Di anime, di target e di otaku

[P Again]

E poi si chiedono perché perseguitano i cristiani in Asia...

[Shito]

Estratto da una corrispondenza con il filosofo giapponese Morioka Masahiro:

 

 

Post-modern society is a society without god or religion, without any desire of fight and any need of pain. It's the society where the human history, written thought great stories or "narratives", has ended already and resolved into a meaningless day-by-day convenient, comfortable and frivolous life.

 

Now, according to the much interesting ideas of Alexandre Kojeve (who, quite interestingly, also visited Japan himself), post-modern society leads to re-animalization of humans through consumerism. i.e. convenient satisfaction of human needs and basic animal desires, i.e. a painless society. Azuma Hiroki also follows pretty much this way of regarding our times, while considering the evolution of Japanese society and otakuzoku.

 

Well, what not even Kojeve, nor Azuma Hiroki, nor Takashi Murakami have foreseen is that maybe prior to the re-animaliazion of men there's another step: the re-inphantilization of men.

 

Basically, Azuma Hiroki -following Kojeve- sees otakuzoku as an "alternative" to re-animalization of men in post-modern society. They think that becoming somebody as an otaku is the natural response of those who, confronted with a painless (and meaningless!) society, where "great narratives" are ended already and life has no meaning at all anymore, just can't accept to "live just for living" - like animals - and thus create a formalist "snob-ism" in some sort of "Meiji-like elegance" by elevating small narratives (manga, anime, fiction in general) to the level of quasi-great-narratives. While I can understand this point of view, except that I would rather talk about "Heian-like formalism", not "Meiji-like formalism" (please refer to "Kaguya-hime no Monogatari" on the subject of "formalism vs. animal life"), I would also say that kind of vision may be true just for the very first generation of otakuzoku - the genertion born and breed with the Wolrd enthusiasm of Osaka'70, let's say, just as Anno Hideaki was (is). And that is because the commodity used by the otakus in their "snobbish" escapism are anyway commercial commodities, thus the market quickly reacted to the presence of the "otakuzoku" by providing commodities especially produced  for otakus. This quicky absorbed otakuzoku itself in the re-animalization process - otaku have no more to "fight" and "experience social pain" in order to acquire their otaku goods, joy and "status". With that, society leans to an "otakuzoku society", i.e. a society of "infantile men" - which is basically what Anno Hideaki himself advocated by saying "Japan is a country of children".

 

Modificato 3 Novembre, 2017 da Shito