A glance back, stumbling forward: Metropolis as prosthetic utopia

A glance back, stumbling forward: Metropolis as prosthetic utopia

This paper examines the imagery of the city in the animated film Metropolis by Rintarô and Katsuhiro Ôtomo (2001), a film which refers back to two earlier Metropolises (Lang, 1927; Tezuka, 1949). The paper adopts the hypothesis that visions of the city such as those cited in this film (including those of Le Corbusier, Hugh Ferriss, and Albert Speer) can be considered as examples of prosthetic imagination. The imagined city is thus revealed as caught up in what Bernard Stiegler refers to as the Epimethean complex: bearing a relation of différance to the present and historical city, looking backward (in delay, too late) as it looks forward (in advance), doubling anticipation with error, utopia with dystopia. As a prosthetic, a utopia falls in the class of what Stiegler proposes as a third genre of being: organized inorganic objects, between animate and inanimate, where it belongs with architecture. Hence the true utopia promises us not a homeland but instead a “not-at-home”land, where we dwell with other emanations and animations of the strange.

The narratives of popular culture (comics, film, animated film, video games) are tangled up with capital, commodification, and trivialities of communication. Yet they are also preoccupied with a number of our concerns: with death, and with the making and undoing of bodies and architectures. They also take, as one of their main subjects and their primary form of mediation, technology – which is of course another of our preoccupations. They often articulate an acute technophilia or technophobia which suggests a sensitivity to that capacity of technology which is (as Heidegger put it) more than technological. Fear and desire are not about the calculative. That these arts engage us in their concerns through modalities of play, desire, and terror suggests that they share something with poetics, and with tragedy.

Imagery of the city in science fiction is one instance of this: depicting the city in terms of a technological enframing of the world which at once promises the fulfillment of all our desires (utopia) yet threatens to evacuate our humanity in awful ways (dystopia). This paper concerns one such imagination of the city: the animated film Metropolis by Japanese animators Rintarô and Katsuhiro Ôtomo.

Three cities future past

In a few minutes I will go over an instance of urban imagery in Rintaro’s animated film which articulates this knot of future and past references. But first I would try to lay out a little theory which suggests how this phenomenon can be read in terms of the technological preoccupation of these kinds of arts and what I see as their (only apparently frivolous) engagement with the tragic aspect of being. I will draw on the argument from Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time⁵ which, working from Heidegger’s own analysis in Being and Time, criticizes Heidegger’s rejection of the ontological status of technics. Stiegler suggests that technics is in fact constitutive of Being, rather than representing what was to Heidegger (according to Stiegler’s interpretation) a departure from it.

The possibility must be admitted here that Stiegler is not quite being fair to Heidegger. For Heidegger is clear that technology is not ever only about the technological, never only about efficient cause, never only about ends and means. Rather, the essence of technology is the revealing of beings, that through which all beings including man are set up – rather than the other way around.⁶ As he puts it in his meditation Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, ”What is distinctive about modern technology is that it is no longer a mere ‘means’ at all, and no longer merely stands in the ‘service’ of something else, but that it itself is unfolding a kind of domination of its own”⁷. And Heidegger’s words from Identity and Difference suggest a formulation of technology as ontological which seems even closer to Stiegler’s: “Just as we call the idea of living things biology, just so the presentation and full articulation of all beings, dominated as they now are everywhere by the nature of the technical, may be called technology.”⁸ In this sense, for Heidegger too, technology seems to be ontology. For the moment, though, I will leave aside the question of whether Stiegler’s thought should be considered a contradiction of Heidegger’s or just a development of it. I will return to that question at the end when I address the issue of the accommodation of the Strange in this film and related arts.

So if I may be permitted to begin with an apparent digression from the subject of this paper, the imagery of the city in this film, I will outline briefly Bernard Stiegler’s theory of the relationship of technics to Being, indicating the significance it has for the preoccupations of the low arts of which this film is one example. (I will illustrate this with a sequence from early in the film).

Technics, time, being, death

In contrast, for Stiegler the who and the what are inseparable and interdependent. Drawing on anthropological sources¹⁰ he argues that human beings are, and have always been, engaged in an instrumental maieutics. By this he means an interplay in which our creation of tools in anticipation of need on the one hand, and the formation of human cognition in response to this creation on the other, results in a drawing forth of the human being. Our works create the conditions which surround our own development. Today’s mechanized planet is only the latest manifestation of this phenomenon. This intertwining of anthropogenesis and technogenesis displaces memory from that preserved by species (the history in the genome) and that belonging to the individual, to that preserved by society and ethnic group (an epiphylogenetic history preserved in things). Paralleling a human development which was technical, was a technical development that was quasi-biological: technical objects and systems demonstrate perfectibility, a drive toward complexity and indeterminateness.

