Ngai, "Animatedness"

88 tone

ecteo by the spectator is modeled on the expression of melancholy 0

Iereilliy that can be found in nature when it is not seen as an objen of action (AT 275) With this striking invocation of individuated

feelings as an index of objectivity as such affect returns through the door to Adornos theo ry of aura as the product of an ove r-

determined relay in his a rgument For here Adorno s analogy between an artworks objective phenomenon of a tance and na ture w hen distanced from practical aims might be sa io to feed bac k melancholy and serenity as semblances of feeling---and in a manner which sugges ts in a reve rsal of our ear-lier d esc ription of tone as a specific version of aura that what critics call aura is actually an unspecified kino of tone For as Tomkins notes about affect tones gene rality and abstractness should not distract us fr om the fact that it is always about something Ironically nothing demonstrates this better than Melville s affec-ti vely ambiguous novel whose ato na l tone we have seen to be ulti -matel) about the simultaneously o rderly and noisy character of tone itself

l animatedness

I II Moving Pictures They Are (1912) I scnes of volumes with the overall title Conquests of SCience

T rcderick A Talhot announced that Americans ha ve brought the HIlC turn one picture movement to a high state of perfection and have produced somc astonishing pictures as a result of its appii - ( It ion A technical explanation of one turn one picture Tal- hilts te rm for stop-motion animation is offered by the cxample of I ll popular film Animated Putty A lump qf this material was hnw n upon a table Suddenly it was obse rved to becom e agitated Ind to resolve itself gradually into statues and busts of well-known people so cleve rly wrought as to be instantly identified

Anti cipating the an imation technique that would be trade-In arked decad es later in the Sta tes as Talhots film featuring a lump of ea rthy matter seems a particularly I ing means for explaining stop-motion cinematography given how primitive this trick vas perceived til be Despite the novelty and sophistication associated with specia l effects in genertl thy stop-motion technique brought _ to a high state of perfection by

89

90 a17imatedness

Americans is not only one of the simplest of trick one of the most tedious to perform

The lump of material lies on the table The camera is set up The modeler advances to the table whilst the shutter is closed and moves the cby slightly towards the desired result He then steps our of the picture and the camera handle is turned sufficiently Lo expose one picture and to cover the lens again The modeler comes forward once again and advances a little further with his work a fter which he retires from the scene and the second stage is recorded upon the next picture [ 1 This alternate process of shaping the putty a littk at a time and photographing every separate movement is contin-ued until the bust is completed

I t is essential thaI the progress should be very gradual or else the material would look as if it took shape hy spasmodic jumps and the illusion would be destroyed (1JP 236)

Harking back to the familiar medium of still photography film an imation was thus seen as a kind of technological atavism As Tallll writes It will be observed that this magical effect is not pn duced in accordance with the generally accepted principles gover n ing cinematography It is merely a series of snap-shots taken at en tain intervals and could be produced just as well hy a hand-calllc-t if one had sufficient plates or film (MP 236) The simuitanco lI1 basic yet exceptional character of this special effect is underscor by the ideological fantasy which Animated Putty seems to that of an agitation that is quickly stilled and even seems COIl

niently to resolve itself as the films lumpen protagonist is trail formed into cleverly-wrought images of humans of unmistabhl social distinction a bust of the King of the American Presidl or some other illustrious personage (MP 236)

The fact that such preclassical trick films scenes of production in the absence of human agents-for install( a film in which a stocking [is] knitted before the audience by I

animatedness 91

n hands or a magical carpenters shop picture in which tools rt manipulated without hands and where the wood is planed

W I1 chiseled and fashions itself into a box by an apparently Y te rious and invisible force2-suggests a further irony that 111)S based on a technically backward and labor-intensive princi-Ie were precisely those that most spectacularly imagined the uto-11 11 possibilities of a technology so advanced as to put an end to Iman bbor altogether (MP 238 237)) In contrast to the vigor ul spirit of the saws and knitting needles moved to action hu-II1 S appear strikingly inert in most of the dimensional animation

