The Mecha that therefore I am (not): Notes on the becoming-animal in the age of robot Giuseppe Gatti (Roma Tre University) Postmodernity reloaded

Japanese sci-fi animated series envision a paradigmatic allegory of the cognitive, political and existential consequences of contemporary technology and (in)human convergence. In this regard, the so-called “Mecha” genre (narratives of giant robots piloted by human operators) occupies a strategic place as anime like Goldrake or Mazinga Z are widely recognizes as part of Eastern and Western juvenile popular imaginary. However, anime are not just animated tv series but a very transmedia franchised projects which aim to create a complex (and marketable) “accumulation of settings”. With these words, Hiroki Azuma highlights a paradigmatic shift on the modes of narrative reception and consumption in the Japanese fandom community (Otaku) as well as throughout the whole post-industrial society. As Lyotard, Rorty, Baudrillard and Jameson announced the end of the Grand narrative and the entry to the world of simulacra, for Azuma, postmodern culture has been progressively organized like a database which afforded an “animalistic drive” to collect and consume fictional data instead of broader narratives.

Neon Geneis Evangelion saga (Gainax Studio, 1995- ) is a paradigmatic case study as its narrative relies on such database organization and pivots on the topic of animality. Originally designed to capture the Otaku’s third generation, Evangelion unexpected success appointed the series as the most acclaimed anime of the 1990s.1 The saga started with a 26 episodes tv series (1995) to which followed two long length movies: Death & Rebirth (Hideaki Anno, March 1997) and The End of Evangelion (Hideaki Annno and Katzuya Tsurumaki, July 1997), which either provide alternative endings. 2 Among them, many alternative storylines continues in manga and videogames. As suggested by Azuma, Evangelion’s films abruptly recap the series’ episodes, why the Japanese fan community focused on the drawing style, the emotional engagement with the characters (the so-called “moe” features) and the settings (in Japanese, “settei”). As paradigmatic of a mid-90 shift of the modes of storytelling production, Evangelion saga is designed to provide an “accumulation of settings” whereby the audience can recollect multiple and customized narrative pathways, as in front of a database. What means, in philosophical as well as cognitive terms, to deal with a database rather than to a traditional story? Azuma opposes two terms: the modern “world image” (seikazō) that provided a Great narrative of the world and the postmodern “setting” (settei), the framework in which multiple “Great non-narratives” are organized.

1 In addition to the aforementioned Azuma’s Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, for an analysis of Evangelion’s narrative and reception see also Christophe Thouny, “Waiting for the Messiah: The Becoming-Myth of Evangelion and Densha otoko”, Mechademia, Vol. 4, 2009, pp. 111-129 and Cris Bolton, “The Mecha’s Blind Spot: Patlabor 2 and the Phenomenology of Anime”, Science Fiction Studies, N. 88, Vol. 29, November 2002. 2 Whereas the Evangelion’s universe mushroomed through manga, videogames, action figures and erotic telephone cards, in 2007 Gainax Studio started a new cinematographic saga called Rebuild of Evangelion (2007- ) that consists of four long-length films which drifts away from the latter setting and is actually expected to conclude by the end of 2015. On Febraury 2015, has been released a full 3D short film titled Evangelion: Another Impact. Directed by Hideaki Anno, it is available on http://animatorexpo.com/evangelionanotherimpact/.

As the American translator of Azuma would highlight, the Japanese term “settei” means both the ensemble of narrative and visual features at the basis of one anime, as well as the set of “default options” present in the Japanese version of Mac OS.3 In virtue of Azuma’s continental philosophical background, seikazō may refer to Heidegger’s notion of World Picture (Weltbild). Hence, why Heidegger defines the animals as “lacking in world” (weltarm), Azuma labels database consumption as “animalistic” for it lacks “a picture of the world”. The Japanese term settei, I contend, would be linked as well to the Heideggerian notion of “Umwelt”. It is significant that Heidegger takes this term by Jacob Von Uexküll, the pioneer of modern ethology.

Starting from the Umwelt-theory of Uexküll, now I will focus on the issue of becoming-animal present in Evangelion. By contending Azuma’s thesis, I will recognize in Evangleion’s setting a positive stance towards the notion of animality and, by means of its narrative world, an endeavour to reassess the human-technology convergence in a radical political perspective.

