English Edition｜The Wavering of Individuation and the Letting-Go of Identity — On MyGO!!!!! and Ave Mujica

~The “Weak” Autonomy of a New Generation~
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Note on the English Edition

This is the English edition of an essay first written in Japanese. A few conventions hold throughout. Page references to theoretical sources are given for the editions the author actually consulted — in several cases Japanese translations — and are retained as such rather than converted to other editions. Technical terms are restored to their original languages (French, English) on first appearance and glossed where useful. Song titles use gikun — kanji assigned readings unrelated to their ordinary sense — and are glossed on first appearance. Song lyrics and in-work dialogue are never reproduced verbatim; their sense is paraphrased and marked “(paraphrase).” Character, band, and song names are romanized. The first-person pronoun boku (僕) is kept untranslated where its specificity matters, since the movement 〈boku〉→〈bokura〉 (I → we) is load-bearing in the argument.

Introduction: Scope, Method, Theoretical Handles

1. Scope — Not Criticism of a Girls-Band Anime

This essay does not read MyGO!!!!! and Ave Mujica as internal criticism of the girls-band-anime genre. It reads them as criticism of a response — by way of fiction — to problems that people in contemporary Japanese society actually face. There are two such problems: people for whom holding a unified self has become difficult, and people exhausted by the economy of recognition. The two works are positioned as one precise fictional response to these two problems.

2. Method — Observation-Driven

This essay adopts an observation-driven order. It begins from the description of material detail — shot, timecode, spatial arrangement, sound, color, editing — draws hypotheses from it, and only at the end connects to theoretical concepts. Theory is never mobilized in advance of observation. Each chapter preserves this order internally as well: theoretical handles appear only as the connection points for hypotheses drawn from observation. Every concept mobilized is grounded in a primary source, with its provenance, its original context of use, and its redefinition within this essay made explicit. The authorial intention indicated by a director’s interview (Kakimoto Kōdai, Megami Magazine, May 2025, p. 31) is not mobilized as grounds for observation, so as to avoid retroactively justifying the work; the interview is treated as material of a separate order from observation.
The method of this essay aligns neither with a reading that takes authorial intention as the work’s true meaning (interpretation-as-speculation) nor with one that erases the author and treats only the autonomy of the text (text-centrism). The former seeks the right answer in the director’s interview; the latter closes the image off as a sign-system severed from any author. What this essay observes is the surplus of filmic matter — a surplus reducible to no single author’s intention (Sanzigen, the director, the screenwriter, the music) and yet not dissolved into the author’s absence either〔1〕.

3. Theoretical Handles — Three Layers and One Interface, Without Integration

The theoretical handles of this essay consist of three layers and one interface. On the ontological layer it places at the center Simondon’s metastability, the pre-individual, and dephasing (déphasage); it uses Maki Yūsuke’s The Origin of the Self〔2〕 as a connector from that ontology to the problem of the “self” in contemporary Japanese society, and Combes’s reading of transindividuation in Simondon as an auxiliary line in the bodily register. On the semiotic layer it places Kristeva’s subject in process / on trial (sujet en procès), the semiotic (le sémiotique), the chora, and the thetic (thétique). At the interface between the semiotic and social layers it places Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion. On the social layer it places Butler’s performativity and the central concepts of Uno Tsunehiro’s The Garden (platform versus garden, withdrawal from the game of mutual evaluation, weak autonomy).
What matters is not to integrate these layers philosophically. The driving principle of each differs — Simondon’s non-negative dephasing, Kristeva’s negativity-driven thetic, Barrett’s constructivism, Butler’s negativity-driven citation. At the Simondon–Kristeva interface in particular, having fixed the interface term to pre-articulate rhythm and vibration, the difference in their tenses (the pre-individual as a surplus oriented toward the future; the chora as the trace of a past posited retroactively) and the difference in their driving principles are preserved as heterogeneity, not bracketed. What this essay attempts is not integration but the layering of the multiple descriptions that heterogeneous layers give to the same matter, with their differences kept intact.

4. Distinguishing Four Words

“Self,” “individual,” “subject,” and “identity” are not used interchangeably. “Self” (jiga) is vocabulary from Maki Yūsuke’s The Origin of the Self, carrying an evolutionary-biological and sociological thickness. “Individual” (kotai) is the translation of Simondon’s individu, cutting ontologically across the physical, the organic, and the psychic. “Subject” (shutai) is the translation of Kristeva’s sujet, bearing a psychoanalytic and semiotic processuality. “Identity” is the translation of Butler’s identity, designating a sociological and performative construct.

5. Three Precautions in Mobilization

First, the mobilization of Barrett includes a critical extension beyond the reach of her original text. Barrett’s view of the subject leans toward the legally responsible subject (Chapter 11), but this essay reads the chain of bodil
y movement and prediction-change in musical performance (Chapter 9), together with emotional communication and social influence (Chapter 7), as a bridge from musical subjectivity to social subjectivity. This is the essay’s own extension, an operation beyond the original’s reach. Relatedly, Barrett’s recurring meta-thesis that “change is the norm” resonates with the metastability — the perpetually wavering phase — established in Chapter 6 of the preceding essay (“change is the norm” appears in Chapter 13; Takahashi Hiroshi’s translation, How Emotions Are Made, Kinokuniya Shoten, 2019).
Second, the mobilization of Butler is restricted to the speech-act-theoretical register of Excitable Speech; the gender-specific portions of Gender Trouble are not mobilized. This is to prevent, from within the criticism itself, the hasty reduction of this essay’s argument about subject-formation to a gendered reading.
Third, the “device that reflects” (the mirror) that this essay treats does not reflect an image but generates one. It is therefore not recuperated into Lacan’s mirror stage — the site of misrecognition through reflection (that Kristeva’s thetic derives from Husserl’s thèse / Setzung also serves to avert this recuperation).

6. Inheritance from the Preceding Essay, and This Essay’s Question

This essay is the inheritance and development of the preceding essay, On Ave Mujica: Mask, Mirror, and the Continuity of the Floor. That essay converged, through two mediations (the visual layer and the acoustic layer), on the metastability of individuation, and opened one question at its close: why did the wavering of individuation require two different filmic forms?
This essay answers that question as a two-axis inversion. In a present where holding a unified self has become difficult, MyGO!!!!! and Ave Mujica stage — upon a shared metastable substrate called the wavering of individuation, and using the relation to performed identity (role, mask, puppet theater, mimicry) as their medium — mutually inverting responses along two axes, the individual and the communal. The Mutsumi-type (Ave) occupies the negative pole of both axes, dissolving the individual into nothing and annihilating the communal. The Tomori-type (MyGO) occupies the positive pole of both axes, relinquishing social legibility so that an irreducible 〈boku〉 (“I”) stands erect, and re-binding the communal out of collapse. As for why these two works and not others: it rests on the material fact that both works share one and the same collapse — the collapse of CRYCHIC — and that Sakiko Togawa and Mutsumi Wakaba straddle both works (detailed in the Conclusion, §4). Temporality and structurality are not the essence of this inversion but its formal signature. The chapters that follow build this thesis up, step by step, from observation.

Chapter 1. The Substrate — 〈the wavering of individuation〉: relational and transindividual

（Avemujica 　#7）

What we place at the substrate is the wavering of individuation. It is not a property residing inside an isolated individual; it occurs within the relation to others, and it propagates to those who watch. This chapter reads the origin, the propagation, and the signature of this wavering materially, in three scenes from Ave Mujica. The wavering materializes most overtly on the Ave side; the MyGO-side wavering — Tomori’s trembling voice, the not-knowing that grasps neither the right answer nor the ordinary — is carried by the material of Chapters 3 and 4. We first erect the substrate from Ave’s unambiguous matter, and the two figure-chapters then set both works upon it.

1. Origin — a longing sealed in

Episode 7, Mutsumi’s room. Across the mirror, Mutsumi pleads to be allowed to see Sakiko, and Mortis refuses, casting the refusal as protection — she is, she says, protecting her. The origin of the wavering lies here: a longing for the other (Sakiko) is sealed in. The instability of individuation appears not as a solitary psychology but as the tension between an orientation toward the absent other and the force that seals it off.

2. Propagation — it happens through watching, and is reciprocated by “me too”

（Avemujica 　#10）

Episode 10, the play-within-the-play. As Mutsumi/Mortis calls each member up by her role name, only Nyamu does not respond. Awakened by a stroke of her hair, Nyamu dilates her pupils, sways from side to side, lips trembling, seizes Mutsumi/Mortis by the chest, and confesses in a tear-choked voice an impossible love — that she loves but cannot love enough, that she is not loved (the tears are not shown). Mutsumi/Mortis answers, “me too.”

From here a hypothesis is drawn. Nyamu’s wavering — the question what am I — occurs, in this confession, through watching Mutsumi/Mortis, and is reciprocated by “me too.” The wavering does not complete itself within one person; it travels back and forth between the one who watches and the one who is watched. The wavering of individuation is relational, and it is shared across subjects. Yet this “me too” must not be read as maternal mutual acceptance. The one who utters it is the figure that seals in under the name of protection (Mutsumi/Mortis), and what Nyamu confesses is an impossible love — to love without being able to love enough, to be unloved. Transindividual propagation is staged not as the consummation of a healthy, unconditional acceptance, but as the exchange of an impossible love through the figure of sealing-in.

