Seven Kings of Rome

 

Fredric Jameson Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Fredric Jameson
Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
The last few years have been marked by an inverted millennarianism, in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the ‘crisis’ of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.): taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s. As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus, abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalized and canonized in the works of Wallace Stevens): all these are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them. The enumeration of what follows then at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism, and beyond it, the ‘new expressionism’; the moment, in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and ‘popular’ styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and the Stones now standing as the high-modernist moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard and experimental cinema and video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which more below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and the French nouveau roman and its succession on the other, along with alarming new kinds of literary criticism, based on some new aesthetic of textuality or écriture . . . The list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style- and fashion-changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?footnote＊.

The Rise of Aesthetic Populism
It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism—as it will be outlined in the following pages—initially began to emerge. More decisively than in the other arts or media, postmodernist positions in architecture have been inseparable from an implacable critique of architectural high modernism and of the so-called International Style (Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies), where formal criticism and analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of the building into a virtual sculpture, or monumental ‘duck’, as Robert Venturi puts it) are at one with reconsiderations on the level of urbanism and of the aesthetic institution. High modernism is thus credited with the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and of its older neighbourhood culture (by way of the radical disjunction of the new Utopian high-modernist building from its surrounding context); while the prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly denounced in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.
Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough stage itself as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi’s influential manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ultimately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at least the merit of drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories and contents of that very Culture Industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have in fact been fascinated precisely by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and kitsch, of tv series and Readers’ Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and sciencefiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply ‘quote’, as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.
Nor should the break in question be thought of as a purely cultural affair: indeed, theories of the postmodern—whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation—bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized ‘post-industrial society’ (Daniel Bell), but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society or ‘high tech’, and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle. The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with vehemence, with the signal exception of the economist Ernest Mandel, whose book Late Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomize the historic originality of this new society (which he sees as a third stage or moment in the evolution of capital), but also to demonstrate that it is, if anything, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it. I will return to this argument later; suffice it for the moment to emphasize a point I have defended in greater detail elsewherefootnote＊, namely that every position on postmodernism in culture—whether apologia or stigmatization—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today.

Postmodernism as Cultural Dominant
A last preliminary word on method: what follows is not to be read as stylistic description, as the account of one cultural style or movement among others. I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical periodization has come to seem most problematical indeed. I have argued elsewhere that all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always involves a buried or repressed theory of historical periodization; in any case, the conception of the ‘genealogy’ largely lays to rest traditional theoretical worries about so-called linear history, theories of ‘stages’, and teleological historiography. In the present context, however, lengthier theoretical discussion of such (very real) issues can perhaps be replaced by a few substantive remarks.
One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodizing hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate difference, and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable ‘chronological’ metamorphoses and punctuation marks). This is, however, precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp ‘postmodernism’ not as a style, but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features.
Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that postmodernism is itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper (if not, indeed, of the even older romanticism); it may indeed be conceded that all of the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate can be detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding modernism (including such astonishing genealogical precursors as Gertrude Stein, Raymond Roussel, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered outright postmodernists, avant la lettre). What has not been taken into account by this view is, however, the social position of the older modernism, or better still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie, for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive and generally ‘anti-social’. It will be argued here that a mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly; they now strike us, on the whole, as rather ‘realistic’; and this is the result of a canonization and an academic institutionalization of the modern movement generally, which can be traced to the late 1950s. This is indeed surely one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which ‘weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living’, as Marx once said in a different context.
As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features—from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism—no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalized and are at one with the official culture of Western society.
What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities then find recognition in the institutional support of all kinds available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage. Architecture is, however, of all the arts that closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship: it will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it. That these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project we will try to suggest later on. Yet this is the point at which we must remind the reader of the obvious, namely that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror.
The first point to be made about the conception of periodization in dominance, therefore, is that even if all the constitutive features of postmodernism were identical and continuous with those of an older modernism—a position I feel to be demonstrably erroneous but which only an even lengthier analysis of modernism proper could dispel—the two phenomena would still remain utterly distinct in their meaning and social function, owing to the very different positioning of postmodernism in the economic system of late capital, and beyond that, to the transformation of the very sphere of culture in contemporary society.
More on this point at the conclusion of the present essay. I must now briefly address a different kind of objection to periodization, a different kind of concern about its possible obliteration of heterogeneity, which one finds most often on the Left. And it is certain that there is a strange quasi-Sartrean irony a ‘winner loses’ logic—which tends to surround any effort to describe—a ‘system’, a totalizing dynamic, as these are detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic—the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example—the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.
I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and assessed. I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today is ‘postmodern’ in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term. The postmodern is however the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses—what Raymond Williams has usefully termed ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ forms of cultural production—must make their way. If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. This has been at any rate the political spirit in which the following analysis was devised: to project some conception of a new systemic cultural norm and its reproduction, in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today.
The exposition will take up in turn the following constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary ‘theory’ and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose ‘schizophrenic’ structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone—what I will call ‘intensities’—which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system; and, after a brief account of postmodernist mutations in the lived experience of built space itself, some reflections on the mission of political art in the bewildering new world space of late multinational capital.

