Japan as Cyberspace

Especially in the age of cyberspace, Japan has become a medium for thinking about mediation. To understand this assertion, it will help to recount some recent histories of the concept of media and theories of cyberspace.

John Guillory’s excavation of many historical concepts of media reveals how “media” have tended to presuppose a distance between worlds, dimensions, realms, or layers to be mediated: “The enabling condition of mediation is the interposition of distance (spatial, temporal, or even notional) between the terminal poles of the communication process (these can be persons but also now machines, even persons and machines).”1 As connectors in a communication model around the advent of information studies, media were often positioned as lines in the distance or space between nodes, often reduced to wires. This narrow vision of medium has not been its primary conception through its long and expansive history. According to Guillory, the pivotal moment in the history of media came in the wake of World War I, when the term became associated with conjuring spirits from the other world. In that moment, media came to be seen primarily as a means of communication. Previously, medium had been thought of simply as the material on or in which art had been brought into existence or made manifest.2 But it was the advent of a person acting as an embodied conjurer of the dead (indeed, in many cases an actor) that the question of media and mediation as a connector of two otherwise separate worlds, dimensions, or levels became well known.

Guillory’s notion of “distantiation” incorporates and exceeds the basic concept of distance posited in the information studies communicative models, where it is simply the space between two points: sender and receiver, writer and reader, artist and audience, creator and consumer. Rethought to include instances when the sender is also a receiver and vice versa, when both sender and receiver themselves are media, or when the message has less to do with a substance or content delivered than the biographical details or identities of the poles, the grander concept of media (including both information studies models and spiritualists conjuring other planes of existence) allows for a wider sense of what is at stake in contemporary uses of the term. With the human embodiment of the bridge in the distantiation, the gadgetry, mechanism, trick, or cheat of the media concept comes into high relief, embodied as an active, subjective agent rather than as a transparent window. In this sense, media are necessarily relational and often liminal, on the edge between this world and that, but not completely here or there. They are more than conduits or bridges; they can be virtual—both here and elsewhere, as well as the form that connects the notion of the here with the elsewhere. As originally conceived, cyberspace was just such a space. And the “here” or proper place of cyberspace was Japan.

Since the 1990s, the perspective of Japan as a medium that conjures or channels another place of pure artifice has been vividly theorized through the ideas of cyberspace. William Gibson’s notion of cyberspace was anchored in the real world—in some sense “Japan” was necessary or proper to his neologism. Subsequent ideas about cyberspace bore the taint of this imagined exotic Japaneseness even when they did not ever make those connections explicit. Such exoticism is a willful “blindness” that is ontologically productive; as Karatani Kōjin argues, such Kantian “bracketing [of] other concerns” is the origin of aesthetics as such.3 Slavoj Žižek’s attempts to conceptualize the social importance of cyberspace beginning in the late 1990s relate a particular kind of aestheticized blindness to the world that creates the aesthetics of the new medium. In “Cyberspace, or The Unbearable Closure of Being,” Žižek begins with the example of J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon,” in which the main character willingly chooses to blind himself in order to enjoy his continued dreamlike visions.4 Žižek’s reading lines up this fiction with that of Plato’s cave, Saki’s “The Open Window,” Roland Emmerich’s Stargate, and Orson Welles’s The Trial to highlight willful play with phantasmatic media (such as dreams, cave walls, windows, gates, and doors) that provide vantage points to connect with other spaces that seem more desirable than either the reality embodied in the (corporeal, social) world (of labor, scarcity, irrationality) or the directly inaccessible infinite (Lacanian) real. For Žižek, it is the preference for the virtual or simulacrum that reproduces the structures of desire apparent in the mass participatory behaviors of the internet.5 In this sense, Žižek is less interested in the medium per se than in how cyberspace provides a real-world instantiation of long-running human psychological concerns about the ontological status of being and reality. What happens when a country itself takes the place of that threshold or medium?

