Issue #305: Eating the World in One Bite in Pluto
Issue #305: Eating the World in One Bite in Pluto
I have only mentioned the ongoing state sanctioned massacre with seemingly genocidal aims perpetrated by the so-called state of Israel and inflicted upon Palestine in brief passing. I have been self-conscious about discussing it in the same proverbial breath as anime and pulp movies. I wouldn’t say I am over it, I feel self-conscious doing it now. A few paragraphs from now — or just right now if you start scrolling — you are going to be reading about the movies I saw two weeks ago and Pluto. But, it seems to me, my overall lack of decorum is not a reason not to talk about something. Such juxtaposition has been, historically, a characteristic of this newsletter.
The other incentive I have had not to discuss Palestine is my extreme antipathy to the idea of parroting anything someone else has said without significant development or re-contextualization. Part and parcel to that is repeating what many have seen on social media repetitively. I like to pick my spots. When one is inundated by something, they may become desensitized to it.
I’m also just not (currently) the guy you should be taking your cues on Palestine from. I’m just a guy who is behind on his reading.
But you may notice the (once again, proverbial) elephant in the room: the newsletter is in your inbox on a Tuesday. I mean, whatever, 1am, that’s not rare. But Tuesday morning?! The reason is because, yesterday, there was a strike.
This action involved a work stoppage, cessation of economic transactions, and usage of transit. Esraa Alshikh writes, “it is necessary to paralyze the movement of life and the economic wheel in all countries so that everyone feels he is directly affected by the impact of the aggression on Gaza.”
It is often difficult for me to swallow that in the face of tremendous moral and geopolitical catastrophe, the world goes on. This strike, conceptually, attempts to block the world’s inertia. So I participated. I stayed home, I didn’t participate in economic productivity, I didn’t participate in economic consumption, I reflected.
Regardless of what the outcome of this action, distinct from an act, might be, we will never be able to predict the outcome of that which is undertaken to move the needle. Even if every realm targeted by the strike showed the desired outcome, one knows not what could happen as a result. That is a characteristic of all extreme political action. Molly Anne Rothenberg in The Excessive Subject (2010) aruges, in agreement with Žižek, that the outcome of a revolutionary act is impossible to predict precisely because of the nature of the act as a radical break from the status quo. While she disputes Žižek’s account of how one evaluates the act both before and after the fact of its undertaking, she elaborates the uncertainty of an act and highlights the degree to which a social transformation may redefine the act that transformed it. Quoting Žižek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) and Organs Without Bodies (2003), she writes:
In another text published in the same year as Revolution at the Gates , he concedes that “the same gesture can be an Act or a ridiculous empty posture” depending on the “specific socio-symbolic context.” But this criticism, he claims, is not the true focus of those who are disturbed by the “Lacanian notion of Act” (WDR 152). Rather, precisely because its effects cannot be calculated in advance, these critics shrink from the Act because it carries with it no guarantee that it will not lead to “terrifying excesses” (WDR 153). The Act may be ethical or it may be monstrous; as Žižek puts it in another text: “in a truly radical political act, the opposition between a ‘crazy’ destructive gesture and a strategic political decision momentarily breaks down” (OWB 204). We cannot ignore the risk that violence may fail to achieve any positive political outcome. (169)
All of this is to say that one’s uncertainty about the efficacy of an action in having the desired impact on the political and social world is no reason not to do it.
There is a great deal of uncertainty even beyond what one’s actions can accomplish. One may ask questions about the efficacy of the BDS movement, an endeavor to correct the injustices in Palestine ongoing since 2005, but isn’t there an evaluative incongruence to the statement: “I won’t participate in the BDS movement because it won’t work.” Any collective action is less likely to have an impact the fewer who participate. But more importantly, what you are asked to give up is far less than what others might gain. Be critical as you like, skewer or lambast a movement if you so choose. But in the end, if you agree with the aim, it can’t hurt to throw your lot in with those striving for it.
The other dimension of uncertainty that arises is one around information. Who can you trust? What reports will provide the truth? No information is unbiased, so one must always be critical when assessing what they hear about a conflict far away from them. History is instructive here. And as a student of it, the ongoing violence perpetrated upon Palestinians is not new. Learning history makes sense of a lot.
It’s a lot easier to predict what a state will do to consolidate power than the result of radical political action.
The current widespread bombings are a new order of catastrophe, but there is not even an attempt by the Israeli government to meaningfully assert the most basic criteria for jus ad bellum (as contradictory a phrase as this might be) nor any attempt to ensure jus in bello. Israel attacks Gaza indiscriminately, without any measure of proportionality, and without necessity. And fancy Latin aside, this isn’t even a war. Palestine has no standing army to defend it.