I. The Deconstruction of Expression

‘Peasant Shoes’
We will begin with one of the canonical works of high modernism in visual art, Van Gogh’s well-known painting of the peasant shoes, an example which as you can imagine has not been innocently or randomly chosen. I want to propose two ways of reading this painting, both of which in some fashion reconstruct the reception of the work in a twostage or double-level process.
I first want to suggest that if this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation—which has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production.
This last term suggests that one way of reconstructing the initial situation to which the work is somehow a response is by stressing the raw materials, the initial content, which it confronts and which it reworks, transforms, and appropriates. In Van Gogh, that content, those initial raw materials, are, I will suggest, to be grasped simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state.
Fruit trees in this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of poor soil; the people of the village are worn down to their skulls, caricatures of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature types. How is it then that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into a hallucinatory surface of colour, while his village stereotypes are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and green? I will briefly suggest, in this first interpretative option, that the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure colour in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture: as an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses, or at least of that supreme sense—sight, the visual, the eye—which it now reconstitutes for us as a semi-autonomous space in its own right—part of some new division of labour in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them.
There is, to be sure, a second reading of Van Gogh which can hardly be ignored when we gaze at this particular painting, and that is Heidegger’s central analysis in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, which is organized around the idea that the work of art emerges within the gap between Earth and World, or what I would prefer to translate as the meaningless materiality of the body and nature and the meaning-endowment of history and of the social. We will return to that particular gap or rift later on; suffice it here to recall some of the famous phrases, which model the process whereby these henceforth illustrious peasant shoes slowly recreate about themselves the whole missing object-world which was once their lived context. ‘In them,’ says Heidegger, ‘there vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.’ ‘This equipment,’ he goes on, ‘belongs to the earth and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman . . . Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth . . . This entity emerges into the unconcealment of its being’, by way of the mediation of the work of art, which draws the whole absent world and earth into revelation around itself, along with the heavy tread of the peasant woman, the loneliness of the field path, the hut in the clearing, the worn and broken instruments of labour in the furrows and at the hearth. Heidegger’s account needs to be completed by insistence on the renewed materiality of the work, on the transformation of one form of materiality—the earth itself and its paths and physical objects—into that other materiality of oil paint affirmed and foregrounded in its own right and for its own visual pleasures; but has nonetheless a satisfying plausibility.

‘Diamond Dust Shoes’
At any rate, both of these readings may be described as hermeneutical, in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form, is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth. Now we need to look at some shoes of a different kind, and it is pleasant to be able to draw for such an image on the recent work of the central figure in contemporary visual art. Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s footgear: indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organizes even a minimal place for the viewer, who confronts it at the turning of a museum corridor or gallery with all the contingency of some inexplicable natural object. On the level of the content, we have to do with what are now far more clearly fetishes, both in the Freudian and in the Marxian sense (Derrida remarks, somewhere, about the Heideggerian Paar Bauernschuhe, that the Van Gogh footgear are a heterosexual pair, which allows neither for perversion nor for fetishization). Here, however, we have a random collection of dead objects, hanging together on the canvas like so many turnips, as shorn of their earlier life-world as the pile of shoes left over from Auschwitz, or the remainders and tokens of some incomprehensible and tragic fire in a packed dancehall. There is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture, and to restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion or of glamour magazines. Yet this is even more paradoxical in the light of biographical information: Warhol began his artistic career as a commercial illustrator for shoe fashions and a designer of display windows in which various pumps and slippers figured prominently. Indeed, one is tempted to raise here—far too prematurely—one of the central issues about postmodernism itself and its possible political dimensions: Andy Warhol’s work in fact turns centrally around commodification, and the great billboard images of the Coca-cola bottle or the Campbell’s Soup Can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital.
But there are some other significant differences between the high modernist and the postmodernist moment, between the shoes of Van Gogh and the shoes of Andy Warhol, on which we must now very briefly dwell. The first and most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense—perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we will have occasion to return in a number of other contexts.
Then we must surely come to terms with the role of photography and the photographic/negative in contemporary art of this kind: and it is this indeed which confers its deathly quality on the Warhol image, whose glacéd x-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content. It is indeed as though we had here to do with the inversion of Van Gogh’s Utopian gesture: in the earlier work, a stricken world is by some Nietzschean fiat and act of the will transformed into the stridency of Utopian colour. Here, on the contrary, it is as though the external and coloured surface of things—debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images—has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in certain of Warhol’s pieces—most notably, the traffic accidents or the electric chair series—this is not, I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself—now become a set of texts or simulacra—and in the disposition of the subject.