Critic Azuma Hiroki picks up Žižek’s thread dealing with cyberspace as a simulacrum in a series of essays published in Intercommunication between 1997 and 2000. There, Azuma fixates on computer graphics (CG) in films and video games as the visual instantiation of the absent presence of simulacra.6 Mindful of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious in the spatial and temporal magnification and expansion that media can produce, Azuma recognizes that media can capture aspects of the otherwise imperceptible real, resulting in a consequent lack or loss of what Benjamin would term “aura.” Azuma parallels this form of simulacrum based on a distortion of reality with Lacan’s notion that the Other “does not exist.” For Azuma, the notion that CG can create spaces, people, and things that do not exist outside of the media is an almost perfect analogue for what he, following Žižek, terms a degradation of the Symbolic register or an end of the Symbolic era. This supposition about postmodern loss of meaning relies, of course, on the assumption of the existence of an earlier time when media supposedly had a more direct relation to reality.7 Azuma claims that CG, the internet, and, implicitly, all such virtualizing media require new metaphors to help us understand them. In his view, the old visual and spatial metaphors and representations (such as mirrors) no longer suffice to help us grasp our state of mediation.

For his explication of cyberspace, Azuma lands on the thinking of science fiction writer Bruce Sterling and others, who propose “mirrorshades” as the appropriate metaphor for the literary form of cyberpunk.8 At a key moment in his essay, Azuma quotes Samuel Delany from an interview with critic Takayuki Tatsumi, elaborating on the aviator sunglasses popular in the 1970s and 1980s as the exemplary metaphor for cyberspace:

What are mirrorshades, after all? They’re a thin film of reflective mylar. They cut off your gaze—at any rate, darken what you see. At the same time, they mask the gaze’s source. Someone looking at you cannot tell whether you’re looking at them or looking away. Thus, they both mask the gaze and distort the gaze. They protect us against a painful light. At the same time, they displace the gaze of the reader, who must always look at himself or herself any time she or he seeks to find the origin of the gaze. All you can find is yourself. . . . Well, they constitute the structure of a particular displacement of the notion of vision—and since the whole notion of the gaze comes from Lacan, and from Lacan’s emphasis on the mirror stage, the text becomes someplace where you look to see what’s going on, only what you see is yourself looking at the text to see what’s going on—while at the same time, the text presents a gaze that is somehow darkened, distorted, and reflected. . . . It’s not quite clear whether you’re the one wearing the mirrorshades or whether the text is wearing them. I think in cyberpunk the text is wearing them—the mirrorshades.9

In this statement, Delany explains how “mirrorshades” work to capture the cyberpunk aesthetic, as well as how they function in society. Azuma takes this notion of the mirrorshades as being emblematic not only of cyberpunk but also of cyberspace itself. He aligns the metaphor with Derrida’s notion of a visor effect (“effet de visière”) in his reading of the ghost of the father in Hamlet, who wears armor and a helmet with the beaver up, essentially giving Hamlet and the audience a sense of being watched by a faceless spirit.10 For Azuma, whether mirrorshades or the ghost’s visor, the weight of the idea of the absent presence falls more significantly on the absence side, in his paralleling of the two forms of headgear with cyberspace. This is because for him, it is the ability to dwell in cyberspace as an anonymous participator that enables a kind of free subjectivity. This cyberutopian idea that we can participate in without a trace leading back to an individual outside of the network is key and later led Azuma to reconceive cyberspace as Rousseau’s participative democracy—precisely this sort of anonymous participatory space.11 But this notion of cyberspace as virtual simulacrum that disconnects users from the world by transitioning them into virtual selves or avatars is a core problem with Azuma’s thinking of cyberspace and media in general.12

The notion that anonymity holds in cyberspace (or behind the mirrorshades of a 1970s California highway patrolman, for that matter) is but an imaginary fantasy.13 And although Azuma acknowledges that the internet relies on the material infrastructure of “telephone lines, antennas, modems, tuners and computers,” ultimately he argues that “‘media space’ and ‘cyberspace’ do not physically exist.”14 His argument amounts to a willful ignorance of its own, a dismissal of work like Lev Manovich’s that places cyberspace squarely as a product of the Cold War military-industrial complex.15 This is because Azuma fundamentally believes the postmodern hype that we have now drifted away from traditional meaning-making structures (like the Symbolic), when in fact new media simply present another moment of having to rediscover how meanings are made (a new occasion or context for understanding the Symbolic). In short, Azuma emphasizes the power of hiding identity behind the mask or screen, the anonymity of the web, as being the sum total of agency itself.16 And, of course, even in today’s cyberspace that always already seeks to hide its origins and technical apparatus in favor of smooth, frictionless consumer experience, there is also a more distributed form of power, a force that accumulates through peeking behind the mirrorshades, in reading code, in calculating the carbon footprint of its servers, in understanding algorithms, and in reconnecting IP addresses to actual people in order, for instance, to assign blame for cybercrime or responsibility for cyberparticipation.17 We have reached a moment in history when our recognition of new symbols may be lacking because we have yet to develop a dynamic sense of the new media.