3. Signature — the ambiguity itself

Signature designates, here, an identifiable appearance through which the observer correlates the material of the image — lighting, contour, the motion of the mirror surface, the direction of motion — with a phase-state of individuation and its axial position (hereafter, signature). It is not a sign that a subject leaves behind in the expressivist sense, nor the cause (essence) that produces the work’s differences. It is the correlate of a procedure by which the observer reads matter and correlates it with a phase-state. The signature here is independent of Derrida’s signature and of the trace of différance, and equally of an indexical semiotics premised on causal contact (Peirce; Barthes’s “ça a été”).

Episode 13, the ED, the hand mirror. The mirror image goes pale and hollow just before the smile, then turns into the smile and gains its contour. This motion may be read as “a being-about-to-be-born,” or as “the surfacing of a residue = trace”; matter permits both equally. The signature of the wavering is this very undecidability. That the image does not settle to one side — that it can be read as a tension oriented forward and as the return of a past trace alike — is the material endorsement that the substrate is metastable.

4. Hypothesis

The wavering of individuation is, first, relational (its origin is a longing for the absent other and the sealing-in of that longing). Second, it is transindividual (Nyamu’s wavering occurs through watching Mutsumi/Mortis and is reciprocated by “me too” — the wavering propagates between subjects). Third, its signature is undecidable (the ambiguity of the hand mirror is not an insufficiency to be resolved one way or the other, but the very mode of being of the wavering). This substrate is shared by both works. On the MyGO side, the not-knowing of Tomori — who grasps neither the right answer nor the ordinary — and her trembling voice implement the same metastability in different matter. And that the wavering is transindividual — that it travels between subjects — is also a potential for the individual to open toward others and toward the formation of a group. But that is not the necessity of becoming-community. The same transindividuality, depending on the polarity of the axis, leads a group toward re-binding or toward annihilation alike. The matter of that branching is carried by Chapter 4 (Utakotoba (詩超絆) = the positive pole of re-binding / communal annihilation = the negative pole).

5. Connecting the theoretical handle

The wavering of the substrate can be described as the metastability (métastabilité) that Simondon formulated. The characters’ subjectivity is implemented as a third state, neither stable nor unstable — a perpetually wavering phase. This essay mobilizes the concept restricted to psychic individuation (taking Fujii Chikayo’s supervised translation, The Philosophy of Individuation, Hōsei University Press, as the reference standard).

What materializes in the scene of origin (Episode 7, the sealed-in longing) is what Simondon calls the pre-individual (le pré-individuel). It is an unresolved tension carried over within the individual, a surplus oriented toward the future that drives, as potential, the formation of the transindividual (le transindividuel). When Mutsumi’s longing for Sakiko is sealed in under the name of protection, that longing is neither dissolved nor realized; it is retained within the individual as tension. Grasping is the gesture of clenching a pre-individual tension while it remains unresolved.

The scene of propagation (Episode 10, Nyamu’s “me too”) connects to Kristeva’s sujet en procès (the subject in process / on trial). Procès bears the double sense of process and trial: the subject is on the way of its formation and, at the same time, ceaselessly on trial before the other. Nyamu’s wavering (what am I) occurs through watching Mutsumi/Mortis and is reciprocated by “me too.” This phase, in which the wavering travels back and forth between subjects, this essay describes as the interface term of the Simondon–Kristeva interface — a pre-articulate rhythm / vibration. Nyamu’s bodily-affective register — dilated pupils, trembling lips, a tear-choked voice — corresponds to the layer that Combes’s reading of transindividuation in Simondon (taking the MIT Press English translation as reference standard) describes, reading the pre-individual as “active metastability.”

（Avemujica 　#7）

The scene of signature (Episode 13, the ambiguity of the hand mirror) materializes the heterogeneity of this interface itself. If the motion from hollow to smile is read as “being-about-to-be-born,” it corresponds to Simondon’s pre-individual — an unresolved tension oriented toward the future. If the same motion is read as “the surfacing of a residue = trace,” it corresponds to Kristeva’s chora (chora; deriving from Plato’s Timaeus 52A–B; made explicit in a note) — a site posited retroactively as what was repressed once the subject was constituted. The two point in opposite tenses (the pre-individual = a future-oriented surplus / the chora = retroactive, past-trace). And in driving principle they are opposite too (dephasing = déphasage is non-negative becoming; the thetic = thétique is negativity-driven; the thetic derives from Husserl’s thèse / Setzung, and equation with Lacan’s mirror stage is avoided, made explicit in a note). This essay does not philosophically integrate the two. That the ambiguity of the hand mirror does not settle to one side — that itself is the material endorsement that the two heterogeneous registers of the interface are preserved without being bracketed. The signature of the wavering is this preserved heterogeneity.

Chapter 2. The Medium Layer — 〈the relation to performed identity〉: the generating mirror, and three relations to performance

The wavering of the substrate always appears through some medium. That medium is performed identity — role, mask, puppet theater, mimicry. The wavering never appears raw; it takes shape only through the relation to performed identity. This chapter describes the medium layer along two pillars. The first pillar is the device that reflects; the second is puppet theater and role names, and the three relations to performance.

1. First pillar — the device that “reflects” generates rather than reflects

（Avemujica 　#13）

The dressing-table mirror in Episode 7 gives birth to Mutsumi’s image. In the shards of broken glass, Mortis herself is reflected in fragments; repression shatters the self-image. In the unbroken hand mirror of Episode 13, only the mirror image moves autonomously while the body behind it stays still, and a whole semblance is born. What matters is that the mirror is not reflecting here. It does not capture the still body behind it; it generates an image independent of the body. This device is therefore not the site of Lacan’s mirror stage, where misrecognition between image and self occurs. It is a generative membrane of sealing-in, a medium that gives birth to something on its far side and confines it there. From the fragmented mirror image of Mortis (Episode 7) to the whole semblance born of the unbroken hand mirror (Episode 13), the arc of mirror-and-image is read not as a theme of reflection but as a theme of generation.

2. Second pillar — puppet theater, role names, and three relations to performance

（Avemujica 　Eight awn star　Dance）

Ave Mujica mediates identity as puppet theater〔3〕. The puppet-dance music that plays at the scene of the mirror’s destruction in Episode 7 is the same piece as the theater in which Mutsumi performed thirteen puppets in Episode 3; Mutsumi, who once performed puppets, is now sealed in like a puppet on the far side of the mirror. In the Episode 10 play-within-the-play, each member is called up by a role name. The role names — Doloris, Timoris, Amoris, Oblivionis, and Mortis — are the genitive singular forms of the Latin nouns for grief, fear, love, oblivion, and death (dolor, timor, amor, oblivio, mors)〔11〕. Because the case is genitive, each name is read not as the affect itself but as “[the mask] of grief,” “of fear,” “of love,” “of oblivion,” “of death”: the persona belongs to, or is possessed by, the affect it bears. The calling-up by role name (Episode 10) thus summons each member into a mask defined by a genitive bond to an affect, and the puppet-theatrical mediation of identity is, at the level of naming, the placing of a body under the possession of an affect.

The relation to performed identity divides, on observation, into three types. The first is the Mutsumi-type — dissolution by role. Mutsumi/Mortis wears the role expressionlessly and disappears (part of the collective expressionlessness of the Episode 13 “eight-pointed-star dance,” not a singular, salient mark). The second is the Tomori-type — the renunciation of mimicry: the relinquishing of being socially legible (the turn away from the external norm seen in zone D in Chapter 3). The third is the Nyamu-type — the one who performs knowingly. Nyamu does not answer the calling of the role names (Episode 10, resistance to the summons of the role), and yet, inside the frame of performance, she erupts with the rawest affect, and in Episode 13 she winks toward the audience / the camera. A third relation to performance, distinct both from the Mutsumi-type that wears the role and disappears and from the Tomori-type that discards mimicry. The Uika-type — the constructive type that throws itself into the role to build a relation — is, however, reserved as an intended margin of the medium layer in this essay and sent to the brief for a subsequent essay.

3. The multiplication of masks

The diffusion of “Kao〜AlterEgo〜,” set aside and reserved out of the individual axis in Chapter 3, belongs here. The movement by which a single body cycles through many personae that Mutsumi alone never shows — expressionlessness, a wink, a fearless smile, bewilderment and anger — is not a phenomenon of the individual axis in which the individual dissolves into nothing, but a phenomenon of the medium layer in which performed identity proliferates from one to many: the multiplication of masks. The Mutsumi-type not only disappears by role but also proliferates many performed faces within a single body. Dissolution (individual axis, negative pole) and multiplication (medium layer) belong to different registers, and the two must not be integrated as “both being roads to nothing.” With this, the axial belonging of the diffusion is settled.

