the author makes the case that the anime Otaku were already post-narrative by 2000. That is, they are trained like animals to react to "attributes" of characters and settings. All it takes is a girl with a set of animal ears.
This paper has to be sharpened into bite-sized pieces that would fit into a tweet or two if it's going to be the basis for intervention.
I was thinking this weekend that the thing about memes is that they spread: they don't have to communicate anything in the ordinary sense, they don't have to serve any purpose, they just have to spread.
When I was in elementary school I remember a student who was provoked acting out what I think was a scene from a movie where he took off his jacket and said "I'm taking off that jacket, it means I'm really serious" and thought at the time, and I still do, that somebody might kill somebody else just because they saw some image that resonated with them.
mallowdram•4mo ago
Otaku still order events as causal sequences, rely on intent. There's no validity to claiming Otaku re post-narrative. Besides, relying on "attributes" rather than resonance and relationship is a Western view of Eastern perception.
Also, the book isn't claiming Otaku are post-narrative, it claims Otaku are "absent grand narratives", and are more concerned with smaller levels of narratives that might be labeled "animalistic," which still preserves narrative ideology/illusion.
The paper is a treatise we use internally for game-dev. It's meant to be absorbed analytically, not tweeted. There's no capability of intervention on meme-scale. The system has to be rethought from initial conditions.
PaulHoule•4mo ago
Those initial conditions are the design of your game?
That book strikes me as "Western" in the sense that a lot of anime criticism and other literature from Japan of that time, particularly
where you'll find an actual psychiatrist has heard of Lacan absorb heavily from French theory and do it in a way quite different than we have done it in America because the close tie between French and English causes serious problems of over and under-translation. [1] In Japan $20 dollar words are explained with $1 words and when it is translated to English it comes across as remarkably clear.
I'll grant that there is a certain naive reaction to French theory and thinking inspired by it that an analysis is so incisive that it would be the basis for an revolutionary intervention. I had that when I read Simulacra and it took me a while to realize that and Seduction are accelerationist.
I'd argue though that there is space for an intervention in terms of getting the old guard to at least understand that they don't understand memes, that some brainrot scrawled on bullet casings doesn't mean you're a radical TransFurry or right wing because you talk like a Redditor.
A catholic school student recently wrote a thesis on the application of Girardianism to pornography which is an excellent application but he had the same naive reaction that I had to Baudrillard once that you could understand a phenomenon you could make it go away.
Girard's idea of mimetic desire is interesting, particularly applied to pornography where various "attributes" have stuck like the nasty scowls that make western pornography dead to me yet somebody must think it is acceptable if not arousing because they've seen so much of it. Yet I think desire in the ordinary sense has nothing to do with memes -- you take a pleasure in spreading them that is intrinsic and instantaneous and self-reinforcing the same way a dog takes pleasure in barking. There is the thwarted desire that something might not spread or the boredom of waiting for something to arrive, but those are secondary. You can participate in the meme system without any desire to make something spread, in fact that desire to have some impact outside the meme system is... outside the meme system.
[1] French words are often "fancy" in English if you go to a gas station in Quebec there is an ad for an everyday breakfast sandwich, coffee and hashbrown combo advertised as "L'Ensemble Quotodienne" -- a rock band is "L'Ensemble" and a dive bar that it plays advertises the "SPECTACLE" that Guy Debord warned you about, Derrida got Différance under-translated but I'd argue that L'evenment should also be under-translated even though it is a technical term that Debord and Badiou use in entirely different ways.
mallowdram•4mo ago
Much if not all of this is non-scientific, it doesn't hold water except as narrative, which I don't know how to engage with except reject it on basic grounds. Psychoanalysis isn't science, Girard isn't science, both are narrative. That means it's designed for sender-status. Pointless to discuss.
Scrawling memes on casings though is not brain rot, it's a general hack of mythological thought, it's a break from the overall patterns academia, intelligentsia, and plain English general interest media fool audiences into the status game inherent to narrative. Stay in line, buy more, be happier. The point of memes are to shred this causal link between the arbitrary (words, narratives, money etc). I'd look at meme culture as revolutionary, but that subverts most of what you're citing.
And I don't think considering Baudrillard's critique of the seamlessness of simulation with reality it or he is accelerationist, that's a narrative take of an analytical probe.
gsf_emergency_2•4mo ago
>intervention in terms of getting the old guard to at least understand that they don't understand memes
Hey, you're replying to one old guard (the GP's) quirky attempt to understand memes; it's rather harmless in the scheme of memes.
I'd wish memes would be less oblique though (as in, please attack specific insidious myths already!) but that might also be contrary to the (organic? noninterventionist? deus ex?) power of memes.
mallowdram•4mo ago
Memes are like entoptics of the Paleolithic (Lewis-Williams), they're staging areas for subverting communication and cohering them in a new form of screen/toplogy. They're just proto-variables that destroy the long nightmare of mythological thought, and are so effective, they're able to topple regimes.
Our generations have to face the notion that psychology, sociology, history, narratives, all of the humanities, all of the narrative sciences, computer science and their theories are this easily liquidated by meme-culture.
Now what's next is the scaffolding to replace them, beginning with words, then sequences.
