Scan Line: How Cyborgs Feel Thomas Lamarre, McGill University (draft not for circulation) So often cyborg perception in cinema and animation appears in the form of a mechanized or technologized eye moving through the world, as if looking through the viewfinder of massively enhanced monocular apparatus, which also offers a broad range of sensory measurement of the environment, from infrared night vision and zooms to facial recognition and pattern matches (Fig. 1).1 Such a presentation gives the impression that there is a seer behind the seeing. You are invited to see with cyborg eyes (rather, eye), as if perception were primarily a matter of a seer sitting inside someones head. Thus it is possible for you to look through their eyes and to hear through their ears. In fact, cyborg hearing typically gravitates toward voices in the head, that is, hearing messages from other cyberized entities without their actually speaking, without emitting sound into their surroundings. Rather, speech is (one supposes) formulated and transmitted electronically or digitally (without any initial production of sound waves), yet is received through an activation of the human sensory apparatus for hearing, and then heard as if in the head.

Cyberized transmission and reception of speech is commonly distinguished perceptually from non-cyberized modalities (people talking to one another without prostheses) by adding reverberation to cyber-transmitted voices, as if they were being heard within something. With both cyborg seeing and hearing, the effect is that of a perceiver behind the perceiving, a disembodied subject that may readily move from body to body, while bodies begin to figure as nothing more than apparatuses for the transmission and reception of images and sounds, as disposable and exchangeable as cameras or mobile phones. These examples of cyborg perception are drawn primarily from animations in the Kkaku kidtai: The Ghost in the Shell series, which includes Oshii Mamorus two animated films, The Ghost in the Shell (1995) and The Ghost in the Shell: Innocence (2004), and Kamiyama Kenjis two animated television series, The Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 1st Gig (2002-3) and 2nd Gig (2004-5), which was followed by his television movie The Ghost in the Shell:

Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society (2006), and more recently the first in a series of animated prequel films, The Ghost in the Shell: Arise (2013), directed by Kise Kazuchika. But cyborg perception is so consistently staged in this manner across a range of films and animations produced in various locations around the world, that it is surely a generally familiar trope for viewers of other cyborg films and animations. What is striking about such a staging of cyborg perception is that it seems to confirm the dualism of mind and body, a divide between perceiver-subject and perceptual machine-organ. As such, it runs counter to claims made for how cyborgs signal a rupture with Cartesian dualism, for what is staged in such instances is the very possibility of a disembodied subject, of subjective disembodiment. Of course, this sort of perception is not all that happens in films and animations dealing with cyborgs. Moving images do not and probably cannot remain fixated on one sort of perceptual experience. There is, for instance, a relation between seeing and hearing, which adds a twist. Still, this twist may be construed in terms of a disjunction of voice and image and thus an instance of the disembodied existence of a networked self, as Christopher Bolton does in his account of Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell.2 In contrast, Hyewon Shin, dealing with the same animated film, finds that the correlation of voice and body (image) results neither in synchronization nor voice-off, which paves the way for a new understanding our connection with non-human entities in general, one not based in Cartesian optics and thus subjective mastery.3

In other words, even when persuasive arguments are made for how cyborgs go beyond the Cartesian ego, it seems that the paradigm of the disembodied subject reappears, surely because cyborg perception seeing through the massively mechanized eye and hearing voices in the head remains a major source of attraction, not only because it offers a futuristic or high-tech feel but also because it offers a media problematic, a site of perceptual focus where technologies seem at once to be holding things together and to be pulling them apart. This is lure of cyborg perception, so to speak. Nonetheless, if cyborgs today arouse less theoretical enthusiasm and controversy than they did in the 1990s, it is because the cyborg problematic came to an impasse in its reliance on a certain way of contesting the disembodied

subject or Cartesian ego. Katherine Hayles explains, for instance, the importance of Donna Haraways seminal essay, A Manifesto for Cyborgs, published in 1985: Deeply connected to the military, bound to high technology for its very existence and a virtual icon for capitalism, the cyborg was contaminated to the core, making it exquisitely appropriate as a provocation.4 Yet she also adds, the cyborg no longer offers the same heady brew of resistance and co-option. Quite simply, it is not networked enough. the individual person or for that matter, the individual cyborg is no longer the appropriate unit of analysis, if indeed it ever was.5 Hayles offers instead the paradigm of the cognisphere, or computationally distributed cognition, to overcome what she sees as the impasse of cyborg theory: taking the individual as the unit of analysis. Still, she finds a solution in Haraways work, in its general commitment to thinking relation. It is true that thinking relation presents a powerful alternative, and yet the impasse of the cyborg problematic lies not so much in its emphasis on the individual per se as in its recourse to a disembodied subject. Feminist critics exploring new materialisms called attention to this problem. Vicki Kirby, for instance, questioned the assumption that net avatars, for instance, had no materiality, reminding us that their immateriality meant neither an absence of materiality nor pure subjectivity.6 Ian Hacking approached the cyborg impasse from a different direction, and cited this passage from Haraway to signal a troublesome proximity with Descartes in her take on the relation between humans and machines: Late twentieth century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial and many other distinctions that apply to organisms and machines. 7 In other words, as both Kirby and Hacking suggest, the impasse of cyborg theory comes of a methodology that posits distinctions and then blurs them. The alternative (thinking relation) is not, however, merely a matter of turning away from individual terms to the relationship between them, thereby shifting attention from the individual to collections of individuals or interactions between individuals. The result is a displacement of the disembodied subject into a networked or distributed subjectivity or cognition. The problem is not simply one of ignoring materiality (with cognitive or logical structures) but of ignoring the relation between materiality and immateriality, that is, the media

problematic, or mediality. The challenge of thinking relation lies in attending to relation prior to the

emergence of the two terms (human and machine in Haraway, or consciousness and computation in Hayle) that at once grounds their distinction and is produced and changed by their interaction. As such, it is not a question of looking at how computation distributes consciousness but of considering what relation distributes experience into computation and consciousness (or into human and machine), and how their interaction potentially transforms that relation. This is what William James refers to as a pure experience, which operates as a little absolute insofar it is a primary stuff from which both subjective and objective are differentiated in this specific universe, our cyborg universe.8 This is precisely the media problematic, the mediality between materiality and immateriality. Films and animations are good to think with because they work with and through experience. Returning to our initial problematic of cyborg perception, we see that an impasse arises when we accept the distinction between perceiver and perceived, only to argue that the distinction then becomes blurred or ambiguous. For we then accept the idea of a disembodied transcendent subject that undergoes a crisis of identity. We thus need to work to some extent against the grain of some aspects of received stories about cyborgs, which often stage such a crisis of identity on the part of cyborg, reinforcing the idea of a preexisting subject that is thrown into crisis by technology. In Oshii Mamorus first The Ghost in the Shell animation, for instance, there is a general crisis of identity because anyone with a cyberized brain can have their brain hacked, and thus their actions controlled, and their memories altered or wiped.

Thinking the relation requires, then, that we move against the grain of this paradigm of a preexisting identity that is threatened by technical alteration. Fortunately, The Ghost in the Shell also offers a genuinely alternative problematic: the ghost, sometimes also glossed as soul. The ghost is matter of embodied experience and intuition of the world rather than disembodied subjectivity. It entails, in effect, feeling rather than perceiving. Where the perceiver seems to reside in the shell (or in the head) and to stand outside the world, the ghost feels the world and the self at the same time, prior to the

perceiver being conscious of either. Sharalyn Orbaugh builds on Teresa Brennans work to highlight this aspect of Oshiis film: affect does not arise solely or even primarily from within a self-contained, autonomous body () affect moves between (and into and out of) bodies in a literal, physical sense.9

Such a ghost offers a speculative counterpart to the techno-scientific pragmatics of The Ghost in the Shell world: the pragmatics, for instance, of producing a cyborg body, cyberizing a brain, transferring a consciousness into a new prosthetic body, dubbing a ghost. It also hints at a definition of science fiction as a mode of reading: reading the speculative not in opposition to the pragmatic but in terms of the contingencies of the speculative-pragmatic relation. After all, the speculative may well prove pragmatic if it affords a productive reading of science.10

