EME 14 (1+2) pp.

107–124 Intellect Limited 2015

Explorations in Media Ecology

Volume 14 Numbers 1 & 2
© 2015 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eme.14.1-2.107_1

JOFF P.N. BRADLEY

Teikyo University

A contribution to the
schizoanalysis of indifference

Abstract Keywords
Utilizing Félix Guattari’s ecosophical ideas, the media critiques of Bernard Stiegler Zerrissenheit
and Franco Berardi and the neuro-philosophy of Catherine Malabou, I shall exam- schizophrenia
ine and describe the case of hikikomori or social recluse in Japan as a striking schizoanalysis
excrescent effect of the media’s collusion in engineering sad affects. With refer- Deleuze
ence to post-Fukushima Japan, and through the prism of contemporary literature, Guattari
manga, anime and film, this article tests the propensity for loneliness among youth Stiegler
and how the media is complicit in crushing subjectivity through the veneer of Japan
‘connection’. hikikomori

Introduction

[H]ope itself has fled this hopeless, hapless, grey world. Beyond malaise,
life sinks into sadness, boredom and monotony, with no chance to break
out of the morass of absurdity. Communication – speech, conversation,
banter, even conspiracy has all been taken in by the discourse of mass
media. Interpersonal relations likewise have spoiled, and are now
characterized by indifference, disingenuous disgust and self-hatred – in
a word, we’re all suffering from bad faith.
(Guattari et al. 2010: 28)

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Joff P.N. Bradley

1. Following Teo and What we have for almost two centuries called ‘nihilism’ is the exact
Gaw (2010), we define
hikikomori as those
opposite of what we had hoped to achieve by technology, mastery over
who: spend most of fate. Communication becomes contamination; transmission becomes
the day and nearly contagion.
every day at home;
persistently avoid (Nancy 2015: 34)
social situations; avoid
social relationships; This contribution to the schizoanalysis of indifference explores the claim that
experience distress in
everyday routines; stay the mass media and technological addiction are implicated in the dissolution
indoors for at least six of hope in advanced industrial societies. Utilizing the ecosophical ideas of Félix
months; and do not fall
under other psychiatric
Guattari, the media critiques of Bernard Stiegler and Franco Berardi and the
disorders such as continental neuro-philosophy of Catherine Malabou, we will examine the case
social phobia, major of ひきこもり1 – hikikomori or social recluse in Japan – as a striking excres-
depressive disorder,
schizophrenia and so cent outgrowth of the mass media’s collusion in engineering sad, impersonal
on. Literally hikikomori affects (as opposed to personal feelings). With special reference given to post-
means a pulling away, Fukushima Japan, and through the prism of contemporary Japanese literature,
a tearing away of
consciousness from manga, anime and film, this article tests the propensity for loneliness among
social life (Saitō 2003). youth and the way the mass media is complicit in ‘neuroleptizing’ subjectiv-
Saito- estimates the
number of shakaiteki
ity through the veneer of ‘connection’. Under particular scrutiny is a selec-
hikikomori or those tion of Japanese thinkers including the Murakamis – Ryū (村上龍) and Haruki
suffering from acute (村上春樹) – the film-maker Sion Sono (園子温) and the novelist of Tatsuhiko
social withdrawal in
Japan as standing at Takimoto (滝本竜彦).
around one million. In their own unique way, the Murakamis Ryū and Haruki make very impor-
Other accounts put tant social comments about loneliness and the question of hope, however
the figure closer to
1.6 million. But who frail. Enveloping the present, Ryū Murakami claims, is a loneliness that has
really knows! Japanese never hitherto existed. As the level of loneliness is without precedent, Ryū
government figures
put the number
Murakami writes, ‘There has never been a Japanese person since the begin-
of hikikomori at ning of our history who has experienced the kind of loneliness enveloping
around 700,000, with the children of today’ (Murakami and Tamura 2010: 59). And in The Sputnik
an additional 1.55
million so-called semi- Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami (Haruki Murakami and Philip Gabriel, 2001:
hikikomori. Moreover, it 196) questions the reality and meaning of loneliness. He writes of the millions
is estimated that there of isolated individuals yearning for connection. In Ryū Murakami’s Kyōseichū
were about 847,000
NEETs (the acronym or Symbiotic Worm (2000c), it is a mysterious symbiotic worm, Inter-Bio, that,
is usually associated as an Internet portal, cultivates sad affects and negate joyful passions. With
with the coinage of
former British Prime
Sion Sono, it is a subliminal message disseminated on mobile phones which
Minister Tony Blair, causes young people to commit suicide. And in Takimoto’s Welcome to the
which stands for N.H.K. (Takimoto, Tatsuhiko et al., 2007) it is the Japanese broadcaster NHK
‘Not in Education,
Employment, or that engineers shut-ins.
Training’) in 2006. Now, As we shall see, all four intellectuals contest mass mediatic subjectification
hikikomori appears as a and call for a change in the order of things. The tropes of hope and loneliness
phenomenon that has
permeated all strata of are used in the conclusion to reflect on the assertion that withdrawal is also
Japanese society. a timely undergoing, preparatory for the new. We shall examine how those
engaged in extreme forms of social withdrawal can become a harbinger of the
new, as Ryū Murakami (2000a) argues. Indeed, the Japanese novelist and film-
maker has insisted that if Japanese culture cannot face up to the trials and
tribulations ahead it may well drown in ‘a tsunami of technology’ and sink
ever deeper into a ‘labyrinth of confusion’ (see Bradley 2013).

