You Can Call Me Miku
Miku’s originary identity is a corporate corporealization, a mascot for Crypton Future Media. Corporate mascots are powerful weapons. Corporations have much to gain from being seen as persons, as “Complex social unities and individuals are taken to be equivalent, and the goal of a transaction or contract is to distribute risk and responsibility equally among the legally constituted actors as though, say, a bank and a homeowner are equivalent entities.” (Manning and Gershon 116) Thus, an animated character logo can be a highly effective and affective instrument for corporate interest.
Technologies of reproduction have a long history with labour and capital. In “Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor”, Sharon Corwin outlines the specific interconnection of chronophotography and industrial factory labour practices. Chronophotography, invented by Étienne-Jules Marey in 1882, is a technique that captures multiple still images of a moving subject at deliberate time intervals, typically rendering each of these shots into a single frame to depict multiple stages of movement simultaneously. It allows the holistic process of a movement to be fragmented into its constituent parts, capturing otherwise invisible moments within the particular movement practice. This capacity for visualization of the otherwise invisible made chronophotography an invaluable tool in the establishment of the Fordist factory line. This factorial model depends on the atomization of labour to maximize efficiency, requiring that each worker perform the same productive task repeatedly, collectively producing a product as a cumulative assemblage, rather than the traditional mode of start-to-finish single-person production.
Frederick Taylor, an American mechanical engineer and founder of the Taylorist movement, played a foundational role in the advent of the assembly line. Motivated by President Theodore Roosevelt’s call for “national efficiency” (qtd in Corwin 139) as well as a general American culture of maximized productivity, Taylor published his 1911 text, Principles of Scientific Management. To do so, Taylor employed a team of engineers to closely watch and time various workers as they carried out their labour practices, documenting and publishing the movements and moments of productive inefficiency. Building from Taylor’s initial findings, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth sought to discover what they called “the One Best Way” (Corwin 139), or the most efficient means of production. To do so, they utilized chronophotographic technology to render visible the otherwise imperceptible processes of movement, attempting to “eliminate what they saw as unnecessary and wasteful movements” (140).
This relationship between the representative technology of photography and the embodied subject then fundamentally changed how the human body and society produce and labour. “Chronophotography was not merely a decisive step towards the animation of images. It was equally the basis for the animation of the Taylorist factory regime” (Franke 14). This, therefore, sets a general precedent for representative technologies’ impact on human experience and embodiment, establishing how media and technology mediate the body and the subject.
Beyond this, however, the specific practices of chronophotography as well as the assembly line crucially introduce the notion of fragmentation. Dissection and disassemblage is the precise goal of the chronophotographer. It is not one single moment within a movement nor the complete movement that this technique captures, but rather the splintering of a movement into its constituent parts. Here, movement is no longer a singular whole, but rather the cumulative sum of fixed, fragmentary pieces. The gesture is no longer a gesture, but an assemblage of micro gestures instead. This capacity for disassemblage is precisely what made chronophotography so compatible with Fordism and Taylorism, two ideologies that depend on the atomization of labour. As outlined above, the assembly line breaks production down into its constituent parts, dividing the disassembled labour between a factorial team. Therefore, chronophotography’s fragmentation of the human body and motion creates an industrial ideology of productive fragmentation, also played out on the human body.
Miku is an aggregate of fragments and she is an entity for fragmentation. As a corporate logo to sell a software that is ultimately a database of fragments, Miku’s body becomes the new site of capitalistic fragmentation for the maximization of profit, the chronophotographic Fordist reign of power over AFK bodies transforms into the databased fragmentary reign of power of virtual and AFK bodies alike. Miku is like all of us, an assemblage of digitally enfleshed commodity forms. We are sold and we buy the fragments that constitute ourselves. We are made into biometric data, extracted from, and reassembled in advertising algorithms. We are broken down into body part fetishes on Pornhub.com and rebuilt as collections of IRL gifs. Our faces are quantified and positivized by cop cams near-everywhere we go. Miku’s body shows us what all of our bodies are--fragmented, commodified, thing-ified, digitized, positivized, made commensurable.
Fragmentation, as individuation, atomization, or difference can be ripe with revolutionary potential. Fascism thrives off logics of the same. But our fragmented bodies are not radical particularities, denouncing unification for true individual autonomy and liberation. Quite the opposite. Our bodies already are radically particular, already are different and good for it. This form of fragmentation does not work against the inferno of the same, of unification, because it is an extractionist and violently quantitative fragmentation. We are broken down not for liberation, but for each fragment to be data-mined, turned into information, made measurable, made the same. A particular part of a particular body is a particular in a non-fragmented body. The body of a fragmentary assemblage, however, does not contain particulars but has leg as the category ‘legs’, finger as the category ‘fingers’ -- the fragments are made into universals when placed alongisde all other fragments like that one. Algorithms do not understand particularities.
Miku shows us the positivized, quantitative, coded, fragmented, and assembled post-postmodern body. Miku’s body is the new playground for capitalism’s exertion of power over flesh. Miku’s body is all of our bodies.