4. Hypothesis

The medium layer is the layer in which the wavering is mediated as the relation to performed identity. The device that reflects works as generation rather than reflection (a generative membrane of sealing-in); puppet theater and role names mediate identity; the relation to performance divides into the Mutsumi-, Tomori-, and Nyamu-types; and the mask can multiply within a single body. The wavering of the substrate always passes through this medium to appear as figure. The raw wavering of individuation never appears on screen.

5. Connecting the theoretical handle — the reiteration of role, and the erupting semiotic

The observations of the medium layer connect to two theoretical handles.

First, the relation to performed identity — the calling by role name (Episode 10), mediation as puppet theater (Episodes 3 and 7), the reiteration of role — is described as citation and performativity, as Butler discussed them (citation; Takemura Kazuko’s translation of Excitable Speech, Iwanami Shoten, 2004). Identity is not a substance that exists in advance, but the effect of the citation and reiteration of norms. When Ave Mujica calls its members up by role name, when Mutsumi performs puppets (Episode 3) and is now again sealed into a performed identity like a puppet on the far side of the mirror (Episode 7), identity is rising upon a medium that is cited and reiterated. But which of reiteration, failure, or refusal this citation tends toward, according to polarity — those three modes are described in the two figure-chapters (Chapter 3 §6, Chapter 4 §5), axis by axis. What the medium layer establishes is exhausted in this: that identity appears only through a medium of citation and reiteration — that the relation to performed identity is the site of citation.

Second, the raw affect of Nyamu erupting inside the frame of performance — dilated pupils, trembling lips, a tear-choked voice (the Episode 10 confession) — is described as an eruption of Kristeva’s semiotic (le sémiotique; Harada Kunio’s translation of Revolution in Poetic Language, Part I, Keisō Shobō, 1991, Chapter I §2, p. 15). Nyamu does not answer the calling of the role names — a non-compliance with the summons of the role, that is, with le symbolique. But the body that does not answer thrusts up a pre-articulate affect, prior to becoming speech. Inside the frame of le symbolique that is the role, a bodily-affective rhythm not recuperated by it erupts. This phase, this essay places at the same interface that the preceding essay mobilized at the collapse of Mutsumi/Mortis’s mask — “the gap between language and affect” (the discrepancy between le sémiotique and le symbolique) — and describes as Nyamu’s eruption.

Third, as for the device that reflects: as confirmed in §1, that it generates rather than reflects is stated at the level of theoretical introduction. Since the mirror image does not capture the body behind it but generates an image independent of the body, this device is not recuperated into the site of misrecognition between image and self = Lacan’s mirror stage. That Kristeva’s thetic (thétique; Harada’s translation, Chapter I §5, pp. 36–37) derives from Husserl’s thèse / Setzung (made explicit in a note) also supports this avoidance. The mirror of the medium layer is read not as a structure of misrecognition but as a generative membrane of sealing-in.

Chapter 3. The Figure, Individual Axis — the pole that grasps and scatters, and the figure that remains on the ground

The individual axis stands on the origin and reiteration of the negative imperative 〈do-not〉 as its spine. At one pole (the Mutsumi-type), the clenching imperative multiplies its voices with each reiteration, until it unclenches the grasping hand itself and drops the subject into nothing. At the other pole (the Tomori-type), being socially legible is relinquished, and yet an individual that does not vanish stands erect as figure. This chapter first describes the series of the negative imperative materially, then describes the inversion of the two poles as a difference of figure-and-ground and of finality, and finally connects this inversion to the theoretical handles.

1. The central axis — the origin and reiteration of the negative imperative 〈do-not〉

(Ave Mujica #7)

The origin is Episode 7, Mutsumi’s room. Across the dressing-table mirror, the mirror-image Mortis is in front and Mutsumi is “on the far side of the mirror.” Mutsumi puts her hand to the boundary line and pleads to be allowed to see Sakiko; Mortis refuses and commands Mutsumi to silence. What deserves attention is that the command is justified as protection — sealing-in is spoken as guardianship. Mutsumi’s hand reaches across the boundary toward the real side, and, lit by moonlight, its shadow falls for an instant onto the real (a partial transgression). Shaken, Mortis swings and breaks the mirror, and the shards reflect Mortis’s own head, arm, and waist in fragments. What is playing is the same puppet-dance music as the scene in Episode 3 where Mutsumi performed thirteen puppets. The command of silence is here uttered upon the music of puppet theater.

The reiteration is Episode 9, Ikebukuro Sunshine City and the mental world that follows it. The negative imperative here changes shape into 〈do-not-take〉 and is reiterated three times. But with each reiteration, what is not to be taken away shifts. The first time, in a delusion in the real, Uika cries it in the singular, and its object is a person (Sakiko). The second time, immediately after, in the mental world, Mutsumi utters it in the singular amid a struggle over a guitar, and the object shifts to an instrument (the guitar). The third time, in the mental world, a giant shadow of Mutsumi reiterates it as simultaneous high-and-low multiple voices, and the object is again the instrument (the guitar). Although the object moves from person to instrument, the grammar of grasping — of not letting something be taken — alone is kept isomorphic (this connects to the medium-layer point that the instrument = the materialization of performing subjectivity). With each reiteration a railing is destroyed, Mutsumi falls backward into the dark, and a pareidolia-like proliferation of the Mutsumi/Mortis swarm raises a cheer. The speaking subject swells from Uika to Mutsumi, from the singular Mutsumi to a giant shadow of multiple voices, and the grammatical subject mutates from “Wakaba Mutsumi” into the fused body of “Wakaba Mutsumi/Mortis.”

2. The Mutsumi-type negative pole — dissolution

(Ave Mujica #10)
The end point of the arc of the negative imperative is the Mutsumi-type negative pole. Episode 10, “Imprisoned XII,” becomes the starting point of dissolution. A persona that had been substance (3D) shifts into contour (2D). This shift is presented not as a continuous fade within a single shot but as a cut-to-cut switch — Mutsumi first becomes contour, then in the next cut Mortis too becomes contour only, the two mutually contour-ized, embrace and press their foreheads together, then sink into the dark / the water’s bottom at the lower part of the screen. What remains is the sole substance still kept: the 3D guitar. What occurs here is the sinking by which the figure (the persona as substance) is swallowed into the ground (the dark, the water’s bottom), and contour-ization is its transitional state. And the dissolution itself occurs in the mental world (unseen); onto the real stage it surfaces in a heard-but-unseen manner — as the change in the guitar’s tone right after the return, and as the surprise of Umiri and the dumbfoundedness of Nyamu who notice it.

https://youtu.be/1_0LTMNKYGo?t=4

In the Episode 13 ED hand-mirror cut (26:05–26:08), this sinking is folded into a single cut. The body behind raises the gold-framed hand mirror to eye level; the mirror image, just before the smile, goes pale and its contour hollows, and at 26:07 it turns into the smile and the contour clarifies. Only the mirror image moves; on the body behind, no perceptible motion is found during these roughly three seconds (26:05–26:08). The lighting register is identical to the end of Episode 2, “Hateru” (to expire), and immediately after, the lighting drops, the body goes dark, and at screen center it switches to Uika in Ave Mujica costume. The figure tilts toward the ground (black background, red bokeh).

(The diffusion in the same Episode 13 “Kao〜AlterEgo〜,” in which many confident, fearless personae cycle through a single body, was settled in Chapter 2 as belonging to the medium-layer “multiplication of masks.” The negative pole of the individual axis is here described in the single series of dissolution.)

3. The Tomori-type positive pole — standing erect

(MyGO!!!!! #12)
Against this, the Tomori-type positive pole is concentrated in Episode 12, “Mayoiuta” (迷星叫, read mayoiuta)〔4〕. At the opening a frame is set — the former owner (Raana’s grandmother) saying that the child has found her place — before the performance begins. In the second verse, the countless glowsticks scattered across the darkened audience contrast the external norm that is sinking away with the 〈I of now〉 who looks ahead. At the position of the second chorus, 〈boku ni naru〉 (“I become 〈boku〉”), Tomori (and Soyo) blur once and then clarify into contour, holding the mic in the left hand and pressing the chest with the right, eyes closed, then face the audience again. In the final chorus, from a backlit single figure she goes to the whole face lit by strong light and, without dissolving into the group, sings to the audience = “you.” There is no trembling; after the refrain too, the cry is stable. And the terminus resolves in two beats. The first beat: after the reverberation of the performance’s end, pale-blue stage light dyes the whole screen blue, the five members stand at equal intervals in full figure, all pale-blue, but only their contours remain white while everything else sinks to black (super-long shot, backlit, cool color, lit area about 25%, deep shadow). Here cool color goes to the ground (the screen-wide blue / black), and the white contour is drawn out of the ground as figure. The second beat: the immediately following cut — a super-close-up of Tomori from forehead to upper chest (frontlit, warm color, lit area over 75%, shadow shallow, only under the jaw and at the neck, constant light). From the backlit, cool, low-lit group image to the frontlit, warm, high-lit single Tomori. The terminus resolves, by way of the drawing-out of the pale-blue contour (first beat), into the persistence of the warm, frontlit Tomori (second beat).