The Waning of Affect
All of which brings me to the third feature I had in mind to develop here briefly, namely what I will call the waning of affect in postmodern culture. Of course, it would be inaccurate to suggest that all affect, all feeling or emotion, all subjectivity, has vanished from the newer image. Indeed, there is a kind of return of the repressed in Diamond Dust Shoes, a strange compensatory decorative exhilaration, explicitly designated by the title itself although perhaps more difficult to observe in the reproduction. This is the glitter of gold dust, the spangling of gilt sand, which seals the surface of the painting and yet continues to glint at us. Think, however, of Rimbaud’s magical flowers ‘that look back at you’, or of the august premonitory eye-flashes of Rilke’s archaic Greek torso which warn the bourgeois subject to change his life: nothing of that sort here, in the gratuitous frivolity of this final decorative overlay.
The waning of affect is, however, perhaps best initially approached by way of the human figure, and it is obvious that what we have said about the commodification of objects holds as strongly for Warhol’s human subjects, stars—like Marilyn Monroe—who are themselves commodified and transformed into their own images. And here too a certain brutal return to the older period of high modernism offers a dramatic shorthand parable of the transformation in question. Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream is of course a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude and social fragmentation and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will here be read not merely as an embodiment of the expression of that kind of affect, but even more as a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which seems to have dominated much of what we call high modernism, but to have vanished away—for both practical and theoretical reasons—in the world of the postmodern. The very concept of expression presupposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and the outside, of the wordless pain within the monad and the moment in which, often cathartically, that ‘emotion’ is then projected out and externalized, as gesture or cry, as desperate communication and the outward dramatization of inward feeling. And this is perhaps the moment to say something about contemporary theory, which has among other things been committed to the mission of criticizing and discrediting this very hermeneutic model of the inside and the outside and of stigmatizing such models as ideological and metaphysical. But what is today called contemporary theory—or better still, theoretical discourse—is also, I would want to argue, itself very precisely a postmodernist phenomenon. It would therefore be inconsistent to defend the truth of its theoretical insights in a situation in which the very concept of ‘truth’ itself is part of the metaphysical baggage which poststructuralism seeks to abandon. What we can at least suggest is that the poststructuralist critique of the hermeneutic, of what I will shortly call the depth model, is useful for us as a very significant symptom of the very postmodernist culture which is our subject here.
Overhastily, we can say that besides the hermeneutic model of inside and outside which Munch’s painting develops, there are at least four other fundamental depth models which have generally been repudiated in contemporary theory: the dialectical one of essence and appearance (along with a whole range of concepts of ideology or false consciousness which tend to accompany it); the Freudian model of latent and manifest, or of repression (which is of course the target of Michel Foucault’s programmatic and symptomatic pamphlet La Volonté de savoir); the existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity, whose heroic or tragic thematics are closely related to that other great opposition between alienation and disalienation, itself equally a casualty of the poststructural or postmodern period; and finally, latest in time, the great semiotic opposition between signifier and signified, which was itself rapidly unravelled and deconstructed during its brief heyday in the 1960s and 70s. What replaces these various depth models is for the most part a conception of practices, discourses and textual play, whose new syntagmatic structures we will examine later on: suffice it merely to observe that here too depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces (what is often called intertextuality is in that sense no longer a matter of depth).
Nor is this depthlessness merely metaphorical: it can be experienced physically and literally by anyone who, mounting what used to be Raymond Chandler’s Beacon Hill from the great Chicano markets on Broadway and 4th St. in downtown Los Angeles, suddenly confronts the great free-standing wall of the Crocker Bank Center (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill)—a surface which seems to be unsupported by any volume, or whose putative volume (rectangular, trapezoidal?) is ocularly quite undecidable. This great sheet of windows, with its gravity-defying two-dimensionality, momentarily transforms the solid ground on which we climb into the contents of a stereopticon, pasteboard shapes profiling themselves here and there around us. From all sides, the visual effect is the same: as fateful as the great monolith in Kubrick’s 2001 which confronts its viewers like an enigmatic destiny, a call to evolutionary mutation. If this new multinational downtown (to which we will return later in another context) effectively abolished the older ruined city fabric which it violently replaced, cannot something similar be said about the way in which this strange new surface in its own peremptory way renders our older systems of perception of the city somehow archaic and aimless, without offering another in their place?

Blindsight Peter Watts

IBM Keyboard M

 https://sharktastica.co.uk/wiki?id=modelm

https://www.clickykeyboards.com/

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An Unfinished Project that was Also a Missed Opportunity”: Utopia and Alternate History in Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro

What if it were the other way around, however? What if it were the failures of socialism, better still, of socialists and communists, which left in their wake a universal disillusionment in which only consumption and narrow fanaticism seem possible, at least for the present?



–Fredric Jameson, Foreword to Kojin Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature

No differently will the world one day appear, almost unchanged, in its constant feast-day light, when it stands no longer under the law of labour, and when for homecomers duty has the lightness of holiday play.

–Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Even in this global age, it’s the most local things that can have a worldwide effect. Yet why doesn’t anyone make a delightful and wonderful film set in Japan?
We need a new method and sense of discovery to be up to the task. Rather than be sentimental, the film must be a joyful, entertaining film.
The forgotten.
The ignored.
Those that are considered lost.
Yet I made My Neighbor Totoro with the firm belief that these things still exist.

–Hayao Miyazaki, The Art of My Neighbor Totoro

In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones?

–Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”

In what follows, I want to make a case for reading the great Japanese anime film maker Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro) (1988) as a supreme example of the subgenre of the science fiction narrative utopia know as the alternate history or “what if” story. Many of Miyazaki’s films present what will be readily recognized as Darko Suvin’s “possible worlds” of utopian narration.1 Most explicitly, examples of this can be found in the far future ecological dystopia of Miyazaki’s first feature film and manga, Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind (1984); but also in the young adult fantasy of Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) (itself an adaptation of a novel by the Japanese children’s author, Eiko Kadono); the heroic fantasy of Princess Mononoke (1997); the mythic world invoked in Spirited Away (2001); and even the fantastic post-WWI allegory of Porco Rosso (1992). Moreover, a number of Miyazaki’s films explicitly deploy elements of the alternate history, including the fantastic alternate nineteenth century imagined in Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), and the parallel worlds story of Howl’s Moving Castle (2004).2

However, most critics would in fact exempt Totoro from this list. The film is understood to be at most a beautiful nostalgic evocation of rural life in late 1950s Japan (or earlier, and more intriguingly as I will suggest, of Miyazaki’s own childhood in the late 1940s), with some fantastic elements drawn from Shinto, the traditional polytheistic and animistic religion of Japan, injected in it.3 The pioneering scholar of anime, Susan J. Napier, for example, describes the film as “perhaps the most ‘Japanese’ of Miyazaki’s films” (493), a “nostalgic personal fantasy,” and thus an exception to a body of work that “supports the kokusaika [internationalization] side of the debate, as both texts and subtexts of his films clearly advocate a flexible openness to and appreciation of other cultures” (475).4 Moreover, the film continues to be an inspiration among some Japanese viewers for an outpouring of nostalgia for the more “innocent” 1950s, before the explosive wave of modernization that would sweep the island beginning in the 1960s (although for a devastating critique of the former moment see Kenzaburo Oe’s classic novel, The Silent Cry [1967]). This nostalgia culminated in the construction at the 2005 World Expo in Japan of a replica of the house featured in the film, where, as a website for the Expo notes, “everything in the house appears to have come straight out of the 1950s” (Expo 2005 n.p.).

The story of Totoro is a deceptively simple one (and I must confess that I was first drawn to this film by my twins, Nadia and Owen, who, as three year olds, requested repeatedly that we watch the film – I thus need to thank them for the inspiration to begin to watch and rewatch all of Miyazaki’s films). Two sisters, four-year old Mei and pre- teenager Satsuki, move with their father, Tatsuo Kusakabe, a professor in the department of archaeology at Tokyo University, into a beautiful if run-down house, one that combines traditional Japanese and modern Western elements, located in farmlands modeled on those of Saitama Prefecture outside of Tokoyo. They do so, we soon learn, to be nearer the moutainside hospital where the girls’ mother convalesces. (Mei’s age and the mother’s condition have led some viewers to surmise that the film is in part based in autobiography, as Miyazaki’s beloved mother began a nine-year period of treatment for spinal tuberculosis when the boy was only six years old [McCarthy 120]. This too required that the Miyazaki family move frequently.) While establishing themselves in their new home, the children encounter magical beings, first the soot sprites (susuwatari) inhabiting the shadowy regions of the building (and ultimately driven from it by the family’s collective laughter); and then, far more significantly, the creature that identifies itself as Totoro (a childish mispronunciation of the phonetic Japanese pronunciation of troll [toröru]) and his diminutive companions, all of whom inhabit a magnificent camphor tree that grows near the family’s home. In perhaps the most celebrated scene of the film, Satsuki first meets Totoro at a bus stop as the girls wait one rain soaked evening for their father to return from the university.
Figure 1

When Satsuki shares her umbrella with Totoro, he gives her a set of magic acorn seeds – which a few nights later, sprout into giant trees – before climbing on board a fantastic “cat bus,” one of a number of such vehicles that race across the countryside while apparently remaining invisible to adults.

A crisis arises late in the film when Mei, believing her mother’s condition has worsened, attempts to walk to the distant hospital. When they cannot find the child, the family’s close friend, Granny, comes to believe she has drowned. After learning this is not the case, Satsuki pleads with Totoro to help her. Totoro comes to the rescue, calling for the cat bus, which finds Mei and then takes both girls to the hospital where, safely perched in a tree, they are reassured by the sight of their mother sitting in bed talking with their father. The girls then leave an ear of corn on the windowsill where it is found by their parents, a sign that moves the film from what Tzetvan Todorov calls the genre of the fantastic, a tale that leaves the viewer hesitating between understanding the events they witness as the children’s fantasy or as actuality, to that of the marvelous, “characterized by the mere presence of supernatural events, without implicating the reaction they provoke in the characters” (47).5 The end credits serve as an epilogue to the film, and assure us that eventually the mother becomes healthy enough to join the family in their new home.

A number of critics have read Totoro and the other marvelous creatures in the film as kami or the animistic spirits of Shinto. This interpretation is further strengthened by the fact that the family honors the various shrines they encounter as they move through the countryside. This in turn reinforces a reading of the film as nostalgic for an earlier more “pure” Japanese way of life, a fact that becomes even more problematic when one recalls that Shinto was deployed as a nationalist ideology in the period of military build up leading to the Second World War. Such an interpretation, however, runs counter both to Miyazaki’s explicit denial – “this movie has nothing to do with that or any other religion” (qtd. in McCarthy 121) – and to what we know to be the filmmaker’s professed early investments in Marxism. (Indeed, although sometimes referred to, much to his dismay, as the “Walt Disney of Japan,” Miyazaki served in his earlier days as an organizer and officer in his animator’s union.6)

One recent reading that complexifies this interpretation of the film has been advanced by Lucy Wright, who argues that while Miyazaki “is still drawing on the cultural myth of an idealized, paradisal existence in ancient Japan,” he also “attempts to distance himself from the significant political and nationalistic implications inherent in any discussion of Shinto.” In its stead, Miyazaki develops a “more expansive and global vision” that ultimately brings in elements of other culture to “coalesce into coherent and transnational human traits” (paragraph 3). While moving in the right directions, Wright’s reading still elides the deeply historicist, materialist, and ultimately radical political nature of the utopian vision evident in this film. Indeed, I maintain that this is in many ways the most political of all of Miyazaki’s deeply political films.

