Offtopic - 'A future without language: Blame!'

The first of many off-topic articles to follow, mostly stuff that couldn't find a home somewhere else. If you're here for museums, feel free to skip.




Hundreds, maybe thousands of years into mankind's bleak future, a wandering scientist's assistance is required by a tribe of born-again foragers: she has to help them decipher a set of cryptic hieroglyphs adorning a sealed door. These mysterious markings, the scientist reveals, merely identify the door as an emergency entrance into a dormant industrial complex: she can easily follow the instructions, open the door, and gain the group access into the structure. The quick deciphering job, so arcane and shaman-like to the foragers as to leave them speechless, would hold little mystique to most readers of this page from sci-fi manga Blame! (1998, Buramu!), as the mysterious markings were common, grade-school level kanji. Yet, within the story, written language is of little use unless strictly necessary to daily life: as the foragers readily admit, 'that's something from long, long ago'i.

Language, be it written or spoken, conceived as a medium or as an agent per se, has been a privileged site for cultural analysis, in particular since postmodern discourse theory staged the importance of language and words as generators of reality at all levelsii. Even following the waning of the postmodern paradigm at the turn of the millennium, language and words remain a crucial point for cultural studies, literary studies, and countless other disciplines: virtually all aspects of human culture have been explored according to their use of language and communication, both mimetically and structurally.

One item of human culture where analysis of language has paid dividends is the literary genre of science fiction. A host of scholars (pioneers Walter Meyers and Myra Barnes above all) have thoroughly investigated the importance that language, as a both a familiarizing and destabilizing agent, holds in giving shape to humanity's fictional vision of possible futures – from the rather straightforward and often implicit acknowledgment that, for example, an alien race might speak Klingon or Na'vi, to more complex use of language as a character or a plot point within the story (I'm thinking, for example, of George Orwell's Newspeak in 1984, or D'ni in the Myst video game franchise)iiiivv. Starr Friedman has strikingly characterized language in science fiction as a 'familiar alien': an agent that can either bring a vision of the future closer to us, or conversely distance us from immersion, encouraging critical reading usually of the social or political varietyvi. This is particularly true when the 'possible world' presented to us is of a kind that is particularly alien to us, in value if not in likelyhood: dystopian and anti-utopian fictions very often resort to language as a crucial device, in order to defamiliarize the ultimately undesirable alternative universe they present, unsettling the viewer and breaking the mimetic flow in order to hopefully engender critiquevii.

It seems to me that there have been, in spite of abundant research, two limits to current discourses on the importance of language in dystopic science fiction, and science fiction in general. On one hand, critiques of language in dystopian fiction concentrate intensely on a few select case study, which have become somewhat iconic: among them, Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, and Hoban's Riddley Walkerviii. Exploration of the same topic in other media, outside the Western canon, have been sporadic at best and, more often than not, just as canon oriented: within Japanese studies, names that appear with clockwork regularity are Otomo's Akira, Shirow's Ghost in the Shell, and Gainax's Neon Genesis Evangelionix. If, however, we listen to convincing literature that poses dystopian science fiction manga (and anime) as a substantial genre that is not occasionally, but universally engaged in negotiation of contemporary Japan's many cultural anxieties (among them, destructive capitalism, bubble economy and the 1990s 'lost generation) it stands to reason that the same degree of analysis can be applied successfully to Japanese media, including lesser known textsxxi.

Additionally, nearly all research concentrates on 'language rich' works: which is to say, text that prominently and explicitly feature language as an agent, within the story and on a structural level. Much less attention has been paid to (admittedly, less frequent) works that intentionally minimize or suppress the role of language as a mimetic, or a structural device; texts that make of the scarcity of language a critical point. While it is perfectly understandable that scholarship should concentrate where an issue emerges forcefully and frequently, at times it is the very dearth of a crucial element, such as communication, that makes a strong ideological point.

In this article I will briefly look at the anti utopian, science fiction manga Blame!, written and illustrated by Nihei Tsutomu from 1998 to 2003. Firmly positioned outside the established canon of science fiction manga, this work is mostly well known for its striking scarcity of dialogue which, for the whole run of the series, takes a backseat to painstakingly rendered architectural backgrounds, rendered even more forcefully thanks to Nihei's distinctive dark, tortuous lines.

