Software in a Body: Critical Posthumanism and Serial Experiments Lain

“Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Index

• A Shōjo Named Lain
• E-mail from the Dead
• Doppelgängers in Cyberspace
• Desiring Disembodiment
• The Question of Resistance
• Footnotes

A Shōjo Named Lain

Awarded a prize at the 1998 Japan Media Arts Festival for “its willingness to question the meaning of contemporary life” and for the “extraordinarily philosophical and deep questions” it raises,¹ director Nakamura Ryūtarō’s Serial Experiments Lain caused quite a stir when it was first broadcast on Japanese television (TV Tokyo) from July through September 1998 for a late-night audience. Written by the prolific Konaka Chiaki, who has authored numerous screenplays for anime such as Armitage III: Poly Matrix (1997), Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 (1998), Gasaraki (1998), The Big O (1999), Hellsing (2001–2), and Texhnolyze (2003), with original character designs by ABe Yoshitoshi, Serial Experiments Lain is among the most philosophically provocative anime to come out of Japan in the past twenty-five years, engaging issues relating to cyberspace, virtual reality, addiction to technology, the crisis of youth in the Japanese education system, and the status of identity in a posthuman world.

Like Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s groundbreaking manga and anime AKIRA, Serial Experiments Lain is a coming-of-age story, but instead of being about adolescent boys and their motorcycles, Serial Experiments Lain tells the story of a thirteen-year-old girl named Iwakura Rein (a.k.a. Lain) who struggles with her status as a “shōjo” in the realm of cyberspace. The figure of the shōjo typically describes a girl who (a) occupies the liminal stage between childhood and adulthood (approximately seven to eighteen years of age²); (b) is not permitted to express her sexuality (even if physically mature) because she is “socially considered sexually immature”³; and (c) is the avid consumer (and target demographic) of popular culture and merchandise that might be described as “cute”⁴ (kawaii) and that appeals to the shōjo’s sensibility which privileges human relationships (especially close same-sex friendships and romances), emotions, and psychological interiority.⁵ It is no exaggeration to say that the shōjo is “a definitive feature of Japanese late-model consumer capitalism,”⁶ as John Treat has suggested, with an entire industry devoted to shōjo culture (manga, anime, and novels), shōjo fashion, and shōjo hobbies. What Serial Experiments Lain offers is a coming-of-age story about a shōjo named Lain who undergoes a profound transformation in cyberspace by means of a specific form of electronic presence—that is, telepresence.

Strictly speaking, telepresence is defined as “a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance that they were present, or to have an effect, at a location other than their true location.”⁷ Telepresence in the strict sense of the term typically engages multiple senses (sight, hearing, and touch) and gives an individual the immersive feeling of being present in a remote location and of being able to affect that remote location, enabling the emergence of “distributed selves” and the experience of “action-at-a-distance without the familiar restrictions of conventional interfaces.”⁸ Information travels in both directions between the remote location and the location of the telepresent agent or agents. Examples of telepresence in the strict sense include, but are not limited to, video teleconferencing, telesurgery, bomb disposal and working in hazardous environments via robotic technology (including firefighting), and remote combat via unmanned aerial vehicles (or drones) and other remotely operated devices in technologically mediated theaters of war.⁹ However, telepresence may also be used in a more extended sense to refer to “presence at a distance” in any form. Many forms of telecommunication, including telephone and mobile phone communication, text messaging, and live Internet chats (either text based or in virtual online communities and three-dimensional environments, such as Second Life) may also be construed as telepresence in an extended sense so long as one achieves the feeling of vividly interacting with someone or something from afar as if one were there. What happens when the lines separating the so-called real and wired worlds become blurred by means of telepresence in this extended sense is at the heart of the posthuman dilemma faced by the shōjo named Lain.

E-mail from the Dead

As has been the case with all other examples that I have considered during the course of this study, from AKIRA to Tetsuo: The Iron Man, from Ghost in the Shell 2 to Kairo, the posthuman mise-en-scène of Serial Experiments Lain is urban, although the form and limits of the city undergo profound changes as it becomes digital. After the opening credits, each episode (or “layer”¹⁰) in the series (except for the last) begins with an everyday cityscape bathed in a computerized green glow: pedestrians, appearing as abstract shadow figures, cross the street at night in sync with changing crosswalk signals. What could be more mundane than a pedestrian crossing? However, the accumulation of such imagery casts this everyday urban scene in an uncanny, defamiliarized light. Within the framework of the series, such a seemingly benign feature of the city functions not only as a metonymy for strategies of urban planning and techniques of traffic calming but also as a means of visualizing the programmed control of pedestrian and automobile traffic, which regulates the circulation of bodies and cars in space and their rates of acceleration and deceleration across the digital urban grid. In other words, what is evoked by this repetition of the pedestrian crosswalk scene at the outset of each episode is the power of urban planning and social control, which we largely take for granted when crossing the street.

In the midst of this scene of social control, the voiceover of a girl is heard, asking “Why? Why won’t you come? I wish you would come here.” Although the speaker is not identified, the addressee is a teenage girl named Yomoda Chisa, a classmate of Lain’s, who navigates the urban landscape alone through a maze of couples, groups of friends, and the occasional drunken salaryman looking for a good time—all but Chisa apparently enjoying Tokyo’s neon-lit nightlife. Chisa stands out because she walks with her face downcast, gasping for breath and looking depressed. This scene and the associated sounds of the city are interrupted by an intertitle—a message that ripples across the screen in Japanese in total silence, bathed in an iridescent rainbow of pastel watercolors: “Why you should do that is something you have to consider by yourself [Dōshite sō shinakya ikenai ka wa—jibun de kangaenakya ikenai].” As is frequently the case in Serial Experiments Lain, messages from the networked world of online digital communications (a.k.a. “the Wired”) appear as text on the screen in a manner that evokes Jean-Luc Godard’s mix of image and text in his films, which the creators of Lain actively sought to emulate.¹¹ As I noted in my analysis of Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence in Part I, Godard foregrounds the status of language in cinema, infusing or interrupting the image with text, as a way of rejecting the continuity editing of classical Hollywood cinema. In so doing, Godard’s interplay of text and image demystifies the constructedness of traditional narrative film by “making the text question the image, and denying the possibility of the image to simply illustrate the text.”¹² In the context of Serial Experiments Lain, when text appears on the screen, whether in the form of e-mail, texting, instant messaging, or via pseudodocumentary footage overlaid with text that outlines the genealogy of the multimedial World Wide Web from Vannevar Bush’s “memex” to Ted Nelson’s “Xanadu,” it not only interrupts the narratival flow of the series and underscores the stylization of each episode but also foregrounds how such electronic communications and rhizomatic hypertextual multitasking impacts the cognitive functioning of its characters with information and distraction overload, producing effects of attention deficit (or “continuous partial attention” in the lingo of cognitive psychologists and informatics specialists) and technological addiction.¹³

As Chisa removes her glasses, loosens her hair, and leans precariously from the edge of a railing on the rooftop of a building in the shopping mecca of Shibuya, there is little doubt as to what the silent message she received is advocating that she do: commit suicide. Before she leaps to her death, a smile appears on her face in close-up and she silently mouths words that are translated into Japanese text (again bathed in an iridescent kaleidoscope of colors) on the screen: “I don’t have to stay in a place like this [Atashi wa konna tokoro ni inakutemo ii no].” As the series evolves, it becomes clear that such intertitle texts are electronic communications (in the form of e-mail, texting, or instant messaging) circulating in cyberspace. However, what is most peculiar is that we never see Chisa use a device, such as a computer, mobile phone, or handheld personal digital assistant, through which to transmit or receive such messages. Chisa’s death may be another example of Internet-facilitated suicide, such as I discussed in relation to Kairo in Part III; however, it is as if the electronic communications leading up to her suicide were conducted without the aid of any device. What it means for the boundaries between the real and Wired worlds to become blurred in this way is not only the fundamental question of the entire series but also a powerful metaphor for the posthuman blurring of boundaries between the human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, organic and machinic.

Chisa’s suicide is the first of many in Serial Experiments Lain, but it is one of the most shocking because she does it in such dramatic fashion: she hurls her body through the air and crashes into a large neon sign, as if in protest against the rampant consumerism appearing all around her. After she hits the ground, her motionless body lies crushed underneath the sign that she had just dislodged. Everyone at the scene expresses shock and denies responsibility. A week later, Lain’s classmate Julie (Juri) is quite upset because she has received an e-mail message purportedly sent by Chisa after she committed suicide. Lain, too, is haunted by the ghost of her dead classmate. When Lain returns home and powers up her NAVI (an abbreviation for “Knowledge Navigator”¹⁴) computer, she discovers that she, too, has received an e-mail message from the dead Chisa, who writes, “I have only discarded my body [nikutai o suteta dake]. By doing this, I can explain to you that I am still alive… You will all understand soon. Everyone will.” Lain asks, “Why did you die?” to which Chisa responds by evoking religious metaphors that cast cyberspace as a transcendental realm: “God is here [koko niwa kamisama ga iru no].”

