“Chapter 6. Mediated Expressions: Emoji’s E-mimesis” in “The New Real”
6
Mediated Expressions
Emoji’s E-mimesis
The modes of mimesis are necessarily most visible in overtly embodied mediations. Representation and mimicry can be seen clearly, for instance, in the popular phenomenon of cosplayers copying the dances of anime characters and posting their performances on video-sharing platforms like YouTube and Niko Niko dōga.1 These dances echo the dynamic of real play (jikkyō purei) clips posted by video gamers of their game playthrough (discussed in chapter 5) but with a twist. If in reality gameplay, gamers simply try to post a true-to-life game with the value added of their affective comments about the immediate experience of gaming, with these dances we get something different, innovation on the worlds of anime and game characters. Media theorist Hamano Satoshi argues that such dancing suggests new “meanings brought about by Japanese cyberspace”:
Since the advent of the internet, there has been a lot of discourse critiquing its lack of corporeality [shintaisei, embodiedness or somato-psychic links]. For instance, the notions that there are no face-to-face relations, that the space is anonymous, and that “the appearance” (Arendt) of flesh and blood bodies does not exist, all lead to the fact that this cannot establish “the public sphere” (Habermas), in which subjects resolve to take responsibility and have exchange and discussion. This is what has long been said. But our internet society has found a completely different path for this sort of modern subject; that is to say, a form of imitation or mimicry [mohō] of the fictional character-like [kyarakuta-teki] “Haruhi” body gives way to the “appearance” of countless flesh and blood living bodies on the web. The addenda I want to add here is that this unmistakeable reality [jijitsu] is probably the limit of the possibility of a Japanese networked society.2
Hamano’s comments here resemble those of Ueno Toshiya, who was among the early wave of thinkers who found techno-orientalism to be a useful concept. Whereas Ueno contrasts the techno-orientalism of Japanimation with the “media-tribalism” of rave culture, Hamano presents an example that exhibits both.3 It is significant that Hamano’s “Japanese cyberspace” (Nihon no netto kūkan) provides a moment of mimicry (that Hamano himself glosses as “mimesis,” mimeshīsu) in which netizens copy the dance in the anime adaptation of the breakout, highly self-reflexive sci-fi light novel The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Far from either Silicon Valley’s utopian visions around media connectivity or notions that Sony’s high-definition screens and crystal-clear headphones will realize our wildest dreams of democracy manifesting virtual reality through immediacy, Hamano suggests that the most sustainable connection to the real that we can hope for through our new media is people dressing up and line dancing together and posting for others to see, copy, and repeat. He fundamentally contradicts what Azuma Hiroki describes as a “game-like realism” (gēmu-teki rīarizumu), in which cultural products gain reality through their verisimilitude to other products rather than to objective reality (which might seem apropos of cosplayers imitating their favorite game or anime) and the cyber-mediated participatory cultures that he elsewhere labels the instantiation of Rousseau’s ideals.4 By contrast, what Hamano calls the base, incontrovertible truth (magirenai jijitsu) is precisely the new real. And the sheer popularity of the Dance Dance Revolution (1998–2022) and Just Dance (2009–2021) video game series confirm the prevalence of this new real. The new real is the humdrum everyday of living with, in, and through our media that may seem so commonplace and boring as to hardly warrant notice or mention. However, it is precisely through focus on the new real that we can assess the integrative as well as sinister impacts of media on our economic, political, social, sexual, and other realities.
Body: The Medium of Identity
The reason that the body has become a center of media studies is because it seems to be the first, last, and ultimate medium.5 Broadening the concept of media to include the body clarifies the relation of the mediated and the mediators, revealing the intertwining or entanglement of two otherwise seemingly antipodal strands of mimesis (representation and mimicry). If we move beyond a static concept of media in which external objects (print, screen, canvas) are the only viable media to a relational one that includes the flesh-and-blood bodies working with such objects, within them, and themselves as objects—a continuum of mediation rather than discrete media per se—we begin to understand that repetition and copying of mediation cannot be accounted for solely by the conditions or affordances of lifeless frames. Considering the human body as yet another medium to represent reality and to mime such representations shows how representation and mimicry can both be captured by the concept of mimesis as a remediation of content with attention to fidelity. Furthermore, the concept of body as a threshold brings into question the binary notions of an inside and an outside, human and nature, and recasts notions not only of media as between but also of mimesis as a simple question of transparent copying. In the two-sides-in-one or Möbius strip concept of body that contains an inside as it touches an outside, we find an exemplary instantiation of the paradox of a medium that is both part of a message and the means for that message’s transference.6
Drawing deeply on Walter Benjamin’s understandings of mimesis, theorist of mediation and embodiment Mark B. N. Hansen develops the notion (similar to Jacques Lacan’s distinctions between realities and the real) that all reality is mixed reality (composed of the virtual and the real) in order to argue that our bodies are the means through which the real world and, indeed, all media eventually must pass. Hansen’s view (like Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the “extensions of man”) is that all media and mediation are subordinate to the concerns of the body. Rather than understanding the body as an ontology constructed through experience, memory, and culture, Hansen argues for “the de jure primacy of embodiment over cultural construction.”7 He persuasively argues that since all media are received through the body, it is, therefore, the ultimate medium. But his fundamentally ahistorical and presentist argument that the experience of the body takes primacy over culture is a logical leap and, indeed, contradictory of the point that the body is the ultimate medium.
