Getting #Lainpilled: Towards a Definition of the (Hyper)Eschatological Condition
by Alexzander Mazey

Getting #Lainpilled: Towards a Definition of the (Hyper)Eschatological Condition

Alexzander Mazey

‘The funny part is that experts have calculated that the state of emergency decreed by an earthquake warning would unleash such a panic that its effects would be greater than the earthquake itself. Here we fall into full derision: lacking a real catastrophe, it will be easy to unleash a simulated one, one which will be as good as the first and can even replace it. […] How true it is that we cannot rely on chance to bring on catastrophe: we have to find its programmed equivalent in the preventive measures.’

                        – Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies^[1]

Since that analysis of Dripvangelion^[2], published in the autumn of last year, Instagram’s short-form video content has found competition in the trendier algorithms offered by the likes of TikTok or, surprisingly enough, YouTube Shorts, where even Google’s hegemony is diminished by the sad desperation produced by an accelerated, de-sited culture of thirty seconds or less. The prevalence of short-form video content seen on screens, wherever it may be found today, recalls in my mind the ephemeral and faddish appeal of a new media which requires very little demystification in a hyperculture already beyond even the sardonicism it denies by way of its very transparency. The baked-in cynicism of doomscrolling culture, observable from a kind of anthropological perspective, is already present in every noscope clutch clip made adjacent to whatever profound aphorism Joe Rogan has for us today. Welcome to the desert of the reel.      

The power of the generative algorithm is like a Subway sandwich in the sense that if the customer, I was once told, comes to complain about the sandwich they receive, it is only the customer who is at fault for choosing the constituent ingredients of the sandwich to begin with. From my own generative algorithm of e-girls and Alan Watts heard over rainy windows, no doubt when a person talks critically of their content algorithm in this way, they inadvertently reveal the idiocy of their own shadow. A cursory look into the reel as a medium nevertheless reveals such ephemera as nothing more than that which provides relief from the experience of boredom, and yet in order to diminish this once coveted and sought after experience of situational ennui a person must first attain a certain degree of boredom to begin with. It may be the case, from a certain intuitive standpoint at least, that the act of doomscrolling is merely 1) a precautionary measure taken against the possibility of boredom, 2) a temporary escape from the non-places of Supermodernity^[3] whose liminality exists everywhere today, or 3) the considerably more black-pilled prospect that doomscrolling today functions as a collective nepenthe. How much of the last two options are one and the same thing is difficult to ascertain and yet what can be understood here is how the precautionary measure taken against the catastrophe of boredom became, in many ways, the catastrophe itself. 

The black-pill in this context does not represent the wishful thinking of nihilism turned towards reactionary evil, whereby the recalibration of nihilism back into political and moral frameworks makes the phenomenon of contemporary nihilism easier to dismiss outright. Instead, the black-pill in this context stands closer to its terminally-online etymology which once had more to do with a kind of passive nihilism, which is to say, Doomerism. Likewise, Doomscrolling does not (and perhaps it never did) refer to the ecstasy of pursuing an endless stream of upsetting news – which is perhaps a generational inheritance from the classical age of television – rather doomscrolling is defined here as that more surreptitious activity of any old hypnagogic and hypnopompic scrolling, the kind that still resembles flicking through television channels to see what isn’t on. The incessant scrolling of Instagram and the like is perhaps far more dangerous, however – more mesmerising – in the sense that it is so algorithmically intimate and made so personal to us. How fun it is to tell people I no longer watch television whilst not once disclosing my sixteen hours a day screentime.

When I was a child and we inevitably flicked through the news channels in an attempt to catch another look at the second plane hitting the towers there was still, in many ways, a sense of collective joy to be had in doing so. Today’s joy, if we are to call it that, is a joy primarily felt in the loneliness of the network; the dissociative paradox of personal screens. It is a circumstance of the network never quite remedied by the inclusion of community standards, the share button; an insufficient tool which is practically always dismissed at the level of our subconscious by the dual anxiety that no one ever looks at the rubbish we send them anyway. There are even memes out there that address this very anxiety. Nevertheless, sending memes to our friends and loved ones is perhaps less about sharing a moment of humorous – “literally us” – relatability than it is a kind of hyperfocused aggregation. To say, we have trained ourselves to show our love for one another through this strategy of production, through our workaday productivity; the act of trawling this world of trash on their behalf. The share button is perhaps the only place we have left to show our appreciation; and if it is correct that doomscrolling has become a kind of collective nepenthe then it is perhaps only right in our hearts that we should pursue more of it.

