The Politics of Animation and the Animation of Politics

Introduction to the Special Issue

How can political inquiry guide the study of animation? This Special Issue addresses the many valences of this question. Indeed, the articles included here explore a wide range of animation forms and contexts and do so from diverse and interdisciplinary scholarly approaches. These approaches range from regional and global industry studies to close examinations of individual films and the work of individual animators. The contexts and objects of interest include American cartoons, Hungarian collage animation, Japanese anime, Indian animation education, and digital animation and effects. Threaded through the Issue’s articles are multiple lines of inquiry that examine animation production, labor, and aesthetics in relation to corresponding geo-political contexts, and that address, whether directly or indirectly, two related questions: What are the politics that structure the study of animation? How do different animation forms and practices contribute to political expression and political innovation? These inquiries presuppose a definition of politics that foregrounds disagreement and contention as much as, if not more than, formal structures of power and consensual social organization.

The Issue begins with an intervention into debates about whether or not animated cartoons present a view of the world. In a remarkable demonstration of close analysis, Hannah Frank examines the traces of labor and world that are presented through the photomechanical processes of cel animation production. Transitioning to today’s digital landscape, Mihaela Mihailova investigates the persistence of exploitation, objectification, and inequality based on sex and gender that continue through motion and performance capture industry practices. Paul Flaig’s analysis of WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) elaborates this discussion of digital production by detailing how the film presents a return to slapstick and physical labor while disavowing the post-Fordist ethos championed by Pixar Studios itself. Following Flaig’s article, the Issue shifts to more regional considerations. Timothy Jones offers an investigation into animation education in India that examines how that country’s approach to globalized media production informs the construction of identity for animators entering the field. Focusing on Hungarian animator Sándor Reisenbüchler, Paul Morton considers the globalist politics of Reisenbüchler’s aesthetics in the context of communism’s decline in Europe. The Special Issue concludes with Peter Paik’s close reading of the Japanese animated film Jin-Roh (2000), which engages with the theoretical work of Thomas Lamarre and demonstrates how anime aesthetics function in support of the film’s political thriller narrative.

The articles in this Special Issue explore the nexus of animation and politics in at least two directions: the politics of animation and the animation of politics. The former refers to the debates and contests that structure the study of animation with its many techniques and aesthetic forms. The latter refers to animation as a mode of political expression and innovation that addresses and interrogates (animates) a range of cultural, environmental, ideological, governmental, and personal conflicts. These two formulations can intersect, of course, and with significant real world implications; for instance, when animation’s marginal status within film and media studies bolsters the expression of marginalized views and modes of being in animated media. I will say more about this minor aesthetic momentarily but, in general, debates about animation, what it is and what it is not, contribute to its capacity to explore a given subject matter. The contention and confusion surrounding ‘animation’ as a term and as a concept foment interest in it as a field of study and mode of artistic making. The fact that it is ‘up for debate’ gives it intellectual appeal as there appears to be plenty of intellectual work to be done. ‘Animation’ has a robust etymology and a wealth of denotations and connotations that vary between disciplines, but the term has expanded as a descriptor across transmedia landscapes. The many animation-related publications and the increasing number of conferences and symposia focusing on the topic are clear indications that the term does not have the limitations that it once had. ¹ Theoretical efforts to remap the boundaries of animation can be found in media theory, animation theory, and film theory. ²

The politics of animation within this media context results in large part from a paradoxical marginality: the term animation is at once capable of referring to all moving image media but, during the age of analog cinema at least, has been used in a narrow fashion to refer to cel and stop-motion animation techniques, and to refer to the genres and aesthetics of cartoons and abstract or avant-garde film. Rather than recount the history of the arguments about digital media’s approximation to animation and the debates about whether or not cinema is a single moment in a longer history of animation, I am interested in analyzing the complications and implications of remapping animation, especially in respect to its conceptual roots in modernity and political philosophy. Complementing the material, aesthetic, and geo-political specificity of the articles in this Special Issue, this conceptual approach considers how animation studies can expand to include multiple forms of specificity.

Animation as a moving concept

Examining animation at a conceptual level means attending first to animation as a functional unit at work in thinking and communicating rather than attending primarily to animated artworks or animation production. This approach illuminates the political stakes involved in moving the concept of animation away from its associations with illusion and mastery and toward associations with realism and distributed agency. This shift presupposes a general Platonism that distrusts fabrication and artifice, and distinguishes such things from truth and knowledge. To avoid over-generalizing, I will focus my comments on Jeff Malpas’s definition of animation as ‘making move’ and on the work of Bruno Latour, whose arguments about modernity, agency, action, and politics often include figures of puppetry – one of the ur-forms of animation. Since Latour’s work was foundational to the expanse of media studies, demonstrating its relevance for animation studies gestures toward possible routes of theoretical expansion as animation leaves its minor status behind. ³ My argument will proceed by first considering what it means to refer to animation as a minor aesthetic form, and then, what it might mean to think of animation as a much more expansive, fundamental philosophical condition. In the end, I conclude that it is possible and valuable to maintain both medium-specific definitions and broad philosophical definitions of animation, and that the political vibrancy of animation lies in its problematics and pluralism. Admittedly, this will be a partial account that omits many of the global and diverse facets of animation study, but I hope it is an account that adds a valuable contribution to the Special Issue in its entirety.