Figure 4.1 Power lines reflected on the eye of Lain (Serial Experiments Lain).¹⁵

The next day, during her commute to school, an accident occurs when the train Lain is riding hits someone (possibly another suicide) and comes to a sudden halt. When Lain looks outside the train window, which glows white like a computer monitor without a signal, she sees blood dripping from the power lines outside. Serial Experiments Lain is well known for its highly stylized imagery of utility poles distributing telephone lines, coaxial cables for cable television, and power cables with their associated incessant hum. This network of cables and wires,¹⁶ which stretches as far as the eye can see across urban and suburban spaces, envelops the city and comes to suggest the foreboding, ominous hum of electronic existence, the flow of data and power in cyberspace, the interconnectivity between the real and Wired worlds, as well as the assemblage of technical and abstract machines that make cyberspace possible (see Figure 4.1). The image of blood dripping from power lines serves as a powerful visual metaphor that suggests not only the posthuman intersection of the living and nonliving but also that electricity is the lifeblood of a cybersociety, that power lines circulate the electronic presence of cyberspace.

Although we do not know for certain who or what was hit by the train, Lain later hallucinates seeing the ghostly, shape-shifting image of Chisa on the train tracks as she is run over by an oncoming train that has appeared out of nowhere in the suburban neighborhood near her home. Lain awakens from this vision, crying at her desk in class, only to have another vision in which the English grammar lessons written on the chalkboard dissolve into pixilated data, under which is revealed a palimpsest message apparently from Chisa: “Come to the Wired as soon as you can.” In a third vision, on her way home from school, Lain sees Chisa juxtaposed with power lines in the background. Lain asks, “Where are you?” Chisa smiles, the answer being obvious—she is in the Wired—before dissolving into an Escheresque, two-dimensional helix-like spiral (see Figure 4.2), a technique we saw used earlier in relation to the stylized deaths of Stunner and Murphy in Avalon discussed in Part III.¹⁷ “Chisa” is but one of many anthropomorphic faces given to the Wired.

Figure 4.2 Against the backdrop of high-tension wires, Chisa dissolves into an Escheresque helix (Serial Experiments Lain).

That Serial Experiments Lain begins more like a horror film than cyberpunk is perhaps not too surprising given that it was written by Konaka Chiaki, who also makes a living as a screenplay writer in the genre of live-action horror cinema and is a self-professed follower of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937).¹⁸ But it is the unique way in which Serial Experiments Lain blends elements of horror and cyberpunk that makes it so compelling. As with Kairo in Part III, the glue that holds this techno-horror together is electronic presence and its manifold fictions. Whether in the form of e-mail as an uncanny gateway to another world, a “sovereign electronic world” accessible by means of the latest telecommunications technologies,¹⁹ or cyberspace as a realm in which the technological “dissociation of consciousness and the body” is made possible, creating a simultaneity that allows “for temporal immediacy and spatial isolation,” bringing “psychical connection in spite of physical separation,”²⁰ the fantasies of electronic presence animate Serial Experiments Lain from beginning to end.

Doppelgängers in Cyberspace

Serial Experiments Lain negotiates the fictions of electronic presence in relation to a world that is split into two spheres that are distinct but interconnected. On the one hand, there is the analog world “around us, a world of people, tactile sensation, and culture.” On the other hand, there is the digital world “inside the computer, of images, personalities, virtual experiences, and a culture of its own.”²¹ Serial Experiments Lain dramatizes the extent to which the primal scene of translation is no longer simply between speech and writing, or between consciousness and the unconscious, but rather between the analog and the digital. The series reframes this scene of translation in terms of what it calls the “real” and “Wired” worlds. Every time we talk on a mobile phone, compose e-mail, watch television, listen to music, or surf the Web, we enter and reenter the scene of analog-digital translation. In the midst of this interminable scene of translation, Serial Experiments Lain explores the crisis that emerges when the distinction between the analog and digital, the real and Wired, begins to dissolve in the person of the introverted thirteen-year-old girl named Lain.

This blurring of boundaries manifests itself initially through a series of surrealist moments. The opening credits of each episode include a strange sequence in which Lain’s cap blows off due to a sudden gust of wind while she is crossing a pedestrian bridge, but instead of falling to the ground, her cap freezes in midair as she continues across the bridge. As the series progresses, Lain has increasingly surrealistic visions in which her surroundings and the figures inhabiting them fade in and out of focus and sometimes dissolve into digital data or shape-shifting shadows. In Lain’s world, the highly stylized, almost abstract shadows are especially noteworthy, insofar as they often appear strangely colored with blood red (or, in some scenes, blue) spots that dot and, in some cases, animate the surface of the shadow even when the person or object casting the shadow is standing still. In other scenes, Lain observes smoke emerging from her fingertips, or chalkboard lessons become animated and dissolve into pixilated data. What such surrealist moments show is the uncanny irreality of Lain’s “real” world—the Wired’s immanence just “beneath the surface”²² of everyday reality. “The real world isn’t real at all,” as Lain remarks to herself in an especially self-reflexive moment as she gazes out over her neighborhood in Layer 07, titled “Society,” looking through the bars of a railing as if imprisoned. If cyberspace is a “consensual hallucination,”²³ as William Gibson famously defined it in his quintessentially cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), it is the hallucinatory aspects that come to the fore when cyberspace bleeds into the spaces of Lain’s everyday life, as they did for Ash in Avalon as discussed in Part III.

That Lain herself comes to function as a sort of screen for the consensual hallucinations of the Wired is suggested by repeated scenes of her staring blankly at her computer monitor as blue rectangles reflecting the screen are projected back onto Lain’s eyes, suggesting that she is transfixed by what she sees (see Figure 4.3). It is no exaggeration to say that Serial Experiments Lain contains more imagery of computer terminals, television screens, and their associated video lines and noise than just about any other anime to date. Addiction to screen technology (and its negative effects) is as important an issue for Serial Experiments Lain as it was for Kairo and Avalon in Part III. By the time the series reaches Layer 11, titled “Infornography” (a play on the words “inferno + information + pornography”²⁴), Lain has metamorphosed from a demure and innocent shōjo, who wears cute bear pajamas, into a “machinic junkie”²⁵ (see Figure 4.4), entwined from head to toe in electrical cables, with electrodes attached to her head and even her mouth, and computer-generated holographic screens superimposed over her entire body.

Figure 4.3 Lain’s eyes reflect back her computer screen (Serial Experiments Lain).

Figure 4.4 Lain the machinic junkie (Serial Experiments Lain).

The extent to which Lain has changed is also underscored by how completely her bedroom has become transformed from that of a slightly immature adolescent girl’s room, filled with stuffed animals, to a cyberpunk’s techno-haven reminiscent of the metal fetishist’s apartment in Tetsuo discussed in Part II, overflowing with computer equipment, liquid cooling devices triggered by thermal sensors with retro-futuristic pressure gauges that spew out steam, as well as holographic projections overhead. The representation of Lain the techno-fetishist is also reinforced in the final image that appears at the end credits of each episode in a slow zoom out: Lain lies naked in a fetal position, surrounded by a multitude of power lines and data cables (see Figure 4.5). Although this image may be a citation of the tentacle motif, whose long history stretching back to Hokusai I considered previously in my reading of Tetsuo in Part II, it is noteworthy that Lain is not under assault by any of the cables or wires surrounding her, but instead appears to be resting peacefully, lulled asleep by the warm electronic embrace of the techno-womb. On the one hand, such womblike imagery reinforces the conclusion that the development of the posthuman cyborg subject is coemergent with the forms of technology and companion devices that surround it;²⁶ on the other hand, it suggests that during the course of the series, Lain’s perception becomes almost completely mediated by the consensual hallucinations produced by the network of hardware and software technologies that are connected to her cybernetic body and enframe her personal space.

Figure 4.5 Lain enjoying the warm electronic embrace of the techno-womb (Serial Experiments Lain).