In pursuing this strategy then, we may one day find the algorithm passing from Rei Ayanami in Dripvangelion^[4] to Juliana Chahayed cosplaying Rei Ayanami in the limerent intonation of ‘rei sings u fly me to the moon [10 hours]’^[5]. In this soothing composition, seen on Instagram Reels, Chahayed’s performance is presented in horizontal, adjacent collusion with Patrick Bateman’s memeification only to remind the viewers that the hypercultural miscibility of neither Chahayed’s disconsolate appearance nor the tonality of a pensive – practically sepulchral – hauntologically positioned ‘sad music’ is designed to be taken too seriously lest we deep even the nudge in the ribs that quietly recalls the performativity of images that amounts to – like the fate of hauntology itself – not much of anything. And yet it is precisely in this wry performativity of images, the dark iris of an eye that glimmers with the regulation of all light, where seduction and reversibility still remain.

It could be said that Chahayed’s performance, presented in tandem with intertextual reference, is largely emblematic of a countercultural approach that understands fully the vacuum of power – the algorithm in this case – that stands ready to absorb it, just as Baudrillard described power in Fatal Strategies as the ‘empty place’ no one ever wants to occupy: ‘They know that power, like truth, is the empty place you must know how never to occupy, but that you must know how to produce so that others will be swallowed up in it.’^[6] (Fatal Strategies, p. 106.) As such, the mise en scène of Chahayed’s performances come to represent a ‘strategy of intelligent subversion’^[7] (Fatal Strategies, p. 106) standing peripheral rather than diametrically opposed to any integral reality, careful to reject even the mistake of a countercultural identity hence why those other things that seem seductive in their approach today not only fall into the problematic categories of playful ambiguity and hermetic reference but often take up into ambivalent dialogue an entire playbook of heresies the least of which involves dressing up as characters from Neon Genesis Evangelion.^[8] It is less cosplaying an allegedly schizophrenic and profoundly dissociative character that is important to the analysis at hand and more the eschatological tonality of Chahayed’s music that circulates as the perihelion; that which comes closest to the problem of an integral reality that always sought to cast away the affliction of having to discern what’s real from what isn’t.

It was in The Intelligence of Evil^[9] where Baudrillard provided a brief yet pithy observation in the direction of that ‘music in which sounds have been clarified and expurgated’, ‘shorn of all noise and static’, writes Baudrillard, to the point where it had reached a kind of ‘technical perfection.’^[10] (The Intelligence of Evil, p. 21.) Baudrillard associated the cleaned-up sterilization of such music with the computer and the virtual scene, the ‘actualization of a programme’ inherent to the ‘closed circuit’ of what he called ‘Integral Reality’.^[11] What is inevitably produced is a music that is ‘flawless and without imagination’, ‘shorn’ – as Baudrillard writes here – of all that which made it music to begin with. This was, as Baudrillard also noted, a theory of ‘technical perfection’ that must be ‘open to doubt’ since many musicians ‘have actually come up with the idea of reintroducing noise into it to make it more ‘musical’.’^[12] The saving grace of what might be successfully reintroduced into music was later put to death by Mark Fisher’s theories of a culture defined, by and large – perhaps even too reductively (which might have inadvertently been Fisher’s saving grace in a theory that lacked the perfection of a closed-off system) – by an age of musical regurgitations; a nostalgic forever present that would facilitate the ideological precedent that Capitalist Realism^[13] had landed in neoliberal perfection. It was with a terroristic hope – perhaps the only hope that still remains – where the eschatological fate of this Integral Reality had been predicted years before when Baudrillard wrote on the ‘radiant perspective’ of this heavenly utopia ‘today lived as a catastrophe in slow motion.’^[14] (Fatal Strategies, page 97.)

This leads to perhaps the only question worth asking in anthropology today; where does this musical expurgation place the ritual of singing in Rei Ayanami costume? It is interesting to note that the popularity of cosplay amongst young people runs parallel to the ‘painful void’^[15] of identity. (Hyperculture, page 51). In Chahayed’s covers and original works, there is less a regurgitation of forms and more a hypertext of ‘plurality’ where ‘identities emerge’ in the ‘patchwork structures’^[16] of an Instagram account. (Hyperculture, page 52). From the grainy footage of a CRT monitor illuminating a darkened bedroom, to a faint voice heard through an old telephone set, it is without a doubt a performance where ‘fuzziness, tremor [and] chance’^[17] have been returned to the image through a process of readmission and even poetic reversal. At the same time Chahayed’s account is perhaps ‘Hypercultural Art’ as defined by Byung-Chul Han in the way it ‘no longer pursues the truth in the strong sense; it has nothing to reveal.’^[18] (Hyperculture, page 51). It may be the case that in lacking moments of truth and revelation, hypercultural art challenges a system whose game is always one of excess and transparency. How much of these cosplayed performances are an appeal to hauntological infusion is unknown and yet looking into her sepulchral bedroom nonetheless and the hauntological conception of what bygone dreamscape Chahayed’s performance recalls would be difficult to pin down exactly since in its allegiance to contemporary memeifications, algorithmic trends, wry smiles, the internet’s collectively renewed interest in the demiurgic Gnosticism on offer in Neon Genesis Evangelion, one cannot help but detect a bridging of sorts between something of a lost and imaginary there made miscible with the timely mourning of the here and now. In hypercultural art’s indifference towards truth and revelation, there is perhaps something to be revealed after all.

