AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT

"Every spectator owns a Vietnam of his or her own."

--Trinh T. Minh-ha[1]

The "public and televised execution of a country and its people" in the former Yugoslavia (Alija Izetbegovic), the afterimages of a recent sequence of violence that began with the videotaped beating of Rodney King on March 3, 1991 and culminated in the convictions of two LAPD officers and two members of the so-called "LA Four," require us now, perhaps more than ever, to speak to the convergence of racism and the media in the 1990s and, indeed, in the coming millennium--to the existence of communities whose only vital signs appear in the sutures and edits of the mass media. Invisible, fragmentary, nomadic, and underground, these animated communities surface and cohere only in the momentary constitutions of mediatic exposure. As Paul Virilio writes of the Palestinian ontology, for example: "Whether they horrify or become exemplary, the Palestinians are now masters of an audio-visual empire, of a state founded on roads, airways and images. They exist, somewhere, with a precarious and phantasmal identity, deep in the memories of 400 to 500 million television viewers."[2] The media engender and sustain such communities--communities whose worlds are enclosed in the fourth dimension of media temporality. Whether revealing or concealing, the audio-visual media construct and ensure the temporary survival of such communities. As a function of memory the media put into crisis the status of history as the only form of recognition: with its power to evoke community, the media, as Virilio suggests, challenge our conventions of historical determination. The Hegelian notion of "History" as the name for humankind's effort to make its presence known seems undermined by the arrival of the technological media following World War II. Indeed, for Alexandre Kojève, World War II marks the end of history, the end of the possibility for human self-determination through the dialectical struggle dictated by history.

Accordingly, the media can be seen as an event that takes place at the end of history. Reflecting on that finitude, Kojève identifies Japan and the United States as two locales for the emergence of post-historical communities.[3] According to Kojève, American materialism and Japanese formalism serve as indices for the post-historical era. With the commodification of racism in the United States (where so-called "Japan-bashers" demolish electric appliances and automobiles with the same intensity and aggression exhibited during Operation Desert Storm or the LAPD assault on Rodney King) and Japan's reinvention of itself as a purely formal nation--that is, a nation which has eliminated the option of declaring war--Kojève's predictions appear intact.[4] And if history has betrayed the global community, has abolished the hopes of a transcendent humanity, then we must now confront the transfigured subjectivities and adolescent constituencies that blast forth from the mediatic *Dasein*. In the shadow of Hegel's end of history, the technological media have emerged as a new mode of ontological determination, tracing the outlines of a new population. The end of the war, the end of history have given humankind, for the first time, a non-dialectical vantage from which to view itself: that is, humankind can see itself from somewhere other than within itself. At the end of history, humankind can only see itself--the so-called "community of man"--as other. And in that dialectical pause--in the discursive exhaustion from which mankind exits history--a specular realm of being has begun to take shape in the media's virtual environment. It is a category or community marked by a profound relation to multiplicity since the technological media, as we shall see, always resist the dialectics of singularity. What follows is a series of brief speculations concerning such subjects of multiplicity in postwar Japan--at the emergence of the media figure and the ethical specters that it summons.

TV AND THE WAR MACHINE: ADOLESCENCE

"Perhaps the most familiar and pathetic effect of the TV image is the posture of children in the early grades. Since TV, children--regardless of eye condition--average about six and a half inches from the printed page. Our children are striving to carry over to the printed page the all-involving sensory mandate of the TV image. With perfect psycho-mimetic skill, they carry out the commands of the TV image. They pore, they probe, they slow down and involve themselves in depth."

--Marshall McLuhan[5]

In a series of famous quotations printed under bottle caps, Jacqueline Kennedy contributes the following thought: "There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is best of all." OK. But it was on TV that an entire generation of adolescent de-generates grew up watching her husband's head explode.[6] The classical childhood imperative that required such literary cerebral expansion found its graphic illustration in the TV images of President JFK's cranial explosion. During the 1960s, books competed with television for the child's expandable mind, with television increasingly gaining ascendancy. As the technical media invaded and possessed the slumping populace, the new violent pedagogical dynamic demanded: enlarge, expand, explode. Television in the 1960s can be understood as having introduced a crisis in adolescent metaphysics: a disruption which ended--almost before it had started--the nascent adolescence that had begun to emerge as juvenile delinquency in the 1950s.[7] As Karatani Kojin reminds us, the concept of the child is a relatively recent invention, one that effaces the history of its production. Karatani writes:

"It is because the child seems to exist as fact before their very eyes that scholars of children's literature not only fail to question the concept of the child but try to find "the real child" in literature. The child, like landscape, is considered to have an objective existence that can be observed and studied, and this fact itself has become difficult to question. The further 'objective' psychological studies concerning the child progress, the more we lose sight of the historicity of 'the child' itself. Of course, children have existed since ancient times, yet 'the child' as we conceive of it and objectify it did not exist prior to a particular period. The question is not what is elucidated by psychological research about children, but what is obscured by the very concept of 'the child.'"[8]

While the advent of the child may serve as a signpost of modernity, its demise marks the end of what we naively call human "progress." Childhood--the existential temporality that we define by that name--is not destroyed by television, it is replaced by it. TV destroys "our" children only to the extent that it makes us all remain children. Stated more succinctly, TV destroys childhood only to perpetuate it elsewhere. Watching television, as we shall see, involves more than spectatorship: it demands an engagement with the apparatus that is ontological and mimetic--watching TV means becoming-TV, duplicating the structures that it engenders. Childhood and adolescence are rendered obsolete, and perhaps even extinct, by the metamorphic force of TV. Through the logic of prosthesis, TV turns us into extensions of itself. From the end of World War II, we witnessed that *thanatos*--that disappearance of the child "as such"--scrambled, scattered, and relayed across the interstices of television stations. From JFK's spectacular assassination to the violence that attended Vietnam, television quickly came to stand for and occupy the primordial site of mass media murder: "Primal time" TV, as Laurence Rickels names it.[9] The evolutionary tract from adolescent to assassin in the epistemic break that followed World War II seems to circuit, time and again, through the TV.[10] And while Kennedy broadcast his death across the tele-visible world, Japan, in the throes of a post-war reappearance prepared a massive media retaliation: an offensive that would restore imperial desire to its proper medium--technology. Japan achieved the peak of its paramilitary expansion--its apparatic surge--in the consolidation and deployment of the television and its screens.

