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veryfantasticstudent · 5 years

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What happens after Evangelion? Posthumanity in 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン (Neon Genesis Evangelion)

I finally watched (and subsequently re-watched) the classic (and highly controversial anime) Neon Genesis Evangelion, thanks to Netflix’s partial acquisition of the rights to the show—they somehow forgot “Fly Me to the Moon”[1]. Evangelion is an anime about a lot of themes—too many, thanks to Hideaki Anno’s dodgy responses regarding its interpretations. Alienation and depression are at the center of it all. Countless articles will tell you that Anno was suffering from depression while working on Evangelion. Further, Japan had recently faced terrorist attacks in Tokyo, as well as a series of devastating earthquakes. In the face of such tragedies, Evangelion asks, what will become of us in the future? In a world where lives are arbitrarily lost, where we have no direction to go towards, how can humanity itself continue?

These are some of the bigger questions that Evangelion asks, and they connect to the more intimate, the more human questions it poses as well. How can two human beings form any connection when disasters like the Second Impact occur? The English title of the fourth episode of the series is “Hedgehog’s Dilemma”. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer coined this term to express the complexity of human relationships; moving closer together—physically or mentally—means that we will hurt each other. And yet, this proximity is what we humans crave the most. How do we reconcile these conflicting desires and keep moving on in the face of tragedy? For many of us, these thoughts may not result from Second-Impact-scale disasters, but personal tragedies—the death of loved ones, or even the break-up of friendships or relationships. These feelings seem unconnected to the future of humanity, but as the series repeatedly emphasizes, the two are linked. Evangelion asks: how do we face tomorrow. In my essay, I propose that there multiple ways that Evangelion answers these questions, and all of them are linked to the notion of posthumanity.

Before I get into Evangelion we must clarify what I mean by “posthuman”. An umbrella-term, “posthuman” is literally what comes after humanity. It is the posthuman who must adapt to the new world that is altered by climate change, nuclear wars, alien life contact, and endless numbers of (not entirely) science-fictional scenarios. Bio-technological invasion of the human body alters the limits of a human being, extending us into our electronic environments, interfacing us with machines and artificial intelligence. This is a kind of posthumanity, often leaning towards calling the current human being a “cyborg” (in Donna Haraway’s term). A central aspect of posthumanity tends to be the displacement of the “rational thinking machine” of the Renaissance humanist. “Man” is no longer the measure of all things. The posthuman is as much an animal as any, and no longer claims a moral stature higher than its fellow earth inhabitants. It suggests an equality with everything, especially if we look at vitalist materialist Rose Braidotti’s stance in her book The Posthuman. These are the broad notions of the posthuman that I will work with for this essay.

The people in Evangelion are, in at least the bio-technological sense, posthuman. This is especially true for the three EVA pilots, who meld with their EVA Units. However, that is not enough to survive in this world. Humans are no longer allowed their aspirations, displaced as they are by repeated Angel attacks. They still do not connect with their environments—the futuristic landscapes of Tokyo-3 little more than blast shelters. Animals do not even survive in this world. There is something missing in even the humanity of the Evangelion human beings, and all characters can feel that. That is why there is a thrust to the posthuman in the show with the 人類補完成計画, translated as the Human Instrumentality Project, comes into play. 「人類方完成計画」means different things to different people and organizations—is not surprising, considering this is Evangelion. I see three major interpretations of this phrase, and these are the posthumanities of Evangelion, the humanities after the Evangelion series. These are the posthumanities of Seele, Ikari Gendō, and Ikari Shinji.

Let us start with Seele. “To return humanity to its original form”—this is the posthumanity of Seele. All individuality must be extinguished, and we must return to the primal forms of Lilith and Adam. Why Lilith? This is where my knowledge of the Christian tradition fails. As far as I know, Lilith was Adam’s first “companion”, but she never lay with him. Instead, she gave birth to all the monsters of the world. Often, she has been thought of as a witch. If you want an instance of Lilith close to the world, Jean E. Graham’s paper “Women, Sex, and Power: Circe and Lilith in Narnia” compares the White Witch of Narnia to Lilith. In fact, she is explicitly noted to be a descendant of Lilith. This is speculation, but it seems that we are all, then, descendants of Lilith. Not even those of Adam and Eve, we are irredeemable monsters, unless we go back to the form that bore us, and resume the innocence of the formless. This needs the destruction of the human, and in some ways, this is the end that Ayanami Rei almost leads us to.

Ikari Gendō’s posthumanity is a rogue form of Seele’s plan, insofar as is it wishes to bring together all the living and the dead. The show repeatedly tells us that Ayanami Rei is somehow connected to Ikari Yui, Ikari Gendō’s deceased wife. Most people seem to find this form of posthumanism twisted and somehow fundamentally wrong. Akagi Naoko found it disturbing enough to find Yui still shadowing her that she committed suicide.