The very fact that all mediation comes through the body also means that mediation of the body comes through the body. This leaves us with an undecidable moment or a binary: either the body takes precedence in experience of the world (including the mediation of the body) or the mediation of the body as a medium does. It is the chicken-or-the-egg of constructivism (or the nature–nurture tension; or, as Benjamin puts it, the mimetic faculty is both phylogenetic and ontogenetic) that is not really an either/or but a dialectic tension.8 Something like a body is (exists) even before we may name it as such; yet the body as we know it only comes (begins to exist) with the naming (its concept). Ultimately, the priority of the body or its concept does not matter, because for all intents and purposes, we live after any such moment when one might have preceded the other. Rather, we dwell in a world that must deal with a situation in which both a body in the world (even in utero) exists and its emergent concept continues to be developed.
This tension or gradation itself comprises how we know anything about not only the body but also anything in the world. It is not that the body simply is, but that it is and that its “is-ness” (ontology) is mediated over time just as existence of mind, thought, and memory are mediated by the body. Mind, thought, and memory may be contents that are mediated by a body, and this body (media) exists as a concept, thought, or memory mediated in turn by that same body. Just as there can be no a priori existence of a body without its concept, there can be no concept without its concept-forming body. More than Kantian, it may be Hegelian (in the same way the master needs slave and slave needs the master, according to his system) or more akin to what Karen Barad refers to as “entanglement.”9 Media needs the content and content needs the media, or body needs culture and culture needs body; media needs mimesis and mimesis needs media. They exist as systems in tension, so to posit an a priori is itself to mistake what the (ecology or economy of the) system is.
But for Hansen, our Being-with technological media is never to be reduced to the level of simply a mind and cultural construct or discourse.10 Citing Benjamin’s understanding of Erlebnis, he argues for direct engagement (or the lived experience of technology) rather than knowledge through memory (Erfahrung). However, Hansen goes too far in arguing for the potential of the direct sensuous touching between body and media. Experience, memory, language, and discourse have roles in marking how we exist alongside and with our tech even prior to some moment of a Merleau-Ponty-like touch. Yet for Hansen, the emphasis is always on the ways in which such embodiment is directly experienced by the body: “the ways in which technology’s power over our bodies (domination) actually gets experienced.”11 He claims such body experience is unmediated (by, for instance, memories of other experiences, our linguistic thought processes, our cultures, our media); for him, it is directly encountered and experienced knowledge.12 But this is magical thinking that ignores the body as but one more medium through which such immediacy can be apprehended.
The argument of this book runs parallel to Hansen’s important idea that we need to recognize the power of technology in our everyday lived experience, but the idea that such dwelling with our media happens as though through a short circuit around culture, memory, ideology, and other forms of mediation and is sensed directly through our bodies must continually be called into question. Hansen is right in pointing out that for Benjamin mimesis is part of nature, part of the way the world and the human machines living in it work. But this is precisely why he is wrong in thinking that Benjamin is writing against a kind of cognitivized (linguistic/discursive) experience and thinking anyone at any time can dwell in pure experience. Rather, Benjamin’s argument (clearer in his “The Storyteller” essay than in his essay “On the Mimetic Faculty”) is that there is nothing unnatural about discourse, as it is but one of several manifestations of our natural mimetic faculties—in this, emoji discourse does not substantively differ from that written in other scripts.
The crass, false, or mythical history of mimesis (the nostalgia for a prehistorical moment of premodern external [to body] media) is nothing if not useful. It articulates the range of mimesis as a story of human progress over time. Benjamin and McLuhan share the notion that writing and inscription marked a difference in how human beings related to the world. Whereas, for McLuhan, writing alienated us from our visual worlds, for Benjamin writing was but the most recent stage in the growth of nonsensuous mimesis, which may not have alienated us from the world so much as provided another natural moment of being human within it. This sort of nostalgia for the preprint era also holds in Saitō Tamaki’s media theory:
In cultures since the advent of the use of character writing [moji shiyō] mimesis itself is dominant. . . . Mimesis is recognition of the object and the whole, pointing to the experience of the divide between subject and object disappearing. In oral cultures, the mimetic faculty was helpful for the memory of poetry and such. However, the appearance of the alphabet brought about the distance between subject and object through vision. Here “objectivity” was born. However, at the same time, the good [kōfuku] unity or integrity of mimesis was lost.13
This notion of a time when there was a unity of subject and object is a fiction we tell ourselves to continue to dwell in the world as split subjects in the here and now. Saitō’s notion of mimesis as being embodied in a pre-media-laden world and tangibly changed in a mediated one ignores the notion of the body itself as media for mimesis.14 So, what I want to argue through attention to the body here is that the body is both semiotic and sensuous. This dual tension runs the course of the history of mimetic thinking through Benjamin and continuing today—and is quite evident in emoji. This is not to say that the tension is ahistorical or constant but rather to say that, because it is a modal tension configured differently at different moments, it needs to be historicized. The point here should not be to take a side (to assign to one mode a modern, unnatural derivative position and to the other an original, essential, natural, and timeless one) but to recognize the state of being as such is torn between both modes. So, for example, it is not whether emoji are a new language or a return to pictures on cave walls but to recognize that the script is actualized by the tension between the two. The task of this book has been to identify how such tension is manifest at various times in various media histories and mediations.
Benjamin senses that human mimesis (as opposed to naturally occurring resemblances between things) requires and draws on human ingenuity and creativity. To read the stars, dances, and entrails, he argues, was not a kind of unthinking mimicry or copying but required some “nonsensuous” (not directly embodied) interventions or innervations—which is to say, it required what we would now call some frontal-lobe thinking even as it deeply engaged the body. As Susan Buck-Morss puts it, it is not that the kind of mimesis that needs to be recuperated from primitive or childish mimesis was a knee-jerk bodily reaction.15 It is not, as Hans-Georg Gadamer says, that in the modern period “the concept of mimesis has lost its aesthetic force”; it is not that only in the premodern or childish form of mimesis in which the child’s play of imitation was for the purpose of becoming “like that which is imitated” but to become “the object imitated” proper.16 So, it must be the case that only in the (“modern”) mediated mode (not moment) is mimesis aesthetic in the first place. In one version, mimesis is a representation and, therefore, possibly aesthetic. In the other, it is a conjuring forth or a manifestation of the thing itself (an embodiment). But even in that embodiment, the copy is iterative of the copied, a self-consciously different version of it.17 One version does not precede the other; in some sense, all versions are equally original and radically new because of this process.