Looking through Chahayed’s YouTube account and it is easy enough to find her cover of Duvet^[19] by Bôa, the intro theme to the anime, Serial Experiments Lain. Directed by the late, Ryūtarō Nakamura, Serial Experiments Lain^[20] was a short, thirteen-episode television series that made its debut run on TV Tokyo in the summer of 1998. It is, for the most part, a profoundly post-structural narrative concerned with a culture of mourning at a time when Japan, like the West, was preparing for the arrival of Y2K. As such, Serial Experiments Lain set the precedent for an account of a “present day, present time” that was less Frutiger Aero and more the hypercultural landscape of technological paranoia we occupy today. It was the washed-out imagery of cathode-ray monitors made in tandem with Lain’s palpable sense of dissociation from the emptiness around her that best cut across the lofty expectations of the new millennium to show a society that would soon enough collapse into alienation and conspiracy. It was a narrative that achieved as much from the perspective of an unassuming adolescent, Lain Iwakura, in this case, where those who seemed to be living through the end times were made dissociative to the point where no one seemed to care. Unplugged from anything logically sequential and practically schizoanalytic in scope, Lain was less the eschatological vision of great and powerful angels falling to earth in Neon Genesis Evangelion and more a Baudrillardian retelling of catastrophe seen in terms of a reality that had disappeared without notice, vanishing so quickly that no one had even realised they had been left behind to mourn it.

In Nihilism in Postmodernity^[21], Ashley Woodward contextualised ‘the cultural psychoanalysis of postmodernity’ within ‘a pervasive melancholy, beyond both nostalgia and mourning, in which the values of modernity cannot be relinquished in the name of a new beginning.’^[22] (Nihilism in Postmodernity, page 245.) Whilst Woodward’s text rightfully acknowledged ‘the mood appropriate to the postmodern scene’, it was at the same time a ‘melancholia’ that stood as both ‘a rejection of and attempt to move beyond nostalgia and mourning, both of which are bound too closely to modernist sensibilities.’^[23] (Nihilism in Postmodernity, page 166.) And whilst it was Mark Fisher who also outlined the excess of nostalgia as one of the many cultural logics of neoliberalism, it is perhaps easy enough to ask where this ‘move beyond’ placed mourning in the plexus of contemporary phenomenology. Maybe it is in the psychoanalysis of mourning where we find a melancholic culture still steeped in the mythologises of the twentieth century to the point where we could ask how much of modernism and its doubling in the shadow of the postmodern was merely scapegoat and patsy for the whitewashing of history; a reading of the twentieth century made in retrospect in order to absolve liberal humanism of its corrupt conscience. Furthermore, what if the bloodied hands of the twentieth century were not unfamiliar, but ordinary? This hamartia that undercuts modernism is certainly a topic addressed in various chapters of Naomi Klien’s Doppelganger^[24]; a spectacular work of theory that recalls the emergence of a mirror world, which is to say, the introduction of a hyperreality-lite that comes dangerously close to being Baudrillardian if only Klien was to wade a little further still, to plunge into that lifeworld of mirrors without so much as a real to reflect anymore. This is not to rehash Klien’s deep dive on doppelgangers or even mirror worlds but to demonstrate how the contemporary may be shaped by grief and its mirror image in the shape of condolence in a way that turns its back on the hegemon of an absolute melancholia; that ‘fundamental passion’^[25], in the words of Baudrillard, as the failed introduction of another stable point of reference. It is not coincidental that Lain Iwakura is also haunted, throughout the anime, by a doppelganger who is representative of her ecstatic shadow; the ecstatic double of that melancholia which looms large over practically every scene of Serial Experiments Lain.

