Kwasu David Tembo, University of Edinburgh, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
#TCVol8Tembo
Abstract
One of the most enduring conceptualizations of technoaffect in the popular cultures of both Eastern and Western societies of the 20th and 21st centuries can be found in Mecha manga, anime, video games, cartoons, and film. The concept of a human being that, to varying degrees of psycho-physical penetration, interfaces with a giant anthropic or humanoid machine is ubiquitous to popular culture; be it for mining purposes as are the Orbital Frames in Hideo Kojima’s Zone of the Enders series, or strictly war machines as they are in numerous texts ranging from Mamoru Nagano’s The Five Star Stories (1989), Harmony Gold USA’s Robotech franchise (1985), Toei Animation’s Voltron (1984), Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), Genndy Tartakovsky’s Symbionic Titan (2010), to Tsutomu Nihei’s Sidonia no Kishi (Knights of Sidonia) (2015). The preponderance of such conceptualizations of technoaffect indicate that the techno-organic assemblage of human and Mecha is a concept, narrative, and aesthetic that has become a staple of contemporary science fiction more broadly. That said, examinations of the onto-existential consequences, such as the various increased psycho-physical abilities and proportionate disabilities, as well as the affective resonances experienced by Mecha pilots in the aforementioned texts, and yet numerous others, remains under explored. Referring to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of machinic assemblages, Julia Kristeva’s concept of the Khora, and Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, this paper will explore how the Mecha pilot, as portrayed in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) and Hideaki’s Neon Genesis: Evangelion (1995-6), represents a type of technoaffected entity who, through techno-organic flows and assemblages of power, is mediated by radically enabling and disabling onto-existential affects. As part of this paper’s methodology, a coeval point of discussion will focus on how the concept of psycho-emotional assemblage facilitated by direct interfacing, be it purely physical or psycho-physically, with the Mecha itself or a co-pilot turns the Mecha into a core, collective, or repository that circulates anthropic psycho-emotional phenomena, thereby forming a technoaffected loop between Mecha and pilot.
Key Words: Affect; Jaeger; Evangelion, Pilot-to-pilot Interface; Pilot-to-mecha Interface; Psychoanalysis.
Essay
I. Introduction
One of the most enduring conceptualizations of technoaffect in both Eastern and Western popular culture across the 20th and 21st centuries can be found in mecha media. Mecha manga, anime, video games, cartoons, and films show a historical preoccupation with the interface between humans and machines. In these genres and sub-genres, the term ‘technoaffect’ refers to the concept of a human being that, to varying degrees of psycho-physical penetration, interfaces with a giant anthropic or humanoid machine. In Anno Hideaki s Neon Genesis: Evangelion (1995-6; hereafter Evangelion), this process is called Synchronization. In Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013), this process is called Drifting. Mecha-pilot interfacing and the cyborg assemblages that result have a variety of aesthetic and narrative forms throughout various media in popular culture; be they for mining purposes as are the Orbital Frames in Hideo Kojima’s Zone of the Enders series; or strictly war machines as they are in numerous texts ranging from Mamoru Nagano’s The Five Star Stories (1989), Harmony Gold USA’s Robotech franchise (1985), Toei Animation’s Voltron (1984), Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), Genndy Tartakovsky’s Symbionic Titan (2010), to Tsutomu Nihei’s Sidonia no Kishi (Knights of Sidonia) (2015). The preponderance of such conceptualizations of techno-organic assemblages of human and mecha suggest that the concept and its associated narrative and aesthetic tropes have become a staple of contemporary science fiction. However, examinations of the onto-existential and psycho-emotional consequences of such interfacing remain under explored. Referring to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of machinic assemblages in Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (orig. 1972) and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the chora discussed in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), this paper will explore how the mecha pilot represents a type of technoaffected entity. In being psycho-emotionally penetrated in her exchange with the mecha that affords her radically increased strength, agility, and power, the pilots symbolic self disappears leaving only her unconscious drives, fears, desires and trauma. Equally dissolved in this process of affective exchange also experienced by and within the mecha itself is the idea that the mecha is a dead thing, an unfeeling, un-affected tool. Therefore, I will theorize how through techno-organic flows and assemblages of power, the mecha-pilot is mediated by radically enabling and disabling onto-existential affects.
This article discusses a fascinating phenomenon, the portrayal of the psychological and physiological experience of the mecha-pilot, in two contrasting but complementary films from two different traditions. It uses the figure of the mecha pilot as portrayed in Evangelion and Pacific Rim as case studies through which to engage theory and encourage the reader to think differently about techno-organic assemblages via the construct of “technoaffect” and its relation to the concept of the drift. It also seeks to make an intervention into thoerizations of the relationship between the psychoanalysis and the concept of human-machine mecha interfaces. In bringing together psychoanalytical theory and anime, it is my hope to build upon the scholarship of commentators such as Thomas Lamarre, who in A Media Theory of Animation (2009) states that
Guattari’s notion of machine implies heterogenesis, encouraging us to push beyond the reading of animation as symptomatic of the modern or postmodern technological condition, encouraging us to treat the putative “symptom” as a material process in its own right, a process that defies neat divisions and hierarchies between inside and outside, or between technology and value. In this way, rather than take anime as a symptom of social conditions or national culture, one sees divergent series of anime world working on and thinking through technical value. (Lamarre xxxi-xxxii)
While one may offer a cursory reading of the confluence of the aforementioned conceptual areas, particularly instantiated in anime, as “the giant robot of anime reprises the Japanese awe vis-à-vis the technological power of Perry’s black ships, or that the otaku fascination with space operas about global annihilation reflects the Japanese experience of the atomic bomb”, my theorization of technoaffect and the drift is intended to diversify theoretical interpretations and considerations of mecha anime and its relationship to theories of affect and psychoanalysis (Lamarre xxxvi-xxxvii).
My thinking regarding the affective assemblages of mecha and pilots in anime and action blockbuster cinema can also be situated within a broader contemporary context. The idea of intimate human-machine interfacing ultimately refers to the relationship between human beings and technology. This phenomenon abounds in postmodern global culture of which the mecha pilot is a particularly potent aesthetic example. For example, the description of the Mecha pilot as an entity through which techno-organic flows and assemblages of power pass through, suggests that the Mecha pilot might be a projection of postmodern self in technoculture more broadly. In this sense, the process of ‘interfacing’ itself may also relate to the mobile device as interface between technology and the self in contemporary technoculture.