Ims cited by Talbot as in the case of a short depicting a shoeshine 1 11 going to sleep at his task and the footwear cleaning itself hi le he dreams brushes running to and fro to remove the dust Iply the blacking and to give a vigorous polishing off (MP 235) rom this ambiguous interplay between agitated things and deacti-ttd persons one could argue that what early animation technol-y foregrounds most is the increasingly ambiguous status of hu- 11 agency in a Fordist era These questions of agency will figure ptl rtantiy in this chapter as we focus on one of the most basic )5 in which affect becomes socially recognizable in the age of

ln hanical reproducibility as a kind of innervation agitation (the term I prefer) animatedness Indeed the rudimentary as-

i I of stop-motion technology parallels the way in which the af- live state of being animated seems to imply the most basic or lI1i mal of all affective conditions that of being in one way or an-1H r moved Bllt as we press harder on the affective meanings of animated- we shall see how the seemingly neutral state of being moved omes twisted into the image of the overemotional racialized

liect abctting his or her construction as unusually receptive to lernal control This surprising interplay between the passionate n l the mechanical vill be our focus as we move through readings

lexts by William Lloyd Garrison Frederick Douglass Harriet cher Stowe Ralph Ellison and the short-lived but aesthetically

92 a12imatedness animatedness 93

and politically controversial Claymation television show The PJ (1998-2001) tracing the affects transformation into a racializinK technology in American cultural contexts ranging from nineteenlh century abolitionist writing to the contemporary cartoon In order to unpack the ideologeme of racialized animatedness we will keep returning to the questions of human agency associated with til much more general concept of animation that underlies it-with

animation designating not only a magical screen practice hilI

also a rhetorical figure and the general process of activating or g i ing life to inert matter It seems fitting then to begin by eXltlminilllot another scenario in which a lump plays a key role in dramatizin the process by which an object becomes imbued with life though this time in a manner that explicitly foregrounds the problemati l connections between emotion and race

A foul lump started making promises in my voice notes th speaker in John Yau s poem cycle Genghis Chan Private Eyc M

(f989- 1996) giVIng new life vigor or zest to a cliche or overfamiliar metaphor for ones inability to speak due to undis charged emotion a lump in my throat4 In fact the exhausted metaphor could be described as doubly revitalized insofar as th inhuman entity obstructing human speech in the original adage itself brought to life in Yaus poem perversely ventriloquizing the speaker If Animated Putty demonstrates thl quieting of an agitated lump as it resolves itself into the facsimik of a person in Genghis Chan an increasingly vocal lump to take posession of the person as if it were the first lump evil t-yin We thus move from a human character who is all choked up rendered inarticulate by some undischarged feeling to a situa-tion in which the lump responsible for this rhetorical disem-powerment suddenly individuates into an agent capable of speak-ingjor the human character-and more dangerously in a manner

contractually binding him to othcrs without his volition For Nietzsche it is precisely the act of promising that humanizes

the subhuman To breed an animal with the right to make prom -

s-is this not the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the 1( of man In a striking echo of this question the disturbing

1 lVer of the inhuman entity in Genghis Chan to silence and IIntractually obligate the racialized speaker similarly echoes Nietz-hes observation that something of the terror that formerly at-Ilded all promises pledges and vows on earth is still effective M 61) As Nietzsche notes Man himself must first of all have

I(w me calculable regula necessmy even in his own image of If if he is able to stand in security for his own which is ha t one who promises does (GM 5R original italics) We could

rgue howcvCf that Yaus lump promises not so much to make a Il im for its own humanity as to force the human whose voice it

h1 appropriated into the social role of this promising-and there-lu re regular and accountable-subject If for Nietzsche the long lll ry of hov lespol1Jibility originated is that of how one first Iukes men to a certain degree uniform like among like nd consequently calculable (GA1 58) the story of the lump who

lu rns Genghis Chan into a pledging individual might be read as an lil egory of bow the Asian-American becomes forced into the posi-lion of model minority- that is the person marie uniform ac-w untable and therefore safely disattendable at the cost of hav-Ing his or her speech acts controlled by another6