Returning in a mode of hyperfixation to the mise en scène of an Instagram reel is perhaps heretical to media theory, and yet there is obviously something deeply anthropological in Chahayed’s cover of the Serial Experiments Lain opening, communicated here in the backlit Casio watch of emulation. From Y2K, to CRT, to coil cord landlines exhibiting the same transparency as a Game Boy Color, the equivocal fuzziness inherent to an aesthetics of glow converges with the cyber gyaru (hyper)eschatology of cute accelerationism in Doja Cat’s music video to Agora Hills.^[26] Here, in perhaps an even greater example of glow, the appearance of the cathode-ray monitor is amplified beyond even that of its appearance in the aforementioned Instagram reel since it is in Agora Hills where glow is also contextualised within an entire mise en scène of lava lamps; those period artefacts which once offered a sense of playful anfractuosity to the ebb and flow of temperature, to the warmth of shadows cast by coloured wax. What is important to understand is the holistic aesthetic that Serial Experiments Lain prognosticates is very much hyperstitionalised upon in the “present day, present time”, where the actual content of the anime, both in its cinematography and schizoanalytic consistency, seems perhaps more relevant today than it did in 1998. It is perhaps also worth mentioning how each of the thirteen episodes begins with a cathode-ray fuzziness that resembles William Gibson’s ‘…the color of television, tuned to a dead channel’^[27] where viewers of this late-nineties animation first observe Lain Iwakura’s translucent image within the white noise of analog video.

Of course, watching the opening credit sequence^[28] from the perspective of that “present day, present time” and the static snow on screen evokes certain associations with turn of the century technologies. There is, alongside these technological associations, a striking juxtaposition of a dark and faded imagery with the melancholic yet ever so slightly warmer blues that constitute the washed-out colour palette of the opening sequence. It is within this montaging of suburban Japan, the architecturally significant nonplaces of supermodernity, especially, where the viewer is first introduced to the extradiegetic and aforementioned main title, Duvet by Boa. Situated within those blue hues that recall the artworks of Tsuchiya Koitsu, or perhaps a more tenuous association with the city pop liminality of Hiroshi Nagai, is Lain Iwakura as she turns in motion that resembles a spectral hand having been placed upon her shoulder. It is a motion where those sad and starless eyes that were set upon the urban landscape are now spurred from an instance of quiet contemplation. What’s particularly interesting about Lain is her ambiguity of thought entirely, those moments of mute reflection to which we have no real access. The subtle alterity offered by Lain’s overwhelming equivocation facilitates not only a surface reading as it might relate to a sense of her social alienation but actually places Lain’s thoughts into a distinct category of anti-transparency, opacity.

Before turning from the urban landscape, as she does here, Lain is introduced with a gravitation pull whose intensity is offset only by the sudden appearance of a knitted beanie accented with a cutesy bear design; her face framed by trademark hairclip, an appeal of sorts to the conventions of anime where the nuance of characters’ hair designs often signify something important about their character, for example, in the case of Evangelion then, the gnostic dualism represented by Rei Ayanami’s ice blue and Asuka Langley Soryu’s fiery red. What’s important to Lain’s character however is that she is an unassuming junior high school student – a loner of sorts – perceived by others as still somewhat childlike (as the hairclip might suggest) and, as this opening sequence further alludes, impressed by that androgyny of youth which defines an inward-looking young girl now seen passing through a murder of crows; all the metaphorical implications of those eaters of carrion whose significance point towards a world made already quite cadaverous. The crows depicted here – as such birds tend to be – picking away at the remnants of something dying and soon to be left behind. It is the eschatological tonality of this world ‘falling’ and ‘fading’ not only addressed in the lyrical extradiegetic but very much illustrated in Lain passing through those weary spaces of transition, crossing – as it were – from the residual luminosityof cute into the cold light of tech nihilist becoming, where it is important to acknowledge both Lain’s iconic bear onesie and the tutelary presiding of a plushie decorated window sill as perhaps more successfully prognostic than anything Philip K. Dick could have conjured when it came to this depiction of a bedroomed lifeworld. In the end Lain’s world offers a lived (hyper)eschatology of onesies, plushies and collective nepenthe certainly more contemporarily in-tune than the floating cars we were once promised, but not promised here.

When God died he forgot to take the final judgement with him and because of this the (hyper)eschatological concerns final judgement on our own terms, a hyperreal kind of end of the world with all the hopes and dreams of the sceneodrama de-sited from retributive justice in which there was never enough of God’s wrath to go around anyway. It might yet turn out that on the precipice of our final destiny there was an unquenchable fire half as bad as what we deserved. What is promised in its discernment however, emphasised by both the characteristic equivocation of Lain, alongside the architectural arrangement of this illustratively nonplaced world, is the narrative facilitation of a yet to be fully-defined crisis point we may one day need to cross. Certainly, it is this act of crossing that the opening sequence really evokes, made evident in those spaces of transition the protagonist inhabits, Lain coming to pass both through and under, as seen in the case of a subway underpass, and over, as seen in conclusion upon the motorway bridge.