Superficial lack of dialogue is, however, merely the most immediate result of the highly destabilizing use of language that Nihei makes throughout Blame!, a work in which speech and written word feature more clearly than ever as Friedman's 'familiar aliens'xii. This manga, upon close scrutiny, configures a possible future, markedly dark and anti utopian, in which language as a constituent force of reality and discourse has thoroughly disintegrated: mimetically as a plot point within the story; structurally, as an element of manga as a text; metaphorically, as in the case of the 'visual language' of architecture. Thanks to these features, Blame! offers a destabilizing vision of our future, radically bleak unlike that of most dystopic science fictions, both within and without manga. I will discuss the 'anti utopian' role of language in Blame! from three, distinct but entwined perspective. First, I will briefly look at the visual and structural aspect, focusing on the role of architecture and landscape in relation to action and characters; then, I will examine the breakdown of the linguistic in the construction of relationships between different characters in the unfolding of the story; finally, I will focus on Blame!'s protagonist, Killy, as an example of the future, dystopic 'subject without language' that Nihei proposes as a possible posthuman subject.




Architecture Without Signs


One could argue that, far more than the barely sketched characters or the generic quest that drives the plot, it is the architecture, the landscape that raises to the status of real protagonist of Blame!xiii. Characters, aside from the protagonist, are scarce and sketched at best, but the organic conglomeration of structures and buildings that makes up 'the City', Nihei's visionary Dyson Sphere-like future Earth, is omnipresent: it is not rare to encounter entire pages consisting of nothing but architectural background, the protagonist reduced to an insignificant visual footnote tucked into a corner.

These omnipresent architectural landscape is also characterized by its database-like repetitiveness, its utter lack of a 'here' and a 'there', and its poverty of the visual/linguistic cues we associate with our current urban environment: for all one could gather, Killy might as well have walked in circles for the manga's ten volumes, wandering a deserted cityscape that has lost all meaningful signage. If the landscape is, as I would argue, a veritable character in Blame!, as an agent it radically breaks with the metaphorically 'inscribed body' of Foucaultian memory: in spite of its labyrinthine qualities, its layered construction, and its immediate (perhaps even too obvious) psychoanalytical values, it exists as something of a discoursiveless absolute, outside of discourse and outside of historicity (even a fictional one)xiv.

It would be easy to read Nihei's dystopic landscapes as we have often done with similar examples of apocalyptic, dystopic architecture in manga, that is to say as a negotiation of the trauma spurred by the atomic bombs, or the collapse of the economic bubble in the 1990s: while certainly there is a stylistic similarity between Nihei's architecture and some visual cues from Akira's ruins or Ghost in the shell's cyber layered city, the dystopian fantasy at the basis seems to be entirely different and, I would add, language and the way it (not) helps negotiating the environment is a marker of such difference.

I have already remarked on the nearly absolute lack of language signifiers within Blame!'s environment: events as the ones recounted in the article's introduction, in which language enters the picture both as a mimetic and as a structural element inscribed in the City, can be counted in single digits. The manga's characters almost universally interact with their environment on far more unmediated, sensorially engaged level, one that could be termed as 'after language', or similar to the kind of interactions with a priori objects as agents described by Object Oriented Ontologyxv. Killy's most frequent interaction with the City is the wholesale destruction of its architecture with his overpowering handgun, an action to which sometimes full double page spreads are dedicated: in extreme cases we don't even get to see the enemy that, allegedly, has been pulverized in the process, and that was meant to be the real target. Killy, and many other characters' interactions with their environment are not mediated by the normative forms of language and discourse (which govern contemporary mediation of the human environment) but are instead tackled in an animalistic, sensorially loaded kind of way, with great pain spent in displaying the immediate physical interaction with the environment as an object and agent, rather than the characters' negotiation and normalization of it through speech; as in the case of the belabored expositions so common in science fiction, especially of the dystopian variety.

In Blame!, essentially, the landscape is presented as an object per se, impermeable to human discourse and its surface non inscribed, with the result that its semiotics become all the more alien to us; far more than is the case with tamer and, in the end, more 'human' alien landscapes. If one were to look for a kindred vision within Japanese media, I think the most fitting example would be the cities seen in the animated version of Fist of the north star (1988, Hokuto no Ken), Buronson and Tetsuo Hara's ultraviolent, dystopically cynical science fiction sagaxvi. Here protagonist Kenshiro roams through a postapocalyptic landscape that has been stripped of all marks of humanity's collective knowledge, including signs and language: barren husks of buildings collapse and distort in the wake of destruction, yet they do not paint a discursively new, alternative future, even in the dystopian sense. All order enforced by language and discourse has been obliterated, and now the landscape exists only as a discarded artifact in mankind's teleologically ruptured march of progress.