TV, as McLuhan observes, figures a "cool medium," one that requires a high level of participation on the part of its user. McLuhan explains the difference between hot and cool media: "A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in 'high definition.' High definition is the state of being well filled with data...Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience."[11] As a cool medium, TV demands our efforts: we are the space of its existence, we are its body. According to McLuhan, TV occupies us through implosion: "the hot form excludes, and the cool one includes."[12] Unlike the dense projections that define TV's volatile counterpart cinema, television maintains a multiplicity of substance, withholding a repository of subjects in simultaneous reserve. The TV body comprises channels that we must enter, even as they enter us. Television induces us, as spectators, to pursue the elusive totality that it suggests, and because TV denies us the immediate fullness of its phenomenal potential, we are forced to participate in the fragmentation of the real that it effects. Television demands a sort of universal channeling, a movement from medium to medium, universe to universe. In this sense TV reverses the function of Hitler's radio, a hot medium that pressed the dictator's persistent singularity or "totality" across the German airwaves, everywhere.[13] Hitler attempted to universalize himself on the radio, through the radio in a fashion that TV could never sustain. Unlike that of the radio, the universe of television always involves the spectator. In the case of Japan, the shocks of national surrender were absorbed by the public when the Emperor collapsed the discrete spheres of divine and secular by speaking on the radio. Thus even in affirming the phenomenal, the radio functioned as the condensation and contraction of "truth" to the human range of audibility. Despite the cooling, death-of-god effect of that address, the transmission itself was hot.

As a cool apparatus television ushers in not only a new medium, but a new conception of the media as multiplicity. That notion, it is worth mentioning, appears to have been a trend across the intellectual disciplines and cultural domains following World War II. Cool media and concepts are increasingly introduced into the overheated postwar climate. McLuhan explains the relationship between cool media and hot worlds, hot media and cool worlds: "A cool or low literacy culture cannot accept hot media like movies or radio entertainment. They are, at least, as radically upsetting for them as the cool TV medium has proved to be for our high literacy world."[14] Not unlike the "alternative worlds" envisioned by quantum physics, the particular channel delineates or holds in abeyance the vast continuum of alterity from the phenomenal dimensions. Like the multiple worlds of popular science and the multiple personalities of popular psychology, the multiple channels of popular television increase the volume of psycho-spatial information available to the spectator-subject.

THE LANDSCAPE OF JAPAN

"Once a landscape has been established, its origins are repressed from memory. It takes on the appearance of an "object" which has been there, outside us, from the start. An "object," however, can only be constituted within a landscape. The same may be said of the "subject" or self. The philosophical standpoint which distinguishes between subject and object came into existence within what I refer to as "landscape." Rather than existing prior to landscape, subject and object emerge from within it."

--Karatani Kojin[15]

Long suffering from a lack of inhabitable space, Japan had converted, by the early twentieth century, its total island space.[16] From the limits of feudal division to the seemingly infinite potentials of colonial appropriation, Japan embarked upon a course of territorial conquest throughout Asia. With the end of the war and the expansionist ambitions that it sustained, Japan turned its efforts toward economic growth, toward the expansion of its national identity through technology. The phenomenon of economic presence without military support is, as Eqbal Ahmad claims, a unique event. He asserts:

Throughout history, there has existed a coincidence of economic, military, and political power in world politics; the rise of Japan and Germany as global economic giants who do not enjoy concomitant military and political power is a unique phenomenon. It progressively becomes a striking feature of international politics as Japan, and to a lesser extent, Germany go multinational...In Pakistan, for example...Japan, diplomatically and militarily invisible, is the most ubiquitous economic presence.[17]

The singularity of that situation--cultural presence without military force--is marked by the content of the Japanese presence: by technology. Let us focus on the apparatus that perhaps best embodies postwar technology, the TV. Television creates space, allows for the conversion of nothing into space. Through the productive operation of *imagination* television facilitates the sudden appearance of anti-matter into the psycho-physical universe. Just as mirrors and glass populate the urban landscape with illusions of expanse, the TV monitor enhances the visible spectrum. In Japan, the urban cramp of Tokyo's commercial districts receives supplementation from an overwhelming crowd of tele-visual fixtures. Monitors of improbable dimensions and construction are a common feature in these areas. In order to resist the anxiety of spatial collapse, urban tenants often aspire to the illusion of an added dimension--to the planetarium effect--by installing disproportionately large TV screens in their miniature living spaces. McLuhan analyzes the phenomenon as a symptom arising from the desire "to experience the outside as inside": "The TV viewer is in just that role at all times. He is a submarine. He is bombarded by atoms that reveal the outside as inside in an endless adventure amidst blurred images and mysterious contours."[18] And whereas the processes of mirrors (reflection) and glass (transparency) require the pre-existence of space (either before or beyond the surface), television provides an additional space with its own dynamic content--it adds a dimension to those in which we normally exist. In this fashion, TV facilitates Japan's colonization of itself.

In the case of Japan, "colonialism" thus comes to signify the creation of space rather than its occupation. And having resisted invasion from both East and West (an issue that has remained essential toward the constitution of its historical identity), Japan assumes the posture of a phantasmatic empire, literally of an invented topography. Let us briefly survey some of the conceptualizations of Japan by various Western theorists. Seized by the lure of an irresistible *japonisme*, aesthete and novelist Oscar Wilde exclaims:

"Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art have any existence?...The Japanese people are a deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists...In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people...the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art."[19]

Wilde's Japan exists in the instance of its representation. Japan is, according to Wilde, essentially a self-representation, a self-portrait. Filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, on a Japanese cinematography that appears everywhere but in its cinema, supports that thesis. He declares: "It is a weird and wonderful feeling to write a booklet about something that does not in fact exist...about the cinema of a country that has an infinite multiplicity of cinematic characteristics but which are scattered all over the place--with the sole exception of its cinema."[20] Eisenstein suggests that Japan cannot achieve a proper cinematography since it is itself already a type of cinema. In his _Empire of Signs_, semiotician Roland Barthes extends this phantastic line of thought:

"If I want to imagine a fictive nation I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object,...so as to compromise no real country by my fantasy...I can also--though in no way claiming to represent or analyze reality itself...--isolate somewhere in the world (*faraway*) a certain number of features...and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call Japan."[21]

Despite the existence of a country known as Japan, despite the acknowledgment that such a country exists in the phenomenal world, Barthes chooses to name his invented system of signs Japan. Apparently, Barthes feels that the signifier Japan can sustain a limitless number of signifieds. Japan becomes, in Barthes' view, a virtual television with any number of possible channels. In another vein, expatriate Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro finds in Japan what Oe Kenzaburo calls an "illustration of the way a writer's imagination takes shape."[22] Ishiguro narrates his relationship to a Japan he left at the age of five:

"I think that the Japan that exists in [_An Artist of the Floating World_] is very much my own personal, imaginary Japan...[W]hen I reached the age of perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four I realized that this Japan, which was very precious to me, actually existed only in my own imagination, partly because the real Japan had changed greatly between 1960 and later on. I realized that it was a place of my childhood, and I could never return to this particular Japan. And so I think one of the reasons why I turned to writing novels was because I wished to recreate this Japan--put together all these memories, and all these imaginary ideas I had about this landscape which I called Japan."[23]

For Ishiguro, the very process of writing itself is contained in his fantasy of Japan: "I very much feel that as a writer of fiction that is what I'm supposed to do--I'm supposed to invent my own world, rather than copying things down from the surface of reality."[24] In fact, the image of Japan appears repeatedly as a figure for the rhetoric of invention. Ishiguro's fiction, Barthes' semiotics, Eisenstein's cinematography, and Wilde's art utilize the trope of Japan to describe an anasemic process by which Japan always stands for something else, something other--something entirely other than the country recognized as Japan. According to the registers of Western cartology (in which, for instance, Africa places an origin, China an antiquity, India a distance), Japan appears to outline a purely fictive realm, a depository of the other. Since the atomic destruction, the myth of an imaginary Japan has increased through the spectacle of its economic miracle, its rapid reconstruction. Since the end of the war, Japan has come to be seen less as a nation than a phantasmatic state or *polis* like Troy, Pompeii, or Atlantis.