II. On Technoaffect
In this paper, technoaffect is a portmanteau of ‘techno’ and ‘affect’. In defining their collective signification, let me first define the latter so as to provide a solid theoretical basis upon which to develop a reading of mecha-pilot technoaffect. My understanding and use of the term ‘affect’ is primarily based on Baruch Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattaris’ respective understandings, conceptualizations, and discussions of the term. In the third part of Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677), Spinoza defines ‘affect’ as the modification or alteration/variation that is produced in a body-mind caused by that body-mind’s interaction with another body-mind. He defines the measure of the affect of this interaction in terms of increase or decrease in the body-mind’s power of activity: “by affect I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections” (Spinoza 278). Deleuze and Guattaris’ understanding of affect is directly derived from Spinoza’s. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), translator Brian Massumi offers a helpful discussion of Deleuze and Guattaris’ understanding and use of the term:
AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies). (Deleuze and Guattari xvi).
According to Guattari, “affect is a process of existential appropriation through the continual creation of heterogeneous durations of being and, given this, we would certainly be better advised to cease treating it under the aegis of scientific paradigms and to deliberately turn ourselves toward ethical and aesthetic paradigms” (Guattari 159). Put more simply, Guattari posits affects as the that which make up the relations of the temporary worlds we are constantly creating and experiencing as we interact with one another and live our lives. In this sense, we are also constantly being (re)created by affects. Affect, therefore, refers to the idea of being in the world and all its myriad complexities, which are made up of constant change. Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg offer a similar and helpful Guattarian definition of affect that applies directly to the idea of the drift, pilot-to-pilot/pilot-mecha interfaces and assemblages I shall discuss below:
Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relations as well as the passages (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities. That is, affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, non-human, part-body and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. (Seigworth 1)
For Delueze and Guattari, affect is also understood as the power to affect and be affected. Latent to this idea is the notion of the power of transformation and transforming, of becoming. Here, the notion of a self can only be understand is a series of affects, a mutable and ever changed and changing collection and dissipation of instincts, emotions, sensations, and ideas. In this sense, affect precedes our assumptions of the stability of subjects and objects. As Deleuze notes in The Fold (1993), “nothing authorizes [us] to conclude in favour of the presence of a body that might be ours, or the existence of the body that would have happened to affect it. There exists only what is perceived” (Deleuze 94).
The strength of using Deleuze and Guattari as a theoretical foundation for a discussion about psychoanalysis and mecha anime is the fact that the authors’ machinic reading of the assemblage of human and machine provides a holistic understanding of the onto-existential and psycho-emotional technoaffects that result in mecha-pilot interfacing. My understanding of mecha-pilot technoaffect in machnic terms is an extrapolation of Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic understanding of desire. Deleuze and Guattari describe desire in mechanical terms, as a machine-like force that is in itself an unstoppable and endless flow. As such, desire has no organizing principle, no origin, or generative centre or even a self that produces desire. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire is radical in the sense that they view it as a force that is independent from any law. The intention behind such a reading is to deterritorialize the various types of thinking and systems that seek to fuse desire with law or identity. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari offer the following discussion of the concept of territorialization, and the interplay between its poles namely, deterritorialization and reterritorialization:
the social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold. (Deleuze and Guattari 260)
Viewed in this way, desire has a deeply transgressive power in that it cannot be absolutely subjected to psycho-social human forces, yet is instrumental in constituting such seemingly fundamental concepts of human experience like the self. As Julian Wolfreys notes in Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory (2004), “[t]he subject does not produce desire but the flow of desire plays a role in the constitution of the subject” (Deleuze and Guattari 296). The aforementioned machinic description of desire is instrumental in understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s use of terms and phrases such as ‘flow’ or ‘body-without-organs’. Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic conceptualization of desire also provides a helpful vocabulary with which to theorize the technoaffect of the drift. The technoaffects of mecha-pilot interfacing are
everywhere at work in said interfacing, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts [where…] everywhere it is machines—[…] machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy- source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth-machine coupled to it […] For every organ-machine, an energy- machine: all the time, flows and interruptions” (Deleuze and Guattari 1-2).
Desire is viewed as a machine that is itself linked to a series of interconnected machines in a machine-like arrangement (Deleuze and Guattari 296). They define a machine as a ‘system of interruptions or breaks’ without which no machine can function and, in turn, produces a producing or product identity they describe as ‘an enormous undifferentiated object’ or an unproductive body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari 36; 151; 7-8; italics mine). In this sense, the entire process of production is recorded on this body without organs. Furthermore, the authors view any machine as linked to a continual material flow which they describe as a decoded flow of desire that constitutes the free energy of the desiring-machines (Deleuze and Guattari 15). The continuous interplay between machines and their agents beneath the various determinations that associate desire with a person or an object in a representational framework are mediated by deterritorialization. As such, subjective abstract desire cannot be underpinned by that which it acts upon, flows through, or constitutes: “social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 300). According to this understanding of desire, the entire Anthropocene is a socio-historical process both constituted and produced by desire or, as they say, ‘[t]here is only desire and the social, and nothing else” ( Deleuze and Guattari 300). Taking inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari’s views, I will try and show that in pilot-mecha assemblages, there is no authoritative self or identity driving the machine. Instead, the functioning of the mecha requires both organic and mechanical elements and actors, but the affects that result from their combination are independent from the laws that govern each individually. In this mecha-pilot interface, “one machine is always coupled with another. The productive synthesis, the production of production, is inherently connective in nature […] this is because there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow” (Deleuze & Guattari 4). In this way, both pilot and mecha function as breaks in the flow they jointly create, or as Delueze and Guattari state, “every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it” (Deleuze and Guattari 36).
My discussion of the mecha in each of my case studies would seemingly posit jaegers and evangelions, when interfaced with their respective pilots, as emotional machines. Therefore, in terms of more contemporary loadstars for my own thinking about the interplay between psychoanalysis and mecha, current research into the area of affective computing has been influential. In Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence (2017), Richard Yonck discusses what he considers the next phase in human-machine interactions, namely, emotionally intelligent machines. According to Yonck, affective computing is a nascent branch of computer science that “deals with the development of systems and devices that interact with our feelings. More specifically, affective computing involves the recognition, interpretation, replication, and potentially the manipulation of by computers and social robots” (Yonck 5). The idea of a machine—be it a personalized pet, council robot, sexbot, or mecha—that is able to identify and replicate complex human emotions is of particular interest to my reading of pilot-to-pilot/pilot-mecha interfacing. This is because a latent aspect of such interfacing, I argue, is not only the exchange of biometric data, but also psychological and emotional affects, memories, impressions, fears, and desires. In short, pilot-mecha interfacing is also emotional transfer between pilot and pilot through the machine, or the pilot directly with the machine. Such a process would require an emotionally intelligent operating system to successfully and safely govern such interactions so as to protect the pilot(s) from psychical danger or injury, as well as maintain the smoothest possible functioning, that is reaction time and pilot-mecha synchronization, of the human-machine assemblage. In this way, the mecha does not only interact with the pilots’ body or bodies, but their emotions as well. This turns the mecha from inert tool to quasi-sentient vessel of vicarious emotion.