In order to begin to shift the discussion then, I want to note one remarkable aspect of the film that has received very little critical attention – the utter absence of “landscape” within it. I take the concept of the historical “discovery of landscape” from Kojin Karatani’s landmark book, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Karatani claims that landscape is, along with a number of other foundational categories – face, interiority, confession, a signifying sickness, and the child – “an epistemological constellation, the origins of which were suppressed as soon as it was produced” (22). He later expands upon this idea, arguing, “Once a landscape has been established, its origins are repressed from memory. It takes on the appearance of an ‘object’ which has been there, outside of us, from the start” (34). The rapid emergence and naturalization of this new notion of landscape occurs in the late nineteenth century, the period of a dramatic change in Japanese life known as the Meiji Restoration. Karatani notes, “I would like to propose that the notion of ‘landscape’ developed in Japan sometime during the third decade of the Meiji period. Of course, there were landscapes long before they were ‘discovered.’ But ‘landscapes’ as such did not exist prior to the 1890s” (19). Karatani further contends that while these transformations first take place in the West, “Meiji Japan offers us the key to the nature of that inversion which was specific to the West yet was concealed (since it took place over a much longer period of time) under the façade of linear development” (30).

Karatani goes on to observe, “Of course, I do not mean to say that landscapes and faces had not previously existed. But for them to be seen as ‘simply landscape’ or ‘simply face’ required, not a perceptual transformation, but an inversion of that topos which had privileged the conception landscape or face. It was only through such an inversion that the naked face – the naked face as a kind of landscape, took on meaning in and of itself and what had been insignificant became profoundly significant” (56). “Landscape as such,” a concept Karatani claims is central to the development of literary realism, depends upon a separation of subject and object: “Both the landscapes and the ‘ordinary people’ (what I have called people-as-landscapes) that realism represents were not ‘out there’ from the start, but had to be discovered as landscapes from which we had become alienated” (29). This then marked a profound break from older practices, evident in sansuiga landscape painting, haiku poetry, and, even earlier, medieval European arts:


Medieval European painting and landscape painting share something in common that differentiates them from modern landscape painting. In both, place is conceived of in transcendental terms. For a brush painter to depict a pine grove meant to depict the concept (that which is signified by) ‘pine grove,’ not an existing pine grove. The transcendental vision of space had to be overturned before painters could see existing pine groves as their subjects. This is when modern perspective appears. Or more accurately, what we call modern perspective had already emerged at some point before this in the form of a perspectival inversion. (27)

It is a form of this older transcendental vision of space that we see at work in My Neighbor Totoro. The best example of this is to be found in the figure of the giant camphor tree, home to Totoro, that hovers above the family’s home and much of the action of the film.
Figure 2

The choice of this particular tree species was not an accidental one, for as Wright observes, “The majestic camphor tree often plays an important role as signifying both kami and ancestors” (paragraph 26). It is her term “signifying” on which I would like to place the most emphasis here, for this fantastic form is clearly not the representation of any existing tree but rather the figuration of a set of concepts signified by this tree: an erasure of the dividing line between humans and nature – at one point when the family goes to greet and thank the tree, the girl’s father states that this is a very old tree from the time “when trees and people got along” – as well as a deep rootedness in place, community, belonging, and mutual support. (Moreover, in a brief scene that uncannily seems to nod toward the passage from Karatani I cited a moment ago, Satsuki’s classmate and Granny’s grandson, Kanta, is shown inscribing the Japanese characters signifying the concept “pine nut.”)

We also are presented throughout the film brief self-contained lyrical images – raindrops in a rice paddy, a frog crawling alongside a puddle (“Spring rain: as yet/ the little froglets’ bellies/ haven’t got wet”), a pink sandal floating in a pond with a dragonfly resting upon it – which function in a way similar to traditional haiku.
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5

In describing a work of the great Edo period poet, Yosa Buson (1716-1784), whose “spring rain” haiku I quoted in the previous sentence, Karatani writes, “what this example really reveals is that Buson was fascinated, not so much by landscape, as by the written word” (22). Similarly, I would suggest that in My Neighbor Totoro, as well as in his more fantastic anime, Miyazaki is fascinated not so much by landscape as by the expressive potentialities of the animation medium itself. This is because such a non-naturalistic presentation is especially well suited to animation – and, following Walter Benjamin’s lead, we might use Miyzaki’s work to begin to think further about the utopian dimensions of animation itself.7

The film’s setting further reinforces the notion of the absence of landscape. The main actions of Totoro take place in a region known as the satoyama, forest commons managed by local agricultural communities. One discussion notes,


According to another more recent definition, satoyama includes not only mixed community forests, but also the entire landscape necessary for agricultural activity. Thus, according to this definition, satoyama consists of a mosaic of mixed forests, rice paddy fields, dry rice fields, grasslands, streams, ponds, and reservoirs for irrigation. In this system, each habitat is considered essential for the agricultural economy. Grasslands were maintained to feed horses and cattle, which were then used as sources of power in agricultural activities. Streams, ponds, and reservoirs were managed to adjust water levels in the paddy fields and to supply fish to eat. (Kobori and Primack 308)

