engleski

Pink is the New Red. Neo Yokio as an Expression of Millennial Marxism

Adaptation is, among other things, «a process of creation, the act of adaptation always involves both (re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation ; this has been called both appropriation and salvaging». What happens with Marx's ideas in Neo Yokio (2017), an American – Japanese – South Korean anime series created by Ezra Koenig is someplace in these Linda Hutcheon's words. The series is «anime-inspired – it’s a hybrid», as Koenig sees it, and a tribute to anime bursting with references to many other shows. Koenig's anime show is a part of a particular cultural climate that could be defined 'millennial socialism' or marxism or even 'Marx’s revival' and a strong segment within a growing interest in socialism and left-political theory among the millennials impelled by the crisis of capitalism and incited by the new media that emerged during the Bush / Obama and Cameron / Clegg era. The utter reification of the real through consumerism, the serial possession of industrial luxurious goods or unique, personalized ones is in the focus in Neo Yokio where, in a product placement of a kind, a huge number of luxury goods are displayed only because the characters granted them with a larger than life position and status defining role through the 'panmythologizing' (and, now, commodifying) language theorized by Barthes at the end of the Fifties. In this article I argue the similarities between the overtly covetted marxism (through the dense marxist innuendo) by the millenial creator of the show and the marxism itself through Walter Benjamin's theories (in particular his ideas on mimicry, useful when analyzing the switch between the human being and the commodity, and his never thoroughly defined concept of dialectical image). Walter Benjamin understood the concept of commodity fetishism more thorougly and articulated it in a more subtle way than Marx since for him it was clear that it manifested itself even better through objects of consumption, not through those of production the former being a much more diffuse and thus powerful expression of collective consciousness of historical experience than the latter. Marx did not grasp that well the commodity’s status as a phantasmagoria, as an expression of the delusional and utopian fantasies of the collectivity. Furthermore, the broader implications of the so called 'millennial marxism' are analyzed in the paper.

Neo Yokio ; Anime ; Korean animation ; Marxism ; Walter Benjamin.

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