In some mecha, the EVAs in Evangelion, the mecha itself has its own emotions with which the pilot interacts with when interfacing with it. This changes the relationship between human and machine from one of mono-directional organic privilege, to one of bi-directional bio-mechanical affective exchange (Yonck 7). Within the context of my chosen examples, mechas-as-giant-affective-computers are tributaries of their respective State military-industrial complexes. They are, primarily, fighting machines whose existence is, by and large, predicated on military service. Were they to be fully psycho-emotionally independent, they would attain the status and rank of soldiers. Here, the agnetially complex onto-existential status of the mecha raises interesting questions concerning the interplay between affect and tools of war. As Rosalind Picard asks in “Affective Computing” (1995), “why bring ’emotion’ or ‘affect; into any of the deliberate tools of science [or warfare]? Moreover, shouldn’t it be completely avoided when considering properties to design into computers [or war machines]? ]…] Who wants a computer to be able to ‘feel angry’ at them? To feel contempt for any living thing?” (Picard 1). In the case of my chosen texts, the necessity of an affective computer substantiating pilot-to-pilot/pilot-mecha interfacing is efficiency, reactivity, and creativity in combat scenarios. In this sense, the mecha in Evangelion and Pacific Rim move well beyond what Picard describes as a future affective machine that is capable of “identifying underlying sentic states[s] from observations of physical expression [based on] patterning [attained[ from an individual in a given perceivable context” (Picard 4). For a battle mecha, the interface marks a breakdown in the ontological (physical) and existential (emotional) barriers between machine and pilot. Interfacing with the mecha elides the two, mixes, and fluxes them. In this sense, the observational aptitude of the mecha is not limited to the acquisition of “ambient perceptual and contextual information” of the pilot(s) in order to “identify automatic emotional responses conditioned on perceivable non-emotional factors” (Picard 4). As a result of pilot-mecha interfacing, the mecha can feel the pilot, haptically and psycho-emotionally. It can detect a range of phenomena from external factors like the pilots temperature, blood pressure, respiratory rate and so on, to details of more ephemeral phenomena such as the pilot’s desire, fear, anticipation, tactical/problem solving thoughts. The pilot-mecha interface allows the machine to perceive through feeling, whereby its perceivable context includes “not only physical milieu but also cognitive milieu” (Picard 4). This means that the processing capacities of the mecha are not necessarily concerned with mimicking or imitating affective states. Instead, the pilot-mecha assemblage allows the machine to become the woman and the woman the machine: the assemblage allows the pilot to disappear or, in certain instances, become lost in the mecha while this same assemblage allows the mecha to be and become. Much in the same way desire allows for the dissolution and constitutions of the symbolic self, organic and machine alike, the pilot-mecha assemblage and its affects (what I call technoaffect) facilitate and precipitate the modification of the affective forces latent within the human body-mind through direct or indirect interaction with another body-mind and/or machine.
III. On the Drift
What is the drift? How is it brought about? What is inside of it? In the aesthetic and narrative presentation of the drift, a phenomena produced by drifting as it is in Pacific Rim, or Synchronization as it is in Evangelion, both texts attempt to imagine a disembodied consciousness, brain, ‘soul’, or as Lamarre puts it, “a ghost that can move from shell to shell; or a robot or computer that develops a heart, mind, or soul; or a mecha or giant robot that somehow communicates with its pilot via empathy, via psionic connection or some other kind of quasi-spiritual bond” (Lamarre 200). In a related sense, my theorization and understanding of the drift is indebted to Julia Kristeva’s concept and discussion of the chora. In her seminal text Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), Kristeva criticizes “classical” semiotics’ proposition that desire, play, any other affects and transgressions are beyond its remit. Central to her argument is troubling the idea that the speaking subject is a “transcendental ego” detached from its history, its unconscious, and its body that persists as such through any assemblage or synthesis it may experience with other phenomena. Instead, Kristeva argues that the speaking subject is necessarily fractured. Reflecting both Freudian and Lacanian thinking, Kristeva’s understanding of the bifurcated subject holds that the speaking subject is made up of a conscious and unconscious mind. The former houses various social constraints such as family structures and modes of production. The latter contains the subject’s bio-physiological processes, which Freud previously referred to as ‘drives.’ Against Freud, Kristeva proposes an alternate semiotics or semiology. Here, Kristeva proposes that meaning should be understood as a living signifying process as opposed to an inert sign system. In this way, semiology accords with the concept of the bifurcated subject as a socially-determined biological being. Kristevan semiology is predicated on two main concepts, the genotext and the phenotext. The former refers to the body and the bio-physiological processes contained and constrained therein by social codes. The content of the genotext, these bio-physiological forces or drives, cannot, however, be reduced to linguistic expression and are therefore beyond the system of language. The latter, a perceivable signifying system, contains the former but cannot express it. Thus, unlike Jacques Lacan’s phallogocentric discourse concerning the androcentric prohibition of the power of the unconscious through the symbolic order (through emasculated institutions such as the law, politics, and language), Julia Kristeva’s notion of “the semiotic chora ordering the drives” calls for a shift in focus from the prohibitive symbolic order or phenotext to the primordial conditions and closeness associated with the genotext (Kristeva 2169). According to Kristeva, society is subject to multitudinous sociopolitical constraints which “stop the signifying process…[and] knot it and lock it into a given surface or structure; they discard practice under fixed, fragmentary, symbolic matrices” (Kristeva 2178). This notion is described by Kristeva as the phenotext. Kristeva describes the genotext however as an infinite space (that can be lent a topography, but never be given an axiomatic form) which includes within it “drives, their disposition, and their division of the body, plus the ecological and social system surrounding the body such as objects and pre-Oedipal relations with parents” much in the same way polit-to-pilot interfacing through a more primary connection between the pilot and the mecha facilitates and engenders similar genotextual relations (Kristeva 2177).
Relating this back to Evangelion and Pacific Rim, I propose the following two formulae:
a) the drift=the chora=the genotext.
b) the pilot-mecha interface=the phenotext.
The latter allows access to the former. Let me give a simple scenario to clarify the above. The mecha pilot, a speaking subject, steps into her entry suit. She then steps into the cockpit of her mecha. She establishes a neural handshake/synchronization with her mecha, a process which brings about the drift. Up to and including this step, the process of the drift can be monitored by her superiors, technicians, and support staff through yet other computer interfaces that monitor both her and her mecha’s psycho-emotional and physical condition. Everything that has occurred from entering the cockpit to launch is phenotextual. It can be read, expressed, calculated, and predicted. However, what happens inside the drift, between pilot-mecha-pilot or pilot-mecha is shown to be unpredictable, private, traumatic, abstract, and inexpressible in both texts, especially Evangelion. In short, the process of establishing the drift is, by and large, phenotextual. What exists and is experienced within the drift is genotextual.
