Explainer #2: Hiroki Azuma and the Database Animal
Our book Event Horizon draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as the work of critic and thinker Hiroki Azuma. In two explainer posts for this blog, we outline key ideas and concepts from both. We hope they help those of you who may not be familiar with them. These posts, together with our regular blog posts, can be read alongside the book.
Hiroki Azuma is a leading Japanese cultural critic, writer and thinker. His classic book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals was published in 2001 and the English translation hit bookstores in 2009. His book draws loosely on psychoanalysis and develops a highly original theory of otaku. Otaku have existed since the 1970s and can be defined, broadly speaking, as people, mostly straight men, who are deeply attached and devote themselves to niche hobbies such as manga, anime, and games. Despite its offensive roots, the word has come to be embraced by fans of Japanese pop culture and is now generally regarded as no more problematic than ‘nerd’ or ‘geek’.
Azuma argues that otaku culture emerged as a post-WW2 phenomenon in light of the defeat of traditional Japanese culture and decline of symbolic authority and efficiency, which he names the loss of a ‘grand narrative’ as part of a transition from modernity to postmodernity. Otaku grew significantly from the 1970s onwards. By the 1990s, otaku culture is accustomed to a loss of the grand narrative and functions through a kind of superficial immersion into texts. Taking the popular 1995–1996 Gainax series Neon Genesis Evangelion as an example, Azuma argues that the otaku only took an obsessive interest in specific parts of the text rather than the entire narrative universe of Evangelion. Through combining religious symbols such as Kaballah’s Sephiroth, Christian crosses, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and science-fictional interpretations of Adam, Eve, and angels, Evangelion poses profound existential questions in regards to human evolution and technology, its characters often grappling with murderous frustrations and suicidal depressions. However, the show also provides a layer for fans to consume only the cool designs and variations of the robots, and many fans, magazine publishers, merchandisers, and retailers would go on to eroticise the anime’s 14-year-old female characters in spite of the depressing mental health issues depicted in the show.
For Azuma, this kind of consumption is what is known as the database mode of consumption. Azuma develops Otsuka Eiji’s idea of narrative consumption, an idea that all cultural products are equivalent entry points to a narrative, where there is no primary product and ancillary products. It does not matter if you enjoy Pokémon through its card games, its video games, its anime series, its apps, its merchandise, and so on — all of those are small narratives that connect to the same grand narrative (Eiji 1989). With Azuma, the database consumption adds two new dimensions: taking apart and collecting.
The database animal — his term for the postmodern capitalist subject — does not merely consume small narratives, but rather takes them apart ‘into elements, categorized, and registered into a database’ (ibid, 47). They are then brought together again in endless variations to be collected and modified further, such as in the case of fan art and gijinka discussed in Chapter 3 of the book and on this blog. Cat ears, twintails, and pleated checkered skirts, as well as personality traits such as the tsundere (putting on an aggressive facade over a sentimental personality), are all parts of this database. Likewise, the robots and high school girls of Evangelion are simply other instances of this same database. All are signifiers that have been taken apart from their predecessors and registered into a larger cultural database to later be recycled into new characters.
Azuma goes on to show that the database also influenced the production of anime after the age of Evangelion. We argue that such a mode of cultural production influences all corners of contemporary culture, and can easily be found at work in Korean and Japanese idol culture for instance, as we discuss in Chapter 3 of our book. Do concepts such as the leader, the maknae, the beagle and so on not point to a pre-existing structure of consumption that transcends beyond the empirical existence of the idol members themselves? In this sense, the K-Pop industry can be thought of as an industry with a single product. As we argue in Chapter 3, the unique individuality of idol members merely serve as variations of the same fantasy in fans’ minds. Its rapid speed of growth, just as the speed of growth of anime as a cultural product in multiple parts of the world, rely on the export of a fantasmatic structure that can dominate the cultural landscape, after which individual products can directly fit into this structure. In a sense, database animals are subjects that already enjoy the very objects they are supposed to enjoy before these objects actually exist (as cultural products on their screens or on the stage) — capitalist subjects par excellence.
In effect, Azuma produces a theory of cultural production consistent with that of the Frankfurt School. Cultural production is a factory of signifiers, schemes, and elements that are interchangeable and can be reused, adopted, or merged for any kind of format, going far beyond Japanese anime and into our larger cultural landscape. The database is also evoked more literally by Azuma when discussing the otaku subculture and their use of their own search engine which has indexed only otaku-related sites and can perform specific image searches for example. The origins of 4chan in Japanese imageboards and its heavy reliance on manga and anime are perhaps not coincidental here. It was 4chan that gave rise to the kind of trolling and subcultures such as incels we see on the internet today.
The transition from modernity to postmodernity is characterized by snobbery or cynicism for Azuma (drawing on Kojève and Žižek). Otaku, and all of us, know of the deceitful and superficial characters of the culture industry, and nonetheless devote themselves to it. A cynicism that is taken to a new extreme by incels and other groups of the manosphere. Otaku, and many other online groups today, have built a fake grand narrative, or nonnarrative, around their own cosmos and worldview. They know it is fake and nonetheless elevate it to a higher order. And like other fans and online subcultures, incels have also created their own world in which particular codes and terms (such ‘femoid’ for woman) are used that are difficult to decipher for outsiders. In that sense, while incels subscribe to the desire of anchoring heterosexuality as a master signifier, as we discuss in detail in Chapter 3 of Event Horizon, they do so according to their own logic which is shaped by Japanese fandom and geek attributes.