In a way, the postmodern (to which Azuma too often clings) describes not the real as such, not an actually new crisis in signification, but a bubble in signification, one pumped up like a bubble economy on hype. And like an economic bubble, this bubble in signification marks a precarity of presentism that ignores the inevitable futurity when such bubbles pop and the real returns with force. Just as the bursting of a bubble economy indicates a time when our debts will have to be paid and real values will be reassigned to the formerly inflated ones, so too will behaviors in cyberspace have real-world effects when people are directly identified with their online avatars. To understand the importance of cyberspace as a useful example and metaphor for thinking about media, to reground its importance as today’s medium par excellence, it is not enough to recognize, as Azuma does, that the shared symbolic and material ground for the internet does not simply reside in the infrastructure of its servers and networks. Rather, the quasi-reality of a Japan imagined by techno-orientalists from Gibson to NTT DoCoMo (the corporation that was Japan’s primary internet provider and published Intercommunication, the journal in which Azuma launched his ideas on cyberspace), the neither-past-nor-future, neither-here-nor-there-like reality of Japan is the ontological reality that founds the media concept today as such. In other words, cyberspace is like mirrorshades—not because we cannot see the person behind the glasses, but because it makes a performance of not being able to see behind them. It is a performance in which the wearer appears to be unknowable but is either knowable or theoretically discoverable. If cyberspace can be read through the metaphor of mirrorshades, Japan is the name behind the japanning veneer of the internet.

Further developing Azuma’s thoughts on cyberspace in the provocative book Media Do Not Exist (Media wa sonzai shinai), Lacanian psychoanalyst and occasional media theorist Saitō Tamaki complicates notions of the real and virtual in productive ways. For Azuma, as we have seen, the essence of cyberspace is its virtuality (extant nonexistence). But for Saitō, who draws more deeply on Lacan, the insubstantiality of CG and their relation to the Lacanian Other must be considered in a different way. Ultimately, Saitō understands the notion of “does not exist” in the vein of Lacan’s notion that “the Woman does not exist” (“la Femme n’existe pas”). Individual women exist, the stereotype exists, but the stereotypical woman does not.18 So too with Saitō’s titular homage to Lacan, where he substitutes “the media” for Lacan’s “the Woman”: though Media writ large does not exist, we have uncountable instances or examples of media. We cannot study Media per se, but we can study its examples—for instance, a given medium.

To make this argument, Saitō connects questions of virtuality and cyberspace with the psychosociological prison experiment conducted at Stanford University in 1971. The human subject simulations in that experiment became, for the participants, the real thing. The experiment was canceled early when participants role-playing as guards and inmates began to exhibit all too real and violent prison-like behaviors. To Saitō, this experiment is an example of cyberspace, meaning that, if given enough time and pressure, virtual behaviors in cyberspace become real.19 At a certain point, the simulation ceases to simulate and simply becomes our lived reality. The primary point of difference between Saitō’s view of cyberspace and Azuma’s comes down to this having-become-real quality of the virtual: for Azuma mirrorshades present a dark bar beyond which the gaze cannot penetrate; for Saitō the virtual performance in the cyberspace will necessarily bleed into the real.

Saitō views cyberspace as part of the world of information. To explain our informatization, he deems “rendering” (as in CG) to be a primary function of digital media. That is, as he defines it, media render data so that data can be perceivable or understandable by humans. Rendering is thus a metaphor for thinking about data or information processing, though for Saitō it never rises to the level of an interpretation of data. Rather, he sees rendering or mediation as a conversion or transformation (henkan), a reworking in different terms, or what other media theorists might call a remediation of data. Saitō is then proposing something like a rigid distinction or difference between a passive transliteration and a creative translation. Like Azuma, Saitō is interested in the problem of what rendering means when it creates an actor without a body in our world. Not exactly creating a virtual body out of thin air but out of digitized data. What does it mean that media can create a reality? Here again there is an echo of the notion that media do not exist. But Saitō recognizes that, once rendered, the rendered image has a substance; it exists not in a generalizable way but in a very specific mode that can act in and on the world.