Kristeva states that the chora “precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality” and is, instead, characterized and valorized as an ecological, maternal, pre-Oedipal state” (Kristeva 2170). This description is startlingly similar to the highly abstract affective states induced by pilot-to-mecha interfacing. This is because the latter is a process which subsumes, dis-interpellates and/or inundates the pilot in a hybrid organico-mechanical, cyborg assemblage. In the drift, the pilot’s ego or self-formulation is decoupled from her/his affective experience of egolessness. This means that the dissolution of the symbolic self, regardless of the degree thereof, is a prerequisite to entry into the drift in principium. A pilot cannot achieve synchronization/neural handshake with a mecha without giving up or sharing some of him or herself with said mecha. In view of Kristeva’s discussion of the chora, I propose that inherent to the idea of the drift is the notion that the drift engenders an unavoidable re-encounter between the pilot and whatever latent maternal neurosis, complexes, traumas, and fetishes she/he may harbor in her/his unconscious. The similarity between the chora and the drift here makes the latter read not so much as a site but a state of honesty, vulnerability, and exposure. In this sense, the drift does not guarantee any nurturing or salubrious experience in the individual pilot’s connection to a state of primordial oneness through the non-prohibitive access and exploration of choraic drives facilitated and circumscribed by the drift.
IV. On Evangelion
Before further theorizing mecha-pilot interfacing with concrete examples, I need first provide brief synopses for the relevant aspects of each of my chosen case studies. Evangelion was first aired in 1996. The series’ groundbreaking aesthetic and narratology is considered seminal by numerous scholars who typically regard it as the vanguard of a then new type of original anime series. In “When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in “Neon Genesis: Evangelion” and “Serial Experiments Lain” (2002), Susan Napier states that
Evangelion is a text that can be read on many levels. On the one hand, […] it can be seen as a coming-of- age story, expressed through the narrative of a young boy’s growth vis-a-vis others, in particular the patriarchy represented by his father and the feminine presence represented not only by his colleagues but, […] by the EVA itself. The EVA is a clearly maternal entity in whose fluid embrace-it fills with liquid when the pilots enter-Shinji and his copilots can return to the womb. Shinji must also deal with the Angels who, [..] can be seen as the Other that needs to be repudiated in order for the subject to mature [..]. (Napier 433)
While the aesthetic and narrative complexities and nuances of this extremely multifaceted text cannot be fully explored within the remit of this paper, the narrative, broadly speaking, is as follows. Both the series and its subsequent films are set in the post-apocalyptic world of “Tokyo 3” in 2015. The series ostensibly reproduces every trope of earlier mecha anime from the 1980s centred around a now familiar story: alien invaders attack the Earth only to be quelled by a small group of young people using impressive giant robots which they physically and psycho-emotionally synchronize with. As the series develops, Evangelion completely deconstructs this cliché. This is particularly noticeable in the second half of the series, in which the tortured psychology of the main characters and a variety of enigmatic apocalyptic elements that result as technoaffects of mecha-pilot interfacing begin to de-familiarize conventional mecha aesthetic and narrative tropes.
The opening episode introduces the viewer to NERV, a clandestine subterranean command centre for various scientifico-occult organizations. NERV headquarters are overseen by Ikari Gendo, the emotionally distant scientist father of the series protagonist Ikari Shinji. NERV is responsible for protecting the remnants of humanity from giant monsters called Angels using giant cyborgs called EVAs which are piloted by three main fourteen-year-olds: Shinji (pilot of EVA Unit 01), a depressed and ostensibly suicidal introvert, along with two female pilots—Ayanami Rei (pilot of EVA Unit 00), a clone of Shinji’s mother, and Asuka Langley Soryu (pilot of EVA Unit 02), an obnoxious EVA ace whose brash demeanour is a cover for her own disturbing psycho-emotional neuroses centred on her mother’s suicide which come to light as the series progresses.
The narrative of Evangelion unfolds on two levels. On the one level, the series consists of NERV’s combat with the Angels. These are depicted as extremely violent battles characterized by avante garde, abstract inventiveness in both the aesthetic treatment of the battle sequences, as well as the portrayal of the Angels themselves. The series’ combat scenes involving the EVA are visually and narratively arresting. The EVAs themselves are depicted as uncannily anthropic, and yet also bestial, mechanically un-mechanical, fluid, graceful, savage, violent, lithe—as wild and strange and perhaps even awkward as the interstice-bodies of their pubescent pilots. On another level, the progression of the narrative is far more complex and controversial. The series becomes notably increasingly preoccupied with the problematic psycho-emotional states of the main characters. All of the series’ primary characters bare pervasive psycho-emotional traumas. Their respective psycho-emotional turmoil is exacerbated by the fact that it exists within the socio-political and cultural framework of an increasingly unstable post-apocalyptic background. In this sense, Evangelion‘s true originality inheres in the series’ engagement with the psycho-emotional struggles which the characters endure. These psycho-emotional struggles are, both directly and indirectly, technoaffects resulting from mecha-pilot interfacing.
For example, in the third episode titled “A Transfer” (October 18, 1995), Shinji fights and defeats an Angel codenamed Sachiel. He is pushed to a point of psycho-emotional and onto-existential crisis during the battle in which his EVA has its arm cut off and left eye pierced. The EVA also goes ‘berserk’, reverting to a primal form, and savagely beats the Angel to a bloody pulp. After the battle, Shinji is traumatized by the onto-existential and psycho-emotional experiences of extreme violence he had while interfaced with the EVA. In episode sixteen titled “Splitting of the Breast” (January 17, 1996), Shinji battles an Angel codenamed Leliel. During the confrontation, both Shinji and Unit 01 are consumed by the Angel. Trapped within the EVA within the Angel, Shinji undergoes what can only be described as a psychical introspective journey. In this self-katabasis, Shinji encounters a spectral woman whom is later revealed to be the spirit-memory of his mother. The allusion here is toward one of the series’ most startling revelations: his mother’s ‘spirit’ became trapped within his EVA during a Synchronization test she conducted with Unit 01, resulting in a gruesome accident that kills her which he witnesses as a child. In this way, Shinji’s mecha-pilot interface with his EVA is, in fact, a physical and psychological interfacing with his mother, leaving him to come to terms with the latently incestuous character of his status as an EVA pilot in principium.