Frail hope
Put into anecdotal context, these preliminary vignettes haunt the writer of this
article. As a teacher at universities and high schools in Tokyo for many years,
the writer regularly witnesses the onerous and conspicuous stresses imposed

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on young people. Empathizing with their plight, he questions the pointless-

ness of it all. It seems that what young people face today is even more ominous
and exhausting than the endurances and trials he faced as a young teenager.
Indeed, this was true before the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident on
11 March 2011, but the nuclear meltdown has transformed the arena of possi-
bilities for generations ahead. It is and will be a sad, indelible blot on the
ecological, social and mental landscape of generations yet to come. However,
this article is about the hope of hope, the dialectic of Zerrissenheit or tearing,
or how to ‘keep your mind in hell and despair not’ (Gillian Rose). So lest we
succumb to despair, let us resist this tendency. Indeed, even among the sever-
est critics of Japanese culture, there are always signs of optimism. Writing in

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Joff P.N. Bradley

the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and nuclear melt-
down, in his article entitled ‘Amid shortages, a surplus of hope’, and in an
apparent moment of Zerrissenheit – sundered, terrified, torn to bits and full of
foreboding – Ryū Murakami senses a renewed sense of possibility. He writes,

But for all we’ve lost, hope is in fact one thing we Japanese have
regained. The great earthquake and tsunami have robbed us of many
lives and resources. But we who were so intoxicated with our own pros-
perity have once again planted the seed of hope. So I choose to believe.
(Murakami 2011)

This is a point shared by Slavoj Žižek, who finds in despair the possibility of
hope. Contributing to The Possibility of Hope, a 2007 documentary short film
directed by Alfonso Cuarón, added to the DVD version of the dystopian film
Children of Men, he says,

Hope is only where despair is. Something truly new-beginning happens

only when you are in such a deep shit that, within the existing coordi-
nates, you can find no way out, and then in order to survive, you have
to invent something new. The magic is to turn a desperate situation into
a new beginning.
(2007)

自殺サークル
In Sion Sono’s Suicide Club (Sono et al., 2003), it is the mass media as progen-
itor of shrink-wrapped J-pop idol worship, inane lyrics and messages that
compels youth to jump to their deaths. In 2002, the Japanese film-maker
wrote and directed the horror film that featured a wave of seemingly uncon-
nected deaths committed by young students. A suicide epidemic grips the
country. Despite unheard of levels of communicative saturation – with every-
body talking constantly on cell phones and messaging on primitive forms of
social networks – no one is connected to themselves (see Bradley in Chiu
et al. 2014).
This deeply disturbing film goes something like this: the film starts with
several dozen high-school girls chatting on a train platform. As the train whiz-
zes into the station, this everyday event is changed forever as teenagers jump
in unison onto the tracks to gratuitous, gruesome deaths. Shocked commuters
look on as geysers of blood wash spirals and arcs of red onto the concrete plat-
form. The familiar refrain begins: a traffic accident with human casualties on the
Chuo line… delays – 中央線人身事故の影響で… What ensues is a narrative
detailing the spate of mass suicides across Japan, which flummox the police and
panic the populace. As the plot unfolds, the origin and cause of the suicides is
revealed as a website for Dessart, a trendy pop band, whose hit single has liter-
ally hypnotized the nation. Through Internet and mobile phones, the band’s
fans are indoctrinated and drawn into the suicide cult. The police work tirelessly
to decode the subliminal mediated message that hides the word suicide – 自殺.
Blissfully elsewhere, high-school friends play with their mobile phones while
walking along the street – in silent communion – entranced by the impersonal
and anonymous nature of mobile technology, by what Virilio calls collective
audio-visual fantasies. This dystopic horror scenario acts as an allegory to
explain a reality all the more harrowing and real. After an hour into the film,
and as the detectives encounter more and more self-inflicted deaths, their

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 A contribution to the schizoanalysis of indifference

investigation gradually exposes the hollowness of their own existence. When

a family suicide claims the wife and children of one of the leading detectives,
he himself receives a mysterious phone call from a young boy who asks him
if he is ‘connected with himself’ – 繋がっていますか. Through the film there
is a constant refrain on communication and connection – Do you know if you
are connected to yourself? – あなたとあなたの関係は、わかりますか？. The
caller interrogates the detective with a barrage of questions. The policeman is
asked: why couldn’t you feel the pain of others as you would your own? Why
couldn’t you bear the pain of others as you would your own? Upon hearing this,
the detective shoots himself in the head. In the sequel to Suicide Club – Noriko’s
Dinner Table – 紀子の食卓 (Sono et al. 2008) – events are depicted from before
and after the event of the band’s formation. The script of the film reads:

He put his hand on Hatori’s cheek and stared at him. I have to know...
are you connected to yourself? You are connected to Shigure, Akito,
Momiji, Shishou and even Yuki. You are connected to Tohru, Kyo, and
me. You are connected to everyone around you even if they are dead.
But are you connected to yourself?

As we shall see, this is precisely Franco Berardi’s point (2009), because connec-
tion without conjunction and concatenation can lead to disastrous results. It is
a mental ecology tipped out of balance.