Genghis Chan Private Eye thus offers a genealogy of an merican racial stereotype-that of the Asian as silent ivc and like Bartleby emotionally in Iloticeable contrast to what we might call the exaggerttedly emo- t ianal hyperexpressive and even overscrutable image of most ra-l ially or ethnically marked subjects in American culture from Ilarriet Beecher Stowes ebullient Topsy (1852) to Warner ITS hyperactive Speedy Gonzales (195deg) to the hand-wringing jcws gesticulating Italians and hot-tempered Greeks in films ranging from The Jazz Singer to My Big Fat Greek Wedding Ver-sions of these excessively lively or agitated ethnic subjects lbound in American literature as well-for example in Melvilles

94 animatedness

novel The Confidence-Man (1857) where Irish enthusiasm is d scrihed as flamlingl out and irritating gentleman of sense an respectability and in Anzia Yezierskas Bread Givers (192lt) where Sara Smolinkskys struggle with what she perceives to I her problematic overemotionality becomes a key part of her traj tory toward cultural assimilation and where nearly every page CDII

tains an ejaculative Ach or God Whether marked as Jewish Italian Mexican or (most prominently in American littra ture and visual culture) African-American the kind of exaggerlI emotional ex pressiveness I call animated ness seems to function a marker of racial or ethnic otherness in general As Melvilles narra tor notes about his Irish enthusiasts To be full of Nann earn words and heart-felt protestations is to create a scene and vvd l bred people dislike few things more than that9

And though this exaggerated expressiveness is absent from th racial stereotype whose origins are allegorized in Genghis Chan the image of the distllfbingly lively Jump suggests how m animation still seems required for its production Insofar as often regard the cliche as a dead image-what Robert Ston calls a fossilized metaphor whose expired figurative life rarely capable of being restored or reinvented-the poems tra formation of a lump in the throat into one that makes might be said to dramatize giving life in more ways II one III Moreover in presenting the transformation of the inani lump into a living speaking agent middotwithin a series of POt

whose titk marries tHe violent Mongol Genghis Khan with the ill passive Charlie Chan (the American cinema icon from the I

turned into a television cartoon in the 1970S through Ha Barberas The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan) Yau amazi uses all the definitions of animate and animated provided I Websters Collegiate Dictionary With hoth terms we move from rd erences to biological existence (endowed with life or the qualit of life ALIVE) to sociall y positi ve emotional qualities (lively I of vigor and spirit zest) and finally to a historically spet

animatedness 95

HIde of screen representation (made in the form of an animated 1I( on) 11 While all these meanings become spectacularly IIsed in Yaus lump the already counterintuitive connections in

standard dictionary definition of animated-between the or-lI ie-vitalistic and the technological-mechanical and between the hnological-mechanical and the emotional-are further compli- d by the way in which the orientalized and cartoonish G enghis Ul introduces race into the equation

With such a surplus of animations at work in Genghis I ll it is as if Yaus poetic series is suggesting that to be ani-Inl in American culture is to be racialized in some way even if

Iln ations affective connotations of vivacity or zealousness do not r every racial or ethnic stereotype Indeed Genghis Chan

IWS the extent to which animation remains central to the pro-fion of the racially marked subject even when his or her differ-

signaled by the pathos of emotional suppression radler than motional excess Yet it is the cultural representation of the Afri-American that most visibly harnesses the affective qualities of

linltss effusiveness spontaneity and zeal to a disturbing racial remology and makes these variants of animatedness function

lu dily (hence self-evident) signs of the raced subjects natu-or authenticity Here as epitomized in Stowes character the affective ideologeme of animatedness foregrounds the

rct to which emotional qualities seem especially prone to slid- Into cOlporeal qualities where the African-American subject is

( rned reinforcing the notion of race as a truth located quite II ra lly in the always obvious highly visible body I lbolitionist William Lloyd Garrisons preface to the Narrative

Life of Frederick Douglass (r845) we find this connection be-rl the physical and emotional aspects of being animated put Il rk in his testament to the slave narratives authenticity one

he genres standard features Garrison directs us to the singu-II lthorship and verisimilitude of Douglass narrative but also he texts to move the reader He who can peruse