In response to the Western conceptualization of Japan, Japanese theoreticians have themselves promoted an identity of absorption. In _The Awakening of Japan_ (1905), Okakura Kakuzo attributes the rise of Japanese civilization to its geo-historical function as receptacle. Having mediated, historically, the commerce between Asian countries, between Eastern and Western nations, and having encountered and internalized the artifacts of both Eastern and Western cultures, Japan, according to Okakura, comes to stand as a site of global preservation--a trans-continental museum of the other. Okakura explains:

"Our individuality has been preserved from submersion beneath the mighty tide of Western ideas by the same national characteristics which ever enabled us to remain true to ourselves in spite of repeated influxes of foreign thought. From time immemorial the civilizations of China and India have silted over Korea and the adjacent coasts of Japan...Different and conflicting as were these various schools of thought, Japan has welcomed them all and assimilated whatever ministered to her mental needs, incorporating the gift as an integral part of her thought inheritance. The hearth of our ancient ideals was ever guarded by a careful eclecticism, while the broad fields of our national life, enriched by the fertile deposits of each successive inundation, burst forth into fresher verdure."[25]

Following the idiom of consumption that Okakura extends in the image of tea in his 1906 treatise on Japanese modernity and ceremony, _The Book of Tea_, Japan emerges as a kind of cannibal nation.[26] Okakura connects the history of Japan to the formation of its particular aesthetics. Concerning the logic of reception on Japanese aesthetics, Okakura sees the structure extended throughout Japan's various art forms. Okakura writes:

"In jiu-jitsu...(the Japanese art of self-defence)...one seeks to draw out and exhaust the enemy's strength by non-resistance, vacuum, while conserving one's own strength for victory in the final struggle. In art the importance of the same principle is illustrated in the value of suggestion. In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up the measure of your aesthetic emotion."[27]

Such an aesthetics of reception effects the feminization of Japan's affect. In fact, Okakura's portrait of Japan is permeated with a sexual terminology. For example, Okakura states: "We have an old saying in Japan that a woman cannot love a man who is truly vain, *for there is no crevice in his heart for love to enter and fill up*."[28] In that passage, Okakura not only reverses the conventional discourse of sexual penetration but he idealizes the "feminized" man as a figure of Japanese art: "until he has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty."[29] Elsewhere, Okakura describes the forced entry of the West into the closed gates of Japan in the following manner:

"The advent of the American Commodore Perry finally opened the flood-gates of Western knowledge which burst over the country so as to almost sweep away the landmarks of its history. At this moment Japan, in the re-awakened consciousness of her national life, was eager to clothe herself in new garb, discarding the raiment of her ancient past."[30]

Again, the imagery of nakedness and ecstasy suggests the attempt to transform Japan from one identity to another, from masculinity to femininity, from militarism to aestheticism. In this fashion, Okakura's Japan also prefigures and haunts the invention of another apparatus of reception: television.

The convergence of an imaginary Japan and television along a feminine trajectory offers a significant insight into the understanding of television culture and its effects. For the figure of "woman" is, according to its most radical configuration, the site of an irreducible multiplicity: "The female sex is," writes Judith Butler, "*the subject* that is not one."[31] The deconstruction or multiplication of the subject that Butler locates in the female sex resembles the curious investment that many Japanologists maintain in a Japan "that is not one." The *topos* of "woman" will, as we shall see, play a critical role in our discussion of technology and postwar Japan. In a Japan-induced fantasy he calls "Without Words," Barthes portrays the disengagement of the self from itself, the dissolution of the unified self in the field of the other:

"The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a *delicious* protection, envelopes the foreigner...in an auditory film which halts at the alienations of the mother tongue...I nonetheless grasp the respiration...as I move, a faint vertigo, sweeping me into its artificial emptiness, which is consummated only for me: I live in the interstice, delivered from any fulfilled meaning...in Japan the body exists, acts, shows itself, gives itself, without hysteria, without narcissism, but according to a pure--though subtly discontinuous--erotic project."[32]

In that pre-Oedipal hallucination, "which halts at the alienations of the mother tongue," Barthes reveals a being at the precipice of identification. Barthes describes a being that ex-ists in the realm of multiplicity and in so doing inadvertently approaches a psychoanalysis of the television. For the deconstructed subject can be thought of as a kind of television, a repository of potential subjectivities. In "Darwin," William Gibson offers the following description of a virtual TV apparatus and the subject that engages it: "Trev grunts again; his lips move. He talks to himself when he does television, but she doesn't try to make out what he says. He probably doesn't know she can hear him."[33] Doing TV, Trev loses language, loses hearing, regresses to the stage of an imaginary moment from which his future stretches into infinity--Trev's future lies within the TV. Barthes' inarticulate, "oriental" murmurs return in Gibson's narrative as the pre-semantic grunts of a TV adolescent, a "desiring machine" mainlined to the progressive grafts of technology. Television can be seen as suspending the Oedipal resolutions and propulsions into language, freezing the gendering movement of the subject: it retains the spectator within the suspended world of multiplicity.

