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Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 1) Christophe Thouny* Abstract Postwar Japanese popular culture and animation in particular is often concerned with the relation between the human and a planet on the brink of disaster. While this has been explained in terms of the Japanese experience of war and nuclear disaster, I argue in this article that we should rather understand postwar Japanese animation in relation to a growing awareness of a planetary situation in what is now called the age of the anthropocene. This planetary situation has often been figured through the image of urban fortresses where a community of humans, Japanese or not, unify to fight against an external aggressor and survive. The figure of the urban fortress in Japanese animation such as Multidimensional Fortress Macross or Evangelion resonates with present discussions about the anthropocene articulated in terms of risk, sustainability and survival. By looking at the recent manga and TV series Made in Abyss , I propose to consider another figure of our planetary situation, not defined by survival but rather by an ongoing process of deformation in place allowed by kawaii consumption. Or more simply, Made in Abyss is about how much the body can take in a planetary situation Key words： Planetary, Anthropocene, Kawaii, Japanese animation, Postwar Japan, Urban Fortress * Associate Professor, Ritsumeikan University

10 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 < contents > 1. Introduction 2. The Planet as my Backyard 3. Kawaii Consumption 4. Platform Characters 5. The Planetary Abyss 6. Deformation as Destiny 7. Conclusion - Between Orth and Uruburu 1. Introduction The 2017 TV animation series Made in Abyss directed by Masayuki Kojima (also known for the TV series Monster (2004-2005)) and adapted from Akihito Tsukushi’s online manga bestseller is symptomatic of our planetary situation when both capitalist structures and natural ecologies seem to be allied in challenging our sense of the human, society, and life. Its narrative structure and space constitutes what Frederic Jameson (1983) calls ‘a socially symbolic act’, as it reveals and questions the contradictions of late capitalism in a planetary situation. Made in Abyss is about how much the body can take in a planetary situation. By planetary situation, I mean here an open relation in front of a changing planet rather than the closed image of a Planet Earth to be saved and managed efficiently. In other words, what is planetary is the local experience of a planetary movement rather than to the closed representation of a finite globe promoted by disaster capitalism and the discourse of the anthropocene.

Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 11 The political critique and journalist Naomi Klein (2014) has shown with others, how disaster capitalism has brought together human and natural disasters under the comforting umbrella-term ‘terrorism’, legitimi- zing a global discourse of risk and survival in line with the now fashionable term of ‘anthropocene’. The anthropocene presents us the image of a natural world that has been irremediably distorted and tainted by human civilization, a world on the brink of disaster that would now need to be preserved for us humans to continue prospering on the planetary commons. The human in the anthropocene has become a geological force that affects all planetary ecologies, ecologies that would now need to be properly administered for the good of the human. To risk and survival is then added ‘sustainability’, which usually means nothing else but the mobilization of technological and natural resources for the reproduction of established social forms, that is for a capitalist global world. A number of postwar Japanese works of popular culture have flirted with this representational image of the end times defined by the triad risk, survival and sustainability, from post-apocalyptic cosmic wars and alien invasions to cyberpunk dystopia of computer control and police-states. Rather than such closed imaginations of the planet as fragile and cute ‘Blue Planet’, we find in Made in Abyss another figure of the planetary, the figuration of the planetary as an ongoing process of intensification of the local , as an ‘abyss’. In late capitalism, what mediates this experience of the local is kawaii culture, or rather kawaii consumption. Kawaii can be defined in several ways, usually in terms of the cute and the grotesque characteristics of a particular object, a doll, a person or a turn of phrase. Kawaii as such is first relational, and kawaii consumption concerns a singular relation to local places in a planetary situation. As kawaii consumption is a characteristic of late capitalism, it is a

