Thomas Lamarre: An Introduction to Otaku Movement - Arts @ Brunel

overcoming. I am thinking especially of Azuma Hiroki’s idea of anime otaku as
posthistorical.
EnterText 4.1
A theory of emergence should spur thinking about how something new (say, the
postmodern) emerges from densely interconnecting prior elements (of the modern) yet
does not resemble those elements. The new is an experience and actualisation of what
was virtual to a set of material conditions. The Gainax discourse, however, dispenses
with correspondence and thus cannot think materiality or continuity. For Azuma, for
instance, a simple break marks the movement from modernity to postmodernity (or
alternatively, the posthistorical). In a predictably modernist fashion, the historical break
between modern and postmodern is re-inscribed as a geopolitical break: Western
modernity versus Japanese postmodernity. Consequently, what began as a raid on
hierarchies, subject positions and identities turns into a defence of precisely these
hierarchies, positions and identities.
Let me give a last example that brings this discussion full circle. After attending
the Otakon (Otaku convention) in the United States in 1995, Okada Toshio wrote of his
encounter with American otaku. In his account, Okada demonstrates his profound
fascination with the American otaku looking at Japan. Okada’s fascination with the gaze
of the American otaku recalls Zizek’s discussion of the Western fascination with events
in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. “What fascinates the West,” Zizek speculates, “is the
re-invention of democracy.” 28 In Eastern Europe, the West looks for its own origins, for
the authentic experience of its democratic invention. Likewise, Okada’s fascination with
American otaku appears as an attempt to re-invent anime and otaku, to re-discover their
origins and identity. As Zizek suggests, the real object of fascination is the gaze, the
Thomas Lamarre: Otaku Movement 178