{"id":326,"date":"2018-02-25T05:26:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-25T05:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/?p=326"},"modified":"2022-11-25T01:08:52","modified_gmt":"2022-11-25T01:08:52","slug":"end-of-history-endless-summer-akira-mizuta-lippit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/2018\/02\/25\/end-of-history-endless-summer-akira-mizuta-lippit\/","title":{"rendered":"End of History \/ Endless Summer: Akira Mizuta Lippit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Filednotes: Toward an Ecology of the Super Flatline: Murakami Takashi at the End of History<\/strong>
Akira Mizuta Lippit (USC)
Workshop on Media Ecologies<\/a> | Keynote<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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Tan Tan Bo \u2013 In Communication, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 141 3\/4 \u00d7 141 3\/4 in 360 \u00d7 360 cm \u00a9 2014 Takashi Murakami\/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Photography by Robert McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Akira Mizuta Lippit<\/a> has written on Lynch, Media Archaeology, Japanese film, and a number of other media and philosophy-related topics; a renaissance interdisciplinarian, he is positioned against the \u201cacademic zoning\u201d imposed by more formal approaches to culture and communications. The keynote at this conference was built around the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and his Superflat<\/a> manifesto. Murakami\u2019s theorization of otaku<\/a><\/em>, Lippit commented, is the creation of a world in which subjectivities blend into each-other like soup and borders are done away with. This view provides an interesting counterpoint to Naoki Sakai\u2019s notion of co-figuration<\/em>, which is the way a \u201ccommunity represents itself to itself, thereby constituting itself as a subject\u201d (Sakai 15). In other words, the interaction between a community and an outside entity needs to establish a system of exchange values that make communication possible. The two would need to agree on equivalent meanings so that they may understand each-other. Alternatively, following Lippit\u2019s interpretation, the otaku<\/em> flatness suggested by Murakami is a hypothetical pluralistic world without frontiers and conflict, without centres and peripheries, because both the sender and the receiver are undefined subjects; they would be impossible to contextualize in terms of power dynamics (who is speaking, and to whom?).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further exploring the manifesto, Lippit associates Freud\u2019s pleasure principle<\/a> with Murakami\u2019s flatline<\/em> and the death drive<\/a>. Through that proposition the artist relates the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagazaki, which took place during the summer vacation of 1945, to an \u201cendless summer:\u201d death and pleasure together into a single whole. The never-ending summer connects to otaku <\/em>culture, permanent adolescence, the obsession with feel-good culture and cute power<\/a>, through the ironic suggestion that since the bombing\u2014and forever and ever, as the Grady twins beckon<\/span>\u2014the Japanese have cultivated the emotional age of a fourteen year-old because the horrors of fallout would otherwise have been too much to bear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The neverending summer, then, indicates a certain end of history. The time of humans on Earth, what we call \u201cHistory,\u201d has been declared about to end many times throughout history, noted Lippit referring to Hegel and Koj\u00e8ve\u2019s assertions of that fact (and, in passing, Fukuyama\u2019s). For Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve<\/a>, what replaces History is \u201cAnimality.\u201d Koj\u00e8ve saw the principle Cold War adversaries as one and the same. The Russians and the Chinese were only poor Americans, but quickly getting richer. For him, the post-historical being is American animality, or what is more formally referred to as American materialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Koj\u00e8ve\u2019s visit to Japan presents an interesting counterpoint to Murakami\u2019s own theorizations of what the future would look like. The views are uncannily similar, but for very different reasons. Koj\u00e8ve\u2019s opinions are ridiculously stereotypical impressions that nevertheless resonate very closely with Murakami\u2019s own. For Koj\u00e8ve, the Japanese are all about formality and snobbery (a post-historical subjectivity par excellence<\/em>). Their ritual, essentialist notions of art-creation reduce art to a bodily, corporeal return to animality; musical concerts are not unlike the sounds of frogs and crickets; visual art is as plain as spider webs; lovemaking is animalistic. In the end, art creation is unnecessary because art is already all around us, found in (what\u2019s left of) the environment. At the end of the day we all just want to \u201cfeel good,\u201d declares Murakami, or in Hegel\u2019s (via Koj\u00e8ve) formulation, \u201chappiness and plenitude are the highest forms of being.\u201d Thus, Murakami\u2019s argues that humanity is reduced to linear forms of expression, as in anim\u00e9, to what he calls \u201cdeformalism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately \u201cflatness\u201d is a perspective: of the pre-Columbian world, of painting (via the impressionists, the image loses its volume and flattens to the black square<\/a> on the canvass itself); Murakami\u2019s \u201cSuperflatness,\u201d the medical flatline, ultimate linearity, 2D, the end of history visible forever as the linear perspective converges at infinity upon the horizon. Art will be reclaimed by Nature and Life. A Hegelian might argue that a rock does not have its own world and that it is human beings who build worlds. The process of building worlds through imagination, innovation, enterprise, and fantasy is the rewriting of Reality itself in which thou, the Subject, art always at the centre. In defining what is Human, Hegel claimed that what distinguishes us from animals is Art and Work. Because the colonizing Western-European nations had a long history of organizing work and workers, Hegel in a sense justifies colonialism and capitalism. Lippit questions that strife for \u201cmore,\u201d for the accumulation of capital through Work and cultivation through Art. At this present time of shortages, risky economic speculation, societal erosion and a rapid class division into vulgar extremes, why not settle for just \u201cenough?\u201d One does not need to fall in romantic love or eat gourmet food. A takeout meal and some friendly intimacy can be enough. To wit, our atomic world is already well irradiated after decades of testing and reactor failures; background radiation measures as high in central London as it does near the Fukushima plant. Perhaps, then, animality is a way to pause from all this and to return to a more natural, ecological balance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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References:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sakai, Naoki. 2008. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism<\/em>. 1st ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Legend: The text annotated in blue<\/span> indicates personal comments accompanying my field notes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Filednotes: Toward an Ecology of the Super Flatline: Murakami Takashi at the End of HistoryAkira Mizuta Lippit (USC)Workshop on Media Ecologies | Keynote Akira Mizuta Lippit has written on Lynch,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":783,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[36],"class_list":["post-326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-critical-fieldnotes-theory","tag-conference-notes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":784,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions\/784"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediawerks.ca\/n\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}