The Ghost in the Shell animations offer an experiential analog to the ghost, the scan line, as the relation between materiality and immateriality, in the register of infrastructure and self. Beginning with Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell animated film, cyborgs do not only stand apart from the world as disembodied subjects perceiving the objective world through technologically enhanced organs. They also feel the world in scan lines, which are, in effect, material residues or artifacts of communication and transmission, which usually tend to escape notice. Yet with the scan line, the world and other entities in it are in turn feeling the (individual) cyborg: the relation between individual and collective is at once being produced and becoming productive in a mode of affective communication. Communication might thus be thought of in the sense of building with.11

To situate to the specific affective and speculative functions of the scan line in Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell, I propose first to consider it more generally. Disjunctive Synthesis

When a television screen makes an appearance within a movie, rows of fine lines often appear on the screen, dark narrow bands traversing the bright image. These scan lines commonly result from a disjuncture between two media platforms. For instance, the movie camera is capturing images at a frame different from the frame rate or refresh rate of the image on the television screen. The movie camera thus picks up what the human eye does not perceive on the

television screen: cathode rays fire half the image at a time in alternating rows at a rate faster than the human eye can detect. The movie camera, however, shooting at a faster rate, catches the interlacing of the two images, and the result is a striping effect of darker and lighter bands across the image. In effect, we are seeing an encounter of two different media rates or media temporalities: if we see the underlying temporality of the television screens refresh rate, it is only because we perceive the television screen via the temporality of the movie camera.12

The scan line is thus an almost paradigmatic example of what Gilles Deleuze called disjunctive synthesis, a notion that Deleuze and Guattari, in their retooling of Marx and Lacan in Anti-Oepidus, used to characterize the production of distribution.13 Indeed, scan lines make perceptible the underlying experience of how distribution across media is produced: the interface between two media platforms movie camera and television screen, for instance does not entail a blurring of distinctions but rather a mode of holding together and holding apart of differences between media, which arise in this case in the register of frequencies or temporalities.

Scan lines also can appear when something recorded at one rate is replayed at a different rate, which we generally associate with video playback when the frequency of the screen does not match that of the video. Footage shot with surveillance cameras commonly is presented with scan lines to indicate a discrepancy in resolution between two platforms. Moreover, the first game systems used a non-interlaced signal and introduced frames with 240 lines for compatibility with television screens, yet the resulting difference in frequency produced scan lines on the image, which today are associated with classic video games.

In sum, scan lines appear for different reasons in different contexts (and there is the related roll bar effect), but the basic operation is one of disjuncture between media platforms at the level of temporality, as rate or frequency. Because scan lines appeared historically in media practices associated with television screens that used cathode ray tubes and interlaced images, such as adapting video games, playing back camcorder footage, and filming television screens, scan lines have gradually become associated with the experience of

television screens in general. As such, even in recent films, when television screens make an appearance on screen, it is common to present them with scan lines.

For instance, in recent high-profile American movies such as Bourne Legacy, Total Recall, Warm Bodies, The Call, and World War Z, scan lines are prominent on television screens. Such a use of scan lines is rather surprising, particularly in light of their emphasis on high-tech media or futuristic technologies. After all, the use of cathode ray tubes or CRT screens is a thing of the past: production of cathode ray tubes ceased in 2012, and current television screen technologies (liquid crystal and plasma displays) do not interlace images. When filmed, liquid crystal displays tend to generate a moir effect rather than scan lines. Indeed, in Kamiyamas The Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex television series, produced in the 2000s, the effect of filming screens gradually becomes rendered as geometric crosshatching on the image rather than scan lines. In the recent reboot of the Space Battleship Yamato series, ch senkan Yamato 2199 (2013), the media technology of technologically advanced aliens, the Garmillas, is characterized by forms of crosshatching on screens, in contrast to the scan lines appearing on screens used by humans, who are presented as less advanced technologically. In other words, there are some signs of a conscious shift away from the scan line in some Japanese animations, with deliberate characterizations of it belonging to a prior, lower tech moment. Nonetheless, scan lines remain the most common way to stage effects of transmission in films and animations. When crosshatching appears as an alternative, it is usually in oscillation with scan lines, which suggests a lack of certainty about whether transition is indeed underway, and whether it is or can be complete.

Because scan lines today usually are added to the image as special effect, rather than appearing spontaneously as a artifact of filming, their continued usage is all the more striking. In cinema, it is possible today to eliminate scan lines when filming television screens. In Argo, for instance, in keeping with the general mission of the film to create the sense of a direct seamless relation to the past, television screens do not show scan lines and do not produce an experience of disjuncture.

In sum, as these examples indicate, the appearance of scan lines entails something more than a simple and direct artifact of filming. Conventions have developed around the presentation of television screens, and in recent films such as Total Recall, Bourne Identity, Warm Bodies, The Call, and many others, scan lines apparently were added to television screens in post-production, as special effects, rather than arising in the process of filming with a movie camera operating at a different frame rate than the television screen. In this respect, cinema is hand in glove with animation.

When scan lines are added as effects to certain images, it marks them as scanned-transmitted images, that is, images operating across a disjuncture between what is shown-recorded and what is transmitted-received. In the films mentioned previously, a contrast between television and cinema arises, in the form of a contrast between scanned-transmitted images (television) and filmed-projected images (cinema). Cinema does not pretend to provide an invisible or transparent mediation of television: when scan lines appear, we know were watching cinema and television at the same time. Nonetheless, there are a variety of ways of negotiating this effect.

In Total Recall, for instance, marking screens with scan lines plays into the movies central concern how to distinguish genuine memory from implanted memory by establishing a firm distinction between the media world and the real world. Such a distinction may actually serve to stabilize at the level of media the very distinctions that the film proposes to destabilize at the level of plot and action. Marking television screens with scan lines reassures viewer that at some level there is the possibility of keeping things straight or, to evoke Thomas Elsaessers notion, of solving the puzzle upon repeated viewing.14 Similarly, in Bourne Legacy, scan lines remind us of the constant presence of information surveillance by indicating that what is seen is being seen by someone, and potentially recorded and transmitted. In sum, in such instances, the moment of disjunctive synthesis underscores an oscillation between two realities that takes on the form of a puzzle, which holds out the possibility of an answer or resolution, that is, a determination of which reality is genuine. How you respond to the film depends a great deal on whether you feel that the film needs to provide a conclusive answer, or whether puzzlement itself is sufficient

entertainment. As already mentioned, Argo goes in the opposite direction: television screens do not show scan lines nor an experience of disjuncture, which is in keeping with the films concern for capturing the year 1980 accurately: there is no disjuncture between the movie camera and television media. In sum, scan lines may evoked in a variety of ways. They may also be construed nostalgically, for instance, as signs of the good old days of television or the classic era of video games.

As their prevalence in Total Recall and Bourne Legacy indicate, scan lines are frequently used today to impart an aura of high-tech telecommunication and information networks. In fact, scan lines have become a sign of the digital. To impart an aura of high-tech digital media events, trailers for films frequently increase the number of images showing screens with scan lines. The Call is a good example for it not only shows television footage with scan lines but also imbues its graphics and its look with scan lines, in order to give the sense of proliferating humming networks of information, weaving together cell phones, cameras, and screens. Similarly, books on digital media in Japan from the late 1990s and early 2000s feature images with scan lines.15

It may seem odd that the scan line, associated with now out-dated CRT technology and low-resolution video, has forged such a dominant association with cutting-edge digital and multimedia effects, rather than functioning primarily as cause for nostalgia. Yet if we look at what is happening in scan lines, this association makes perfect sense. At work in the scan line is disjunctive synthesis, which builds together different modes of media existence, of capturing, sending, and receiving. The disjunctive synthesis might even be said to entail a communicating communication, recalling Niklas Luhmanns dictum, Only communication communicates.16 Or, put otherwise, only building with builds with.