And Lain is not the only machinic junkie to appear in Serial Experiments Lain. Numerous characters display an addiction to technology to varying degrees: for example, Lain’s father, who, although issuing a warning to Lain that the Wired “is just a medium for communication and the transfer of information” that she “mustn’t confuse . . . with the real world,” spends much of his time surfing the Web in a home office filled with multiple computers and monitors; her sister Mika, who gets trapped in a sort of limbo in between the real and Wired worlds and starts mumbling to herself, repeating the sounds of a telephone’s busy signal²⁷; the Men in Black (Karl and Lin Sui-Xi), who keep Lain under constant surveillance in order to prevent the crumbling of boundaries between the real and Wired, yet, at the same time, are so reliant upon technology that they resemble cyborgs; members of the Knights organization of hackers, who will do anything necessary to usher in a new age in which there is no border between the real and the Wired; and Eiri Masami, the self-proclaimed “God of the Wired,” a researcher for Tachibana General Laboratories who illegally inserted his personal history, thoughts, memories, and emotions into the code of the Internet Protocol before committing suicide, uploading his consciousness in order to rule the Wired with information as an anonymous Godlike digital entity.

To this list one could also add a host of secondary characters, such as the young man in Layer 02, “Girls,” who ingests a pill-sized nano-mechanism called Accela at the Cyberia dance club in order to accelerate his sense of time and ends up going berserk on the dance floor right in front of Lain, proclaiming, just before he takes his own life with a gun, “The Wired can’t be allowed to interfere with the real world!” to which Lain responds, “No matter where you go, everyone’s connected.” Or the virtual reality–headset-wearing street person Nezumi in Layer 07, “Society,” who, despite the fact that he is weighed down by a backpack that holds his computer and wireless modem, traverses the city making pronouncements about how he is able to “send [his] consciousness anywhere [he] wants,” no matter where his body happens to be, “breaking the barrier between the real world and the Wired.” Or the adolescent boy in Layer 04, “Religion,” obsessed with the online game Phantoma, who becomes trapped in its virtual environment while being chased by the Wired Lain and accidentally shoots and kills a young girl who is playing tag in the Wired. Even after smashing his portable computer to the ground, the boy continues to see reality itself as if it were virtual reality—everything appears mediated by video lines and pixilated, low-resolution computer graphics. As Kawashima learned in Kairo, disconnecting or even destroying the machine does not help once one has become part of the network, programmed by it, seeing the world through its Webcam eyes. Like Kim in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, the metal fetishist in Tetsuo, Harue in Kairo, and Ash in Avalon, all of the aforementioned characters in Serial Experiments Lain may be construed as machinic junkies to varying degrees along the continuum of technological addiction.

In addition to the problems of techno-addiction, the accumulation of screen metaphors in Serial Experiments Lain is also used to suggest the operations of abstract machines. It is much easier to identify and domesticate the threat posed by technology when it appears in the Hollywood form of the Terminator (with red eyes aglow), but technology is not always reducible to the technical machines, hardware prosthetics, and high-tech implants that are on display in cyberpunk films and anime. Machines in the wider, more generalized sense of “abstract machines”²⁸—a concept introduced by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—include social machines, political machines, economic machines, scientific machines, media machines, ecological machines, and even aesthetic machines. Such abstract machines never operate in isolation but always in relation to larger arrangements and concrete assemblages. The value of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the “abstract machine” to critical posthumanism is that it makes visible less conspicuous, but no less constitutive, networks of control and stratification: “An order-word machine overcodes language, a faciality machine overcodes the body and even the head, a machine of enslavement overcodes or axiomatizes the earth: these are in no way illusions, but real machinic effects… Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic—perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and semiotic—but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent.”²⁹ Abstract machines operate as an exteriority that becomes immanent in the human subject, programming the forms, movements, and subjectivities of bodies in a controlled and pre-mapped space. At its most provocative, anime such as Serial Experiments Lain demystify the workings of abstract machines, foregrounding their operations so that they are no longer simply taken for granted.³⁰

The various types of screens—from computer terminals to televisions, from classroom blackboards to large-format outdoor video screens— that appear in Serial Experiments Lain foreground not only addiction to technology but also the enthrallment with abstract machines and the “control society”³¹ they constitute. The frequency with which Lain not only appears as a screen for the Wired but also appears on screen (whether on a computer monitor, television, or giant JumboTron-type outdoor screen)—her image distorted by television scan lines, intermittent video noise, and blue static, as well as vertical hold malfunctions and video ghosting—underscores the mediating force of abstract machines and their associated screen(ing) technologies.³² Gilles Deleuze has famously remarked with respect to cinema’s power to endow images with self-motion that “the brain is the screen”: “Cinema not only puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind.. The brain is the screen… Cinema, precisely because it puts the image in motion, or rather endows the image with self-motion [automouvement], never stops tracing the circuits of the brain.”³³ Perhaps nowhere is this claim more applicable than in the posthuman cinema of Serial Experiments Lain. Not only does the series show that “the brain is the screen” for Internet addicts such as Lain, but by explicitly visualizing the reflection of the blue computer screen onto Lain’s eyes as she looks back at the camera from the computer’s point of view—with the audience placed in the position of the computer screen (or just behind the terminal)—it suggests that we viewers and scholars of posthuman anime are also the screens of anime. If one accepts Deleuze’s argument that cinema not only “puts movement in the image” but also “puts movement in the mind,” tracing the circuits of the brain—the brain-as-screen—then perhaps it is not going too far to suggest that the movement of images produced by that particular form of cinema called “anime” also traces the brain circuits of anime viewers around the world and their transnational relations to abstract machines. In other words, the anime viewer is placed in a position similar to that of Lain, whose eyes reflect the screen’s projections even as the screen traces the circuits of her brain. But I would go even further: if one considers the incredible rate of consumption of anime outside of Japan, in regions as diverse as East and Southeast Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia, then it is not only the brain that is the screen of anime. One would have to say, in an era of global capitalism and the accelerating transnational traffic of cultural flows, that the world is the anime screen.

However, within the diegetic world of Serial Experiments Lain, it is noteworthy that the consensual hallucinations of cyberspace are not simply projected onto the body and brain of Lain but also projected outside of Lain in the form of doppelgängers manifesting both inside and outside of cyberspace to suggest that Lain is losing control of who she is, that her subjectivity has become not simply distributed but fractured.³⁴ As I noted in my discussion of the uncanny in Part I in relation to Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, the figure of the doppelgänger expresses a blurring of boundaries between self and other that is one of the dominant issues of posthumanism. The spectrality and uncanniness of electronic presence (and telepresence, in particular) in cyberspace is what makes this split possible in Serial Experiments Lain. Telepresence creates an electronic doppelgänger by turning the self into media, since the self-turned-into-media that is introduced by telepresence is not simply identical with the self that is engaged in telepresence.³⁵ In this sense, more than simply a coming-of-age story for the Internet age, Serial Experiments Lain is a story about the struggle between a shōjo and her telepresent doppelgängers.

The disjunction between the real and Wired worlds is paralleled by the differentiation between the real and Wired Lains. Lain struggles with the duplicity of her identity in cyberspace after her virtual alter ego, called “Wired Lain,” takes on a life of its own, spreading nasty rumors online, acting as a digital peeping Tom (a metaphor for identity theft in cyberspace) who acquires personal secrets and then discloses them to others online, as well as engaging in other forms of antisocial behavior designed to disrupt the smooth functioning of the status quo. In a psychoanalytic register, in addition to being interpreted in the context of ego formation as a sort of superego or moral censoring agency that tells the self what it should or should not do and making it feel guilty about misdeeds, the doppelgänger may also function as a sort of id, impulsively doing all the things the self would like to do but dare not do. Lain’s doppelgänger behaves and dresses so differently from her counterpart in the real world that the Wired Lain is sometimes referred to as the “wild Lain.” As Tarō, the young technopunk who hangs out at Cyberia Club observes to Lain in Layer 03, “Psyche,” “Most people take on a personality in the Wired that’s different than what they have in the real world, but yours are total opposites.”