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12 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 question of valuation, of capitalizing on a planetary movement, that is of the capture of life-surplus value. Building on Brian Massumi’s recent work, I discuss this process of capitalization in terms of the concepts of ontopower. Ontopower is a form of environmental power distinct if at times contemporaneous with disciplinary power and biopower (Foucault, 2010). As Brian Massumi argues, late capitalism prospers on the basis of ontopower, ‘the power to bring to be’ (2014), that is to generate conditions appropriate to capitalist valuation by capturing intra-individual life-surplus value (2018). In other words, ontopower is a mode of capture of affect within local places. Made In Abyss however suggests the possibility of a counter-ontopower where ongoing deformation in always in excess of the capture of life-surplus value in closed atmospheres. For life-surplus value actualized in a planetary movement of intensification of local places is not defined by risk, survival and sustainability. It is rather defined by the triad of distribution (across local places that enter in resonance in a planetary situation), fabulation (generating an open figure of the planetary as The Abyss) and ongoing deformation (of bodies leaping in place). Starting with a critical discussion of the figure of the planet in global postwar environmental discourse, I then argue for the need to discuss our planetary situation in relation to the intensified experience of local places in late capitalism. For this I examine the spatial setting of Made In Abyss in terms of kawaii consumption, platform characters and the figuration of the planetary situation as an abyss. 2. The Planet as my Backyard The Blue Marble photograph (fig.1) taken by Appolo 17 in 1972 is

Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 13 ‘the most reproduced image ever’ (Mirzoeff, 2015). This ‘whole and round and beautiful and small’ image presents us with the image of ‘a unified and balanced world’ (Heise, 2008) in a time of war, capitalist exploitation, planetary urbanization and global oppression of the South. This beautiful, cute and fragile planet becomes visible at a time of grotesque and brutal exploitation and destruction. The planetary situation that emerges from the cold war as exemplified by the Blue Marble photograph is dual, cute and grotesque as kawaii consumption. More specifically, the image of the Blue Planet shows the planet as a singular environment, a closed-system that has to be preserved and managed by and for the human. The planetary becomes the scale of action for a planetary apparatus able to cope with any incipient risk and prevent the final end of human life. Figure 1. Blue Marble Photograph (1972)

14 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 The Blue Planet crystallizes in the image of the planet as fortress inhabited by a human population fighting for survival and of the wall as that which cannot but be there, standing and unbreachable because grounding the fantasy of human life. This is why the wall of the planetary fortress keeps being destroyed to better be rebuilt. The Japanese manga and TV animation series Attack on Titan is a perfect example of this fantasy of human life on the planet, taking its place within a genealogy of planetary fortresses in Japanese postwar popular culture that runs from Space Battleship Yamato to Super Dimension Fortress Macross , the Gundam series, Neon Genesis Evangelion , Rahxephon and others. However the planetary does not have to be understood as a closed-system nor as a limited scale within a nested hierarchy of scales, as for example the planetary, the global, the regional, the national and the local. Rather, I posit that the planetary is heterogeneous to the global, and as such local places do not have to follow a progressive movement across scales to enter in resonance with other places and a planetary movement. There is still mediation between the local and the planetary but a mediation that is not anchored in linear and progressive scales of analysis and control starting with the national. The planetary itself becomes the mediation in the local; it is an intensification of the local, a leap in place, rather than an object called ‘planet’. Perhaps the easiest way to understand the planetary, a term that emphasizes relationality, movement and openness, is by quoting Ursula K. Heise when she speaks of the planet in my backyard. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008) starts with a reference to Douglas Adam’s science fiction comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at the beginning of which ‘Earth is destroyed — to be replaced later by an identical copy of itself, manufactured in the same galactic factory that

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Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 15 the original turns out to have come from’. This is an obvious satire of the ills of urban development, colonization and the language of technocrats. More importantly, ‘much of its humor derives for the reader from the way it redefines the meaning of the word “local,” which here encompasses not just all of Planet Earth but also distant solar systems where humankind has not even yet set foot. Whether Adams intended it that way or not, this sudden confrontation with a spatial, political, and economic context of previously unsuspected vastness also provides an apt metaphor for a cultural moment in which an entire planet becomes graspable as one’s own local backyard [my emphasis].’ We are far here from the kawaii Blue Planet for here ‘local’ has lost its grounding within a balanced and unified, if fragile, environment to be re-inscribed within multi-dimensional ecologies in an ever-receding image of the planetary. The humor Heise refers to is not only about the absurdity of alien technocratic language and action (aliens and alien technology are responsible for the destruction of the Earth in the opening pages). She is rather talking about irony, if we understand irony to rely on a position of authority and critique that allows us to see and laugh, without being able to detach ourselves from the spectacle. In this image of the planetary as my backyard, there is also humor in addition to irony. This is not just a matter of scale, of Planet Earth being only one corner of the universe and as such both too big and too small. The planetary is indeed both too big and too small, and this tension between both scalar vectors is what challenges our understanding of place and of dwelling. Dwelling on the planet relies on the extraction of resources from a planetary common (and the problem of not-using-too-much, in short, sustainability), and as the city fed on the country, local dwelling places feed on each other and the rest of the planet. At the same time, the planet as my backyard also summons the