At the same time, insofar as the experience of the scan line derives from the media world of CRT television screens with consoles or plug-ins (VCR, game consoles, and camcorders), it reminds us that contemporary media infrastructures have a deeper history, a history that is not a simple succession of forms but the transformative prolongation of a diagram or dispositif. Recall that the refresh rate for computer screens for many years was modeled on that of the

television screen, building an analogy between computer and television screens that was not in any way technologically necessary. Although today neither television nor computer screens employ interlaced images, the ease with which computer screens are used for viewing television is surely due at least in part to this initial analogy constructed between them. The critical question with scan lines then is not that of whether they appear or not. It is one of how and how much the effect of disjunctive synthesis is deactivated (enclosed or contained within a stable semiotic system) or activated (amplified and prolonged in experience). Reproducing scan lines for nostalgic effect, mobilizing them as general indicators of media interfaces, or using them to stabilize an underlying distinction between real world and media world these practices tend to deactivate the scan line. Films with media puzzle effects such as Total Recall, Bourne Legacy and Inception, are difficult to gauge, because such films studiously, even laboriously hover at the tipping point, vacillating between activation and deactivation. If films with puzzle effects based on staging disjunctive synthesis via scan lines are becoming more common, it is surely because there is an increased awareness of scan lines as an actual effect, as an active force, rather than an artifact to be tolerated or ignored. Significantly, it is for the same reason because it does not generate scan lines as an artifact of the production process that animation actually shows a greater awareness of them, and a tendency to use them actively, forcefully. In addition, because so much animation is produced for television or for release on video, DVD, or Internet, it frequently shows increased awareness of these effects that were initially associated with the experience of small screens, that is, televisions and computer monitors. The use of scan line effects in animation, then, should not be considered to be secondary to or merely derivative of cinematic effects. In this instance, the idea that animation is operating at a remove from the indexical capture associated with live-action filming does not imply a diminishment of an original but rather a sustained engagement with and prolongation of an effect.

This is precisely what happens in Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell: the scan line is activated to address the media problematic associated with cyborg perception: the moments of cyborg perception in which there seems to be a perceiver behind the perceiving, a disembodied subject, presents an experience

in which new technologies (information and telecommunication networks) seem at once to be holding together mind and body, human and machine, and to be tearing them apart. In response, Oshiis animation highlights and expands the effect of the scan line. It thus invites us to consider how a disjunctive synthesis between media platforms is the site of a pure experience or little absolute that at once generates and grounds distinctions between human and machine, and between mind and body, while being prolonged and transformed by their interaction. In this respect, Oshiis animation feels more in touch with the implications of building with media platforms than do many of the recent films cited above. Expanded Television

Serialized in Kdanshas weekly manga magazine, Young Magazine, between April 1989 and November 1990, and released in book format in Japanese in 1991, and in English in 1995, Shirows Kkaku kidtai: The Ghost in the Shell presents a series of eleven story-chapters set between 2029 and 2030. Stories center on Section 9, a highly secret special ops unit led by Aramaki Daisuke, initially set up as a anti-terrorism squad under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but reconfigured by the end of the second chapter, Super Spartan, into an international hostage rescue unit reporting directly to the Prime Minister.17 Section 9 is characterized as an offensive assault unit deploying high-tech power suits or tactical armors, hence the Japanese title Kkaku kidtai or armored mobile troops. The central characters, members of Section 9, range from humans with very minimal prosthetics and cyberization such as Togusa, to humans with entirely prosthetic bodies and highly cyberized brains such as Major Kusanagi Mokoto and Bat; gynoid robot operatives referred to as speakers, and spider-like intelligent mobile tanks called Fuchikoma.

Chapters consist largely of stand-alone stories, but in the first volume, a larger storyline emerges across chapters 3, 9, 10, and 11, in which the Major, the female cyborg Kusanagi Motoko who is ace squad leader of Section 9, encounters a criminal called the Puppet Master who is hacking into human cyberbrain ghosts to control their actions like a puppeteer. He (the manga presents this AI as male) turns out to be a new form of intelligence, accidentally generated through

governmental experiments with AI, which now seeking a way to prolong its life. Realizing that self-replication will not result in genuine reproduction (temporal stability across fluctuations), the Puppet Master develops a plan to fuse with the Major to produce new entities that will inhabit the Net. This mode of fusion is presented in terms reminiscent of disjunctive synthesis: fusion does not result in a blurring of distinctions insofar as both entities are said to retain their distinctive identities within their fusion or unification.

Oshiis 1995 animated film follows this storyline fairly closely, but transforms it into a media problematic by working with different kinds of images that present distinct media types. Especially salient is the contrast between computer images and images of the everyday urban world, that is, between cyberscapes and cityscapes. Cyberscapes are images resembling what would appear on a computer screen, which are transmitted directly from computers to cyberized brains. For instance, computer graphics track the location of a car upon a grid, allowing section 9 cyberpolice to pursue their quarry (Fig. 2). Such images are accompanied by voice-overs that do not function in the manner of voice-over as voice-across indicating transmission across network channels. Such imagery may appear crude in design by contemporary standards, consisting of a black screen with simple geometric layouts in glowing green, but the idea is contemporary enough: there is a digital transmission of GPS tracking information directly into the cyberized brain. Such cyberscapes, with their simplicity of design, color, and illumination, contrast sharply with the cityscapes.

Oshiis animation was renowned for its use of techniques of rotoscoping in creating the urban world of The Ghost in the Shell. Particularly famous is the sequence in which The Major travels through the city by boat on canal, which, like many other sequences in the film, was based on camcorder footage shot by Oshii in Hong Kong. Animators did not digitally paint the footage in the manner of films like Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), but rather the footage provided a point of reference for the creation of what might called video realism. If Oshiis animation is said to entail greater realism, it is because, on the one hand, its future world feels lived in, that is, grimy and seamy rather than clean and glossy, for which the noir-like aesthetics of Blade Runner were a source of inspiration. On the other hand, realism entails a sense of

accuracy in depicting pocked and pitted surfaces as well as detailed painting to impart depth to the image. The result is a world of muted tones, full of depth and detail yet without sharp corners and boundaries, as if in lower resolution than high-speed cinematography. Even when brilliantly colored, fully illuminated advertisements and street signs appear, their hues are somewhat less saturated than expected due to their brilliant hues and full illumination, which imparts a tinge of warmth and intimacy (Fig. 3), in keeping with the feel of camcorder footage. This video realism, with its combination of high detail with somewhat low-res depth and lesser saturation, contrasts sharply with the geometric simplicity and bold black-green illumination of cyberscapes.

What is the relation between these two distinct perceptual experiences, which makes cyberscapes and cityscapes feel like different worlds?

The story sets up a potentially antagonistic relation between them. Indeed, following the manga, the film opens with a statement about the tension between computerization (corporate networks and flows of information without physical boundaries) and the persistence of boundaries in the form of nations and ethnic groups. Put another way, there are two sorts of infrastructure implying different kinds of experience: the almost oceanic experience of unbounded flows of information in corporate computer networks, and the experience of persistent or residual boundedness related to geopolitical frameworks and legal institutions. The Ghost in the Shell thus seems to flirt with the notion, dubious yet popular in the 1990s, that globalization tended to eliminate national boundaries and ethnic affiliations.18 Significantly, while Shirows manga situates the action within Japan, Oshiis animation does not name its location, thus implying a generalized, hybridized global city in East Asia. As such, the scale already seems to be tipping in Oshiis version toward a vision of the global city as a site that is neither globalization nor nation, neither infinite network nor finite enclave, but some amalgamation of them.

At the same time, in keeping with Shirows manga, Oshiis animated film displaces the geopolitical question (crisis of national sovereignty) onto questions of identity and selfhood (crisis in personal sovereignty). It displaces them especially onto the Japanese female cyborg, the Major, who seems especially prone to doubt her identity. In this register, the antagonism returns, in the form

of the Cartesian ego or disembodied subject, which is mobilized and called into question at the same time: if ones self is infinitely transferable from one prosthetic body to another, how does it remain the same self? Such doubts assail the Major, especially in the wake of two incidents in which the Puppet Master has hacked into a human cyberbrain, implanted fake memories, and taken control of conscious person. The sovereignty of consciousness, of a self-identical conscious self, appears at once highly desirable and unsustainable. How to know if you are a puppet or not?

It is possible to tease a conceptual answer to this cyborg conundrum out of philosophical discourses running through the film, and Oshiis films are famous for their protracted discussions of conceptual and geopolitical issues, often accompanied by direct quotation of an array of major thinkers.19 Yet the genius of Oshii lies in the transformation of such questions, crises, and paradoxes, into media problematics. Indeed, protracted discussions and extended citation always occur in conjunction with sequences that highlight media and technology. Clearly, conceptual questions and discourses are not autonomous of media through which they appear. Moreover, even in conceptual terms, the direction taken by the Major in Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell hinges on a media problematic related to perceiving and feeling: she soon realizes that, if the continuity of the conscious self cannot be guaranteed, then continuity must be sought at another, non-conscious and even non-sensuous or non-appearing level, namely, that of the ghost, which entails an experience of something on the fringes of consciousness, never quite appearing as such but decidedly present nonetheless.20

The challenge of shifting attention to the media problematic is that it is no longer possible to look at the identity crisis in terms of a problem with an answer, or a contest with a victor. Taking a discursive side, for instance, siding with the nation or ethnicity against corporate information globalization, or vice versa, resolves nothing. Oshii instead situates us within a media experience of the problematic, which is salient in the contrast between cyberscapes and cityscapes.