Television thus appears to determine the directions for a set of immediate symptoms. Television duplicates in the viewer its *modus operandi*; viewers become extensions of the TV sets, TVs come to be seen as subjects. The mimetic force is constant, persuasive, absolute. In the economy of television, viewers resemble the TVs to which they attend, transferring the logic of TV to their exposed subjectivities. The relationship between TV and Japan can thus be described as an economy of displacement: television takes place in and takes the place of Japan, while Japan, in turn, is nothing more than a tele-vision. In his travel guide, Wilde suggests the impossibility of ever reaching Japan without first understanding the essential disorientation which marks that country. The only route to Japan, Wilde explains, involves a detour:

"And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokyo. On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere."[34]

For Wilde, Japan is like a TV program: the viewer reaches Japan through absorption and not travel. Or rather, one can view Japan itself as a television--a virtual topography or spectacle that is always screened by the spectator's imagination. "With TV," notes McLuhan, "the viewer is the screen."[35]

As such a stimulant, the effects of Japan are always "sensed" at an imaginary remove while never "present" for perception. Martin Heidegger, who has addressed the place of being in the technological frame, poses the following question to a Japanese interlocutor: "What does the Japanese world understand by language? Asked still more cautiously: Do you have in your language a word for what we call language? If not, how do you experience what with us is called language?"[36] What is most astonishing in Heidegger's query is his assumption that the Japanese might have no word for language. Given the trajectory of his work, that is, the importance that Heidegger places on the question of language, one would have to conclude that Heidegger doubts, despite the presence of his Japanese interlocutor, the very existence of Japan. Many Japanese, as we have noted, however, are complicit in the type of reasoning that Heidegger employs. In spite of its military surrender to the Allied Forces on August 15, 1945, Japan defers, through a metapsychology of displacement that we will now examine, the surrender of its "essence."

BECOMING-TELEVISION: TRAUMA AND THE ATOMIC REFERENCE

"If, according to a structuring hypothesis, a fantasy or phantasm, nuclear war is equivalent to the total destruction of the archive, if not of the human habitat, it becomes the absolute referent, the horizon and condition of all others."

--Jacques Derrida[37]

The atomic destruction of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 can be seen as having put an abrupt halt to Japan's quest for territorial annex and the Pacific war but also as having created the traumatic conditions required for the advent of television as a phenomenon. For the television apparatus requires a receptive space, a clearing for its subject to occupy. Like a TV set, Japan resurfaces after the devastation as a space of emptiness. "The only referent that is absolutely real," writes Derrida, "is thus of the scope of or dimension of an absolute nuclear catastrophe that would irreversibly destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity."[38] Absolute violence, Emmanuel Levinas argues, forces the victim to relinquish its identity, to place a "call to an impossible nothingness." This is, of course, also the definition of trauma.[39] Having renounced the patriarchic war machine, Japan turned toward new directions of identification--nature and technology. In an emblematic gesture, Japan's defeated Emperor devoted himself, after the war, to the study of natural sciences, publishing his botanical research while the industrial sector pursued the construction of a technological empire. The dual trajectory not only resurrects the classical opposition between nature and technology, *phusis* and *techne*, but it also frames the feminine and masculine connotations that those terms imply. Theorists Karatani and Asada Akira have discussed at length the juxtaposition of an "infantile capitalism with a maternal superego" as a particularly Japanese legacy.[40] The co-existence of a pacifist naturalism and a corporate technicity relax, re-pose the former military posture to a theatrical stance. The analog that figures and runs across the disparate channels emerges at once as a parallel to and offspring of the TV phenomenon: Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) provides an exemplary psychic condition and narrative for the discourse of TV.

MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER: THE FANTASY OF INTEGRATION

"With the revelation of the five new selves, the strategy of treatment remained what it had been before--to uproot and analyze the traumas, thus rendering unnecessary the defense against each particular trauma and the self who did the defending. Integration would be accomplished by getting the various selves to return to Sybil, the depleted waking self, the acquisitions and modes of behavior that they had stolen from the original Sybil. They had to return the knowledge, the experiences, and the memories that had become theirs in the third of the total Sybil's life that *they* and not Sybil had lived."

--Flora Rheta Schreiber[41]

A 1990 criminal trial and media event involving MPD brought this contested syndrome of the 1970s (Sybil) back into public consciousness.[42] Experts argue that when the child experiences trauma, she multiplies the repositories of psychic refuse in order to absorb the insurmountable, indigestible excess pain, in an attempt to avert a psychotic collapse. Thus multiple personalities are established to preserve the conscious unity and unconscious community of the victim's primary persona. As opposed to the disorderly fragmentation of the self effected by schizophrenia, MPD erects an elaborate edifice to house its distinct and autonomous occupants. Therapist Lynn Wilson records the following impressions of her patient:

"Even with the amnesia and denial that accompany Multiple Personality Disorder, I'm amazed by the completeness of some memories of early childhood. I think now that the multiple mind must be a receptacle lacking the normal filters that allow for true repression. What one personality represses, another personality stores completely. The memories have sight, sound, texture. They are vivid in the retelling."[43]

The multiple personalities are, quite literally, mnemic traces or embodiments of specific memories: each personality represents a living memory. The two traits that distinguish this disorder are its tendency to afflict women and its proximity to the world of television. Prior to the advent of the TV era, displays of multiplicity were viewed either as intrusions of external forces (spirits, demons, divine penetrations) or as irreparable fragmentations of the self (schizophrenia, paranoia, and so on). TV gives us the figurative means with which to understand the logic of multiplicity. TV forms, along with the fields that supplement it, an episteme. Only in the quantum universe of post-Newtonian physics and the post-psychoanalytic frame of popular psychology--only under the influence of the televisionary aura--can the rhetoric of multiplicity be understood phenomenally.[44]

The original North American TV networks, for instance, like the personae of MPD, insist upon their centrality: Columbia Broadcasting Station, American Broadcasting Company, National Broadcasting Company. Japanese TV networks also avoid, in the very idiom of the name, contact with their sibling stations. In fact most networks do not even acknowledge the existence of any other network.[45] It is as if across the airwaves, an impossible totality dictates the monadic insistence of each autonomous identity. In the scientific disciplines, the idea of multiple worlds populated by infinite versions of oneself with slight modifications has gripped the public imagination. Fueled by developments in quantum mechanics and chaos theory, physicists have come to envision the universe as a Leibnizian spectacle. Regarding the proliferation of ontologies in the parallel registers of quantum physics, Paul Davies comments on the absolute separation of each universe:

"The idea of one's own body and consciousness splitting into billions upon billions of copies is somewhat startling to the say the least, yet the proponents of this theory have argued that the splitting process is quite unobservable, because the replicated consciousness cannot communicate in any way with its *siblings*. In fact, the separate worlds of superspace are all completely disconnected from each other as far as communication is concerned. It is not possible for an individual to leave one world and visit his copy in another, nor can we even glimpse what life is like in all those other worlds."[46]

Thus the quantum universe comes to resemble a TV--its totality cannot be apprehended at once. Jacques Lacan encapsulates the fractal logic of television and truth in the opening remark of a lecture he presented on the air in 1973. Addressing a TV audience no different from the "public known as [his] seminar," Lacan proclaims: "I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real."[47] Truth, for Lacan, remains in the area of the real only through the impossibility of a total, immediate representation. Through the impossibility of a simultaneous presentation of itself, of "integration" (the "medical" term for the dialectical synthesis of a multiple), TV holds onto the real. TV and MPD can thus be seen as displaced sites of racial integration--utopias, atopias.[48]