This aspect of Shinji’s mecha-pilot interfacing has its most extreme expression in episode twenty titled “Weaving a Story 2: Oral Stage” (February 14, 1996). In this episode, Shinji achieves a four hundred percent Synch rate with Unit 01, a feat previously thought impossible. In the process, Shinji’s interfacing with the EVA-mother becomes absolute. His corporeal form dissolves in the amniotic conductive fluid of the cockpit (or ‘entry plug’) called LCL—a fluid described as smelling like the pilot’s mother. In this disembodied state, Shinji goes on another psychical katabasis while fully merged with and submerged in Unit 01. He eventually comes into direct contact with his mother’s soul. This interaction results in Shinji re-corporealizing or being ‘reborn’ from the EVA. Due to his mecha-pilot interface, Shinji is directly connected to the myriad onto-existential and psycho-emotional complexes and traumas of being ‘inside’ his mother. This sort of extreme onto-existential and psycho-emotional trauma can also be noted in a scene in the feature length film Evangelion: Death & Rebirth (1997) in which Shinji learns that the EVA’s are alive and, in fact, cyborgs. Shinji’s reaction of horror on seeing simultaneously his and his mother’s reflection through the eye of Unit 01 reflected in the glass of the EVAs’ hanger bay/enclosure/cage, is a horrific recognition of the radical onto-existential and psycho-emotional merger an EVA represents. As an example of mecha-pilot interfacing, piloting a mecha in Evangelion always-already involves the idea of the self into the Other, man into woman, son into mother, human into machine.
Besides Shinji, Asuka arguably experiences the most traumatic technoaffects of mecha-pilot interfacing in the Evangelion diegesis. In episode twenty-two titled “Don’t Be” (February 28, 1996), Asuka battles an Angel codenamed Arael. During the confrontation, the Angel forms a psycho-emotional link with Asuka using a telepathic attack. The horror and trauma of this penetrative experience is portrayed somewhat abstractly. The Angel’s attack forces Asuka to relive the most traumatic moments of her childhood which include her mother’s depression caused by an unnamed psycho-emotional ailment akin to bipolar disorder. On the one hand, Asuka’s mother’s illness caused her to not be able to recognize Asuka. On the other hand, it also caused her to violently verbally and emotionally abuse her. Ultimately, Asuka’s mother is shown to have committed suicide by hanging herself, with the then toddler Asuka discovering her corpse. Screaming helplessly in her entry plug, Asuka describes the mental distress of the Angel’s psycho-emotional probing as a ‘mind rape’ (Anno 1996). Following the Angel’s assault, Asuka becomes clinically depressed and later in episode twenty-four titled “The Beginning and the End, or ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (March 13, 1996), she becomes fully catatonic.
In episode twenty-five or the first half of Death & Rebirth, Asuka is able to defend NERV headquarters after the command centre comes under attack from the Japanese Strategic Self Defence Forces (JSSDF). Asuka is able to re-Synchronize with her EVA because she realises that the soul of her mother has been with her and watching her inside Unit 02 throughout the always violent traumas of her victories and defeats as its pilot. This jubilant and triumphant moment is punctuated with a tour de force of action scene animation in which Asuka battles and defeats eight JSSDF Mass Production (MP) Evangelions. It also suggests that there is a cathartic aspect to the mecha-pilot interface amid its many traumas. However, the battle ends with Asuka’s EVA being defeated and brutally eviscerated by the MP Units. Descending upon her like vultures, they rip off her EVA’s armour-plating and disembowel it. Here, Asuka has to experience three levels of dying: the onto-existential and psycho-emotional death of her EVA, the soul of her mother within it, and her own death due to being interfaced with a dying being. Ultimately, these onto-existential and psycho-emotional technoaffects of mecha-pilot interfacing are presented with incisive, if not controversial, psychoanalytical sophistication as the characters attempt to reconcile their own inner turmoil, their problematic relations with each other, and finally, their relation to more remote forms of Otherness—both with those of the Angels they must battle and the EVAs with which they must Synchronize. Ultimately, within Evangelion‘s vast array of intertextual symbolism, intersectional aesthetic and narrative choices, and post-modern storytelling techniques, the suggestion Anno makes throughout the series is that the mecha-pilot interface and the technoaffects that result are really a form of psychoanalysis. As Lamarre notes, the series’ final “action-image [in episode twenty six] opens up from within, exploding into anxiety, uncertainty, disorientation, and also reverie, recollection, love, and confidence […]We are then shocked into thought and remembrance” (Lamarre 199-200).
V. On Pacific Rim
In contrast to Evangelion, Pacific Rim‘s premise is a straightforward contemporary retelling of mecha tropes, leitmotifs, and aesthetico-narratological traditions cultivated in the mecha media of the 1980s. The film’s action is set after 2013, where giant alien creatures called Kaiju emerge from an interdimensional portal called the Breach situated at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. It is revealed that the Kaiju terrorize and destroy coastal cities including San Francisco, Sydney, Manila, and Hong Kong over a three year period. Humanity responds by constructing massive robotic war-machines called Jaegers to resist the Kaiju threat. Each Jaeger is piloted by two or more people called Rangers, whose consciousnesses are connected by a neural bridge (known as a ‘neural handshake’) in a process called “drifting”. This process allows each respective pilot to feel one another’s consciousnesses, ‘feel’ any damage their Jaeger might sustain, and therefore, be able to share the mental and physical stress of piloting the machine. After being reinstated in the Jaeger Program headed by Marshal Stacker Pentecost’s (Idris Elba) in 2025, the film’s protagonist Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) needs to find a new co-pilot after his brother and previous co-pilot had been killed during a battle off the coast of Anchorage five years previous. Tryouts that test for pilot-to-pilot compatibility called ‘drift compatibility’, depicted as a bo staff duel, are held between Raleigh and Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), director of the Jaeger restoration program and Pentecost’s adoptive daughter. During their first official practical drift-compatibility test inside the veteran Jaeger Gipsy Danger, Raleigh is distracted by the memory of his brother’s death. Similarly, Mako becomes trapped in the memory of the Kaiju attack on Tokyo that orphaned her when she was a child.
What is most pertinent to this analysis is the manner in which the text deals with the drift and the nature of the mecha-pilot interface. For all its hermeneutical complexity, Evangelion offers a surprisingly limited, or at least highly abstract, exploration of this interface. In contrast, Pacific Rim offers a very detailed, straightforward account of this assemblage, its processes, functions, and technoaffects. According to the Pacific Rim Official Featurette (2013), drifting was created by Dr. Caitlin Lightcap of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps (PPDC) after realizing that the neural load required to pilot a Jaeger cannot be sustained by a single pilot which often resulted in death (Del Toro 2013). From a theoretical standpoint, drifting ultimately refers to a technoaffective process in which two Jaeger pilots onto-existentially and psycho-emotionally synchronize with one another before synchronizing with the Jaeger itself. The process of drifting results in the creation of ‘headspace’, what I refer to as the drift itself. In this abstract space of pilot-to-pilot interfacing, the two consciousnesses of the pilots communicate, touch, interpenetrate, learn, help, hinder, and experience one another. According to author Travis Beacham, ‘headspace’ is “the arena of the Drift in which the bridged minds communicate” through the active neural handshake between the interlaced subconsciousness” (Beacham 2013). As a result, literal, abstract, and subconscious elements drift between the two in an onto-existential and psycho-emotional conversation.
