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Book Review: Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai

Published onJan 31, 2025
Book Review: Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai

Jinying Li. Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024. 344 pages.

Despite its title, Jinying Li’s Anime’s Knowledge Cultures offers insight into far more than anime, manga, and fan cultures. Li’s theorization of the “cybernetic affect” makes Anime’s Knowledge Cultures invaluable to scholars working at the intersections of media, culture, and digital studies. Li’s assertion that anime culture is anything but localizable to a material East Asia sets it apart from much scholarship within the subfields of anime and manga studies, perhaps signaling a new turn in these fields to move beyond regionalization—Stevie Suan’s lauded 2021 Anime’s Identity, for example, makes similar claims, albeit in a more limited manner. For Li, the culture, logic, and information produced by anime and manga culture are accessible, adaptable, and localizable to most contemporary fan cultures operating within the larger transnational information culture. This is because anime culture both expresses the state of contemporary information culture and aids in the production and re-production of its laborers (1). Anime’s cultures are enmeshed in, reproduce, and respond to networked, globalized information culture and create a polemic of information-work and information-play. The affective experience of this polemic, the laborious fatigue and joyful exuberance generated through data management, is what Li characterizes as the cybernetic affect.

            Li theorizes the cybernetic affect by drawing from studies of information culture, computationalism, and media ecosystems alongside a compelling interpretation of technological innervation, which she claims “operates as a collective cultural obsession with excessively producing, sorting, and consuming information through cybernetic systems” (13). While experiencing cybernetic affect, the consumer, or geek, “simultaneously and paradoxically” desires access to more information while feeling increasing anxiety, discomfort, and agitation from the overwhelming amount of information stored and processed (26). Li’s argument culminates in her reading of the cybernetic affect as a general condition of contemporary information culture, which happens to be exemplified by anime and its associated fandoms.

            Chapter One traces a general history of transnational anime culture, using Astro Boy as an avatar of anime’s emergence in both Japan and China, albeit decades apart. Thus, Li outlines both the historical context of Astro Boy in 1960s Japan and 1980s China. The rise of anime in China in the 1980s coincides with the advent of post-industrial knowledge culture, and as such, it has powerful effects on Chinese and transnational fandom, creating an environment in which information becomes a resource for both labor and play. All recreational media can be equated to a shared experience of play with the potential to generate the heightened experience of kong, in which a consumer has “an obsessive complex with something” that “also expresses a subtle feeling of control and of being controlled,” which recalls and is a facet of the cybernetic affect (73). Kong, to Li, is an amorphous term that evokes a continuum of obsession culminating in the self-identification of fans as -kong of their respective fandom. That is, one can have a kong for or be a -kong of their object of devotion.    

            Chapters Two and Three analyze fandom's intricate relationship with language, labor, and text. Chapter Two examines fansubbing as a practice in which geographically disparate fans work together to translate content from its original language to others for distribution before official translations can be released. This practice is part of what Li calls “pirate cosmopolitanism,” a mode under which global information workers can organize their labor virtually to promulgate play cultures across geographic and linguistic borders (83). Fansub, then, becomes the language of fandom (89-90). The material manifestation of this language is a forced hypermediacy, or the unassimilable confrontation between language, media, and labor (93-123). If the jarring visual presence of fansubs is already hypermediated, danmaku screens are uncannily so. Danmaku screens present real-time viewer commentary overtop a video as a dense wall of subtitles often saturating the entire image. In their textual density and transformative effect on the viewing experience, danmaku screens function as a platform, or a way of structuring and managing information and content rather than simply mediating it (126). In the elision of speaker and language and the platformization they generate, danmaku screens bring the controlled, hierarchical concentration of power that haunts computation on an ideological level to the forefront. Anime culture is inextricable from computation.  

            Chapter Four posits the theoretical figure of “the Mecha-Child,” or the post-human evolution of the information geek. As its name implies, the Mecha-Child is directly correlated to the subgenre of mecha anime in which children pilot massive, anthropomorphic metal war machines and which embody, for Li, the integration of the speculative, the high-tech, and the everyday in contemporary information culture (170). What the geek desires in becoming the Mecha-Child is a total integration of self and technology that culminates in the affective experience of techno-intimacy, one aspect of the cybernetic affect (178). Yet, as the cybernetic affect cuts both ways, so does the Mecha-Child's techno-intimacy. The figure is desirable simultaneously for its sentient posthumanism and objectified technological condition of thingness (189).

             “Cybernetic Play,” the title and topic of Chapter Five, directly responds to Hiroki Azuma’s theory of database consumption. Cybernetic play is synonymous with database consumption as “a mode of play that relies on informative feedback to improve learning, optimize performance, and ultimately control and unify the expansive information field” (205). However, unlike database consumption, cybernetic play is play because it utilizes a gamic logic to search for something undesirable or irrelevant under the open framework of the database, “the true end” (206). Where database consumption operates through the affective power of moe in which consumers seek perpetual remediations of a given entry in an ever-expanding database of textual components, cybernetic play is the gamification of the database by subjugating the moe experience of database exploration to the ludic condition of victory embodied by the true end.

Similarly, chapter six engages another longstanding tenant of anime and manga studies, Takashi Murakami’s superflat, an anime-inspired visual mode and artistic movement emphasizing depthlessness and saturation of the surface. Li argues that superflat is the quintessential media effect of our era, not a uniquely or essentially Japanese aesthetic (243). Superflat is thus not an artistic principle but the visual logic of screens (244). To reduce superflat to the exclusive domain of Japanese culture is to obfuscate its experiential dominance in information culture at large.

            Li concludes by reemphasizing “three key elements that constitute anime geekdom: knowledge, play, and pleasure” (275). These three elements are indeed the core themes of Anime’s Knowledge Cultures and the generative components of the cybernetic affect. As the abstractness of these elements imply, the cybernetic affect is not exclusive to anime and manga cultures but to contemporary transnational popular culture. To Li, under information culture, all is reduced to information, including labor and play. Play becomes the accumulation, translation, management, manipulation of, and identification with chosen information. Indeed, these activities generate the cybernetic affect in and beyond anime, manga, and gaming cultures and their prominence as recreation raises poignant questions about our relationship to cultural production, knowledge, and labor.

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