TechOrgy

The ascension and orphic sacrifice of the Beatles in Devin McKinney’s account of their history up until Sgt. Pepper’s casts the band as being a linguistic action, an epic or ritual taking place at a key moment in history, a manifestation of an undercurrent tidal shift, a subterranean dao changing its course. Rising to the aristocratic symbolic authority, they were then sacrificed to the market, the consumers, torn apart by the crowd as idols of distribution. This was finally symbolized by the motif of meat through the interim years of the 1960s, the original cover of Yesterday and Today being the mutilated products of the body of the band, butchered and sold, and the mutilated fans, the convulsing ecstasies of Beatlemania shown in the torn apart dolls. The hidden action this elides is a new form of language emerging in full form. The Beatles were at this time, an industry unto themselves. Music alongside concerts, film, distributed images, merchandise, magazines, dozens of different types of production were put into effect in order to distribute the meat of the Beatles, in a way never before seen. The novelty of this total immersion, this complete orgy of media, is shown in the way its fans were gripped, possessed to psychosis by gorging themselves on the unprecedented bounty of consumable media.

The Daicon IV opening animation shows the character of the animating studio dancing about through a collection of fetishes, characters and icons from other properties contorting in various ways in tune with her step. The studio’s statement is clear. In positioning themselves as the studio of true fandom (the OVA Otaku no Video being emblematic of this myth), they are both the producers and the consumers. The bunnygirl produces the entire product, being the mascot of the enterprise, while at the same time being the consumer, perusing her own animation as if it were a gallery of products arrayed in an Akihabara otaku-merchandise store. In this opening, the characters are arrayed using the typical narratological arrangement of anime characters, as demonstrated in the Fate series, where historical figures are expressed as fetishistic objects, circulated through the franchise, consumed as their own individual items, such as in merchandise or the cards of the gacha game. Additionally present is the hidden knowledge of the ways in which these products must be sought out. At the time of Daicon IV, it was primitive, the variety of older and western media across comics, movies, television, music, etc, shows the otaku as an explorer secondly and a consumer firstly, a very sophisticated and wide-reaching consumer. This same concept is carried on, inherited by current otaku franchises such as Fate, where the multiple consumption is consolidated not only upon a single point, the otaku, but from a single source, the franchise. Fate encompasses television, visual novels, mobage, movies, OVA, merchandise… In order to fully ingratiate oneself into the Fate franchise, one has to engage with the central authority across multiple channels of distribution.

What did the Beatles recognize, in their tearing apart? The orphic death here didn’t come at the hands of a thousand grasping hands, it came at the hands of the Beatles themselves, arranging the photo symbolic of their position in an English studio. The product originates from a single source and is then fractured artificially, spread across as a franchise down a variety of channels of distribution, converging again in pieces, at the hands of the consumer. That this drove the fans into fits and ecstasies is no accident. This form of media exists as a celebration of technology in and of itself. No wonder then, is the Daicon IV opening so preoccupied with western media, its creators unconsciously recognized their otakudom as being descended form a mode of technological consumption that originated with post-war NATO technocracy. These franchises exist not as works of art, but as orgies of technology, celebrations by the machine, showing the multiplicitous ways in which it can spread itself out, flexing its muscles by engaging all engines of production at its disposal to create and recreate over and over, one single symbol.