Cyberscapes offers a tentative experience of disembodiment: you see what the cyborg sees (computerized imagery) and hear what the cyborg hears (voices

in the head reverberating) as if you could occupy that body, as if a body were but a center of perception. A pattern of shot and reverse shot may step in to remind you that this is what Bat or the Major are experiencing. Yet, even with shots that connect perceptual experience to a particular body, you dont know what to feel because cyborg faces are entirely impassive, without the slightest display of emotion. Cyborg faces are thus like the cityscapes: fleshed out in detail, modeled in depth, implying possibilities for warmth and intimacy, but somehow floating and dreamlike in their low-res clarity. The low rhythmic pulse of the music over the longer sequences increases the detached quality of the scenery. In one sequence in which the Major ponders the reality of her self, as the viewing position gradually comes closer to her face, the layers of background cityscape appear to separate, as if the city had become unmoored, and voice that does not seem to be hers speaks, laden with reverberation to signal that its source is cyber.21 In other words, as you shift back and forth between experiences of the disembodied subject and images of the actual world, the video-realism of the actual world does not provide as strong sense of embodiment as you might expect or desire. The crisis of the Cartesian subject, then, is not merely in cyberscapes or cityscapes but in their relation. Within and across cyberscapes and cityscapes, there is constant desynchronization and resynchronization of seeing and hearing, reminiscent of Michel Chions notion of cinema as audiovision, which Massumi describes as a singular kind of relational effect that takes off from both vision and audio but is irreducible to either.22 Like the Major, you may well wonder, what is it that allows these two aspects to stand apart and to hold together? What is their relation?

If you only pay attention to the action of the film, there is an accelerating pattern of alternation between the two audiovisual types, which does afford a certain degree of blurring, as if the two terms were gradually merging, as the spokes of the wheel appear to blur when the wheel turns rapidly. Things will somehow cohere, you feel, provided everything continues to accelerate until the end. In addition, there are moments in which the cyber-images are layered into the images of the actual world, usually in the form of computer displays that appear in luminous translucent green, projected from who knows where. Yet, at the same time, the languid pacing of some sequences in The Ghost in the Shell

reminds you that at any moment, the distinct terms may precipitate out of the mix as soon as the stirring slows: the terms are in colloidal suspense, instead of dissolving into a solution. The experience of the film is as much one of incipient precipitation as one of action accelerating to an end. The pockmarks ripped into the wall by bullets recall the ripples caused in a puddle as raindrops start to fall. Events are precipitating.

This is precisely at this point that you might notice something unusual about the staging of cyborg perception: scan lines. Horizontal bright and dark bands stripe the screen when you move into the cyborgs field of perception. The first instance almost escapes notice: in the opening sequence, the Major sits on the rooftop of a skyscraper, gathering information about an illegal meeting, establishing the coordinates and timing for her intervention (she dives from the building in thermo-optic camouflage, crashes the meeting from the outside window to kill her target, momentarily becomes visible, and then fades into her camouflage again as she falls toward the city streets). As she sits and gathers data, the sequence alternates between green screen computer images and video-real cityscapes, but for a moment, when she looks down into the streets, the screen is striped with scan lines (Fig. 4). It is easy to miss this fleeting instance of perception that is neither cyberscape nor cityscape. Later, however, the film suddenly brings this mode of perception to the fore. Section 9 learns the whereabouts of the Puppet Master (he is in the body of a cyborized man who is in turn taking control of a cyborized man, a garage collector), and the garage man rushes to warn him. As the cyberized man looks at the approaching garbage truck, he perceives the world in scan lines (Fig. 5). And in the subsequent sequence in which Bat and The Major chase him through backstreets and a marketplace, Bats perception is also characterized by scan lines (Fig. 6). Finally, in the penultimate scene in which the Puppet Master and the Major fuse, perception is consistently, even insistently, rendered with scan lines (Fig. 7). The scan line is impossible to ignore. In other words, Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell does not so much build toward a resolution of conflicts as stage a disjunctive synthesis: two entities merge without losing their distinctiveness. Because such a synthesis was always already present in the scan line, the merging or fusing of the two entities is less a break with the existing order of thing than its definitive

moment. But how does such a disjunctive synthesis work, concretely and specifically, in The Ghost in the Shell?

First, because the scan lines characterizing cyborg perception are identical to the scan lines that arise when shooting video footage, the cyborg is situated as a sort of media platform. The analogy to the camcorder is especially strong, and in addition, the constant use of cables to connect cyborgs to the central computer or to other cyborgs (the plug features prominently when a cyborg dives into the brain of another) recalls the act of plugging consoles or peripheral devices into the television or into computer monitors. As such, the cyborg appears as one media platform in network of platforms, but this is a specific network infrastructure. This network is a sort of expanded television, not only because it highlights the emergence of a new, largely televisual world, but also because the operative paradigm is that of hooking peripherals into a television screen, and even the computer monitor functions like the television screen. In one key sequence in the film, Aramaki covertly sets up video surveillance around a house: he uses what looks like a laptop computer, into which cables are plugged, connecting his computer to other and the network, reminding us that this is not the era of wireless connection but of wires, cables, and diverse modalities of hooking up and jacking in. Second, the surveillance footage appearing Aramakis computer screen shows scan lines, recalling another dimension of disjunctive synthesis: when you see the world in scan lines, whatever you see is being transmitted to someone somewhere, and thus potentially to anyone anywhere. What you see may be intercepted, overheard, whether deliberately or accidentally. As such, when you perceive in scan lines, your perceptual world is open or exposed to other media platforms. The response to this situation of disjunctive synthesis can go in one of two directions. On the one hand, it can lead to paranoid defensive formation in which you are caught up in a unending game of building new forms of protection, to assure that your shell is not breached, your brain not hacked, your memories not stolen or damaged. This is where personal and national sovereignty are forced into collusion in a paranoid escalation of preemptive and hence offensive defense in a world where security is simply more insecurity. On the other hand, a world in which everything and everyone becomes a

disembodied ego sealed within layer upon layer of protective barriers is ultimately unsustainable, and it effectively eliminates the self that it is allegedly designed to preserve. In response, at some point, like the Major and Puppet Master, you will have to run the risk of exposure to the network and of losing yourself to survive. Here a distinction arises between the conscious subject and the experiential self, and the experience of the scan line turns in a different direction. Rather than being construed as an invasion of your consciousness by another consciousness, it implies feeling the world, and the world feeling toward you.

This experience of the scan lines brings us to the third point: the scan line is not contained with any media platform. It is the material residue of platforms building with each other. In this respect, the scan line is important precisely because it does not lead toward the blur or stain, which tends to sustain an idealist or psychologistic relationship of the self to media, which claims that media touches the subject there where its perception becomes blurred and troubled.23 On the contrary, the scan line is visible, even tangible, and it has a sonic analog (reverberation, not distortion). The scan line is not in the brain or in the object, but in the world. As mentioned previously, a recurring feature of Oshiis style is the staging of sequences in which characters engage in a lengthy discussion of one of the key issues in the film, but they do so while driving along a highway at night. Bands of light wash over the cars interior and their faces as they pass under the evenly spaced rows of lights illuminating the highway (Fig. 8). The sensation of forward motion is lost, and it seems that the car stands still as the citys lights sweep over them. The city itself is now scanning them, the city feels them. The scan line is not confined to the screen, to cyborg perception, or cyberscapes. In effect, the city has become cyberized and cyberizing.

This is what the coupling of the Puppet Master and the Major stages as well. Cables are plugged into the remnants of their cyborg bodies, and connected to Bat as well, making him the witness and guardian of this marriage. While mismatches or new matches between body and voice (the Puppet Master speaks from the Majors body, for instance) may impart the sense of disembodiment, the insistent use of scan lines highlights that this coupling entails different media platforms that perceive, record, and transmit at different frequencies. As such,

the experience is one of building a specific infrastructure and a specific self simultaneously. The human now appears as one media platform among others, as a mode of temporality that is only experienced when interlaced with another.