So, that’s a lot for you to chew on right at the outset. Below is the usual, but it’s not business as usual and never has been because I’ve never written a word in this newsletter — or in my life — at the same time there has been a free Palestine. End the occupation.
Week before last was pretty busy, so I didn’t get a chance to talk about the outrageous heater string of movies that was promptly brought to an end this past week. From December 1st to 3rd, I watched nothing but flicks that ignite the celluloid. On the 1st was a Victims of Sin (1951) and Messiah of Evil (1973) double feature. On the 2nd, I watched Robinson’s Garden (1987) in the morning and then hit Jordan’s Furniture for Godzilla Minus One (2023) that afternoon. On the 3rd, I watched Jawan (2023) for the second time — but it was Erin’s first time seeing it.
It’s a wide range. The movies are vastly different from one another in subject matter, production date, and even country of origin. But there were ways I found them to interlink that was quite thought provoking. Victims of Sin and Jawan both deal with the site of imprisonment, specifically for women, and feature alienated women uniting to correct injustice. Victims of Sin also has a very Dickensian character that matches Godzilla Minus One, where characters on the fringes of society — again — come together, in both films to take care of a child that has either been abandoned or orphaned. Messiah of Evil deserves a pretty extensive writeup of its own, but it ran nicely into Robinson’s Garden taking a broader view of bohemian social outsiders. Robinson’s Garden also features Sakevi.
Yeah, he looks cool.
Last week I saw Thanksgiving (2023) and Silent Night (2023) back to back. Thanksgiving was awesome and Silent Night sucked bad. Come on John Woo. He ended my hot streak with prejudice.
“I know about it, of course, but I’ll act very surprised”: Mimesis and Authenticity in Pluto “Episode 7”
Of all the episodes of Pluto thus far, “Episode 7” is the most visually interesting. Looking at the fight between Epsilon and Pluto, there are shades of Masaaki Yuasa’s style. These flourishes and the dynamic animation are not even close to the realistic way Urasawa draws it in the original manga. But that’s just the first of a few divergences from Pluto’s source, though most of them are simple exclusions. Conversations between Abullah and Tenma, more detail about their relationship and history. And references to something crucial: Bora.
Pretending for Whose Benefit?
With Gesicht dead, this episode feels almost like a full length version of the North No.2 vignette. That is, at least, how it came across to me despite the fact that everything happening is very close to the central plot of the show. Indeed, “Episode 7” doesn’t exactly resolve a ton of narrative threads but it does move things along. Tenma lied to Ochanomizu, he did work with Abullah on the robotic creation that supposedly he was unable to awaken. As I predicted (I promise, I really don’t remember what happens) last week, Tenma uses Gesicht’s negative emotion to awaken Atom.
It also seems that “Bora” is another robotic creation that has some close relationship to Abullah and has some control over Pluto. Presumably, Bora is the “other weapon” that annihilates Epsilon’s safe house and shows up at the end of the fight between he and Pluto.
Even with all that, this is the Epsilon episode. Early on, he tells his new bodyguard that it is his birthday and his orphaned charges are preparing a surprise party. Despite knowing about it, Epsilon will “act very surprised.” This moment is evocative of the end of last week’s episode and all the way back to “Episode 2” where Atom discussed emulating human behavior.
There is some similarity between Epsilon’s choice to feign surprise, Helena’s attempt to find an outlet for her anguish by imitating crying, and Atom’s imitation of human covetousness and response to pleasant tastes. While Helena is seeking some kind of relief, Atom’s enthusiastic devouring of ice cream and usage of the rest room are to make humans more comfortable.
Surprise is an affect like any other, but there seems to be no uncertainty that Epsilon understands enough about what it means to be surprised to give the impression that he is to his charges. But, thinking back to Atom and Helena, one might wonder if Epsilon can do anything but pretend to be surprised. Either way, he does it for the benefit of the human children he takes care of. It’s not an unfamiliar idea, to behave in a certain way in order to indulge a child’s naiveté.
Atom seems to be somewhere between Helena and Epsilon. Yes, he claims that by reacting as if something is “tasty,” he starts to know what it actually means to experience something tasty. To read his behavior more cynically, though, human society requires certain kinds of obvious signs that one is similar to “the human” in the aggregate. Relishing a good meal, using the restroom, accepting a cup of tea, the spectrum of Helena to Epsilon’s human mimesis shows how the criteria for human moral status is arbitrary and restrictive. Whether one behaves in accordance with convention or not, they have no more or less of a claim to moral status.
Following this line of reasoning, there’s a certain condescension of Atom’s attitude toward humans that, in turn, exposes a social ill. If Atom resembled humans less, or behaved less like them, he would nonetheless deserve to be considered a subject given that Pluto has shown him to be just that.