16 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 image of the planet emerging in my backyard, of the possibility of anything happening anytime anywhere (Thouny, 2016). No place is immune from a nuclear disaster, an earthquake, a tsunami or an explosion of love. Love and disaster are in fact often juxtaposed in postwar Japanese animation such as Anno Hideaki’s short Daikon III (1983). In other words, I could be hit anytime anywhere by another planetary event crashing in my backyard as happens in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . This could as much be a possibility for what Heise calls an ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ based on a consciousness of planetary risk, as a legitimation for not taking any responsibility nor act on an inevitable future disaster that nonetheless does not let itself be grasped by formula of risk analysis (Thouny, 2016). This could also be a chance for change. What Heise and many works of ecocriticism do not talk about is the experience of the local in a planetary situation, a situation that emerges from multiple ecologies (mental, social, natural, media etc..) that share nothing in common but their planetary contemporaneity in late capitalism. This planetary situation is not radically new but intensifies a series of tensions and dynamics characteristic of place experience in capitalist modernity starting with the one of dwelling and change, in short ‘how can we dwell in a world without ground (anything can happen anytime anywhere) nor exterior (as the planet is only one among other planets)?’ Late capitalism intensifies this particular experience of the local in multiple ways depending on the place and medium considered. Turning to Made in Abyss , I discuss this intensification of the local in postwar Japanese popular culture in terms of Kawaii consumption.

Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 17 3. Kawaii Consumption The plot of Made in Abyss is centered around a young girl called Riku who, with the help of the robot boy Reg, goes down into The Abyss to find the secret of her lost mother and of Reg’s origin (fig.2). It is a narrative of exploration as the two kids go further down and learn to survive in a hostile environment populated by all kinds of dangerous species. It is also a quest for origins, for the lost mother, for the lost civilization of the The Abyss and for the secret of life in The Abyss. The manga is still ongoing and there is so far no mention of a return to the surface. Riku and Reg keep going further down, and the only end in sight seems to be the moment when they will reach the bottom of The Abyss. Rather than a formal narrative analysis, I discuss now the particular spatial setting of the world of Made In Abyss and how it problematizes kawaii consumption in late capitalism. The Abyss is a pit at the center of an island around which has been built a human settlement (fig.3). Human dwellers are cave raiders, parasites who make a living by selling old artifacts found in the various levels of the Abyss (fig.4). Both the two characters Riku and Reg and the space in which takes place the story, The Abyss problematizes kawaii consumption as a capture of life-surplus value, that is of affect (Massumi, 2018), through the discrete control of movement across discrete atmospheres. These atmospheres take the form of platforms while the movement across atmospheres qua platforms is articulated by kawaii consumption. The question raised by Made In Abyss is of the possibility for a different planetary ecology without capture of affect, that is of a counter-ontopower relying on distribution, fabulation and deformation, what Félix Guattari (1995) called a chaosmosis, rather than

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18 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 nested scales, risk prevention and survival. For by capitalizing on the process of intensification allowed by distribution, fabulation and deformation, kawaii consumption potentially allows for the emergence of another figure of the planetary, The Abyss. Figure 2. Cover of the first volume in English with Reg and Riku over Orth and The Abyss Figure 3. Diagram of The Abyss Figure 4. The city of Orth surrounding the pit of The Abyss

Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 19 As we see in figure 2, Riku and Reg are cute characters. They are prepubescent children with a big head, big eyes and feet, laughing, running and screaming as kids are expected to do. They are kawaii, cute when they laugh and grotesque when their poisoned limbs start swelling or their eyes crying tears of blood. Kawaii consumption oscillates between the two polarities of kawaii as ‘cute’ and kawaii as ‘grotesque’, that is both of the kawaii object as a cute object of care, attention and despondency, as well as the object of a desire to control, master and destroy. As Sian Ngai explains in her discussion of cuteness, ‘cuteness might provoke ugly or aggressive feelings, as well as the expected tender or maternal ones. For in its exaggerated passivity and vulnerability, the cute object is as often intended to excite a consumer’s sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as his or her desire to cuddle’ (2005, 816). As such, kawaii is not simply the attribute of an object nor the expression of an individual emotion. An object can be called kawaii as I can be moved by the kawaiisa (cuteness) of a kawaii object such as Hello Kitty or Minty, but kawaii is the relation that articulates the subject-object affective relation as such. Kawaii is a social relation before being a subjective experience or an objective designation. It is a relation anchored in a moment of capitalism that articulates together the technological, the human and the social in particular localities, here Japan, but not only. Kawaii as a social relation and practice might have emerged in Japan, it shows a ‘family resemblance’ with other forms of cuteness enabled by our present moment of global capitalism. This explains how Sian Ngai (2005, 2012) can discuss together Murakami Takashi’s work on superflat and Gertrude Stein’s collection of poems Tender Buttons . This is not however simply a matter of resonance between social practices across national spaces but also of a global