Evangelion’s Umwelt

Uexküll posits a question: how do organisms make meaning and thus act accordingly with their environment? Against a mechanicist view, Uexküll’s starting assumption is that all creatures (including humans) are subjects whose essential activity consists of perceiving and acting. Therefore, even if they share the same physical space (umgebung), every creature lives in its own world. What a subject perceives becomes its perceptual world and all that it does becomes its functional world. Perceptual and functional worlds together form a subjective close “bubble”, that is the Umwelt. More precisely, Umwelt may be considered as the “functional cycle” resulting from the interaction between animal’s sensory and motor organs with object’s perceptual and functional cue bearer. As Umwelt’s objects may change in significance depending on animal’s mood (stimmung), for Uexküll “the subject and the object are dovetailed into one another, to constitute a systematic whole” (1934: 11).4

Besides Heidegger, the Umwelt-theory has notably inspired many continental philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze up to Giorgio Agamben. The Italian philosopher provides an insightful contemporary reading of Uexküll, as it remarks how the man (i.e. the subject) arises from the separation of the category of human and animal. As Agamben points out, even if each animal lives in its bubble-like Umwelt, they nonetheless seem to share a synchronic “musical score”. Take the spider’s web. It constitutes a somewhat medium that links the apparently incommunicable Umwelt of the spider with that of the fly: “Though the spider can in no way see the Umwelt of the fly the web expresses the paradoxical coincidence of this reciprocal blindness”.5 In fact, the spider’s web perfectly fits with the fly’s body whereby it is elastic enough to imprison it, and sufficiently strong to serve as a shortcut for the spider attack.

3See Hiroki Azuma, op. cit., p.132n13; 4Within the subjective space of the Umwelt, animal and object establish “perceptual cue” (merkmal) and “effector cue” (wirkmal) that are action-perception “distributed proprieties” similar to James Gibson’s notion of “affordances”. Interestingly, effector cue may “extinguishes” perceptual cue depending on subject’s “mood” (Stimmung). Uexkull also claims that “the receptor signs of a group of receptor cells are combined outside the receptor organ, indeed outside the animal, into units that become external objects” (1937: 9). 5 Giorgio Agamben, The Open. Man and Animal, Stanford University Press, Stanford (CA), 2004, p. 42.

More provocatively, Uexküll argues that “the receptor signs of a group of receptor cells are combined outside the receptor organ, indeed outside the animal, into units that become external objects”6. Umwelt is thus a distributed functional system which provides cognitive scaffolding.

A post-Cold War branch of cognitive science employees, among others, the notion of Umwelt to develops new epistemologies toward the study of human and in-human forms of cognition and subjective experience. Calling for collaboration among neuroscience, psychology, technology and cultural studies, scholars like Andy Clark and Edwin Hutchins marshals an epistemological campaign in looking at human cognition as a “cultural-cognitive ecosystem”. 7 As neuropsychological experiments provide evidence that human neural architecture is “naturally” equipped with an unusual cortical plasticity and a prolonged period of learning, for Clark we are “bio-technological symbionts” as technology is not simply a “prosthetic” extension of our brain-cantered cognition, but is strictly “dovetailed” to our existential scaffolding in a way that overcomes the artificial penetration, in favour of a deep psycho-cognitive relation”. 8 As old “cognitive technology” such as notebook actively re-shaped human thought, new software-agent technology “will be less like tools and more like part of the mental apparatus of the person.” We are, according to Clark, “natural-born cyborg” as language, mnemonic tools or practices that involve high-cognitive processes like driving a car or performing a sport, must be considered technologies. In turn, theories of “distributed cognition” and “extended mind” are perspectives on the study of emergent intelligent system stemmed by the mutual work of central nervous system, body and environment. As for Uexküll the human is the only animal whereby its physical space (umgebung) constitutes its Umwelt, for Clark human mind and subjectivity are, in some extent, an Umwelt itself as they are respectively the by-product of a de-centred population of neural processes and a transient and expandable apparatus. In a broad sense, if subject is an Umwelt, such Umwelt is a technology.