In his later work, Hansen comes closer to this understanding of the body’s role in mimesis. For Hansen, the way in which the digital or virtual spaces allow for, encourage, or afford a drift from the “mimetic identification with the body image and toward creative play” gives such work its meaning.18 Though in Hansen this becomes another sort of cyberutopianism, in fact it becomes clear that the experience neither begins nor stops with the body: “Decoupling identity from any analogical relation to the visible body, online self-invention effectively places everyone in the position previously reserved for certain raced subjects,” or what Hansen calls a “radically unprecedented condition of selfhood.”19 Slavoj Žižek is right when he claims that the content of cyberspace is simply the self (id and ego) projected outside of the body and made manifest in the physical world rather than kept inside.20 Study of such media simply make more tangible and evidentiary insights already accessible through conjecture and logic. But there is more to it than that. As the case of emoji will show, study of such media can better help us to find our position in the physical world in relation to and with/in our media.
Emoji: The Medium of Universal Expression?
One story told of media studies since at least McLuhan but on through Hansen is that print media (and its associated sign signification) reified the Cartesian mind-body duality. In this view, print media took us away from body and embodied mediation, while visual (from film to TV) and, more recently, digital media (from VR and AR to biomimetic prostheses) have brought us back to body and embodiment representing some originary, more natural moment. The preceding chapters expose the falsity of this historical narrative about media and its relation to body. Indeed, media stood in relation to body and embodiment through visualization of solid objects in space in chapter 2, sound similarity in chapter 3, becoming in chapter 4, and dwelling and building in chapter 5. Through the recent print-like scriptural form of emoji that is purportedly of the new digital visual regime and, therefore, more tightly connected to body, this final chapter examines the way emoji reveal both the always already embodied character of scripts and the myth of visual difference.
Emoji are not simply a fleeting fad in international youth culture but rather are, thus far, the most effective, if unintended, fruition of a long series of attempts to refine the complexities of spoken language into a universal pictographic script. At one time or another, various languages and scripts have been called “universal.” Since at least the biblical dreams of the mythical Tower of Babel, linguists, governments, and philosophers (among others) pursued and “discovered” universal languages everywhere, in mathematics, science, music, laughter, tears, Latin, French, Arabic, English, the sinograph, Sanskrit, Esperanto, binary code, Blissymbolics, LoCoS, and now emoji. Perhaps the only real universal in this story about the desire to find universal scripts and languages is the continually renewed human struggle for better communication, for an improved “medium for language,” a medium of meaning or of message transmission that is faster and clearer, logical, and pervasive—in sum, more immediate.
One history of emoji could start with the 1987 publication of a tome by the designer and semiotician Ōta Yukio titled Pictogram Design: Pikutoguramu [emoji] dezain, not as an absolute origin but as yet another significant marker of the multiple origins of emoji. The book itself is something of a coffee-table book of signs, from hieroglyphics to the (then cutting-edge) world of computer icons and international airport signage, but it also deals intensively with the idea of pictographic scripts.
Figure 24. Cover of Ōta’s book designed in conjunction with the September 4–16, 1987, exhibition curated by Kikutake Kiyonori, organized by the Nihon Design Committee, and displayed on the seventh floor of the Matsuya Ginza Department Store in Tokyo. Ōta Yukio, Pictogram Design: Pikutoguramu [emoji] dezain (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo, 1987).
Ōta’s book is part of the rise in the usage of the Japanese word emoji (lit. “picture character”) following the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, stemming from his efforts to create internationally legible signage for that mega-event. It was in 1964 that Ōta (who would later also design the “green running man” exit sign ubiquitous in Japanese and European public spaces) developed his LoCoS (Lovers’ Communication System) pictorial script. Ōta’s book was one obvious, significant source of inspiration for the designers of NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode phone system (including the now famous Kurita Shigetaka), who first released their set of 167 pictographic characters in 1998. One example of this influence is the NTT design team’s choice to adopt a modified image of Gerd Arntz’s “turban-wearing man,” a design created in 1920s Vienna that had been reprinted in Ōta’s 1987 book (see Figure 28). As both a sourcebook for the designers of the original emoji sets and as a history entwining what we would today call infographics and universal languages, Pictogram Design is a revealing point of departure.
The book is also something of a crystallization of the supposed value of the icon in modern life, far exceeding the realization of abstract visualizations within computing in the years immediately preceding Ōta’s book. Looking back across the twentieth century for other forms of information display and its visual organization, Ōta most prominently and repeatedly cites Otto Neurath, a philosopher and sociologist with the Vienna Circle, a group known for promoting logical positivism and verificationism.21 So, we should not be surprised to find that emoji’s roots in the progressive, socialist educational apparatus continue to be echoed in the Silicon Valley utopianism surrounding them today. The claim that pictographs might best present complex information and arguments seems to reflect ancient educational calls for the reading of prayers through pictograms aimed at illiterate Japanese (see Figure 25). Like many technological developments in the history of new media (such as television), emoji began with (and perhaps will end with) a dream of universal humanism through education.