This coupling also tries to produce an interlacing of gender identities: after coupling, the Major in Oshiis animation regains consciousness in a girls body. (In Shirows manga, she winds up in the body of a youth so beautiful that Bat mistakes it for a girls body.) Commentators on The Ghost in the Shell have questioned its vision of gender, calling attention to how womans bodies stand in for matter, and as such, dont really seem to matter, existing only to be dismembered and discarded.24 It is true that The Ghost in the Shell is so intent on reconfiguring ethics and politics in terms of media others (robots, AI, AL, cyborgs) that it tends not to treat received forms of alterity (gender, class, ethnicity) as residual formations. As such, gender trouble, for instance, feels at once displaced onto and displaced by cyborg trouble. Yet there may be a challenge here: drawing on the logic of the scan line indicates, we might also look at the implications of a disjunctive synthesis holding received forms of alterity together with electronic or digital information entities. As such, the female cyborg is not about the blurring of distinctions between woman and machine but about the specific rate or frequency of an interlacing. In the Majors instance, this interlacing also takes the form of meeting with her self: as she slowly cruises through the city, she encounters other cyborgs with the same prosthetic body. The interlacing of perception and cityscape takes on temporal rhythm of encounter, which is, in fact, her.

The final image of the animation is of the Major overlooking the wired city, into which she will release the progeny of her coupling. It is a city of towering buildings laced with cable-like connections that promise to hold it together two kinds of infrastructure city structures and wired networks (Figure 9). This is a highly specific vision of infrastructures in which city and net appear literally plugged into one another. It is worth recalling that Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell appeared in 1995, the year associated with the emergence of DVDs, the ascendency of the Internet, and the rise of digital television. Its cyborg world is that of a prior infrastructure, of cables and camcorders, of consoles plugged into televisions and computers. Indeed, Oshiis animation might be seen

as the culmination of the video revolution of the 1980s that generated both expanded television and a new aesthetic, that of the Original Video Animation or OVA.

From the early 1980s, production of animation in Japan at once boomed and become more differentiated in terms of its markets, formats and genres. With the advent of VHS, a range of new animations appeared for home video, ushering in the OVA. At the same time, discourses on information society, prevalent from the late 1960s, spurred interest in emerging technologies of television reception, transmission, and of display and interaction (such as satellite and cable, and VHR and console games), which inspired teletopia initiatives and made new media the buzzword in discussions of television in the 1980s in Japan.25 Not surprisingly, as a consequence, Japanese television animation, often loosely dubbed anime, often focused attention on the impact of new computer and television technologies, exploring their effects in different registers, at the levels of story and art, and distribution and reception. In fact, anime might well be considered the new media form par excellence of 1980s, anticipating its surge to global popularity in the 1990s. OVAs in particular played an important role in expanding the media purvey of animation. They not only created a relay between animated films for theatrical release and animated television series but also generated new circuits of distribution and new modes of watching.

Significantly, Oshii is credited with creating the first OVA series, Dallos (1983). More importantly, it was in the context of such animation that the scan line came to the fore. As animators found new markets and new budgets for release directly to video, they began using video or camcorder footage to enhance both the realism of effects and the media quality of animation, to produce darker, more conceptual, and more sexually explicit fare. Thus the scan lines that appear on television or computer screens when filming with camcorder found their way into animation: the flickering scan-lined screen in a dark room became something of a signature feature of OVAs.

Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell is the apotheosis of this world of expanded television infrastructures and OVA aesthetics. Bringing that infrastructure to the surface in the form of the scan line, Oshiis animation shows how media

networks are not simply about the reproduction of the disembodied subject, networked selves, or the distribution of cognition. It explores the co-emergence of self and infrastructure, the distribution that is producing the distinction of self and network, and is prolonged by it. In the form of a media problematic, it tries to formulate an experience of a self-in-disjunction that might be capable of responding to the capacity of media platforms to work together.

Notes 1 In The Scene of the Screen: Cinematic and Electronic Presence, in Materialities of Communication, eds. Hans Ulrich Gumbrechts and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), Vivian Sobchak looks closely at such effects in terms of technologically mediated experience, exploring how such effects prove alienating. My argument is not entirely different from hers in that I initially emphasize how such effects seem to generate a disembodied subject, and yet, because I am not treating natural perception as a baseline, I tend to think in terms of historical configurations of media infrastructure and their potentiality. As such, rather than stress alienation of natural or human-scaled perception, I tend to see in the production of disembodied subjectivity a form of perceptual disabling that is not at odds with her analysis. 2 Christopher Bolton, From Wooden Cyborgs to Celluloid Souls: Mechanical Bodies in Anime and Japanese Puppet Theater, positions 10:3 (2002): 748-49. 3 Hyewon Shin, Voice and Vision in Oshii Mamorus Ghost in the Shell: Beyond Cartesian Optics, Animation 6:7 (2011), 13, 21. 4 Katherine Hayles, Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere, Theory, Culture, Society (2006): 159. 5 Hayles, Unfinished Work, 159-60. Haraway, too, resituated the cyborg, albeit in very different terms: I have come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species. See Donna Haraway, Cyborgs to Companion Species: Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience in Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality, ed. Don Ihde and Evan Selinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003),

6 See chapter 5, Reality Bytes, in Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (London: Routledge, 1997). 7 Ian Hacking, Canguilhem amid the Cyborgs, Economy and Society 27: 2 (1998): 202-216; Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 152. 8 James writes, the pure experiences of our philosophy are, in themselves considered, so many little absolutes See William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 134. 9 Sharalyn Orbaugh, Emotional Infectivity: Cyborg Affect and the Limits of the Human, Mechademia 3 (2008), 165, drawing on Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 1-2. My argument differs primarily in that I see affect less as a blurring or obscuring of the boundary between subject and object or inside and outside. Rather I see affect as related to a disjunctive synthesis that at once distinguishes inside and outside and holds them together, and because affect is related to a material continuum, it tends to act with and through a holding together of self and infrastructure, making for a specific kind of self and a specific infrastructure. 10 I am drawing on Brian Massumis discussion of the spectulative and pragmatic in Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurent Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). 11 There is resonance here with Orbaughs notion of infectivity, but I wish to emphasize something more like a form of communicability that is specific to a network infrastructure of expanded television. 12 The filmed television screen may also appear brighter. Due to space limitations, I do not here address this aspect of disjunctive synthesis, although it is important in Oshiis film. Suffice it to say, this brightening of the screen signals the intensity of disjunctive synthesis, serving to activate the scan line. 13 Gilles Deleuze first addresses what he later calls disjunctive synthesis in the context of the second synthesis or determination (neither passive nor active) in Difference and Repetition (NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 82-83; Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oepidus (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 4. 14 Thomas Elsaesser, The Mind-Game Film, in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Warren Buckland (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 13-41. 15 A good example is the cover for Funamoto Susumus Anime no mirai o shiru: posuto-japanimshon; kwdo wa sekaikan + dejitaru (Tky: Ten bukkusu, 1998). 16 Niklas Luhmann, How can the mind participate in communication, in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), 371 17 The Japanese edition is: Shir Masamune, Kkaku kidtai: The Ghost in the Shell (Tokyo: Kdansha, 1991), and the English edition: Shirow Masamune, The Ghost in the Shell, trans. Frederic L. Schodt and Toren Smith (Milwaukie, OR: Darkhorse Comics, 1995). 18 Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 252-54. 19 Livia Monnet provides an extensive interpretation of the impact of Oshiis combination of staging philosophical debates while remediating a variety of media forms in her three-part essay on his film Innocence. See especially Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part II: Bellmers Dolls and Oshiis Gynoids, Mechademia 6 (2011), 153-69. 20 I am drawing here on Brian Massumis discussion of semblance as non-sensuous similarity in Semblance and Event. 21 For an account of the use of mobile background, see Stefan Riekeles and Thomas Lamarre, Mobile Worldviews, Mechademia 7 (2012): 174-188. 22 Massumi, Semblance and Event, 81-82. 23 Lucas Hilderbrand, in Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), shows how artifacts of copying videotapes became associated with transgression and illicit pleasure, in a manner reminiscent of the Lacanian stain. The logic of the scan line, however, is very

different from the blur or stain. Its prevalence in OVA speaks to a very different relationship with videotape and piracy. 24 See, for instance, Livia Monnet, Toward the Feminine Sublime, or the Story of a Twinkling Monad, Shape-Shifting across Dimension: Intermediality, Fantasy and Special Effects in Cyberpunk Film and Animation, Japan Forum 14:2 (2002): 225-268; and Kumiko Sato, How Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in the Japanese Context, Comparative Literature Studies 41:3 (2004): 335-55. 25 teletopia; use of term new media; television as new media

Figures and (brief) Captions Figure 1: Bat looks at cyberdogs and assesses their parameters by drawing on computer data, from episode 14, Stand Alone Complex Gig 1.