It is this sense of a total integration with the land, a blurring of the lines between nature and culture, and a collective stewardship of these commons that is a central aspect of the film’s larger vision as well. Crucially, without landscape, there can be no possibility of an environmental politics isolated from other social and cultural concerns. (However, in our non-utopian world the film served as the inspiration for efforts to preserve satoyama in the Sayama Hills region, giving rise in April 1990 to the National Trust of Totoro no Furusato [homeland of Totoro].)8

This also offers us another explanation of the Shinto imagery and practices on display in the film. In a later discussion of the role of Christianity in the transformations of the Meiji period, Karatani writes, “Through monotheism, for Uchimura, nature became for the very first time ‘simply nature.’ . . . One has the sense, moreover, of a discovery of landscape here. Nature, formerly veiled by diverse prohibitions and significations, becomes ‘simply nature’ when it is seen as the creation of a single God” (88). In a similar manner, in Totoro, Shinto functions not as an articulated system of beliefs, let alone the nationalist ideology it had become in the prewar period, but rather as a sign of the absence of the alienations that produce landscape and its related conceptual configurations.

All of this is effectively staged in a visually rich sequence that immediately precedes Satsuki’s first encounter with Totoro I alluded to earlier. Running home from school, Satsuki and Mei are caught in a sudden heavy rainfall – the first sign of which is the image of drops hitting a rice paddy I described a moment ago – and are forced to seek shelter in a roadside shrine to Jizo (literally translated as “womb of the earth”). The girls thank the Jizo statue, addressing it as “sir,” and ask if it would not mind if they share his shelter for a while. We then cut to a pan across a rice paddy that stops on an image of Kanta moving up the road. Next, we see through Kanta’s eyes the shrine with the girls framed by an electric trolley passing by.
Figure 6

Kanta arrives at the shrine, forces his umbrella on the girls, and then sprints home through the downpour, passing by the stone entrance way to the shrine of the giant camphor tree. When we next encounter Kanta he is at home playing with a model prop plane – images of flight, especially in propeller driven craft, recur throughout Miyazaki’s films for reasons that I will make clear shortly – and being berated by his mother for leaving his umbrella at school. Shortly thereafter, the girls arrive at Kanta’s home, return the umbrella and ask his mother to thank him for them, before they head off in turn to meet their father at the bus stop. Kanta’s joy at this recognition is indicated by his subsequent play. In this sequence, all of the elements I described above are present – the absence of landscape and in its place a sense of the deep interrelationship between humans and their world; the reinforcement of all of this through signifiers of Shinto; and a clear expression of the forms of mutuality that pervade the community. It is as if the subsequent “miracle” of the encounters with Totoro and the cat bus are enabled by precisely these events.

Finally, we might also follow Karatani’s lead and argue that there are no children in the film, children being another of the ruptural discoveries of the Meiji period: “Of course, children have existed since ancient times,” Karatani writes, “yet ‘the child’ as we conceive of it and objectify it did not exist prior to a particular period” (118). This plays out in the film in terms of a blurring of the distinctions – between adult and children and, equally significantly, between work and play – that are fundamental to the “discovery” of the figure of the child: the girl’s father is shown at a number of times working at home, sharing a bath with his daughters (a scene that produced some anxiety when the film was first planned on being released to a Western audience), and taking their claims about the existence of Totoro and the soot sprites with an utter joyous nonchalance.9 At the same time, we see all of the younger members of the families continuously moving fluidly between school and work in the family farms.

Moreover, the film also dispenses with the divisions between children of different ages, divisions, Karatani points out, that are produced by modern educational systems: “From this viewpoint, it becomes clear that the grouping of children by age in the compulsory educational system of modern Japan signified the uprooting of children, as abstract and homogenous entities, from productive relations, social classes, and communities that had previously been their concrete contexts” (130). In a useful on-line close reading of the film, Chris Tham interestingly observes that, in the scene I described a moment ago of Kanta at work in the one- room classroom, the characters the boy inscribes in his notebook are those learned in three different grade levels (3,4, and 5). Tham then concludes, “Perhaps this is an attempt to ensure grade schoolchild viewers (of multiple ages) identify with the drill practice. Or perhaps Miyazaki’s recollection of his early schooldays is a bit hazy!” (n.p.). I would argue, on the other hand, that through this figure Miyazaki deliberately undermines the divisions, hierarchies, and developmental teleologies (” ‘maturation’ an inevitable trajectory for them” [Karatani 123]) that are an essential aspect of modern schooling.

Finally, this absence is further reinforced in the difference commented upon by both Napier and Wright, between Miyazaki’s films and the “sanitized children’s stories” and “reassuring fantasy” produced by the Disney corporation (Wright paragraph 12; Napier 490). (Ironically, Disney now is the U.S. distributor of Miyazaki and other Studio Ghibli films, including most recently Miyazaki’s latest critical fable of environmental despoilage, Ponyo [2008]). Indeed, Miyazaki’s films are closer to traditional folktales and, as Karatani notes, “Japanese folktales were not meant for children” (121).