20 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 movement of cuteness re-packaged as kawaiisa in Japan and re-exported as national product in the world market. Kawaii consumption is entirely part of a global project of exploitation of planetary commons in late capitalism. Although kawaii consumption does not directly challenge this global project of exploitation of planetary commons and is in fact particularly appropriate to late capitalism as ontopower, it can as Sharon Kinsella (1995) argues, allow for local and fragmented tactics of resistance, mobilizing an imagerie of childhood against neoliberal demands of individual responsibility, competition and growth. While the Japanese social critique Hiroki Azuma (2001) has popularized the understanding of kawaii consumption as compliance to national capitalist exploitation by using the expression ‘animalized postmodern’ ( dōbutsuka suru posutomodan ), works in fan studies such as Christine Yano’s 2013 Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific have emphasized kawaii consumption’s potential for resistance in fan practices. The third understanding I propose in this article argues that kawaii consumption, precisely by capitalizing on life-surplus value also potentially enacts a counter-ontopower through a process of intensification of local places, when the local feedbacks on itself through a global detour and starts to resonate with not-quite-the-same planetary places. The grotesque of kawaii is then not simply the mark of a desire to control and destroy while the cute would promote more progressive feelings of care and empathy; kawaii’s grotesque side also marks the emergence of a counter-ontopower, of life-surplus value itself. As I now discuss the worldview ( sekaikan ) of Made in Abyss , I show how kawaii consumption is figured in The Abyss in terms of a platforms of distribution, as both spatial structures and subjective formations, as character-platforms mobilized for the extraction of life-surplus value.

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Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 21 4. Platform Characters Platforms usually refer to the dominant platforms, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram to which we can add Uber, Airbnb and other companies that prosper by offering a platform of exchange (usually closed) of goods and services. As such, platforms do not contribute to production as such and surplus-value is primarily generated by movement across platform/atmospheres. In addition platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017), a more specific and focused understanding of late capitalism if limited to the particular case of platforms within larger capitalist structures in the time of social media, is not simply concerned with managing the movement of goods but more importantly it capitalizes on the capture of affect in specific atmospheres. For platform capitalism, the question is about the generation and management of environmental systems, systems that tend to form a closed ecology. In short, platform capitalism is about distribution rather than production and consumption, although we must here understand distribution, as in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, as production of distribution (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et schizophrénie , 1972). Kawaii consumption is not about consumption of a commodity by a consumer but about the affective form distribution takes in the movement across production and consumption, about the generative power of distribution (of affect) that it attempts to capture within closed atmospheres (LaMarre, 2018). In the case of Japanese animation (but not only), platforms are not distinct from characters because characters are not individuals. Anime characters are rather defined by their capacity ‘to generate links across media forms’ (LaMarre, 2018, 206). Ian Condry argues that ‘One can

22 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 think of platforms not only as mechanical or digital structures of conveyance but also as ways to define and organize our cultural worlds’ (Condry, 2012, 56). Platform-characters articulate the capture of affect by indexing an impersonal affect onto the individual response of the character within a particular world-view that constitutes the setting of a fictional narrative and the movement of characters across this world, the narrative, and platforms. This does not make of the character a transcendental subject of free will with consciousness and interiority but rather a social technology. Riku and Reg oscillate between the human and the technological because the subject emerges between the world of the character and the platform infrastructure. Reg is a robot that appears to be sentient and to have an autonomy of will while Riku is a classical shōjo, between childhood and adulthood, without parents, and maybe just a doll, if not a walking-dead. As we learn, Riku was born at the bottom of the Abyss, died and was brought back to life by her mother using a powerful artifact. And nothing tells us whether she is actually alive or simply an animated doll as Riku, literally a character-platform. As LaMarre explains, ‘the anime character appears to have incorporated world and story-play into its very being. Thus the anime character may be considered to be social technology. This is why Ian Condry calls the anime character a generative platform.’ (LaMarre, 2018, 210). As character platform, these anime characters are both code-switchers, assembling and re-assembling themselves by playing with the expectations of kawaii aesthetics, and media-switchers moved across multiple platforms on the screen. And Made In Abyss is first an online manga that can be read on the same screen we can watch the TV series. As LaMarre explains (2018), in their quality of code-switchers, anime characters are agents of continuity relying on a highly stable infrastructure, and it is not surprising that the robot boy Atom became

Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 23 the exemplary figure of the code-switcher in Japanese TV animation. And as media-switchers they open up the closed ecology of platforms to ongoing historical movement and change. This is why the anime character can be said to be a social technology that answers to social changes within society, in particular the family structure and our dwelling experiences, at the very level of distribution. While Thomas LaMarre grounds his discussion of anime characters on the particular case of postwar Japanese media ecologies and TV animation in particular, I want to extend his argument and ask how it can account for a planetary situation. In short, how Made in Abyss presents us with a critical image of platform capitalism and kawaii consumption as ‘planetary abyss’. 5. The Planetary Abyss The whole economy of movement, energy, goods and affect in The Abyss is determined by the particular experience of place in a planetary situation, and the dwelling forms it allows. The diagram of the Abyss (fig.4) makes this clear. In an interview, Akihito Tsukushi explains that this diagram is at the origin of the manga. The Abyss is literally a platform composed of seven layers between the City of Orth at the surface, where the story starts, and the Village of Uruburu above the bottom of the Abyss. The Abyss itself a singular atmosphere, a force field that carries the energy and nutrients necessary for its various life forms to maintain a sustainable life. In this respect, we can see how Made in Abyss tries to answer the most pressing question of our time, how much can we take? Rosi

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24 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 Braidotti defines sustainability, the third term in the triad risk, survival and sustainability, by ‘how much of it a subject can take, and ethics is accordingly redefined as the geometry of how much bodies are capable of’ (2013, 136). Katherine Hayles explains that ‘by ‘how much of it a subject can take’ she [Braidotti] means how much a subject can open itself to the ‘forces, or flows, intensities and passions that solidify in space - and consolidate - in time - within the singular configuration commonly known as an ‘individual’ (or rather: di-vidual) self’’ (2017, 78). Hayles is right to point out that Braidotti’s sustainable subject hesitates between the individual and the dividual, between stable form and the breakdown of form. However to say that subjectivity is a matter of balance between integration in a stable life form and disintegration is in fact central to Deleuzian thought, precisely because any life form emerges from a dynamic assemblage in an ongoing process of iteration over the abyss of chaotic forces, in short, as an ongoing process of deformation . In that respect, sustainability is not simply a conservative gesture as I initially implied in the introduction. For it requires us to engage directly with the distribution of forces in a continuous field and the ongoing process of deformation that allows movement across places, and capitalization. Each layer of The Abyss constitutes a singular space with its own atmosphere, fauna, flora and dangers, while the two main human settlements, the City and the Village, are safe zones, protected enclaves that prosper on the movement across layers, that is across the atmospheres of The Abyss. There is a price to pay though for moving across the Abyss and its poisoned atmospheres, the Curse of the Abyss. As one pays a price to explore the depth of the ocean and coming back too fast to the surface, moving down the vertical axis of the Abyss and coming back to Orth results in various ills and deformations of the body,

Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 25 from headaches to vertigo and bleeding to the loss of human appearance and cognitive faculty (fig.5). Those who survived the 6th layer’s curse but lost their human form are called Narehate, ‘Hollow’ in the English translation. The term ‘nare nohate’ has in Japanese a negative connotation, meaning the ruin of one’s former self. Yet narehate could be translated more neutrally for this text as ‘those who exhausted their becoming’. Figure 5. Riku suffering the Curse of the Abyss Although Riku and Reg meet two Narehate living together in the 4th layer, the Narehate are usually gathered in the Village of Uruburu. If Orth is a city without ground, the bottom of The Abyss, rather than a lost origin might well be what life looks like in late capitalism, or to borrow Brian Massumi’s words, at the end of the economy. As I mentioned already, the City of Orth prospers thanks to the selling of artifacts of a past civilization found in the lower layers of The Abyss. Orth is as such both a local settlement and part of a larger global world of market capitalism. And it exemplifies the biopolitical crisis of human society in a planetary situation. Riku is an orphan who lives in the Belchero orphanage with other kids (fig.6). And as nothing is free, she must earn her right to stay in the orphanage by exploring the upper

