624581

research-article2015
ANM0010.1177/1746847715624581AnimationHerhuth

Special Issue: Introduction

animation:

The Politics of Animation and an interdisciplinary journal

2016, Vol. 11(1) 4­–22
© The Author(s) 2015
the Animation of Politics Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/1746847715624581
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Eric Herhuth
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, USA

Abstract
This article demonstrates how political inquiry can guide the study of animation. It proceeds by
investigating animation’s minor status within film and media studies and then the expansion of
its definition and conceptual associations. This expansion has philosophical implications, which
are explored in this article through the work of Jeff Malpas and Bruno Latour. By examining
how these philosophers discuss animation and animated examples – puppets, in particular – this
article demonstrates a shift from thinking of animation as expressing mastery and illusion to
thinking of animation as expressing transformation, heterogeneous action, and distributed agency.
This shift challenges philosophy’s opposition to rhetoric, poetics, and technology, and in turn
challenges modern binaries between nature and culture, science and politics, reality and artifice,
facts and fetishes, and it presents the world as animated. The author argues that this idea need not
obfuscate the many different moving-image technologies that have been designated animation or
cinema, and contends that some of these, such as animated cartoons, directly engage the confusion
about animation caused by modern binaries. This argument proposes studying animation through
multiple modes or lenses in order to prevent dominant realist modes of inquiry from stifling the
uncertainty and pluralism that are central to animation’s capacity for political expression.

Keywords
actor-network theory (ANT), agency, animation, animation studies, Bruno Latour, philosophy,
politics, puppets

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

Corresponding author:
Eric Herhuth, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Center for International Education, University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee, Garland 138, PO Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201, USA.
Email: eherhuth@uwm.edu
Herhuth 5

animation and effects. Threaded through the Issue’s articles are multiple lines of inquiry that exam-
ine 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 implica-
tions; 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 surround-
ing ‘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 denota-
tions 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 mar-
ginality: 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
6 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11(1)

animation, I am interested in analyzing the complications and implications of remapping anima-

tion, 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 con-
cept 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 fab-
rication and artifice, and distinguishes such things from truth and knowledge. To avoid over-gen-
eralizing, 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 founda-
tional 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 liter-
ary 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 domi-
nant discourses and aesthetic traditions. Major animation studios and white male artists have his-
torically 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
Herhuth 7

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 entangle-
ment 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 ‘prob-
lem’. 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 prac-
titioners 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 dif-
ferent 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 pres-
ence 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 anima-
tion 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 influ-
ential Cahiers du cinema circle of critics and filmmakers (Beckman, 2014, 2015a). Her historio-
graphical 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
8 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11(1)

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 alterna-
tive 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 intrin-
sically 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, revo-
lutions, and other minor formulations is a major business. It remains difficult not to read the sub-
versive 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, con-
verted 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 subver-
sive rebelliousness, thingness, otherness, and commodification that persist in many animated char-
acters 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 activ-
ity 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 criti-
cism of the regime that sets the criteria for judging the bad object as bad.6 Bad objects have a his-
tory 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 trac-
ing 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 tech-
niques 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 anima-
tion 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 bal-
anced position between the poles of artifice and reality.
Herhuth 9

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 indus-
tries 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 considera-
tions, 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 histori-
cal 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 depar-
ture 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 mov-
ing 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 repre-
sentation, Malpas finds the presence of transformation to be fundamental to animated films, pri-
marily 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 philoso-
phy, 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
10 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11(1)

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 move-
ment 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 defi-
nition ‘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 anima-
tion’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’ con-
structs 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 trans-
formation 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 anima-
tion 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 mod-
ern 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,
Herhuth 11

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 anima-
tion, 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 capa-
ble 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, ration-
alism, positivism, and indexicality. This is a sweeping formulation, but the basic point is that ani-
mated 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 pho-
tography. 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 ani-
mation – from the manipulation of material figures in stop-motion to rigging in computer anima-
tion. 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 super-
natural resurfacing through popular entertainment and art (Nelson, 2001). However, such treat-
ments 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 formula-
tions 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 stud-
ies in mind when deploying animated media examples, observing how Latour uses puppet analo-
gies 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 media-
tion, this shift discloses a basic antinomy between certain realist projects and politics while reem-
phasizing the affinities between politics, aesthetics, and philosophy.
12 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11(1)

Most of Latour’s books feature at least one or two puppet analogies, with the figure of the mari-
onette 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 domi-
nant 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 sexu-
ality 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 scien-
tists, between scientists and their funding agencies, between scientists and their families, etc.
Studying the construction of science also requires examining interactions between scientists, tech-
nical 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 phenom-
enon. 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 under-
stand 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 con-
structive forces of culture. We can refer to Latour’s project, then, as a realist one in that it is con-
cerned 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
Herhuth 13

