Postmodernism / Concepts of time and space / Nijigahara Holograph

As I've gained a better understanding of postmodernism through our readings each week, I've started to try and see contemporary media and texts from a new perspective; this post is a self-indulgent reflection piece on postmodernism inspired by Nijigahara Holograph, an extraordinary manga by Inio Asano. To provide some context, these past few weeks I've been grappling with the concept of postmodernism in relation to history and time. Postmodernism seems to me to be uprooted from the "classical" and thus, the past, while at the same time acknowledging that all contemporary existence is at once defined by its place in history, or alternatively, by its ability to exist both in the past and the present. Postmodernism, from what I have perceived, seems to possess a deep sense of instability and lack of a tangible foundation or structure. Its fundamental rejection of empiricism gives it an internal plurality that escapes definition or restraint, and that both fascinates and confuses me.

Following some of these themes, Nijigahara Holograph is an incredibly disturbing manga that deals with mortality and the darkness of human nature. To be as ambiguous as possible and give little away, the story at first seems cruelly random and difficult to follow, erratically jumping between past, present, and future. However, the final pages reveal that everything has happened because of all that came before and after - characters the reader assumed were different individuals turned out to be the same person simply occupying different locations in time (and thus age), but existing together in the same space. In a very postmodern style, the meaning of the story and a full understanding of its plot can only be located in the illogical, the non-linear. In Nijigahara Holograph, all time is occurring at once. Our location in space and time is at once fixed and constantly transient: we are constantly present both everywhere we have been in the past, and everywhere we will go in the future. It’s a concept of time and existence that overlaps too completely to be cyclical, and thus all meaning is derived from everything that has, has not, ever will, and will never happen. 


This strikes me as an expression of poststructuralist theory, wherein the constructs that govern our society—concepts of time, space, and meaning—are deconstructed and challenged. These themes seem to manifest in our readings as well, in that each new theory serves in some way to unmoore the past from its traditional occupation within a linear concept of time, whether it is challenged by "nostalgia for the present" or depicted/perceived in the form of another country (Appadurai), or confronted by Benjamin’s proposal that the location of a work of art in time and space and its “unique existence at the place where it happens to be” determines the history to which it was subject. These exist among a few other examples I’ve picked out thus far from the texts.

This thought is in no way complete, but I really wanted to make an effort to translate my thoughts into a more tangible form. I’d like to apologize to Habermas for neglecting his theory in my discussion, and I’d also like to highly recommend Nijigahara Holograph to anyone who has the time. If you read it, this post might actually make some semblance of sense.