There are instances in Marc Augé’s work on Supermodernity, with all its references to motorways and spaces of transition, where the late anthropologist comes closer than even Naomi Klien in converging on what should now be considered a thoroughly Baudrillardian position based on theories of transparency and excess. In Augé’s Introduction to the Second Edition^[29], he posits the following:

‘Architecture does transmit in a sense the illusions of the current dominant ideology and plays a part in the aesthetic of transparency and reflection, height and harmony, the aesthetic of distance which, deliberately or not, supports those illusions and expresses the triumph of the system in the main strongholds of the planetary network; but in that very process it acquires a utopian dimension.’^[30] (Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, page 16.)

Augé continues thereafter to write, ‘In its more significant manifestations, architecture seems to allude to a planetary society that is yet to materialize. It suggests the brilliant fragments of a splinted utopia in which we would like to believe, a society of transparency.’^[31] (Emphasis added). Likewise, it was Byung-Chul Han who pursed theories of transparency and excess in The Transparency Society^[32], which provides many additional instances of a society seen in terms of ‘hyperreal over-focus’^[33] (p. 16), operating inside those ‘simulacra without reference’^[34] (p. 40), and held antithetical to ‘strong referentiality’^[35] (p. 39). Although, it is perhaps the aforementioned book on Hyperculture that furthers a reading of Han’s Baudrillardian trajectory tenfold; ‘On the model of the term hyperculturality,’ Han writes, ‘it could be called hyperreality.’^[36] (Hyperculture, p. 36.) It is also within Hyperculture where we find a formulation of the crossing as it relates to contemporary space and that which might help us to understand the significance of Lain’s own allegorical identity within these complex spaces of transition.

In the chapter on ‘Hybrid Cultures’^[37], Han explores hyperculture through the metaphor of the bridge, taking inspiration from Homi K. Bhabha’s ‘metaphor of the stairwell’ which acts as ‘an illustration of the interstitial transition’^[38] that aids the formation of cultural identity. Whilst Bhabha ‘points to Heidegger’s trope of the bridge’^[39], it is Han who puts Bhabha’s interpretation of Heidegger to the test, calling it ‘incomplete’, and therefore distorted. One reading of Han’s contention with this distortion of Heidegger involves its noticeable de-theologisation. To say, Bhabha presents Heidegger as having written ‘The bridge gathers, as a passage that crosses.’ When the original, as Han rightly corrects, reads, ‘The bridge gathers, as a passage that crosses, before the divinities.’^[40] Despite his terse style, (both a parody of religious solemnity and neoliberalism’s obsession with clarity (transparency)), there are implications to Han’s equivocation in the way he possesses the wry tendency to become (hyper)eschatological in scope, concerned with the end of things in the way one might produce a contemplative account of a candle which, having been burnt at both ends, is slowly burning out – exhausted.^[41] Even so, both Baudrillard and Han are deeply equivocal theorists whose works lack an element of moral condemnation which, in today’s environment of saviours the world over, would appear only platitudinal at best and performative at worst; the final judgement never for them to deliver and as such develops as a final judgement that is, significantly, deferred elsewhere. There is an ironic power to passing the buck in this way, where the final judgement becomes, in the end, a ball to be volleyed back at God – or, as is so-often the case with Baudrillard, some kind of demiurgic entity. What is important to the analysis at hand however is Han’s reintroduction of the divine to the ‘bridge [that] gathers, and also assembles all paths ‘before the divinities’.’^[42] (Hyperculture, page 23). ‘The divinities Bhadbha tellingly leaves out when he quotes Heidegger.’ Han adds, tellingly adding the divinities back in on Heidegger’s behalf – or is it his own? Either way, ‘Heidegger’s bridge is ultimately a theological trope.’ Han concludes, with emphasis added, nevertheless addressing ‘Heidegger’s trope of the bridge or the boundary’ as ‘not at all suitable as an illustration of the hybridity of culture or of the world.’^[43] (Hyperculture, page 22). Han continues:

‘In Heidegger, Here and There, inside and outside, one’s own and what is foreign, stand in a relation of dialectical, dialogical tension. Heidegger’s world is determined by a strict symmetry that prevents any hybridity which would create asymmetrical entities. Dialectics, which for Heidegger take the form of dialectics without middle ground, that is, without ‘reconciliation’, do not permit any hybridization of what is different. The hybrid buzzing of voices which penetrate each other, mix with each other and multiply is alien to Heidegger.’^[44] (Hyperculture, page 22).  