Animation as a minor aesthetic form

The expression of minor viewpoints and ideologies has a legacy of impact in the history of art and literature. One well-known theorization of this exists in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) argument about minor literature and its capacity to challenge literary norms, and conventional modes of knowing and politics. Deleuze and Guattari find minor literature exemplified in the work of Kafka, whose minority status as a German-speaking Jew living in Prague informed his challenge to literary tradition by way of resisting metaphor and representation. Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 16) explain, ‘A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.’ ⁴ Animation, then, is hardly an instance of becoming-minor in the fashion of Kafka. Animated propaganda and political cartoons can effectively appeal to dominant discourses and aesthetic traditions. Major animation studios and white male artists have historically received more scholarly and popular attention, while independent women and minority animators have been neglected. It seems unreasonable to grant anything like minor status across a host of animators and animation techniques; and yet, animation’s paradoxical marginality and equivocal terminology, its politics, implies something like minor status.

In a narrow sense, animation has been a minor aesthetic form in that it has shared live-action cinema’s photographic and filmic basis but frequently has operated according to different diegetic conventions. In terms that approach those of Deleuze and Guattari, if photography and movement are the major elements of cinema, then animation has been a minor construction within those major elements. But animation is not uniformly minor in this sense given that direct animation and computer animation need not be photographic. The forms of animation that develop minor status typically do so at a conceptual level entangled in the values of modernity. This entanglement is evident when animation is treated as an unconventional alternative, as a devalued or ‘bad object’, but also when it is discussed as a problem for academic study. Kafka’s minor literature offers an alternative logic of sense that appealed to Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in critiquing Western philosophy. Likewise, when animation is considered a minor aesthetic form, it can be used to critique the valuation of dominant moving image forms and associated habits of thought.

Driving the notion that animation is a problem for academic study is the neglect of animation by film theory historically focused on photo-indexicality rather than movement (Cholodenko, 1991: 9; Gunning, 2007: 38–39). But, as Suzanne Buchan (2013: 3–7) outlines in her introduction to Pervasive Animation, there are a host of factors structuring the study of animation as a ‘problem’. These include confusion about how to classify and define animation (Is it a genre, or mode, or set of techniques? Do its variations have common principles? Is cinema a subset of animation or vice versa?). And then there is the dominance of narrative and realist cinemas in addition to a focus on photo-indexicality, all of which obfuscate animation’s photographic, indexical, and realist forms. Even articulating the problem this way perpetuates the tenuous, imprecise usage of the term ‘animation’ to refer to a unified minor form of visual media defined in contrast to live-action film. Further, the field of animation studies has been limited by its early reliance on scholarship by practitioners rather than academics (Buchan, 2013: 2) and animation pedagogy still suffers from a limited canon largely focused on male animators and major studios (p. 6). Finally, in the context of digital cinema, animation is often equated with digital production, which continues to obscure different techniques and materials (p. 7). These ambiguities and limitations, however, while part of animation’s relegated position within film and media studies, also make for an important critical approach to those fields and related areas of study. Animation’s unwieldy and contradictory presence offers views of dominant practices and aesthetic forms that would not be visible from the perches offered by the dominant forms themselves. The study of animation as a problem prompts questions about aesthetic judgement and historical, cultural value.

Karen Beckman’s recent work exemplifies this critical approach. In her article, ‘Film theory’s animated map’ (2015), Beckman considers how animation can disclose marginal texts, regions, and histories within film and media studies more broadly. Commenting on her collection Animating Film Theory (2014), she writes: ‘the project of considering film theory through the lens of animation repeatedly turned contributors toward issues of (trans)nationality and translation, as well as to overlooked histories of the migration of ideas and practices’ (Beckman, 2015b: 475). Beckman attends to an overlooked history herself when investigating the place of animation within the influential Cahiers du cinema circle of critics and filmmakers (Beckman, 2014, 2015a). Her historiographical research shows how cartoons, comics, cartography, and other graphic forms influenced Alain Resnais and that, for Resnais, these were not separate from cinema. Beckman suggests that these media appealed to Resnais because they functioned as alternatives to documentary and realist forms that seemed corrupted by the Second World War and institutionalized culture and memory. ⁵ In this case, Beckman’s study of animation as a problem contributes to enhancing historiographical knowledge of Resnais’ work and it critiques a narrow definition of cinema. Further, even within an investigation that restores the presence of animation to a key moment in cinema history, animation remains valued as an aesthetic and technical alternative.

A different kind of example of animation’s minor status occurs in Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011), which critiques normative, capitalist conventions of success by examining examples of failure in popular culture. For Halberstam, the computer-animated films of the late 1990s and early 2000s provide valuable examples because they tend to be children’s films that depict disorder and revolutionary themes. Halberstam examines how these ‘Pixarvolt’ films, which include Toy Story and Finding Nemo, but also Aardman Animations’ Chicken Run, present alternative modes of being and embodiment and challenge normative social relations and hierarchies (pp. 28–30). This argument maintains that children as not-yet-socialized members of society intrinsically challenge norms and that animated films invested in entertaining children are likely to express similar challenges. In this formulation, the animation enhances this childish, queer critique through its consistent anti-humanistic combinations of animals, humans, machines, its combinations of voice and image, and its blending/stretching/morphing of bodies, backgrounds, and foregrounds (p. 181).

While it is surely the case that animated films targeting family audiences address the typical childhood processes of negotiating norms, it is also the case that the depiction of alternatives, revolutions, and other minor formulations is a major business. It remains difficult not to read the subversive and revolutionary themes of animated family films through the lens of neo-liberal culture in which expressions of individual freedom and revolution are simultaneously monetized, converted to labor by other parties, and utilized to maintain socio-economic stratification. Equally disturbing is the vestigial presence of blackface minstrelsy in American commercial animation. As Nicholas Sammond (2015: xii) documents, this presence implies that the caricatured and subversive rebelliousness, thingness, otherness, and commodification that persist in many animated characters can be attributed to a racialized imaginary.