It is the recognition of the absence in the film of landscape and children (and to this list we might also add, psychological interiority) that is crucial to understanding the film as a utopian alternate history. For what Miyazaki presents us with in My Neighbor Totoro is a vision in which the classic “what if” question of the genre has been proposed: that is, what if the Meiji revolution did not happen? Moreover, since it is the dramatic and rapid modernization of the Meiji period that gives rise to the virulent imperialist nationalism and militarism that ultimately results in the Second World War, Miyazaki also offers in his film us a glimpse of a Japan in which the catastrophe of World War II did not occur.

A further sign that Totoro represents an alternate history is indicated by the fact that in its original Japanese release, the film was screened as part of a double feature alongside Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka), a grim naturalist portrait (indeed, it has been compared to post-World War Two Italian neo-realism) of an orphaned brother and sister’s futile efforts to survive during the final weeks of the war in a Japan devastated by fire bombing. Not only did many of the same animators and production teams work on both films, there are a number of references throughout that suggest it and Totoro were intended to be understood as a complementary pair. For example, the lush visual representation of the countryside that the children inhabit for part of Grave of the Fireflies recalls the setting of Totoro; and at one point, the young protagonist Seita lies to his sister telling her that their mother – who perishes after being severely burned in the attack on their city and whose ashes are in a can inside their meager cave-like dwelling – is buried under a giant camphor tree.
Figure 7
Figure 8

Here too we see a world that is the inverse of that figured in Totoro. The children starve and Seita is forced into robbing homes during air raids because of the refusal of the local population, and even their aunt’s family, to share their meager possessions. Moreover, whereas in Totoro the natural world itself seems to also shelter and nurture the children, here a fully objectified mute landscape appears glacially indifferent to their suffering. And finally, the fact that this world is the direct product of the Meiji modernization is made apparent by Seita’s faith in the might of the Japanese military – the children’s father is a member of the Navy – and the rightness of its nationalist and imperial project. The final image of the film, where the ghosts of the two children sit on a hillside overlooking the gleaming towers of a prosperous contemporary city, suggests that they are to be understood as the specter disrupting, in Benjaminian fashion – “The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history” (390) – any triumphalist late twentieth century vision of Japan’s economic success.
Figure 9

As in the classic examples of the alternate history, the valences are then reversed in Totoro, this contemporary urban landscape becoming the terrible specter, and the children given a new and redeemed life. One of the standard devices of the alternate history is to present the world we know and inhabit as a grim dystopian possibility within the alternate world. Viewing the two films in tandem in effect locates the naturalism of Grave of the Fireflies in this same position of dystopian Other in relationship to Totoro.

Read in this way, the biographical and psychological motivations for Totoro‘s alternate history scenario become readily apparent. Miyazaki’s father was not, unlike Mei and Satsuki’s, a university professor benignly studying ancient civilizations. He was in fact the director of Miyazaki Airplane, a manufacturing concern that made the rudders for A6M Zero fighter planes. We are told that Miyazaki has been plagued throughout his life by guilt for his family’s profiting from the destructiveness of the Second World War. Thus, in this film fantasy, this guilt, along with the war’s violences and victims, are spirited away along with the histories – “one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet” – that gave rise to them in the first place (Benjamin 393).

All of this also reveals something interesting about the formal operations of the subgenre of the alternate history. Fredric Jameson argues that one of the quintessential operations of all utopian figurations is what he calls “world reduction”: “based on a principle of systematic exclusion, a kind of surgical excision of empirical reality, something like a process of ontological attenuation in which the sheer teeming multiplicity of what exists, of what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and weeded out through an operation of radical abstraction and simplification” (271). The “what if” question that is at the center of the alternate history too can be understood as inaugurating a similar operation of world reduction, such that for example, what we have in the otherwise very different alternate histories of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine and Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain is a vision of another world without the development of the superpower conflict of the Cold War; or more recently, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt, we glimpse a global history without the dynamics of European capitalist and imperial modernization.10

However, to read the film exclusively in this negative and wish-fulfilling fashion is to miss the deeper utopian implications of both Karatani’s study and this particular film. My title and epigraph in this paper are taken from Jameson’s foreword to Karatani’s book (an essay now also reprinted in his volume, The Modernist Papers). Here Jameson notes the radical originality of Karatani’s historical vision:


For Karatani also simultaneously projects a historical narrative which stands outside this one, and which has determinate political consequences: this is the notion that what we are here calling “Meiji” – that is to say, modernization and modernity, literature, interiority, “westernization” – is itself the result of defeat and failure. There were in this view two Meiji revolutions, one that succeeded and one that failed. The successful one is the constitution of the Japanese modern state as we know it; the failed revolution was contemporaneous with the Paris Commune, the popular uprisings that arose in millenarian fashion at the “dawn smell” of a new era and at the collapse of the old structures (like Bakhtin’s moment of Rabelais, at the end of the Middle Ages; or Imamura’s apocalyptic and utopian film, Eijanaika [1981], about this same period). These needed to be repressed in order for power to be consolidated by the clique around the new emperor, but it is their repression and defeat which is accompanied by a massive popular disillusionment that can alone enable the setting in place of the new authoritarian structures: “[T]o speak in Freudian terms, the libido which was once directed towards the People’s Rights movement and the political novel lost its object and was redirected inward, at which point ‘landscape’ and ‘the inner life’ appeared.”