Cyberspace and media in a sense create or name the dichotomy between the real and the simulacra they purport to bridge. Tracking the history of new media from photography to computing, Lev Manovich notes a return of computing to the original function of media “as information carrier, nothing less, nothing more,” that accompanied the birth of the Zuse computer that used discarded film as the medium for programming, thus abandoning the “pretense” of new media’s “simulations of sensible reality.”20 Yet with the increased connectivity of networked systems, size of informational storage potential, and speed of computing power, the rendering of the particular new medium of cyberspace has brought the digital full circle back to a medium that promises precisely the delivery of such simulacra. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun narrates a similar disillusionment with cyberspace itself over the course of the nineties that began with utopian dreams over anonymity and ended with dystopian nightmares of surveillance:

The image of the Internet has shifted radically from the mid to late 1990s, when it was seen as “cyberspace,” an anonymous and empowering space of freedom in which no one knew if you were a dog, to the mid to late 2010s, when the Internet was commonly conceived of as a space of total surveillance or as a privatized space of social media. In both cases, knowing who was a dog and who was not was key.21

The confusion of humans and dogs before new media will compose a portion of the end of this chapter and so will be left alone here. But the transition from the initial utopian rhetoric of a free place of play to the system of control functioning around the identity of the sender is key to the functioning of the new media system. Or as Chun puts it elsewhere: “If online communications threaten to submerge users in representation—if they threaten to turn users into media spectacles—high-tech Orientalism allows people to turn a blind eye to their own vulnerability and to enjoy themselves while doing so, to enjoy one’s emasculation.”22 Cyberspace enables two modes of mimesis: representation of identity (that either comports with a body or does not) as well as disguise through mimicry.

In sum, the concept of media at once presents a distance and the bridging of the distance. Media are neither quite entirely here nor completely elsewhere. In other words, the concept of media is so troubling that it forces us to search for other words, to repeat it in different ways, represent it in smaller, more tangible modes—modes that are more ready-to-hand than not, more here than there. Digital media of recent years (CG and cyberspace) have provided some key examples with which to think through these problems of media. And yet they, too, have been explications or metaphors that require still other examples and analogues for understanding (such as mirrorshades, the Stanford prison experiments, and many other possibilities). As such, the concept of media is thoroughly imbricated with mimesis.

Mimesis in Japan

Thus far, mimesis has played a minor role in both media studies and Japanese studies. This probably has as much to do with the way the disciplines draw their borders as it does with the historical concerns of these disciplines. Media studies tends to emphasize the technological system of the medium as a means of communicating information. In such work, the focus is on the quality or fidelity of message transfer within the system, often regardless of fidelity of the input to the real world outside of the system.23 And oddly, in focusing on the affordances of the technological apparatus, media studies tends to ignore technique (despite the recent spate of treatises using the word technê), drawing less on the skills of the human beings and bodies involved in the cultivation of the external (to body) media.24 Mimetic theory has long considered the representation of the world in art, or the art of mimicry by human beings and their bodies, as a skill that has a transformative role in the world. This is why it can be mutually beneficial to bring communication and media studies together with disciplines such as anthropology and literature that are traditionally more interested in questions of mimesis. In addition, both media and mimetic studies have largely remained Western and even anglophone in orientation, despite anomalous and stochastic use of non-Western examples, and even though so much of our audio, video, and digital media equipment have been produced in Asia since the dawn of the discipline. This is one reason why bringing a study of Japanese media into this discussion can be fruitful.

The intertwining and problematic concepts of media and mimesis are the spine that runs through and binds the case studies of this book together. The expansion of media studies beyond the press and mass media to book history, screen studies, and information systems over the past several decades and the trendiness of the term media have raised questions about its precision and continued utility.25 Yet despite doubts about the term, it remains useful not only because it is a valuable ontological category in mainstream discourse but also because it pinpoints a conundrum in the age-old text/context or content/frame distinctions. The conundrum is this: there is no clear way to determine how the content of any media directly affects the world (there is no clear line connecting what happens within cultural products and their various receptions); yet, at the same time, this lack of direct and determinable impact does not mean that content is entirely disconnected from the world or without world-changing possibilities. The concept of media directly labels this problem. As a bridge (or connection between inside and outside), media continue to provide a useful rubric for considering the problem of relating what is in the system and what is outside of it. In short, attention to media and mediation helps articulate the paths connecting content and frame, text and context, culture (from art and information to criticism and knowledge) and the objective real world. And it is in this final connection to the real world that mimetic theories can be helpful.