One can argue that Japan, in order to absorb the atomic trauma that concluded World War II, developed another personality--a technological character--in which to deposit the imperial compulsion that remained within the Japanese sensibility. After all, desire "as such," psychoanalysis argues, is never extinguished but merely re-channeled. Moreover, Japanese imperialism, as Masao Miyoshi claims, was always marked by a profound ambivalence. "Japan," he writes, "is the earliest non-Western case of modern imperial aggression. At least at the ideological level, however, this aggression also contained a nativist program of fighting back against the Western conquest."[49] Japan's ambivalence--its patterns of emulation of and resistance to Western colonial efforts--can be seen as having developed into a kind of national MPD after World War II. After its defeat, Japan was thus able to produce the so-called democratic, capitalist personality demanded by the West, while its technological other continued to nurture a fascistic, colonial, and expansionary libido. In this respect, the television functions as both the emblem of and vehicle for the postwar Japanese identity. "The space of creativity," writes Trinh, "is a space whose occupancy invites other occupancies."[50]

The other fact that distinguishes MPD is its tendency to strike, for the most part, women. Although MPD is thought to be a result of abuse, and abuse is certainly not restricted to women, as a public spectacle MPD has tended to be associated with women victims. The celebrity cases of MPD include Sybil (16 personalities), Kathy Roth (8 personalities), Kit Castle (7 personalities), Sarah (46 personalities), and Trudie Chase (a sort of cable-MPD with upwards of 92 personalities).[51] That women--feminine subjects--play such a significant role in the mechanisms and structure of multiplicity figures prominently in the conclusion of a discourse that spans from World War II to television and Multiple Personality Disorder. Each aspect involves a dimension of colonization, and for the colonial imagination, the body of woman is, says Klaus Theweleit, "a body more enticing than all the world put together."[52]

Indeed the body of the woman is the world, the body of the world in miniature that Japanese aesthetics cultivate as a formal ideal. In Japanese poetics, Sybils become syllables, minute bodies of the world that are exhaled as totalities in *haiku*, for example. Kuki Shuzo explains:

"If the infinite is everywhere, then a very small thing contains the infinite just as much as does a thing of great dimensions...This shows us why with us the most cultivated type of poetry is a very short poem, a *tanka* for instance, having thirty-one syllables, or in the *haiku*, having seventeen syllables. We could say that it is the infinite which here liberates itself from time: a short time comes to be seen as containing much more than contains a long time."[53]

That notion of the liberation of spatial and temporal restrictions within the confines of the miniature object (in this case syllables, Sybils, siblings) provides an optimal aesthetic connecting the topological dynamic of Japan, the channels of television, and the subject of multiplicity. The miniature, according to Susan Stewart, is particularly suited to the posthistorical age since it "does not attach itself to lived historical time."[54] An image of the miniature aesthetic appears among Baudelaire's descriptions of the modern. Concerning the "Philosophy of Toys," Baudelaire suggests:

"All children talk to their toys; the toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced in size by the *camera obscura* of their little brains. In their games children give evidence of their great capacity for abstraction and their high imaginative power. They play without playthings."[55]

From Jacqueline Kennedy's books to Baudelaire's toys, children are called upon to imagine and expand--to move from the *petit objet a* to the multiplicity of desire, from the self to the world, from the plaything to play.

We have thus far glanced at a number of topologies that appear to embody the subject of multiplicity--TV, Japan, quantum physics, MPD, and "woman." But where do the deferrals, the displacements of the subject end? What constitutes the destinal site of those trajectories, channels, multiplicities that extend from the collapse of humanism? Or is this even the proper line of questioning within which to think the subject of multiplicity? Where--in what world--might such a subject reside? Where is the case study, the proper name that can represent the popular culture derived from science, psychology, and electronic phenomena? TV has already given us Max Headroom, the electronically generated alter ego of a TV reporter. Drawn from the psychic, mnemic material of his living counterpart, Max Headroom exists along the zero degree of television: his existence depends upon the spectator's attention. But according to the logic of television, the logic of extension that McLuhan identifies, every TV subject must have its referent in the empirical world, in the world that has become a simulacrum of TV. Let us turn then, in conclusion, from the spectacle to its agent, from the plaything to the player, from the object to the subject of multiplicity--let us revisit the scene of the crime.

SAGAWA ISSEI: CANNIBAL

"Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others. The average Westerner, in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea ceremony but another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the quaintness and childishness of the East to him."

--Okakura Kakuzo[56]

A 1981 incident involving Sagawa Issei, the Japanese cannibal in Paris, may bring the crisis into focus if not to a provisional point of closure. The episode that toppled the ravenous student also startled and pierced the nervous systems of the international media. A brief synopsis of the events is perhaps in order. Sagawa, a precocious twenty-eight year old student of literature with painterly aspirations arrived in Paris in 1977 to absorb the other culture. What struck those who knew him most was his size. As one journalist writes, "a few inches shorter and he would fit into any Fellini film."[57] (Already preparing Sagawa for a filmic transfer, the reporter's image of "fitting into" must here be retained.) Other students echo this trait. Claims one colleague, "We never made fun of his appearance" (which means they did); or, Sagawa was "very sensitive, but very childish." By 1980, however, the mood of the group had soured. Sagawa now appeared a "very embarrassing person" to his fellow students, and he repulsed them with his "sticky" and lonely behavior. Aside from one friend, Dutch student Renée Hartevelt (who, according to one acquaintance, "mothered him" and "even took him on holidays"), Sagawa seemed to be losing his community. Yet as the community dissolved, apparently, his appetite for inclusion grew. To make a long story short, Sagawa killed and then cannibalized his Dutch friend.

Two key points emerge from this case: 1) the Dutch identity of Sagawa's female victim; and 2) the constant effect of Sagawa's size. Regarding the first, we might recall that the Dutch were the first (official) Westerners to appear on Japanese shores.[58] The history and effects of those encounters have been recorded elsewhere. Suffice it to say, the Dutch remain a vital force in the *imaginaire* of the Japanese psychic landscape. Of the second issue, Sagawa's size, the cannibal himself insists on this ratio of desire. Reflecting on his passion, Sagawa recounts: "I was very weak, very small...I also adore big...I admire very much beautiful girls, especially Occidental girls who are healthy and tall. On the other hand, I also have this aspiration, this strange desire for cannibalism."[59] Size, scale, and space explode from within Sagawa's libidinal bowels onto the spheres of a kind of concentric semiotics. According to the pedagogy of an infantile mathematics, small objects fit into larger ones and never vice versa. Thus Sagawa can project himself into the tall and healthy bodies of Occidental women, the community of Parisian students, or even a Fellini film, but the reverse cannot--without a transmutational intervention--take place. The anxiety that grips Sagawa appears to be of national proportions: prewar Japan also feared finding herself ingested into the bowels of the West, and only a mediating gesture (like war, for example) could resist that flow. Sagawa's identification with Japan seemed complete--Sagawa had reproduced her symptoms. In his autobiography, _Kiri no Naka_ (_In the Mist_), Sagawa tracks the appearance of his cannibalism to a dream in which he and his brother are being boiled in a pot. Needless to say, the protectionist logic here intervenes as an imperative: eat or be eaten.[60] But the last and perhaps most significant ripple from Sagawa's ex-centric display of spatial reconfiguration arrives at the site of the media itself. Like Sagawa's painting, the technical media attempt to frame and consign spaces for the representation of a magnificent and boundless exteriority. The impeccable precision of history, the irreproachable empiricism of nature, and the insurmountable distance of alterity are all transmuted to the micro-economic stomachs and organs of technological instruments. The technical media achieve the effect of condensation, concentration, and consumption: the transfer of larger corpora to smaller loci.