With the rise of socialism and machine design in the early twentieth century, a number of new, internationally minded projects created what seemed like real possibilities for mass education. The development of what is now known in infographic circles as the “Helvetica man,” the ubiquitous pictogrammatic rendering of a human now most commonly associated with restroom signage, represents but one of these educational efforts. Combining the urge for widespread legibility and clarity, Neurath’s International System of Typographic Picture Education (Isotype) provides perhaps the earliest attempt at a universal pictographic auxiliary language for the express purpose of educating the modern masses.22 The idea of representing complex ideas pictographically remains with us today in the art of data visualization (the direct legacy of Isotypes), as well as in its “cute-ification,” such as the recent depiction of “The Entire US Economy Depicted in Emoji.”23
Figure 25. Early emoji? Image of a seventeenth-century rebus for prayer reading. Reproduced in Tachibana Kenkei, Tōzaiyūki hokusōsadan (Tokyo: Yūhōdō shoten, 1922). Courtesy of National Diet Library.
Touting the notion of signage as a language to its primarily Japanese audience, Ōta’s book stages the very conflict between signage and language itself: meaning as controlled design in contrast to meaning by natural evolution. In a section titled “Why Pictograms?,” the tension between static sign versus moving language becomes evident.24 Ōta presents a critique of Isotypes by the graphic designer and artist Awazu Kiyoshi: “In the beginning Isotype tried to make language into ‘a language to be seen with the eyes’ from an educational aspect, but the problem of race rooted in it remained unsolved, and it was practically impossible to make it a global visual language.”25 Here, Ōta and Awazu raise the problem of Eurocentrism as a fundamental barrier to the global humanist goals behind Neurath’s practice. Transcending the problems identified by an increased awareness of multiculturalism, another diagnosis Ōta gives for the failure of Neurath’s method (rather than his theory itself) is that Isotypes are inflexible. Ultimately, Pictogram Design argues that Neurath strove for a mathematically definable language that would not need to change once it was composed. After a backpacking trip through Italy, during which he discovered the usefulness of signage for communication, Ōta became more optimistic about the possibilities than Awazu. Out of this optimism emerged Ōta’s key innovation: he purposely constructed his LoCoS system and equipped it not only with a grammar but also with possibilities for future modification and growth.
In the most utopian claims about pictographs, the glyphs are all at once evocative of our cave-dwelling past and our globalized future: a better language, more direct than Japanese, more transparent than phonetic or even ideographic characters, and, simultaneously, more “Japanese” than Japanese and older than ancient hieroglyphics. According to the philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke:
As more and more people use things like Isotypes and LoCoS and mix them up, we draw closer to pictographs that everyone can use. The great thing about pictographs is that they are not so narrow as to benefit only Europeans alone, but are things that everyone can use equally. Another way in which they differ from language is that two- and three-year-old children can understand them right away. Even the elderly in their 70s and 80s can freely master pictographs.26
Tsurumi’s appeal to the global reach of a pictographic script in 1991 cites the history of Neurath and Ōta, noting that, if it is to be successful, such scripts must not reside in a local or even regional culture but must remain withing the purview of all cultures and age groups.
Two films about global issues with which Ōta was involved display a kind of dedication to world education through “visual support.” The 1979 film Visualizing Global Interdependencies followed up on Aaron Marcus’s 1960 report of the same title.27 Developed from a black-and-white slideshow presented at the University of Hawai‘i’s East-West Center, it features the transnational work of research fellows from India, Iran, the United States, and Japan and purportedly “developed a new visual language” (see Figure 26).28
The film reprises the Malthusian problems of population expansion, food systems, energy consumption, and environmental pollution through use of Isotypes and emoji-like symbols. Despite its primary reliance on visual interfaces, it also uses verbal English terms such as GNP, Calories, Consumption, or Metric Tons of Coal Equivalent and relies on numbers to convey its arguments. Ōta would later draw on the pictographic lessons learned from this project to produce a different film with Alan Kitching (a developer of the Antics 2D-animation software system) for the United Nations University in 1984. The computer-animated Sharing for Survival (1984) made a more dynamic and cinematic film, giving a certain “flow,” if not a previously lacking grammar, to the visual language. Like its predecessor, Sharing for Survival was intended to be partly educational. But it could also be seen as something of a flashy mission statement for the United Nations University. However, the voiceover narration by the famed British actor Peter Ustinov undercuts the notion that the animated images alone could convey the film’s meaning. In his discussions of the film in Pictogram Design, Ōta maintains his focus on the notion that education and more direct communication can circumvent and supersede established and national languages.
Figure 26. The Visualizing Global Interdependencies 1979 project depicts the four major concerns of population expansion, food, energy, and pollution. Image from Aaron Marcus, “New Ways to View World Problems,” East–West Perspectives (Summer 1979): 16.
To some extent, as we have seen, emoji were born from the rising internationalization in preparation for the 1964 Olympics. So consideration of the burgeoning theories around the rise of electronic age communication and information in the 1960s will help to understand those origins. In reflecting on the geopolitical state of the world in 1963, just a few years before the coining of the term information society, philosopher and critic Yoshimoto Takaaki wrote “The Copy and the Mirror” about how our political lives were even then always already mediated:
All the events and achievements currently appearing in the world are merely mirrors that reflect the reality of events and achievements in which we dwell. And the mirror will also represent our situation.