Therein, Han rejects Heidegger’s ‘dialectics without middle ground’ whilst also pushing away the de-theologised, antagonistic conception of the dialectical present in Bhabha since it is this antagonistic conception that ‘does not permit’ the ‘playful’^[45] essence inherent to the emergence of hyperculture. Han adequately posits an alternative to both Heidegger and Bhabha then by moving away from a Heideggerian theologisation of the world towards perhaps a neo-theologisation that engenders hybridization whilst simultaneously avoiding Bhabha’s antagonistic dialectics and, perhaps more telling of Han’s own position as a Catholic^[46], the absence of divinities. In other words, Han is placing Heidegger and Bhabha into playful opposition where the crossing is returned to the ‘presencing’ of divinities whilst also accepting Bhabha’s ‘boundary, as a liminal space of transition,’ that neither ‘delimit or excludes’ but rather ‘engenders’^[47] in a way Heidegger’s bridge cannot. Some wish to engender God without saying it directly, just as it seems additionally significant that Lain’s world – like a Neon Genesis Evangelion rich with gnostic symbolism – crosses into the ‘presencing’ of divinities as opposed to their perfectly fashionable negation. The motorway bridge then, standing as Lain’s ‘passage that crosses, before the divinities’ is therefore infinitely more aligned with the hypercultural conception posited by Han than it is the ‘Here and There’ of Heidegger, or Bhabha’s ‘too narrow’ stairwell. Furthermore, ‘The hybrid buzzing of voices which penetrate each other, mix with each other and multiply…’ is additionally significant to the “present day, present time” Serial Experiments Lain recounts since Lain is practically haunted in the washed-out illustrations of transition and liminality by the accompanying buzz of electrical transmission. This is only emphasised by the plain to see symbolic imagery of electricity pylons that makes visible an omnipresent network existing in the open sky of an infinite virtual; an overarching theme introduced in Serial Experiments Lain through the idea of Schumann resonances. Moreover, the mise en scène of Serial Experiments Lain so-often concerns the unnerving isolation of similar ambient noises to that of buzz, whether they are diegetically communicated through the excoriation of a classroom chalkboard or felt in the low hum of bedroom CRT. It is unnerving perhaps in the way sound, like information, is so rarely isolated from its semiotic embeddedness so when noise or a particular scene is isolated-from-context in this manner then the illustration of the bedroom (as is also the case with Agora Hills) or classroom environment becomes thoroughly uncanny^[48] in a way Sigmund Freud might have recognised. In the end what remains intrinsically unsettling under hyperculture is nevertheless reconciled by the very existence of the network itself, normalised under the network-as–nepenthe in which we can today endure the realities of genocide – all manner of evil – within an established network of bad actors and feel nothing. Alternatively, it would seem like a contemporaneously trendy reading to take Lain’s auditory sensitivities, among other things, as the perfect way to regulate her mind to the neoliberal dispositif we call neurodiversity, to present the nepenthe of having seen her, heard her, listened, and benevolently moved on to the next varied perspective with fidgety and progressive restlessness.

Seen from public transport and elsewhere, electricity pylons, saturated with a meshwork of entangled wires as they are so-often presented in Serial Experiments Lain, are frequently observed from windows that also act as a symbolic precursor to a world of screens. A screen is both a window and a crossing, and whether they are presented behind a congregation of plushie toys as is the case of Lain’s bedroomed lifeworld, or find themselves before the pensive stare of her daily commute to and fro from school, windows are everywhere in Serial Experiments Lain. As such, Han’s chapter on ‘Windows and Monads’^[49] (Hyperculture, page 42), is additionally significant in coming to understand Lain as another precursory to hypercultural identity. The very structure of Serial Experiments Lain attempts to achieve that of a ‘hypertextual world’^[50] (Hyperculture, page 43), forgoing the idea of an episodic structure for what the series called Layers. The reader, or viewer, in this case, ‘is no longer thrown into a monochrome structure of meaning and order.’^[51] Writes Han in reference to Ted Nelson’s ‘general emancipation’^[52] (Hyperculture, page 42) of the hypertext, ‘Rather’, Han states, ‘the reader moves actively, lays pathways through the multicoloured space…’^[53] (Hyperculture, page 43). It is the pathway as a self-administered layer, rather than the passive designation of narrative order, and whilst Serial Experiments Lain might have failed at producing a kind of radical alterity to an otherwise episodic structure, it is nevertheless an attempt to emulate something of the hypertext, an attempt to cross over into it. ‘The inhabitant of a hypertextual universe would be a kind of window creature, consisting of windows through which it receives the world.’^[54] (Hyperculture, page 44). Is this not precisely the way in which Lain ‘receives the world’ through both the window of her morning commute to school, and later, in the experience of ‘stepping through’ the ‘Navi’ portal, that is to say, her computer screen. ‘A window actually has two functions.’^[55] Han continues in conclusion then, writing:

