberspace—rely on the

incomprehensibility of the Orient for their comprehensibility. Faced with making

areas of commonality have increased to the point where it is easier than ever before to reach out and understand each other on the deepest levels of human experience and emotion. (339)

49 More often than not authenticity is proven by incomprehensibility. The true Japanese anime, unlike

Power Rangers, do not try to address a non-Japanese audience.

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computer networks readable to others, influential writers, such as William Gibson, draw

on Asia (where in Japan, Asia does not equal Japan) as a land easily reduced to

information, yet also exotic enough to overload the viewer with information. To be clear,

I am not arguing that cyberspace is limited to Gibson’s, Oshii’s, or Shirow’s conception

of it, nor am I arguing that Orientalism is the only “other space” relied on to make

cyberspace comprehensible. I am arguing that the conjunction of narratives about

cyberspace and Orientalism domesticates fiber optics narratives. Narratives of

cyberspace that make reference to Orientalism seek to contain what they also create, even

if they show cyberspace as exceeding information. That is, these narratives view the

Orient as challenging one’s assumptions and usual navigational assumptions, but still rely

on the logic of the navigatable, of the symbolic as readable. The confusion the viewers

feel stems from their position as tourists viewing the exotic. The unreadability of these

locations serves to enhance their exoticism, rather than challenge the viewers’

assumptions about the symbolic and about orientation and orientalism. Barthes, in

Empire of Signs, speaks of the ways in which he seeks “the very fissure of the symbolic”

in his constructed Japan: “Japan has starred him with any number of ‘flashes’; or better

still, Japan has afforded him a situation of writing….writing is, after all, a … seism which

causes knowledge, or the subject, to vacillate: it causes an emptiness of language” (4).

Barthes’ formulation of a mythic Japan has its own problems, but what Barthes offers and

Gibson and Oshii do not, are an admission of construction, and the possibility of

emptiness and fissure. The point, then, is to see the ways in which this challenge of

disorientation in the face of the foreign can disrupt everyday locations and

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understandings, rather than being reserved for those other spaces. The point is to see the

ways in which heterotopias disrupt “normal” spaces, rather than lie neatly outside them.

GOING NATIVE

This orientalizing of the digital landscape, this entry into cyberspace as entry into

world of Oriental sexuality, is not limited to literary and animated conceptions of the

Internet. Marty Rimm, whose senior thesis became the notorious Carnegie Mellon report

on the consumption of pornography on the information superhighway, argues that

cyberspace introduces nine new categories of pornography, two of which are “Asian” and

“inter-racial.” What is interesting in this supposedly identity-free public sphere is not

simply that Asian pornography has emerged as a popular genre, but rather that, referring

back to the search on Oriental that concluded chapter two, Asian has itself effectively

become a pornographic category.

The Internet also revises our understandings of Orientalism, disengaging

Orientalism from the Orient. Through high technology, Orientalism is made to travel: it

is cited and disseminated in ways that untether the relationship between Orientalism and

the Orient. Oriental mail order bride sites such as Asian Rose Tours offer women from

the former Soviet Union as well as the Philippines. Oriental pornography sites also offer

pictures of white women, albeit women who are either bound or mutilated. The conceit

behind these Oriental pornography sites is that Oriental women are submissive and in

some way lacking the independence and status of their female contemporaries

(importantly, the visitors to these sites are American and Japanese men). The inclusion

of Russian women exposes the economic base behind this assumption, but also reveals

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the flexibility of the category “Oriental” to include all economically disadvantaged

women. It relies on Mitchener’s Oriental dreams: fantasies of white men and Asian

women brought together by WWII. The inclusion of mutilated white women disturbingly

points out the image of Oriental women as submissive and lacking. The fantasy here is

that mutilating white women makes them more “Asian,” re-creates lack and dependence.

The point is that these women in some way lack the ability to stand as “wholes.” High-

tech Orientalism, then, disperses Orientalism, in all the meanings of the word disperse.

High-tech Orientalism seems to be all about dispersal, specifically the dispersal of global

capitalism.

These attempts to contain the Internet, to restrict it via techno-Orientalism, do not

guarantee safety. Orientalist narratives are not always comforting: they do not always

orient. Rather, they carry with them fear of the yellow peril or uncontrollable and

contagious intercourse; they carry fears of overwhelming contact, of being taken over by

the very thing they seek to control. They carry with them the fear of going native.