Not surprisingly, Sagawa dates the origin of his disorder to the end of World War II. In _Kiri no Naka_, Sagawa describes the privation and suffering of his family in the wake of a disastrous defeat. It was, indeed, a war already haunted by disclosures of a cannibalistic campaign--in figurative and literal senses--as evidenced in Kazuo Hara's 1987 film _Yuki Yukite Shingun_ (_The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On_). As if to underscore the point, Sagawa, who is now unbound and unimpeded, has become something of a media star both in Japan and abroad. (His recent appearance on a German talk-show raises troubling specters of a mediatic and cannibal alliance--or axis--between Germany and Japan.) And if in Sagawa we feel closer to the symptoms of a tele-scopic, infantilized culture subject to the rumbling force of an irrepressible trauma, then let us turn finally to the case of Miyazaki Tsutomu, serial child-killer and TV saturant.

MIYAZAKI TSUTOMU: SERIAL KILLER

"And it is because sex can instantly repair the leaks of divided consciousness that human beings are so prone to sexual deviation--which, as we have seen, is closely connected with crime."

--Colin Wilson[61]

In 1989, the year that saw Japan's Emperor Hirohito slip into a coma and die--ending the Showa era--Japanese police apprehended a twenty-five year old publishing house employee for a string of sensational murders. For almost a year Japan had been terrorized by a serial-killer who abducted, murdered, dismembered, and allegedly consumed pre-adolescent girls. The killer's apprehension immediately summoned the specter of Sagawa. Michelle Magee of _The Asian Wall Street Journal_ writes, "Regarded as a cannibalism expert, in 1989 Mr. Sagawa was bombarded with requests from magazines to write editorials about Tsutomu Miyazaki, who was charged with butchering, burning and eating parts of four girls ages four to seven in the Tokyo area."[62] During his period of activity, Miyazaki communicated with the media and the children's parents under the alias of a comic book super-heroine whose name "Imada Yuko" roughly translates as "now" (Imada) and "I speak" (Yuko): "I am speaking now." Explaining in his letters that he was a woman incapable of "bearing" children, Miyazaki claimed that he killed in order to satisfy his frustrated maternal desire. Immediately convinced, Japanese media analysts insisted that these missives could, in fact, only come from the hand and mind of a woman. Upon his arrest, however, the nation learned not only of his gender but of his living habits: Miyazaki had packed into a tiny studio room over eight thousand video cassettes of children's programming--horror and animation. (Of the collector Walter Benjamin writes: "For the private individual the private environment represents the universe...The collector dreams that he is not only in a distant or past world but also, at the same time, in a better one, in which, although men are as unprovided with what they need as in the everyday world, things are free of the drudgery of being useful.")[63] In the course of his interrogation, Miyazaki confessed that he had tried to engage his victims in conversation but when they displayed fear, he had panicked and killed. Another detail that emerged from the investigation was that Miyazaki had been on television, having attended a televised seminar for prospective TV industry cameramen when he was 19. With that flashback, that overdetermined disclosure, the revolution from TV adolescent to serial killer completes its cycle. On TV and in front of TV, Miyazaki has become-Japan, become-other, become-TV. Miyazaki has recreated his world, his universe in the image of television. Like Sagawa, Miyazaki appears consumed by an impossible geometry, destined to struggle with the desire to be elsewhere, to ex-ist in the fictive space of the media. And from Sagawa's totemic ingestions to Miyazaki's fascinating *mimesis*, a subject of multiplicity surfaces from the recesses of Japan's traumatized technical unconscious--figures of geo-metry aspiring to exist everywhere, universally.

The geo-metric crises that we have glossed are symptoms of a crisis in racism: that is, the question of multiplicity is bound by the discourse of race. The collapse of history and the humanism that it sustained has forced the survivors of the end of history to appeal to the media for shelter. The technological media have become, in this manner, a veritable house of being for those races who had been excluded from historical recognition. The media shelter those who had been denied the privilege of passing into the afterlife of history. And if, as Virilio asserts, the Palestinians exist in the phantasmal depths of the technological media, then the same holds true for the survivors of the Holocaust, the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, South Central LA, South Africa, Bosnia-Herzegovina--those who have fought for recognition, for a world that has been historically denied to them. They exist in the dimensions of multiplicity opened by the media. For in the generation immediately following World War II, the popular culture that entered the traumatic abyss demanded the creation of an ontological multiplicity. Psychoanalysis, physics, and technology, which had propelled the world community into war, re-surfaced after concentration, extermination, and atomic devastation traumatized and multiplied. Now, in the age of the popular and the televisionary, the dynamic of history itself has been suspended. Like the frozen clocks at Hiroshima (8:15 am) and the temporal freeze of black holes, the post-historical momentum no longer generates. In its expansion toward an infinite and interior multiplicity, it de-generates. In this sense the popular subject renounces individuation, the futurity of the unique being--the axes of the subject are no longer dialectical and chronological but multiple and simultaneous. The global community has been replaced by the insatiable appetites and limitless stomachs of television and the subject of multiplicity that it cultivates. And in the glow of TV's aura--its voracious appeal--we remain, as simulacra, perpetually hungry, perpetually transfixed to our specular adolescence.

Akira Mizuta Lippit is an assistant professor of film studies and critical theory in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

NOTES

1. Trinh T. Minh-ha, _When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics_ (London: Routledge, 1991), 99.

2. Paul Virilio, _Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles_, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), 57. This is the logic, of course, that has been traditionally applied to Jews. Slavoj Zizek explains: "[I]n anti-Semitism, the Jew is everywhere and nowhere; you can never localize him. They can be hidden everywhere. They are perceived as being all around, the ones who penetrated everything...In anti-semitism, the Jew represents a nation that has no proper nature, has no proper character, which can mix. There is nothing horrible about having Chinese neighborhoods, Little Italy, etc. As long as you have these distinct entities, it's all right. The problem is that surplus element that is everywhere and nowhere" (Slavoj Zizek, Interview, "It Doesn't Have To Be a Jew," by Josephina Ayerza, in _Lusitania_ 1.4 [1992]:50). See also, Benedict Anderson, _Imagined Communities_ (London: Verso, 1983).