If, as Akira Lippit, Marc Steinberg, and Alexander Zahlten argue, the media concept is a problematic import in the Japanese instance, then the same critique can be made even more strongly for mimesis, a Western term of ancient Greek origin.26 To study Japanese media in the terms of mimesis could seem like yet another example of the colonial technique of mining non-Western sources for the service and application of Western theory. This book is an effort to generate a broad and deep understanding of how the multiple concepts of mimesis could help media studies; how media history might add nuance to theories of mimesis; how mimesis continues to have relevance as a product of convergent evolution of thought and homogenization of cultures via globalization and modernization and the accompanying homogenization and diversification of new media technologies. If theories of mimesis have been seen by many as a Western form of representation, it is because the rise of the printed word (logos) in modernity itself has displaced one of the aspects of mimesis already present in the ancient Greek notion—mimicry (mimos).27 To put it another way, theories of mimesis written in the print era are already transformed by print media and, therefore, tend to overemphasize its representational aspects while neglecting the mimicry embedded in the original term.28 Consideration of Japan’s alternative modernity within the variegated global modernity allows us to see the global modern as multifaceted, creative, multipolar, unevenly distributed, and asynchronous.29

To some degree, attention to mimesis and mimetic theory is already present in Japanese culture and Japanese studies, as there are at least three native Japanese concepts that correspond roughly to the three major strains of mimesis examined here. The Japanese aesthetic tradition of ari no mama (things as they are), the Noh drama principle of monomane (imitation of things), and the Japanese visual arts concept of mitate (resemblance) all resemble ideas encompassed in the term mimesis. But they do not correspond perfectly: unlike traditional views of mimesis as representation in the West, the desire to present things ari no mama is not simply a representational realism.30 And unlike standard views of mimicry as mimesis, the concept of monomane, for instance, is not a mirror or perfect copy but, according to Noh drama theorist Zeami Motokiyo, when done best, a distortion that gestures ironically toward its own imitation.31 Likewise, beyond metaphorical understandings of visual mimesis, mitate does not simply implore viewers to see one thing as another but to see the one thing through the other, to see how such a metaphor or re-presentation transforms or bends the thing itself—noting the critique and irony that accrue through repetition with differences.32 These historical terms might provide the beginnings of a traditional Japanese mode of considering mimesis. More recently, there have been other specific ways in which mimesis has been used in Japanese studies. Japanese linguists rely on the concept of mimesis today to explain the proliferation of Japanese onomatopoeias as a technical term for sound symbolism.33 And occasionally Japanese art history and history use mimesis as a foil to the role of originality and creativity.34 But such historical reverse translations of native terms or current-day applications to Japanese culture of a predefined notion of mimesis are not the subject of this book.

Rather, this book takes as a starting point the modern moment, in which the globe directly matters as much for culture on the Japanese archipelago as it does elsewhere. Mimesis is considered not simply as a universal, human faculty but also as a useful way to understand long-running concerns about media that remain with us today. Since the contemporary study of media is itself a conceptual product of global and alternative modernities, this approach makes sense. The study of something like “Japanese media” is imbricated in the modern moment, in which the concepts of mimesis and media are already active and too often assumed or neglected. This book attempts to challenge the disciplinary inclinations of both media studies and Japanese studies to disregard the importance of the mimesis concept, in both senses of representation and mimicry.

Even when we are holding in our hands what is sold as a sign of the future that will connect us more immediately to the world, we resort to comparisons with the media of the past. Even as it sells the novelty of the new, the marketing and remediation of new media tacitly acknowledge their connections to the past. This explains why, for the debut of the camera function on mobile phones in 2001, a television commercial by Japanese telecom company au by KDDI contrived a convoluted explanation of why anyone would want a camera on their phone. The commercial depicted a man (played by charismatic star Asano Tadanobu) bumping into an old acquaintance. Sucked into conversation, Asano’s character is at a loss for how he knows the apparent acquaintance. The acquaintance recalls the wedding of a mutual friend, Okamoto. Asano snaps a photo and sends it to the mutual friend with the message: “What’s this guy’s name?”35 In doing so au by KDDI draws on the late nineteenth-century discourse of the photograph as a form of portable identity that had been solidified soon after the arrival of photography as a mass medium.36 Here we have a very old problem (identity and recognition) being solved through the marriage of photography with the new tools of the mobile phone camera and its high-speed connection.