As the series progresses, the more the real Lain hears about the “wild” Wired Lain, the more she worries about what the other Lain has done in her name. The conflict between real and Wired Lain reaches its peak in Layer 08, “Rumors,” as Lain surfs the Wired during class with her HandyNAVI, a handheld computer. She enters a chatroom in which Internet Protocol 6 and its bugs are being discussed along with a variety of other rumors on the Wired. Eiri Masami, the self-proclaimed Deus of the Wired, makes a grand entrance and proceeds to engage Lain in a theological debate about his status in cyberspace: “How do you define ‘God’? If it’s the creator of the world, that’s not me. The all-powerful ruler of the world? You give God too much credit… But if you define God as one who exists everywhere in that other world? If that’s what you mean, then yes, I suppose you could call me that. I have only a slight influence on the workings of the world, however.” The conversation takes an unexpected turn when Lain presses him and asks, “Who are you?” to which Deus responds, “I am you… You are merely a hologram of that other you. You are just a body.” She thinks this is crazy and refuses to believe him. Deus presses further: “But you don’t think that the you in the real world is the same as the one standing here in the Wired, do you?” “But I’m me,” Lain responds and returns to the classroom, where her teacher is standing over her disapprovingly. It is one thing for Lain to enter the Wired fully. “In full range. Full motion. I’ll translate [metaphorize] myself into it,” she asserts in Layer 04, “Religion.” Lain is considered powerful in the Wired precisely because she can “metaphorize” herself, translating her real world form into the Wired as a digital avatar, as the avatar of a talking mouth explains to Lain in Layer 06, “Kids.” However, what the God of the Wired is suggesting is that Wired Lain is able to transubstantiate herself into the real even as the real Lain metaphorizes herself into the Wired. Indeed, Eiri Masami, the self-proclaimed God of the Wired, tries to convince the real Lain that she is just a hologram of the Wired Lain—just a body. In Layer 10, “Love,” Eiri tells Lain that she was “originally born in the Wired”: “The real world’s Iwakura Rein is merely a hologram of her, a homunculus of artificial ribosomes. You never had a body to begin with.” But this simply begs the question as to who is the doppelgänger of whom—is the Wired Lain the doppelgänger of the real Lain, or vice versa? And things become even more complicated when it is suggested that Lain may have developed more than one doppelgänger. As the doubles started to proliferate, the creators of Serial Experiments Lain had to resort to orthographical distinctions in order to differentiate Lain into three figures: the name of the so-called real Lain was designated using the Chinese characters 􏰎􏰏; the Wired Lain was written in katakana³⁶ as 􏰐􏰑􏰒; and the Wired Lain’s evil twin was written in Romanized script simply as “Lain.”³⁷

The conflict between Lain and her doppelgängers comes to a head in Layer 08, “Rumors.” As Lain lies terrified in her bed, flashing power lines, both within her room and outside, give birth to Wired Lain out of the real Lain’s dapple red shadow. As the confrontation between the real and Wired Lains ensues, Lain’s crisis of subjectivity comes to a head: “You’re not me!” proclaims the real Lain to the Wired Lain. “I’d never do what you do. Stop it! Why are you acting like the part of me that I hate?” As the real Lain begins to strangle the Wired Lain, she reflects, “I’m committing suicide.” This is followed by a surrealistic vision of multiple bodies, both male and female, with Lain bobbleheads bouncing on top. Deus tells Lain that they are all her, since she has “always existed in the Wired” and is “omnipresent.” Lain denies it, saying that her “true self is inside” of her and proceeds to knock over the dummies with bouncing Lain heads. Lain asserts that if she is really what Deus claims she is, then she should be able to delete the unpleasant memories of people who believe they were wrongly surveilled by the panoptic, peeping-Tom Lain. Deus agrees, and Lain carries out her first act of historical revisionism. At school, real and Wired Lain split off from each other with the latter running to Lain’s friends and greeted warmly. The Wired Lain taunts the real Lain: “That’s right! Lain is Lain, and I’m me.” When the real Lain next reappears in her bedroom, she tries to reconfirm her existence as the “real Lain,” greeting her NAVI computer as a friend: “I . . . I’m me, right? There’s no other me but me, right?” By this point it has become clear that, given the split subjectivity of Lain, neither the real Lain nor the Wired Lain is the master of her posthuman house. In terms of the larger issues of posthumanism, Serial Experiments Lain shows how such computer-generated virtual worlds can offer “new forms of ‘post-bodied’ activity,” as described by Elaine Graham, in which “the unitary face-to-face self is superseded by the multiple self—the simulated, fictive identity of the electronic chat-room or the multi-user domain, the avatar or synthesized self of a digitally synthesized interactive environment.”³⁸ Although it may seem obvious that such virtual reality worlds are not simply “instruments in the service of pre-given bodies and communities” but “are themselves contexts which bring about new corporealities,”³⁹ the status of the body both inside and outside the digitally generated worlds of cyberspace is far from straightforward.

Desiring Disembodiment

Despite the fact that forms of Japanese visual culture engaging issues of posthumanism often push the envelope of what may be conceived as the gendered body, both gender and the body remain profoundly at issue. In the midst of Lain’s protracted existential crisis, the status of her shōjo body becomes an important point of contention. Is it possible to get in touch with the “real” organic body beneath all the layers of virtuality, or do all such attempts betray a nostalgia for the Real and reinstatement of anthropocentric essentialism? There is a tension throughout Serial Experiments Lain between a desire for disembodiment, on the one hand, and a desire for reembodiment, on the other. Indeed, it could be argued that most posthuman anime and films involve some sort of negotiation between these two poles, generally favoring one side over the other. The desire for disembodiment typically presupposes contempt for the obsolete human body and a yearning to escape death by discarding or annihilating the body in favor of some higher, transcendent state of being, whether spiritual or software, free of mortal and biological constraints.⁴⁰ For example, the devaluation of the body in favor of a “mind” or “soul,” however conceived, exemplifies a clear desire for disembodiment. Moreover, the desire for disembodiment may also include transhuman (or extropian) fantasies of uploading consciousness into a computer⁴¹ in the digitally pure form of an autonomous program or code that can then circulate freely across cyberspace (which Kusanagi does at the end of Ghost in the Shell when she uploads herself to cyberspace after merging with the Puppet Master or, conversely, downloads herself from cyberspace into a gynoid in order to protect Batou in Ghost in the Shell 2, as I discussed in Part I).⁴² This transhuman view of posthumanism privileges what N. Katherine Hayles has described as “informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life.”⁴³ In his essay “Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman,” Eugene Thacker coins the useful term “informatic essentialism” to describe the extropian view that considers the body as “essentially” information but insists that such informatic essentialism “is not a repression, denial, or effacement of the body.”⁴⁴ However, insofar as Thacker acknowledges that “the body in informatic essentialism increasingly becomes valued less according to any notion of materiality or substance . . . and more according to the value of information itself as the index to all material instantiation—a kind of source code for matter,”⁴⁵ this “valued less” is itself an explicit devaluation of the materiality of the body in favor of information, reducing flesh to “the material carrier for the information it expresses.”⁴⁶ On the other hand, just because the body is repressed by such informatic desires for disembodied consciousness-as-data does not mean that it is no longer relevant. Indeed, the obsessiveness with which the desire to escape the body is asserted in posthuman popular culture betrays the extent to which the materiality of the body still haunts the ideality of digital information. In such narratives, the body often comes back with a vengeance as the return of the repressed.

In contrast, the desire for reembodiment typically involves the reconfiguration of one’s body in the form of a cyborg, mecha, or other biomechanical mutation on the way toward an evolutionary redefinition of what is human without necessarily aspiring to the immateriality of the soul. In numerous posthuman anime and films, this desire for reembodiment often takes the form of armoring the human (especially male) body as an expression of the crisis of masculinity: biomechanical hardware remakes the weak body into a hard, phallic, machinic body capable of defending humanity against threats from without or within. However, just as often, the armored body of hypermasculinity fails to work as a defense mechanism against the disempowerment of men in an age of waning patriarchy—the redefinition of masculinity must be sought elsewhere. In some cases, a desire for reembodiment may actually be a disguised desire for disembodiment, a desire to discard inadequate embodiment in favor of something provisionally better on the way to no embodiment.⁴⁷

How do these two opposing desires manifest themselves in Serial Experiments Lain? On the one hand, the Wired God’s assertion that the real Lain is just a hologram of the Wired Lain clearly presupposes devaluation of the obsolete body and a desire for disembodiment as opposed to a desire for reembodiment. Eiri Masami, the Deus of the Wired, tells Lain that she is “software” in a body—nothing more than an “executable program with flesh.” In Layer 12, “Landscape,” Lain opines to her close friend Alice (Arisu) that this applies to everyone else as well: all humans are reduced to software applications. Lain then proceeds to proclaim openly her desire for disembodiment: “The truth is you don’t need bodies.” In saying this, Lain echoes not only Eiri Masami, who conveys a similar disregard for the body in Layer 10, “Love,” but also Chisa, the girl who committed suicide at the outset of the series, whose ghost informs Lain that “bodies are totally meaningless.” However, Lain’s friend Alice knows better, telling Lain she is dead wrong—they do need their bodies. Alice shows Lain that they are more than just “inconvenient bodies” (an expression used in Layer 11, “Infornography”) by placing Lain’s hand on her chest so that she can feel Alice’s beating heart, which is beating so quickly because she is scared. Although Lain’s body is cold and she is enshrouded in cables from head to toe, she is still alive and has the capacity for affect.⁴⁸ As Bruce Braun has argued, one of the lessons of posthumanism is “the possibility of, and necessity for, a political cartography of bodily formation that attends to how bodies are imbued with the capacity for affect—the capacity to be acted upon, and the capacity to act.”⁴⁹ In contrast to humanism, the posthuman emphasis on the capacity for affect is no longer tied to a norm, universal, or essence, but instead attends “to the middle—that place where everything happens, where everything picks up speed and intensity,” a “meeting place of danger and hope”⁵⁰ where ontological play allows for the hybridity and heterogeneity of new becomings, where the subject is “local, fluid, and contingent.”⁵¹