In the behind the scenes commentary with the director, Del Toro describes drifting as a form of mind melding. This meld is an exchange, wherein which memories, instincts, and emotions ‘drift’ from one pilot into the other, thus turning the pilots and their Jaeger into a technoaffected onto-existential and psycho-emotional loop-interface. Drifting also allows the pilots and their Jaeger to completely synchronize, harmoniously controlling the physical movements of the Jaeger itself. The arrangement of the pilots within the ‘head’ of the Jaeger resembles that of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, wherein which the Jaeger pilots controlling the right side of the Jaeger are regarded as the dominant pilot. The dangers of this type of interfacing are described as ‘chasing the rabbit’ (Random Access Brain Impulse Triggers), a phenomenon whereby a pilot becomes attached or trapped within a memory, thereby losing control of the Jaeger whose commands are overridden by the emotional content of the memory its pilot(s) are ‘chasing’ (Del Toro 2013). According to Beacham, it is possible for a pilot to become trapped in a memory that does not belong to them in the Pacific Rim diegesis (Beacham 2013). Beacham further states that “a notorious quirk of drifting” is the fact that “recruits are warned not to control or judge the imagery that jumps to mind. The modesty reflex is antithetical to a working connection. Some PPDC psychologists claim that psycho-sexual embarrassment is the single biggest reason algorithm-paired trainees fail to sync up” (Beacham 2013). Here, as it is in Evangelion, the content of the drift is connected to libidinal psycho-emotional/sexual forces. In this sense, desire, as it is for Delueze and Guattari, does not obey phenotextual prohibitions such as shame and embarrassment. In the drift, these forces are totally exposed both for the pilots with and to themselves, and with and to the mecha itself. Therefore, the traumatic and/or liberating revelation, sharing, and experiencing of uninhibited desire is an inescapable aspect of successfully piloting a mecha. The difference in the presentation of this phenomena in each text pertains to the question of intimacy which I can frame as follows: is it more traumatic to share the content of your subconscious with the ‘soul’ of your mother or the mind of your crush?
VI. Theorizing the Drift and the Technoaffects of Mecha-pilot Interfacing
While technoaffect, as above defined, manifests throughout Eastern and Western anime, manga, comics, T.V., cartoons, literature, and cinema, Pacific Rim and Evangelion have been privileged as dialogic case studies because each text explores the onto-existential and psycho-emotional technoaffects that could result from a mecha-pilot interface in depth. It would seem that any discussion of mecha-pilot interfacing is, theoretically, a discussion of the interfacing of cyborgs with cyborgs. Indeed, the ostensibly obvious theoretical framework to be deployed in theorizing said technoaffects within said context would be found in Donna Haraway’s critique of the figure of the cyborg in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1983). However, my understanding of the technoaffects of mecha-pilot interfacing is primarily indebted to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (orig. 1972). This text provides a helpful vocabulary in terms of theorizing, first, mecha-pilot interfaces as examples of multiplicity and second, how both mecha and pilot function in themselves as well as interlinked with one another in an onto-existential assemblage of mecha and pilot.
How can I refer to the assemblage of pilot and mecha and their technoaffects in anything more than a metaphorical sense? Here, I refer back to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of a machine as ‘a system of interruptions or breaks [whereby] every machine […] is related to a continual material flow that it cuts into. It functions like a ham-slicing machine, removing portions from the associative flow’ (Deleuze and Guattari 36). When applied to the pilot and mecha interfacing in both Evangelion and Pacific Rim, both the pilot and the mecha cut into one another’s onto-existential reality as well as the power and weakness that constitute it. While interfaced with the mecha, a human being has the destructive power of a nuclear weapon. Conversely, the mecha is only as capable as its pilot and is therefore subject to human limitations (however, there are numerous examples of how the creative and destructive abilities of the mecha in Evangelion far exceed any human frame of reference). In this way, the pilot and mecha in a mecha-pilot interface are inter-affective. Deleuze and Guattari describe the relationship between flows and interruptions with specific examples: “amniotic fluid spilling out of the sac and kidney stones; flowing hair, a flow of spittle, a flow of sperm, shit, or urine that are produced by partial objects and constantly cut off by other partial objects, which in turn produce other flows, interrupted by other partial objects” (Deleuze and Guattari 4-5). Similarly, I understand the mecha-pilot interface as a flow of self-interrupting flows of the pilot and the mecha, each interrupted by the other through interfacing. The interfacing between pilot and mecha results in a connection with another identity-machine within the unstable flow of a disintegrated self, “so that one machine interrupts the current of the other or “sees” its own current interrupted” (Deleuze and Guattari 5). In this sense, the machinic technoaffect of mecha-pilot interfacing means that in said assemblage, “there is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever” (Deleuze and Guattari 2). Relating this back to the pilots in Evangelion and Pacific Rim, once the pilot and mecha establish synchronization/neural handshake with one another—a process which subsequently establishes the drift—the notion of a discrete Self distinct from the co-pilot and/or mecha becomes unreliable and indeterminate. As a result, the process of the drift becomes the only reliable aspect of the pilot-mecha assemblage itself.
VII. The Drift is Silence: Theorizing the Content of the Drift
In view of the above discussion of some of the many psychoanalytically relevant commentaries on the technoaffects of mecha-pilot interfacing made in the series, the mecha-pilot interface in Evangelion is consistently shown to essentially be predicated on the (re)experience, confrontation, and overcoming of trauma. Anno suggests that the drift produced by synchronization is really an exploration of the nature of self, its fracture, creation, and re-creation. As such, the drift is pregnant with psychoanalytical concepts. For example, a consequence of Shinji’s mecha-pilot interfacing is the character’s neuroses concerning his incipient immateriality. Both before and after piloting, these and related concerns are irrevocably encountered, re-encountered, and exacerbated by the fact that his subjectivity increasingly moves toward total dissolution due to his dependence on the mecha to, ironically, know himself (Napier 433). In terms of theorizing the content and function of the drift, and the various technoaffects of mecha-pilot interfacing, Evangelion concludes that the most interesting, complex, traumatic, and bizarre aspects thereof are located in the the pilot’s subconscious. Ultimately, it is the ineffable aspects of the self that the pilot, co-pilot, and mecha encounter in the drift.