(But that regime was already fragile so it could have been other types of catalyst.. no this is not South Asian spring
(SSEA sputtering?)
mallowdram•4mo ago
That's only the beginning yet meme's have a glass ceiling built in, they are merely non-linear, chaos, or nihilistic. They can't cohere the analytic. But what is missing from meme-culture, their next form, will be.
PaulHoule•4mo ago
https://mogami.neocities.org/files/otaku.pdf
the author makes the case that the anime Otaku were already post-narrative by 2000. That is, they are trained like animals to react to "attributes" of characters and settings. All it takes is a girl with a set of animal ears.
This paper has to be sharpened into bite-sized pieces that would fit into a tweet or two if it's going to be the basis for intervention.
I was thinking this weekend that the thing about memes is that they spread: they don't have to communicate anything in the ordinary sense, they don't have to serve any purpose, they just have to spread.
When I was in elementary school I remember a student who was provoked acting out what I think was a scene from a movie where he took off his jacket and said "I'm taking off that jacket, it means I'm really serious" and thought at the time, and I still do, that somebody might kill somebody else just because they saw some image that resonated with them.
mallowdram•4mo ago
Also, the book isn't claiming Otaku are post-narrative, it claims Otaku are "absent grand narratives", and are more concerned with smaller levels of narratives that might be labeled "animalistic," which still preserves narrative ideology/illusion.
The paper is a treatise we use internally for game-dev. It's meant to be absorbed analytically, not tweeted. There's no capability of intervention on meme-scale. The system has to be rethought from initial conditions.
PaulHoule•4mo ago
That book strikes me as "Western" in the sense that a lot of anime criticism and other literature from Japan of that time, particularly
https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Fighting-Girl-Saito-Tamaki/...
where you'll find an actual psychiatrist has heard of Lacan absorb heavily from French theory and do it in a way quite different than we have done it in America because the close tie between French and English causes serious problems of over and under-translation. [1] In Japan $20 dollar words are explained with $1 words and when it is translated to English it comes across as remarkably clear.
I'll grant that there is a certain naive reaction to French theory and thinking inspired by it that an analysis is so incisive that it would be the basis for an revolutionary intervention. I had that when I read Simulacra and it took me a while to realize that and Seduction are accelerationist.
I'd argue though that there is space for an intervention in terms of getting the old guard to at least understand that they don't understand memes, that some brainrot scrawled on bullet casings doesn't mean you're a radical TransFurry or right wing because you talk like a Redditor.
A catholic school student recently wrote a thesis on the application of Girardianism to pornography which is an excellent application but he had the same naive reaction that I had to Baudrillard once that you could understand a phenomenon you could make it go away.
Girard's idea of mimetic desire is interesting, particularly applied to pornography where various "attributes" have stuck like the nasty scowls that make western pornography dead to me yet somebody must think it is acceptable if not arousing because they've seen so much of it. Yet I think desire in the ordinary sense has nothing to do with memes -- you take a pleasure in spreading them that is intrinsic and instantaneous and self-reinforcing the same way a dog takes pleasure in barking. There is the thwarted desire that something might not spread or the boredom of waiting for something to arrive, but those are secondary. You can participate in the meme system without any desire to make something spread, in fact that desire to have some impact outside the meme system is... outside the meme system.
[1] French words are often "fancy" in English if you go to a gas station in Quebec there is an ad for an everyday breakfast sandwich, coffee and hashbrown combo advertised as "L'Ensemble Quotodienne" -- a rock band is "L'Ensemble" and a dive bar that it plays advertises the "SPECTACLE" that Guy Debord warned you about, Derrida got Différance under-translated but I'd argue that L'evenment should also be under-translated even though it is a technical term that Debord and Badiou use in entirely different ways.
mallowdram•4mo ago
Scrawling memes on casings though is not brain rot, it's a general hack of mythological thought, it's a break from the overall patterns academia, intelligentsia, and plain English general interest media fool audiences into the status game inherent to narrative. Stay in line, buy more, be happier. The point of memes are to shred this causal link between the arbitrary (words, narratives, money etc). I'd look at meme culture as revolutionary, but that subverts most of what you're citing.
And I don't think considering Baudrillard's critique of the seamlessness of simulation with reality it or he is accelerationist, that's a narrative take of an analytical probe.
gsf_emergency_2•4mo ago
Hey, you're replying to one old guard (the GP's) quirky attempt to understand memes; it's rather harmless in the scheme of memes.
I'd wish memes would be less oblique though (as in, please attack specific insidious myths already!) but that might also be contrary to the (organic? noninterventionist? deus ex?) power of memes.
mallowdram•4mo ago
Our generations have to face the notion that psychology, sociology, history, narratives, all of the humanities, all of the narrative sciences, computer science and their theories are this easily liquidated by meme-culture.
Now what's next is the scaffolding to replace them, beginning with words, then sequences.
gsf_emergency_2•4mo ago
Just making this more concrete
https://youtu.be/EwXAz8MJ5l8
https://archive.today/latest/www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-as...
(But that regime was already fragile so it could have been other types of catalyst.. no this is not South Asian spring
(SSEA sputtering?)
mallowdram•4mo ago