As Alice convinces Lain of the importance of embodiment (no matter how hybrid) and the capacity for affect, Eiri Masami floats into view from behind Lain (albeit initially invisible and inaudible to Alice) and offers a counterdiscourse in favor of disembodiment, telling Lain that Alice is scared “because she’s afraid of losing her body.” Eiri asserts that if “all sensations are caused by impulses in the brain,” then one simply has to block unpleasant impulses and select pleasant ones. Thinking that Lain has a programming bug that needs fixing, Eiri proceeds to materialize as a disembodied hand that is perceived by Alice, who recoils in fear. In response, Lain questions the godhood of this self-proclaimed Deus of the Wired. Lain points out that, despite Eiri’s attempt to remove all peripheral devices from the Wired in order to raise unconscious human connections to a conscious level and create a worldwide wireless neural network whose rhizomatically distributed connections mimic the brain itself, Eiri could not have accomplished all that he has without such hardware. The more Eiri rants against the materiality of the body and hardware, the more obvious it becomes that his is an ideology of electronic presence—an “informatic essentialism”⁵² or digital idealism, if you will—that is simply another variation on the extropian fantasy of electronic transmutation, such as I discussed in relation to Kairo and Avalon in Part III. According to Eiri’s brand of digital idealism, the sensible world of phenomena is subordinated to the intelligible world of digital data in the Wired, of which the material world is merely a hologram. In other words, by elevating the Wired to a transcendental realm where Truth, the Real, and the Thing-In-Itself reside, Eiri’s digital idealism approaches something like cyber-Platonism. According to a virtual avatar in the guise of Lain’s mother (serving as one of many mouthpieces for Eiri) in Layer 05, “Distortion,” “physical reality is nothing but a hologram of the information that flows through the Wired.” Eiri’s digital idealism advocates transcending the obsolete body and rising to a higher plane—not of spirituality but of pure digitality. However, as Jeffrey Sconce reminds us in Haunted Media, although “dreams of a complete absenting of the body and entrance into a more rarified plane of existence have definitively shifted from the metaphysics of the church to those of the computer chip,” in the last analysis, “we are always left with a material machine at the heart of such supernatural speculation, a device mechanically assembled, socially deployed, and culturally received within a specific historical moment.”⁵³ In response to this “hallucinatory world of eternal simulation where the material real is forever lost,”⁵⁴ Serial Experiments Lain offers the ubiquitous sound of powerline hum heard throughout the series, which underscores the importance of materiality to the Wired world—that it is material hardware and infrastructure that make possible the virtuality of the Wired world. Although we see repeated examples of wireless technologies being used during the series, the continued emphasis on the Wired makes it clear that there is no wireless telepresence without the hardware technology that makes it all possible. The wireless dreams of electronic presence are nothing without the Wired reality of electronic materialism and a steady source of electric power.

Furthermore, Lain asserts that without a body, Eiri “will never be able to truly understand” the human animal, which is more than simply a machine. In response to this confrontation, Eiri insists that he is the one who gave Lain a body in the real world. In an attempt to demonstrate his omnipotence in the Wired and real worlds, Eiri desperately tries to create a body for himself by materializing in the form of a grotesquely misshapen body, a monstrous assemblage of organs that is an obvious homage to the mutating bodies of Tetsuo in Ōtomo Katsuhiro’s AKIRA and the salaryman in Tsukamoto Shin’ya’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man. In order to defend themselves against the assaulting tentacles of Eiri, Lain telekinetically mobilizes nearby hardware, flinging equipment of all types at the transmutated body of Eiri and crushing it in the onslaught. In the end, Lain’s declaration of victory is also a victory for the body: “So what do you think now? Do you still think a body doesn’t mean anything to you?” However, where that leaves Lain’s identity is uncertain. At the outset of the final episode, Layer 13, “Ego,” Lain is still faced with a crisis of subjectivity despite her reaffirmation of the body. The degree of Lain’s crisis is indicated by the series of existential questions that she poses in a soliloquy addressed directly to the viewer, her image distorted by the usual television scan lines, vertical hold malfunctions and video ghosting, as well as intermittent noise and blue static: “I’m confused again. Am I here? Or am I there? Over there, I’m everywhere. I know that. I’m connected there, after all. Right? But where is the real me? Oh, right—there is no real me. I only exist inside those people who are aware of my existence. But this me who’s talking right now—it’s me, isn’t it? This me who’s talking—this me—who is it?” Where is the real Lain? Who is the real Lain? Or is there no real Lain? If there is no stable subjectivity, what is the ontological status of Lain’s posthuman existence? How are agency and politics redefined in the face of such posthumanism?

The Question of Resistance

Serial Experiments Lain traces the emergence of the Internet and the posthuman transformation it has brought about in the technologies of subjectivity that govern human forms of self-reference, categories of perception, and forms of communication. One of the most commonly accepted ideologies of cyberspace at the time Serial Experiments Lain first aired on Japan’s TV Tokyo network in the late 1990s portrayed it as a zone of unbridled democracy and freedom of expression, which was beyond race, nation, and class. Such utopian rhetoric is referenced in the opening credits of each episode through English slogans appearing as motion graphics: “NO RACE . . . NO NATION . . . NO POSITION.” However, as the series illustrates, the Internet is an arena in which struggles for power still occur. What Serial Experiments Lain offers is a counterdiscourse to such cyberutopianism, linking the digital realm referred to as “the Wired” to surveillance technologies and a control society. In Serial Experiments Lain, the world of cyberspace is haunted by the anonymous eye of the Panopticon.⁵⁵ The panoptic eye of Wired surveillance manifests itself not only in terms of the characterization of the Wired Lain as a peeping Tom but also in the repeated imagery of the panoptic eye of Lain’s NAVI computer (running an operating system provided by Tachibana Labs) that greets her at start-up, as well as the ubiquitous Men in Black who are constantly subjecting Lain to surveillance. What was all too often ignored by early Internet theorists in their enthusiasm for the “egalitarian” open-endedness of Web surfing was the extent to which the user is subjected to the filtered selectivity of search engine algorithms constituting a virtual network of links, while user profiles created from the digital tracks left at each Web site visited are bought and sold as data commodities for both commercial and government uses: “Most of us are unaware of being watched. But if you surf the net half an hour a day, chances are there’s an online profile of you . . . a cyber you who reflects your online behaviors and can help marketers target ads especially for you.”⁵⁶ Internet choices and options, no matter how decentralized, exist only to the extent that Web programming and search engine algorithms make them possible.⁵⁷ As the Internet spread to every corner of the world and was embraced as a sort of “digital democracy,” Serial Experiments Lain warned us of the need to be more attentive to the new “technologies of the self”⁵⁸ enframing the subjectification of Internet users. How does the increasing accessibility of the Internet to users all over the world contribute to the disciplinary programming of gendered subjectivities and bodies circulating in the analog world? How do techniques of online user profiling and information gathering figure into the emergence of new disciplinary technologies and the constitution of the Internet as a power-knowledge grid? How does the ideology of the Internet as “digital democracy” conduct readers into a rarefied and regulated field of possibilities—manipulating and controlling individual bodies, turning them into normalized, serviceable subjects directed toward strategic ends and goals? These are just a few of the questions evoked by Serial Experiments Lain.

In a posthuman world dominated by abstract machines, in which human beings have been reduced to “executable programs,” is resistance still possible? If the real and the virtual have already become blurred, if the real is already in some sense virtual due to the programmed instructions of abstract machines, what form must resistance take if it is to be effective as an antiprogram? If power is not concentrated in a single individual or group, but is dispersed across a decentralized network of abstract machines, who or what does one resist? As we have seen in discussions throughout this study, becoming-other is the strategy most often pursued in Japanese posthuman visual culture as a line of flight away from abstract machines and their mechanisms of classification, normalization, commodification, and control. Becoming-other denaturalizes the socially constructed body and resists the classifications and categories to which it is subjected by the abstract machines of society. In the forms of posthumanism analyzed thus far, becoming-other is either visualized quite literally in the form of a mutating body that resists the social classifications and categories to which it is subjected by pushing the boundaries of the body itself into nonhuman monstrosity (e.g., AKIRA, Tetsuo), or such becoming-other manifests itself in terms of split, multiplied, or distributed subjectivities (e.g., Ghost in the Shell 2, Kairo, Avalon, Serial Experiments Lain).