96 animatedness animatedneJs 97

[this narrative] vtithout a tearful eye a heaving breast an a spirit-without being animated with a determination to the immediate overthrow of that execrable system -must ha a flinty heart and be qualified to act the part of the trafficker slaves and the souls ofmen1 2 The syntactic parallelism of the like construction (without VV X Y-without Z) invites us read being animated as synonymous with the terms that it which indicate an impassioned state betrayed by involulll1 movements of the body (tearful eye heaving breast) but also the endpoint of an action implicit in the form of the list it which through its presentation of discrete elements separated commas rnight be said to enact a segmentation of the human hi into a series of working parts (the eye whose function is to tears the breast whose function is to heave) Hence the anticipa animation of Douglass reader seems not only to involve 1n un immediacy between emotional experience and bodily moven but to be the outcome of a process by which bodily movemenl broken down into phases At the same time however Garri l animation designates the process by which these involunta ry I

poreal expressions of feeling come to exert a politicizing force vating the readers desire to seek the immediate overthrow 01 entire system There is an intim1te link here in other tween animation and the agitation that subtends our concqll the political agitator Facilitating the transition from the imaw I

body whose parts are automatically moved to the oppositional ( I

sciousness required for the making of political movements Garrison calls being animated also hinges on a particularl) mediate relationship to Douglass language which is depict(d havinga spontaneous and direct impact on both the body and I of the reader

Figured as this intensified attunement or hyperreceptivenc the language of others the animation of Douglass reader that ( rison anticipates is strikingly similar to the kind of animated Harriet Beecher Stowe assigns to racialized subjects in Uncle

hin (r852) The negro mind impassioned and imaginative al-Iys attaches itself to hymns and expressions of a vivid and picto-II nature and as [the hymns were being sung] some laughed and

nc cried and some clapped hands or shook hands rejoicingly II h each other13 In this passage animation turns the exagger-d ly expressive body into a spectacle for an ctacle featuring an African-American subject made move

lvs ically in response to lyrical poetic or imagistic language A tli Jar excessi ve responsiveness to poetic discourse but with differ-I lffects is implied in Stowes description of Uncle Tom himself

Nothing could exceed [the] earnestness of his prayer en- riched with the language of Scripture which seemed so entirely to have wrought itself into his being as to have become a pa rt of himself ltlnd to drop from his lips unconsciously And so much did his prayer always work on the devotional feelings of his audiences that there seemed often a danger thltlt it would be lost altogether in the abundance of the responses which broke out everywhere around him (UTe 79)

Ihis case the animatedness ascribed to Tom which stems to aten to animate his audience in turn takes the form not of

li ly movement but of a kind of ventriloquism language from ltIf1 Ihide source that drop[s] from his lips without conscious n H ence the animation of the racialized body in this instance ll ives likening it to an instrument porous and pliablc for the ll ization of others

In this function animation seems closely related also to apostro-- lyric poetrys signature and according to Jonathan Cullcr

1 [ embarrassing rhetorical convention in which absent dead 1I1 1 nimate entities are made present and human-like in be-Iddressed by a first-person speaker H As Barba ra Johnson notes

lrophe can thus be described as a fonn of ventriloquism in Ich a speaker throws voice into the addressee turning its IICC into a mute responsiveness Igt Here one recalls the scene

98 animatedness animatedness 99

of Toms enthrallment (and ventriloquization) by Scripture link between apostrophe animation and enthrallment can alslI found in Garrisons preface

This Narrative contains many affecting incidents but I think the most thrilling one of them all is th e description DOUGLASS gives of his feelings on the banks of the Chesa-pea ke Bay-viewing the receding vessels as they fl ew vith their white before the breeze and apostrophiz ing them a animated by the living spirit offreedom Who can read th at pas-sage and be insensible to irs pathos and sublilIlity (P 249 em phlsis add ed)

Just as Toms prayer workrsj on the devotional feelings of dience tlere animation becomes a thrill that seems highly COl

gious-easily trans ferred through the animated body to its tors This transferability is reinforced by Ga rrisons use 01 oblique conjunction as which makes it difficult to distin the subject performing the animation from the object being mated One wonders if Garrison finds this scene thrilling bel it provides the spectacle of Douglass animating the ships-in ing these inanimate objects with the living spirit of freedom n

if the thrill comes from witnessing the animation of Douglass self either by the same living spirit of freedom or through own expressive act of apostrophizing