Finally, we have the posthumanism of Ikari Shinji. This is how I read the last two episodes of Evangelion, the two episodes that make the least sense in an anime where few things make sense. Over the two episodes, the EVA pilots and other NERV personnel face the monsters that have haunted them throughout their lives and try to overcome them. Shinji’s fear is the fear of intimacy, of becoming close to people. He does not know how to open himself up without getting hurt, primarily because his father never showed him any warmth even after his mother gave herself up to EVA – 01. It is the Hedgehog’s Dilemma all over again. The primarily-teenage audience of Evangelion possibly relates the difficulties that Shinji faces, the inability to somehow “let loose” and connect with people freely. How can one do that when it is so easy to not only hurt others but also hurt oneself? This is what stops Shinji often taking decisive action and stops him from fully realizing himself.

The purpose of the last two Evangelion episodes is to show us how Shinji admits that he has been drawing walls in the way he imagines the world to be. In the alternative world that he dreams of, he acts the same way as his classmates—a carefree, horny, uninhibited, Japanese teenage male. It is just an altered version of a scene we have already witnessed before. It is important that this world is not radically different from his own world. The people are the same—his classmates and Misato still make the experiences of this world. If it can be done in that imaginary world, why not in this world? Shinji realizes that the world he has been looking for does not need to be an LCL-fuelled dream, but a world that he can inhabit. When Shinji rejects the dream world that Lilith-Rei gives him, Shinji accepts the difficulty of human existence. He accepts the borders that characterize the individual human and yet also looks to the possibility of moving beyond our borders and bonding with other people. The “congratulations” sequence in the original ending and the final scene of the 1997 movie (where he almost strangles Asuka), both accept the fact that people are always distinct, but there is no reason why we cannot connect with each other.

The show then inevitably puts its weight behind the last form of “perfection” or 「完成」(Kansei). This is how human realization should function. The show not only addresses teenage anxieties through this, but its rejection of other forms of perfection is important too. It rejects forms of human perfection that try to take us into some primordial past or try to erase all our distinctions. The erosion of borders, the assertion that we are all the same is, is as threatening as the assertion that some shadowy organization that does not even live among us can decide who is or is not a part of a community. Evangelion is prescient in the fact that not only does it see the creation of rigid borders as a problem, but it also sees that the complete dismissal of borders is not a solution either. I would like to think that it gives us tools to think about the problems of borders that we face in many regions of the world—whether it is the wars in the Middle East, the anti-immigrant agendas of Trump’s America and Modi’s India, the slowly digesting monster that is the PRC in Hong Kong, or even the xenophobia that countries like Korea and Japan still struggle with. Every individual must revaluate themselves before we blindly forge on this path that we call “humanity”. Maybe we all need to pause for a few days and watch Neon Genesis Evangelion before we create the cataclysm of the Second Impact.

[1] Before pointing out that Netflix’s dubbing and subbing has horribly altered the anime and therefore Evangelion has lost its essence, please note that I know Japanese. You can find that on my LinkedIn Page. Of course, I haven’t linked that anywhere on Tumblr, so don’t look for it.

#evangelion neongenesisevangelion posthuman #human humanity humaninstrumentality

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guidetoenjoy-blog · 5 years

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India's #MeToo moment? Media and entertainment industry shaken by allegations

New Post has been published on https://entertainmentguideto.com/must-see/indias-metoo-moment-media-and-entertainment-industry-shaken-by-allegations/

India's #MeToo moment? Media and entertainment industry shaken by allegations

New Delhi (CNN)A year after the fall of US movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, a flurry of allegations of sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior has shaken the Indian media and entertainment industries, prompting many to ask if the #MeToo movement has finally arrived in the world’s largest democracy.

A leading comedy outfit popular with Indian millennials was also shaken when a comedian it worked with faced harassment allegations, while in the media industry, allegations of inappropriate behavior saw a prominent Delhi-based political journalist lose his position pending an internal investigation, according to reports.

Allegations have also been leveled against a minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

The movement appears to have been prompted by allegations late last month by former Bollywood actress Tanushree Dutta, who spoke publicly about being a victim of assault allegedly at the hands of a former co-star in 2008.

“He was grabbing me by the arms, pushing me around, then he would ask the choreographers to move and teach me how to dance and the next thing I know he wanted to do an intimate sequence with me. It was ridiculous,” Dutta told CNN affiliate News18 about her experience when she worked with veteran actor Nana Patekar.

Speaking to reporters at a hastily arranged news conference on Monday in Mumbai, Patekar dismissed questions, saying, “My lawyers have told me not to speak to the media so I can’t say anything. Otherwise, I would have said something in the past four days. This case is ten years old, what was true then is true today.”

CNN has reached out to Patekar’s legal team but has yet to receive a response.

Dutta’s allegations prompted support from numerous leading industry figures, including “Quantico” star Priyanka Chopra, who tweeted agreeing with another actor that “the world needs to #BelieveSurvivors.”

In the days since, numerous women from all walks of life have taken to social media to narrate their experiences of assault or inappropriate behavior at the hands of prominent Indian men.