In the final episode, Layer 13, “Ego,” Lain offers the most dramatic form of resistance possible by rewriting history itself, or at least the conception of history that is circulating in the digital memory of the Wired. Like a deus ex machina, Lain resets everything in her world in an attempt to correct the mistakes of the Wired Lain by deleting bad memories. She is able to accomplish this feat through the dislocated indexicality of digital memory. As Adèle-Elise Prévost has suggested in her reading of Serial Experiments Lain, insofar as “digital information, by its very nature as ‘a seemingly arbitrary code of discrete, relational elements (numbers),’ is almost infinitely malleable,” “nothing serves as an unambiguous index of a real-life event; any pre-existing medium can be digitized and turned into raw material, and in this grand levelling ‘universal coding procedure’ anything can be transmuted, redistributed, and recast in new ways.”⁵⁹ In this newly reset, more vividly colored, utopic world, with an upbeat soundtrack playing, Lain’s parents and sister Mika eat breakfast together (without Lain) as if nothing had happened. Eiri Masami is no longer the Deus of the Wired, but just another disgruntled salaryman who is thinking about quitting his job. The Men in Black are now telephone repairmen working high atop utility poles. Chisa, the girl who committed suicide at the outset of the series, is alive again and attending school. Moreover, e-mails from the dead are no longer leaking out of the Wired world. Even the incessant noise of power cables now seems to “hum in harmony.”⁶⁰ But the most significant change is that Lain is no longer a part of this world. Her place at her family’s kitchen table is empty, as is the spot where she used to sit on the train. In resetting everyone’s memories, she has written herself out of the world altogether, since “what isn’t remembered never happened,” as a textual intertitle asserts. However, rather than giving her peace, such historical revisionism causes Lain great distress.⁶¹ Lain finds herself not in this new, more utopic world but in a vastly different one in which the city appears gray and bleak, the streets are eerily empty, technical machinery and digital connections are everywhere the eye can see, and Lain is merely an electronic shadow. When the camera pulls back, it reveals a domed city situated on a piece of rock floating in a void. Although no one is being hurt from the actions of the Wired Lain—indeed, everyone seems almost better off without Lain—she is lachrymose because she has deleted herself from everyone’s memory. Wired Lain appears and asks her if this is not what she wanted all along, but the real Lain wonders who she is if she is nowhere. So Lain resets the world again, but this time reinserts herself in it. With the help of her doppelgänger, Lain comes to the realization that “the Wired isn’t an upper layer of the real world,” since the Wired is so thoroughly entwined with the real that the two cannot be so easily disentangled. As soon as Lain starts to realize that her everyday life includes aspects that are both embodied and virtual, she becomes less inclined to submit to the programmed instructions of the abstract machines constituting the society in which she lives. Once the programming of the abstract machines has been demystified, Lain no longer feels compelled to submit to the status quo or its Ministry of Information Control.⁶² The technology of control demands that every body be put into its place,⁶³ but Lain refuses to be pinned down, identified, classified, or regulated by the abstract machines of society. Lain discovers that the most effective act of resistance in a cybersociety is to proliferate one’s digital personae in cyberspace in ways that disrupt the flow and control of information and elude the digital representations of personal identity stored as user profile data.

In Serial Experiments Lain, the powers that be consider it a threat to the system if there are two or more versions of the same person. The top executive for Tachibana Labs with the assistance of the Men in Black, who may also be agents for the Ministry of Information Control, interrogate Lain in Layer 07, “Society,” describing her as “dangerous” because if there are two Lains, then “the border between the real world and the Wired is starting to crumble.” During the interrogation scene, serious questions are posed about the identity of the real Lain, which she seems initially unable or unwilling to answer.⁶⁴ Questions such as when and where she was born, whether Lain’s parents are her real parents, whether she can recount important dates in her family’s history (including her mother’s and father’s birthdays, their wedding date, etc.) are posed to her. Lain’s inability or unwillingness to recollect such fundamental personal data suggests either that her memories and life history are fabricated fictions (like the implanted memories of replicants in Blade Runner or the ghost-hacked garbage man in Ghost in the Shell), or that she is resisting the demands of the status quo to be pinned down as a singular identity. During the interrogation, Lain’s personality shifts to that of the more assertive Wired Lain and she responds, “Shut up, damnit! Who cares about that crap? Like any of it matters.”

According to the Men in Black, “the Wired can’t be allowed to be a special world. It can only be a field that functions as a subsystem reinforcing the real world” (Layer 10, “Love”). Why does it matter to the system whether or not individuals can be pinned down? Imposters threaten the system with crimes of identity theft, tax evasion, forgery, illegal immigration, and so forth—all crimes involving false identity. If one is not who one claims to be, then one must be a hacker, criminal, illegal immigrant, or terrorist. False identity (or multiple identities) simply cannot be tolerated by the system.⁶⁵ As soon as individuals start to become difficult to track or categorize, then the system begins to have problems. Serial Experiments Lain suggests that the task for posthuman political resistance is not to overthrow the virtual (which is impossible) but rather to elude its totalizing grasp by using technologies of virtuality against the very assemblages and abstract machines that cast a virtual web over our bodies and subjectivities.

Rather than fighting her Wired doppelgängers, Lain learns to embrace them and the perspectivism they evoke, since “people only have substance within the memories of other people”: “That’s why there were all kinds of me’s.” If there are multiple Lains, it is due to the multiple memories of Lain in different people. Like Murphy in Avalon, Lain seems to have come to terms with the insubstantiality of her posthuman subjectivity and the extent to which it is constituted in a virtual, relational fashion. “Is it even necessary to posit the interpreter behind the interpretation?” asks Nietzsche. “Even that is fiction, hypothesis.”⁶⁶

In the penultimate scene, Lain encounters Alice on the pedestrian bridge featured in the opening credits. Although Lain appears to be about the same age, Alice is now a mature woman (twenty-two years of age according to the production notes) with an adult boyfriend who resembles a handsome young teacher from Lain’s school that the younger Alice used to have a crush on. Thinking that she recognizes Lain, Alice approaches her and they speak briefly, with Alice wondering aloud if Lain was a student at the school where she was employed as a student-teacher. Lain responds by saying that they are meeting for the first time. They proceed to exchange names, and Alice suggests that maybe they will meet again someday. As Alice walks away with her boyfriend, Lain remarks to herself, “You’re right. We can see each other anytime.” In the final scene, the Wired Lain reappears inside an old computer monitor or television set, her figure distorted by the scanlines and blue static that we have come to associate with her throughout the series, and offers a highly ambiguous concluding remark: “I’m right here, so I’ll be with you. Forever.”⁶⁷ Whether this final manifestation of the Wired Lain addresses her real-world self, the grown Alice, the audience, or perhaps all three remains uncertain. In the end, it is unclear if Lain has truly reset the world but remains trapped in cyberspace as a goddess or “digital angel” of the Wired,⁶⁸ or has awakened from her delusions of cyberspace grandeur and it is only her virtual doppelgänger who remains online. In either case, although Lain may not have completely eluded the fictions of electronic presence and the technological sublime,⁶⁹ her realization of the ineluctability of perspectivism, the fragility and rewritability of memory, and the importance of hybrid embodiment has moved her considerably beyond the techno-reductive views of transhumanist Eiri Masami, for whom human beings were no more than devices and communication, simply data exchanges.⁷⁰ More importantly, Lain has learned to accept the posthuman self as an ongoing work of fiction that is in a constant state of revision—contingent, fluid, and in between human, animal, and machine—a “nomadic subject” that emerges in relation to a wide range of nonhuman others.⁷¹

Footnotes

1. “Excellence Prize for Long Form Animation: Serial Experiments Lain,” Japan Media Arts Festival (1998), http://web.archive.org/web/20070426014853/ http://plaza.bunka.go.jp/english/festival/backnumber/10/sakuhin/serial.html (accessed November 17, 2008). Brief portions of the following analysis of Serial Experiments Lain first appeared in my “Screening Anime,” in Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation, ed. Steven T. Brown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 2–7.↩