Since even animated films with revolutionary themes often benefit the corporate status quo and perpetuate stereotypes, theorizing animation as minor should be understood as an additional activity that engages such media in order to facilitate criticism of the dominant aesthetic traditions involved. As in the different approaches of Beckman and Halberstam, there is a basic effort to link forms of neglect and marginalization in order to map and resist dominant discourses. It is here that arguments about aesthetics and medium connect to more practical political concerns. This includes discerning the prevalent valuation of realist aesthetics in visual media and relating it to values in modern culture. Sammond (2015: 31) notes in his study that ‘Animation’s irreality becomes its plausible deniability.’ The under-analyzed role of animated cartoons in perpetuating a racialized imaginary is part of a larger neglect of fantasy media in general. In short, the basic approach I am delineating entails appreciating and analyzing an aesthetic ‘bad object’ in order to generate criticism of the regime that sets the criteria for judging the bad object as bad. ⁶ Bad objects have a history of marking social hierarchies and inequities, and their analysis belongs to a postmodern legacy of leveling high and low distinctions in art and culture, whether through feminist, race, or class-based critical approaches. ⁷ The aesthetic regime that informs the evaluation and judgement of animated media, especially American cartoons, tends to be described as modern or Western and has clear commitments to distinguishing realism from fantasy.

Scholars such as Paul Wells (2002) and Esther Leslie (2004) have made compelling cases tracing animation’s roots to modernity and modernism. Concerns with technological development, changes to human experience and sensation, industrialization, rationalization, consumerism, and correlating changes to art and artistic practices have found expression in animation’s various techniques and materials. Accounts of animation’s modernism tend to focus on the reflexivity and artifice of animated cartoons, abstract forms, and experimentation; the very basic notion being that animation’s status in modernity is part of an erroneous division between trick films invested in illusion and realistic films invested in mimesis and narrative continuity. The mistake of referring to this division or to tricks and effects going underground betrays a modern value hierarchy – i.e. that illusion and realistic recording are not valued equally or judged analogously. ⁸ Considering animation as a minor aesthetic form is unavoidably caught up in a modern value system that positions animation as an extreme form of artifice – i.e. irreality – in contrast to live-action film’s more balanced position between the poles of artifice and reality.

The expanse of the term animation, then, has broad ranging philosophical, cultural, and political implications to the extent that it indicates a shifting aesthetic order. In Jacques Rancière’s (2006: 3) terms this could amount to a redistribution of the sensible or a reconfiguring of forces regulating perception, sensation, and therein political possibilities. And while this redistribution could bring new aesthetics and new voices into media culture, it is also true that art and entertainment industries are hardly egalitarian or democratic spaces. There will be winners and losers in such a shift. But which elements/parties gain or lose visibility/intelligibility in this process? Animation studies has access to critical methodologies similar to Beckman’s as long as animation remains a minor form, but if animation begins to refer to all moving image media, then new terminology will be needed to designate its instantiations that remain minor lest they become further marginalized under the presumption that animation is now a privileged media category. ⁹ Several of the articles in this Special Issue examine animation elements, practices, and people who remain or become marginalized and overlooked during this shifting media landscape. But before these considerations, I want to continue to investigate how the expanse of the term ‘animation’ and the changing media landscape could impact the animation concept rooted in modernity.

Animation as ‘Making Move’

The expansion of the term ‘animation’ has elicited cautionary arguments about terminological and historiographical precision, but it has also prompted occasions for more radical reconfigurations of animation as a field of study. Donald Crafton (2011), for instance, argues that animation should not refer to all instances of an ‘animation effect’ that triggers the biomechanical system that perceives movement. This system can be triggered by a range of media – from watches to optical toys to television, cinema, and computer screens. The common presence of this effect is not dominant enough to tie an assortment of media into a linear historical sequence (p. 107). Crafton is rightfully concerned about maintaining distinctions between media that offer ‘animation effects’ lest historical and aesthetic accounts become distorted and teleological. On the other hand, something like this happens in Jeff Malpas’s (2014: 65) philosophical exploration of animation defined as ‘making move’, which seeks to overturn animation’s affinity with illusion. This definition initiates a departure from animation’s modern conceptualization.

For Malpas (2014: 69), animation as ‘making move’ can refer to a wind rustling leaves or to a moving body that casts a moving shadow. In each case, one moving element begets another moving element. The indexicality of these examples does not interest Malpas. Instead, he focuses on the qualities of differentiation and transformation that constitute processes of making movement: ‘animation always involves a transformation, rather than merely a replication of movement or its immediate transference’ (pp. 75–76). Following Aristotle, he notes how movement consists of a differentiation between at least two elements and how frequently the movement of one element is transformed into the movement of another (p. 71). In contrast to the prizing of mimesis and representation, Malpas finds the presence of transformation to be fundamental to animated films, primarily cel animation, and to automata and animatronics, in which ‘the exact purpose of the mechanism is to transform the one movement into the other’ (p. 69).

Malpas’s definition serves his own discussion of movement and place in the history of philosophy, but it also expands animation almost indefinitely. ¹⁰ Instead of referring to specific kinds of visual moving-image media, animation becomes a fundamental concept for understanding the presence of transformation in our world. In this view, moving-image media are basically a recent iteration of animation suitable for modern industrial and technological contexts. This modifies animation’s modernist definition by inserting it into a longer history. By reassessing the concept of animation in this fashion, we can begin to gauge how it has functioned within modern categories delineated by Western rationalism, political philosophy, and scientific inquiry, and what the stakes are in altering that functionality.