However, in this world, bizarre things sometimes exist along with reality. In one form, “knowledge” comes from somewhere in the world like a real “thing” and it lives in our brains. In this case, what conveys “knowledge” is literally the shipping, air mail, communication, or transportation networks. So there it is clear that circulating “knowledge” has become a fetish [busshin]. Among the classical left-wing of this country, Marx’s phrase that “knowledge is merely an act of consciousness” has already ceased to exist. It is not simply that we lack this “act of consciousness”; we completely lack “conscious” human-beings.29
Yoshimoto makes plain that media (referred to here as information and communication infrastructures) do not connect with objective reality. Here he argues that the left had already been so “diffused and dispersed” over the past decades in Japan that revelation and transmission of knowledge itself would no longer reflect the economic and geostrategic realities of the postwar. Rather, he suggests that knowledge had simply become a widget traded using the information and communication infrastructure tools of the neoliberal state. Here the copying and circulation (representation or mirrors) of knowledge about the world alone would not suffice for its critique; rather, one needs to take stock of the media upon which such knowledge dwells in the world. In short, infrastructures themselves do not increase universalism or lead to higher consciousness. This clear statement of the structure of a media infrastructure system—that it manifests both types of mimesis (representation and mimicry)—is the crux of the argument in this book. And no truer a test for its idea could come than in the seemingly innocent and cute form of emoji.
A Technical History
In this vein, another history of emoji could begin in 1982 with the Sharp MZ-80K personal computer, which sold over one hundred thousand units worldwide and included sixty-eight “graphical symbols” (gurafikku kigō, such as a “nose” or “eyes”) as characters on its keyboards and systems. Subsequently, the font designer Satō Yutaka’s pictographic script (or font) on the emoji-history timeline included early versions of a “heart,” an “envelope,” a “poop,” or an “umbrella” (see Figure 27).30
Figure 27. Pictographic font, honorable mention in the symbol division (yakumono bumon) at the eighth annual Ishii Mokichi Typeface Contest in 1984. Courtesy of Type-labo.jp.
Perhaps even more pertinent to this history, however, are pagers of the midnineties that came equipped with pictures as well as characters. In 1995, NTT DoCoMo sold a pager (in Japanese, a pokeberu, a “pocket bell”) with a screen that was able to display a face with varying expressions. In a television commercial unveiling the product, a woman (played by Hazuki Riona) reading a book alone in a dark room receives a message from a man sitting in a park with another man. “I’m lonely” (samishii), reads the text on the screen of the device, white with a trim of purple and pink geometric designs. Next to the text of the message, a cartoonish face of a man with animated, upturned, plaintive eyebrows blinks, letting out a sigh of exasperation. Cut to the woman, contemplating the text and responding between this shot and the next cut. Then back to the man looking at his “manly” black and gray pager, the screen of which reads: “I’m really into you!” (daisuki), with a cute woman’s cartoon face animated in a pucker and a rose floating behind her. The ad, in its brief twenty seconds, has all the salesmanship of the new form of writing it needs; seeing is believing: the new graphics present affect.31 And this reading of emoji as conveyors of embodied affect holds through today in the common mistaking of a shared origin of emoticon and emoji.32
Figure 28. Top, Gerd Arntz’s designs for Otto Neurath’s Isotypes reproduced in Ōta Yukio, Pikutoguramu [emoji] dezain (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo, 1987). Bottom, Biomimetic representational racial diversity depicted in a screengrab from a Google image search for “turban man emoji” after the skin tone additions were announced in 2015.
Perhaps driven by similar intentions as the midcentury icon designs for education, the designers of cell phone emoji borrowed the look for their contemporary digital pictograms directly from these keyboards, fonts, pagers, and even from Isotypes. To recognize the connection from early 1920s Isotypes to contemporary emoji, compare the cell phone emoji “turban man” to Gerd Arntz’s Isotypes designs in Neurath’s work. The DoCoMo designers who borrowed the forms of some emoji from Ōta’s book took the basic appeal and the simple design of pictograms for specific marketing purposes (to open up a new, particularly “female” market for pagers), stripping away the original educational and internationalist intentions associated with the designs (see Figure 28). Identifying a particular historical or local origin of the script, then, gets us only so far. We must also judge claims to its “universality” from its function and design.
The Case for Particularism
It would be misleading to categorize all the discourse about emoji as “universalist” or “utopian” in orientation. If there is a real global revolution of emoji, however, it can be seen in the simple fact that a medium emanating from a specific moment of Japanese postwar internationalization (from echoes of early twentieth-century attempts toward global mass education in the midcentury efforts to build an international signage system at the Olympics) and from a narrow (particularly female) youth subculture circulating on Japanese mobile devices and cyberspaces became part of a global code for inscription. The movement of emoji from a local Japanese encoding system known as Shift-JIS to a global one (the pan-platform standard of Unicode) in such a short time is remarkable, if not unprecedented, and it was certainly not inevitable; Unicode’s initial rejection of emoji in 2005 was reversed only in 2008 with corporate coaxing by Apple and Google, who sought to gain smartphone market share in Japan.