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 rational-
ity, 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 para-
doxes 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 independ-
ent 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 icono-
clasm, 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 remi-
niscent 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.
14 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11(1)

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 con-
tests 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 class-
room technology instead of cinema or puppet theatre, Latour suggests that the modern, anti-fetish-
ist 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 presupposi-
tion 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 dou-
ble 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, techno-
logical, 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
Herhuth 15

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, espe-
cially 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 actu-
ally 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 rebel-
liousness 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 audi-
ences 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
16 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11(1)

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 ani-
mated. 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 car-
toons 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 anima-
tion’s association with a realist project like that of Latour’s. While animated cartoons share a criti-
cal 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 ontol-
ogy – 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 effective-
ness of network power.
This last point is a return to a classical debate. After all, this discussion of puppets is an investi-
gation into what it means to act freely and what it means to control others – political and philo-
sophical 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 sci-
ence with a small ‘s’) refers to an ideal transportation of information without deformation, transla-
tion, 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).
Herhuth 17

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 capi-
talism. 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 his-
torical 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 neu-
tral. 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 judg-
ment. 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
18 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11(1)

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 philoso-
phy.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 ani-
mated 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 cor-
relates 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 asso-
ciations 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 discus-
sions 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.

Acknowledgements
I wish to extend my sincere thanks to the authors who contributed to this Special Issue and to Suzanne Buchan
for the opportunity to realize this project.
Herhuth 19

Funding
This research was not supported by any grant from any agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Notes
  1. A few recent book collections detailing the expansion of animation include Suzanne Buchan’s Pervasive
Animation (2013) and Karen Beckman’s Animating Film Theory (2014). Recent academic conferences
include Life Remade: The Politics and Aesthetics of Animation, Simulation and Rendering at Birkbeck
University of London, June 2015 and Fantasy/Animation: A Conference on Media, Medium and Genre
at King’s College London, September 2015. The Society for Animation Studies also hosts an annual
academic conference. Finally, this ‘Animation and Politics’ Special Issue developed out of a couple of
panels I organized for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Montreal, 2015.
  2. For example, see Manovich (2001), Cholodenko (1991), LaMarre (2009), Cubitt (2004), and Gunning
(2007).
  3. Latour has begun using the term animation more frequently as a synonym for agency (see Latour, 2014).
A more animated view of the world would be one that acknowledges agency among actor-networks.
  4. Kafka’s fiction uses the major language of German but to express alternative logics of sense or illogi-
cal sense experience, e.g. when the character Gregor Samsa becomes a beetle this is not metaphor, it is
metamorphosis. Instead of using literary expression to refer to something outside the literature, Kafka’s
work resists this conventional mode of reading referentially. Despite Kafka’s singular notoriety, Deleuze
and Guattari explain that for minor literature all work has collective value because there are no liter-
ary masters in a minor literature. The political context contaminates every statement the authors make,
even if they are not in agreement. In this way, the work calls others to form a community (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1986: 17).
 5. When discussing the Resnais and Chris Marker collaboration Toute la mémoire du monde (All the
Memory in the World, 1965), Beckman (2015: 15) writes:

It is as if Resnais, through a network of authorial references and images, were posing the question of how
to create cinematic truth in 1956 in the wake of the fascist use of documentary film. Along with collabo-
rative authorship, ephemeral and simple graphic images—the kind that would never be catalogued in this
library—seem to participate in his answer to this implied question, not least because the film constantly
and explicitly bemoans the imprisonment and domestication of cultural artifacts. There is something
special about those objects that manage to escape and that are suspended between cultural permanence
and cinematic ephemerality.
The description of graphic images as ephemeral refers to Dudley Andrew’s Bazinian claim that films
of paintings differ from animation because paintings gain permanence and solidity from being kept
by museums. Beckman is critical of this cultural officiating and remarks that Toute la mémoire du
monde, ‘might be read as a fantasy about a different type of cultural memory or storehouse, one
made up of culturally unsanctioned objects that perhaps offer a counterhistory’ (p. 15). Beckman
champions the values of filmmakers like Resnais and Marker, who persistently declare an openness to
cinema’s becoming and participate in the creation of cinemas that use new technologies, dispose of or
retool old ones, and are permeated and transformed by neighboring arts, including animation and the
comic strip. (pp. 24–25).