We here fleetingly glimpse an alternate world alongside our own historical one: a world in which modernity in the current coinage did not occur, without our being able to discern clearly the outlines of what, equally supplanting precapitalist forms and relations, took its place. But this alternate world, outside our own history, also lies beyond the boundaries of our explanatory and narrative systems. (xvi- xvii)

If such a utopian vision lies outside of Karatani’s genealogical narration it does not, I would suggest, lie outside of Miyazaki’s fictional one, and thus in this film we see a figuration of the lived relations of a world not only where the second Meiji revolution never occurred, but where the first popular uprising succeeded. A footnote in Karatani’s main text further describes what this event represents in ways that also hints at why it may be so resonant for a Miyazaki who remains so deeply concerned throughout his films with questions of gender and equality: “The People’s Rights movement (jiyu minken undo) was launched by Itagaki Taisuke and other samurai disaffected with the policies of the Meiji government in 1874. Agricultural depression and popular opposition to the new uniform tax system swelled the ranks of the movement, broadening its base to include village leaders, wealthy farmers and merchants and, by the 1880s, women” (37).

Thus, we do have in this film a world that seems to have returned to an earlier relationship between people and nature, where “landscape” and the child in their modern alienated senses have not come into being. However, it is also a world where modernization has continued, albeit in a new direction, something signaled by the repeated images throughout of electrification and Shinto coexisting side-by- side, and even in such figures of enchanted technology as the cat bus.
Figure 10

This then results in a vision not unlike what we find in William Morris’s great Meiji era utopian fiction, News from Nowhere (1890): a world where the hierarchies of gender and class have disappeared along with any sign of nationalist or militaristic violence (as well as the occupying U.S. military so omnipresent in Japan in our history of this period); where there is a sense of collective stewardship of the land and an end of the destructive exploitations illustrated and condemned in Miyazaki’s more dystopian anime and manga visions; where there is a deep sense of community and mutuality (something that comes to the fore in the images of collective working of the land, and in the representation of the mobilization to find Mei); and finally, where there seems to be no sign of money whatsoever. It is a deeply satisfying utopian vision of a world that has not yet but might very well come into being – a vision that, I would conclude, keeps not only my children, but myself, and many others besides, returning again and again to the “epoch of rest” so brilliantly illuminated in this film.
Figure 11
Notes
[1] See Darko Suvin, “Locus, Horizon, and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies,” Utopian Studies 1, no. 2 (1990), 69-83, now reprinted in Darko Suvin, Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction, and Political Epistemology – A Darko Suvin Reader (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009).


[2] I discuss the genre of the alternate history in “Learning to Live in History: Alternate Historicities and the 1990s in The Years of Rice and Salt” in Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays, ed. William Burling (MacFarland, 2009); and in “The Last Bomb: Historicizing History in Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain and Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine,” The Comparatist 23 (1999): 141-151.


[3] Miyazaki himself, in an interview upon the film’s release, is adamant that the film is in fact not set in the 1950s: “It’s actually a lie to say it was set in the latter 1950s; the truth is that it is a story set in a time before television” (Miyazaki, Starting Point 350).


[4] However, Miyazaki asserts, “I do want to state clearly that I didn’t make this film out of personal nostalgia for that time” (Miyazaki, Starting Point 355).

[5] Susan Napier maintains that the film is a “clear example” of the genre of the fantastic in her Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 127. McCarthy points out that in the film’s visuals, “Miyazaki uses the contrast between darkness and light effectively to blur the boundaries between the real and the mysterious, the predicatable and the uncertain” (134-5).


[6] For a discussion of Disney’s struggles with organized labor, see Denning, ch. 11.

[7] For further discussion of Benjamin’s thoughts on animation, see Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde (New York: Verso, 2002), as well as the introduction to this issue.

[8] See Totoro Fund, http://www.Totoro.or.jp/new/E_zaidann.html.

[9] McCarthy notes the controversy surrounding the scene, as well as its importance to the film’s vision, in Hayao Miyazaki Master of Japanese Animation, 118 and 136.

[10] Again see my “The Last Bomb” and “Learning to Live in History.”
References


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Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1996.

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005.

Kobori, Hiromi, and Richard B. Primack. “Participatory Conservation Approaches for Satoyama, the Traditional Forest and Agricultural Landscape of Japan.” Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment 32, no. 4 (June 2003): 307-311. Available online at <http://ambio.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1639%2F0044-7447(2003)032%5B0307%3APCAFST%5D2.0.CO%3B2>

Karatani Kojin. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Trans. edited by Brett de Bary. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

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Suvin, Darko. Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction, and Political Epistemology—A Darko Suvin Reader. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009.

– . “Locus, Horizon, and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies,” Utopian Studies 1, no. 2 (1990): 69-83.

Tham, Chris. “Japanese Learning Notes.” 14 March 2010 http://nihongonotto.blogspot.com/2008/06/analysis- of-from-perspective-of-student.html.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.

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Wegner, Phillip E. “The Last Bomb: Historicizing History in Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain and Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine.” The Comparatist 23 (1999): 141-151.

– . “Learning to Live in History: Alternate Historicities and the 1990s in The Years of Rice and Salt.” Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays. Ed. William J. Burling. MacFarland. 98-112.

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