According to Senator Exon amongst others arguing for Internet regulation, cyberspace

has spread obscene pornography, pornography that goes beyond naked women.

Importantly, Exon, when arguing on the Senate floor for Internet regulation, had never

surfed the World Wide Web. Rather, he had an intern or friend collect the most vile

online pornography and then print them off. He carefully compiled these print-outs into a

little blue binder and brought then to the Senate chamber. Before the vote on the

Communications Decency Act, his peers came over to his desk, looked at the pictures and

then overwhelmingly supported the CDA. His notebook, in many ways, served as a

perverse version of “look at my pictures from my friend’s last vacation.” Exon’s horror

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at “hard-core” pornography and his desire to censor such materials is analogous to

European reactions to excessive Oriental intercourse. As Said argues:

Every European traveler or resident in the Orient has had to protect himself from its unsettling influences. . . . In most cases, the Orient seemed to have offended sexual propriety; everything about the Orient—or at least Lane’s Orient-in-Egypt—exuded dangerous sex, threatened hygiene and domestic seemliness with an excessive “freedom of intercourse,” as Lane put it more irrepressibly than usual. (166-7)

Again what ruffles legistors’ feathers about the Internet is freedom of intercourse in all

senses of the word intercourse. Faced with the Information superhighway and the

massive deregulation of the telecommunications industry in 1996, the reason seized upon

for government regulation was pornography—excessive sexuality.

So, what happens when we take freedom of intercourse seriously, even if it is

within the rubric of high tech Orientalism? Take, for instance, the case of virtual sex. In

many ways virtual sex epitomizes the Orientalist dreams of the Internet. As Cleo Odzer

argues in Virtual Spaces: Sex and the Virtual Citizen, “western men play with Thai

prostitutes with the same non-chalance we play with our cyber-lovers” (239). The

guiding metaphor of the WWW, namely virtual travel, feeds into the notion of the

Internet as a vacation space, a space in which responsibility is temporarily suspended in

favor of self-indulgence, a space in which our formal identities are left behind in favor of

our secret ones. Significantly, the Orient is also, first and foremost, a virtual space. As

many critics of Orientalism from Said on have argued, the Orient is not a “real” space but

rather a textual space. According to Said, Orientalism is a textual universe—it is created

by texts supposedly on the Orient that in fact create what they purport to describe.

Virtual sex seems always to verge on the risque: bondage, domination, sadism and

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masochism dominate virtual sex, which furthers the theme of submissive and deviant

Oriental sexuality.

Virtual sex and all so-called real time communications cannot be safely cordoned

off because they are not limited to the self and because cyberspace cannot be limited to

narratives of it perpetuated by works in other media that try to tell the truth about

cyberspace. Instead, these real-time communications enable a form of contact that

disable the notion of disembodied communication. The mirror starts breaking down. By

now, we’ve all heard stories of people addicted to chat rooms and virtual sex—people

whose lives and marriages have been destroyed by virtual infidelities or obsessions, or

people whose definition of community has been redefined by their online participation.

Further, rather than marking a disembodied space, moos and muds create spaces in which

people pass, rather than imagine themselves as everywhere yet nowhere. Although I

elaborate on real time in the next chapter, I would like to flag it here as a place where

dreams of exploration and domination are put to the test—as a space that is

fundamentally public, in the sense that it belongs to no one, but is also constantly

contested. The fact that real-time communications are never really real time, that there is

a considerable time lag between question and response, also serves to make this space

dis-orienting, and it is this dis-orientation, I argue, that enables the Internet to verge

toward the disruptive, to verge toward the truly public. In real time communications,

narratives do not prevent contact with the “new.”

To conclude, the Internet is not inherently Oriental, but has been made Oriental.

The narrative of the Internet as Orientalist space accompanies narratives of the Internet as

disembodied space. In other words, the Internet can only be portrayed as a space of the

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mind if there is an accompanying Orientalizing of difference, if there is an accompanying

display of Orientalized bodies. However, this binary of disembodied mind, on the one

hand, and embodied and Orientalized other, on the other hand, breaks down with so-

called real time communication. And this binary breaks down not because the

Orientalized other is suddenly afforded the status as subject, but rather because the

boundary between self and other, self and self begins to break down.