The very process of encoding the emoji characters, whether in Shift-JIS or in Unicode, has led to a number of problems and happy mistakes at the level of transcriptions and interface renderings—“slips” of signification within the media system that make any claims to the “universal” mythic at best. The many confusions between signs rendered across multiple platforms show that, in some important ways, cross-platform legibility might itself constitute an equivalent of the untranslatable: when, for instance, around 2010, a given code for an emoji on a DoCoMo phone might have been displayed as a “musical” note on an AU phone and as a “pile of poo” on a SoftBank iPhone.33 Sociologist Inamasu Tatsuo writes that even despite such “difficulties concerning the compatibility between different devices and mobile phone companies,” “the characters have already obtained the right of citizenship.”34 But this lack of stable trans-platform signifiers shows precisely not only how mediation matters but, moreover, how media history and, specifically, mediation history matter. It also reminds us of the fact that local cultural histories are often part of broader technological media histories.35
So, we need to move away from the technicist myths of “universality” to realize that emoji are, and always have been, strongly embedded in cultural conditions. Beyond the meek listing of ten national flags in the original sets (later remedied by the inclusion of most United Nation flags), the Unicode set of emoji remains highly skewed toward Japanese culture. Despite the famous addition of “taco” to the emoji syllabary and its paltry attempt at biomimetic “diversification” through six skin tones in 2015, there persists a disproportional representation of Japanese cultural icons, such as sembei (rice crackers), love hotels, tengu (mythological long-nosed ghostly creatures), Japanese driving learners’ permit emblems, and curry rice. There are at least fifteen overt references to Japanese culture within the current Unicode emoji set (at least, if we trust the official name tags such as “Japanese castle” or “Japanese rice cracker”). But even some seemingly universal emoji, like the very popular “pile of poo,” are based on highly specific Japanese cultural references. When code transcription is corporatized, standardized, and made part of a system on a device, it can result in a loss or, at the very least, in a transformation of meaning.36 All “universal” aspirations and the respective discourses are limited not only by the practical realities of corporate image branding but also by linguistic realities wherein language is immediately localized—or even prelocalized—so that no image can be seen with fresh eyes.
Literary Usage and the Question of Universal Grammar
Grammar is inherently determined not by the design of emoji but by their usage. Consider an emoji novel, titled Emoji Novel (Emoji shōsetsu). It was written by a user of the pseudonym “Chicchikichī!” and posted August 10, 2007, on the Eburisuta website for digital novel distribution. Filed under the category of ren’ai (love), the fifteen-page novel is presented completely in emoji (alternating between one and seven emoji per page), telling the story of a woman who works at a hospital and a man who gambles for a living. They go on a date together and consummate their love at a love hotel. The woman then gets in some kind of trouble (we only see the emoji for “SOS”), goes to the hospital, and has a baby; the novel ends with a celebration of the newborn’s birth. Though the story is simple and short, there are instances when it becomes quite literary, if by “literary” we mean not merely the functional command of language but also the willingness to play with signification itself. In this regard, the love scene after a short fight and the later reconciliation is telling:
Figure 29. Four pages of Chicchikichī!’s 2007 emoji novel titled Emoji Novel. From the Eburisuta website for digital novel distribution.
In just four pages, we are nearly given a complete narrative of a sexual encounter.37 Reunited, the couple goes to a love hotel where they engage in acts not suitable for those under the age of eighteen, after which the woman is left in need of help. The insertion of the “blank space” of a 🔞 (“not for under eighteen” mark)—as a way of navigating a taboo subject—suggests precisely in a humorous way, but without actually showing us, what transcends the graphic signification we might expect from a love scene composed not of words but of pictures. By navigating around highly sexualized emoji such as the “eggplant” and the “peach,” and by merely giving us a “blank space,” the novel adheres to time-honored novel and film aesthetics that cut away or substitute the acts themselves with figurative expressions. What is lacking in the short staccato flashes of meaning in Chicchikichī!’s work is a clear grammar. Consider page 1:
Figure 30. Page of Chicchikichī!’s 2007 emoji novel titled Emoji Novel. From the Eburisuta website for digital novel distribution.
Clearly, there is a woman. But is she at a hospital, receiving a shot to get strong—to then go on to spend money? Or is there something else going on? As in many modernist novels that teach their readers how to read them, the following page seems to instruct us how to interpret the first through a sort of parallel construction:
Figure 31. Page of Chicchikichī!’s 2007 emoji novel titled Emoji Novel. From the Eburisuta website for digital novel distribution.
Here, the man is gambling for money. This might lead us to reflect back to reconsider the woman’s situation as well. Perhaps, we see now, the first page is meant as a comment on her employment and her means of making money. She administers medicine to cure people at a hospital for a living. In any case, the potential for confusion, I would argue, stems from the use of the arrows. They are obviously stand-ins for actions or verbs. The reader is forced to try to understand, not necessarily in a uniform method, the action that is supposed to take place here.
We can see a similar communicative tension when emoji stories on video (even prior to Animoji) try to animate emoji. Years before Hollywood produced The Emoji Movie (2017), numerous videos that animated emoji had already been posted online, such as the popular YouTube video “Game of Phones,” a translation of the television series Game of Thrones into an all-emoji video. In such video experiments, a montage of otherwise static images (flashing between different emoji) often assumes the role of the “grammatical” arrows above.38 Such use of cinematic grammar gestures toward the problems and gaps in the everyday usage of emoji as word-for-word substitutions. Such animating of emoji highlights not simply what functions emoji usually lack (grammar) but also what they tend to afford us (visual-verbal communication).
That is to say, the real revolution of emoji (if there was one at all) was the quick pervasiveness and penetration of the script across several platforms in a short span of time (not simply the ability to send pictures). Visual communication through pictorial symbols was at least theoretically possible on mobile phones through telemessaging, GIFs, and later shamēru (mobile phone photography as marketed by i-mode in 2000) long before the advent of emoji as a keyboard script input choice on platforms beyond the Japanese ones.39 It follows then that either there is something unique about the pictogram script that gives cell phone emoji a special place and meaning among ideographic languages or there is nothing new under the sun since cave paintings.