4. Hypothesis — the pole that grasps and scatters, and the figure that remains on the ground

The grammar of the negative imperative 〈do-not〉 is, throughout, grasping. The gesture of clenching: do-not-lose, do-not-let-go. At the origin it takes the form of the sealing-in of silence (do-not-speak), in the shape of a domination disguised as protection; in the reiteration it takes the form of the assertion of possession (do-not-take), reiterated while swelling from a singular voice to multiple voices. Grasping, the more it clenches, multiplies its voices and scatters the subject from the singular into the plural. And this arc of grasping — the sealing-in of silence (Episode 7) → the swelling of possession (Episode 9) → dissolution (Episode 10) — in the end unclenches the grasping hand itself, thins substance into contour, and sinks the figure into the ground. The Mutsumi-type negative pole is the self-collapse of the arc of grasping. To grasp becomes to scatter, and at last to fall.

But to these two differences that constitute the inversion, one more asymmetry, not contained by the inversion, is appended: the presence or absence of the register of death. The Mutsumi-type ED hand mirror is cool-colored and constant-lit, and resonates, in coolness, with the end of Episode 2, “Hateru” (backlit, cool) — the light-source direction and lit-area ratio differ between the two, but the coolness of color temperature is shared. Dissolution wears this cool lighting, and moreover the ED hand mirror is followed immediately by a darkening and the replacement of the subject by Uika — it entails the erasure of the image. Against this, the terminus of Mayoiuta resolves into a different lighting regime. The group image (first beat) is backlit, cool, low-lit and adjacent to “Hateru,” but the terminus does not remain there; the immediately following close-up of Tomori (second beat) is frontlit, warm, lit area over 75%, constant light, and forms a lighting regime distinct from the “Hateru” series that ends in cool color. The Mutsumi-type sinks into the ground under cool lighting (the ED hand mirror further entailing the erasure of the image), while the Tomori-type persists as figure under warm, frontlit lighting. This asymmetry — a dissolution that ends in cool color and erasure, and a standing-erect that ends in warmth and persistence — counsels reserve about reading the two poles as “the positive and negative of one and the same axis,” and opens the possibility that they are two phenomena of different qualities: a dissolution haunted by death, and a standing-erect that lacks death. This essay preserves that reserve.

https://youtu.be/B8k6JtF6WrU?list=RDB8k6JtF6WrU
What the Tomori-type positive pole relinquishes is not depicted as a single act of discarding mimicry. What is relinquished is social legibility — it is placed within the contrast, in Mayoiuta’s second verse, between the external norm that is sinking away and the 〈I of now〉 who looks ahead. A departure from being read as the right answer or the ordinary occurs, and at the end of that departure, an individual that remains as figure rather than vanishing is confirmed in the second chorus 〈boku ni naru〉 and in the contour-retention of the terminus. What is relinquished is social legibility; what remains is the irreducible 〈boku〉. Yet this standing-erect is not self-grounding. Mayoiuta is framed at the opening by the external frame of the former owner (Raana’s grandmother) — that the child has found her place — and the irreducible 〈boku〉 stands with the blessing of the other as its ground. The standing-erect cannot be read as pure heroic individualism. This is a friction corresponding to the blessing-frame of Utakotoba, and the asymmetry by which the Mutsumi-type is pathologized and the Tomori-type idealized is leveled by this reserve. Against the Mutsumi-type that keeps uttering the negative imperative and at last unclenches its grasp and scatters, the Tomori-type utters no negative imperative — what Mayoiuta places is an affirmation, not a grasping command. The inversion can here also be written as the pair of the negative imperative (grasping) / affirmation (standing-erect).

https://youtu.be/QkG7tIGYgSw?list=RDQkG7tIGYgSw


Finally, let us limit the scope of this settlement. What Mayoiuta establishes is exhausted in this: that there is a positive pole on the individual axis — that there exists a phase in which the individual remains as figure without being swallowed into the ground. The internal ambiguity of the touchstone (the hand mirror) — whether the motion from hollow to smile is read as “being-about-to-be-born” or as “the surfacing of a residue” — is not closed here. The line of Chapter 1, which places the signature of the substrate at “the wavering itself,” is preserved. Mayoiuta does not decide the meaning of the touchstone’s image; by showing that there is a pole that remains as figure on the individual axis, it fixes only the polarity of the axis.

5. Connecting the theoretical handle — the two registers of the interface

The inverting pair of the individual axis gives material, respectively, to the two heterogeneous registers of this interface.

At the Mutsumi-type negative pole — the self-collapse of the arc of grasping — metastability collapses toward one pole. The grasping of the negative imperative 〈do-not〉 keeps clenching a pre-individual tension, swells the singular voice into multiple voices with each reiteration (Episode 9), and at last unclenches the grasping hand itself, thins substance into contour, and sinks the figure into the ground (Episodes 10 and 13). This collapse is shot through with negativity. Whereas Simondon’s dephasing is non-negative becoming, the Mutsumi-type dissolution is a grasping that, having kept answering “do not lose” within the trial, self-collapses and falls into nothing — a negativity-driven movement. This essay therefore describes the Mutsumi-type dissolution by leaning it toward the register, within the interface, that Kristeva formulated — negativity-driven and retroactive. The pre-articulate rhythm / vibration here dissolves.

At the Tomori-type positive pole — the figure that remains from the ground — the wavering stops, at one pole, as figure. The relinquishing of social legibility (Mayoiuta’s second verse, the turn away from the external norm) can be described, in Kristeva’s vocabulary, as the cessation of the response to the trial of procès — the other’s trial that demands one be legible. And what remains as figure after ceasing to answer the trial, the irreducible 〈boku〉, corresponds to the phase in which Simondon’s pre-individual surplus stands oriented toward standing-erect rather than toward vanishing. This is the register on the side of non-negative dephasing. This essay therefore describes the Tomori-type standing-erect by leaning it toward the register, within the interface, that Simondon formulated — non-negative and future-oriented.

Here let us forestall a misreading that the bibliography-police would instantly seize on. This correspondence — leaning the Mutsumi-type dissolution toward the negativity-driven register, the Tomori-type standing-erect toward the non-negative register — is a correspondence of critical operation, not a theoretical identification. To read Mutsumi as a Kristevan subject and Tomori as a Simondonian subject — adjectival recuperation — is prohibited. The interface remains open and preserved; the two registers find material at the work’s two poles, but no third image that integrates them exists. What guarantees the absence of that integration is Chapter 1’s signature = the ambiguity of the hand mirror, and it is for this reason that the meaning of the touchstone’s image is left undecided. Mayoiuta establishes only that there exists, on the individual axis, a pole that remains as figure; it does not close the ambiguity of the hand mirror to one side. The inverting pair stages the two registers of the interface, but the interface itself is preserved as undecidable.

6. Connecting the theoretical handle — the social layer (the reiteration, failure, and refusal of citation)

At the outset of theoretical introduction, one point is made explicit. This essay restricts the mobilization of Butler to the speech-act-theoretical register of Excitable Speech; the gender-specific portions of Gender Trouble (the feminism argument of its first chapter, most of the embodiment argument of its third) are not mobilized. This is to prevent, from within the criticism, the hasty reduction of this essay’s argument about subject-formation to a gendered reading or to the critical scope of yuri studies.

The arc of grasping of the Mutsumi-type can be described, among the three modes of citation (citation; Takemura’s translation) that Butler discussed, as the slide from reiteration to failure. Identity is the effect of the citation and reiteration of norms, and that reiteration ordinarily maintains subjectivity. The three instances of the negative imperative 〈do-not-take〉 — Uika, the singular Mutsumi, the giant shadow of multiple voices — are reiterations of citation that seek to secure possession. But this reiteration, the more it is repeated, far from maintaining the subject, scatters it. That the speaking subject swells from the singular into multiple voices, and that the grammatical subject mutates from Wakaba Mutsumi into the fused body, is nothing other than the failure of citation, in which citation does not produce its intended effect (the securing of possession) and intention and result drift apart. The Mutsumi-type does not refuse citation. To the very end it keeps reiterating citation, and that reiteration self-collapses. The series from reiteration to failure is the arc of grasping (the mobilization of citation presupposes Derrida’s iterability, but this essay confines itself to Butler’s concept of citation, and Derrida’s iterability is left to explicit citation in a note, not independently mobilized).

The Tomori-type letting-go can, by contrast, be described as the refusal of citation. To actively cease the citation of the norm — the right answer, the ordinary — that demands one be socially legible. This is the core, on the social layer, of possibility three 〈the letting-go of identity〉. The turn away from the external norm in Mayoiuta’s second verse, and Tomori’s active silence, are neither the reiteration nor the failure of citation, but the active cessation of citation itself.

Here let us manage the layer-crossing precisely. The Tomori-type letting-go is described, on the social layer, as the refusal of citation, and on the semiotic layer, as the cessation of the response to the trial of the subject in process (sujet en procès). The two are descriptions of different layers of the same scene, not one integrated image. Furthermore, into the place that the refusal of citation (Butler) actively opens, the pre-individual surplus (Simondon) that remains as figure rather than vanishing stands erect — this too is a superposition of a social-layer description and an ontological-layer description, not a synthesis. Butler is the negativity-driven of the Hegel–Lacan–Derrida lineage, and differs in principle from Simondon’s non-negative individuation. This essay does not place the two on the same layer; it preserves the difference of driving principle. Letting-go is described as the multilayered path of the refusal of citation = the cessation of the response to the trial, and the heterogeneity of each layer is kept.