No Relationships


Another aspect of the manga in which Nihei's imagining of a postlinguistic human condition comes to the fore is, unsurprisingly, the characters' interactions among and between themselves. Blame!'s speech poverty, both on a mimetic and on a structural level, sets apart the work from most other science fiction dystopias within popular Japanese media and, further, dystopian tradition in the West.

There is a host of research supporting the centrality of language, speech and verbal / written interaction in the context of futuristic dystopias. According to this research, language in dystopia more often than not holds an ambiguous allegiance: it allows the implicitly critiqued dystopian order to retain and disseminate its controlling, fascist agenda; yet, many times it also constitutes the vehicle by which a dissenting minority can critique, challenge and eventually change the dystopic order. In particular, Eike Kühl characterizes this dichotomy as 'control and resistance', a dynamic which frames 'the obliteration or control of the past, the relationship between language and control, the ban of literature and writing, freedom in language, freedom from language, and, at last, the relationship between language and social class': what this essentially means, is that language, both as an fictional actor and as a tool at the disposal of the writer, is usually abundant, multifaceted and at the forefront in future dystopiaxvii. The form that such centrality takes is, of course, of a different variety according to region and media: while Western literature abounds of dystopian fictional languages (Newspeak, Nadsat, DC Comics' Interlac), within Japanese media dystopian language as 'familiar alien' tends to bear itself by constructing complex architectures that mix more or less idiomatic Japanese with foreign lexicon, made up verbal constructions and the interplay of words and symbolsxviii.
Blame!'s use of language by characters within the story continues along this general paradigm, in the sense that the characteristics of language displays remark its centrality to the worldview presented: yet, this happens in a form that is highly sui generis, and essentially destabilizing with regards to traditional notions of language in dystopias. As previously noted, one of the most striking features of Blame! is the rarity of dialogue. Characters barely ever engage in conversation and, when they do so, the result is surprisingly stilted and monodirectional, resembling mumbling monologues more than actual dialogue: snippets of formulaic information interject in between large swathes of silent traveling, or a character will briefly explain a situation or idea, yet only receive as an answer blank stares from other conversation participantsxix. Occasionally, interruption of communication borders on the surreal, as when Killy, engaged in a quest with the scientist Cibo, replies to her concerns by anesthetizing himself and falling asleep on the spotxx. Finally, interruption of communication between agents is replicated also on the story's macro level: there is no engagement between the protagonists and the supposedly antagonist 'silicon lifeforms' beyond reflexive, instinctual assault and mutual annihilation on the spot; gone is the long honored manga tradition of drawn out speeches and exchange of retorts before confrontation.

Within Blame! language, unlike most other dystopic fictions, is important exactly because of its scarcity, its awkwardness, its implausibility. Each time we witness the truncated, aimless and largely irrelevant dialogue that makes the series an outlier within future dystopias, we are implicitly reminded of the constructed, artificial nature of language itself; and we are reminded that language, as a human artifice just like the rest of human culture, could easily collapse and disappear in a more or less remote future, becoming nothing more than a memory without purpose in the legends of futuristic foragers. Language in Blame! Is then, more than misshapen creatures or convoluted fictional architectures, the true 'familiar alien' within the series: a husk of a former discursive order that, in the reaches of a far future, has become truly alien and unrecognizable to us.




A Mute Protagonist  


In the face of an erratic storyline and plenty of throwaway characters, there is but one constant in Blame!'s universe: the glum looking, largely mute protagonist – Killy. Blessed (or cursed) with a name that largely defines his approach to his mission and life in general, Killy is a virtually indestructible warrior, a relic of a past age that continues his mission in the meandering corridors of the city in spite of everything, including the mission itselfxxi. He does not entertain any meaningful relationship with other characters, and is generally impervious to pain as much as joy: he rarely changes facial expression even as he is dismembered, and only once in ten volumes he is seen smirking. Due to his invincibility, his immortality and his ability to connect to the City's cyber level without peripherals, Killy surely checks all the boxes for being defined as a posthuman characterxxii. Yet, I would argue that he is also an highly idiosyncratic posthuman; once again, communication, and especially language, is at the center of this idiosyncrasy.