  6. Rosalind Galt’s Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (2013: 12), while not about animation, demon-
strates this critical maneuver quite thoroughly by analyzing film examples of pretty aesthetics which are
at once ‘too decorative, too sensorially pleasurable to be high art, and yet too composed and “arty” to be
efficient entertainment’. The category of pretty enables Galt to critique a film studies aesthetic regime
that privileges anti-aesthetics (aesthetic austerity), neorealism and cinéma vérité, and marginalizes non-
European and non-American film styles that are deemed too decorative.
20 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11(1)

  7. Andreas Huyssen (1986) explores this legacy in his work, and in his essay ‘Mass culture as woman,’ he
writes:

One of the few widely agreed upon features of postmodernism is its attempt to negotiate forms of high art
with certain forms and genres of mass culture and the culture of everyday life. I suspect that it is probably
no coincidence that such merger attempts occurred more or less simultaneously with the emergence of fem-
inism and women as major forces in the arts, and with the concomitant reevaluation of formerly devalued
forms and genres of cultural expression (e.g., the decorative arts, autobiographic texts, letters, etc.). (p. 59)

  8. It is worth recalling here Stanley Cavell’s (1979) appreciation of film for offering an aestheticized ver-
sion of a modern epistemological problem – i.e. skepticism or doubts about the human capacity to know
others and the world. Film rehearses this problem by simultaneously presenting the world and others and
screening us from them. Modern skepticism involves a fraught drive to escape subjectivity and illusion
by finding security in scientific objectivity and truth.
  9. Cinema Studies itself has had a significant role in remapping cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic divides.
In Patrice Petro’s recent interview with Mary Ann Doane (2015), both scholars recall the political
engagements that were central to the field of film studies when it was a younger field open to differ-
ent critical and theoretical perspectives and plenty of engaging debates. See the Society for Cinema
and Media Studies’ ‘Fieldnotes’, available at: http://www.cmstudies.org/?page=fieldnotes (accessed 3
December 2015).
10. Referring to his approach as ‘naïve’, Malpas (2014: 66) admits that his concerns are primarily philo-
sophical and that he neglects the sophistication of scholarship primarily concerned with animation as a
field of media and artistic study. His interest in animation is motivated by the goal of qualifying process
philosophy’s focus on temporality by re-orienting philosophy around the idea of place as constituted by
movement, which includes differentiation and transformation (p. 71).
11. Puppets, after all, present vitality and activity to an audience, but they also present a dead, mechanical,
or masked interiority – e.g. dolls, marionettes, hand puppets. This can resonate with the duality of human
experience in which a person finds his or her body, emotions, and thoughts at once under his or her con-
trol and beyond his or her control; these elements are at once the person and within the person. This mode
of expression is quite conducive to phenomenological analysis and its bifurcation of agency resembles
puppetry’s common master–slave/creator–creation denotations.
12. This also resonates with Christian theology that celebrates humanity’s original sin and disobedience
because it indicates free will and serves as the precondition for grace and redemption. Of course, both
Latour and many forms of animation suggest that it is the autonomy of nonhumans that we need to
redeem.
13. Crafton (2013: 63) writes, ‘There is an analogy between the mechanisms of agency in the relationships
among puppeteers, puppets, and audiences and those of animators, toons, and their audiences.’
14. To hear Harman’s discussion of art and philosophy both operating in the space of ignorance and
unknowability, see Harman’s YouTube lecture ‘Graham Harman: Objects and the Arts’, ICA: https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ0GR9bf00g, 27 March 2014.
15. AIME features a central ethnographer character, and early on in the study, Latour (2013) writes:

And yet, to her great confusion, as she studies segments from Law, Science, The Economy, or Religion
she begins to feel that she is saying almost the same thing about all of them: namely, that they are ‘com-
posed in a heterogeneous fashion of unexpected elements revealed by the investigation’.To be sure, she
is indeed moving, like her informants, from one surprise to another, but, somewhat to her surprise, this
stops being surprising, in a way, as each element becomes surprising in the same way. (emphasis in
original, AIME 33)

16. Harman (2014b) has discussed how Latour’s relational ontology (that which exists is that which affects other
things) fails to account for the reserved surplus of objects themselves that are not present in relationships.
Herhuth 21

17. This idea approaches Buchan’s (2006: vii) use of the term ‘animated worlds’ to refer to ‘cinematic
experience[s] that are accessible to the spectator only through the techniques available in animation
filmmaking’.

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Author biography
Eric Herhuth received his PhD in Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies from the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee. His research areas include animation and film studies, aesthetics and politics, media theory, and
modernity and globalization. He has published articles in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and
Cinema Journal.