Text

theses

Organizing Attention is both a critical inquiry into the configurations of the Japanese popular culture of anime and manga in relation to Japan’s social economy, and a theoretical consideration of how cultural industries and hyperindustrial technologies of consumer capitalism mutate attention formation. The existing literature in the bourgeoning field of anime and manga studies has largely adhered to the approaches of media studies and cultural studies, with both strands developing formal analyses on a premise that media is a carrier of content tethered to the imaginary topos of Japanese culture. Drawing on theories offered by Bernard Stiegler, I propose a paradigm shift by highlighting attention-capture capacities of media as artifacts in making, remaking or unmaking a cultural milieu, irrespective of the content being represented. Beginning with the instance of the attempted censorship of explicit anime, I argue against the grain that efforts to institute parental controls bespeak a structural carelessness by delegating care for youth to technologies and entertainment industries. What is at stake is that attention-capturing technologies of the entertainment and advertising industries short-circuit attention and desire by subjecting the mind to the incessant stimulation of consumption. On the macro level, anime and manga’s emerging as the forerunner of Japan’s global soft power since the 1990s is part of the larger shift from biopower to what Stiegler calls “psychopower,” where the mind, formed by ways of organizing attention, becomes the site of governmentality. My project assembles analyses on different articulations of Japanese popular culture, from Japan’s self-Orientalizing discourse in the 1990s, canonical anime such as Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion, to the most recent virtual waifu phenomenon. I demonstrate how anime and manga as forms of psychopower constellate geopolitics, social psyche and libidinal economy. Specifically, otaku, the moniker for “maniac” fans, epitomizes the issues in Japan’s consumerist-driven ideology after WWII and its neoliberal turn in the new millennium. By showing how otaku play, I conclude my study by emphasizing that the potentials of technologies are entangled with the way we organize attention.

ETD_10854

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-z5vm-cq04

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.