“While in such a state of flux, his face would be hideous”
The questions of appearance and bodily continuity are the primary points of interest for Atom in the episode. After all, he happens to be comatose. But he once again is exposed to Gesicht’s memory chip. He also inserted it in “Episode 2,” both collecting information about the case and experiencing the traumatic residue of Gesicht’s erased memories. Between Atom and Gesicht, it is clear that robots in Pluto have at least three very important parts: the computerized brain, the memory chip, and the body.
According to the conversation back in “Episode 3” between Uran and Pluto, it’s the destruction of the computerized brain that means the death of the robot subject. The memory chip can be extricated from it and shared, as Gesicht does with Atom. In “Episode 7,” Tenma says that the memory chip is equivalent to a soul.
But it also has experiential data and can share it. Often, it’s shared after death, but Gesicht doesn’t stop functioning when he lets Atom insert his memory chip. Finally, there’s the body. Yes, computerized brains and memory chips are interchangeable among bodies. Robots might even have several — an “off duty” and “on duty” body or one suited for day to day activities and one for combat or labor intensive activity. But robots have a relationship to their bodies that is very intimate, and the body remains both a necessary condition for subjectivity and able to tell the story of a robot’s inner experience.
It may be the case that the reintroduction of Gesicht’s memory chip to Atom may have a profound effect. Tenma, as far as Pluto shows, doesn’t know that Atom has read the data from it before Gesicht’s death and experienced extreme emotion as a result. Atom has a far more intimate knowledge of Gesicht than anyone else. In some sense, Gesicht may live again through Atom because of that preexisting knowledge.
Atom is in the same position as the unawakened robot. In a flashback at the beginning of “Episode 7,” Tenma advises Abullah not to look at the face of the robot. “While in such a state of flux, his face would be hideous,” Tenma says.
“Episode 7” doesn’t return to the symbol of the face as readily as the manga, with Urasawa’s original giving more detail about what Tenma did with Abullah.
In the manga, Tenma awakens the robot using a memory chip containing some of the human Abullah’s memories only to see a horrifying visage.
The correspondence of body to subject seems no less significant for robots when compared to humans. The face expresses a great deal of what the subject is. Epsilon also conveys feeling with his hands as he uses them to protect Wassily.
Even as they are separated from Epsilon, they carry on his will in a corporeal way. The insistence of the body’s parts as inextricably connected to their owner — even as they are literally disconnected from him in this case — is a human trait. And Epsilon’s will, transmitted and signified by his hands, is simple: “protect the earth.”
Epsilon’s Pacifism
Even to the end, Epsilon’s hands are meant to protect and not to harm or kill. In his testimony about his fight with Pluto, he says “he could never be my enemy, even if we’d fought a thousand times.” Here, Epsilon is exposing some of the internal logic of his pacifism. Though we see him fight in self-defense, self-defense is an insufficient justification for widespread combat.
One might define Epsilon as a “realistic pacifist” as defined by David Cortright. He describes the realistic pacifist position as allowing for violence under certain conditions:
In other dimensions of conflict, however, pacifism is conditional and pragmatic. It is predicated on a presumption against armed violence, but it acknowledges that the use of force, constrained by rigorous ethical standards, may be necessary at times for self-defense and the protection of the innocent. (Peace [2008] 334)
Nonetheless, this position excludes widespread armed conflict. In fact, it leads to a definitional difference of what constitutes an enemy. Epsilon’s way of defining Pluto is ambiguous. They may not be enemies for several reasons: Pluto isn’t acting of his own accord, Pluto being a robot makes him Epsilon’s de facto ally, or Epsilon’s moral framework doesn’t allow for the designation of enemies.
But Pluto’s situation is quite different. He is supposedly called upon to fight by Abullah because of the past injustice carried out against Persia.
This means Epsilon is an enemy of Pluto simply because of Epsilon’s association with the world that allowed Persia to be attacked. Though he was not culpable because of his action, it’s his inaction that seems to be a problem for Abullah.
Two Sons, Two Puppets
Pluto is the new body of Sahad, Abullah’s robotic son. In the course of Epsilon’s first fight with Pluto, the onlookers observe “two suns.”
There’s a play on words here that applies, in my reading, to Pluto and Bora. While the show has yet to fully explain who or what Bora is, he seems to be yet another creation of Abullah.
But — and here’s where things get complicated — Bora may also, in some way, be Abullah. “Episode 8” will likely clarify the ambiguity, but there’s something going on between the notion of Pluto and Bora as Abullah’s “two sons” and the recreation of Abullah himself, the rebirthing of himself, that he was able to achieve by copying his memories to a memory chip and utilizing a robotic body to prolong his life.