Chapter 4. The Figure, Communal Axis — the relation that vanishes through sound, and the relation that re-binds through sound

On the communal axis, the relation itself vanishes at one pole and re-binds at the other. In the Mutsumi-type, the relation between two persons vanishes with sound as its hinge, and what remains is only the instrument. In the Tomori-type, a collapsed relation re-binds with sound as its hinge, and what remains is the crystal of the bond. This chapter describes both poles materially, describes their inversion as a symmetry of figure-and-ground and of sound, and further takes up the suspicion of a preestablished harmony — “the recovery of the bond = salvation” — as a friction the work carries within itself: compulsion and the empty center.

1. The Mutsumi-type negative pole — communal annihilation

(Ave Mujica #10)

At the start of the second verse of Episode 10’s “Imprisoned XII,” a dissolve transition occurs from the real stage to the second floor of Mutsumi/Mortis’s mental world. This is an optical dissolve between shots: onto a shot in which the real stage’s black floor and amplifier have gone black, a shot of the fallen-away second-floor railing and floor of the mental world appears superimposed — the floor works as the hinge of the layers. On the second floor a struggle over a guitar occurs; Mutsumi breaks through the railing and falls backward into the dark of the first floor, and Mortis throws herself headlong from the fallen-away floor. In the water, the substantial Mortis embraces the back of the contour-only Mutsumi with her right arm; when Mutsumi opens her eyes and smiles, in the next cut Mortis herself becomes contour only and smiles back, and tear-drops rise like bubbles to the top of the screen. The two embrace and press their foreheads together and sink to the water’s bottom together with the three-dimensional guitar that alone remained as substance. Both vanish at once, and only the substance of the guitar remains.

The annihilation occurs in the mental world (unseen). Onto the real stage it surfaces in a heard-but-unseen manner — as the change in tone when Mutsumi/Mortis strums the guitar right after the return, and as the surprise of Umiri, who had been coaching her until the day before, and the dumbfoundedness and the sad gnashing of teeth of Nyamu. The annihilation of the communal is confirmed retroactively, not by a visible disappearance, but by the sound of the instrument and the reactions of witnesses.

2. The Tomori-type positive pole — communal re-binding

(MyGO!!!!! #10)

Episode 10’s “Utakotoba” (詩超絆, read utakotoba)〔5〕 is placed in the phase after collapse. Against Soyo, who says she has come to end MyGO, Tomori runs to her at the rear of the audience seats, seizes the resisting Soyo by both arms, and drags her to the stage wing. Anon seizes Soyo’s left hand, Raana hands over a bass, and the performance begins. Umiri is absent and Taki takes the drums; all five are in their seats.

The opening is dark; light falls on Raana alone, and Tomori begins to sing in a trembling voice — the not-knowing, that she grasps neither the right answer nor the ordinary, that the world is far (paraphrase). Shortly after the song begins, Tomori seizes Soyo’s right hand with her own right hand. In the middle of the first verse there is sung the remorse that she herself broke it, that she let go her hand feebly, and the theme that even so she does not want to lose it (paraphrase). Soon the whole venue brightens white, and the five are wrapped in white light. Each member except Raana sheds tears.

(MyGO!!!!! #10)

The turning point is the moment Tomori begins to sing the chorus out of darkness. From there on, in nearly every cut, all five members’ contour lines blink and shine white (the blinking is observed as the coexistence of a temporal alternation of light and dark with a sustained glow). The cheering grows. As the chorus stretches on, the memories of the CRYCHIC period — the breakup in Episode 1 (Sakiko’s departure), the happy days of middle-school CRYCHIC (including Sakiko and Mutsumi) — interweave with the present singing through white cut-outs / cut-ins, and the theme of 〈not parting〉 is held long (paraphrase). Just before the climax, Soyo’s tears become four lines that unite at the forehead and shine white; in the final stretch, under the theme of hand joining hand, of not wanting to undo it, of 〈boku〉 toward 〈bokura〉 (paraphrase), the camera, without a single switch, keeps revolving around the five (about 20 seconds; beginning from Tomori, circling Soyo, Anon, Raana, and Taki each in turn, drawing a 360-degree full circle as if winding a spiral). What remains firm at the terminus is Tomori’s body and face, and the bond of the five.

(MyGO!!!!! #10 Uta kotoba)

3. Hypothesis — the relation that vanishes through sound, and the relation that re-binds through sound

The inversion of the communal axis reiterates, at the level of the relation, the difference of figure-and-ground and of finality established in Chapter 3. In the Mutsumi-type the relation is contour-ized = two-dimensionalized, descends, and sinks into the dark, cold water-bottom, and afterward an instrument, a thing, remains. In the Tomori-type the relation shines white as the crystallization of contour, ascends, shines, stands upright, and a subject and a bond remain. The pair of a pole in which the figure is swallowed into the ground and a pole in which the figure is drawn out of the ground holds here too. Here contour-ization and crystallization are the two poles of one and the same axis, driving “the reduction to contour alone” in opposite directions. Contour-ization designates the movement that sinks the figure into the ground as the thinning of substance (2D-ization); crystallization designates the movement that stands the figure up out of the ground as the solidification of contour (the emphasis and retention of the figure by light). The two words are on the same single axis as the figure-ground inversion of Chapter 3, and are used throughout this essay in this opposite-pole relation.

What is decisive is that sound is the hinge of both poles. In the Mutsumi-type, annihilation occurs through sound — the disappearance of the relation surfaces onto the real stage as the change in the guitar’s tone. In the Tomori-type, re-binding occurs through sound — the collapsed relation re-binds taking Tomori’s singing voice at the chorus’s onset as its starting point. The communal, when it vanishes and when it is bound, alike comes to be through sound.

And the quality of the remainder inverts. As seen in Chapter 3, on the individual axis of Mayoiuta the 〈boku〉 remained alone as figure. On the communal axis, the remainder is not an isolated 〈boku〉 but a 〈bokura〉 in which the contours of five shine together. On the individual axis 〈boku〉 stays 〈boku〉; on the communal axis 〈boku〉 goes toward 〈bokura〉.

Here the core asymmetry sent to the Conclusion in Chapter 3 takes a concrete shape on the communal axis. The Mutsumi-type lets go of the relation and erases it (the completion of letting-go; mutual de-materialization). The Tomori-type does not let go of the relation but takes it back (the refusal of letting-go; re-grasping). In Utakotoba, 〈letting-go〉 appears as the past remorse of having let go one’s hand feebly = the object to be overcome, and the movement of the song is its inversion. The chain of seizing hands — Tomori seizing Soyo’s arm and dragging her, Anon seizing her hand — is a re-grasping that pulls back into the relation. Whereas the Ave side moves from the grasping of Episode 7 toward the letting-go of Episode 10, the MyGO side moves in the opposite direction, from letting-go toward re-grasping. On the communal axis, the Mutsumi-type and the Tomori-type are not the positive and negative of one and the same “letting-go,” but form a pair as two movements of different qualities: the completion of letting-go and the refusal of letting-go.

4. The internalization of the Uno-style counter-argument — compulsion and the empty center

Here the chapter takes up, not by repelling from outside but by internalizing, the two most expected counter-arguments. The first is the suspicion of reproducing a maternal dystopia. But this suspicion must not be received only as “a utopia of gentle, unconditional mutual acceptance and plenitude.” A maternal dystopia is, more than gentleness, also the name of enveloping-and-not-releasing, of refusing separation, of regression toward a lost fusion (a return into the mother’s womb). The second is the suspicion of sermon-porn〔6〕 — if one reads Utakotoba as a story in which the collapsed bond recovers and everyone is saved, then it is a preestablished harmony by an “author who does not destroy the sandbox,” purified into the doctrine that “bonds are wonderful.” These two are different suspicions, and the work relates to each in a different way. The clue is the two frictions the work itself leaves: compulsion and the empty center.

First, compulsion. The re-binding does not begin from Soyo’s own initiative. Tomori physically drags the resisting Soyo, who has come to end it, and Anon seizes her hand. That the salvation begins not from consent but from compulsion itself creaks, from the inside, the preestablished harmony of “the bond = unconditional good.” The work begins the re-binding not as a consensual, amicable recovery but as a violent dragging-back.

(MyGO!!!!! #10)

Second, the empty center. When the camera begins to revolve at the climax, the strongest lighting gathers at the stage center, but that center is unmanned — Anon and Raana too leave their proper positions, and as everyone approaches Soyo the center empties. In the final stretch too, while the roughly-20-second, 360-degree revolution catches each member in turn at the periphery, the stage center where the lighting gathers is kept unmanned — the length and the full-circularity of the revolution sustain the composition that sets an empty center at the middle. The re-binding holds not as a filled circle but as a circle that places an empty center at its middle. And taking together that the memories of the CRYCHIC period (including Sakiko and Mutsumi) interweave through the sustained chorus, this lit empty center can be read as the place of the absence of the lost CRYCHIC = those who are no longer there. The re-binding of the communal is staged as something that, holding the absence at its center, does not reach a complete recovery.