A Genealogy of the “Poop” Emoji
A genealogy of one specific emoji can demonstrate the ways in which the script, even today, fails to attain the level of a “universal” or “transhistorical” signified, while continuously hinting at such a domain. The “pile of poo” (unko or unchi māku, “poop mark”), spotted almost everywhere in our digital media environment, might indicate some directions. Perhaps we should recognize that part of the popularity of the “pile of poo” emoji might be related to the global interest in the “poop” shape because of its characteristic swirl (the makiguso or makifun), even before it came to be labeled thus in Japan. Notably, the Japanese Wikipedia page for unko māku lists the engraving The Perfumer, created by French craftsman Bernard Picart (1673–1733), as an origin for the shape of our pile today, though the equally authoritative 2006 packaging of a toilet calendar (by Yakult yogurt) recalls, as a kind of fun fact, a Japanese Edo-period version as one of the earliest examples.40 But the premodern history of the shape of “swirly poop” does not quite explain its emoji anthropomorphization and the seemingly global fascination with it today.
To understand the meaning of the “pile of poo” at a deeper level, our discussion of universal humanism, media, mimesis, Japan, and emoji can benefit from a consideration of Gomi Tarō’s most elegant work of Japanese literature, first published as Minna unchi in 1977. Following its translation into English as Everyone Poops, the book became a mainstay in children’s world literature, perhaps as the result of its titular universal humanism.41 Everybody poops, but how we express ourselves about it differs. Fundamentally, we humans all may seem to defecate, but the book goes beyond the human in its enumeration of who counts as “everyone.” The educational (potty-training) book includes animals as its most basic set of candidates, only then building toward the human. In this sense, we can speak of a “universal animalism” if we include humans in the category of “animal” (as does the literal translation of the respective Japanese term dōbutsu, “animate things”). But maybe the notion that “everyone poops” is nothing but a commonplace fiction if it is expanded this broadly; maybe everyone only thinks that “everyone poops” or wants it to be the case that “everyone poops.” Beyond the simple medical fact that many animals today (also some of the human variety) have to rely on colostomy bags or had their digestive tracts removed almost entirely, Gomi’s book does not consider the possibility of a sentient machine—that is, a body without poop. In short, what about androids? Do they poop electric poop?
At one historical root of our globally popular “pile of poo” emoji, we encounter the robot. The “poop” emoji—at least in its playful form and usage—became part of the highly intertextual and self-referential world of Japanese popular culture after one significant appearance in Toriyama Akira’s manga (and later television anime series) Dr. Slump (1980–84). The series revolves around the hapless Norimaki Senbei, otherwise known as Doctor Slump, and his invention, the android girl Arare (a.k.a. Arale).
Figure 32. Commercial star Ayami Nakajō plays the automaton Arare in a commercial for fashion brand GU in 2016. The character is identified by her cap and her main prop, poop on a stick.
Famously, Arare prods a pile of swirly poop with a stick asking it if it is lost, to which the faceless poop responds, “Go away; poop can’t talk!” Further anthropomorphization (occasionally adding feet, eyes, and mouths) and chromatic shifts (from a dark brown to pink) happen when Arare and the shit she prods appear as minor characters in Toriyama’s later and even more popular series Dragon Ball (1984–95). The stick became associated with the icon when the “poop” was marketed in the form of countless collectible goods such as poop-on-a-stick pillows, pens, and cell phone accessories. So, the vast international success of the Dragon Ball franchise might help to explain the adoption of the “poop” icon into the award-winning font dingbats in 1984, into pagers in 1996, and into Japanese cell phone emoji sets in 1998. We can then imagine the Unicode gatekeepers, through laziness or fun, approving all the famous Japanese characters as a set already time-tested and proven within the Japanese media ecology. But, since the “pile of poop” persistently remains in the top one hundred characters used, and since we can assume that most global emoji-users are not simply Dragon Ball fans, what could explain this emoji’s popularity beyond its culture of origination?42 I suggest that it is likely a kind of reverse mimesis. The remediation of the “poop mark” into digital environments betrays a truth some of us might rather not admit: globally, a primary site of cell phone use is the toilet.
What do we make out of this fertile mess? The “poop” character in our phones helps us to engage with our actual world, not simply to represent a universal condition; rather, it helps us to think about the poop on our phones. According to one study, as many as one-sixth of all cell phones today are covered with fecal matter and dangerous bacteria such as E. coli.43 Emoji eloquently reaffirms the toilet not just as a site of texting but also as a site of reading. The “pile of poo” suggests what we probably already know about our new media—too many of us are spending far too long on the toilet with our new media gadgets. This mimicry might show us the true reason why the “poop” emoji is so popular globally, which is to say that the “poop” emoji is both a sign of our contemporary media consumption and a manifestation of its waste. Whether the global appeal of emoji stems from a kind of close or iconic representation of our collective lives or a universal life (we dance, we get sick, we are happy, we cry, we sweat, we poop) or whether they simply provide the necessary means for a new kind of contentless communication given the new media of texting cultures and social media on portable smartphones, part of the appeal, judging both from the character set composition and their usage, is simply the tight connection between the character set and the body.
What I want to suggest is that the “pile of poo” emoji is popular because of the way it not only conditions us to our newly remediated reality but also refers to that new reality in which both the fecal matter represented in our phone screens and the fecal matter actually on phones coalesce and become, if not indistinguishable, at least parallel. The “poop” emoji might not, therefore, be popular because poop is universal but because one particular use of the cell phone might be, if not universal, at least broadly popular. The “poop” character in our phones helps us engage with our daily situation of carrying this powerful medium with us. So the sign can be read not so much as a symbol or symptom of a real situation as an iconic mark or stain of the situation itself.