In this ecological perspective, the very idea of human-technology relation and subjectivity has to be reformulated. In a significant way, robotics provides both an analytical study of the basic feature of human/animal cognition and behaviour and designs cognitive technological agents based on principles of distributed and emerging intelligence. 9 As early robotics aimed to develop tele-operation systems which allow remote human controller to work at distance by means of robotic device, later, robots were designed to be “proactive”. Rather than being a simple “medium” between subjective sender and objective receiver, proactive robotics designs autonomous embodied systems by “handling unpredictable events in an environment or niche without recourse to an outsider [on-line] designer”.10 Concurrently, technology of “tele-presence” (namely, the feeling of being present in a remote environment) initiated by modern devices such as telegraph or television up to videogames or

6 Jacob Von Uexkull, op. cit., p. 9. 7 For an introduction on “cognitive ecology” see Edwin Hutchins, “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition”, Philosophical Psychology, 27:1, 2014, pp.34-49. 8 Andy Clark, Natural-born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford Univeristy Press, Oxford, 2003. 9 See Willem F.G Haselager, “Robotics, philosophy and the problems of autonomy” in Itiel E. Dror (ed.), Cognitive Technologies and the Pragmatics of Cognition, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2007, p. 61-76. 10 Id., p. 64.

virtual reality systems can reach, in some cases, a true extension of our sense of bodily presence into a distant environment. 11 As reported by Clark, our sense of location depends on the “combination of visual inputs and the subject’s experience of trying to move and act in the world (and hence, crucially, by feedback coming through various motor and locomotion systems).”12 If the material mechanisms that superintend the emergence of consciousness are still encapsulated within the central nervous system, future high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces might expand the physical substrate of conscious experience it. 13 What’s the philosophical consequence of this technological and epistemological scenario?

The allegory of mecha, a robot-suite piloted by an apparently central human operator, provides an insightful philosophical case study to deal with such issues. Topics regarding emerging and distrib-uted intelligence and systems of tele-presence get particular attention in Evangelion project. If clas-sical mechas reassess the logic of Cartesian subject (an homuncular central operator which com-mands the body that, in some extent, was still present in Uexküll’s theory), rather, I argue, Evan-gelion’s robots (EVAs) are truly “bio-technological symbionts”. To assess my position, I will ana-lyse the imaginary media-technology behind the functioning of EVAs, as well as their visual repre-sentation.14

Inside the EVAs

EVAs are giant cyborgs created by United Nations to defend a post-apocalyptic Tokyo from the attack of the Angels, mysterious supernatural creatures which threatens human existence. Integrating a biological organism within a mechanical infrastructure, EVA includes a capsule called Entry Plug in which a human pilot can controls its actions via neural connection. In respect of old-fashioned mecha, the human operator is immersed into an amniotic-like liquid (the “LCL”), which literally enmeshes his/her body within Eva’s bio-tech corporeal fluids. Despite its mechanical infrastructure, EVA is a porous agency. In fact, EVA is co-controlled by a remote tactical headquarter in live communication with the pilot. The pilot’s neural connection with the Eva is expressed through a “synchronization ratio”, whereby high-synch enhances high phenomenological feedback loop between the two organisms. EVA’s pilot (also called “Children”) would share EVA’s tactile sensations and pain and, in exceptional cases, it could physically merge with the EVA.

11 Andy Clark, cit., p. 93. The question concerning the control is crucial for our everyday sense of agency and corporeality that is, ultimately, at the basis of our sense of self. Not by a chance, Haselager briefly employees Uexkull’s Umwelt-theory to buttress the role of agency within an ecological system or organism. According to Daniel Dennett, our very sense of agency (and ultimately our sense of presence) is the sum of what we can directly control and whose we have direct feedback loop. On this perspective, brain, body and environmental tools (social and technological webs) seems to be just “garments”, or external instrument for a conscious user (Clark, 2003: 128). However when driving a car we say to “feel the road”, neuroscience research provide evidence that our body image and sense of agency would be genuinely extended. Our subjective experience change too, as we execute a series of automated, yet complex, actions of which we become aware only when something unusual happens (say a person suddenly cross the street). See. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Little Brown & Co, New York, 1991. 12 Id., p. 94. 13 Andy Clark, “Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of Consciousness is (Probably) Still in the Head”, Mind, vol. 118, no. 472, 2009, p.24 n xvii. 14 For an epistemological perspective on the study of “imaginary media” see Eric Kluitenberg (ed.), The Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2007.