This issue is widespread; for instance, the rampant use of skeuomorphic design, as when digital media interfaces reference the analog world, exemplifies such remediating tendencies. One way to measure a new medium’s connection to the past would be by tracking the ornamental leftovers from a previous era still lingering in the new media, as when a narrative film changes scene by the contrivance of a page turn, or when television is referred to as the electric kamishibai (paper theater), or when mobile phones’ buttons seem to emit tones (which had in the previous era actually started the connection signal), or how keyboards today maintain the QWERTY layout despite the fact that it was developed to slow typing so as to prevent key jams endemic on typewriters with speedier keyboard layouts. Such taking stock of media nostalgia through remediation is one measure of traditional mimesis (in which media represent the world as given, to the point of representing media within that world), keeping the newness at bay, translating the known and acceptable and now seemingly natural through the supposedly new, or even the reverse—translating the putatively new through the known.

What is old seems real, so through remediation, the new media seem to connect us to the real by bringing such old media effects into updated forms. Long after the disappearance of analog filing cabinets and folders from physical office spaces, they linger on in digital environments, shaping our ability to conceive of alternative hierarchical structures for organizing information. But the success or failure of skeuomorphic design features is dependent on the fact that the media (like mirrors) exist as objects in our world and so play a role in its slow transformation through successive mediations. The media’s secondary function as a mirror of our world is well articulated in Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, which helps us recognize the ways in which clear access to reality, often fetishized by the marketing of new media, neglects the presence of the media in reality.37 Marketed as both an “other space” and as an access point to reality, new media can be a portal opening into “other spaces” of reality that occupy space here in our hands or at our fingertips. The notion that the space being represented through media is truly other to the here and now is mythological. It is not another space that can be accessed through the media, because it is already ready to hand. To grasp represented space as other denies the material objective reality of its mediated existence. Recognizing this dual structure of media as both the conveyor of the message and part of the message is another way of understanding hyperreality, a meta-real that encompasses all others, such that there can be no other reality to the real. Rather than in their representative claims on immediacy, it is in the way media occupy space that they become transformative, making human beings behave in accordance with their affordances (mimicry) because of their presence in the world.

Mimesis and the New Real

There are numerous definitions for the obscure yet foundational word mimesis. In some renderings, mimesis forms a basis for the concept of media. John Guillory understands the development of the media concept as a historical pivot away from mimesis because he sees mimesis primarily in its representational mode. For him, the media concept resolves problems in the consideration of art in the world by focusing on the systemic issues defined in communication studies.38 But Stephen Halliwell resuscitates the term mimesis by showing the complexity of the multifarious early recorded uses of the term. According to Halliwell, the discourse on the word has been divided since its various meanings appeared in ancient Greece. He identifies five subcategories of definitions within conceptual families of mimetic ideas: resemblance, imitation, impersonation, expressive sound, and metaphysical conformity.39 Halliwell then distills these various definitions of mimesis into largely two categories, identifying a tension present in the term from Aristotle through Goethe and continuing today, between representation and mimicry. These two major modes of mimesis (art imitating life and life imitating art) inform the histories of the media presented in this book, even as they clear a path for other considerations: life imitates life; art imitates art; everything is imitation; nothing imitates anything. In all of these possibilities, media as a means for imitation can facilitate and impede, and as the manifestation of mimesis in the world, media are one link between the mediated world and the world in which media dwells.

The major poles of mimesis (representation and mimicry) are overlapping and intertwined rather than mutually exclusive. In its representational mode the medium is said to reflect the world and in its miming mode the medium is said to affect or change the world directly or indirectly by inspiring its users, consumers, or audiences to change their behavior. The two modes have been studied in separate quarters in academia: generally, philosophy, literary studies, and art history have held on to the representational meanings of the term, while dramaturgical, anthropological, psychological, and sociological studies have been more concerned with questions of mimicry. From Erich Auerbach and Clement Greenberg through Luce Irigaray and Richard Rorty, the central role of representationality in cultural products has been studied through historical, hermeneutical, analytical, and philosophical lenses.40 In contrast, thinkers such as Michael Taussig, René Girard, and Roger Caillois, who work on less print-mediated areas of study, such as performance or anthropology of rituals, have focused on definitions of mimesis that emphasize embodied mimicry.41

The history of mimesis in the Platonic tradition presumes an inside and outside to art, artifice, or the manufactured. This assumed distinction (between that which was built and that which simply is given) provides the foundation for concepts of representation and mimicry and is paralleled within the concept of media itself.42 If media bridge a border, they also demarcate it. If you want to find such a border, look at the media. Mediation itself may even be the means by which such borders come into being, providing the very situation in which an objective reality would need to be reflected or represented. In this sense, media and mimesis are deeply entwined.