Figure 2: Image of cyberscape from Oshiis The Ghost in the Shell

Figure 3: Image of cityscape

Figure 4: the Majors scan line perception in opening sequence

Figure 5: trash collector sees with scan lines

Figure 6: Bat chases, seeing with scan lines.

Figure 7: scan lines in final scene

Figure 8: rows of lights along highway

Figure 9: wired city

Companion Screens: Living between Infrastructures Thomas Lamarre, McGill University [Note: this is a draft, and so the notes are still rudimentary; the extended discussion of broadcast towers has also been omitted to cut the length down]

On the evening of August 2, 2013, between nine and eleven-thirty, NTV (Nippon terebi hsm kabushikigaisha) broadcast Miyazaki Hayaos beloved animated film, Tenk no shiro Rapyuta (1986), known as Castle in the Sky in its English release. At about eleven-twenty, the film reached the climatic scene in which the heroes, Sheeta and Pazu, together intone Barusu (transliterated as Balse or Balsus in English), an incantation triggering the destruction of Rapyuta, the castle in the sky, to prevent the villain Mooska from seizing it and utilizing it for military domination. At that moment unprecedented surge of tweets occurred, 143,199 within a single second, or twenty-five times the usual volume (Figure 1). As The Economist noted, because Twitter successfully dealt with the spike, the event not only served to confirm its technological robustness but also helped Dick Costolo, its chief executive, to further his promotion of tweeting while watching TV, styling Twitter as a second screen.1

Costolo had already given a talk in Tokyo on the Twitter usage in Japan, on April 16, 2012 (or 2013) in which he called attention to a previous Japanese record for tweets per second (11,349), also during a television broadcast of Rapyuta in 2011.2 Generally speaking, tweets hit new peaks during big TV events such as the Super Bowl or in response to mass media events (the announcement of Beyonces pregnancy).3 But the surges associated with Miyazakis animated film are more pronounced and concentrated due to this fan practice of responding to a specific moment in the film. As such, they imply a specific kind of connection between television audiences and social media, between the small screen and a smaller mobile phone screen, which is increasingly pitched as a second screen, a companion screen, to the television screen.

Mizuiro Ahirus Journal describes the connection between the two screens in this way: Rapyuta is a wonderful film but surely weve all seen it enough.

And yet this year, the audience ratings went way up. The motivation behind tweeting Barusu is less a one of watching TV and shouting Barusu and more one of watching Rapyuta to participate in the festive event (matsuri) of shouting Barusu with everybody. Even if people are watching it alone in their houses, Barusu lets them be with everybody.4

Such a festive event, as this blogger and others were quick to note in the wake of a report by Twitter Japan, entailed a very close, even intimate relation (missetsu) between broadcast ratings and tweeting.5 Above all, it would seem that tweeting had dramatically improved television ratings for Rapyuta: the audience ratings had dropped to 15.9% at the time of Rapyuta tweet surge in 2011, while the 2013 broadcast culled an impressive 18.5%. It is not surprising that the term matsuri (festival or celebration) appears to describe fan-created connections between the small screen and the smaller screen, for it often arises in the context of fan interactions with media beyond one-time consumption of a product (for instance, the manga market Comiket and anime-related tourism). What demands further consideration, however, is the aura of success and happy synergy that surround the responses to the recent Rapyuta tweet surge. It seems that everybody was delighted. Technicians responded beautifully, assuring that the surge did not affect Twitter service negatively. Television broadcasters garnered higher ratings, which translates into advertisement revenues. Twitters CEO saw his promotional strategy perfectly realized: the smaller second screen acted synergistically with the television screen, compounding the success of both. Fans found new recognition of their collective force. Media remediation here appears as a mode of reciprocal intensification, of synergy, convergence, and resonance rather than rivalry, divergence, or interference. Whats not to celebrate?

Interesting enough, Rapyuta tells a very different story about networks, calling for the destruction of the castle in the sky, and not only because it operates as a weapon of mass destruction, a militarized satellite, but also because it functions as part of a highly advanced telecommunications system that works at a distance from the earth, thus distancing human experience from the earth. The threat of the castle in the sky is at once technological (capable of destroying cities from the air) and perceptual or aesthetic (capable of producing an image of

the world and thus reducing the world to its picture).6 Ironically, however, at the moment when Sheeta and Pazu in the animated film intone the word that destroys this militarized telecommunications satellite, fans are bouncing electronic signals off of satellites and communications towers in celebration. Are they celebrating the destruction of big media or its ascendency?

Probably fans, and indeed people in general, do not think of mobile phones as big media or mass media, despite the increased construction of large-scale infrastructures to support service. The notion of the horizontal, leveling force of telecommunications and televisual media, first associated with television (as with McLuhans global village) and then with Internet and wireless networks, so dominates the contemporary imagination that television and social media are commonly assumed to present a force that acts in opposition to the threats embodied in Miyazakis castle in the sky, namely the techno-aesthetic massification implicit in mass media and mass destruction. Television and social media are felt to have already blown the castle from the sky, and to have brought mass media down to earth. (Maybe small-screen people are already living in the utopian, post-massified world of Rapyuta, in little pastoral media villages.) Consequently, vertical or hierarchical integration does not come under much scrutiny in the context of the Rapyuta tweet surge. Yet there are already signs of one kind of hierarchical integration at work in the reporting of the event: somehow the collective force of fans (their little village, as it were) has been equated with Japan, with the masses of people living in the nation. In this instance, the synergy of the smaller companion screen with the bigger television screen seems to encourage a conflation of subculture with national culture, erasing any tension between them.

This synergy is precisely what I wish to contest, not because it is not real but because it is not all that is really happening between television and smaller screen media. While the discussions of the Rapyuta tweet surge tend to assume that people were at home watching television and tweeting (thus introducing a bias toward paradigms connecting house and state), I propose to take the companion screen out of the house and put it in motion. In fact, the horizontality of social media is commonly associated with the mobility and personalization of smaller screens. The use of mobile phones in the context of commuting time thus

provides a good site of inquiry. My goal is not, however, to provide a full sociological account of the use of mobile phones, or rather, as they are called in Japanese, keitai, a term that Mizuko Ito glosses as something you carry with, a connotation to which I have been alluding with the term companion screen. My goal is here to consider the relation between broadcast television and its mobile companion, a relation that is more and more frequently staged or enacted in Japanese animation or anime made for expanded television (broadcast, DVD, BR, streaming). The Production of Distribution Mobile phones appear everywhere in Tokyo, but their presence seems especially palpable on commuter trains, with commuters thumbing out messages, scrolling through web pages, lingering on images, reading, watching, sending flows of signs, or dashing through wickets (Figures 2 and 3). The dominant company in Japans keitai market is Docomo, formed in 1991 as a subsidiary of the telecommunications company NTT, which launched its mobile Internet service in 1999, and whose rapid and widespread adoption inaugurated a mobile revolution. The rubric Docomo, derived from the phrase do communications over the mobile network, also means everywhere, which aptly captures something of the ubiquity of keitai. In addition, as Mizuko Ito notes, [i]n contrast to the cellular phone of the United States (defined by technical infrastructure), and the mobile of the United Kingdom (defined by the untethering from fixed location), the Japanese term keitai is not so much about a new technical capability or freedom of motion but about a snug and intimate technosocial tethering, a personal device supporting communications that are a constant, lightweight, and mundane presence in everyday life.7 Still, the distinction between keitai, mobile phone, and cell phone is not categorical. It is a matter of contextual emphasis. Indeed, as the example of Rapyuta attests, when anime stages a relation between television and keitai, it shifts easily from everydayness to technological infrastructures and to a sense of mobility and dislocation. Although keitai are largely used for retrieving information and sending messages (initially email and now text messaging), they are integral to a

dramatic transformation not only in telecommunications (how, when, where people communicate) but also in media consumption (how, when, where people receive, consume, and interact with media forms ranging from newspapers and magazines to video games, music, manga, animation, cinema, literature, to name only some obvious forms). The distinction between communication and media consumption is not strict insofar as messages include images, links, speech, written text, and other media types. It is because keitai are personal, portable, pedestrian, or as Fujimoto Kenichi puts it, like shikhin, recreational consumer products, or objects of recontextualization, relocation, and actual media objects,8 that the distinction is not clear. This is also why keitai invite us to think in terms of active, personalized, and even productive consumption: such media objects truly call for user agency, activity, and productivity. The Rapyuta tweet surge is an obvious case in point. As a consequence, such media objects can encourage the overall impression of a decentralized and dehierarchized participatory media world, in which flows are entirely horizontal, and the agency and productivity of media users or consumers is on par with that of media owners and producers.