By excluding pilot’s control, EVA can be also remotely controlled by the headquarter through an autopilot system (the Dummy plug). More interestingly, EVA autonomously can break any human control when it goes in “berserk mode” (Japanese “bousou”, which means “out of control”). While in berserk EVA’s strength and capabilities dramatically increase, showing animalistic features and behavior. In this status, EVA usually breaks or morphs its mechanical carapace, showing its fang and casting out a frightening howl. In turn, the pilot is shown to be unaware or “possessed” by a similar animal rage.

I argue, berserk mode would stand for a new kind of post-human agency, which drifts away from the Cartesian notion of subjectivity which nonetheless presupposes a certain degree of autonomy and singularity. Notably, the berserk is activated while the pilot is under extreme stress and the synch-rate reaches high level. I can assume that such merging relies on a sort of inter-connection between midbrain systems, the part of the brain which we, humans, share with the most ancient of vertebrates and that is responsible, among others, of “rage” behavior.15 This would be a profitable explanation of why the berskered EVA is represented like a gorilla, or as a four-footed animal.

In fact, during a cult fighting scene in the episode 19 (also present in Death & Rebirth), Eva Unit-01 lost its left and, as its batteries expires, it seems bond to succumb under Angel’s attack. We see a helplessly Shiji, the Unit-01 pilot, bagging his Eva start working again. Suddenly EVA goes berserk, regenerating its left arm and defeating the opponent Angel by devouring the monster’s energetic core (a sort of pineal gland situated in its chest, called “S2 engine”). As EVA goes berserk, we don’t see Shinji anymore, by discovering, in the next episode, that he has merged with EVA’s body by reaching an unbelievable 400% synch-ratio. It follows a psycho-odyssey within Shinji’s mind as, it is recognized, its body is reverted into the LCL and its “essence” is distributed into the EVA. Although, by devouring the Angel’s core, Eva-Unit 01 accomplishes a crucial step in its evolution. As a fictional example of evolutionary and proactive robot, Unit-01 is capable to integrate new genotypes, to change its morphology and, as shown, its phenomenal states.

15 According to neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, rage is an innate emotional system which “is characterized by a vigorous casting of the body at offending objects with biting and pounding of the extremities; it is a mixture of positive and negative valence; it is related to dominance hierarchies and submission and relationship with consepcifics esp with regards to territorial behavior”. Thereby, the neural circuitry that superintends human and animal rage “are the irritations and frustrations that arise from events that restrict freedom of action or access to resources”. See Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998.

More than a decades later, the second episode of Rebuild saga (Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, 2009) remixes the scene in question, pinpointing on new interesting details. In this case, the animalistic reaction stems from the pilots. A new relationship with the two is highlighted by an extreme close up of Shinji’s predator-like eyes to which follows that of EVA.

As EVA’s body morphs, including a new glowing limb and a fluorescent red armor, suddenly a white halo floats on the head of Unit-01. But this time, Shinji seems pretty aware of the situation as he says to be disposed to lose his humanity in order to save his friend, Rei Ayanami, which in turn had been absorbed by an evil Angel. At the end of scene, Shinji’s EVA absorbs both the Angel’s and Rei’s S2 engine thus assuming the semblance of a god-like agency which sprouts giant wings of light. In this scene, Evangelion envisions a possible coalition between subject, human and in-human as – echoing Agamben – “perhaps even the most luminous sphere of our relations with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal”.16

In fact, such transformation triggers a planetary cataclysm (later known as the Third-Impact) that transforms the entire world in a red bloody surface. Instead of “lacking a word”, EVA-plus-human becoming-animal enhances the configuration of a fourth phenomenological Umwelt where agency’s presence is powerfully distributed and extended through the world. As this visualization of pantheistic transcendence, of course, has grounding in messianic, oedipal and post-ideological themes to which Evangelion is explicitly dominated, it reassesses a monistic and post-anthropocentric position towards philosophical and political issues concerning the existence. The cyborg allegory first employed by Donna Haraway in 1984 and recently by Rosi Braidotti that implies the rethinking of concepts such as consciousness and subjectivity in radical political terms, resonates in Evangelion’s narrative world.

16 Giorgio Agamben, op. cit., p. 16.