共生虫
In Ryū Murakami’s Symbiotic Worm (2000c), the reader comes to know of a
website called interbio.ne.jp, which details the workings of a strange symbi-
otic worm. Pharmacologically, the website simultaneously both promises
release from the hell of a social reclusive life and further poisons human rela-
tions. The biological term in Japanese 共生 pertains to symbiosis. As a verb
it means to live together symbiotically, with the living being designated a
symbiont 共生生物. This being the case, kyôseichu cannot, strictly speaking,
signify a parasitical relation, if we mean by that term someone or something
that devours the other to serve itself. Symbionts cannot be parasitic in this
sense. Yet, if we understand the wordplay in Japanese a little more, the fuller
paradoxical meaning becomes clearer because we may derive the sense of
寄生虫 kiseichu, which does indeed mean a parasite, or a parasitic worm. In this
sense, symbiosis between two bodies is self-supporting, even life-affirming.
In terms of a mass mediatic eco-noology, the Internet and its users in symbi-
otic relation are mutually parasitic.
The story pertains to Uehara, who at 22, unemployed, and a junior-high-
school dropout and hikikomori, has not worked or attended school since that
time. At 14, Uehara eats his own life in a cloistered world of antidepressants
and self-loathing. Living a bare existence in seclusion for several years, he
survives with support from his mother who effectively feeds him and takes him
from time to time to the psychiatrist. This long-term social recluse eventually
finds a connection with the outside world through the Internet. In desiring a
‘flow’, beset on a line of flight or deterritorialization, it would seem his seclu-
sion is preparatory for a line of abolition. Adrift, engrossed in digital ‘funk’,
pulverized and stupefied by it, the recluse wastes his youth (himatsubushi –
暇つぶし) watching TV and playing video games. Spotting a sudden spurt of
interest in her son, Uehara’s mother provides him a laptop to research the
ideas of Yoshiko Sakagami, a TV journalist who discusses an unknown disease

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Joff P.N. Bradley

infecting the unconsciousness of young people. Unbeknown to Uehara, the

disease has already penetrated his body. Gradually, he becomes aware that
the strange worm is the cause of his self-imposed isolation. After he chances
upon a strange website that puts him in touch with a cyber-bullying body
called Inter-Bio, and through numerous e-mail exchanges, Uehara decides
to leave his home to find out what lies beyond. He finally gains a self-under-
standing of the symbiotic worm and through it slakes his vengeance upon the
world. Uehara’s self-realization leads to the acting out of his most repressed
impulses and drives.
In the postscript to the French edition of 共生虫, Parasites (2002), Ryū
Murakami reflects on the concept of hope, which he says is not something any
institution or government can offer. Rather it is that which individuals must
make and discover for themselves. While his repeated discussions on hope
are not without contradictions or paradox, his point here is that contemporary
Japanese society believes hope is futile at root and only an issue determined
in extreme circumstances, when the question of the future becomes pressing,
when one has to choose. His point is that children desperately need hope
because it is they who see the future as pristine virgin territory. Their future.
Ryū concludes by insisting (Murakami 2002: 397–98) ‘Les individus contraints
de vivre (en entrait du monde) refusent probablement ce monde de fausses
esperances’, which can be translated as ‘People who are forced to live back in
the world, invariably refuse worlds of “false hope” like the Internet’. In others
words, hope is not found in mere connection but in conjunction with others.
Despite the affirmative moment at the end of the book, Murakami regu-
larly depicts Japan as locked in a state of precariousness – a world of hyper-
consumption, gratuitous violence, and which – although ultra-modern and
cutting-edge – is stymied by the breakdown of traditional mores. In Symbiotic
Worm (2000c), killing time only makes sense for those who ‘have no hope,
no expectations for the future’. Thanks to the Internet, Uehara gains a rela-
tion to the outside but at a price, as his project is the destruction of the weak,
those subject to the orderliness of ‘automated’ life. It is Inter-Bio that compels
him to commit murder. The Internet acts pharmacologically as a remedy and as
poison, a promise and threat. It gives Uehara the chance to break free of his
isolation but at a price. The nature of Uehara’s infection is such that thought-
less, nihilistic rage can erupt in murderous violence at any time. The worm
empowers. It is a communication tool that allows hikikomori to open up to
the world, to explore and share personal problems, but Uehara’s world is an
un-world (immonde), a non-place, full of foreboding and menace. His character
is desperate or what Stiegler (2010) designates dis-individualized. The symbi-
otic worm reduces its host to an idiotic, hideous beast (la bête immonde) as
Stiegler says (2012: 48), living without remorse. The worm proclaims a new
hope for its carriers, albeit through self-annihilation and a carnival of violence.
Ultimately, Inter-Bio follows the path of information – further dissemination –
negation of life as such. Inter-Bio is the body that lives to destroy but who
needs others to exist. It shocks its users into a stupor or bêtise. The parasite
is Uehara himself, who at the beginning of the story is a parasite on soci-
ety, useless, but at the end is in harmony with a schizoid society endemically
alienated from its inhabitants. Uehara encapsulates what Stiegler describes as
a state of disaffected being – the state of an overcoded or de-individualized
self. In terms of the perceived becoming-inhuman of civil society, Stiegler says
on this matter:

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 A contribution to the schizoanalysis of indifference

