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“Pokémon by nature are friendly
creatures and prefer cooperation to confrontation” (Professor Oak in
"Pikachu's Vacation," Pokémon: the First Movie) |
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[1]In Pokémon: the First Movie,
a situation develops in which the elusive, ancient, and powerful pokémon,
Mew, is cloned from DNA found in a fossil. The result of this operation
is the creation of Mewtwo, a flawed and evil version of the original. Driven
by a crisis of identity, Mewtwo agonizes over his status as a clone, melodramatically
wondering aloud, “Am I only a copy!?” And then goes on to declare
a war upon humanity, striving to pave the way for a New World Order of pokémon
clones. This, of course, doesn’t happen. But the set of relationships
that this storyline enumerates is can be read as a rather sophisticated
allegory for contemporary geopolitics. |
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[2] Key to this discussion
is the linguistic capacity of Mewtwo. His ability to express his motives
is necessary to an understanding of the plot, which in itself supports claims
I have made elsewhere that poke-speak’s lack of variation and untranslatability/only-translatability
is characteristic of their status as an “Other.” The presumption
is that its motives need to be expressed because its desires generate the
conflict and drive the plot; the effect is that Mewtwo’s motives resemble
our own closely enough that they cease to be so radically “Other”—even
if they are judged to be morally reprehensible. To clarify, the poke-speaking
pokémon cannot be understood because their motives are unimportant
and alien. The trainer is freed to translate and produce satisfactory meanings.
Mewtwo cannot be trained, but can negotiate with humanity because its mode
of thinking is consistent with our own—he is driven by a personal quest
for identity. |
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[3]Mewtwo’s
dual citizenship (human/pokémon) is the product of the technological/industrial
relationship between first and third worlds. Following the logic of what
has prompted some scholars to prefer the term “developing world”
for the third world, Mewtwo is a pokémon in development, the product
of an exploitative technical advancement. The vaguely identified scientists
(emblems of a militarized technoscience) involved in Mewtwo’s creation
churn Mew’s DNA (seized from the tropics) through their machine in
order to create a westernized version of the original. But rather than produce
a useful subject, they create something else entirely. This Frankenstein’s
monster story is described by Deleuze and Guattari: “On the contrary,
central capitalism needs the periphery constituted by the Third World, where
it locates a large part of its most modern industries; it does not just
invest capital in these industries, but is also furnished capital by them”
(465). |
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[4] Interestingly, it is not the State which
arises to battle the menace of Mewtwo, it is the loose network of children—the
pokémon trainers—who unite to fight the threat with the help
of non-cloned pokémon. It is the nomad that rises to fight the marginal
figure of Mewtwo and its army of clones. Aside from the wandering nature
of the pokémon trainer, some definition of the
nomadism and its relation to the war
machine, may clarify the terms of this battle. Deleuze and Guattari
offer an interpretation of Virilio as a definition:
As Virilio says, war in no way appears when man applies to
man the relation of the hunter to the animal, but on the contrary
when he captures the force of the hunted animal and enters an entirely
new relation to man, that of was (enemy no longer prey). It is therefore
not surprising that the war machine was the invention of animal-raising
nomads: animal breeding and training are not to be confused with either
the primitive hunt or with sedentary domestication, but are in fact the
discovery of a projecting and projectile system. Rather than operating
by blow-by-blow violence, or constituting a violence ‘once and for
all,’ the war machine, with breeding and training, institutes an
entire economy of violence, in other words, a way of making violence durable,
even limited. (396)
In addition to wandering and capturing pokémon, the trainer’s
application of the pokémon’s force to battle has clear parallels
to the nomadic invention of the “man-animal-weapon” or “man-horse-bow
assemblage”
(D+G 404). Furthermore, the nature of the existence of the pokémon
trainer as a way of life and the way this way of life is expressed through
the succession of quick contests between trainers clearly illustrates the
“economy” of violence over the war-to-end-all-wars logic of total
annihilation. |
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[5] This positioning of the trainer (as
nomad) in opposition to the totalitarian and statist mentality of Mewtwo
is problematized by two factors; Mewtwo is a pokémon (and a third-world
subject by analogy), and the war machine (trainer tribe) rises up in defense
of humanity (the First-world, characterized traditionally as “States”).