While the instances of techno-organic trauma I have discussed would suggest that the technoaffects of mecha-pilot interfacing are irrevocably negative, in “Bodies of Future Memories: The Japanese Body in Science Fiction Anime” (2016), Dolores Martinez suggests that Rei and Asuka are cyborg goddesses due to their self-machine assemblages. She states that “the girls in NGE are powerful through their augmentation vis-à-vis the EVA they pilot” (Martinez 78). In contrast, in “Between the Child and the Mecha” (2007), Frenchy Lunning offers a Lacanian reading of the psycho-emotional and onto-existential technoaffect of mecha-pilot interfacing by suggesting that
between the child inside and the mecha outside is a gap: a symbol of a yawning sense of lack suffused with a complex of narratives that lie between the child-pilot subject and his or her mecha-ideal image of power and agency. That gap is the space of lack and the consequent production of desire, the space of conflicting drives and conflating worlds, and the space in which the sets, lights, and costumes for the performance of the transformation into maturity are set for what Jacques Lacan describes as the full emergence into the symbolic realm. These conditions within the space of the gap play perhaps the most decisive roles in supplying the narrative with its contents, for in that gap is scripted the journey that will counter the lack of the child with the image of its desire. (Lunning 269)
My counter-point against Lunning’s reading of the drift as a site of lack here is returns to the Kristevan chora. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kirsteva describes the structuring of the human body as follows:
Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constrains imposed on this body—always already involved in a semiotic process—by family and social structures. In this way the drives, which are “energy” charges as well as “psychical” marks, articulate what we call a chora: a non- expressive totality formed by the drives and their stasis in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated” (Kristeva 2072: emphasis mine).
While Kristeva uses the term chora as a means of identifying and denoting “an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases”, my usage of the term in riposte to Lunning isolates the notion of the power and chaos of the energy or energies that exist beneath the over-arching superimposition of the power of ideology acting on the symbolic self, and its dialectical opposition to the Other (Kristeva 2073). When applied to mecha-pilot interfacing and the inherent destabilization of the dialectic of self/Other that results from that process, the drift is more accurately described as choraic, a primordial unity of undifferentiated drives, including human drives and cyborg drives. Implicit in Martinez’s reading of Rei and Asuka as cyborg goddesses is the suggestion that while there is trauma in the drift, there is also strength therein. Like his female colleagues when in Unit 00, and Unit 02 respectively, in Unit 01, all Shinji has, on the one hand, access to the undifferentiated primordial forces of the choraic drift as a technoaffect of his mecha-pilot interfacing. On the other hand, all he has is instinct, and the techno-organic ability to convert those instincts into raw destructive power. In this regard, the drift is in many ways the opposite of lack, a return to the womb-like wholeness of the Real.
This theme is embodied by Rei who acts as doorway to the Real. The theme also receives robust, beautiful, surreal, terrifying, and awful aesthetic representation in The End of Evangelion, whose imagery is, as Žižek would say, psychotic. This is due to the fact that the surreality of said imagery attempts to represent the unrepresentable, the fusion of all being on Earth into a primordial Oneness or Wholeness. Anno does so by pushing against the limits of signification, thereby creating an affective milieu of apocalyptic and resurrectionary aesthetics and narratology open to myriad forms of interpretation, while simultaneously resisting clearly defined, or even comprehensible, interpretations. However, this interpretive exorbitance is aesthetically and narratively always-already gesturing to the same set of ideas: a collapse back into the idea of primordial Oneness, a return to the chora, identarian undiferentiation and self-lessness, Monadism, the self into the machine, the self-machine assemblage as a gateway/Event/catalyst for the dissolution of all selves in toto. I argue that it is the connection to the undifferentiated choraic forces Rei, Asuka, Shinji, Mako, and Raleigh have access to in the drift is what makes each pilot an example of transgressive, identarian, onto-existential, and psycho-emotional power. In this way, included in the theoretical content of the drift caused by Mecha-pilot interfacing is the primordial flow of life, death, and rebirth.
We can conclude that both Evangelion and Pacific Rim‘s respective engagement with the concept of the technoaffects of Mecha-pilot interfacing are primarily located in the onto-existential and psycho-emotional aspects of the drift. The term drift latently implies transience, the interstitial, slow movement and flux, as well as separation. As Christophe Thouny suggests in “Waiting for Messiah: The Becoming-Myth of ‘Evangelion‘ and ‘Densha Otoko‘” (2009), for Shinji, “riding the EVA is what defines his very identity as an individual subject of action, the very subject produced by the structure, and this is why he constantly defers his commitment to the grand narrative. The EVA-robot symbolizes this denial of individual subjectivity and instrumental technology as a temporal movement of delaying” (Thouny 117). Both texts respective explorations of this phenomena suggests that there is a paradoxical disintegrated unity in the machine so that the self-machine assemblage is a mirror, and the drift is the heterotopic space of reflection, a zone outside of time, governed by the subconscious and its interactions with the adjoining mind, be it of the cyborg-machine itself or a co-pilot. If, indeed, heterotopias are spaces in which all normalcy breaks down, then the drift is a space that is unlike any other space: nothing is more foreign, more a breakdown of self than the direct, non-semiologically predicated experience of anOther mind. Not only is the drift a zone of merger in this way, it is one wherein which this sense of merger can only be achieved through the dissolution/annihilation of the symbolic self. This is because when the self-machine assemblage occurs, there can be no authoritative identity being referred to. As a paradoxically self-interrupting loop, Shinji in Unit 01 is, both onto-existentially and psycho-emotionally, one being physically inside another. However, the assemblage of Unit 01 also represents a consciousness inside another, one being inside the being of anOther. Much like the PPDC’s warning against Jaeger pilots ‘chasing the rabbit’, NERV’s resident lead EVA scientist Ritsuko Akagi often warns the EVA pilots from Synching too deep with their respective EVA lest they lose themselves entirely, in animo et corpore, inside the EVA. As Thouny suggests,
in contrast to Gundam, [or Pacific Rim] EVA completely blurs the distinction between the mechanical and the organic, the EVA-robot and the child-pilot. […] The nature of the relation between the pilot and the EVA-robot forces the externalization and relocation of subjectivity into the interface itself, thus opening the social structure to its abstract machine. Subjectivity is externalized as mediation between the heterogeneous segments of a machinic assemblage. (Thouny 118).
In Pacific Rim, however, the assemblage is less underpinned with the sinister and ethically problematic questions of mecha-pilot interfacing raised in Evangelion as the interface is between two human pilots whose self-merger is facilitated by the machine. It is an inert merger in which the machine does not participate as a consciousness in itself. Thus, the interaction between Mako and Raleigh is a consensual meld in which ‘being in someone else’s mind’, though theoretically a signifier of the loss or disintegration of a single, distinct self, is portrayed jocularly despite the problematic onto-existential and psycho-emotional technoaffects thereof.
