Anime Ecology

Thomas Lamarre is James McGill Professor in East Asian studies and associate professor in communication studies at McGill University. He is author of Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichiro on Cinema and “Oriental” Aesthetics, and The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minnesota, 2009). He was coeditor of the Mechademia annual book series and is coeditor of the Parallel Futures series with the University of Minnesota Press.

"The Anime Ecology is a path-breaking work of media philosophy whose influence will be felt for many years to come. In this wildly innovative book, Thomas Lamarre presents an enlarged concept of animation that entails a major theoretical revision of our understanding of the complexly interrelated genealogies of television, animation, and interactive gaming with respect to their media platforms, technologies, infrastructures, screen forms, and affective relations. What Lamarre describes as the ‘anime ecology’ is nothing less than the emergence of a new and distinctive mode of techno-sociality."-D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago"By tracking the evolving modes of television animation across cultures as well as in modern Japan, Thomas Lamarre offers a painstaking account of the infrastructure complexes that constitute affective experiences in the age of non-discrete multimedia objects. Written with both a media specialist’s technical precision and a maverick theorist’s archival resourcefulness, this book compels us to rethink our relations with the electronic screens that cohabit intimately with us, body and soul. A brilliant work."-Rey Chow, author of Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture"Infrastructures have a tendency to slide into the background, and after seven decades of television, it is hard to make it new and strange again. In his long-awaited book, Thomas Lamarre turns everything we think we knew about television upside down. Animation, not liveness, is the key to its ontology. Japan, not the USA, is the place to see its most radical development. Signals are not simply the raw materials of electrical engineering but the symptoms of our vulnerable existence in the world. Television turns out to be a strange and wonderful habitat, a meeting place of many species. In seeing media platforms as wormholes into alternate universes, The Anime Ecology fulfills the prime directive of media theory: to show that channels are not simply pipes but are worthy of existential dread, respect, and reverence. Steeped in both Japanese television and continental theory, this book is a kind of Japanese-French fusion, a delicious feast of insight. To write this book you would need to be a world-class media theorist, a long-time connoisseur of Japanese culture, and even a former marine biologist, and the one person on earth who is all of those things has brought the rest of us this gift."-John Durham Peters, author of The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

• ContentsIntroduction: Television Animation and Infrastructure EcologyPart I. The Screen–Brain Apparatus1. Population Seizure2. Neurosciences and Television3. This Stuff Called Blink4. A Thousand Tiny BlackoutsPart II. A Little Social Media History of Television5. Media Genealogy and Transmedia Ecology6. A Little History of Japanese Television7. Television and New Media8. Sociality or Something Like It9. Platformativity and OntopowerPart III. Infrastructure Complexes10. The Family Broadcast Complex11. The Home Theater Complex12. The Game Play Complex13. The Portable Interface ComplexConclusion: Signaletic AnimismNotesBibliography