As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world seems to have gotten away from us. The scale of institutions, of technology, of play, of capital, and of power seem to have grown to the point where humans can no longer grasp their workings or their reasons. Now our fates are increasingly determined by sophisticated but insentient artificial intelligences. An entire generation is disappearing into virtualities of play that have more verisimilitude than their substrate (the physical world). Social lives now consist of the performance of multiple subjectivities in complex interconnected webs of electronically mediated relations that no one can quite grasp. Lyotard may have noted the obsolescence of metanarratives of power, but power is still exercised, and the lack of legitimating heroic myths and narratives obscures its operations and subjectivity. This panel considers how contemporary pop-culture across the globe struggles with these conditions of powerlessness and provides pathways towards a more capacious understanding of human agency and existence.

This panel proposes that pop culture has attempted to struggle in various ways with these larger-than-human institutions and systems and search for humanity once again. It is precisely pop culture, with its larger-than-life superheroes, cyborgs, AIs, virtualities, fantasies, and armageddons, that is positioned to grapple with the society at the nonhuman scale we find ourselves mired in, and search for humanity—and the possibility of human involvement and agency—once again. We argue these stories, and the notions of humanity they present and interrogate, provide powerful imaginative resources for rethinking human experience within a contemporary global landscape, and for recovering possible sites of engaged, meaningful life and human action.

First, in “Man-Machine Interface: Automated Intimacies and Developmentalist Cybernetics in Korean Science Fiction,” N. Trace Cabot investigates the history of cybernetics in Korean pop culture to show that this science fiction trope has long been a method of offering alternative visions of humanity opposed to capitalist alienation and dictatorship. Benjamin Noys describes the ultimate fantasy and terminal endpoint of capitalist accelerationism in terms of direct man-machine integration. Ch’oe Chaesŏ’s deployment of this imagery, combining man and machinery into a collective integrating Koreans directly into Japanese empire and modernity, serves as a template for accelerationist fantasies on the peninsula. This fascination with cybernetics and machinic intimacy is not, however, exclusively a reactionary phenomenon; drawing on contemporary Korean science fiction and 1920s NAPF debates surrounding the camera as a critical prosthetic, this paper identifies opposing left visions of man-machine hybridity consistently formulated around revealing repressed antagonisms, approaching the Real of capitalist production in itself, and developing new forms of solidarity and revolutionary agency despite the foreclosure of the political, whether under the auspices of Imperial Japan, military dictatorship, or the market logic of neoliberalism.

Moving to contemporary pop culture, in her paper “Origin Stories: Wonder Woman and Heroic Exceptionalism,” Elizabeth Barringer reads Patty Jenkin’s 2017 film, Wonder Woman, as a political myth of democratic founding. Drawing on theories of classical reception, Barringer shows how Wonder Woman adapts two myths from the Athenian polis: the myth of Pandora and the myth of the colonizing demigod such as Theseus. These myths structured discourses that managed political anxieties concerning political violence, exclusion, and democratic agency within the classic polis. Barringer argues that Wonder Woman’s (re)presentation of these myths offers two competing responses to similar, contemporary anxieties over democratic agency and sovereign violence. One is exceptionalist, where sovereign interventions by extraordinary ‘super-agents’ like Wonder Woman are justified by their unique origins and powers. Yet Wonder Woman also subverts this narrative, offering a tragic depiction of democratic agency. Wonder Woman depicts the insufficiency of a politics of heroic exceptionalism, suggesting instead that ordinary agents must continually struggle to establish communities which do not ignore their human failings. Wonder Woman therefore provides important imaginative resources for resisting the kinds of seductive, exceptionalist political narrative it also presents.

In “The Gamic Virus: Spatio-temporal Distortions in Summer Wars,” Keita Moore explores Hosoda Mamoru’s Summer Wars (2009), a film that details the trials of an extended family as they fight a rogue AI across a virtual realm (OZ) and the real world. Moore argues that the film pathologizes the gamic, which it depicts as destabilizing the social disposition of space-times. Given access to the source code, the antagonist dismantles the boundaries within OZ, an act that allows the violence of the “play” sections to enter more prosaic digital areas. This unrestrained “play” erupts into real-world productive temporalities, disrupting (sub)urban infrastructures linked to OZ. In contrast, the human family’s games range from analogue games of chance to videogames; yet, these activities are compartmentalized by the leisure spatio-temporalities of the family home, and through mediation by physical screens. In the end, the film expresses an uneasiness towards the unbound free play of extensive digital spaces, as a threat to the proper social divisions of spacetime.

Finally, in his paper “Who’s in charge here?: Struggling to Restore Human Subjectivity to Power in Psycho Pass and Yokohama Eki SF,” Christopher Smith compares two recent works of Japanese pop culture that struggle with power’s lack of subjectivity. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have commented on the immanence of power in the postmodern collapse of transcendentalism. We understand ourselves as unmistakably the object of power, but it is hard to locate the subject of power because of what Karatani Kōjin calls the lack of “exteriority” (gaibusei) to state power and capitalism. Smith examines two recent works of Japanese anime and manga that struggle with this lack of subjectivity to power. Psycho Pass features an omnipresent panoptic state which rules through subjectless computer systems. Yokohama Eki SF, meanwhile, features a metaphor for capitalism that has metastasized out of control in the form of a train station that covers the entire main island of Japan. This paper compares the different strategies these texts employ to return humanity—and the possibility of human subjectivity—to these systems of power.