We urban dwellers… we suffer from this psychic and collective conges- 2. This continues to be
the world of post-
tion, and from the affective saturation that ‘disaffects’ us, slowly but Fukushima Japan. Much
ineluctably, from ourselves and others, dis-individuating us psychically has been made of the
as well as collectively, distancing us from our children, our friends, our sense of community
that emerged in the
relatives, from our own, all of whom are constantly moving away from wake of the natural
us… We, we others, we who feel ourselves being distanced from our and man-made
own, feel ourselves irresistibly condemned to ‘live and think like pigs’. disaster. The concept
and media effect of
(2012: 89–90) (絆) ‘kizuna’, signifying
friendship or sense of
community, has been
In Ryū Murakami’s novel 希望の国のエクソダス – Exodus to the Land of Hope highlighted by many
(2000b), the story begins in 2001 when a Japanese youth appears on CNN researchers. Indeed,
armed with a rifle in Pakistan and tells the world, ‘There’s nothing in Japan. It’s the BBC documentary
Coming Here Soon
a dead country. There’s nothing to say about Japan’ (2000b: 9). Inspired by his also highlights the
example, junior-high-school students en masse organize via the Internet and possibility of friendship
stop going to class. Published in the same year as Symbiotic Worm (2000c), the as a way to ward off
societal indifference
storyline again points to the loss of hope for Japan’s youth. The disgust with and alienation in Japan.
the status quo promotes young people to move to Hokkaido in northern Japan. This point is also made
in Allison’s thought-
Their diaspora is premised on a desire to forge a new utopos – 理想郷. In the provoking work
book, we hear the statement (2000b: 409) ‘This country’s got everything except ‘Ordinary refugees’
hope’ – 国には何でもあるが、本当にいろいろなものがあります、だが、 (2012), which uses
Berardi’s notion of
希望だけがない. According to Ryū Murakami, it is this paradox that remains precarity. The problem,
unresolved because outside the secluded life of isolated individuals like the however, is that NHK
hikikomori is a ‘prison’ of prefabricated world of consumer wants and desires and the Japanese
government’s spin
(1998: 317). Mirroring Baudrillard’s thesis on the simulacra, in Coin Locker Babies doctors have produced
(1998) Ryū Murakami has his narrator describe the world as prison-like with in unison one of the
world’s greatest cover-
walls concealed behind enjoyments and consumer articles. Reality is hidden ups of the nuclear
behind ‘potted plants and sparkling pools, behind cuddly puppies and tropical plight facing Japan.
fish, movie screens and exhibitions and layers of smooth lady-skin’. Behind this With Japan winning
the 2020 Olympics, the
veneer is a wall, a heavily protected barricade, a panopticon. His solution to the media has effectively
suffocating hypocrisy is extreme and violent (1998: 317): ‘There’s only one solu- erased Fukushima from
tion, one way out, and that’s to smash everything around you to smithereens, to the collective memory
(see also Nojiri野尻 英
start over from the beginning, lay everything to waste…’ This is perhaps where 2013).
the individual work of Ryū Murakami and Guattari share common ground, the
latter of whom writes,

To give fresh power to our segments, we must withdraw our being-seg-

ment from the totality in which it is imprisoned. Unless we destroy the
totality to which we have been forced to comply, no proclamation of our
contingent character and particularity will suffice, as it has done in the
past, to rebuild the world.
(2010: 132)2

Now, the point is that such a shrink-wrapped world of consumer wants and
desires enshrouds a subjectivity stultified by deep-seated loneliness. To escape
this barren psychological landscape through an act of diaspora is a fatal strat-
egy. It is the stuff of cults. The mindset thinks it better to live apart from the
world to escape its corruption than play a part in its transformation. It is a
moment of schizophrenia and withdrawal. We also find this strange paradox
ruminated upon in literature, often through the vehicle of utopia. A case in
point is H. G. Wells’ 1898 masterpiece The Time Machine, in which the time
traveller observes members of the Eloi society who care not one iota for the
other. The narrator writes,

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Joff P.N. Bradley

And the little people displayed no vestige of a creative tendency… They

spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making
love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see
how things were kept going… I was watching some of the little people
bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began
drifting downstream. The main current ran rather swiftly, but not too
strongly for even a moderate swimmer. It will give you an idea, there-
fore, of the strange deficiency in these creatures, when I tell you that
none made the slightest attempt to rescue the weakly crying little thing
which was drowning before their eyes.
(1995: 35–36)

In one film version of The Time Machine (1960) (Pal et al., 2000), we hear the
narrator speaking in a manner similar to Stiegler and Berardi regarding the
current state of his world and time: ‘I’d hoped to learn such a great deal. I
hoped to take back the knowledge and advancement man had made. Instead,
I find vegetables. The human race reduced to living vegetables’. The vision of
H.G. Wells is in keeping with the likes of Stiegler and Ryū Murakami because
the latter also describes the spread of human and industrial wastelands across
the world. Furthermore, it is Ryū Murakami who traces the passage from the
‘sorrow’ of the past to the ‘loneliness’ of the present. He writes brilliantly on
this portentous state of affairs:

It is of course risky to lump all of these people together, but I believe

that what they all share is an unawareness that the core emotion of the
Japanese people has now shifted from the ‘sorrow’ of the past to the
‘loneliness’ of the present.

彼らを一括りにすることは危険だが、共通しているのは、日本国民
の中心的感情が「悲しみ」から「寂しさ」に移行しているのに気づ
いていないことだと思う.
(Murakami and Tamura 2010: 49)

We can also find this pessimism running through Haruki Murakami’s work in
the 1980s, when Japan was just beginning to enjoy the Bubble years of conspic-
uous consumption. Indeed, Tamotsu Aoki claims Murakami's heroes display
‘an intense indifference; neither happy nor sad, replete nor empty, lonely
nor loved, he simply exists. This is life in the 1980s’ (1996: 271). This is the
sentiment and the sense of the indifference to indifference found in Stiegler,
who writes that in the hyper-industrial epoch such disaffection – the loss of
psychic individuation – and disaffectation – the loss of social individuation –
threaten the very fabric and being of childhood. Children are tending to
become more and more disturbed and disaffected through human audio-
visual and informatic ‘psychotechnologies’, which, he claims, break up the
‘long circuits’ of generational time at the behest of speculative capital. He
writes in a tone full of anger, frustration and resolution:

[T]he slow decomposition of the motives for living, in the ruined milieu
of what had previously contained possibilities of existing, signify that
the reign of despair, that is, the destruction of every reason to hope, has
now become immense and terrifying.
(2012: 62)