3. Alexandre Kojève, _Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit_, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 157-62n. Kojève writes: "[I]n spite of persistent economic and political inequalities, all Japanese without exception are currently in a position to live according to totally formalized values--that is, values completely empty of all 'human' content in the 'historical' sense" (Kojève, _Hegel_, 162n).

4. See in this regard, Masao Miyoshi, "Bashers and Bashing in the World," in _Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 62-94. Zizek makes the compelling argument that the contemporary Japanese have assumed the role historically relegated to Jews. They are seen, Zizek insists, as "work[ing] too much." He asserts: "In spontaneous American ideology, the Japanese are constructed as an enemy that functions in an almost anti-Semitic way...The standard role attributed to the Jew in Europe is here, up to a point, taken by the Japanese...that Japanese don't know how to enjoy properly, that they work too much, the idea that the Japanese relationship to enjoyment is somehow strange, other than ours, not normal, disturbed. I am always struck how in the American media they report this with regularity...This is the idea, this is the ultimate racist fantasy...[R]acism ultimately concerns the Other's relationship to pleasure" (Zizek, "Jew," 50-51).

5. Marshall McLuhan, _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 308.

6. Nellie Connally, who was in the automobile with her husband/governor John, Jacqueline, and JFK claims that following the shooting, Jacqueline screamed: "My god, I've got his brains in my hand." Apparently, she was already losing grip on the (subtle) distinction between minds and brains.

7. For a concise history of television in the postwar United States, see Lynn Spigel, _Make Room For TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America_ (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

8. Karatani Kojin, _Origins of Modern Japanese Literature_, trans. edited by Brett de Bary (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 118.

9. See Laurence Rickels' reflections on mass media, technology, and cultures of mourning, _Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts_ (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988) and _The Case of California_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

10. McLuhan offers this synopsis of the Kennedy/Oswald murders and their relationship to TV media: "Jack Ruby shot Lee Oswald while tightly surrounded by guards who were paralyzed by television cameras. The fascinating and involving power of television scarcely needed this additional proof of its peculiar operation upon human perceptions. The Kennedy assassination gave people an immediate sense of the television power to create depth involvement, on the one hand, and a numbing effect as deep as grief, itself, on the other hand. Most people were amazed at the depth of meaning which the event communicated to them. Many more were surprised by the coolness and calm of the mass reaction" (McLuhan, _Media_, 335-36).

11. Ibid., 22-23. See in this connection, Raymond Williams' response to McLuhan's TV, _Television: Technology and Cultural Form_ (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), especially Williams' concept of TV "flow" in his chapter "Programming: distribution and flow," 72-112.

12. McLuhan, _Media_, 23.

13. McLuhan adds: "In a radio speech in Munich, March 14, 1936, Hitler said, 'I go my way with the assurance of a somnambulist.' His victims and his critics have been equally somnambulistic. They danced entranced to the tribal drum of radio that extended their central nervous system to create depth involvement for everybody ...Radio provided the first massive experience of electronic implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of literate Western civilization" (McLuhan, _Media_, 298-300).

14. Ibid., 31.

15. Karatani, _Origins_, 34.

16. Japan's colonial efforts begin with itself. Karatani explains that during the Meiji period (1868-1912), "Hokkaido became a new territory for colonists, created by driving its indigenous people, the Ainu, off their lands and forcibly assimilating them...With the agricultural school established in Sapporo as its center, Hokkaido became the prototype for the colonial agricultural policy later applied by Japan to Taiwan and Korea" (Karatani, _Origins_, 40-41). The residual effects of World War II remain over the issue of the Kuril Islands: Taken by the then Soviet Union, those northern islands have come to symbolize, for the Japanese right wing, the final frontier of Japanese colonialism.

17. Eqbal Ahmad, "Racism and the State: The Coming Crisis of U.S.-Japanese Relations," in _Boundary 2_, ed. Masao Miyoshi, associate ed. H. D. Harootunian, 18. 3 (1991):25.

18. McLuhan, _Media_, 327.

19. Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying," in _De Profundis and Other Writings_ (New York: Penguin, 1954), 82.

20. Sergei Eisenstein, "Beyond the Shot," in _Eisenstein Writings: 1922-34_, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), vol. 1, 138.

21. Roland Barthes, _The Empire of Signs_, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 3. See Trinh's reading of Barthes, "The Plural Void: Barthes and Asia," in _When the Moon Waxes Red_, 209-222.

22. Oe Kenzaburo and Kazuo Ishiguro, "The Novelist in Today's World: A Conversation," in _Boundary 2_ 18. 3:111.

23. Ibid., 110.

24. Ibid., 111.

25. Okakura Kakuzo, _The Awakening of Japan_ (New York: Japan Society, 1921), 187-88.

26. See in this connection, Jacques Derrida, "'Eating Well,' or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida," in _Who Comes After the Subject?_, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell (New York: Routledge, 1991), 96-119. See also, Seiji M. Lippit "Tea is for Translation: Japan's Digestive Tracts," a paper delivered at the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America in Chicago, IL, Oct., 1992.

27. Okakura Kakuzo, _The Book of Tea_ (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1964), 25.

28. Ibid., 45 (emphasis added).

29. Ibid., 61. Elsewhere Okakura states: "The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece" (44).

30. Okakura Kakuzo, _The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan_ (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1904), 219.

31. Judith Butler, _Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity_ (New York: Routledge, 1990), 11. According to Butler, the notion of a feminine subject, which remains a theoretical paradox, leads to the deconstruction of gender as a category of sex. She writes: "When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free floating artifice, with the consequence that *man* and *masculine* might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and *woman* and *feminine* a male body as easily as a female one" (6). See also, Judith Butler, _Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex_ (New York: Routledge, 1993).

32. Barthes, _Empire_, 9-10 (emphasis added).

33. William Gibson, "Darwin," in _Spin_ 6.1 (1990): 61. In fact, Gibson's cyberpunk trilogy _Neuromancer_ (New York: Ace, 1984), _Count Zero_ (New York Ace, 1986), and _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ (New York: Bantam, 1988) deploys the image of Japan as a signifier for cyberspace.

34. Wilde, "Decay," 82.

35. McLuhan, _Media_, 313.

36. Martin Heidegger, "A Dialogue on Language," in _On the Way to Language_, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 23.

37. Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)," trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, in _Diacritics_ 14.2 (1984):28.

38. Ibid.

39. Emmanuel Levinas, _Time and the Other_, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 69.

40. See Karatani Kojin and Asada Akira's roundtable discussion with Fredric Jameson, "Wangan Senso Igo" ("After the Gulf War"), in _Hihyo Kukan_ 4 (1992): 6-35.