‘To begin with, it is an opening to the outside. But it also seals me off against the world. The screen, too, as a kind of window, reveals as well as shields. Windowing can therefore also produce monads, this time monads with windows whose Being-in-the-world turns out to be a Being-before-a-window. In their isolation they come close to the old windowless monads. Will they also have to call on God?’^[56] (Hyperculture, page 45)

Being-before-a-window is certainly the means in which Lain experiences this ‘hypertextual world’, and it is likely due to this windowing – ‘the hypertextual mode of experience’^[57] (Hyperculture, page 44) – where Lain also observes very little in the way of differentiation between the ‘Real World’ and her virtual life in ‘The Wired’, where, as Lain mentions to her father, “The border between the two isn’t all that clear.” The violence the virtual performs on reality was perhaps once entirely recognisable then, exhibited as early as 1998 in the bloodied shadows that accompany the aforementioned illustrations of the nonplace, brilliant white and ever present. It should be mentioned in conclusion how these nonplaces, entirely complicit within a Baudrillardian reading, not only exhibit in ‘supermodernity’ that ‘society of transparency’, as Augé plainly states, but simultaneously come to ‘express its essential quality: excess.’^[58] (Non-Places, page 24). When Lain passes through these spaces of transition, windowing as she goes, it seems clear in the narrative’s fractured – ‘layered’ – progression that Lain is a young girl driven less by the mystery of her classmate’s suicide and more the desire to escape the transparency of a ‘radiant perspective’ beyond glow, driven by her own attempt to ‘call on God.’ 

In theories of transparency, Jean Baudrillard and Byung-Chul Han converge in a critique of the culture that Jun’ichirō Tanizaki once reached In Praise of Shadows^[59] when he wrote of an imminent globalisation made ‘…utterly insensitive to the evils of excessive illumination.’^[60] It was also here where Tanizaki would write that most exquisite line, ‘Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.’^[61] One only has to pass down a corridor of fluorescent lamps on route to the photocopier at work to detect a post-industrialism in favour of excessive illumination let alone that phenomenological quality of our world revealed in the emptiness of its corridors. It is perhaps in Baudrillard then where those excesses Tanizaki recounted as early as 1933 can be extended to best describe the bright implications of those deeply saturated meanings which ‘snatch away from us even the darkness beneath trees that stand deep in the forest…’^[62] scattering shadows and with it the beauty that once swam beneath the stillness of Tanizaki’s ‘dark pond’.^[63]

It is not necessarily the similarities in their theories of positivity, transparency, or overabundance that links these thinkers with the hypercultural conditions explored in Serial Experiments Lain but rather the rejuvenation of negativity as the overarching project of the works mentioned therein. ‘Theory in the strong sense of the word is a phenomenon of negativity[…]’ where, ‘On the basis of such negativity, theory is violent.’^[64] Han writes in The Transparency Society, striking another uncanny resemblance to Baudrillard’s ‘Theoretical violence’^[65] (Simulacra and Simulation, p. 163). It is this rejuvenation of the negative shadow that also runs in anime as hyperstitional theory fiction, the negative essence of Serial Experiments Lain in particular finding exacerbation in a messianic schizophrenia more preferable to the transparent utopia Lain ultimately comes to leave behind in the process of having crossed over completely. There is perhaps no way back for her now. From the politicians who promise to deliver us from the evils of the world to those who promise to deliver us from an earth that, in their minds, cannot abide for ever, it may be the case that this messiah complex, which is exhibited everywhere today, has become the phenomena par excellence of the (hyper)eschatological condition.