26 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 layer of the Abyss and bring back precious artifacts. She thus learns her future work as cave raider and her place in society. The social is in Orth ordered by a hierarchy of whistles from red to white, red whistles like her and the other kids having restricted access to The Abyss while the white whistles like her lost mother are able to move across the whole topography of The Abyss, if at the price of deformation. Figure 6. The Belchero Orphanage classroom Foucault argued famously that the home-family serves as a relay between failed sovereign power and emerging disciplinary formations (LaMarre, 2018). However when the home has become more a shelter than a family as in the case of the orphanage, its social function has changed to become the relay between biopolitical crisis (when biopolitics becomes necropolitics) and ontopower (platforms and environmental power). In other words, home as shelter now articulates the movement of characters across layers of the platform in terms of risk evaluation, sustainability of form, and survival of species in a particular

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Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 27 environment. We do not find fortresses that break but refuges that bend and adapt to the missing mother and father by allowing temporary collectivities to form and deform along the axis that runs from necropolitics (the city of Idolfront controled by Bondrewd) to ontopower (the Seeker Camp of Ozen or Nanachi and Mitty’s house). The series orphanage, camp and house articulates a figure of home as station or relay point on a journey where companionship and provisional alliances have replaced familial and national bonds. Orth, Idolfront and Uruburu then figure the necropolitical capture of life-surplus value by mobilizing the ideology of the home-family to generate energy. This is shown in a tragic episode where Bondrewd plays the fake father for his adopted daughter Prushka to then turn her into a portable battery. Or when we learn about Nanachi and Mitty’s story, two children (Mitty a female, Nanachi non-gendered in the story) who were seduced by Bondrewd into taking part in an experiment about the Curse of the Abyss. Placed in two separate glass- elevators, the two friends were dropped to the lower level and then brought back up rapidly in order to see the effect on their bodies : Mitty became a kawaii furry thing while Nanachi took the appearance of a human- rabbit (fig.7). If Made in Abyss is about how much the body can take in a planetary situation, we see how movement and the experience of Figure 7. Nanachi and Mitty

28 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 movement is what allows for valuation and capitalization. As Marx showed, capitalization is the result of operations of mediation, and we can say that platform capitalism in late capitalism pushes this logic to its logical end. The capture of life-surplus value is allowed by movement through atmospheres at the price of body deformation. Or, reversing the logic, deformation as destiny is the production of distribution that is prior to and allows valuation, with or without capture. 6. Deformation as Destiny In the last part of this article, I would like to return to my initial proposition, that our planetary situation is not so much about the representation of a closed human dwelling space in danger of disappearing, as it is about an intensification of the local that disrupts all conventional scales of analysis and reopen local dwelling places to life-surplus value. Late capitalism has already adapted to this situation as an ontopower that modulates environments within platform structures, and the image of the Blue Planet now has become entirely part of an ideological spectacle of the end that hides the actual working of capital in particular in what I have called kawaii consumption. In this respect, a good part of the autonomist theories of capital end up fetishizing the neoliberal spectacle of a fully integrated capitalist system on a planetary scale, a world without exterior. These theories, if interesting to talk about an ideology, end up being trapped in the ideology the claim to deconstruct. In fact, as the anthropocene becomes the image of a human hubris that dreams of recovering its lost omnipotence, Berardi or Negri’s work

Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 29 turn capitalism into a monstrous omnipotent ubiquitous and eternal system with local and historical variations but no consistent break, only an ongoing drive toward totalization and integration into a homogenous system of valuation. Read within a genealogy of accelerationism (Noys, 2014), this argument for immanence, that is for the impossibility of stepping out of capitalism and as such for immanence as the only place from which to unveil, criticize and change capitalism by pushing it to its limits both misses the point about immanence (that it is first about engaging locally with a continuity of forces) and capitalism (that always needs to reproduce a relative exterior in touch with an absolute exterior in order to prosper). As Gavin Walker (2016) argues, capital can only dream its full realization because real subsumption (totalization and integration of all in a closed capitalist system) would be the end of capitalism. One could say that capitalism prospers on the reproduction of this fantasy of the end as complete destruction that keeps coming but cannot be allowed to happen. No wonder then that catastrophe and post-apocalyptic movies are so popular in Hollywood movies and Japanese animation. And no surprise that the cute fragile Blue Planet continues to exert such a strong attraction, precisely because it is not the point anymore. For the Planetary is not Planet Earth when valuation has become a question of deformation. There remains of course value in pursuing a symptomatic reading of cultural texts as I do here, but only if it does not end up in fetishizing the very thing it purports to deconstruct. In this respect, McKenzie Wark’s critique of the use of the term ‘neoliberal’ makes complete sense. An alternative that I still think valuable if in need of serious reworking is Frederic Jameson’s reading of narratives as ‘socially symbolic acts’. Cultural texts are never here representations that can then be evaluated by their degree of closeness to historical reality. They are acts, creative

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30 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 acts that both mirror in a figure and redistribute this figure into another fabulation of the real. In other words, symptomatic reading is a dynamic operation of critique that operates at the very moment of capture of life surplus-value, at the moment of reproduction of ontopower in fabulation. For Jameson, this fabulation is always articulated by a historical contradiction. But as the figure of the Blue Planet has lost today its critical potential, the binaries that define a classical historical contradiction have become the mask that hides the beast of fabulation, of deformation as destiny (LaMarre, 2018). Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s work on Francis Bacon (2004), I define deformation in opposition to transformation. Transformation from one form into another ends up relying on a unique process of transformation that is hidden by the infinite possibilities into which one form can be transformed. Transformation is at the heart of ‘personalization’, presenting the possibility of choosing between several colors for the iphone as an improvement and way toward free consumption. Or like alternative modernities that really are the same process of modernization with local inflections that matter but are not essentially different. These affect people’s lives and their experiences of local places, but they miss the most important, the very process of differentiation, of deformation. Platforms capitalize on deformation by capturing it into a process of production of distinct individual forms, into processes of transformation where humans have no access to the means of production, the infrastructure, the platform emerging as an eternal total and unmovable ground of reality, as an Abyss.

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Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 31 7. Conclusion – Between Orth and Uruburu In conclusion, I return to Made in Abyss by comparing and contrasting the two polarities of The Abyss, the two human settlements of Orth and Uruburu that orient the journey of Riku and Reg. These two urban settlements show, in their resonance and tension across The Abyss, how the dialectical and reversible movement between transformation and deformation is at the heart of our present planetary situation and how it redefines our sense of the local, and of valuation. Orth presents the image of our present crisis, of disciplinary and biopolitical emergency at a moment when the human has become a parasite unable to access the means of production. Cave Raiders survive on scraps of lost technology in a city that is more a shelter for a lost humanity on the brink of disaster than a grounded and solid home. Surplus-value here relies on the rarity of the object (scarcity), the danger required to find it and bring it back (price of return) and the toll on the body (deformation across platforms). In other words, valuation is a matter of transformation into disciplinary forms (for example the orphanage and the whistle order) and ongoing channelling of forces of deformation (affect) into processes of transformation (valuation). The transformations are real and they are also fictions, the result of a fabulation that hides its process. On the other hand, Uruburu is a figure of ontopower where what matters is how to modulate environments. Uruburu is a protected enclave that is not affected by the Curse of the Abyss. The shelter has become here a Special Economic Zone, an island. Its inhabitants are Narehate who lost their human form when they went down The Abyss. It is said that as they enter Uruburu the Narehate will remain in the deformed

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32 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 shape they most desire. In other words, they have ceased to transform and simply become. The Village itself is protected by a force field that protects its inhabitants from monsters but forbids them from leaving. Now what is interesting about Uruburu is the particular market economy that regulates its inhabitants’ lives. Uruburu is in short a realized fantasy of late capitalism. The price of objects is determined as in Orth by their rarity but also by two other factors, the importance of the object for its owner, and an immaterial Village market value. As the poisoned atmosphere of The Abyss that connects and feeds all living things, Village market value connects all things and desires - like Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Yet here the invisible hand of the Village market materially affects its participants. When one buyer damages a desired item before paying for it, it is immediately judged and loses an object of equal value or, if the value of the damaged object is too high, brutally maimed. Last, since villagers cannot go out hunting as the Cave Raiders of Orth do, they must lure their prey into the village. In a way, Uruburu is an intensification of Orth, ontopower become real and actual on the basis of ongoing deformation in place. This is not this time the ideological spectacle of late capitalism fetishized in some Marxist writings but rather an ongoing fabulation where deformation becomes a choice that determines surplus-value without capture. This might be the power at the end of the economy Massumi (2014, 2018) is talking about, already opening onto another form of creative valuation. And as works like Made in Abyss show, we need for this to start from distribution in the very process of fabulation. For to avoid the lure of the spectacle of the end, we need to embrace fabulation as deformation, learning to live as if already dead (Braidotti, 2013).