Rega rdless of where we locate the thrill Garrison describes II important to note that both Stowe and Garrison find it necessary dramatize the an imation of racialized bodies for political purr in Stowes case to demonstrate the intensity of the slaves d tiona I feeling in order w support a Christian indictment of sla as a sin in Garrisons to signify Douglass power as a writer 1

mobilize his readers to the antislavery cause In both cases the I I

nection between animation and affectivity is surprisingly fost t through acts resembling the practice of puppeteering involving ther the bodys ventriloquism or a physical manipulation of

h Yet the thinging of the body in order to construct it coun-Intuitively as impassioned is deployed by both abolitionists as a legy of shifting the status of this body from thing to human as he racialized hence already objectified bodys reobjectification ht ing animated were paradoxically necessary to emphasize its

onhood or subjectivity Rcy Chow in her essay Postmodern Automatons argues that lim ing animated in this objectifying sense-having ones body I voice controlled by an invisible other-is synonymous with lini ng automatized subjected to [a manipulation] whose ori-

are beyond ones individual grasp16 In a reading of Charlie plin s hyperactive physical movements in Modem Times (193 6)

lOW suggests that film and tel ev ision as technologies of mass luetion uniquely disclose the fact that the hum]n body as

II is already a working body automatized in the sense that it be-lles in the new age an automaton on which social injustice as II as processes of mechanization take on a life of their own so peak (PA 62 italics in original) For Chow this automatiza-

II of the body as an effect of subjection to power coincides with rnoment the body is made into the object of a gaze being ani -

lled thus entails becoming a spectacle whose aesthetic power rcases with ones increasing awkvvardness and helplessness

PA 61) While Chow describes this simultaneous visualization d technologization as a condition of the modern body in general

also observes that certain bodies are technologized in more pro-lunced vvays than others Hence the automatized other takes r form either of the ridiculous the lower class or of woman IA 63) From a feminist perspective this point enables Chow to s ue that the main question facing third-world subjects constantly Iloked apostrophized or ventriloquized by first-world theorists lhe question of how to turn automatization into autonomy and

Idependence The task that faces third world feminists is thus II simply that of animating the oppressed women of their cul-

Ires but of making the automatized and animated condition of

100 animatedlless

their own voices the conscious point of departure in their inter tions CPA 66 68)

Automatization in the Fordist or Taylorist sense dramatized Chaplin (and Chow) becomes a useful if slightly anachronist synonym for the kind of animation already at work in the ante

of Garrison and Stowe in both situations the hUll body is subjected to [a manipulationJ whose origins are bey ones individual grasp and becomes a spectacle whose aesthl pover increases with ones increasing avvkwardness and hel ness Vhat makes the affect of l11imatedness distinctive is the way in which it oddly synthesizes two kinds of automati whose meanings run in opposite directions encompassing the tremely codified hyperrationalized routines epitomized by the I tory workers repetitive wrenching movements in Modem but also as Rosalind Krauss notes the kind of liberl6ng release spontaneity that we associate with the Surrealists inv()catioll the word automatism (as in psychic automatism)I As this culiar blend of the spontaneous with the formulaic the u meditated with the predetermined and the liberating psychic lmpulses with the set of learned more or less rote con tions (automatisrns) contained within [a system or traditional

the concept of animated ness not only returns us tel

cpnnection hetween the emotive and the mechanistic but also cc mingles antithetical notions of physical agency On one hand matedness points to restrictioFlS pbced on spontaneous and activity in vlodern Times for example it emerges froin the cl us ion of all bodily motion apart from the one assigned to the sembly-line worker On the other hand the affect can also be I

as highlighting the elasticity of the body being animated as evi in Sergei Eisensteins praise of plasmaticness in his analysi Disney cartoons Just as animatedness integrates the two contr ing meanings of automatism then the affect manages to fuse of the bodys subjection to power with signs of its ostensive dam-by encompassing not only bodily activity confined to Ii

animatednesJ 101

il lS and rigid specialized routines (Fordist or Taylorist anima-n) but also a dynamic principle of physical metamorphosis by mmiddot h the body according to Eisenstein seems to triumph over the 1 rs of form (what we might call animistic animation)I ) It is Ii that for the filmmaker the excessive middotenergy and meramor-Il potential of the animated body make it a potentially subver-

or powerful body whereas for Chow the very qualities that nstein praises as liberatory-middotplasmaticness elasticity and pI i-