(MyGO!!!!! #10 )

Compulsion and the empty center do not dismiss the first suspicion = the reproduction of a maternal dystopia. On the contrary. The compulsion of physically dragging back the Soyo who “came to end it” is the very image of a maternal figure that refuses separation and encloses; and the empty center that keeps revolving with the lost CRYCHIC (Sakiko, Mutsumi) set at its middle is another tense of the mourning for a lost fusion = a regressive maternity. While one could dismiss it against the narrow maternal image of gentle, unconditional inclusion, against its proper reach — enveloping-and-not-releasing, fusion-as-mourning — compulsion and the empty center rather endorse the suspicion. This essay therefore admits that the re-binding of Utakotoba is tinged with the pull of a regressive maternity. Having taken it up rather than denied it, it nonetheless reads, in the work’s very dominant matter, the sign that this fusion cannot be completed. The dominant apparatus of re-binding — the strongest light, and the 20-second, 360-degree full circle — keeps revolving, as seen earlier as the empty center, with its center kept unmanned. If it were fusion, the center would be filled. A circle that persists with its center empty means that the fusion the regressive maternity demands — a complete return into the mother’s womb — cannot structurally be completed. Whereas the Mutsumi-type communal annihilation dissolves individuals into an undifferentiated fusion (a complete regression in which the center fills), the re-binding of Utakotoba is an unfinished fusion that revolves around an unfillable center. This is not a thin resistance remaining within the dominance of fusion. It is the endorsement, by the dominant matter, that the very form of the fusion is structurally unfinished, carrying an unfillable center.

The suspicion of sermon-porn is contiguous with this. Utakotoba presents a difficulty (compulsion, absence) once and then dissolves it emotionally — this “show-it-then-recover-it” double movement is also the typical structure of sermon-porn. The recovery (the white light that floods the venue, the contour-white of nearly every cut from the chorus on, the swelling cheers, the union of tears, the 20-second 360-degree revolution of the final stretch) is maximized in length, light, and sound alike; the matter clearly leans toward the pole of recovery = salvation. But the distinction from sermon-porn cannot be placed in the quantitative ratio of presentation to recovery — whether the friction is thin or thick. The double movement of showing and dissolving a difficulty is performed by nearly every drama; the defining feature of sermon-porn is that its dissolution completes the doctrine (bonds are wonderful) as a consumable emotion. The footing of the distinction is not quantity but structure — whether the work blocks the completion of the doctrine. And that blocker is the empty center seen in the maternity passage. Since the dominant apparatus of recovery itself stages the form of salvation around an unfillable center, salvation is performed as form and does not complete. The doctrine cannot close. Whereas Chapter 1’s hand mirror was phenomenally ambiguous (whichever way it is read, the work’s phase-evaluation does not move), the ambiguity here is evaluative, and moreover not symmetrical. When the receiving side purifies this double movement into a consumable message, that is a reading that fills the empty center the work left open — a closing of the work’s own unfinished form to one side. The work’s unfinished form and the reception’s closure are on different layers, and to take the latter as an object of criticism does not absolve the fact that the work itself leans toward salvation.

5. Connecting the theoretical handle — the social layer (resignification, and the impossibility of an outside to citation)

On the communal axis, Butler’s concept of citation takes a different mode. As seen in Chapter 3, the Tomori-type individual axis was the refusal of citation (letting-go). But the Tomori-type of the communal axis is not the refusal of citation. Utakotoba is the refusal of letting-go, a re-grasping, and what works here is resignification (resignification; Takemura’s translation; “re-semioticization” and “re-meaning-attribution” are not adopted). The collapsed CRYCHIC relation — the failure of a past citation, of having let go one’s hand feebly — is given a new meaning and taken back as another bond from 〈boku〉 to 〈bokura〉. This very path, in which the failure of citation produces a new meaning, is what Butler calls resignification (that this concept connects structurally with Barrett’s reclassification is made explicit in §6, note 〔8〕).

And the re-binding that begins from compulsion can be read, within Butler’s framework, not as a defect but as a condition. In Butler, to stand outside the system of citation is in principle impossible, and even the refusal of citation is a movement within the system. That the re-binding of Utakotoba begins not from Soyo’s initiative but from Tomori’s compulsion (the dragging hand, the chain of seizing hands) is the material appearance of the fact that resignification occurs not as a free founding that has stepped outside the chain of citation, but always as a recombination on the inside of constraint. Resignification has no foothold outside. It is for this reason that the re-binding entails compulsion and holds while carrying, at its middle, the empty center seen in §4. Here too, the “liberation from self-enclosure” that Mita gives (The Origin of the Self, pp. 147–148) does not slide into the vocabulary of salvation.

Against this, in Ave Episode 10’s “communal annihilation,” citation is not resignified but stops and vanishes. The relation de-materializes, sinks to the water’s bottom together with the very norm to be cited, and what remains is only the performing apparatus. Re-binding through resignification (Utakotoba) and the vanishing of citation (communal annihilation) form the two poles of the communal axis.

6. Connecting the theoretical handle — collective individuation, and its bodily interface

The re-binding of Utakotoba is described on a layer distinct from the social layer (§5). Return to observation. From the chorus on, in nearly every cut all five members’ contour lines blink and shine white; just before the climax Soyo’s tears become four lines and unite at the forehead; in the final stretch a camera without a single switch circles the five in turn in a roughly-20-second, 360-degree full circle. Whereas on the individual axis (Chapter 3) 〈boku〉 remained alone as figure, here what remains as figure is the five whose contours shine together — 〈bokura〉.

From here a hypothesis is drawn. Communal re-binding is not the individual vanishing and melting into a whole. The five contours are each kept, and yet stand simultaneously as figure within the relation. The individual, without losing its independence, comes to be only through the relation to others — this phase this essay describes as ensemble individuation. On the ontological layer, this ensemble individuation — this essay’s descriptive term, drawn from observation — corresponds to Simondon’s collective individuation (individuation collective). The two correspond but are not identical. Ensemble individuation is this essay’s descriptive term; collective individuation is Simondon’s technical term. The individual participates in a higher individuation not as an isolated substance but by way of the pre-individual surplus — the unresolved tension — that each carries. Here process and basis are not confused. Collective individuation is a process, and the transindividual (le transindividuel) is the basis on which that process stands〔7〕. That in Utakotoba the five contours crystallize together while keeping their individuality is because each person’s pre-individual surplus is shared as the transindividual, and the process of collective individuation is set in motion (Fujii Chikayo’s supervised translation, The Philosophy of Individuation, Part Two, Chapter Three, “The Basis of the Transindividual and Collective Individuation,” chapter frontispiece p. 481, main text p. 499).

This process has a bodily-affective register. Combes reads Simondon’s pre-individual as active metastability and describes transindividuation in the bodily register (MIT Press English translation, pp. 31–33; chapter “The Transindividual Relation,” p. 25–). That the re-binding of Utakotoba occurs not through dialogue or explanation but through the chain of seizing hands and the bodily-affective matter of blinking contours, the union of tears, and the revolution, corresponds to this bodily register.

At the interface between the semiotic and social layers, Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion describes the same bodily register by a different path〔8〕. In Barrett, if one moves the body the brain’s predictions change, and thereby experience changes (Chapter 9), and emotion is a social reality constructed and propagated among others (Chapter 7). The bodily movement of the ensemble in Utakotoba — playing instruments, joining voices, seizing one another — changes predictions, recombines emotion otherwise, and raises a collective emotion upon the stage. But this essay makes explicit that it is here performing an operation beyond the reach of the original. Barrett’s view of the subject leans toward the legally responsible subject (Chapter 11) and does not thematize musical or collective subjectivity. This essay reads the chain of bodily movement and prediction-change in musical performance as a bridge from musical subjectivity to social subjectivity. This is this essay’s own critical extension.

These layers are not integrated. Simondon’s collective individuation has non-negative dephasing, Barrett’s emotional construction has constructivism, each as its driving principle. They are layered as different descriptions, by different layers, of the same matter — the crystallization of the five — and not synthesized into a single image. Barrett and Kristeva in particular stand in head-on opposition over whether drive and emotion exist prior to language, and so this essay does not place the two in the same paragraph, situating Kristeva within the semiotic layer and Barrett at this interface.

What gives the concrete content of “otherness” to ensemble individuation is Mita’s relational origin of individuality. The view that places the origin of the self not in an isolated interiority but in the relation to others = sexual individuality (Maki Yūsuke, The Origin of the Self, p. 70) names the fact that 〈bokura〉 is a self that comes to be only in the relation to others. Yet this is not read as “salvation through love.” Mita’s “liberation from self-enclosure” is not a tale of salvation but a logic of de-individuation (pp. 147–148), and the 〈bokura〉 of Utakotoba too is a relation that holds while carrying the compulsion and the empty center seen in §4 — not a plenary salvation.