Technics therefore generates history: it constitutes our memory, and it engages us in and engages with us in a movement toward the future, a teleology – or two teleologies, ours and technics’. In this sense, technics is time. It is so in a more profound sense also, and in a sense which Stiegler claims is neglected by Heidegger¹¹. For if the tool is about anticipation, it is also about the ultimate condition of all anticipation: the anticipation of death. It is about Being-unto-death; it is ontological.

Given this understanding, it is entirely appropriate that the technologically-mediated and technologically-preoccupied works I have spoken of should accommodate, even demand, an imagery of death, a seemingly ontological experience of the body (coming apart and reforming) and of space, and even, associated with this, something like an experience of distended time.

Anticipation, delay, Epimethean complex

Prosthetic

In this condition the relationship of technics to man is prosthetic:

“Man invents, discovers, finds, imagines, and realizes what he imagines: prostheses, expedients. A pros-thesis is what is placed in front, what is outside, outside what it is placed in front of. However, if what is outside constitutes the very being of what it lies outside of, then this being is outside itself. The being of humankind is to be outside itself.”¹³

And indeed, we find ourselves very much outside ourselves in the figures who populate these arts: robots, cyborgs, little green men.

The fruit of this becoming exists somewhere between the conditions of living and nonliving objects: a third genre of being: organized inorganic beings. This is the rightful place of the many figures which promise both the fulfillment and the negation of humanity: the superhuman and the subhuman but also, according to this argument, the most authentically human. It doesn’t need to be pointed out to us that this genre of being also includes architecture and, perhaps, cities.

Polis

Consistent with this, cities and also imaginary cities can be considered prosthetic. The prosthesis implies being “(1) set in front, or spatialization (de-severance); (2) set in advance, already there (past) and anticipation (foresight), that is, temporalization.”¹⁴ Prosthetics therefore include not only things but also places (cities) and times (future cities). The Promethean complex thus catches within its orbit utopias and dystopias. Utopias (in this term I include the full range of urban projections into the future, plans, proposals, fantasies, delusions, and films) are a kind of prosthetic, that is a thing which is put before us, at our service; and yet which always implies a failure and a forgetting and a coming-short, of being in delay as well as in advance. Put in another way: the urban plan is the Promethean projection always caught in an Epimethean error; similarly, cinematic future cities present within the anticipation of what is to come, a sorrowing glance backward at what failed to be.

This all might suggest why it is that so many cinematic visions of the future tend to also be images of the past, and act as stages for dying and becoming, including their own dying and becoming in the form of apocalypse. This film is no exception.

The knot

The opening sequence of the film takes us in a fragmented series of images and changes of point-of-view from the pinnacle of a tall building, through and past the ceremony which marks its inauguration, and back along a central boulevard. It finally arrives at a shot which places that tower and the cluster of tall buildings around it in the context of the city. This single shot, summing up the opening sequence, superimposes visions of the city taken from at least five sources, including Lang’s film.¹⁶

One of these is the city we see stretched out at the foot of the tower. No-where in print do the film-makers admit to this, and they have manipulated it somewhat, but with its central core dominated by tall buildings, wide divided boulevard, triumphal arch (now orientalized and emblazoned with half of a rising sun), raised elliptical platform in the center, and surrounding blocks of housing – this is Le Corbusier’s City for Three Million inhabitants. In this shot it lies at the feet of a cluster of tall buildings which replace the array of identical cruciform skyscrapers of Le Corbusier’s city. At the center of this cluster is another tall, cruciform, building: the one with which this sequence began. Named the Ziggurat, it refers to the two central structures from Lang’s film: the New Tower of Babel and the Gothic Cathedral. This building and its neighbors are based on Hugh Ferriss’ drawings of New York (which the film-makers cite as a source¹⁷). Le Corbusier’s city was of course surrounded by open land; in the next shot we are to discover that it is hemmed in here by a skyline also stolen from Ferriss. Later we, by daylight, we see that this skyline stretches on beyond something like the East River, seemingly forever. So if this is some version of Manhattan, the City for Three Million might form the clearing occupied in real life by Central Park. The cartoon-like nature of this imagery finds its inspiration (as do the features of the animated characters) in the comic-book Metropolis by Osamu Tezuka. But another thing clear from this shot, and it sits rather disturbingly with the cartoon-like nature of the imagery, is the reference to the scenographic designs of Albert Speer. Given this, a second reading of the central boulevard emerges, consistent with the nationalist imagery of the rising sun which emblazons the arch: of Speer’s own grand boulevard and triumphal arch for Berlin.