-are readable as signs of the bodys utter subjection to power lli rming its vulnerability to external manipulation and con- I Although in the last instance Chows pessimistic reading of the lIlated-technologized body as a Taylorized body seems more

lIasive than Eisensteins optimistic one the two perspectives 11 1 lO a crucial ambivalence embedded in the concept of anima-l-ambivalence that takes on special weight in the case of ra-Itlcd subjects for whom objectification exaggerated corporeal-or physical pliancy and the body-made-spectacle remain doubly Ihted issues r ite category of racial difference has thus come to complicate the ings of animation on television a visual medium Jane Feuer described as increasingly governed by an ideology of liveness-

I i$ the promise of presence and immediacy made available by llfl technologys capacity to record and transmit images simulta-ILJsly20 Recalling the similarly direct and immediate impact ofmiddot jlliage on the racialized subjects in Stowes Uncle Cabill nesss promise of presence and immediacy has thu been par-

IIla rly crucial to what Sasha Torres calls the definitionally tele-Itd events of the 1990S which have involved if not centered

persons of color21 As Torres notes historically significant Idcasting events such as the Clarence Thomas confirmation li ngs the trial of O J Simpson the videotaped beating of Iney King and more recently Court TVs coverage of the trial

Ihe New York City police officers indicted for the murder of Idou Diallo have made it impossible to ignore the centrality

lO2 ullimatedness animatedness 10]

of racial representa t ion to televisions representational while also indicating the primacy of liveness in informing race look[sJ Like on television

Vvhat bearing then does the liveliness assoc iated with an in tion in all of its va rious meanings have on what race looks Ii to viewers in a medium whe re liveness signifies Jive action and simulta neity between event and t ransm ission-principles fu mentally opposed to the stop-motion technology on which coni porary screen animation ofte n depends) Vhile it is the live bn casting even t that has made race central to television as Tor argues in King TV it could be sa id that animation on televi ll foregrounds the centrali ty of li veness to the representation of r l difference in a particularly intense way even though at a cert level the genre runs counter to m edium-specific meanings of ness middotwhich as Feuer notes is less an on tological reality thall ideological nne As television in fact becomes less and jess a medium in the sense of a n equ ivalence between time of event time of transmission the medium in its p rac tices insists more more on the li ve the immediate the direc t the spontaneous rea1l A lthough we have already seen-via the writings of 511

and Ga rrison- how a sim il a r ideology informs the relation tween animation and racia l identity in ea rli er m odes of cuhll production the epistemological inflection linking these attri l to the raciali zed feeling concepts above (what a re vivac ious livel iness and zea l if not affective correla tes to the immed iatc d irec t the spontaneous [and] rea l ) makes telev ision ali idea l for examining animnion both as screen genre and as a technol for the rep resentation of rac ial difference

At the end of the twen tieth cen tury questions related to ani tion and the politics of rac ial rep rese ntation rose to the fore in bates surrounding F ox Telev isions dimens ional animation se ri es The Pfs (1998-2000) The Pfs was the first prime-time I gram in Ame rican televisioll history to feature a compl etely white n on-middle-class and nOll-]jve-action cas t as well

l to depict its characters in foamation a three-dimensional stop-Ill tion an im ati on technique trademarked by Will Vinton Studios IIlce producer of the infamous California RaIsin commercia ls hich featured anthropomorphized black g rapes singing and I1cing to a classic Motown hi t) 24 Introduced to the network s

ncur in the fall of 1998 and fea turing multicultural bu t primarily Irican-Ame rican cha racters living in an urban housing project

PIs generated controve rsy several months prior to more widely uhlicized debates over the whi tewashing of network television c ribed by K weisi Mfume as the most segregated industry in IlHrica during his Jul y 1999 keynote address to the 90th annual ACP convention l gt Sta rring Eddie Murphy (who was also one

I the producers) as Thurgood Stubbs the superintendent of the tional Hilton-J1cobs projects the program was soon the ta rget of Itic isms frolll a number of g rass roots organizations who accused orcarryi ng an antiblack message These criticisms ca me from a r ic ty of directions includ ing the Black Muslim g roup Project Il mic H ope as well as the Coa lition against Media Exploitation