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 A contribution to the schizoanalysis of indifference

N • H • Kにようこそ!
Indifference to indifference is generated and sustained by a media conspir-
acy called the NHK. In the novel Welcome to the N.H.K. (2007) written by
Tatsuhiko Takimoto (滝本竜彦), university dropout Tatsuhiro Satō realizes
in a drug-induced dream that the NHK, the acronym that usually stands for
the Japanese Broadcasting Association – 日本放送協会 – is in fact an organi-
zation called the Nippon Hikikomori Kyoukai – 日本ひきこもり協会 or the
Japanese Society of Social Recluses. In its parasitic form, the Japanese media
works upon the mind of hikikomori, keeping youth away from life, enforcing
shut-ins or self-enclosure. Upon uncovering the conspiracy, a planetary strat-
egy of the mass media, the anti-hero says,

I see! At this point, the direct connection between NHK. hikikomori

finally should be obvious to everyone. In short, broadcasting such inter-
esting anime, NHK mass-produced anime otaku, thereby essentially
creating hikikomori on a large scale. Dammit! What a dirty thing to do!
(2007: 18)

Alone in their rooms, hikikomori are systematically destroying any trace of

themselves. NHK – one might even say in Guattari’s language Integrated World
Capitalism – is determined as the name of the evil organization and secret soci-
ety that tortures, ‘the terrible God’, ‘a huge organization that spans the entire
globe’ (2007: 220). It paralyses, panics and disseminates sad affects and encoun-
ters. Pulverized into non-activity, Satō struggles to break free of his hermetic
lifestyle: ‘Ah! I can’t go on! It’s a psychic attack by the NHK!’ (2007: 222).
NHK promotes the death-in-life of hikikomori. It stops them from forging
friendships, giving meaning to life – hoping. As a weapon of propaganda and
communication wielded for political aims, its nature is to curb desire, to pacify
the masses. It is a machine serving a subjectification process that feeds on
mass fear. In summa, NHK rots the spirit or what Stiegler calls the industrial
ecology of the spirit.
With more than one million hikikomori in Japan, tens of thousands of
whom have given up on schooling, what we find is a youth ‘profoundly cut off
from the world’ (Stiegler 2012: 88), ‘living a kind of social autism, ensconced
in their domestic and televisual milieu, and hermetically sealed away from
a social environment that is itself largely ruined’ (2012: 88). Welcome to the
N.H.K. (2007) mirrors this psychoanalytic account. It follows the progress
of a hikikomori who searches for a way to escape attention deficit disorder/
hyperactivity, depression and anxiety. Through the intoxication with ‘indus-
trial temporal objects’ and the proliferation of sad affects aired on TV, Stiegler
claims the libido is diverted from love objects towards objects of consumption.
This in turn provokes indifference towards parents and the world at large.
Festering in funk, this form of non-activity produces ‘a general apathy, over-
laid with a sense of threat’ (2012: 88). It is this that Satō tries to escape. His
escape encapsulates the pharmakon of the media, at once poison and cure.
Put in Guattarian ecological terms, we can say that NHK works as a cloak
to neuroleptize subjectivity (2000: 68) in the sense that it is akin to an ‘anti-
psychotic drug’; it grips the nervous system. It produces a ‘somnolent’ popula-
tion. Moreover, as it ‘infantalizes subjectivity’ (2000: 50) this acts as a breeding
ground for repression after repression – religious fundamentalism, racism, the
oppression of women (2000: 28). Again, this process is the perfect breeding
ground for cults. NHK works through ‘the transduction of prepersonal’ or

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impersonal forces. For Stiegler, disaffected otaku, who live in a closed, virtual
world of computer games and comics, are dis-individuated psychically and
socially and as such are ‘perfectly indifferent to the world’ (2012: 89). We can
say they suffer from sad mediatic affects and encounters – a cruel system to
ensure the death-in-life of its practitioners.

Mediatic affects
Mediatic affects can be so construed as a cruel ‘logic of affects’ (Guattari 1995: 9).
They conspire to control the micropolitical events of everyday life – to produce
an affection of the body, leaving it petrified and stilted. The destructive refrains of
the media structure the affective toil of existential selves. Affects are left stripped
of intensity. Deadly refrains recycle, more dead time, prefabricated mass media
highs, which lack any relation to chaos, to the becoming-other or becoming-
otherwise, to the true passage of joy. This mediatic affective intensity pulver-
izes subjectivity. As all affects are weapons in some sense, here mediatic affects
act as a weapon against the body. Spinoza’s Ethics (1994), a work of practical
philosophy of joy and affirmation, exposes the causes of sorrow and that which
is complicit in the corrupt performance that sustains it. In Book III, definition 3,
we read affectus as the power to affect and be affected. They are degrees of
power to which correspond active or passive affects or intensities. Spinoza
writes, ‘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’ (1994: 154). For Deleuze, affectus pertains to a state
of the affected body and implies the presence of the mechanism of affecting.
Encounters with the outside are divided into two categories: joyous encounters,
which increase the body’s ability to act or think – and sad ones, which lessen
the body’s or mind’s ability to think or act. Joy is therefore produced when a
body comes into contact with another and enters into composition with it, and
sadness when a body or idea threatens its coherence. Considering that the role
of philosophy is the prevention or warding off of sad affects, Deleuze writes,

[The task of philosophy is] denouncing all that is sad, all that lives on
sadness, all those who depend on sadness as the basis of their power.
(1990: 270)

The brain and affect

Affects are transitions between states, and possess an actual and virtual side.
The actual are found in sensations or emotions but this coming to transition as
Massumi describes it (2002: 35) is the virtual aspect that conveys ‘unactualized
capacities to affect and be affected’ (De Landa 2002: 62). The media works to
stifle, harness and rechannel virtual possibilities. Refrains become enclosed
within a designated field of possibilities. They are deprived of a relation to ‘the
forces of the future’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 311) – to the outside. Affect
is hemmed in, without escape. And so the media or NHK prefigures exis-
tential territories, disseminates insecurity and fear and entices paranoia. The
media circulates sad affects and existential territories of insecurity servicing
paranoid visions, which in extreme cases can foster rage and panic – that is
to say, the evacuation of the subject when ‘automatic life’ responses takeover.
Drastic episodes of rage and fear are de-subjectivizing, with affect freed from
any subjective feeling. NHK and Inter-Bio takeover. Agency and subjectivity
are burst asunder.