The animated Metropolis – ostensibly a vision of the future – is caught between the cities of international socialism and Modernism (stretched out below) and (towering above) those of national socialism and industrial capitalism which Speer and Ferriss monumentalized. This overlaying of images might be dismissed as just a well-informed pastiche of sources contemporary to Lang and Tezuka, employed as fodder for the animators’ imagination. But it is not, for the content of the film concerns political overthrow, domination of the world achieved through technical mastery, citizens divided by ontological status, national and individual identity, and apocalyptic conflict. It is a remembrance of political and ethical errors, including those for which the polities that produced Lang’s and Tezuka’s versions of Metropolis were responsible. These polities were all engaged, to a great extent, in the mistakes of technics and politics – including the mis-taking of one for the other – characteristic of modern mankind.

Each of the earlier visions of the future city cited in this image also addressed these errors, to a greater or lesser extent: that is to say, they demonstrated a foresight and hindsight which was nevertheless shortsighted. Lang’s film, for example, explicitly criticizes the modern city, and this includes the modernist city¹⁸. But Lang conflates the rationality of the modernist plan with another threat posed by modernity: hybridity and the undermining of social identity. In his film the modern city is haunted not only by the machine but also by the figure of the foreign: an alien presence associated with the processes of modernity¹⁹. At the end of the film the alien threat is expunged through the immolation of an evil robot, the robot double of the mother-figure to the oppressed workers; thanks to this a divided community is reunited. For Siegfried Krackauer, who also compared Lang’s immense and highly choreographed set-pieces to the Nuremburg rallies, this conclusion forewarned of but in some sense also dissimulated the coming rise of the Nazi party²⁰. So if Lang had foresight, it was clouded. At the conclusion of Lang’s film a city is reunited beneath a trinity of worker, ruler and mediator – “head, hands and heart” – an image which recalls (or pre-calls) Hitler’s united Volk. It also pre-calls the final image of Ferriss’ The Metropolis of Tomorrow: a triangular balance of human capacities and works reinforcing a trinity of city, man and God. In the imaginations of Lang and Ferriss, and for that matter of modernism and Nazism, the solution offered for the alienation and dehumanization characteristic of modernity is a unified social and spatial structure which invokes in Ferriss’ words “the harmonious development of man”²¹. I raise this point because, as we will see later, the faith in a harmonious development of a homogeneous humanity or nation misses something very important; that something haunts each of these visions of the city.

The animated city looks back, then, on several utopic visions, either mistakenly heroic or heroically mistaken. These utopias all compounded errors of technics and politics. In important ways we are still caught in them. Japan, for example, is caught in its past of military aggression (and also victimhood) from which it rushed forward, forgetting; indeed all of anime (particularly the apocalyptic stuff) has been read as a forgetful remembrance of this²². Our globe is likewise caught in a related loop: rushing forward at such a pace that it gets nowhere, never reaches any of its infinite ends, but instead loops back on itself incessantly in an ever-tightening knot. This future city which is really a past city is also our present city and, perhaps, after all, if we don’t remember not to forget, our future city.

This looping of time is manifested throughout the city. The underground city, the labyrinth which is also the base of the Ziggurat, forms a convolution of architectures and urban spaces from different eras (and places). The bodies, human and technical, which move through this city loop back on their own tracks: they are always ahead of themselves or behind themselves, they never seem to get anywhere, they always run on or climb up only to fall back. They are also always in a condition of duplicity, of doubling or being doubled by each other. Their time stops or slows down in response to technological triggers, particularly weaponry. In this they reflect the large-scale loop of time which composes the entire film, for it too is focused on a trigger, on an emblem of technicity and power. The central tower, the Ziggurat, is a gun directed outward (to the sun) but which, in the end, holds the city itself in its own crosshairs. It therefore is the center around which all of these loops are pulled tight into a knot. One body in particular is caught up therein: that of the artificial human whose destiny brings her to the pinnacle of the Ziggurat, from which she falls to her death, again in a moment of suspended time. Like many of the other “low arts” of which I have spoken, this one engages us in some kind of love and fear of prosthetic bodies passing away and becoming in relation to a technological and political framework involving a distention of time.

Undoing the knot

A hint is given in the transition undergone by the images of Lang and Ferriss into those of the animated film. Of course this is a transition from black and white to colour, excessive colour at that – a transition which really deserves a paper in its own right. I relate this aesthetic shift to what I see as the fundamental ethical issue in the animated and silent versions of the story. This is the matter of living with the strange.