This entanglement explains why there is a perpetual fetish for better, more transparent mediation—a desire for a better mirror or even clearer window onto what feels like an “other world.” When attention to media reframes debate about how meanings are made, content is being redefined. What was previously considered content was shown to be lacking explanatory power in and of itself; media held the answer to how meaning was made. So now content and its media are said to be the drivers of meaning, and when those meanings become tired and lose their explanatory force a different medium beyond the frame of the old one will have to be sought. Attention to media then creates or mediates a conflation of content and media and thus produces a new outside that will be mediated by a different medium. What we may hope to find in this continual search for a new way of framing meaning at best is simply a recognition of the problem of fidelity, correctness, or truth of the mediated. This does not mean a better fidelity of the medium; it means more consciousness about the issue of fidelity. When content draws attention to media, when content becomes its own media critique or theory, or when the mediated reflects upon mediation as such, the interlacing of mimesis and media is palpable. Media especially afford glimpses of truth about mimesis when they pay attention to or reflect on mediation.

The entwinement of media and mimesis can be illustrated through some of the most frequently referenced concepts in media studies of recent years—Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s terms developed for describing how new media relate to older media. They develop three key terms for describing how new media, old media, and the real world interact. Remediation, according to their theory, is the “formal logic by which new media refashion” or reform and improve on older media.43 They then identify two ways in which this is accomplished—immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy is a transparency and speed of connection that makes the world seem real, up close, clear, present, and unfiltered. Marking when media refer to media, hypermediacy might seem at first an inversion of immediacy, putting us at greater distance from the real. But of course, since media are part the world, hypermediacy is but a form of immediacy—better reflecting a world in which the real is always already mediated.

The intertwining of media and mimesis resides in a tension over an old binary notion of copying: either art (artifice) imitates life (nature) or life imitates art. These two notions present two modes that are more or less salient in all instances of human creation. Imitations are not only framed by media but also materialized there, and it is in this materialization itself that life affects art and art transforms the world. One way to give more nuance to this dichotomy is to think more carefully about the conceptual binary between the mediated and the unmediated. Halliwell and Martin Jay point out that, over the course of the twentieth century, the two major strains of mimetic conceptualization have more and more been thought together.44 This book participates in this tradition of the reunification of the dichotomies of mimesis. These two forms or modalities of mimesis—the representational (copying recorded on external media) and the anthropological (how realities are copied by the bodies of living beings)—were reunited in twentieth-century philosophy.45 Media themselves manifest the link between representation and mimicry.

Welcome to the New Real

The mimicry aspect of mimesis has been considered a false form of mimesis by thinkers from Plato to Adorno and Horkheimer, on through Maruyama Masao and others. Plato holds that mimesis, as both the semblance of the real in art through the imitation of nature and the dissolution of the subject into nature, must be strictly banned from the Republic.82 Adorno and Horkheimer identify fascism as a kind of modern-day magical mimesis of the noncreative/embodied kind (mimicry): what Horkheimer calls the “repressed form” of mimesis, or mimesis of “false projection” that seeks to remake “the environment like itself.”83 In Adorno’s reading of Heidegger, the transparency of mass culture (giving over the private for the public) encompasses a “diluted form of the collective mimesis of the desire to equal everyone else by knowing everything about them.”84 This kind of sociopolitical mode of knee-jerk mimicry as mimesis has been a critique in ancient Greece and twentieth-century Europe. It has also underpinned interpretations of wartime Japan, explaining the repression of self and creativity in the context of the rise of fascism.85 This negative view of copying assumes that, in the moment of bending to power to perform and represent as commanded, the self, creativity, and freedom are lost.