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In post-disciplinary societies or control societies, the semio-capitalistic

order of things is the progenitor of spiritual loss – that is to say, of reasons
to believe, trust and hope. The point is also shared by Italian philosopher
Giorgio Agamben, who in his What is an Apparatus? (2009), reflects on the
political proclivities of the contemporary milieu and finds a similar sense of
stasis and passivity. He argues that the current era is witnessing the presence
of the ‘most docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in human
history’ (p. 22). With respect to control societies, according to Catherine
Malabou (2012), it is the dissemination of sad affects that serves those in
power. In her interpretation of Spinoza, the more sad affects abound, the
more docile the masses become. Sad affects keep the populace on its knees
through a flattening of emotional subjectivity (2012: 53), festering in indiffer-
ence to indifference – feasting on connection without conjunction – a discon-
nection of the loop of desire and hope. In recent years, Malabou’s research
on ‘plasticity’ (2005) – a key concept she derives from Hegel and her former
teacher Derrida – has looked to bridge the gap between continental philoso-
phy and neuroscience, to pave the way for a new cartography of affect – to
account for the relationship between trauma, indifference and the overall loss
of affect. Her recent focus – utilizing the neuroscience research of Antonio
Damasio and Thomas Metzinger – has been on the societal engineering of
cold, indifferent, disengaged subjects who lack empathy towards others –
which she claims is brought about through brain injury or the experience of
severe trauma. The latter may well serve to explain post-Fukushima Japan’s
‘mass-mediatic pollution of collective subjectivities’ (Guattari 2012: 42).
Here we ask: why does the mass media (NHK or Inter-Bio) inspire such
sad passions? In terms of Spinoza’s philosophy, Malabou explains that this
is always a matter of control by the priest or despot. She replaces Deleuze’s
dictum vis-à-vis Spinoza – namely, the statement ‘inspiring sad passions is
necessary for the exercise of power’ with the statement that ‘inspiring indif-
ference has become necessary for the exercise of power’ (2013). On this point,
it is worth recalling Deleuze who claims that one of the central themes of
Spinoza’s Ethics (1994) is that all things that involve sadness express tyranny in
some way (Deleuze 1990: 270). In a sense then, we could add that the media
conspires to diminish the power of acting. The media is tyrannical. It negates
wonder. For example, Malabou discerns in modern societies a fundamental
loss of wonder. Regarding Spinoza’s Ethics (1994), Part III on the emotions,
Deleuze in his 1978 lecture briefly addresses the nature of wonder, which is
described as manifesting through the destruction of the power to be affected
or, said otherwise, the indifference to indifference. Sadness proliferates to
the extent that there is a corresponding abnegation of affect, which Malabou
determines as a hallmark of contemporary subjectivity. As a tool in the exer-
cise and exertion of power, we can say that the media accelerates this indif-
ference. Through the impairment of emotion in the brain this leads to the loss
of wonder and the destruction of the possibility to be transformed. There is a
loss of all affect. Suffering a diminishment of power, of the bodily power to
be affected, hikikomori, for example, suffer a loss of wonder, a loss of interest
in the outside, the new or different. The loss of the feeling of wonder evokes
a disinterest in the exceptional and unexpected. In extremis, this can lead to
catastrophic results – action in cold blood, without remorse or feeling. The 1996
Dunblane massacre in Scotland, the 1999 Columbine High School, the 2008
Akihabara massacre in Japan, the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shoot-
ing, and the 2014 Washington State High School shootings are tragic examples