For instance, this interest in transformational movement over mimetic and correlating movement challenges definitions of animation based on illusion. Malpas (2014: 69–70) explicitly argues against defining animation as the ‘illusion of life’ or the ‘“illusion” of movement’ (p. 76). His definition ‘making move’, which emphasizes mediation and transformation, is decidedly not illusory. Here, animation does not refer to mistaking one form of movement for another or to denying the presence of one form of movement by fetishizing another, but to the process of one movement becoming another movement. This effort to sever the association of animation with illusion returns us to a classical divide in philosophy and in modernity. Malpas acknowledges that his definition, ‘making move’, aligns animation, as an instance of construction and fabrication, with the Greek word technê (p. 70), which has been opposed to epistêmê, or knowledge. His move to sever animation’s association with illusion alludes to a Platonic suspicion of human fabrications as lacking a commitment to truth and reality. In other words, animation’s association with illusion has separated it from its realist principles. By expanding animation to all instances of making move, Malpas is suggesting that animation is fundamental to understanding the differentiations in time and space that are constitutive of our being in the world.

This shift seems to offer animation the world and a philosophical materialism to which modern animation has hitherto not had much access. Thinking about animation as ‘making move’ constructs historical continuity across accounts of phenomena in which movement begets movement – from wind-blown leaves to puppets to cel animation. Within this continuity, the quality of transformation and differentiation between the movements involved appears to be the difference that makes a difference – i.e. some movements beget more transformational movements than others.

For instance, Malpas (2014: 69) makes distinctions between heavily mediated forms of animation and less mediated forms – e.g. instances of puppetry in which the puppet’s movement closely conforms to that of the puppeteer, as in shadow puppetry. It is worth noting that the more direct forms of animation, which align with notions of indexicality, lack the transformational aspects that Malpas appreciates. This is a significant formulation because it treats animation as privileging mediacy over immediacy. It also counters crude valuations of unmediated access to the world, which have been associated with photography’s indexicality and automaticity, and also with modern scientific inquiry more generally. The puppet is an interesting figure here because it raises the question of how much transformation is enough for movement to qualify as animation. A shadow puppet does not seemingly offer enough of a transformation for Malpas even though a shadow is markedly different from the thing making the shadow. The movement of the shadow mirrors too closely its moving origin. The puppet in this case, although easily differentiated from its source, is an over-determined slave rather than a co-actor with enough autonomy to transform the movement of its source. With fewer moving parts and elements to transport and transform movement, some puppets do not demonstrate, or better, dramatize the activity of making move.

Attending to more transformational movement over less transformational movement aligns with an effort to debunk illusion-based definitions of animation. In this case, the astonishment of animation is no longer illusion or a fetishist disavowal (I know it is not real, but …). Instead, the astonishment of animation rests in witnessing real transformations as one kind of movement becomes another kind of movement. This realism (or materialism) does not offer unmediated access to the world, but attends to mediation and construction and how movements are made. The acknowledgment of constructed movement reunites technology, art, and knowledge by removing the old philosophical divide between fabrication and truth. The activity of making is less associated with deception and artifice when making move is essential to the natural world and history. This revision has consequences given that a distrust of fabrication, whether techne, poiesis, or rhetoric, has persisted in parts of Western thought – in particular, science, philosophy, and politics. Crafton warned about sacrificing historical accuracy in the process of expanding the definition of animation, but Malpas’s definition is a reminder that history itself is animated; that the concepts and categories deployed when constructing history – such as illusion and fetishism – transform history as well.

Latour’s puppets or animation as distributed agency

So far I have briefly delineated the political potential of studying animation as a minor form capable of illuminating dominant aesthetic logics and valuations. But animation’s status as a minor aesthetic form is caught up in its conceptual past in modernity and Western philosophical thought. Malpas’s definition evokes this past and animation’s association with mediation, transformation, fabrication, and artifice, which devalues it in a modern context invested in scientific inquiry, rationalism, positivism, and indexicality. This is a sweeping formulation, but the basic point is that animated cartoons and avant-garde animation have functioned as modernist engagements with positivism, rationalization, industry, and technology through medium reflexivity, experimentation, visual gags, and slapstick humor, among other aesthetic forms. Rethinking animation as making move facilitates taking a longer view of animation: it is not just a modernist, minor aesthetic, but a realist, philosophical expression of the world. This long view would situate live-action film as one instance of animation that privileges human performance and chunks of continuous motion photography. And, more importantly, the notion of realist expression that this rethinking posits is not limited to unmediated, analogical, or undistorted views of the world. Watching transformations is also a mode of viewing the world.

The example of puppetry is especially apt here because it has a rich allegorical and analogical history and it is an instance of making move that shares many attributes with contemporary animation – from the manipulation of material figures in stop-motion to rigging in computer animation. Among the numerous accounts of puppets in philosophy and literature, there is a tradition of thinking about puppets as being capable of expressing the thingness or alienness that persists within human experience (Cappelletto, 2011; Zamir, 2010). ¹¹ Puppets have also been discussed in modern and contemporary contexts as evidence of a repressed spirituality and belief in the supernatural resurfacing through popular entertainment and art (Nelson, 2001). However, such treatments of puppetry omit the kind of realist, empirical, world-disclosing expression implicated in the making move definition of animation and therein the political expressions associated with it. Reading puppetry as a real presentation of movement that begets movement and transformation challenges thinking of puppetry as a metaphor for the mastery of a creator and the subjugation of creation, and by extension this challenges the concepts of agency, action, and power presupposed in the metaphor.

