Cute Accelerationism by Amy Ireland & Maya B. Kronic

Author:Amy Ireland & Maya B. Kronic [Ireland, Amy & Kronic, Maya B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2024-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

On Several Regimes of Lines

…all of the crushing assurance of this flattened being…

Tiqqun111

There are fundamentalists who have completely gone over to the two-dimensional world, for whom the chance of returning to the three-dimensional world is close to zero.

Morinaga Takuro112

The noblest are the flat animals.

Gilles Deleuze113

Saitō Tamaki’s moécosmic theory of trauma114 understands the history of anime as an iterated ramification of the inadequacy of standard human rationalisations of sex to cope with the experience of arousal by two-dimensional beings, and the replication, transmission, and refinement of ‘drawn sexuality’115 as a repetition compulsion driven by human culture’s inability to assimilate nijikon, this enduring passion for the less-than-3D.

Now, anything appearing from the perspective of ‘well-assimilated’, healthily invested drives as ‘perversion’ is worthy of investigation. Against the riajuu’s insistence that affection for a fictional character is nothing more than the substitution of fantasy for reality116—a reality otherwise inaccessible to the misfits and outcasts who find moé in lines117—Saitō stands up for a new kind of desire: untimely, attuned to the alienating creativity of a world saturated with digital media, where almost every encounter passes by way of a two-dimensional image,118 and following the contours of its own immanent principle.119 It doesn’t need to report back to the guardians of ‘reality’.120 It is powerful because it is self-sufficient (‘I have no interest in three-dimensional women’), it doesn’t give a damn about exclusive disjunctions (‘I definitely felt something for Sapphire from Princess Knight [...] and Melmo from Marvelous Melmo [...] Sapphire is both a boy and a girl, and Melmo is both a child and an adult’), and no nuptial is too unnatural (‘A train obviously cannot respond to these feelings, so we are talking about moé’).121 In the end it is Daddy Admin whose access is revoked, as moé’s sheer indifference inverts the ontological priority, annexing reality to fiction by way of virtuality.122 Between the 2D and the 3D ‘there is this 2.5D, where reality is now being influenced by the otaku imagination’.123 Flatline constructs: Pump down the volume.124

This is a perfect way to approach Cute, because it shows how the emergence of supernormal cultural phenomena throws the coordinates of human sexuality into disarray and sets in motion a cyberpositive process.125 Moé is incomplete burning.

As Hiroki Azuma shows us, moé soon ceases to be about persons, even flat ones:

As soon as the characters are created, they are broken up into elements, categorized, and registered to a database. If there is no appropriate classification, a new element or category simply will be added. [...] And then the elements [will reemerge] later as material for creating new characters.126

‘Moé-elements’ are partial objects that derive from fiction.127 They are transposable, permutable, contingent, and repetitive. They can act as multipliers (‘if you add cat ears to a girl then it doubles the cuteness’). And although they arise from the regime of the sign, their effects are always bodily.128 Saggy socks, bells, cat ears, fluffy tails, antennae hair, maid costumes, nya-talk, a little fang, softness, smoothness, roundness, distractedness, sleepiness, a shy personality, a mysterious power….

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.