“The stories are there so people can be safe,” said Sheena Dabholkar, a writer and journalist who has been curating a feed of incidents on Twitter and naming those involved through messages that women have sent her directly.

“People worldwide have issues with boundaries and consent. Even recognizing discomfort in people and unwelcome behavior. I want to create an understanding of what people find acceptable and to create a conversation,” Dabholkar told CNN.

Time’s up for Bollywood?

Many of the allegations have resulted in immediate consequences.

On Saturday, news broke that Phantom Films, the Bollywood studio responsible for Netflix’s first original series from India, was to fold.

The announcement, made on Twitter by one of the studio’s co-founders and prominent Bollywood director Anurag Kashyap, came after HuffPost India published a story in which a former female employee accused Vikas Bahl, another co-founder and director, of harassment.

“Phantom was a dream, a glorious one and all dreams come to an end. We did our best and we succeeded and we failed. But I know for sure we will come out of this stronger, wiser and will continue to pursue our dreams our own individual ways. We wish each other the best,” Kashyap wrote on Twitter on October 6.

In the HuffPost piece, the former female employee accused Bahl of masturbating on her without consent after pretending to pass out on her bed.

The alleged incident took place in May 2015. In October that year, she said she shared her experience with Kashyap but nothing was done and she resigned.

Kashyap later issued a detailed statement on Twitter, saying: “While at Phantom, I did everything I could, within what I was told by my partner and his lawyers. For legal and financial decisions, I was fully dependent on my partner and his team. They took care of those things so I could focus on what I did better, creatives. His word and his team’s word on any matter used to be the final word for us.”

“According to legal advice provided to me then, I was told that we had very limited options. Now in hindsight and after taking stock of things myself, I can quite see how I was ill-advised,” he added.

On Tuesday, Bahl’s lawyers hit back forcefully at Kashyap, sending him a legal notice denying the allegations, and hitting back at his statement on Twitter and his interview to Huffpost.

Bahl’s lawyers said the accusations were made “as a result of professional jealousy and with the sole intent to defame our client, malign his image and destroy his career.” They sent a similar letter to Vikramaditya Motwane, another of Phantom Films’ co-founders, who had also weighed in on the allegations on Twitter. Both letters were shared with CNN by Bahl’s legal counsel.

Indian media under scrutiny

Away from Bollywood, the country’s political and media industries have also come under scrutiny, with female journalists sharing incidents of sexual harassment.

The most prominent person to be named so far is MJ Akbar, a former journalist and currently a junior foreign minister in Modi’s government.

In an article written for Vogue India in 2017, journalist Priya Ramani described an experience of workplace harassment that happened while during a job interview in a Mumbai hotel room.

Ramani did not name the individual in the original account. However, on Monday, taking to Twitter, she identified the man as Akbar.

“Turns out you were as talented a predator as you were a writer. It was more date, less interview,” Ramani said of the encounter in her piece, which she claims took place when “I was 23, you were 43.”

“Come sit here, you said at one point, gesturing to a tiny space near you. I’m fine, I replied with a strained smile. I escaped that night, you hired me, I worked for you for many months even though I swore I would never be in a room alone with you again,” wrote Ramaniin her 2017 piece.

On Tuesday, the Indian newspaper, The Telegraph, ran a story on the allegations against Akbar, its founding editor, under the headline “#MeToo finger at Union minister.”

India’s Ministry of External Affairs has declined to comment on the matter.

Meanwhile, on Monday, Prashant Jha, political editor of the leading Hindustan Times daily, stepped down from his post after accusations of sexual harassment surfaced on Twitter, CNN affiliate News18 reported. Avantika Mehta, a former co-worker, said Jha had pursued her even though she turned down his advances.

CNN reached out to both Jha and the Hindustan Times’ legal counsel but has not yet received a response.

Going public

The ongoing public naming and shaming have revolved around incidents ranging from lewd behavior, suggestive text messages and, in some cases, clear instances of sexual abuse.

On October 4, the writer and performer Mahima Kukreja accused comedian Utsav Chakraborty of sending her pictures of his genitals. Her revelation has led to a wave of other women reporting similar incidents.

“It’s a little too late now but I am sorry. I really am. The past 24 hours were a crucible,” Chakraborty tweeted a day later.

Citing previous mental health conditions that he claimed impacted his decisions, he said, “I faced a very scary personal truth. I can’t think of myself as a victim anymore. Please tell me what to do now. How to make things right? I don’t want anyone to be hurt anymore.”

Chakraborty had previously collaborated with AIB, a popular comedy group with a large following among young, urban Indians.

In an online statement, they apologized for not acting sooner.

“We messed up. Since yesterday we’ve been trying to introspect and process what we did wrong, and everything that came up during our conversations all feel like excuses in hindsight and fact of the matter is that we messed up,” AIB said.

The weeks ahead will indicate whether India’s Me Too movement can maintain its momentum and what kind of action will be taken, especially against those in significant positions of power.

Dabholkar is hopeful, saying, “This is probably the biggest people-led one. India will have many Me Too movements.”