It is true that market forces and technological innovations have contributed to decreasing the gap between production and consumption, commonly articulated in terms of supply and demand, in a number of domains. The hallmark of Toyotaism, for instance, was the idea of having a car roll out of the factory personalized to the buyers taste as soon as the buyer could express her preferences. A similar logic informs the keen interest of the big manga publishers in djinshi, in the worlds of amateur or coterie production they follow coterie production because they wish to react as swiftly as possible to changing tastes, which means close attention to what people are doing, what they are making, in their daily lives as it were. Still, despite the increase in measures that speed up the rapidity of the response of production to consumption and vice versa, to the point of blurring the distinction, there remains an asymmetry or unevenness. It is worth noting, as Kohiyama Kenji does in the context of keitai, for instance, that one of the secrets to the success of NTT Docomos i-mode service was that it already had a national network for

packet communications.9 As such, the personalized and the nationalized are linked as if so naturally and inevitably that any asymmetry seems to disappear.

When I state the problem in this manner, I may give the impression that my concern is for separating the personal and the national, for creating a divide between self and society, or the individual and the state. Yet, given that a strict separation would be impossible, something else is at stake: who is asked to sustain this link, and at what price (physically and psychically as well as economically)? And what kind of life is it? This is why I begin with a rather stark contrast between television broadcasting on the one hand, and horizontal networks, personalization, participatory culture, and repurposing on the other. I wish to explore the ways in which everyday practices and experiences not only inhabit such polarized infrastructural tendencies but also do the work that makes syncretism possible, to produce a forced assemblage in daily life. In many areas of Tokyo, when you exit the maze of the metro, you will see looming on the horizon the very embodiment of another dimension of media happening alongside the increased flattening and decentralizing associated with mobile phones and social media (Figure 4): Tokyo Sky Tree, at six hundred and thirty-four meters the worlds tallest broadcast tower, completed in 2012, with a complex of services woven into it, observation decks, restaurants, train lines, and stores (Figures 5 and 6). Built as part of a major initiative to phase out analog broadcasting by providing complete digital terrestrial television (DTT), Tokyo Sky Tree is the very symbol and enactment of vertical media integration, initiated and founded by the most powerful television broadcasters, with Nippon Hs Kykai (NHK) in the lead, working with corporate interests (Tobu Railway Company, Ltd). As such, it is an integral of the bid to assure the continued ascendency of NHK and other major media producers, owners, and distributors, while appealing to national values, unity and identity. The contrast between Tokyo Sky Tree and use of mobile media on commuter trains and in the streets implies a distinction between tendencies toward what might be called vertical or hierarchical media integration (a tendency more pronounced in broadcast TV) and horizontal or heterarchical media differentiation (a tendency more pronounced in mobile social media). Looking at the relation between television and the keitai companion screen in

terms of such tendencies allows for two shifts in emphasis. First, it highlights the importance of distribution alongside consumption and production. Accounts of consumption have tended to stress the productivity and activity of consumers, calling attention to sites where the distinction between production and consumption appears to collapse, while distribution and circulation are downplayed or completely ignored. Such an approach, however unwittingly, risks adopting the standpoint of the liberal or neoliberal political economy so roundly critiqued by Marx, because it acts as if increased circulation or distribution produces greater economic evenness insofar as it flattens hierarchies. The hallmark of Marx was to show that, on the contrary, unfettered circulation increases unevenness. Second, insofar as these polarized tendencies (vertical hierarchical integration and horizontal heterarchical differentiation) are associated with infrastructures, they also invite us to reconsider the intensive life of infrastructures, and thus the politics of experience.

In one of his rare comments on the impact of communications in Capital, Marx remarks, A relatively thinly populated country, with well-developed means of communication, has a denser population than a more numerously populated country, with badly-developed means of communication.10 His remark calls attention to a population effect that is not reducible to population figures, to a headcount. The measurable magnitude of the population does not determine its effect. Similarly, measuring the scale of communication networks will not capture their effect, for the effect is a function of two variables, distribution of people (populations) and distribution of signs (communications). The effect then is intensive, not extensive. There is a relation between population and communications that makes for an intensity of distribution (denseness or thinness). In other words, Marx is drawing attention to something that is (logically speaking) both prior to population and communication (because common to both) and after them (as an effect). This is in keeping with Marxs focus on, and critique of, production, but he is here addressing the production of distribution. The extensive (population, communication networks) may be clearly delineated and readily measured, but as soon as it is, productivity and efficaciousness must then be increased through intensification. Thus when the workday is fixed, production must be intensified through cooperation and

technological improvement, for instance. Intensification also happens between these well-delineated measurable extensions, which might also be called infrastructures.

The intensification that happens between infrastructures may be conceptualized as a society effect (Althusser), or socius (Deleuze and Guattari), or the social (Foucault).11 These commentators remind us that Marx tends to situate production as what happens between and before different infrastructures, rather than speaking of the infrastructure. The society effect or socius may thus be thought of as an overall mode production entailing a forced assemblage of these specific modes of production. Deleuze and Guattari, for instance, speak of Marxs interest in three modes of production: production of production, production of distribution, and production of consumption, whose forced assemblage generates the socius. The socius, or the social, is not a bounded expanse that corresponds point by point with a region, nation, city, or some other territory. It is a matter of intensity between and before extensities. We may think of such an intensive social effect in terms of subjectivity. But care is needed with the term subjectivity. If the analysis of subjectivity has become less common in recent years, it is because the term subjectivity has come to imply an idealist form of psychoanalysis in which the mechanisms of subject formation appear to be indifferent to material conditions, as if ideology always preceded materiality. In the context of considering the lived experience of infrastructures, then, the challenge lies in considering subjectivity (or the intensive social effect) not only in terms of molar formations (codes and ideologies) but also in terms of molecular practices (lived rhythms and daily activities).12 In sum, Deleuze and Guattaris variations on Marx call attention to what happens between infrastructures at two levels, molar formations and molecular practices. But it is not simply a matter of a neutral mixture of, say, vertical integration and horizontal differentiation. Instead there is a forced assemblage that may or may not prove workable or desirable. The initial example of the Rapyuta tweet surge presented an apparently happy, workable, highly productive assemblage between television infrastructures and keitai infrastructures, both at the molar subjective level (subcultures in agreement with

national culture) and molecular affective level (everyday rhythms of television viewing and tweeting or messaging). In this instance, tweeting accompanies broadcast television: people sitting in their living rooms watching TV and sending tweets. Keitai is indeed like a companion screen here. In fact, everything seems to pulled toward broadcast television in this instance: Miyazakis animation Rapyuta, originally a theatrical release, has been reformatted for expanded television viewing many times, for VHS and DVD releases and for broadcast, to the point that it has almost become inseparable from television anime. The tweet surge thus underscores and mimics the continued power of broadcast television to integrate diverse media and audiences. Yet there is also the mobilism of keitai, which feels quite different from broadcast TV. Keitai seems to lend itself as readily to either tendency: its infrastructures for wireless reception (towers, satellites, etc) echo those of broadcast television yet enable forms of mobilism with very different implications. Thus I propose to turn to commuting networks to develop further the contrast between two media infrastructural tendencies. Although I will initially stress the differences between each infrastructure, my interest ultimately lies in what is produced between them, and the subjective effects that then appear to be producing them, through affective feedback. In sum, the basic task is twofold: to consider the experience or intensive life of these two infrastructural tendencies (mobilism and broadcast) and to consider the intensive life that arises between them. Commuting Time The contrast between the Tokyo commuter train network and the newest symbol of the dominance of broadcast television, Tokyo Sky Tree, calls to mind a now familiar distinction made by Michel de Certeau, between the tower and labyrinth. The Sky Tree fairly exemplifies de Certeaus characterization of the towers tendency toward panorama and spectacle: not only does it offer the ultimate panoramic views of the city but it also includes a variety of high-end shops and restaurants, providing a combination of tourist destination, shopping mall, and consumer spectacle. In contrast, even a glance at the map of the Tokyo commuter network attests to its labyrinthine qualities (Figure 7). As Michael