2. As a legal term, shōjo refers to any female juvenile (or minor) below the age of twenty.↩

3. Takahashi Mizuki, “Opening the Closed World of Shōjo Manga,” in Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, ed. Mark W. Macwilliams (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008), 115; see also John W. Treat, “Yoshimoto Banana Writes Home: The Shōjo in Japanese Popular Culture,” in Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture, ed. John W. Treat (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), 281–83.↩

4. Indeed, the aesthetics of cuteness in Japan is indissociable from the figure of the shōjo—Hello Kitty being just the tip of the consumer capitalist iceberg.↩

5. See Deborah Shamoon, “Situating the Shōjo in Shōjo Manga: Teenage Girls, Romance Comics, and Contemporary Japanese Culture,” in Japanese Visual Culture, ed. Mark W. Macwilliams, 137–54.↩

6. Treat,“YoshimotoBananaWritesHome,”280.↩

7. “Telepresence,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepresence (accessed March 12, 2009). See Jonathan Steuer, “Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence,” Journal of Communication 42, no. 4 (1992): 73–93; Jack M. Loomis, “Distal Attribution and Presence,” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 1, no. 1 (1992): 113–19.↩

8. William R. Macauley and Angel J. Gordo-López, “From Cognitive Psychologies to Mythologies: Advancing Cyborg Textualities for a Narrative of Resistance,” in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray (New York: Routledge, 1995), 436.↩

9. On telepresence in war, see Kevin Robins and Les Levidow, “Socializing the Cyborg Self: The Gulf War and Beyond,” in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray (New York: Routledge, 1995), 119–25.↩

10. In the language of Serial Experiments Lain, episodes are referred to as “layers.” This usage invokes not only the concept of layers employed in digital image editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop but also the different layers (Application, Transport, Internet, and Link) that are part of the Internet Protocol Suite.↩

11. In an interview after Serial Experiments Lain had been completed, screenwriter Konaka Chiaki acknowledged having Godard in mind when he called for inserting text on the screen in the script. See Nakajima Shinsuke, “Interview with Chiaki Konaka,” HK (Winter 1999), http://www.konaka.com/alice6/lain/hkint_e.html (accessed October 16, 2006). One of the best examples of Godard’s interplay of text and image is Pierrot le fou (1965).↩

12. Gleb Sidorkin, “Pierrot Le Fou and the Interplay between Text and Image,” Tisch Film Review, May 13, 2008, http://tischfilmreview.com/voices/gleb-sidorkin/ 2008/05/13/pierrot-le-fou-and-the-interplay-between-text-and-image/ (accessed November 10, 2008).↩

13. Vannevar Bush, who was director of the agency that oversaw the development of the Manhattan Project, conceived of the memex as a memory expansion device that offered compression and rapid access to information and multimedia, which were to be recorded on microfilm and projected onto a translucent screen. Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, on the other hand, which was the world’s first hypertext database project, is described in Layer 09, “Protocol,” as “a giant electronic library in satellites in stationary orbit which could be used at any terminal on Earth via radio or phone lines.” On memex, See Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly 176, no. 1 (July 1945): 641–49, available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/194507/bush (accessed April 3, 2007); and James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, eds., From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s Machine (Boston: Academic Press, 1991). On Xanadu, see Belinda Barnet, “The Magical Place of Literary Memory: Xanadu,” http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr_18/BBfr18a.html (accessed February 12, 2009). See Honda Akira, ed., Visual Experiments Lain (Tokyo: Sonī Magajinzu, 1999), 44–45.↩

14. A term coined by former Apple CEO John Sculley in his 1987 biography to describe his vision of personal computing in the future, which would combine Web surfing, high-definition multimedia play, videoconferencing, speech synthesis and recognition, and software agents to facilitate the collection of information from an immense online hypertext database. See Sculley and John A. Byrne, Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple—A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).↩

15. On the ubiquitous imagery of cables as carriers ofelectricity and signals for telecommunications, see Honda, Visual Experiments Lain, 9–10. Also compare Ishii Sōgo’s Electric Dragon 80,000V (2001), which foregrounds similar imagery and associated noise.↩

16. Probably a citation of the famous extreme close-up shot at the outset of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) of a giant blue eye reflecting (like a cinematic screen) the urban dystopia around it.↩

17. On the comparison with the work of M.C. Escher, see n121 in Part III.↩

18. Konaka wrote the screenplay for Shimizu Takashi’s Lovecraft-inspired Marebito (Stranger from afar, 2004), one of the most disturbing and provocative horror films in J-horror history. With its voyage into the netherworld, chilling encounters with a subterranean being who feeds on human blood, and the protagonist’s steady descent into madness, Marebito offers a cinematic nod to H. P. Lovecraft’s acclaimed science fiction horror novella At the Mountains of Madness (1931).↩

19. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 202.↩

20. Ibid.,7.↩

21. From the series synopsis for Serial Experiments Lain. See Serial Experiments Lain, dir. Nakamura Ryūtarō (1998); subtitled DVD, disc 1 (Long Beach, CA: Pioneer Entertainment, 1998).↩

22. ABe Yoshitoshi quoted in “Otakon Panel Discussion with Yasuyuki Ueda and Yoshitoshi ABe,” August 5, 2000, http://www.cjas.org/~leng/o2klain.htm (accessed May 6, 2006).↩

23. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 5, 51.↩

24. Honda, Visual Experiments Lain, 57.↩

25. Félix Guattari, “Machinic Junkies,” Soft Subversions, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 101–5.↩

26. Honda, Visual Experiments Lain On technology as coemergent with social and natural worlds, see Fernando Elichirigoity, “On Failing to Reach Escape Velocity beyond Modernity,” Social Studies of Science 30, part 1 (2000): 146–47.↩

27. Lain’s sister Mika becomes disoriented whens he is unable to keep her Wired and real selves separate. In Layer 05, “Distortion,” Mika encounters her doppelgänger after returning home. As Lain enters the room, the Mika who has just returned home starts to dematerialize, while her doppelgänger takes over. While Lain looks at the front door where Mika had just stood, she sees a scintillating mirage of her sister, almost like a residual heat signature.↩

28. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 510–14.↩

29. Ibid.,514.↩

30. Compare Susan Napier’s analysis of the “invisible” machines in Serial Experi- ments Lain, which “not only support but literally construct identity.” See Susan J. Napier, “When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain,” Science Fiction Studies 29, no. 3 (November 2002): 418–35; reprinted in Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, ed. Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Rony, Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 101–22.↩

31. See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177–82.↩

32. Compare Jean Baudrillard: “In the image of television, the surrounding universe and our very bodies are becoming monitoring screens.” See Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 15.↩

33. Gilles Deleuze, “The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze,” in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 366.↩

34. This may also include the avatars who appear to Lain in Layer 5, “Distortion,” to tutor her in the ways of the Wired, which are likely a reference to Cordwainer Smith’s science fiction short story “Think Blue Count Two” (1963) from his “Instrumentality of Mankind” series. “Think Blue Count Two” tells the story of a young girl named Veesey who is assisted and protected on an interstellar flight by a series of artificial personalities who appear real but are in actuality echoes of her mind. That the creators of Serial Experiments Lain were thinking of Cordwainer Smith is made clear by the Web site password (“Think Bule Count One Tow”) used by Lain’s father, which is an obvious play on the title of Cordwainer Smith’s short story. However, in Serial Experiments Lain, it is unclear if such avatars are all echoes of Lain’s mind or if some may be manifestations of Eiri Masami, the so-called God of the Wired. See Cordwainer Smith, “Think Blue Count Two,” in The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith, ed. James A. Mann (Framingham, MA: NESFA Press, 1993), 129–54. On the role of avatars in defining the inner life of adolescents who play online games, see John Hamilton, “The World Wide Web,” in The Inner History of Devices, ed. by Sherry Turkle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 64–76.↩

35. Compare Daisuke Miyao and Lisa Bode on digital doppelgängers. See Daisuke Miyao, “From Doppelgänger to Monster: Kitano Takeshi’s Takeshis’,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 8–10; and Lisa Bode, “Digital Doppelgängers,” M/C Journal 8, no. 3 (2005), http://journal.media-culture.org .au/0507/07-bode.php (accessed June 3, 2009).↩

36. Katakana is the Japanese syllabary reserved for foreign loan words, onomatopoeia, and special emphasis.↩

37. Honda, Visual Experiments Lain, 43.↩

38. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 5. On the “post-bodied,” see Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, “Cultures of Technological Embodiment: An Introduction,” in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 1–16.↩

39. David Holmes, “Introduction,” in Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace, ed. David Holmes (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 3.↩

40. On transhumanism’s rhetoric of transcendence, see Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 9–10, 131, 158–60, 163–65, 173–75, 211, 230. See also Mark Dery on techno-transcendentalism in his Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 9, 45, 48–49, 161. Also see Sue Short, Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 162–63; Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), 32–33.↩

