Soiveillance
The following is a blog post from Jeeshan Gazi, whose article “Soiveillance: Self-Consciousness and the Social Network in Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop” appears in issue 16.1 of Surveillance & Society.
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As with many of my articles, I began writing “Soiveillance: Self-Consciousness and the Social Network in Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop” with the simple intention of bringing attention to an underappreciated work. In this case a little seen Japanese movie that is utterly unique in its aesthetic, and which is directed by the person responsible for what I believe to be the greatest anime of all time: Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–1996). It was the notion, retained in the final article, that Anno is expressing teenage angst through technological embodiment in both works that initially drew me to conducting the close image-analysis of sequences within the live-action film.
Early drafts discussed how Love & Pop (1998) carries a surveillant aesthetic, but it was upon reading Catherine Zimmer’s Surveillance Cinema (2015) that I realised that there is a rich body of exciting scholarship on surveillance itself, most of which is published in Surveillance & Society. Around the same time, I was delighted to find that Takashi Murakami had written a theoretical account of the reasoning behind his excellent superflat aesthetic. The notion of atemporal intermediality very much excites me and this article marks only the first time that I will be using and developing this theory. These two theoretical strands converge to create the account of Love & Pop and its communication of gendered social media usage today.
The notion of “soiveillance” — which seems to have been previously used in a vague way but has never been examined or formalised — came about upon the realisation that the image-structures of Anno’s film required a new term that would adequately account for the functions they served. Deleuze and Guattari write that philosophy is the act of concept creation, and this is what occurs in this essay through the exploration of the film’s image-structures and its intermedial conflation with the conceptual structures of social media usage. Such a conflation is just one of the exciting outcomes of this study, and the others relate to how we conceive of gender in screen studies and construct gendered power relations both online and in wider society.
My suggestion that we rethink scopophilia is not at all an attack on male gaze theory, but rather an attack on its superficial use whenever a female appears on the screen in a sexualised manner, with the result that the substance of both the theory and the images under examination are neglected in exchange for sloganeering. Susan Sontag used to argue that though most people couldn’t name the surrealists, their influence had infiltrated every department store window of 70s America. This appears to be the case with gender theory today, where important intellectual debate has come to be diluted into flamewars between “SJWs” and “Trumpanzees”. As such it is especially important that we address the nuances of theory in contemporary times. Doing so by way of pop culture and in open access journals such as Surveillance & Society encourages, I hope, just such an examination of the stakes concerning the 21st century self.