Fisch writes, To live in Tokyo is to live on and by the commuter train network. Its web of interconnecting commuter and subway lines dominates the urban topography, providing the primary means of transportation for upward of 20 million commuters a day.13

Fischs account of the commuter network calls attention to another facet that has traditionally been associated with the labyrinthine: crowds. As he explains, What makes Tokyos train daiya [short for traffic diagram] exceptional is the incredible attention that network operators devote to it as a means of transporting daily a number of commuters far beyond the infrastructural capacity. In tangible terms, the latter condition means that a train car designed for a maximum capacity of 160 people will typically be crammed with between three and four hundred commuters. What is more, to accommodate the citys commuters, especially on main lines, train companies need to stream one train after another with an absolute minimal gap between them, sometimes as little as one minute and fifty-eight seconds between trains.14 Precisely because train lines must run overcapacity, with cars overcrowded and timetables tightly compressed, the operation of the commuter network builds in a margin of indeterminacy that builds in quick responses to fluctuations and disturbances, including suicides, euphemistically glossed as human accidents. Fischs account thus traces a shift from thinking the commuter train network as an active or determinate apparatus to perceiving it as a responsive, interactive technology.15 The labyrinthine quality of the commuter network thus differs significantly from the illegible compositions of everyday life that de Certeau wished to valorize in contrast to the tower when he wrote: The ordinary practitioners of the city live down below, below the threshold at which visibility begins. They walk an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the ups and downs of an urban text they write without being able to read it. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold history that has neither author nor spectator.16 The train suicide is, in effect, a text that is written by commuters, but, if they cannot read it; the commuter network can, only to erase it as a fluctuation. Fisch nicely sums up the situation as one in which a logic of the

vanishing gives way to one of emergence. Put otherwise, this labyrinth becomes a source of fluctuations and modulating responses. Such fluctuations are not illegible, nor are they exactly legible as de Certeau imagines legibility: they register as signatures of nervous energy that fuels an infrastructural system of modulation. Thomas Looser, Superflat and the Layers of Image and History in 1990s Japan, in Mechademia 1: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 92-101

The Tokyo commuter network thus puts a quintessentially modern distinction in crisis, for the tower and the labyrinth cannot be held apart.17 But that distinction is everywhere in crisis: every labyrinth becomes somehow legible, and conversely every spectacle seems to afford a labyrinthine structure with wandering, intersecting, manifold iterations, which nonetheless lead back to a commodity world as in the case of convergence culture. Nevertheless, even if the tower and labyrinth no longer appear to stand apart as they once did, they do not hold together naturally or spontaneously through some pre-established urban or postmodern harmony. They still afford distinctive experiences, which happen within and through different infrastructures, and which must be forcibly assembled. Rather than a rupture between a modern condition and a postmodern condition, the example of the commuter network implies intensification in the forced assemblage of different infrastructural dimensions of daily life.

Like Fisch, I wish to track the signatures of nervous energy associated with the commuter network, but from the flipside, from the side of everyday experience. To Fischs analysis of suicides, which are posed as obstacles of external limits to the commuting network that become folded into it, becoming internal limitations and thus sources of potentialization, I propose to add another kind of experience: that of the human body in its routine adjustments to commuting time. Thus I will first focus on the corporeal sensations associated with commuting, with the goal of understanding a different kind of different limit-experience, frequently associated with commuting in anime and manga: apocalypse. Apocalypse is imagined, however, not as utter annihilation of the world, but as destruction of daily life that is equally revelation of it. As we will

see, apocalypse tends to happen where the tower is forcibly assembled with the labyrinth where mobile phones do not merely bring anonymous horizontal linkages but ordering and programming. National train lines and the city commuter network are inextricably intertwined, which allows the Tokyo to mobilize national rail almost as an extension of its commuter network, with workers even commuting to work by Shinkansen. Nonetheless the two infrastructures are different in function and in effect. The commuter network serves primarily to get workers from home to their place of work, and by extension, to get students from home to their schools, and consumers to sites of consumption. As such, while commuter networks entail a physical link between home and work, they afford an experience of something that is neither work nor home, and at the same, feels like both. Commuting time is not recompensed, and yet if youre commuting long hours in crowded trains, it certainly feels like work, and in fact, however long or short your commute, you need to calculate it into your workday or school day. At the same time, commuting time is less structured and disciplined than work or school, and even if it is not exactly leisure, there is a sense of proximity to leisure, echoed in the advertisements colorfully announcing events, products, and opportunities at every platform, train, and station, and in the ubiquitous kiosks selling magazines, candy, snacks, tea, coffee, and other sundries. Its time to relax, and it also is not. One of the best-selling kiosk drinks gives you a shot of caffeine, and a major dose of dietary fiber. Commuters bound for work or school are already appointed carefully in the appropriate attire, for instance, suits and uniforms. Students may adopt accessories forbidden at school, or deliberately skew or shifts aspects of their uniform. Those bound for home may allow themselves to look more rumpled and creased, sometimes loosening clothing. Yet everything conspires to assure that, even if they are not at work, they are not at home either. As Fisch stresses, commuter trains generally operate over capacity, and as such they are usually not merely crowded, but jam packed, which adds another degree of intensity to this suspension between work and home, or between work and leisure, making for bodies suspended between tension and relaxation, like soldiers at ease, in a state of relaxed tension or tensed relaxation. At the same

time, commuting schedules tend to be highly routine, with commuters using the same train at the same time each day, usually encountering many of the same people. The dictates of courtesy are such that you do not address those whom you see on your train day after day: you acknowledge their presence by not acknowledging it. Similarly, while overcrowding means you may be pressed tightly, uncomfortably, against other commuters, the general comportment assures a sense of contact without contact. Commuting demands above all tact, that is, ways of touching without contacting, seeing without recognizing, communicating without speaking. While it may be tempting to construe such tact in terms of characteristically Japanese sense of restraint or politesse, such practices address a more urgent problem in this context, that of preventing commuting time from becoming a social hell, that is, an infinite play of social recognition, response, and obligation. In effect, work and home etiquette are both evoked and suspended in tactfulness, a combination of physical tension and relaxation, which allows for commuting time to remain suspended between labor and leisure.

Such tactfulness explains the difficulty in responding to chikan or gropers, men who exploit the physical proximity afford by crowded situations to grope young women (Figure 8). It is already awkward for women to call attention to gropers because in doing so they call attention to themselves, and the packed situation of the commuter train heightens this sense of awkwardness: it is as if the social effect would be rapidly propagated through the surrounding bodies, destroying tactfulness itself, which would paradoxically amplify the experience of contact. Thus women often ignore the violation, taking refuge in the ambiance of tactfulness, in which contact seems not to be actual contact. Such a response is a cruel amplification of the general disposition adopted by commuters that might be described an experience of distance in proximity. It is not exactly that you ignore your body or retreat into it. There is a sense of mineness or self (not selfhood) that derives from your sense of balance and proprioception, of holding yourself together under conditions of tilting, jostling, swaying and moving, while becoming impervious to external tactile cues. What is in fact very close to you is thus placed at a distance, for touch has been transformed: it comes to operate not as sensation or affection that places you in

direct material contact with your surrounding, but as perception that constructs an experience of distance between you and what lies at hand. The tiny insignificant distances between bodies become experienced as larger significant distances by turning sensation into perception, contact into tact, skin into eyes and ears. What arises then at the level of sensation and affect is a more internal proprioceptive sense of selfness, attuned to its world at the level of fine corporeal adjustments. Such a molecular experience of the body also responds to the molar level of experience: to repeat, this is not exactly leisure, not exactly work, which results in a mixture of physical tension and relaxation. You may relax only insofar as you sustain a certain degree of tension, of self-vigilance. In effect, the molecular