Mixed with jovial attitudes, the utopian rhetoric of universal language and free access around emoji suggests a free transmission of information—free from the need to translate and interpret and free from the cost of distribution, free from the sense that critical historical cultural media studies would be necessary. Noting the prevalence of emoji, the discrepancies in transcriptions on different platforms, and the hikikomori phenomenon, Inamasu writes: “In this sense, ‘universality’ and the ‘closed nature’ entailed in pictogrammic communication as it is (even while advancing us towards isolation) is synchronizing with the composition of modern society developing under globalization.”44 Emoji are emblematic of the way in which our presentist, utopian images of new media function as harbingers of a rosy future of globalization or one-worldism and a mythical prelinguistic past. Neurath’s distinction between humanism, which brings high-level and complex information to a number of people, and popularization, which brings simplified, watered-down information to the greatest number of people, is important here; clearly emoji have skipped Neurath’s first mode and jumped to the second. This is not inherent in the script; indeed, as Ōta’s attention to verbal pictographs in his LoCoS script shows us, it is possible with the addition of new grammatical (particularly verbal) emoji that the script will become less rebus-like and more linguistic in its usage over time. But whether as a step back to cave paintings or one forward to a one-worldist paradise where miscommunication ceases, or both in a kind of postmodern global village, what is assumed in the varied responses and uses is that emoji are somehow clearly different in the way they signify, that they are ahistorical, acultural things in a way that differs from many other scripted languages that are ready to hand.
It is not that by using emoji we are now speaking a universalized Japanese language but that the medium itself has grown larger than the local, even as it still retains the mark of its origins. The scene of our mobile use is not so mobile but rather stuck in some very localizable sites. If the train is a common site for mobile life in Japan, driving while texting in the driving cultures may serve as a corollary outside Japan. But whether sitting on a Toto or an American Standard, understanding originally intended usages of emoji or not, the site of the toilet seems nearly universal. Emoji today are nearly universal in their prevalence and penetration but not in our usage. Different groups will use them differently. This is the closest to the promise of a being-in-common we might get. This is what the new real in practice looks like: a bunch of people on the cusp of becoming globalized just now prodding poop.
To give it one final prod, we need to return to thinking about the body proper. Using emoji to emote universal affect or represent a universal or particular human body has not been enough. We have not only started to think in emoji and see them, but also, with facial recognition on our phones and the advent of Memoji and Animoji, we have in some sense become emoji. This raises the question of what or who is being modified in the skin tone modifiers: Is it the emoji or is it us? Are emoji representing racial particulars or are we miming those presented by emoji?45 White users of emoji have, according to several studies, a pronounced tendency to opt out of setting skin tone options because “proclaiming whiteness . . . felt uncomfortably close to displaying ‘white pride,’” a fact that raised the question of whether such choice to opt out was itself the manifestation of a racial privilege unthinkable for some users of color.46 Because only the tones but not the facial features had changed in 2015, one powerful though misdirected critique arose: “These new figures aren’t emoji of color; they’re just white emoji wearing masks.”47 In other words, the putatively racially neutral features of the early emoji sets were thought themselves to be white in their facial features. Regardless of whether they were white, Japanese, or neutral (universal or iconic), the fact that the birth of emoji skin tones enabled a new representationist critique of emoji itself points to the fact that the change in new media script had transformed how it could be discussed.
There are times when the material world is the ground for the form of cultural material in the world (representation) and times when it is not (mimicry). Emoji were, to a significant extent, made in Japan; the original emoji sets depicted the human body as strictly yellow in tone. Yet these two facts have little to do with one another in a causal way. It is true that Asian technologies hold a particularly fetishized place in the global imaginary; it is also true that many global technologies actually were made in Asia. The second fact embodied in material reality should not offset the first, also embodied in a material reality that is constructed and mediated through cultural material. The yellow’s putative origins are as connected to the 1960s “Have a Nice Day” smiley (designed by Harvey Ross Ball and the brothers Bernard and Murray Spain) as they are to the development of that particular shade of chrome yellow.48 In other words, the fact that the humanoid figures of the original emoji set were yellow is historically unrelated to the fact that emoji first appeared in a country whose people have long existed in the racist imaginary as having that skin tone.
An insistence to pay attention to Japanese media history is not to claim that the yellow skin of pre-2015 emoji must be read as Asian. Rather, this insistence (an insistence on the new real itself) is to argue that we cannot simply discount the kind of techno-orientalist reading of emoji that would do so. Of course, the historical argument about Ball’s smiley face would have little bearing on a techno-orientalist critique of the original emoji set in terms of the yellow skin, because, indeed, the yellow emoji set once embedded in our media has to function in a world in which racism and techno-orientalism are part of lived reality. Ignoring the yellow tone of the originals, some argue that despite their 2015 racial diversification via skin tone modifiers, even yellow emoji “continue to technically center whiteness in the emoji set as an extension of American technoculture.”49 Other studies show the tendency toward whiteness is least profound in the American context and more pronounced, for instance, in Africa and Asia.50 The point here is not to argue about whether users choose a mediated skin tone that matches their embodied one on the Fitzpatrick scale as an attempt to find some sort of representative or immediate connection between body and media but that users recognize their choice of skin tone will have effects on their meaning because their choice has to function in the world. After the advent of racial diversity modifiers in 2015, the default tone of emoji remains yellow; but to consider the tone neutral would be to ignore the demand for such skin tone modifiers in the first place.
Ultimately, the problem with emoji and race is not unlike the problem with CG and techno-orientalism with which this book began. We have already spoken of the simulation that CG can play with the human body and the importance of paying attention to the real bodies that will always underpin virtual bodies in CG cinema.51 Yet it would be irrational from a formal or historical evidentiary standpoint to argue that emoji are yellow because Asian or Asian because yellow: humans (even severely jaundiced ones) are not chrome yellow; yellow comes from the transport of the smiley face and its supposed communication of affect into the new media world. And yet, once included in the writing systems on our phones that exist in the world with racism and techno-orientalism, it would be completely rational to read them in this way. To do so is just to acknowledge what it means to live with technology in the world, to experience the new real.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.