In the last instance, both Pacific Rim and Evangelion posit that mecha-pilot interfacing is predicated on memory, but specifically traumatic memory. It is in the drift that both are confronted. Both Asuka and Mako are emblematic of this. For the former, the drift facilitates, and in certain respects forces, Asuka to confront her complexes and neuroses that are systemic of her failed relationship with her mother. For the latter, the drift allows Mako to overcome her psycho-emotional fragmentation caused by the trauma of her orphanhood, a trauma stored and reproduced through memory, a memory that she has the ability to access and relive through the drift and, in so doing, overcome. This is also true for Shinji as Thouny suggests that “in EVA the social collectivity is still polarized by those two deaths, one in the form of the absent father (the dream of absolute control in a structure, a scenario) and the other in the form of the lost mother (the dream of a state of completion and wholeness)” (Thouny 115). The drift allows Shinji to confront and grapple with both traumas. In this way, the drift is both the end of subjectivity and the re-creation of subjectivity. While the drift is temporarily ‘located’ in a war-machine set against or within a aesthetico-narrotological backdrop of trauma, violence, death and destruction in both instances, within this diegetic milieu is also a means of overcoming existential traumas as well. Ultimately, the content and nature of the drift and the resultant technoaffects of Mecha-pilot interfacing is as “a movement of infinite fragmentation and of both the fusion and dissolution of the self” (Thouny 115).
VIII. Conclusion
In our epoch of AR, VR, social media, and other ever increasing flows of techno-organic intimacy, both texts explored above draw attention to the following questions pertinent to our postmodern condition of technoculture: how much do we want to share ourselves with our machines? What would we be capable of if we did so fully? What would be the risks involved? Is there any practical distinction between ‘chasing the rabbit’ and obsessively scrolling through memory-images curated by and accessed through user interfaces like Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter? In our current technoculture, is there any possibility for a return to the chora through deeper interfacing with our machines?
In Pacific Rim, Raleigh tells Mako that “the drift is silence” (Del Toro 2013). Instead, the more accurate aphorism of the drift would be that it is the potential for silence, silence here being understood as onto-existential and psycho-emotional stability. However, this potential is undifferentiated by the other forces at play in the drift. The drift is trauma, penetration, orgasm, wholeness, disintegration, terror, and joy, all of which are predicated on the concept of bodily conjoining, intimacy, and penetration/permeability played out through a human-machine/mecha-pilot interfacing. As Sharalyn Orbaugh suggests in “Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity” (2002), within the context of the technoaffects of the mecha-pilot interfacing in the drift, “human experience of the singularity of the subject is challenged -through intimacy, loss of self in orgasm, pregnancy, infection, and so on” (Orbaugh 438). On one level of both narratives, it would seem possible to sketch out the boundaries between the interfacing surfaces, that is, between the organic and the inorganic (Orbaugh 439). In the context of Evangelion, the drift that results as a technoaffect of mecha-pilot interfacing turns the entry plug of the EVA into a complex onto-existential and psycho-emotional apparatus through which Shinji and Asuka have the opportunity, both voluntary and not, of going back into the undifferentiated forces of the chora, womb, the mother. These all point to genesis, taboo, myth, and development. In the drift, “questions about gender, sexuality, and the organization of libidinal energies become inseparable from questions about technology and technological condition” (Lamarre 212). Similarly, on the mecha interfacing involving specifically pubescent children Lamarre further notes how
with the emergence of psionic interfaces, control of the giant robot becomes less a matter of masculine will and physical abilities and more a question of an empathic connection, of feelings and emotions. Boy pilots become gradually feminized in the sense that operating mecha demand that they be in touch with their feelings and prone to affective communication in a manner previously coded as feminine. [This…] implies a crisis in masculinity. Girl pilots become more common—and sexy […] Evangelion takes this scenario to its logical extreme: most of the ace mecha pilots are girls, and the one boy pilot, Ikari Shinji, is the antithesis of masculine virtues. What is more, the boy–mecha interface begins to imply a maternal bond, not to mention a biological predisposition in the interfaces based on genetic compatibilities. As the boy pilot becomes shojo-ified, the giant robot becomes a quasi-maternal biological matrix (Lamarre 216).
Every time Shinji submerges himself into the LCL of the entry plug, he has to literally go inside that which he fears, that which he lost, that which is for him a source of mystery (how his mother died and why she died), strength (her/their technoaffected bodies merged in the EVA) and trauma (experiencing the taboo of being inside his mother, his mother who’s ‘essence’, for lack of a better term, is trapped within the parameters of technoaffect). In penetrating and being penetrated by his mother’s consciousness, which has been reterritorialized into a literal frame (an EVA), one designed for combat, combat which is typically against a horrifically violent, abstract, and terrifying foe, Shinji has to go inside his mother and in going inside his mother, he goes inside himself. This entire onto-existentially and psycho-emotionally complex process, this chimerical machinic assemblage of consciousnesses and bodies, is facilitated by the technoaffected assemblage that is the mecha or EVA itself.
This essay has attempted to present theoretically engaged reflections on what I feel to be interesting and under-researched aspect of technoculture and film. It did so by using the figure of the anime/sci-fi action figure of the mecha pilot and affective theory to develop readings of the affective exchanges between humans and machines in Evangelion and Pacific Rim. It tried to draw attention to the important and intimate relationship between humans and technology. Using psychoanalytic concepts along with two texts from different contexts but identical traditions, this paper developed dialogic readings centred around the concepts technoaffect and the drift as a way of investigating the nature, dangers, strengths, and other resonances of techno-organic assemblages. What I discovered in so doing is that for Mako, Rei, Asuka, Raleigh, and Shinji, the drift is as much silence as it is a din. It is both a place and a non-place facilitated by a cyborg assemblage that allows a pilot and mecha to interact psycho-physically in such a way that trauma can be revisited, understood, and overcome. The drift, be it created and sustained within mecha-pilot interface of the neural handshake of a Jaeger or the synchronization of an EVA, is an onto-existentially and psycho-emotionally technoaffected state where the self and individuality paradoxically disintegrate into assemblage. It is a state within which one can lose one’s humanity whereby if one descend deep enough into the assemblage, she/he can lose one’s self in another, as well as the fetters of humanity, be they want, desire, fear, and/or onto-existential fracture and lack. In both Evangelion and Pacific Rim, all this happens in the drift, the drift which is made possible by the technoaffects that form the basis of mecha-pilot/pilot-mecha-pilot interfacing.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, The Athlone Press, 1984.
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Deleuze, Giles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley, Continuum, 1993.
Del Toro, Guillermo. Pacific Rim. Legendary Pictures, 2013.
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Biography
Kwasu David Tembo is a PhD graduate from the University of Edinburgh’s Language, Literatures, and Cultures department. His research interests include, but are not limited to comics studies, literary theory and criticism, philosophy, particularly the so-called “prophets of extremity”—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. He has published on Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, in The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible, ed. Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy (Columbia UP, 2015), and on Superman, in Postscriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies (2017). He also has essays forthcoming in Porn Studies; American, British, and Canadian Journal; and Messengers from the Stars.
© 2018 Kwasu David Tembo, used by permission