It is striking to notice that most conceptions of the posthuman, in a variety of contexts and media, are essentially characterized by a surplus of often linguistic communication, and a parallel abundance of channels and modes by which such communication is established and upkept. Examples are ubiquitous. We could think, for example, of performance artist Stelarc who, since the 1960s, has been augmenting his own body with peripherals, both mechanical and organic, 'speculating on ways that individuals... may want to redesign their bodies': so far he has added to his body, among others, a mechanical third arm; an internal camera; and the structure of a third ear grafted to his armxxiii. He has also added to himself a second head, furnished with all features, through 3D imagingxxiv. Such peripherals (although still in the early stages of development) promise us a posthuman condition in which communication, even of the verbal and linguistic variety, will be greatly enhanced: in the case of Stelarc's vision, this will literally happen by a proliferation of sensorial and communicative organs.

We don't necessarily need to resort, however, to such extreme examples: within Japanese contemporary media, we can think of virtual idols Vocaloidsxxv. These human-looking virtual idols, coming in a variety of genders and features, display one trait in common: their virtual bodies, in and for themselves a novel form of cybernetic communication, are all equipped with gadgets that, metaphorically if not actually, enhance the character's potential for verbal communication. Their futuristic outfits include an array of microphones, headphones, built-in keyboards and other gadgetry that suggests a proliferation and enhancement of the character’s communicative role, which is eminently verbal and linguistic, as Vocaloids are presented to their public not merely as mascots for a digital product, but as singing performers in their own right. Stelarc's extreme body modifications, and Vocaloids' futuristic tools might look miles apart in aesthetics and disruptive potential, yet they can also be seen as expressions of a similar take on the posthuman: our future is, essentially, enhanced communication of the verbal / linguistic kind.

Through Blame!'s characters, and Killy in particular, Nihei offers us a radically different take on the posthuman condition. The manga's protagonist, a silent loner, not only does not possess any meaningful communicative enhancement, but could be defined as largely communicatively stunted, verbally or otherwise: he has little to no facial dynamics, has mostly renounced speech as a form of interaction with the world around him, and is adept at using instinctual violence as an exclusive communicative devicexxvi. Once again, the most apt comparison is to Kenshiro, Hokuto no Ken's protagonist: both him and Killy share the traits of a future subject that has renounced communication in favor of immediate, often reflexive violent actionxxvii. It should be noted that, even when communication does not take a violent turn, there is rarely any meaningful exchange of information, on a formal or content level: typically, Killy absorbs his interlocutor's monologue with barely any acknowledgement; receiving, in turn, a resigned shrug before the two part ways.

Overall, the series configures, through its protagonist, a posthuman subject that is a 'familiar alien' to humanity itself, and a rupturing agent with regard to the means by which humanity traditionally communicates and interacts. He is an outlier with whom communication is impossible; and, even if it was, others seldom attempt.




The End of Adventure Seeking

Once we have identified Blame! as a futuristic dystopia, in which language as a structure and a relational means has utterly crumbled, one question remains: is a way out of such dystopia offered to the characters, and to the reader? After all, dystopia as a genre itself is predicated on the existence of an oppressive order, and the equally unavoidable existence of instruments (as we said, often linguistic) by which escape from dystopia is offered. Is this also the case with Nihei's bleak vision of our future? The answer is, of course, resoundingly negative. The 'order of things' that communication and language enforced can no longer be recovered: Killy moves toward the end of his quest in complete loneliness, indifferent to an empty husk of a world in which all his comrades are dead or lost; even once Killy's search for the 'Net Genes' is completed, he remains a vacant wanderer, and no firm resolution to his teleologically vacuous journey is given.

The absence of all alternatives to the crumbling of discursive order extends at all levels. After all is said and done, even the series' subtitle, 'adventure seeker Killy in the cyber dungeon quest!' ends up sounding bitterly ironical, as the series' very subtext is predicated on the emptiness of such quest; and, surely, Killy not once displays the character of an adventure seeker, facing hosts of enemies with the same resigned ennui as he opens a door or falls asleep. Blame!, as a dystopic work of science fiction, radically critiques the existence of alternatives to a dystopia in which all meaning, discursive and otherwise, is irremediably lost: a bleak and frightening option, among all possible 'day after' scenarios.