 REFERENCES

---

^[1] Baudrillard, Jean. (1990). Fatal Strategies, trans. Philippe Beitchman & W. G. J. Niesluchowski. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). p. 41.
^[2] Mazey, Alex. (2023). Dripvangelion. In: Kent, Aaron & Yallop, Jacqueline. (Eds). Dream Latin, Writing the Subconscious. Cornwall: Broken Sleep Books
^[3] Augé, Marc. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. J. Howe. London: Verso
^[4] SillySeeker Productions. (2022). Dripvangelion, YouTube. Last Updated: 06 February 2022. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLBfTmNdBss Accessed 07 April 2023
^[5] Juliana Chahayed. (2022). rei sings u fly me to the moon [10 hours], YouTube. Last Updated: 07 August 2022. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biy4NbuFu4c Accessed 29 January 2024
^[6] Baudrillard, Jean. (1990). Fatal Strategies, trans. Philippe Beitchman & W. G. J. Niesluchowski. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). p. 106.
^[7] Ibid.
^[8] Neon Genesis Evangelion, 1995, Netflix, Gainax, Tatsunoko, Japan, TV Tokyo, Hideaki Anno
^[9] Baudrillard, Jean. (2013). The Intelligence of Evil: Or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner. London: Bloomsbury Academic
^[10] Ibid.,p. 21.
^[11] Ibid.
^[12] Ibid.
^[13] Fisher, Mark. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? Hampshire: Zero Books
^[14] Baudrillard, Jean. (1990). Fatal Strategies, trans. Philippe Beitchman & W. G. J. Niesluchowski. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). p. 97.
^[15] Han, Byung-Chul. (2022). Hyperculture, trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 51. 
^[16] Ibid., p. 52.
^[17] Baudrillard, Jean. (2013). The Intelligence of Evil: Or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner. London: Bloomsbury Academic. p. 21.
^[18] Han, Byung-Chul. (2022). Hyperculture, trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 51.
^[19] Juliana Chahayed. (2023) lain sings u duvet, YouTube. Last Updated: 13 July 2023. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATd59_wqSJA Accessed 29 January 2024
^[20] Serial Experiments Lain, 1998, Crunchyroll, Triangle Staff, Japan, TV Tokyo, Ryūtarō Nakamura
^[21] Woodward, Ashley. (2009). Nihilism in Postmodernity: Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo. US: The Davies Group
^[22] Ibid., p. 245.
^[23] Ibid., p. 166.
^[24] Klein, Naomi. (2023). Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. UK: Allen Lane
^[25] Baudrillard, Jean. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. US: The University of Michigan Press. p. 162.
^[26] Doja Cat. (2023). Doja Cat – Agora Hills (Official Video), YouTube. Last Updated: 22 September 2023. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c66ksfigtU Accessed 29 January 2024 
^[27] Gibson, William. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace Science Fiction Books
^[28] Stigma. (2015). Serial Experiments Lain – OPENING [VHS], YouTube. Last Updated: 24 July 2015. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlBLcLdTYr4 Accessed 29 January 2024  
^[29] Augé, Marc. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. J. Howe. London: Verso
^[30] Ibid., p. 16.
^[31] Ibid., p. 17.
^[32] Han, Byung-Chul. (2015). The Transparency Society. California: Stanford University Press
^[33] Ibid., p. 16.
^[34] Ibid., p. 40.
^[35] Ibid., p. 39.
^[36] Han, Byung-Chul. (2022). Hyperculture, trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 36.
^[37] Ibid., p. 19.
^[38] Ibid., p. 20.
^[39] Ibid.
^[40] Ibid., p. 21.
^[41] Mazey, Alex. (2023). Are we a burnout society? [Online]. magazine.publicpressure.io. Last Updated: 15 May 2023. Available at: https://magazine.publicpressure.io/are-we-a-burnout-society/ Accessed 29 January 2024
^[42] Han, Byung-Chul. (2022). Hyperculture, trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 23.
^[43] Ibid., p. 22.
^[44] Ibid.
^[45] Ibid., p. 23.
^[46] Han, Byung-Chul. (2021). The Tiredness Virus: Covid-19 has driven us into a collective fatigue. [Online]. The Nation. Last Updated: 12 April 2021. Available at: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/pandemic-burnout-society/ Accessed 29 January 2024
^[47] Han, Byung-Chul. (2022). Hyperculture, trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 20.
^[48] Freud, Sigmund. (1919). Das Unheimliche [The Uncanny], Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works 24 vols, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press
^[49] Han, Byung-Chul. (2022). Hyperculture, trans. Daniel Steuer. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 42.
^[50] Ibid., p. 43.
^[51] Ibid.
^[52] Ibid., p. 42.
^[53] Ibid., p. 43.
^[54] Ibid., p. 44.
^[55] Ibid.
^[56] Ibid., p. 45.
^[57] Ibid., p. 44.
^[58] Augé, Marc. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. J. Howe. London: Verso. p. 24.
^[59] Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. (2001). In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper & Edward G. Seidensticker. London: Vintage Classics
^[60] Ibid., p. 55.
^[61] Ibid., p. 46.
^[62] Ibid., p. 63.
^[63] Ibid., p. 22.
^[64] Han, Byung-Chul. (2015). The Transparency Society. California: Stanford University Press. p. 6.
^[65] Baudrillard, Jean. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. US: The University of Michigan Press. p. 163.