Another factor which complicates and reconciles this difficulty is the appeal
to non-violence and non-exploitation which turns Mewtwo away from its plans
for global domination. Deleuze and Guatarri define the State in opposition
to the nomad’s war machine described as follows:
It will be noted that war is not contained within this apparatus.
Either the State has at its disposal a violence that is not channeled
through war—either it uses police officers and jailers in place of
warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates by immediate, magical
capture, “seizes” and “binds,” preventing all combat—or,
the State acquires an army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical
integration of war and the organization of military function. (352)
In this system, the State’s capacity for violence is enacted in the
absence of war through instruments of social repression and in the presence
of war through the organized structure of a military institution. In either
case, the violence of the State is structured and thus operates with a motive
of stasis or end—two ready examples being the internal repression of
Nazi Germany which employed violence for the creation of a stable and centralized
notion of racial purity, the other being the United States who employed
the total annihilation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in pursuit
of an end—both employing the logic of the “final solution”
in two different directions. |
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[6] This opposition between the war machine
and the State does not preclude an intersection of the two, but as Deleuze
and Guattari define it, the combination is necessarily an appropriation
by which the war machine is filtered through the State’s logic of finality,
centrality, and stability. At the core of this theory is a theory of capitalism:
The factors that make State war total war are closely connected
to capitalism: it has to do with the investment of constant capital and
equipment, industry, and the war economy, and the investment of variable
capital in the population in its physical and mental aspects (both as
warmaker and as victim of war). Total war is not only a war of annihilation
but arises when annihilation takes as its ‘center’ not only
the enemy army, or the enemy State, but the entire population and its
economy. (D+G 421)
Because of capitalism, the State-appropriated war machine becomes functional,
taking on “war as its object” (D+G 418), it becomes a tool to
be employed when needed. |
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[7] The appropriation of the war machine
by the State, however, brings about a hidden crisis in addition to the possibility
of total war. By employing the war machine as a tool, the State itself enters
into the assemblage, bringing about its own “becoming-“,
the becoming-“war machine” of the Pokémon trainer. Thus,
bringing about the following situation: “Wars...become a part of
peace. More than that, the States no longer [appropriate] the war machine;
they [reconstitute] a war machine of which they themselves [are] only the
parts.” (D+G 467) The State itself may become deterritorialized. |
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[8] With this in mind, it is easy to see
the conflict between Mewtwo and humanity as more than the mere expressions
of competing Statist ideologies. Mewtwo’s position as a humanized and
transformed third-world subject, armed with first-world technoscience reflects
a hybridity that can be seen in the geopolitical conflicts that we see today.