Ill ed by A frican-American writer and activist Ea rl Ofari Hutch-1(111 In an interview on the Cahle News N etwork (CNN) in Feb-ull ry 1999 Hutchinson voiced his objec ti on to th e show It does

11 present an accura te or honest depiction of the African-Ameri -III community It does present raciall y demea ning and offensive middot reotypes2( A similar criticism came from th e director Spike ( who described the ca rtoon as rea lly hateful I think to black nplez7 In sp ite of his polemicism the I think in Lees state-

w ilt reveals a crucial ambivale nce over the political and aestheti c II11 S of The PJs and over the use of anima tion fo r the representa-

11 m of rac iall minorities in general-a n am biva lence I lik e to plore by focusing on some of th is technologys intended and un-IL lided effec ts The shocki ng quality that Lee Hutchinson and others attribute

t The PIs points to how the program fundamentally disrupted the 1l1ok of race on mainstream network television since the trad i-

[04 anirnatedneH

tiona I in which racial minorities have had a presence In

arena has been through live-action representations of upwarlt mobile nuclear through animated cartoons featuri the urban poor In particular Hutchinsons criticism of the sh( for failing to present an accurate and honest depiction of the Afr can-American community reflects the insistent demand for m metic realism in the representation of blacks on television-a d mand which is both reflected and resisted in the equally insistl call for what Philip Brian Harper terms simulacral realisl Based on the premise that representations actively shape defi and even occasionally usurp social realities simulacra realism volves the conviction that an improvement in [the] social status African-Americansl can result from their mere depiction in rna stream television programming2x In contrast mimetic realism II

sists that television faithfully mirror a set of social conditil viewed as constituting a singular and unitary phenomenon knl as the black experience YIt is this latter demand that Hutchi sees The PIs as betraying though similar criticism was directed lier at The Cosby Show-a black-produced program that could be more opposed to The PIs in form content and tone This Cl

tradiction reinforces Harpers observation tha t -vhile the ten between mimetic and simulaCFal realism continues to struCIi critical discourse on black television their opposing demands 01 run smack up against reach other]li Yet in its three-dimensilll animation format The PIs changed the terms of the existing I

bate The conflict between simulacral and mimetic realism beell a moot issue since neither television faithfully 11

ror the bla ck experience or that it aim at bettering the social tus of actual African-American subjects-could be properly

plied to a show that so insistently foregrounded its own art Calling attention not just to the exaggerated physicality but al the material composition of its characters-that is to their I

tence as dolls with outsized plastic heads and foam latex bodir The PIs pushed the issue of racial representation outside the I

anirnatedness 105

li sms binary Though in doing so it risked the appearance of rely resuscitating a much older style of racial caricature which

I ism was once summoned by artists to

l the show actually introduced a new possibility for racial repre- Il lUtion in the medium of television one that ambitiously sought reclaim the grotesque andor ugly as a powerful aesthetic ofex- Ic ration crudeness and distortion which late tventieth-century f iean-American artists seemed to have become barred from us-

ven for the explicit purpose of anti racist critique 5 the only prime-time comedy to feature residents of middotd housing since Norman Lear s Good Times (1974-1979) and unly animated program featuring nonwhite inner-city dwellers

1 e Fat Albelt in the early 1970S (the decade of socially relevant wamming) The PIs also produced ashift in the content of net-rk television1 As Armond White has noted every joke on the IW implies a correlated social circumstance3 enabling the pro-li n in its first season to address topics such as accGss to food Ith care public education and safe and livable housing Since

dealt with racism in a larger socioeconomic context rather 11 as a problem of prejudice between individuals its targets were luently government institutions the welfare system hospitals police and the federal Department of and Urban

l lopment (HUD) The humor becomes most acerbic when IU lgood visits the local HUD office which he does in nearly ev-

pisode The sign greeting him displays a variety of sardonic ltIges ranging from HUD Putting a Band-Aid over Poverty

Years to HUD Keeping You in rhe Projectssince 1965 the PIs also replaced the traditional sitcoms main social unit nuclear family with the community formed by the projects inc

hrants In one episode the tenants try to raise money fo one Ir r y resident Mrs Avery when it is discovered she has been rl t y subsisting on dog food Since i1rs Avery is too proud tlke charity the only way Thurgood can convince her to ac-