Finally, it is made explicit that ensemble individuation is not read as the uniformity of weeping. When the venue is wrapped in white light, those weeping are each member except Raana. Ensemble individuation does not mean that everyone’s emotion becomes identical. Raana’s non-weeping is the material sign that participation in this re-binding is not uniform, and how to read the quality of that participation is not asserted in this chapter but left as an observed fact.

Chapter 5. Formal Correlation — Temporality and Structure Are the Signature of the Two Axes

(MyGO!!!!! #1
in MyGO , there are so many variety of mirror usage like
in ikebukuro Studio , preparing room for studio Ring, back ground ,
the scenery goes by storyboard side by side)

The most conspicuous contrast between the two works lies in time and structure. But that contrast is inscribed, as an inverse curve, upon the matter already seen — the device of reflection and the form of reiteration.

MyGO!!!!!’s mirror is an everyday, reiterative device permanently stationed in the practice space. Its functional curve begins from a maximum in which the five are fully arrayed within the mirror image, passes through the foreshadowing of departure, partial subgroups, the depiction of individual mirror images alone, and the guitar alone with no person present, and in the final episode the mirror exits the screen. That the mirror finishes its role — that the device of legibility, which mirrors the self and arrays it alongside others, is relinquished — is staged as the acceptance of being lost.

Ave Mujica’s mirror, by contrast, rises up in an eventful, singular way. The mirror is broken, and the mirror image of the final episode reflects an unfigured image. The mirror does not recede into the everyday; it is foregrounded as the event of collapse, shatters, and becomes the site of dissolution. The form of reiteration draws the same direction. Ave’s three reiterations of “do not take” return toward the past, while MyGO’s Utakotoba heads toward a forward re-binding.

(Ave Mujica #10)

The direction of time of the two works — Ave toward eventful collapse and dissolution, MyGO toward relinquishing the mirror and accepting being lost within a cycle — is not given as an independent narrative fact. It is borne, as an inverse curve, upon the very matter that defines the axial positions of the individual and the communal: the device of reflection and the form of reiteration. The curve of MyGO that relinquishes the mirror bears the Tomori-type individual axis (the relinquishing of social legibility); the curve of Ave in which the mirror rises as event and shatters bears the Mutsumi-type dissolution — not as identification, but as an inverse curve drawn upon one and the same matter.

Therefore the temporal and structural contrast of the two works — an eventful temporal structure and a cyclical temporal structure — is the signature of the two axes this essay has erected. Signature, as defined in Chapter 1, is an identifiable appearance through which the observer correlates the material of the image with a phase-state of individuation, not the cause (essence) that produces the work’s differences. It is in this sense that the central thesis stated that temporality and structurality are not the essence but the formal signature. That the most conspicuous contrast of the two works is temporal and structural is a fact, but it is not the deep theme; it is the surface sign of it.

The undecidability of the hand mirror (Chapter 1) and the directionality of the mirror’s functional curve (this chapter) both occur upon the mirror surface and are observed as motions independent of the body behind. In this material commonality, the two are read as two manners of appearance of one and the same signature. At the stage where the phase is not fixed it appears as undecidability; at the stage where the phase has begun a unidirectional shift it appears as directionality — the former corresponds to metastability, the latter to the onset of individuation.

Conclusion. The Social Layer and Scope — Letting-Go as Weak Autonomy, and the Two-Axis-Inversion Response

This chapter closes, on the social layer, the description of the three layers and one interface laid out so far, and positions the two works as a fictional response to the problems of contemporary Japanese society.

1. The social implementation of letting-go — one path that crosses the three layers

Possibility three 〈the letting-go of identity〉 can be described as a single path that runs through the three layers. On the semiotic layer, as the cessation of the response to the trial of the subject in process (sujet en procès) — the trial that demands one be legible before the other. On the social layer, as the refusal of the citation of the norm (Butler). And the same movement, in the concrete mode of contemporary Japanese society, appears as the withdrawal from the game of mutual evaluation (Uno, The Garden, Chapter 11). Taking up Maruyama Masao’s “being / doing” argument (p. 281; “being” = the recognition given within a community, “doing” = evaluation in society), Uno argues that people sink into a “game of mutual evaluation among human beings” (p. 285). The withdrawal to a place that is neither the winner of that game of mutual evaluation nor the winner of global capitalism — this is the name, on the social layer, of the fictional response to people exhausted by the economy of recognition. Tomori’s active silence in MyGO!!!!!, and Sakiko’s bare-faced collapse and choice of the mask in Ave Mujica, are described at this interface.

Here Butler and Uno are juxtaposed as two mobilizations differing in degree of abstraction and in reach. If Butler treats the structure of citation (universal, negativity-driven), Uno treats the concrete mode of citation in contemporary Japan (the economy of recognition in the SNS era). The two are complementary, not identical.

2. Weak autonomy — the social implementation of a perpetually wavering subjectivity

At the core of the social layer is placed what Uno calls weak autonomy (The Garden, Chapter 12). A middle state that is neither complete autonomy nor complete dependence. This essay reads it as a “perpetually wavering subjectivity” seen from the social layer — the contemporary-Japanese-social implementation of the wavering of individuation (metastability) placed at the substrate. Weak autonomy resonates structurally with the metastability Simondon formulated and with Kristeva’s subject in process (the driving principles differ, however, so this is kept to resonance; no adjectival recuperation is made).

The two-axis inversion can be reread on this horizon of weak autonomy. The Mutsumi-type (the negative pole of both axes) melts into nothing beyond both autonomy and dependence — passing through the critical limit of weak autonomy in the direction of its rupture. The Tomori-type (the positive pole of both axes), on the individual axis, opens toward “you” while staying 〈boku〉 (neither complete autonomy = isolation nor complete dependence = dissolution), and on the communal axis re-binds as a 〈bokura〉 that carries an empty center. The latter relates while keeping the individual’s contour, carrying the empty center — as seen in Chapter 4 §4, that fusion is structurally unfinished, carrying an unfillable center, and differs from both complete fusion into the whole and isolation〔10〕. Yet here the statuses of metastability and weak autonomy are not confused. Metastability is an ontological given that cannot be chosen, whereas weak autonomy is a normative achievement chosen against the game of mutual evaluation. The Tomori-type is not weakly autonomous as a given; if the term applies, it is achieving it, and this essay uses the resonance not as the naturalization of a given but as the description of an achievement. The Tomori-type lives weak autonomy; the Mutsumi-type lives the pole at which weak autonomy ruptures.

(MyGO!!!!! #10)

3. The ethics of the lost child — a third way that is not God

At the core of letting-go runs the ethics of the lost child constructed by the preceding essay (an inherited concept; it runs through the three-layer structure). The lost child is a mode of subject that, having ceased the response to the trial (semiotic layer), refused citation (social layer), and withdrawn from the game of mutual evaluation (contemporary Japanese society), nonetheless remains as figure. What matters is that Tomori’s final choice was not a leap to God = transcendence. As a third way distinct from a leap into religious existence, the lost child overlaps with weak autonomy.

4. The two-axis inversion as fictional response

The two works stage, in the form of a two-axis inversion, a fictional response to people for whom holding a unified self has become difficult (the substrate’s wavering of individuation) and to people exhausted by the economy of recognition (the game of mutual evaluation). Upon the same metastable substrate, the Mutsumi-type plays the negative pole of both axes (dissolution and annihilation), the Tomori-type the positive pole of both (standing-erect and re-binding) — diametrically opposite responses. Why these two works and not others? Because both works are two responses, from opposite poles, to one and the same fictional event — the collapse of CRYCHIC. Sakiko Togawa and Mutsumi Wakaba straddle both works; Utakotoba mourns the lost CRYCHIC (Sakiko and Mutsumi, who appear as the empty center at its middle), and Mutsumi’s arc constitutes the very aftermath of that collapse of CRYCHIC. This is not the author’s intention but the material fact that one and the same person appears in both works and shares one and the same collapse, and it supports the two-axis inversion as a paired structure immanent to the work rather than as the critic’s extrapolation. Temporality and structurality are not the essence of this inversion but its formal signature. This is why this essay positions the two works not as internal criticism of the girls-band-anime genre but as criticism of a fictional response to the cluster of problems of contemporary Japanese society.

5. The redefinition of the figure — recombination with 〈letting-go〉 as hinge, and the contrast over “being no one”

Here the main settlement is placed. The umbrella term for the figure is set as “the recombination of the relation to performed identity / social legibility,” and beneath it are placed 〈the completion of letting-go〉 (the Mutsumi-type, both axes) and 〈selective letting-go + re-binding〉 (the Tomori-type, letting-go on the individual axis / re-grasping on the communal axis).