41. The most famous example of this is roboticist Hans Moravec’s fantasy of a robot surgeon who transfers human consciousness to a machine. See Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 110. See also N. Katherine Hayles’s response to Moravec in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1.↩

42. The situation is more complex in Ghost in the Shell due to Shirow Masamune’s reflections on the post-Cartesian status of the term “ghost.” Given the numerous citations of the Christian New Testament in Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell, some viewers have been quick to conflate the ghost (gōsuto) in the cyborg shell with a metaphysics of the soul, but it is worth recalling that Shirow Masamune, the author of the manga upon which the anime is based, resists the urge to rehabilitate the cyborg subject as a revamped Cartesian cogito with hardware exterior animated by the metaphysical software of the soul. Such a recuperation of humanism is the all too common denouement of many a cyberpunk film to come out of Hollywood, from RoboCop to Terminator 2. In his author’s notes to the manga, Shirow resists such a conclusion by situating the ghost as a phase-effect of a biomechanical system. In the post-Cartesian world of Ghost in the Shell, the cyborg’s ghost functions not as a directing agency positioned above, behind, or beneath the system, but rather as a particular mode of that complex system, as a phase-effect in the system that is open to contingencies and forces from elsewhere in the system. Just as one does not say that the liquid or gas phase of a material system is the controlling “mind” or “soul” to which its solid phase is subordinated as “body,” so too, Shirow refrains from anthropomorphizing the ghost mode of the cyborg’s biomechanical system into a “lord over the decision-making process.” However, Shirow’s post-Cartesian conception of “ghost” notwithstanding, it is also the case that when Kusanagi uploads herself to cyberspace after merging with the Puppet Master at the end of Ghost in the Shell or downloads herself from cyberspace into a gynoid in order to protect Batou in Ghost in the Shell 2, such moments come awfully close to the extropian fantasy that privileges disembodied consciousness over the material body. See Shirow Masamune, Ghost in the Shell, trans. Frederik L. Schodt and Toren Smith, 2nd ed. (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2004), 364. Compare Laura Bartlett and Thomas B. Byers analysis of the desire for disembodied consciousness in The Matrix: Bartlett and Byers, “Back to the Future: The Humanist Matrix,” Cultural Critique 53, no. 1 (2003): 30, 35, 42.↩

43. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 2.↩

44. Eugene Thacker, “Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman,” Cultural Critique 53, no. 1 (2003): 86. See also critical discussions of extropianism in Tiziana Terranova, “Posthuman Unbounded: Artificial Evolution and High-Tech Subcultures,” in FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture, ed. George Robertson and others (London: Routledge, 1996), 170–73; Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York: Harmony Books, 1998), 118–22; and Dery, Escape Velocity, 301–6.↩

45. Thacker, “Data Made Flesh,” 86 (emphasis added).↩

46. N. Katherine Hayles, “Afterword: The Human in the Posthuman,” Cultural Critique 53, no. 1 (2003): 137.↩

47. This is what the “Human Complement Program” (jinrui hokan keikaku) in Anno Hideaki’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–96), inspired by Cordwainer Smith’s “Instrumentality of Mankind” stories, seems to suggest: by attempting to replace the human species altogether in an act of species genocide in order to create room for the next step up the evolutionary (and spiritual) ladder, the Human Complement Program’s evolution of the human animal into something transhuman (“the way to be a god,” as one character in Evangelion asserts) seems to be motivated by a desire for disembodiment concealed as a desire for reembodiment.↩

48. This emphasis on embodiment is also evident in the so-called devices that appeared at the end of each episode to advertise the next, which included live-action footage of actual shōjo showing aspects of their own bodies, such as eyes, mouth, hands, ears, feet, hair, heart, and so on. See Honda, Visual Experiments Lain, 68–69.↩

49. Bruce Braun, “Modalities of Posthumanism,” Environment and Planning A 36, part 8 (2004): 1354.↩

50. Ibid.,1354–55.↩

51. Teresa Heffernan, “Bovine Anxieties, Virgin Births, and the Secret of Life,” Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003): 118.↩

52. I borrow the term from Eugene Thacker without his assumption that the body is not repressed or effaced by such essentialism. See Thacker, “Data Made Flesh,” 86–87.↩

53. Sconce, Haunted Media, 19–20.↩

54. Ibid.,19.↩

55. Ibid.,19.↩

56. Deleuze argues in “Postscript on Control Societies” that we are moving away from disciplinary societies, which organize sites of confinement (prisons, hospitals, schools, factories, families, etc.) toward control societies with new forms of domination (involving incessant monitoring via electronic tagging and user profiling), as well as new forms of resistance (such as computer piracy and viruses). Although I agree with Deleuze’s diagnosis, I would qualify his conclusions by adding that panoptic technology has not disappeared so much as it has been adapted to new contexts. After all, as Foucault recognized, the Panopticon effect is not simply reducible to Bentham’s architectural plans but is, more importantly, an abstract machine of surveillance and normalization with the potential for innumerable concrete applications. As Elaine Graham has remarked, “Surely something like cyberspace must be ripe for a Foucauldian analysis of how codes, protocols, commercial imperatives, modes of access and conventions of design all function to engender ‘regimes’ of virtuality in which self-identity is enacted, renegotiated and disciplined?” See Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 13n4; Charles Ostman, “Total Surveillance,” Mondo 2000 13 (Winter 1995): 16–20; John Perry Barlow, “Jackboots on the Infobahn,” Wired 2, no. 4 (April 1994): 40–49. On the emergence of control societies, see Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” 177–82. On the Panopticon, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York, 1977).↩

57. Adam Zagorin and Karl Taro Greenfield, “Click and Dagger: Is the Web Spying on You?” Time, November 22, 1999, 60, available at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,992648,00.html (accessed February 21, 2010).↩

58. The controversy surrounding Google’s initial decision to comply with the Internet censorship laws imposed by the People’s Republic of China is one particularly troubling example of how search engine results can be filtered, altered, and truncated by political agendas. On January 12, 2010, Google announced that it was “no longer willing to continue censoring” search results on Google China (Google.cn).↩

59. Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16–19.↩

60. Adèle-Elise Prévost, “The Signal of Noise,” in Mechademia 3: Limits of the Human, ed. Frenchy Lunning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 178. On the problem of indexicality in relation to digital animation and cinema, see Thomas Lamarre, “The First Time as Farce: Digital Animation and the Repetition of Cinema,” in Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation, ed. Steven T. Brown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 161–88; Lev Manovich, “What is Digital Cinema?” in The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 173–92.↩

61. Prévost,“TheSignalofNoise,”185.↩

62. The question of historical revisionism raised by Serial Experiments Lain also evokes the controversial issue of censorship involving Japanese history textbooks and the representation of wartime aggression and atrocities committed by the Japanese army during World War II. See Caroline Rose, Interpreting History in Sino-Japanese Relations: A Case Study in Political Decision-Making (London: Routledge, 1998); and Jennifer Lind, Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).↩

63. The name of a Big Brother–like government agency responsible for maintaining the computer-controlled infrastructure of Lain’s world, policing the Wired, and prosecuting hackers.↩

64. See Michel Foucault on the Panopticon, wherein “each individual has his own place; and each place its individual.” See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 154.↩

65. In Layer 10, “Love,” Eiri tells Lain that she has “a fake family” and “fake friends.”↩

66. This is also the threat posed by the splitting of Keanu Reeves’s character in The Matrix into Thomas Anderson and Neo. In an interrogation scene that is probably being referenced by the creators of Serial Experiments Lain, Agent Smith expresses dissatisfaction with Neo’s split subjectivity and double life: during the day he is Thomas A. Anderson, a software programmer who has a Social Security number and pays his taxes. By night, he lives his life in cyberspace as the hacker Neo, whom he claims is guilty of innumerable computer crimes. Neo’s greatest threat to the Matrix is that by daring to be more than one identity, he runs the risk of eluding the user profiles that have been created for him and awakening from the virtual hallucinations forced upon him by that system.↩

67. Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 139 (sec. 7[60]).↩

68. As in the ending of Kairo, the final shot disappears in a flash like an old-fashioned television that has just been turned off.↩

69. “Digital angel” is Konaka Chiaki’s term. See Honda, Visual Experiments Lain, 2. See also Susan J. Napier, “The Problem of Existence in Japanese Animation,” Pro-ceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149, no. 1 (March 2005): 78.↩

70. On the technological sublime, see Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 9–10, 16–17, 155.↩

71. See Honda, Visual Experiments Lain, 48–49.↩