The work of philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour demonstrates with remarkable clarity how a realist reconsideration of puppetry corresponds with a critique of modernity and formulations of power, agency, and action. Latour regularly uses figures of puppets to distinguish between modern and non-modern conceptions of agency and action, and his descriptions of agency, action, and mediation echo Malpas’s definition of animation. While Latour does not have animation studies in mind when deploying animated media examples, observing how Latour uses puppet analogies to critique sociology, critical theory, and modern categories exposes the stakes of a realistic approach to animation for political and critical thought. As animation figures and concepts shift away from expressing illusion and mastery and toward expressing distributed agency and mediation, this shift discloses a basic antinomy between certain realist projects and politics while reemphasizing the affinities between politics, aesthetics, and philosophy.

Most of Latour’s books feature at least one or two puppet analogies, with the figure of the marionette being the most common example but literary characters are also discussed in terms of being an author’s puppets (Latour, 1999: 219–221, 2013: 158). Rarely does Latour reference particular films or productions; instead his examples tend to be generic. In his introduction to actor-network theory, Reassembling the Social (2005), there are nearly 40 instances of the term puppet and its cognates. The many pages discussing puppets analogically or allegorically position the puppet and puppeteer as central figures in Latour’s explanation of actor-network theory and his critique of modernity.

In this text, Latour argues that actor-network theory provides an important alternative to dominant modes of sociological research. Sociology has typically treated the social as a powerful force consisting of human social ties and practices. This treatment facilitates using sociology as a means of explaining the hidden social forces constructing all sorts of phenomena – from gender and sexuality to racism and religious belief to economic and scientific practices. But, Latour argues, this distorts the associations that constitute the social, which involves non-human actors and what we might think of as non-social attachments. In other words, to study the construction of science one should not simply study its social elements – i.e. the interactions and relationships between scientists, between scientists and their funding agencies, between scientists and their families, etc. Studying the construction of science also requires examining interactions between scientists, technical instruments, laboratories, and all kinds of brute matter and non-human organisms. The goal of actor-network theory is to investigate by following all of the actors involved in a given phenomenon. In this approach, action is defined not as human action but as simply the event of one entity making another entity do something. Action is not about control, dominance, or creation. It is about influence, connection, translation, and transport. Thus, each actor is a network of associations that contribute to the action.

The figure of the puppet is capable of embodying both traditional subject-oriented agency and Latour’s networked notion of action and agency. In respect to sociology, Latour (2005: 59–60) writes:

Sociologists are often accused of treating actors like so many puppets manipulated by social forces. But it appears that puppeteers … possess pretty different ideas about what it is that makes their puppets do things. Although marionettes offer, it seems, the most extreme case of direct causality—just follow the strings—puppeteers will rarely behave as having total control over their puppets. They will say queer things like ‘their marionettes suggest them to do things they will have never thought possible by themselves’. (emphases in original)

Latour uses the figure of the marionette and the puppeteer to make the point that such manipulation is not a one-way street. The puppets actually make the puppeteer do certain things or manipulate them in particular ways. Determination is not present on either side. The strings connecting the puppet and puppeteer also serve Latour’s theory because they embody the chain-like connections between actors. It is these connections, associations, and chains of influence that Latour believes sociologists ought to study. And they should not merely follow the strings, they should try to understand how the strings themselves influence action: ‘So, when sociologists are accused of treating actors as puppets, it should be taken as a compliment, provided they multiply strings and accept surprises about acting, handling, and manipulating’ (Latour, 2005: 60). Latour eventually extends this critique of sociology to critical theory more generally and its efforts to reveal the hidden constructive forces of culture. We can refer to Latour’s project, then, as a realist one in that it is concerned with developing more accurate and precise means for describing and accounting for action. This impulse and the definition of action as one entity making another do something echo Malpas’s redefinition of animation as making move. But Latour’s realist project has a few more parts to it that show how the figure of the puppet shifts from presenting control and submission to presenting distributed agency.

Across his body of work, Latour explicitly connects this puppet figuration of sociology to 19th-and 20th-century modernity and the expansion of scientific inquiry into social, psychological, and cultural domains. Modern modes of thought tend to establish a series of divisions between nature and culture, science and politics, actor and non-actor, constructed artifact and real phenomena. Latour refers to people who think this way as Moderns, which is a generalization affiliated with the terms Western or developed. But the idea is that Moderns share many habits of thought. For instance, when doing science, Moderns tend to think they are discovering nature, even though they are constructing it through numerous instruments and transcriptions. When studying society and its constructions, Moderns typically omit the non-human interactions contributing to social bonds. Modernization involves this general effort to purify agency and action, and to rely on a series of categories that distort experience and knowledge. This modern methodology omits non-human agency and divides society from nature and includes the proliferation of Western forms of rationality, imperialism, technological development, and scientific inquiry. In this context, puppets become prime metaphorical and allegorical examples to the extent that they present and dramatize the paradoxes and inconsistencies between modern categories.

Comparable to the sociological analogy in which puppetry expresses the divide between actors and non-actors, Latour also uses the figure of the puppet to express the divide between reality and artifice, and between facts and fetishes. This is evident when Latour traces the origin of the term fetish to an 18th-century encounter between the Portuguese and indigenous people living on the west coast of Africa. The Portuguese accused the people there of fetishism because they believed in the divinity of the stone, clay, and wood figures that they had made with their own hands. This exchange epitomizes the introduction of a modern distinction between that which exists independent from human creation and that which originates from human creation. This distinction is part of the modern divide between culture and nature, only here it is combined with the idea that one should not make an image of God. Deploying a logic affiliated with Platonism and Christian iconoclasm, the Portuguese, in Latour’s account, are early representatives of modern social science in that they take an anti-fetishist position that devalues the supposedly naïve beliefs of the community being studied. This anti-fetishist position explicitly dismisses any notion that a human-made object can have its own autonomous vitality; this is considered an irrational fetishism, a false belief, and a misunderstanding of artifice and reality. While modern, anti-fetishists accuse idolaters of not knowing that the thing they worship is constructed, Latour’s point is that the Moderns are the only ones for whom construction is automatically false.