The reason for this strange positioning of Bora and Abullah is Uran’s reading of Pinocchio. This follows immediately from the observation of the two suns. Uran says:
The younger one’s just like Pinocchio. … He keeps looking, but he can’t find his heart. … He doesn’t wanna be a puppet. Doesn’t wanna be controlled. He thinks he’s acting on his own. But the hatred inside pulls the strings. Then again, he isn’t the only one who’s being controlled. Geppetto is too. His maker, Geppetto, is a puppet, same as him.
One reading is simple: Pinocchio and Geppetto correspond to Pluto and Abullah, creation and creator, both “puppets” because they’re motivated by agencies outside of their control and, more simply, because they are both robots. Abullah himself frequently refers to robots as “marionettes,” particularly his own creations. But if Bora is the first son of Abullah, as opposed to “the younger one,” Pluto, is there some bizarre incoherent familial relationship between Bora — somehow related to Abullah’s rebuilding of himself in a robot body — and Pluto?
Among the wide range of possible readings here, undertaken with incomplete information, it’s clear that the notions of fatherhood, brotherhood, and the relationship between maker and what they make will be essential to how the story of Pluto concludes.
There’s a lot of directions to take the idea of brotherhood as it relates to these robots, and perhaps it’s Pluto and Epsilon that have that implicit familial relationship because of what they share rather than Pluto and Bora. But, I’m putting my bet down on the “two suns” line being an allusive piece of foreshadowing.
Metaphor and Metonymy
Urasawa and Pluto may end up making a mockery of me, just as Tenma mocks Uran for being a “bookworm.”
He doubts the truth of how she describes her sensing of emotions:
Uran, I imagine that you’re quite the little bookworm. … You were being evocative. You didn’t literally mean something interacted with Atom. Sensing emotion is just a figure of speech.
Uran protests, of course. The crucial distinction here is one of great interest to Lacanian theory. Tenma thinks Uran is using a metaphor, while she insists she is being metonymic. In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan writes:
It is on the basis of the copresence in the signified not only of the elements of the horizontal signifying chain but also of its vertical dependencies, that I have demonstrated the effects, distributed in accordance with two fundamental structures, in metonymy and metaphor … metonymic structure, indicating that it is the signifier-to-signifier connection that allows for the elision by which the signifier instates lack of being in the object-relation, using signification’s referral value to invest it with the desire aiming at the lack that it supports …
Now we turn to … metaphoric structure, indicating that it is in the substitution of the signifier for signifier that a signification effect is produced that is poetic or creative, in other words, that it brings signification in question into existence. (428-429)
Paraphrasing Lacan’s account, metonymy is a negative expression because even as one signifier relates to another, the “lack of being in the object-relation” draws signification as such back to the emptiness essential to it. On the other hand, metaphor is positive, because it produces the signifier (again… as such), setting the entire system of signification in opposition to its increment. Even as metaphor makes signification possible, metonymy exposes the lack at the core of the signifier that a signification system might cover over.
For the purposes of Pluto, Tenma assigns a negative truth value (“it is false”) to the positive expression of metaphor and a positive truth value (“it is true”) to the negative expression of metonymy. But Uran is telling the truth, and can only tell the truth through metonymy because there are no signifiers that clearly convey the experience she is having. To “sense feelings” in the way she does is totally outside the scope of human experience.
Uran, exceptional in this way, suggests an entire new horizon of robotic affect experienced in isolation and impossible to convey using language that biases toward recounting only human sense.
As the episode draws to a close, it is clear that what this metonymic signification is trying to get across presents a significant problem for the world’s order.
As Atom says, “the earth is going to shatter.”
Weekly Reading List
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41282-023-00411-7 — My article in Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society is out today. If you have any university affiliation or a library card, you can probably read it for free. I regret being unable to make it open access, but many journals, including this one, require that the author cover the cost or secure funding through some other means. I already didn’t get paid to write this thing, then I have to shell out like two grand for it to be open access? Something’s not right within the realm of academic publishing.
Please contact me if you don’t believe your university or local library has a subscription to this journal. I want to make sure you exhaust all possible options before spending any money on it — money which I do not see a dime of. I am really proud of this article and think it’s great, so I hope you are able to take a look.
https://www.ign.com/articles/zelda-producer-eiji-aonuma-doesnt-really-care-about-the-series-chronology — ITT, Eiji Aonuma puts to rest asinine debates about coherence across the Zelda series.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/50-best-films-2023 — The British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound poll is best known for defining the greatest films of all time. But they also do one for the year’s best films. There’s a lot here, so it’s worth reading through. Killers of the Flower Moon secured the number one spot.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/new-streaming-bundles-netflix-apple-verizon-1235709564/ — Streamers are collaborating with a cable company to reinvent… cable. Please, someone put an end to this nonsense.
Until next time.