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Joff P.N. Bradley

that ought to give the nod to radical theories that criticize the organization of
society left to feed on its own lust, greed, aggression and mad appetites.
Contemporary subjectivity – autistic, without affective engagement, a
disengaged de-libidinalized subject – exudes indifference to strangers. This
emotional detachment can lead to social withdrawal. Without emotion, there
is a corresponding loss of interest in politics, as Malabou says. This is the
libidinal economy of contemporary life. The new wounded, as Malabou labels
them, are those suffering from socio-political trauma who act in the form
of ‘indifference to suffering’ (2012: xii) and proceed through the affective
withdrawal from the world. Cut off from affect, there is no symbolic cure, or
possibility of thinking, doing and loving otherwise. There is a corresponding
renunciation of hope, an absence of hope. The loss of feeling leads to the
impairment of consciousness. There is no time to be unsettled by the anxi-
ety that wonder invokes. Responding to the sense of widespread indifference
and drawing on Guattari’s Three Ecologies (2000), Rick Dolphijn (2013) throws
down the gauntlet to others to respond to the mass mediatic or eco-noolog-
ical crisis. As schizoanalysis is a praxis to free the flows of desire that remain
blocked, he says (2013: 6): ‘[E]cosophy demands us to open ourselves up to
the coldness and indifference that has taken over some of the ecosystems
today, that has traumatized them, disturbed their presence, their ideas with
which we live’. In other words, as sad encounters make us ill, ecosophy is an
experimental project to promote a new vitality through the creation of joyful
encounters. Deleuze and Guattari consider the demands of schizoanalysis on
this point and ask for a relation to the outside, ‘a little real reality’ (1983: 334).
In Chaosmosis (1995), Guattari calls for others to prepare for the ‘ordeals of
barbarism’ and ‘the mental implosion and chaosmic spasms looming on the
horizon’. Unpacking this terminology, Berardi (2014) suggests that chaosmo-
sis is the overcoming of the spasm, the relaxing of the spasmodic vibration.
The Italian theorist writes that consciousness inhabits a ‘psychopathogenic
atmosphere’ that toils from an acceleration of stimuli, constant attentive
stress, immediate access to the info-sphere and permanent connectivity –
or what we have called Inter-Bio. In this new form of semio-capitalism,
following Guattari, the frenetic world of concrete human beings is thrown
into a chaosmic spasm until collapse. In his increasingly influential work,
Berardi – an old friend of Guattari’s – claims semio-capitalism intensifies
mental suffering to social epidemic, pathological levels. This is produced
through constant demands for attention, a world without time for affection
(Berardi. 2014: 38).
Mental suffering is normalized in a system driven by the exploitation of
precarious cognitive work. Here Japan may well prove to be the archetypical
case in point, because it is seen as a society increasingly precarious, ‘haunted
by depression, loneliness and suicide’ (Berardi. 2014: 86). Discerning wide-
spread loneliness, stress, competition, a sense of meaninglessness, compul-
sion and failure in advanced capitalist societies, Berardi finds this mutation
not only in the West but across the planet. He cites Japan’s neighbour South
Korea as a striking case where digitalization has deeply affected the psycho-
logical of its inhabitants. Suggesting there is a causal connection between
connectivity and suicide, he asks the question on everybody’s lips – namely, is
there a link between high connectivity and suicide?

In the place where connectivity rate is the highest in the world, the city
of Seoul, I was impressed by the amount of street walkers who gazed at

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the screen of the smart-phone all the time, apparently driven by trans-
mental signals. I also noticed a sort of inattention to the surrounding
physical landscape. Then I discovered that Korea is number one in the
world as far as concerns suicide rate.
(2014: 244)

Taking a more affirmative perspective from some of the remarks above,

Berardi argues that, whence faced with an attack on mental life as such, with-
drawal can be a sign of resistance. He thus describes the life of hikikomori
as ‘a healthy reaction to the frantic precarious life that late capitalism has
provoked: a fully understandable withdrawal from the hell’ (2014: 85). Making
a direct connection between the media, technology and the loss of empathy,
he bemoans the fact that people have lost the joy of being together (Berardi
and Lovnik 2011):

Thirty years of precariousness and competition have destroyed social

solidarity. Media virtualization has destroyed empathy among bodies,
the pleasure of touching each other, and the pleasure of living in urban
spaces. We have lost the pleasure of love, because too much time is
devoted to work and virtual exchange.

In his doctoral defence at Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland, in 2014,

Berardi made the connection between the media connectivity and the
prospect of a suicide epidemic that he describes as a ‘devastating psychic
bomb’. Questioning the interrelationship between connectivity and the flux
of semio-capitalist production, he writes in Precarious Rhapsody (2009: 129),
‘[A] gigantic wave of desperation could soon turn into a suicidal
epidemic that will turn the first connective generation into a devastat-
ing psychic bomb’. This is the problem of our time and he is right to ask
what is to be done. The virtualization of communication and the precar-
ity of work have combined to disconnect people from themselves, from
the capacity to feel empathy. The way out, for Berardi, is the develop-
ment of strategies of withdrawal, refusal and the negotiation of inaugural
‘lines of flight’ – the creation of velocity transformers. Wistfully perhaps,
Berardi often calls for the creation of ‘social zones of human resistance’
to restore a sense of hope in the present and the future. Questioning the afore-
mentioned lost pleasure of being in communion together, he writes (2014: 40),
‘Electronic media act as an accelerator of info-stimulation and simultane-
ously as a desensibilizer of the collective psyche and the collective skin’.
Constant pre-manufactured excitement or intensified stimulation permeates
the ‘Mediascape’ and places the sensitive organism in a state of ‘perma-
nent electrocution’, much like the becoming-Narcissus-narcotic-numb from
technology that McLuhan (1964) explores in ‘Gadget lover’, Chapter 4 of
Understanding Media. The point is made well in a 1961 interview for Playboy
Magazine. Regarding media-induced environments, McLuhan (McLuhan
et al. 1995: 226) says on this point that when this syndrome becomes ‘all
pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance’ it also becomes ‘invisible’.
Moreover, this self-hypnotic Narcissus-narcosis syndrome fits well into the
mental ecology paradigm developed by Guattari, which is described above.
The scenario is also brilliantly described by sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury in a
reflection on the dystopian trends in 1950s’ America. The world of Fahrenheit
451 was an immediate threat and possibility, he explained:

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Joff P.N. Bradley

Only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife
passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely
stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized
radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which
ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivi-
ous to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap opera
cries, sleep walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who
might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.
(quoted in Amis 1960: 112)