This desire to escape construction, artificiality, and subjectivity, and to reestablish contact with nature and history through scientific knowledge is an illusory modern predicament. Latour describes this problem as the inability to adequately understand ‘factishes’ – literally the existence of objects that are independent, autonomous facts and are simultaneously constructed through human means and imagination. To illuminate this problem, Latour (2010: 8) compares fetishism to an encounter with an overhead projector that accords with his puppet examples but is oddly reminiscent of cinema:

The fetish – at least according to the anti-fetishist – acts, so to speak, like an overhead projector. The image comes from the professor who has placed a transparency on the glass over the blinding light, but what is shown seems to spring from the screen toward the audience, as if neither the professor nor the overhead projector had anything to do with it. The fascinated spectators ‘attribute an autonomy to the image’ that it does not possess.

The autonomy of the image, the fascination of the spectators, and the ‘as if’ formulation evoke numerous references from the history of film and animation theory of which Latour may or may not be aware. The passage calls to mind the naivety of early cinema goers that Tom Gunning contests in his work on the cinema of attractions. It also resonates with apparatus theory and ideas about the fetishistic relation between spectator and screen. However, by choosing a defunct classroom technology instead of cinema or puppet theatre, Latour suggests that the modern, anti-fetishist position is not necessarily against moving images as entertainment. The anti-fetishist is more concerned with critiquing those who would confuse an instrument of science with an instrument of illusion and entertainment.

The anti-fetish position assumes that the animated image dupes spectators; that it makes them forget its human origins and human source of power. But the anti-fetishists themselves supposedly know better. These modern, knowing-spectators may enjoy the spectacle, but they are aware of its human origins and artificiality. Thus, the very separation indicated in the statement ‘I know very well, but’ is a distinctly modern formulation that presupposes the impossibility of a human-made thing possessing autonomous agency. In this formulation, people who do not share this presupposition are distinctly not modern. For them, objects can be divine and human made; this connection can even be the purpose for making them. Latour’s point, illuminated by the overhead projector, is that modern categories do not allow for created things to have their own agency; they do not allow for a natural object to be a social object, or for a divine object to be a human-made object. Further, the pleasure of the fetishist disavowal experienced in cinema suggests that Moderns may even enjoy their own contradictory categories. These categories and divides originate from a modern legacy that has combined the pursuit of knowledge with efforts to purify belief – whether belief in a single God or in a final truth.

In sum, Latour’s work, including his use of puppet imagery, describes how moderns make double moves. They seek to demystify those objects which have been fetishized and they aim to reveal the actual origins and sources of power operating behind objects. But this kind of critical thinking has created problems for itself by discovering that individuals never act alone. Moderns claim to acknowledge human mastery over human-made artifacts, but then when this does not hold up under their critical, scientific inquiries, they jettison human mastery and conclude that the subject, in puppet-like fashion, is over-determined by various forces – whether social, economic, technological, or other. While moderns may be proud of the self-criticism involved in these moves, they have not resolved their misunderstandings of fetishes and their neglect of factishes. A puppeteer may feel slightly ‘outstripped by what she controls’, but analogously, there are numerous forces that manipulate and control this very puppeteer. As Latour (2010: 62–63) explains, ‘these agents, no matter how powerful you make them, will be surpassed by the puppeteer, just as she is by her puppets.’

Animation, whether made with puppets or drawings or software, presents a remarkable capacity for expressing Latour’s argument, especially when it presents itself as the height of artifice and autonomous action. This would be an expression of Latour’s factish, or that which is constructed by humans and at the same time acts independent of human control. This is eloquently formulated in Scott Bukatman’s (2012) discussion of animated cartoons as ‘disobedient machines’. Bukatman remarks that ‘cartoon characters don’t rebel because they can but almost because they have to’ (p. 136, emphases in original) – they are performance machines designed to disobey. Disobedience in such performances establishes character vitality and autonomy. ¹² Animated films and cartoons are able to exaggerate the tension between creator and creation by highlighting artificiality while depicting autonomous movement. Animation’s conspicuous artificiality and autonomy are quite paradoxical if ‘artificial’ means its source of autonomy exists with its creator, not in itself. But this is a categorical distinction created by thought that separates subjects from objects and forces the world into a sort of grammatical sentence with a subject who acts and objects that are acted upon. What we create always exceeds our intentions, designs, and maintenance and these things work on us in return. In practice we know this. An animator may make his or her tools but the tools make the animator and the animation as well.

While puppets and other animation forms seem at first to express the categories of master and slave, creator and creation, real and artificial, they also express the inaccuracy of these categories. The puppet is never fully controlled by the puppeteer, and further, in many cases of animation, the created character is designed to disobey or at least express disobedience. Animation, then, especially in its modernist variations, has tended toward expressing a critique of categories comparable to Latour’s critique of modernity. When critiquing modern categories, it follows that animated media are also alluding to broader philosophical definitions of animation and action – such as those proposed by Malpas and Latour.

Perhaps this is partly the reason for Crafton’s (2013) recent effort to rethink the performance of animated cartoons as including audiences and characters along with animators. Crafton echoes the idea that animated cartoons have frequently expressed the contradictions inherent in how agency is experienced and how it is theorized:

I am mainly interested in the complicated agency that the viewers and the animators devise for the cartoon bodies. The great conundrum here is why do viewers understand these performers to be present and independent, and the performances to be as live as those in non-animated movies? (p. 58)

Crafton’s inquiry is consistent with Latour’s discussion of puppets, but it is nonetheless striking how Crafton’s analysis begins to sound so much like Latour’s.

