Mechademia 4: War/Time (review)

Mechademia 4: War/Time is the fourth entry in a book series that analyses anime, manga and the fan arts. This particular volume proposes, in the words of Thomas Lamarre, to examine how Japanese popular culture negotiates the idea that 'war constitutes the very ground of our productivity and prosperity' (ix). Lamarre suggests that the essays to follow (there are 18) will unfold a general theoretical premise (following from Foucault's analysis of the various productive discourses of war): 'war and everyday life are inseparable, and both our daily time or temporality and our historical moment are conditioned in war' (xi). Lamarre's proposal is fascinating, not least because his premise is somewhat elusive: what precisely are the conditions of a temporality of war? How does war act as a 'control on the everyday time of orderly social productivity' (xi)? While Lamarre does not unfold the various philosophical resonances in the notion of the temporality of war, as such, it is hard not to hear a latent Heideggerianism at work here, one that suggests that to be, in contemporary Japan, is to be towards war, war determining the very parameters, limits and boundaries of cultural and subjective ontology and possibility. But Lamarre is more specific: he suggests that to understand the cultural productions of contemporary Japan one must analyse, interrogate and perhaps inhabit the space between the discourses of war and time: 'here, too, we see an analytic effort to insert a gap between war and temporality, between military destruction and everyday life' (xiii).

The questions that naturally follow from the Preface are these: will the essays making up this volume - essays analysing contemporary literature, film, digital games and manga - fulfil the promise of Lamarre's theoretical introduction? Will they unfold an analysis of the idea of temporality itself being conditioned by the reality (imagined or otherwise) of war? Each essay does make reference to an idea of war (or, to be more precise, some idea of violence, not necessarily militaristic), but only a relative few engage in sustained meditations on the idea of war temporality in any real philosophical sense. Given that Lamarre's Preface does suggest a fascinating, if latent, philosophical understanding of being and (war) time, it is a shame, indeed a very real lost opportunity, that all the essays do not take up the idea that an understanding of time is itself conditioned by the general economy of war as such.

Having said this, however, there is excellent work to be found in War/Time. Gavin Walker, Mark Anderson and Michael Fisch all have produced engaging, thoughtful and philosophically nuanced analyses of their chosen cultural objects. Walker's 'The Filmic Time of Coloniality' is a superb reading of a highly influential film, Makoto Shinkai's The Place Promised in Our Early Days (Japan 2004). Walker suggests, in his reading of this technically revolutionary digital film, that Makoto's manipulation of historical reality (his film offers an alternate vision of contemporary Japan) creates an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for a possible future; the complex psychological temporality of the film - a film latently 'about' Japan's colonial past - offers itself as a sort of allegory of the postcolonial situation. Embedding Gayatri Spivak into his quotation, Walker writes, 'By displacing and dislocating the conceptual architecture of "our" present into another present in which the same materials are divergently organised, the film itself becomes an image of the "geopolitical postcolonial situation" that serves "as something of a paradigm for the thought of history itself "' (14). Mark Anderson's 'Oshii Mamoru's Patlabor 2: Terror, Theatricality, and Exceptions That Prove the Rule' is by far the longest essay in this collection, and one of the more rewardingly complex. The anime film Patlabor 2 (Oshii Japan 1993) is an extended meditation on the military, legal and cultural status of the Japanese Ground Self-Defence Force (according to the Japanese Constitution, created by Allied Forces at the end of WWII, the JGSDF can only serve to defend Japan; it cannot engage in military...