Here the status of the word 〈letting-go〉 must be functionally distinguished from the umbrella term “recombination.” 〈Letting-go〉 is not one species of recombination. It is the common zero point — the hinge — against which all four cells are measured for their position. Mutsumi completes letting-go; Tomori, on the individual axis, lets go of social legibility; Tomori, on the communal axis, refuses and re-grasps what she had once let go feebly. Even the re-binding of Utakotoba is defined against a prior letting-go (the inversion of letting-go as the object to be overcome). All four cells are determined by their distance from, and direction relative to, the zero point 〈letting-go〉. Therefore 〈letting-go〉 in the title and in the name of the figure is the common reference point (the hinge) of all cells, while the body’s umbrella term “recombination” is the name of the operation that works upon that zero point — the two are distinguished as words of different function. This distinction resolves the incongruity of holding the title at 〈letting-go〉 while making the umbrella term “recombination” (crowning a species with the name of a genus; the impossibility of placing Tomori’s communal-axis “refusal / re-grasping” beneath the genus of letting-go). The title and the name of the figure are kept as 〈letting-go〉.

Here one contrast is added. The place Uno calls the public — the place in The Garden, Chapter 10 (pp. 242–243), where plural communalities can coexist and which does not ask “who one is” — and the Mutsumi-type dissolution into “being no one” point in opposite directions. The public, without asking “who one is,” keeps a person at the place and affirms them; the Mutsumi-type dissolution drops the place itself into nothing. The completion of letting-go (Mutsumi) is a movement other than being kept and affirmed without being asked. The Tomori-type selective letting-go remains as figure even after relinquishing social legibility, and relates as a 〈bokura〉 that carries an empty center. Yet this 〈bokura〉 is a bond saturated with who-one-is, tied to a particular CRYCHIC (Soyo, and the absent Sakiko). It belongs not to the public that does not ask “who one is,” but to the intimate sphere at the opposite pole. Just as the Mutsumi-type dissolution is outside the indiscriminate affirmation of the public, so too the Tomori-type re-binding is outside the public — both poles, for different reasons, do not belong to the public.

This intimate sphere this essay does not count as a positive social achievement of letting-go — the consummation of a withdrawal from the economy of recognition. For a closure bound to particular people and a lost object may also be a retreat that, descending from the large economy of recognition, makes a small one. Inside the intimate sphere there is, rather, a high density of mutual evaluation. Therefore the Tomori-type re-binding is, at once, the achievement of a withdrawal from the game of mutual evaluation and the sharing of the symptomatic aspect of a retreat into a smaller evaluation-circle. While ontologically positive (an ensemble individuation in which the individual is formed together in the relation to others), it is socially not open. This essay takes up this split without papering it over. Yet this closure cannot cleave to a self-sufficient enclosure. For the center is an absence (Sakiko) that cannot be sealed. So long as it carries an unsuturable center, the closure does not complete, and the retreat does not reach repose. Social openness, here too, is not supported by the matter — what the matter supports is the single point that the closure cannot reach self-sufficiency. The reason the collectif was not mobilized in the body (its incongruity with the matter that leans toward fusion; endnote 〔10〕) is, in the end, nothing but another expression of this self-limitation.

6. The limitation of scope, and a reservation

Let the scope of this essay be modestly limited here. The claim of this essay, that the two works are one precise fictional response to the cluster of problems of contemporary Japanese society, is of a thematic and formal order. The two works gave, as fiction, a precise form to the difficulty of the unified self and the exhaustion of the economy of recognition. This is a claim about the achievement of form, not a claim that the two works socially-transformatively transgressed the symbolic order of Japanese society. What MyGO!!!!! transgressed is, first, the sandbox of the BanG Dream! series, and second, the symbolic order of 〈the affirmation of the everyday〉 that slice-of-life anime since K-On! and Love Live! have shared (a reading that extends Tokuda’s “impossibility of the everyday” argument, from “The Achievement of …,” to the level of the slice-of-life grammar). The latter is broader than the sandbox of a single franchise, but it is not the whole of the symbolic order of Japanese society, nor a socially transformative intervention.

As a subaxis, one point is sent to a subsequent task. The two works, unintentionally, came into contact with plural symbolic orders outside Japanese society — the Confucian patriarchy of the Chinese-speaking world, Western queer / neurodivergent reception, and others — and generated friction. These may be called “a bundle of differential transgressions against plural symbolic orders,” but they are not a social transformation the work intentionally achieved; they are the record of friction arising at the site of reception. As for the possibility that this touches the level of “the social semiotic”〔9〕, since to claim transgression while lacking the empirical verification of reception would exceed the reach of observation-driven criticism, this essay makes no positive claim and keeps it to a note-level indication, leaving it as a subsequent task (subaxis 4).

Finally, one reservation. Among the three relations to performance, the Uika-type — the constructive type that throws itself into the role to build a relation — is reserved in this essay as a margin of the medium layer and sent to the brief for a subsequent essay.

Endnotes

〔1〕Katō Norihiro, in Distancing Oneself from the Text (Kōdansha, 2004), p. 303, grasps the function of the author in two layers: the “positing author who brings difference into being” and the “substantial author who excludes difference.” The methodological stance of this essay partly resonates with the touch of that two-layer distinction, but in placing its interlocutor at the “surplus of filmic matter” it is a critical extension beyond Katō’s reach.

〔2〕The Origin of the Self is a work that Mita Munesuke published under the name Maki Yūsuke (Iwanami Shoten, 1993 / Iwanami Gendai Bunko, 2008). When citing the title, this essay uses the publication name Maki Yūsuke; when discussing him as a thinker, it uses Mita Munesuke. The two central theses mobilized are: the relational origin of individuality (locating the origin of the self in sexual individuality = otherness) = Iwanami Gendai Bunko edition, p. 70; and liberation from self-enclosure (the dialectic of egoism and love; de-individuation) = pp. 147–148.

〔3〕The three observations of this chapter — the puppet-like body, the reduction to contour, the separation of the mental world from physical space — can be connected, at a note’s level, to the lineage of visual culture from the 1980s onward. The puppet-like body has an isomorphic problematic with the explicit, visible joints of Nagano Mamoru’s character design; the reduction to contour with the Amano Yoshitaka–style semi-transparent, wavering contour expression (the premise that a full existence can be affirmed by contour alone); the severance of the mental world from physical space with the psychological-space staging of Shinbō Akiyuki / Shaft. These cross-references exceed the reach of this essay, so they are kept to the indication of connection points, and a full comparison is left as a task for a subsequent essay.

〔4〕”Mayoiuta” (迷星叫) is read mayoiuta. The song titles of MyGO!!!!! share the structure of gikun, in which a kanji notation is assigned a reading different from its conventional one (for example, “迷路日々” is read “Melody”).

〔5〕”Utakotoba” (詩超絆) is read utakotoba (gikun).

〔6〕”Sermon-porn” is a critical term originating in a remark by Uno Tsunehiro in the Niconico criticism roundtable on Ikoku Nikki (broadcast August 22, 2023).

〔7〕The three Simondon-lineage words are distinguished and matched with their original spellings. Collective individuation (individuation collective) = the process of individuation in a collective (the latter half of the Part Two, Chapter Three title in Fujii’s supervised translation). Transindividuation (transindividuation) = the process of transition, through inter-individual relation, to a dimension exceeding the individual (the word mobilized for the bodily register from Combes, mobilized in the middle of §6). The transindividual (le transindividuel) = its basis (the first half of the same chapter title; first introduced with original spelling in Chapter 1 §5). Fujii’s supervised translation juxtaposes the two but does not identify them. This essay’s descriptive term 〈ensemble individuation〉 is a term erected from observation; it corresponds to collective individuation (individuation collective) but is not identical to it.

〔8〕Barrett’s reclassification (reclassification, Chapter 9) and Butler’s resignification (resignification, §5) connect structurally as the movement of recombining an existing meaning-assignment otherwise. But their driving principles differ — Butler is negativity-driven, holding that to stand outside the system of citation is in principle impossible and that recombination too is a movement within the system; Barrett is constructivist, holding that an active alteration of the conceptual system is possible. The two are two models that treat the same movement by different paths, and this essay juxtaposes them without identifying them.

〔9〕”The social semiotic” is this essay’s operational concept, an extended use of Kristeva’s le sémiotique (the pre-Oedipal, bodily, affective dimension) to the social-cultural level. It is made explicit that this is an operation exceeding the range of meaning of the term in Kristeva’s original.

〔10〕The collectif of Jean Oury that Uno mobilizes (The Garden, Chapter 4, p. 119) — the maintenance of a heterogeneity in which each is independent and does not force itself to conform to the whole — is not mobilized in this essay. Since the matter of the climax of Utakotoba leans strongly toward the side of synchronization and fusion (§4), it does not accord with the collectif, whose principle is the maintenance of heterogeneity.

〔11〕The five role names are all genitive singular forms of Latin third-declension nouns. Lewis & Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1879), s.v. dolor (gen. doloris, m., grief), timor (timoris, m., fear), amor (amoris, m., love), oblivio (oblivionis, f., oblivion), mors (mortis, f., death); cf. OLD² (2012) and Tanaka Hideo, Ra-Wa Jiten, each s.v. The same genitive forms appear canonically in IAU lunar nomenclature — Lacus Doloris (Gazetteer Feature 3205), Lacus Timoris (3220), Lacus Oblivionis (3213), Sinus Amoris (5559), Lacus Mortis (from Riccioli’s Almagestum Novum, 1651; adopted by the IAU in 1935). The role names therefore form not the affect itself but the genitive structure “[the mask] of grief / of death.”