For instance, Crafton (2013: 64–65) acknowledges the analogous descriptions of agency that exist between puppetry and frame-by-frame photographic animation, ¹³ but his examination of this analogy reveals differing emphases and evaluations. He explains how some animators emphasize their creative control and some puppeteers emphasize the non-human agency of the puppets. The idea here is that the agency dynamics differ per performance because there are different materials, techniques, and ideas involved. These generate distinct relationships and therein an audience actually experiences different forms of action and agency specific to the artistic network. Crafton explores this range of articulations through early 20th-century cartoons and finds typical the rebelliousness that Bukatman highlights, but he also finds tropes of self-creation and self-annihilation among cartoon characters. The implication is that the cartoons participate in an expression of the complexities and ambiguities of agency that operate between animators, audiences, and characters. Crafton (2013: 71) concludes that ‘Perhaps it’s the case that toons have agency in the world they share with the viewers, the animators have agency in the world they share with the toons, and audiences have agency in both worlds.’ Agency in this formulation has become relational and world-specific – that is, the designation of ‘agent’ depends on what world you are considering – animator, audience, character – but no one world (or actor-network) seems to fully control another. Crafton (2013: 72) offers a clarifying statement on this point:

Agency in animation, then, is a power grid around which the various players align themselves in relation to each other in the animation (other characters and environmental elements) and of the animation (to the agencies of the animators, the viewers). Agency isn’t an absolute entity possessed by anyone or anything but rather sets of flexible relationships. (emphases in original)

The implication of Crafton’s analysis is that it is helpful for him, and ideally his readers, to think about the reality of performance in animated cartoons as a ‘power grid’, a quintessential actor-network. Thinking about the performance as a network, a set of relationships, dissolves many of the divides between human and nonhuman agency and between nature and culture. Like Latour’s puppets, the non-Disney animated cartoons from the 1930s that Crafton analyzes express modern category mistakes – agency is not restricted to humans and action entails transformation as one entity affects another. Although Crafton resists expanding the definition of animation in the fashion of Malpas, his analysis of performance supports defining animation as an expression of the Latourian ideas of mediation and actor-networks. This implies maintaining both macro and medium-specific definitions of animation. Latour’s puppets suggest that the whole world is animated. In other words, there is no movement without transformation, but Moderns constantly search for the origin of movement, the animator, God, Nature, Society, or some other transcendent source, which obscures their own experience of acting within an animated world. Crafton’s cartoons entertain these Moderns, but they also expose the contradictions inherent in their thinking.

Conclusion

In this final section, I want to return to the dynamics between the politics of animation and the animation of politics more explicitly by discussing a few of the political implications of animation’s association with a realist project like that of Latour’s. While animated cartoons share a critical functionality with Latour’s puppets, Crafton’s analysis also raises a few shortcomings associated with Latour’s work, which are not unrelated to Crafton’s original concerns about over-extending the definition of animation. Notice that the power grid metaphor illuminates how descriptions of experience utilize concepts that are ready-at-hand. I do not think this one passage is representative of Crafton’s book, but it is representative of the unavoidable historical problem of relying on the tools of the present to construct accounts of the past and to interpret past experience. It is not that this leads to falsehoods necessarily, but there is the potential for giving history and experience a homogeneous construction – akin to using power grid metaphors too often. As Latour (2013: 33) acknowledges in his later work, there is a tendency when finding actor-networks everywhere to describe them similarly; investigators are constantly discovering subtle groups of heterogeneous actors entangled together. This problem is compounded when we consider that Latour’s flat ontology – that all entities that affect others are treated as equally real – eliminates many hierarchies frequently used in political discourse. Without transcendence or the ability to attribute action to a single source (puppeteer, animator, society, nature, etc.), politics is easily reduced to the effectiveness of network power.

This last point is a return to a classical debate. After all, this discussion of puppets is an investigation into what it means to act freely and what it means to control others – political and philosophical questions that appear in Plato’s allegory of the cave and its figures of puppetry. In fact, Latour has offered close readings of Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, in which he repeatedly refers to the characters as puppets and the dialogue itself as a kind of puppet theatre carefully controlled by Plato. Of course, part of Latour’s project in these readings is to show how the puppet-characters defy and resist Plato’s designed argument. But Latour returns to the Gorgias dialogue because it stages a debate about Might vs Right in respect to governing society. Plato’s idea is that Reason is needed to stave off Might, and by Reason, Plato means natural laws and a universal order that transcends human beings. Latour (1999: 217) finds this point rearticulated by Moderns in terms of science: ‘Only a Science that is not made by [humans] will protect a Body Politic that is in constant risk of being made by the mob.’ Latour is comparing Plato’s Reason to modern Science, both of which are capable of wielding Truth for political purposes. This version of Science (instead of science with a small ‘s’) refers to an ideal transportation of information without deformation, translation, or discussion. Comparable to the puppetry exercised by some sociologists and critical theorists, this Science does not consider the agency of its own strings. It omits political dynamics by silencing the voices of heterogeneous actors (Latour, 1999: 258).

Contrary to Plato’s Reason and the Moderns’ Science, Latour argues across his work that there are significant democratic and pluralistic possibilities available through acknowledging nonhuman agency and networked action. But this shift toward an improved realism, exemplified by thinking about puppets as figures of distributive agency, on one hand opens up politics, but on the other hand limits the struggle for dominance and inclusion to a single network logic. When power comes from relationships and affiliations alone, there is no recourse for oppressed groups to natural rights or self-evident truths. And for those who mean to rule, maintaining the means of governance gets boiled down to securing and testing fickle relationships and associations.