Put another way, this is the state of the characters in the Welcome to the N.H.K.
(2007) and Symbiotic Worm (2000c). If emotion is the concatenation of uncon-
nected things, events and perceptions, what frustrates this natural process is
digital, abstract connection, NHK or Inter-Bio – that is to say, that which pre-
figures outcomes and options and leads to dissociation of understanding from
empathy.
Berardi insists that the passage from conjunction to connection between
organisms stems from the digitalization of signs and the mediatization of
relations. Much like Inter-Bio, connection introduces pathological contrac-
tions in the flow of conjunction, while simultaneously opening new horizons
of communication. Writing from the perspective of a phenomenology of the
sensible, Berardi is right to note the mutation in sensibility that is producing
unprecedented levels of mental suffering such as ADHD, mental exhaustion,
depression and at its worst violence and suicide. It would seem the speed of
signs and the avalanche of information has transformed the perception of
time, but more than this the dromology of information impoverishes experi-
ence as such, as pleasure and knowledge are left exhausted in turn. Virtual
communication, the precarity of work, and a range of other contemporary
phenomena have disconnected the capacity to feel empathy towards each
other. On this bleak reading, the world is hyperactive, spasmodic and brim-
ming with attention-deprived ‘zombies’, who suffer from all manner of path-
ological effects from the sad affects generated by the schizoid organization
of society.
When read alongside writers such as Stiegler and Malabou, we can
begin to better understand Berardi’s point. Strangers pass us on the street,
conveying a blank exterior that conceals inner turmoil and sadness. Behind
‘disconnected’ eyes, there lurks a teeming volcano of angst and convulsion.
The hikikomori or social recluses in Japan are similarly describable in these
terms as they find themselves assaulted by Weltschmerz or world-weariness.
In post-Fukushima, it seems quite clear that more and more young people
in Japan are locked in this state of Zerrissenheit and seemingly, unable to
break free of it. The solution? For his part, Stiegler (2012) argues that school
constitutes the primary pharmacological site of the ‘battle for intelligence’. It
is for teachers to find a space beyond the reach of control, the media, NHK
or Inter-Bio. Stiegler proposes a new politics of attention, information and
knowledge – a ‘noopolitics’ to oppose what he calls the globalized market of
fools or conspiracy of imbeciles. So says Stiegler the ‘battle for intelligence’
is the political question of our time because now given over to ‘attention
capture’ devices, with brains ‘stripped not merely of critical consciousness but
of consciousness itself’ (2010: 43), children are no longer being educated. As
such, they are cut off from an intergenerational ‘sense of culture and commu-
nity’. In summa, people have given themselves over to these industries.

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Describing what he calls the industrial ecology of the spirit, Stiegler insists
that as a consequence of cognitive and affective saturation, and through the
loss of consciousness and affect, disaffected beings abound. As he says, disaf-
fected people and human wastelands are as conspicuous as disused factories
and industrial wastelands. Yet, in his recent work, he makes the point that,
although young people appear diffident, distant from the authority of their
parents, and who are confronted with the structural cynicism of their society
to the extent that they find no other avenue than anti-social withdrawal, there
still remains a genuine possibility of sublimation through the reconstitution
of the life of the spirit – comprising an ecological economy of cognitive and
affective functions. If you like, a new media ecology.

Conclusion
It has been found through a variety of philosophical and literature resources that
disaffection and withdrawal are engineering effects on the body by technology
and the mass media as such. They are the result of promiscuous sad encoun-
ters. The Internet and mass media are both disease and cure… parasitical and
pharmakon. They agitate a whirlpool of non-human affects and sad encounters,
which we still have yet to fully chart. Through the prism of ecosophy, we have
also seen that withdrawal is a form of undergoing, Untergang, a preparatory
time ahead of the new. But it is through Guattari’s mental ecology that we can
come to better understand how the construction of new existential assemblages
and refrains can help ward off the descent into despair and dissolution. Critical
of the semiotic operations of capital, which generate a flattening of subjectiv-
ity, ecosophy remains a thought-provoking critique of the engineering of sad
affects and obsession with machinic ‘funk’ among young people. It calls for ‘the
seizing of society by society itself’ (Guattari et al. 2010: 126) – a ‘social cyclo-
tron’ to change the order of things. This reading of ecosophy remains staunchly
opposed to the intoxication with technologies and the becoming-hikikomori of
youth. It remains steadfast in its fight against the mindlessness of youth turned
to pulp.
At the end, there is a beginning. It is the hope of hope itself, of a people
yet to come, and the trial that awaits them. Guattari’s search for a third voice/
pathway, from the consensual mediatic to a dissensual postmediatic era, is

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Joff P.N. Bradley

important for this project as he aims to liberate the processual potentialities of

each singularity and, as he says, transform the earth – ‘a living hell for four-
fifths of its population’ – into ‘a universe of creative enchantments’ (2012: 13).
This is all we have left – a trial for the sake of the poor, dispossessed, for those
among us living precarious lives, for those yet to come. I end with Haruki
Murakami’s 1Q84 (Murakami and Gabriel 2011: 744), in which Aomame says
in one of the rare optimistic moments in the majestic novel:

‘It’s a tough world… Wherever there’s hope there’s a trial’ – ひとりぼ

っちではあるけれど孤独ではない。希望のあるところには必ず試練
があるものだから.

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Suggested citation
Bradley, J. P. N. (2015), ‘A contribution to the schizoanalysis of indiffe-
rence’, Explorations in Media Ecology 14: 1+2, pp. 107–124, doi: 10.1386/eme.
14.1-2.107_1

Contributor details
Joff P.N. Bradley teaches in the Faculty of Language Studies at Teikyo
University, Tokyo, Japan. His current work focuses on the becoming-Deleuz-
ian of Asia and the becoming-Asia of Deleuze.
Contact: Faculty of Language Studies, Teikyo University, Hachioji Campus,
Japan.
E-mail: joff@main.teikyo-u.ac.jp
Joff P.N. Bradley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that
was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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