The otaku were the true pioneers of the remix and cut-up culture that would engulf the internet from the 2000s onwards. However, Azuma notes that later generations of otaku (from the mid 1990s onwards) no longer need snobbery or cynicism as the database model dominates. Small narratives (e.g. about a particular game, or series) and fake grand narratives coexist today.
To put it more clearly, they learn the technique of living without connecting the deeply emotional experience of a work (a small narrative) to a worldview (a grand narrative). Borrowing from psychoanalysis, I call this schism dissociative. (Azuma 2009, 84, italics in original)
This dissociative schism is a key feature of the database animal and of capitalism itself where it is suggested that we can have anything almost immediately. While we feel that Azuma overstates the decline of desire, and exaggerates the instant gratification and satisfaction of capitalism, as we discuss in our book in more detail, his notion of the database animal is nonetheless crucial for understanding contemporary online cultures in light of fascism and commodification.
A key part of otaku culture is erotica, and pornography, often based on anime characters. ‘Since they were teenagers, they had been exposed to innumerable otaku sexual expressions: at some point, they were trained to be sexually stimulated by looking at illustrations of girls, cat ears, and maid outfits.’ (ibid, 89). While otaku may be sociable and communicative, their modes of communication resemble that of a database logic. They are immersed in the imaginary and ‘their communication consists in large part of exchanges of information’ (ibid, 93) which revolves around particular and specific topics.
Again, we can see parallels to incels here but also to other online communities today, something we unpack in detail in our book. It is an as-if mode of communication without true commitment or attachment, where one can always drop out. Such a notion of pessimistic, noncommitted attachment is applicable to society at large today. One particular form such a type of attachment takes is through online humour and memes in particular.
The world Azuma describes has become ‘hyperflat’ (Azuma 2009, 102). This is not only the case in terms of the dominance of a computational logic and the digital format whereby everything can be transformed or represented differently (Azuma uses the example of showing an image as hexadecimal code, or as a text file). ‘The hyperflat world, represented by the computer screen, is flat and at the same time lines up what exists beyond it in a parallel layer.’ (ibid, 102). This means that there is a flatness in the hierarchy of data where objects or particular data can be easily turned into something else (see also Manovich 2002). The thing in itself is the same but it can be presented differently, in the case of an image for instance. This also means that everything exists side by side and we can retrieve, collect and analyse whatever data we want.
Again, such tendencies have increased exponentially since Azuma wrote his book in the early 2000s, thanks to big data and the dominance of social media. We are all database animals navigating the hyperflatness of the digital sphere. This means that such acts also exemplify how something invisible (code) is turned into something visible (an output). Aided by the database, more and more invisibles are desired to be turned into visibles. An endless search that the otaku pursue in collecting and creating their fandoms. It knows no end. At the same time, there is a dissociative coexistence of the small narratives and the grand nonnarrative for Azuma. He shows how this is at work in games where different layers and worlds exist that can be navigated by the player. A double-layer structure which consists of the information behind or beneath the game (literally code, but also images, or data that otaku extract, collect and discuss), as well as the game itself with an overarching plotline and narrative. We can see how this is consistent with the notion of the database which (ideologically) functions as a kind of catalogue that provides a structure for storing, analysing, and merging data.
In our book, we take the notion of the database a step further. As a culture, we have globally moved from a textual logic to an image-database logic (Manovich 2002). While code in itself may be ideological (Chun 2011) because its real meanings are obfuscated by interfaces, the ideological object par excellence today is the digital image itself. Online experience and using internet-based services and websites has also become interfaced- and image-based in the last two decades. Social media platforms and also personal websites that can be created through packages such as Wordpress or Wix are interface-based and entirely eradicate any need for coding or technical debugging on the part of users. This may have democratised access but it also further works to foreground the shiny visual and to mask code beneath interfaces. ‘The structure of the Internet reflects the postmodern world image.’ (Azuma 2009, 101). Lev Manovich makes a similar point when he defines the database as a collection of data ‘where every item has the same significance as’ (Manovich 2002, 194) the other. The world wide web itself, websites to be precise, are based on the model of the database.
The logic of the database both as a structural dimension of the internet and of subjectivity has huge implications for online cultures, politics and sexualities today.
We hope this post provided an introduction to a key aspect of Azuma’s thinking. We unpack and apply the concepts discussed here throughout our book and particularly Chapter 3.
For a full development of the theories presented in this blog post, please consider pre-ordering our book! Click on the link below to learn more, or go to Books Depository to place your order. Additionally, it would mean so much to us if you shared this post and gave this publication a follow!
References
Azuma, H. (2009). Otaku. Japan’s Database Animals. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Chun, W. H. K. (2011). Programmed Visions. Software and Memory. New Haven, MA: MIT Press.
Eiji, Ō. (1989). Monogatari Shōhiron. (Theory of Narrative Consumption). Tokyo: Shin’yōsha.
Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. New Haven, MA: MIT Press.