As Plato knew, realism lacks political efficacy; it is more descriptive than prescriptive. This is in part because reality is plural and accounts that pursue accurate descriptions and presentations of the real, whether in philosophy, art, or criticism, are likely to consist of ‘unaligned ethical practices and political projects’ and ‘a host of heterogeneous forces’ (Galloway, 2013: 365). Alexander Galloway emphasizes this point in an article that considers the parallels between recent realist philosophy (Galloway mentions Bruno Latour, Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and speculative realism, but also discusses Alain Badiou) and the infrastructure of contemporary capitalism. These philosophers’ accounts of reality seem to reflect back to us capitalist modes of production heavily reliant on math, automation, and computer programming. The upshot of Galloway’s (2013: 365) analysis is that this philosophy neglects critically engaging its own historical context. In respect to Latour, we should acknowledge that accounting for and analyzing action through networks is more manageable in the computer age and this ease is not value neutral. Like Crafton’s power grid metaphor, the network concept shapes the reality it seeks to describe and has its own series of associations. As Galloway’s argument rightly suggests, strictly realist projects lack the imaginative means to align actors around new ideas and causes. In the case of Latour, discovering the heterogeneous actors and mediators that constitute the world becomes the only unifying constant in every inquiry, whether about the construction of science or the construction of society.

This brief discussion of Latour’s shortcomings suggests an affinity between realist efforts and might-as-right politics, but it also anticipates a concluding point about the politics of animation and the animation of politics: namely, that the nurturing ground for politics is not to be found on the shores of verifiable knowledge, but upon the contentious terrain of uncertainty and aesthetic judgment. Both Latour and Graham Harman, whom Galloway also mentions, have expressed such positions after making more realist claims earlier in their careers. ¹⁴ And in respect to the foregoing discussion of animation via Malpas, Crafton, and Latour, the expansion of animation as a concept along philosophical and realist lines is valuable for exposing the limitations of modern habits of thought, but a realist definition alone is likely to have a political chilling effect. That is, realist accounts of animation, while valuable and true, cannot convey on their own the multiplicity of ideas and worlds that animated media suggest.

As I alluded to before, the homogeneous presence of networked heterogeneous actors is one of the self-critiques that Latour deploys to introduce his recent and most ambitious philosophical project, An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence (AIME, 2013). ¹⁵ In this project, Latour delineates different modes according to their own specific truth conditions and prepositions – networks [net] is merely one of the 15 modes, which include law, religion, politics, science, and technology to name a few. By the time of AIME’s publication, Latour’s approach to politics is no longer inclined towards a might-is-right philosophy, but has become explicitly ‘object-oriented’ (AIME, ch.12). By ‘object-oriented’, Latour is referring to the idea that politics does not exist independent of political issues (objects). Influenced by the work of Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, and Noortje Marres, Latour understands political activity as forming around issues that affect and therein form a given public. This object-oriented definition emphasizes the role of ignorance: in addition to the absence of transcendental authorities and truths, people lack expertise about all the issues going on in their worlds. Graham Harman (2014a: 177) explains that for Latour, politics

results from the hybrid crossing of humans with things … Since even experts cannot fully sound the depths of those things, let alone those non-experts who are affected or concerned by a given issue, ignorance lies at the basis of all human action.

Harman is intentionally articulating Latour’s position in terms that align with his own philosophy. ¹⁶ But he is also emphasizing their common appreciation of ignorance, which follows a Socratic tradition that loves and pursues wisdom, but never possesses it.

Both the pluralist notion of multiple ontological modes and the crucial role of uncertainty in politics have strong affinities with the foregoing discussion of animation. As if responding to Galloway’s analysis, Harman and Latour’s turn away from realist efforts acknowledges that such mathematical accounts of reality are only one reality out of many. Politics, for instance, is one mode for Latour that is not oriented around realism; it is oriented around issues and the publics that gather around them. A fervent commitment to the real can amount to abdicating the political future, which is a problem for theorists concerned about the future of earth. This sounds contradictory given how important it is to acknowledge good science when debating what to do about climate change, but contemplating the virtual and the possible are equally important. As is reckoning with the other modes of human existence that inform how people address global crises.

In line with Latour’s definition of politics, animation as a problematic field and set of objects has prompted people to gather around it. The foregoing argument has considered maintaining some aspects of this vital problematic by including both broad, philosophical definitions of animation and narrow, medium-specific definitions. These definitions are associated – as in the case of animated cartoons offering critiques comparable to Latour’s – but they need not exclude each other even as animation undergoes definitional and conceptual remapping. Further, animation’s legacy of being a minor form can assist in this call for pluralist thinking as attested to by Halberstam’s argument that the alternative worlds built by animated films are conducive to alternative political formations. ¹⁷ The tradition of building worlds and expressing a sense of otherworldliness that remains affiliated with animation prompts explicit contemplations of pluralism. This idea also correlates with Crafton’s (2013: 72) analysis of performance, which maps the different agential worlds between animation, animator, and audience.

It is true that the foregoing analysis and argument has dealt with only a few of animation’s associations and those have been primarily conceptual and general. Distinct animated worlds, different modes of analysis, and unique geo-political and production contexts have hardly been discussed. Fortunately, the other articles in this Special Issue help round out, complicate, and challenge the ideas put forth here. These range from arguments about traditional theories of animation to discussions of political expressions within specific animated films to analyses of animation labor in contexts of neoliberalization, globalization, and gender and sexual inequality. The curation of these articles has involved a conscious effort to express the breadth of animation study and to gesture toward a program for future study. While the short history of animation’s minor status may have ended, it remains valuable to cultivate a politics of animation – a field of study and practice that focuses on problems, alternatives, and marginal objects – in an effort to maintain an animation of politics.