Slobodan Milosevich or Saddam Hussein, for example, embody this sort of
hybridity, in which the formerly subjugated seek to establish strong, centralized
States under the classic Modernist tropes. The first-world nations resist
the strong impetus towards nationalism which many independence-seeking regimes
would need in order to build strong economies and to shrug off the exploitation
that the current system of “free trade” enables. But because national
independence is such a strongly Modernist, and hence centralizing, concept,
it will always take on totalitarian shades—and the resistance to these
regimes will always be clothed in the language of ideology. However, the
real reason is an issue of radically different and incompatible systems
of economics—one ideological, the other post-ideological. Under an
ideological system of economics, a system (communism, socialism, capitalism)
is yoked to a narrative of human values and human worth. Under a post-ideological
system, nomadic capitalism relentlessly shreds ideology through the international
nature of global business and media. There can be no governing State for
a capitalism that has already exceeded the boundaries of the State. Nomadic
capitalism is not opposed to the existence of ideologies within States,
it only objects when these ideologies leaks outwards and attempt to centralize
beyond their boundaries. |
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[9] It is this development in capitalism
which has brought about the war against Mewtwo. Mewtwo’s mobilization
of the Poke-proletariat in pursuit of a centralized and coherent poke-utopia
is resisted by the trainers on explicitly ideological grounds. Ash ultimately
ends the battle of total annihilation by pointing out that pokémon
shouldn’t be made to fight. His self-sacrifice, and subsequent resurrection
through the magic of pokémon tears, leads Mewtwo to the realization
that pokémon should never battle. Mewtwo ceases his aggression and
pledges himself to peace. The crisis is successfully averted. But why do
the trainers engage in combat with Mewtwo’s totalitarian army in the
first place? To protect the sanctity of their nomadic lifestyle which consists
of making pokémon fight each other. The war machine is mobilized
on ideological grounds for post-ideological ends. Fortunately, the realization
that leads them to victory is wiped away for their own good by Mewtwo’s
grand telepathic deus ex machina. The result is a preservation of
the nomadic way of life and of the entire social system. |
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[10] It is important to remember that the
nomad, in this case, is also a capitalist, enmeshed in a system of accumulation
of capital, trade, and speculation. Although the economy of Pokémon
may resemble a pre-capitalist system of barter, it important that the needs
represented by the pokémon themselves are purely spectacular. They
reflect no sort of vital nourishment or necessity beyond their use-value
as signs. At all levels of play, pokémon exist as fetishized commodities
which rely upon simulated combat (on the part of the trainer/player) via
biotechnical machines. Under a system of electronic and plastic commerce,
dollars become only vague abstractions. Value still trickles through the
cash nexus, but cash itself loses its value as a constant or universal signifier
in a system in which exchange rates can grow and recede based on belief
and consumer confidence. Money, as a nomad itself, creates a situation in
which capitalism is no longer the ideology it was once thought to be, instead
it is the substance of a new materialism. |
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[11] The consequences of this messy reconfiguration
of capitalism are radical shifts in economics, government, and the social.
Deleuze and Guattari define the aesthetics of the nomadic experience, “In
short, we will say by convention that only nomads have absolute movement,
in other words, speed; vortical or swirling movement is an essential feature
of their war machine” (381). This characteristic motion, evident in
the life of the pokémon trainer as well as global capital, has as
its essence “speed.” What this reconfiguration, however seeks
to bring about, rather than mere “absolute movement,” is absolute
speed itself. To reconfigure their statement, only-nomads have absolute
speed. The goal, rather than to find smooth
space through which only nomads can move, is to create a “smooth
space” that is itself only-nomad, in which speed usurps mere movement
as the absolute.4 Deleuze and
Guattari anticipate this partially, claiming, “if it is the modern
State that gives capitalism its models of realization, what is thus realized
is an independent, worldwide axiomatic that is like a single City, megalopolis,
or ‘megamachine’ of which the states are parts, or neighborhoods”
(434-35). But rather than the consolidation of all states into a sort of
megalopolis, it may be better to think towards a proliferation of urban
centers as envisioned by Virilio:
Home shopping, working from home, online apartments and buildings:
‘cocooning’, as they say. The urbanization of real space is
thus being overtaken by this urbanization of real time which is, at the
end of the day, the urbanization of the actual body of the city dweller,
this citizen-terminal soon to be decked out to the eyeballs with interactive
prostheses based on the pathological model of the ‘spastic’,
wired to his/her domestic environment without having physically to stir:
the catastrophic figure of an individual who has lost motricity and who
abandons himself for want of anything better, to the capabilities of captors,
sensors and other remote control scanners that turn him into a being controlled
by the machine with which, they say, he talks. (Open Sky 20)
It is here that the world of Pokémon finds its clearest expression
in a new capitalist axiom. The increasingly atomized individual him or herself
becomes the terminal through which speed is realized. Through technology,
the city itself is at home within each individual, and armed with this technology,
the individual acts consistently through proxy—reduced ultimately to
an expression of pure informational speed. |
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