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Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 33 References Azuma, H. (2009). Otaku: Japan’s database animal. (Jonathan E. Abel & Shion Sono, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Braidotti, Rosi. (2013). The Posthuman . Cambridge: Polity Press. Condry, Ian. (2013). The Soul of anime: Collaborative creativity and Japan’s media success story . Durham & London: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (1983). Anti-oedipus: capitalism & schizophrenia . (Robert Hurley, Mark Seem & Helen R. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (2004). Francis Bacon: The Logic of sensation . (Daniel W. Smith, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 2004. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79 . (Graham Burchell, Trans.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Guattari, Félix. (1995). Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm . (Paul Bains & Julian Pefanis, Trans.). Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hayles, Katherine N.. (2017). Unthought: The Power of the cognitive non- conscious . Chicago: Chicago University Press. Heise, Ursula K.. (2008). Sense of place and sense of planet: The Environmental imagination of the global . Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Ikuo, Shinjo ̄ . 2007. Kokka ni hansuru ‘watashi’ – Sho ̄ no Yoriko shiron (The self that resists the state: Sho ̄ no Yoriko’s theory of the self), Gendai Shiso ̄ 35 (4), (2007): 158 – 168. Jameson, Frederic. 1981. The political unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act . Cornell: Cornell University Press. Klein, Naomi. (2014). This Change everything: Capitalism VS the climate . New York: Simon & Schuster. Kinsella, Sharon. (1995). Cuties in Japan. in Brian Moeran & Lise Scov (Eds.). Honolulu: Curzon & Hawai’i University Press.

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34 인공지능인문학연구 ․ 제3권 Kojima, Masayuki. (2017). Made In Abyss Blue-ray Box 1-2 . Kadokawa. LaMarre, Thomas. (2009). The Anime machine: A Media theory of animation . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. _______________. (2018). The Anime ecology: A Genealogy of television, animation and game media . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, Brian. (2014). What animals teach us about politics . Durham & London: Duke University Press. ______________. (2014). The Power at the end of the economy . Durham & London: Duke University Press. ______________. (2015). Ontopower: War, powers, and the state of perception . Durham & London: Duke University Press. ______________. (2018). 99 Theses on the revaluation of value: A Post- capitalist manifesto . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. (2015). How to see the world . London: Pelican Books. Ngai, Sian. (2005). The cuteness of the avant-garde. Critical Inquiry 31 (4), 811-847. __________. (2012). Our Aesthetic categories: Zany, cute, interesting . Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Noys, Benjamin. (2014). Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism . Winchester & Washington: Zero Books. Srnicek, Nick. Platform capitalism . Cambridge: Polity. Steinberg, Mark. (2017). Genesis of the platform concept: I-mode and platform theory in Japan. Asiascape: Digital Asia 4 (3). ______________. (2019). The Platform economy: How Japan transformed the consumer internet . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thouny, Christophe. (2015). The land of hope: Planetary cartographies of Fukushima, 2012. In Frenchy Lunning (Ed.), Mechademia, Volume 10 (17-34). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. _________________. (2016). Introduction: Planetary atmospheres of Fukushima Japan. In Christophe Thouny & Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro (Ed.), Planetary atmospheres and urban life after Fukushima (1-20). Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan Press. Toshiya, Ueno. 2016. Yottsu no ekorojī: Ferikkusu gatari no shikō (The Four ecologies: The thought of Félix Guattari). Tokyo: Kawade.

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Deformation as Destiny : Made in Abyss and Kawaii Consumption 35 Tsukushi, Akihito. (2012-2019) Made in Abyss. Takeshobo . Walker, Gavin. (2016). The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan . Durham & London: Duke University Press. Yano, Christine. (2013). Pink globalization: Hello Kitty’s trek across the Pacific . Durham & London: Duke University Press. Received: 31 March 2019, Evaluated: 8 April 2019~21 April 2019, Accepted: 22 April 2019

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