41. Flora Rheta Schreiber, _Sybil_ (New York: Warner, 1973), 314.

42. On Nov. 8, 1990, a Wisconsin jury convicted Mark A. Peterson, a 29 year old grocery clerk, for the June 11, 1990 rape of a woman with multiple personalities. The _New York Times_ account claims that Peterson "was accused of sexually assaulting one of the personalities, age 20, while another personality, age 6, watched" (_New York Times_, 20 Dec. 1990:B17).

43. Joan Frances Casey with Lynn Wilson, _The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality_ (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991), 34.

44. The idiom of MPD has already become commonplace in the information age. See Frank Hayes, "Personality Plus," in _BYTE_, Jan. 1994: 155-68. Allucquère Roseanne Stone links MPD to virtual reality in "Virtual Systems," in _Incorporations_, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: ZONE, 1992), 609-21. She writes: "The multiple is the enantiomorph, the opposite of the socializer within the networks who exists in the mode of multiplicity outside a unitary physical body located at a terminal in another elsewhere" (611).

45. The denial, however, can only be sustained to a degree. As Bill Nichols suggested during a recent discussion, the networks do display a distinct anxiety at commercial ruptures--"stay tuned," "don't go away," "we'll be right back," and so forth. At such moments, the channels seem to sense the faint pressure of the surrounding channels encroaching upon and threatening their monadic closure. Victims of Multiple Personality Disorder also exhibit that paranoid isolation: while one personality commands use of the body, the others are often described as assuming a seat in a theater, watching the drama from a distance. Joan Frances Casey, a victim of MPD, describes the scene in her autobiography: "'I go inside, but I'm nearby,' I said. 'It's like I'm at the back of a theatre, watching a play. But if I get bored watching, without really meaning to, I leave the theatre and go inside another room in my head. Sometimes a question or some sort of warning bell calls me out. When I come back, I know what happened, but I don't feel like I really did anything" (Casey with Wilson, _The Flock_, 21). In this way, the surplus personalities are disengaged from the site of production and are assigned to the role of observer.

46. Paul Davies, _Other Worlds_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980), 137 (emphasis added). James Gleick's discussion of universality and the fractal effects of chaos also bear a striking resemblance to the present discussion of television. See _Chaos: Making a New Science_ (New York: Penguin, 1987).

47. Jacques Lacan, _Television_, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, in _October_ 40 (1987):7.

48. The structural integrity may already be overdetermined here: integration, race, psychoanalysis converge, as Zizek notes, in Lacan's _Television_. Zizek writes: "Lacan was in a way, to put it naïvely, ahead of his time, because he did already predict this upsurge of racism, in the middle-to-late 1960s, in _Television_. Lacan predicted precisely in 1968, that when the student enthusiasm ended, there would be a new age of racism" (Zizek, "Jew," 52). In response to a question about his prediction of an inevitable increase in racism, Lacan states on television: "With our *jouissance* going off the track, only the Other is able to mark its position, but only insofar as we are separated from this Other. Whence certain fantasies--unheard of before the melting pot" (Lacan, _Television_, 36).

49. Miyoshi, _Off Center_, 40. Miyoshi continues: "Although the struggle was almost from the very beginning contaminated with a homegrown version of imperialism that meant to duplicate and improve on the Western design of domination and exploitation, and although it was rapidly overwhelmed by brute militarism, it is not impossible to discern in the struggle, signs of reactive, counter-contestational will and energy...[T]he cultural productions of Japan in the twentieth century have been inextricably enmeshed with the developments of Western colonialism and non-Western nativism" (Miyoshi, _Off Center_, 40-41).

50. Trinh, _When the Moon Waxes Red_, 187.

51. Trudie Chase, _When Rabbit Howls_ (New York: Jove, 1987). The frequent appearance of animal imagery in cases of MPD is worth noting. For an analysis of multiplicity and the animal figure, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible," in _A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia_, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987), 232-309.

52. Klaus Theweleit, _Male Fantasies_, trans. Stephen Conway with Erica Carter and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), vol. I, 296. "The *fictive* body of woman has become," writes Theweleit, "an imaginary arena for fantasies of deterritorializations, while actual male-female relationships have continued to serve, and have been actively maintained, as focal points for the implementation of massive reterritorializations" (Theweleit, _Fantasies_, 298-99).

53. Kuki Shuzo, "The Expression of the Infinite in Japanese Art," in _Shuzo Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre_, ed. and trans. Stephen Light (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 55. See Leslie Pincus, "In a Labyrinth of Western Desire: Kuki Shuzo and the Discovery of Japanese Being," in _Boundary 2_ 18. 3 (1991):142-56.

54. Susan Stewart, _On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 65. Stewart continues: "The reduction in scale which the miniature presents skews the time and space relations of the everyday lifeworld, and as an object consumed, the miniature finds its 'use value' transformed into the infinite time of reverie" (65).

55. Charles Baudelaire, "A Philosophy of Toys," in _The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays_, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 198. See in this connection, Jerry Herron, "Homer Simpson's Eyes and the Culture of Late Nostalgia," in _Representations_ 43 (1993):1-26.

56. Okakura, _Tea_, 2.

57. Peter McGill, "Portrait of a Cannibal," in _The Observer_ 24 May 1992:47.

58. While this issue has been contested and debated (some suggest that several Portuguese sailors had previously washed ashore), the Dutch are generally credited with initiating the first critical historical encounter between the Western and Japanese cultures. An interesting account of travel to Japan--half-factual, half-fantastic--appears in Jonathan Swift's, _Gulliver's Travels_, which was first published in 1726. Donald Keene noted in conversation that Swift apparently based his description of Japan on Dutch merchants' documents. See chapter XI of Part III in Swift's _Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings_, ed. Miriam Kosh Starkman (New York: Bantam, 1962), 208-11.

59. Sagawa, cited in McGill, "Cannibal," 47.

60. Sagawa Issei, _Kiri no Naka_ (Tokyo: Hanashi no tokushu, 1983).

61. Colin Wilson, _A Criminal History of Mankind_ (London: Grafton, 1984), 666. In his survey of criminality, Wilson appears to link the upsurge in crime to the end of World War II. He writes: "The most obvious point to emerge from this survey of crime since 1945 is that, as the figures have continued to rise, the nature of the crimes themselves has become steadily more horrific. It is as if some basic inhibition in human beings is finally beginning to break down" (Wilson, _Criminal History_, 646).

62. Michelle Magee, "Cannibalism is One Man's Meal Ticket," in _The Asian Wall Street Journal_, 10 Jul. 1992.

63. Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in _Reflections_, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), 154-55. In her introduction to Benjamin's _Illuminations_, Hannah Arendt notes the violence intrinsic to collecting: "The collector destroys the context in which his object once was only part of a greater, living entity, and since only the uniquely genuine will do for him he must cleanse everything that is typical about it" (Arendt, "Introduction," in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken, 1968], 45).