Lang’s city cannot abide by the strange. As I’ve already pointed out, the plot is resolved by the elimination from the city of an alien presence borne by a technological vector. This results in the restoration of a community, and the interruption of a threatened apocalypse. The city is not destroyed. As I’ve also stated, this faith in the unity of a community, and implicitly an intolerance of the strange, is also shared by the other futures cited in the opening cityscape of the animated Metropolis. The strange is relegated to their shadows, as we’ll discuss in a moment.

There is a reading of this circumstance which is of interest to us. If we adopt Heidegger’s understanding of technology as in fact about more than the technological, about the revealing of being, it provides a way of understanding what is implied in Lang’s conflation of technology and reason on the one hand and the alien alchemy which produces his evil robot on the other. This conflation is no longer just about xenophobia, technophobia, or dissatisfaction with modernity; it is instead a perhaps unconscious recognition of that quality of technology which is more than technological, which is about the revealing of being. And what Lang’s film does, in destroying the figure which realizes this aspect of technology (the robot which channels an overwhelming, if malevolent, force), is to deny that other aspect of the technological, its capacity to enframe or set up being.

For what is also entailed in the revealing or becoming of being, for Heidegger, is a dwelling with the strange in what is most familiar, and in a familiar which is most strange: the homelike which is un-homelike or uncanny. This is precisely the mode of dwelling rendered impossible at the end of Lang’s film, by the elimination of the alien and the restoration of a united Volk. This is the reason the ending seems so inauthentic to us.

In contrast, the destruction of the technological vector of the foreign at the conclusion of the animated Metropolis coincides with the destruction of the city and thus with a condition of homelessness in which strangers can finally find a home together²³. (In fact happy bands of humans and robots do populate this post-apocalyptic landscape). This condition is consistent with the rootlessness implied in the superimposition of different futures past throughout the film, and also in the questioning of identity which goes on throughout it.

In Lang’s film the strange is relegated to the shadows, haunting modernity. In the Japanese film, in contrast, the strange is fully lit, vividly arrayed. While it might be tempting to interpret Lang’s haunting black and white imagery as closer to what Junichiro Tanizaki saw as the essence of Japanese aesthetics and ethos, a love of shadows which amounted to a sensitivity to those things strange to modernity, in fact Lang’s film means just the opposite: it exorcises the un-modern. In contrast the animated Metropolis partakes in a poetics which has much to do with those polychromatic Japanese arts such as kabuki and yukio-e (woodcuts) – an aesthetic Kurokawa Kisho has referred to as hana or “flower” – an aesthetic whose indulgence in the grotesque and in caricature in fact embraces the strange. These noisy, colourful arts do not exclude the silence and darkness that Tanizaki loved. Indeed the vibrancy of colour at times seems to tear a gap in the fabric of the film, a gap which intimates an even more profound silence beneath its surface. This is realized in moments of suspended time, of dust, snowfall, scattered rubble in the midst of the hubbub. That tearing or unraveling also appears in the undoing of robot bodies throughout the film, an undoing which reveals their ontology at the same time as it draws a veil over their existence.

It is thus precisely in the ludic and the ludicrous quality for which are tempted to dismiss animated film (and the other low arts I mentioned at the beginning of this paper) as merely entertainments, that we find a redemptive value. And perhaps in the same sense that the technological still harbors something of pre-Socratic tekhné and because of its all-pervasiveness is now our only means to access it, so communication, spectacle, consumption, and capital – all of them today technologized – can form the (admittedly messy) bed for the becoming of poetry.

As for the question I pushed aside at the beginning of the paper, of who is in the right in the quarrel between Heidegger and Stiegler, perhaps the answer is “both”. For the tearing-away or uprooting which brings about the condition of homelessness necessary for dwelling is inaugurated, in the animated film, by Stiegler’s technics (the pressing of a button) – and enacted by technics (the robot). The robot is ourself outside of ourself, the being through whom we are, as Andrew Benjamin puts it with regard to replicants: “both at home and not at home”²⁴. The technics with which we have but no choice to live today have become the source of the originary violence which tears us away from our homes and forces the encounter between the foreign and one's own which Heidegger described as “the fundamental truth of history…the truth from out of which the essence of history must unveil itself”²⁵ In the passage from which these words are taken he goes on to say that poetic meditations on this truth “demand a historical dialogue with foreign poets.”²⁶ – which, if we might be permitted to see Lang’s film, Tezuka’s comic book, and Rintaro’s animation as poetry, is what is going on here.

To return finally again to the prosthetic utopia, that other organized inorganic object: what we should hope for from the city is therefore not a homeland but instead a “not-at-home”land, where we dwell with other emanations and animations of the strange. And the architecture we might imagine for this would invoke a poetry of colour, of excess, of play: the strange brought out into a blaze of light – with, here and there, rents in its fabric through which are revealed (we perceive them with a sorrowing glance backwards) spaces of tragedy.