iNihei Tsutomu, Buramu! (Blame!), 10 vols. (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1998). Scene from vol.3, p. 23.
iiSteven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern turn (Guilford Press,1998).
iiiWalter Meyers, Aliens and linguists: language study and science fiction (University of Georgia Press,1980); Myra Edwards Barnes, Linguistics and languages in science-fiction fantasy (New York: Arno Press, 1975).
ivGeorge Orwell, 1984 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949).
vMyst, PC video game (Cyan, 1993).
viStarr Friedman, “Language as a Familiar Alien in Science Fiction or, as Riddley Walker Would Ask, Wie Wood Eye Both Err Two Reed This?” Unpublished Thesis, 2009.
viiThe seminal text on language and dystopia is David Sisk, Transformations of language in modern dystopias (Greenwood Press, 1997).
viiiAldous Huxley, Brave New World (Chatto & Windus, 1932); Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (Jonathan Cape, 1980).
ixAkira, dir. Katsuhiro Otomo (1988), translated as Akira, theatrical release (Streamline Pictures, 1988); Kôkaku kidôtai: Ghost in the Shell, dir. Oshii Mamoru (1995);translated as Ghost in the Shell, DVD (Manga Entertainment, 1998); Shin Seiki Evangerion, dir. Hideaki Anno (1995), translated as Neon Genesis Evangelion, DVD (ADV Films, 1997).
xThomas Lamarre, “Born of trauma: Akira and capitalist modes of destruction” positions: east asia cultures critique 16 (2008): 131-156

xiSusan Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle, updated edition: experiencing contemporary Japanese animation (MacMillan, 2005).
xiiFriedman, 2009.

xiiiOstensibly, the plot revolves around posthuman (possibly cyborg) Killy, a fighter who roams a vast, mostly deserted cyberpunk Earth known as 'the City' in which remnants of humanity survive along with other transhumans. Here, he searches for the 'Net Terminal Gene', a genetic marker that allows interfacing with the City's computer system, and shutdown of the City's Safeguards, an automated defense system that systematically destroys whoever it comes in touch with. In reality, the manga's main plot line becomes mostly irrelevant past the first couple of volumes, and the manga proceeds through a series of mostly random and disjointed encounters, skirmishes, and side-quests.
xivMichael Foucault, “Nietzsche, genealogy, history' Language, countermemory, practice: Selected essays and inteviews. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
xvGraham Harman, The Quadruple Object (John Hunt Publishing, 2011).

xviHokuto no Ken, dir. Toyoo Ashida (1984). Translated as Fist of the north star, DVD (Manga Entertainment, 1999). I choose to address the anime version as it constitutes, in my opinion, a far more dystopic piece compared to the original manga: the latter is, for the most part, a shounen piece that still celebrates, although within a markedly violent context, the dictates of 'friendship, effort and victory'; the anime series displays more of a seinen paradigm, offering a bleaker, more nihilistic take on a possible future apocalypse.

 xvii Eike Kühl, Newspeak, Nadsat and Laadan – the evolution of speech and the role of language in 20th century
dystopian fiction (unpublished thesis in the public domain, 2013), p.28.

 xviiiNeon Genesis Evangelion is emblematic of this typology. Nearly all dystopic manga, however, displays to a certain degree the habit of forming a sort of 'newspeak' through gergal syncretism.
xixSee, for example, Nihei, Blame!, vol. 8 p. 60;
xxNihei, Blame!, vol. 6 p. 190.

 xxiIn spite of not being written in katakana as one would expect, the kanji used for Killy's name, 霧亥, has no discernible meaning, and is clearly used only for its phonetic valence.

xxiiFor the markers of posthumanity, see Katherine Hayles, How we became posthuman; virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
xxiiiPaolo Atzori and Kirk Woolford, 'Extended-body: Interview with Stelarc' Stanford History and Philosophy of Science web site:http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/stelarc/a29-extended_body.html (accessed January 2014).

xxivMarquard Smith, Stelarc: the monograph (Boston: MIT Press, 2005).
xxvThe visual personalities of Vocaloid voice synthesizing software Vocaloid, developed by Crypton Future Media. Web site: http://www.crypton.co.jp/.
xxviKilly is seen occasionally using some kind of enhanced function in order to plug into the City's cyber layer. Nonetheless, when this happens the reader is presented with blank screens, barren of all discernible verbal content (for example, vol.10, ch.55).

xxviiWith a degree of difference, of course: unlike Killy, Kenshiro still belies an adherence to some form of moral or ethics – which is to say, adherence to an articulated discourse.