But even Maruyama Masao, who shares this generally negative assessment of mimetic behavior in wartime Japan, sees the possibility of a more creative and positive aspect in the postwar era. Mimesis, as imitation of nature and the dissolution of the subject into the fluctuating semblances, is the characteristic trait that brings about the fundamental destruction of identity; and in Maruyama’s version, magical or primitive mimesis in the psychopathology of Japan’s wartime leaders resulted in the absolute subsumption of self for the perceived greater good. Maruyama argues that the structure of Japanese ultranationalism lacked both formal logic and subjective ethics (shukanteki rinri); therefore, there was no clear separation between the self and the public.86 This notion, that in the moment of mimicry the self is given over to the nation, is, for Maruyama, not a universal claim about mimesis but rather a historical one.87 When discussing the postwar era, for instance, even he allows for more active modes of copying:

Of course, even imagination has its existential basis, you know. I mean, if to have imagination is just a matter of ignoring physical reality and floating about with one’s head in the clouds, then the highest forms of art and culture are shuffling about in the wards of mental hospitals. . . . Even realism is a method of creativity. It’s not the faithful copying of a perceptible subject. It is precisely because the reality does not appear directly, but as a “mediated reality” depending on the positive participation of the human spirit, that we can call it fiction. So the decisive factor lies in the integrating force of the spirit after all.88

This idea resembles Benjamin’s endorsement of creative mimesis over what Susan Buck-Morss calls a “knee-jerk” reaction. So, a negative understanding of mimesis only attends to one version of how mimesis can remake the world; such a remaking can be destructive, but it can just as well imagine a world into being. Such mimesis affects the world through the ontological (what Maruyama calls existential) basis of cultural material, which is to say through mediation. This book does not attempt to take sides in a normative debate about mimesis. Rather, following in the steps of Buck-Morss’s, Gertrud Koch’s, and Andreas Huyssen’s readings of Benjamin’s mimetic faculty or Vittorio Gallese’s scientific cognitive behaviorist understanding of mimesis, the book understands this ambiguity of the politics of copying to be the crux of human creativity and its relation to the world.89

Why does it matter that two kinds of mimesis are linked through media? This link itself reveals the power (and, therefore, politics) of mimesis in the world. The concept of media alienates us from the matters at hand in the same way that, in Marx’s conception, money (as a medium of exchange in the economy) alienates us from what is really going on—the exploitation of workers. Mimesis highlights this function of media. By recognizing that the concept of media itself obscures our ability to see the base, the ground, the limit, or the real, we come to see how media participates in power inequalities in and exploitations through mediations, and in doing so tends to alienate us from the mediating human bodies (from the people) in the story of mediation. The concept of mimesis ultimately helps us return the human back into the story of mediation, because media do not copy alone, nor do they make meaning in the world in the absence of human beings.90 Just as the body has returned recently to media studies, the posthuman fantasies that new media produce (and whose arrival we may both desire and fear) do not allay this but rather reify the importance of the human.91

New media are interesting because of the way they create and reflect (or are symptomatic of) a desire to reframe content, not because they fulfill such desires. Media produce the perception that the old frames of content have failed, not because the sociological or cultural dynamics of reception around the frame have fundamentally changed. But such medial shifts are themselves productive, allowing us to recognize the infinite regress of the real as if anew. When new conduits open, content is remediated to fill the new channels, not because of a perceived failure at the level of production, reception, or circulation of the old ones. It is not the case that new media arise to fulfill a specific need of signification or social cohesion. Because new media arise not out of crisis, they only seem to matter anew when the old discourse flow has stopped, hits an obstacle, seems awkward, or becomes so normalized in the everyday as to have become mundane. This is why attention to media seems salient around moments of the perceived failures of the old media to connect, as well as when media seem not to matter and content reigns. On the one hand, we might want to say that media critique is more important now than it ever has been, especially in the wake of the disconnects in popular media after states of emergencies like 3/11, the rise of neofascist leaders, Covid-19, or successive climate disasters. On the other hand, of course, even in seemingly normal times, when media seem to function effortlessly and naturally to communicate the world to us, they transform our reality.

The New Real shows how we compensate for the infinite regress of the real (always beyond reach) with a continual desire for better mediation. The new real is not a better, more immediate connection with the real but rather names both our desire for such a possibility and the inevitable failure of media to provide a lasting fulfillment of that desire. The new real is a joke, something like a not-so-sly marketing ploy that both pokes fun and somehow takes seriously the notion of the real itself being remade anew (renewed) by the latest media gadget. Here we should remind ourselves that, in the vocabulary of online purchasing, renewed has come to mean “lightly used, refurbished, repackaged, and resold.” It names the situation in which such claims for gadgets remaking the world are made with increasing regularity. The new real describes our lives after the social absorption of a new medium into the mediascape. When the new media have become quotidian and boring, when its presence in our lives is unremarkable (to be expected), when we are perhaps ready for yet another next new thing, then the new real has finally arrived, having already transformed our lives.