II the food and health care supplies donated by tenants is by dis-

106 animatedlless animatedness J 07

gUsJng them as gift baskets from the state welfare system Medicaid The joke here is the illusion that these beleaguered i tutions are still efficient-even benevolent-in their intended tions and that the bitter task of perpetuating the illusion of ficiency rather than exposing it becomes tbe only way of ensuri that services are actuall y performed

In another episode after suffering a near-fatal heart a Thurgood is informed that he requires medication he cannot ford The only solution is for him to participate in an experime drug program The problem is that Thurgoods cholesterol k lnd blood pressure arent high enough to officially qualify him the program so the episode turns on his efforts to jack them up order to receive the medication he needs to live Once again I

shows humor finds its basis in the contradictions of an unjust tem targeting the institutional ineptness that translates into ad harm or injury to the bodies of the urban poor In this manner PJs insists that racism involves more than the mobilization o(

reotypes that in fact it extends far beyond matters of visual rl entation While this is a relatively simple point it vites us to push beyond the prevailing methods in media stud where a focus on analyzing stereotypes dominates the conversat about race to the extent that racism often becomes inadvertently duced to bad representation and anti racist politics are oftell picted merely as a struggle over the content of specific images the struggles depicted on The PJs are rarely about imagery ind in a culture where i t is impossible to separate racism from class itics the struggles remain lived and felt primaril y in relation power not visible at all In this sense what the show ultimately fers is a Foucauldian rather than a liberal humanist critique of r ism as Armond Vhite notes When government workers al or Thurgood and his wife visit social agencies conversations I

place in a void Voices of authority are always flceless Til goods trek though a blizzard to retrieve his wifes journal left hospital emergency room is interrupted by cops who stay in II

hide vhile announcing their shakedown through a bullhorn yourself This humor puts The PJs in league with some of

most daring and derisive agit-pop such as Public Enemys 9I I

1 Joke and its colorful comic music video (TPJS 10) Ihis is not to say however that The PJs simply bypasses the is-of representing blackness on television in order to foreground

hl r aspects of social inequity The show also contains the internal It re nces to African-merican history and culture that Kristal

nt Zook finds integral to the antiracist identity politics uf the t black-produced sitcoms in the early 1990S which unlike pre-

jllS white-produced shows about African-Americans attempted foreground struggles over the representation of blackness within

hlack community as a whole But in contrast to the paintings Va rnette Honeywood featured on the walls of the Comiddotby living lin or the framed photograph of Malcolm X prominently fca -r t on the set of Roc (key examples cited in Zooks study) the

It rences to black history and culture in The PJs are primarily ref-nees to black television culture-pointing to the fraught legacy H rican-Americans on television not only in the form of tribute

II also in playful irreverent and ambivalent ways For instance H ilton-Jacobs housing project is named after Lavvrence Hilton-

nbs the actor who portrayed Freddie Boom-Boom Washing-I I in Welcome Back Kotter The mere reference to the older situa-III comedy suggests a relationship between tokenism and gheuo-Ilion as well as the failures of liberal cultural progressivism (as Ikcted in th e demands for issue-oriented programs like Kotter in

It 1970S and early 19805) to create public policy capable of produc-se rious changes in the infrastructure of US cities (7PJS 10)

( 1invoking Sherman Helmsleys apartment in the sky in the me songs description of the Hilton-Jacobs as a low-rent high- and using Janet DuBois singer and composer of the memora-theme song for The Jeffersonmiddot as the voice of Mrs Avery The

II constantly confronts the legacy of the 70S black sitcom-rather middot In simply joining in (TPJS IO) The show also offered a run-

108 animatedness animatednes 109

ning commentary on the cultural legacy of black television in til 1980s and early 199os The most genteel character in The PJs fo r example is a parole officer named Walter whose signature trait ilgt an affable chuckle closely resembling the laugh of the expensively dad family doctor on The Simpsons who in turn seems to be a gen tle parody of Bill Cosbys Dr Huxtable

Yet as a situation comedy based entirely on caricature The P] i forced to confront the problem of stereotypes directly Questioll concerning caricature and typecasting moreover necessarily COllll

to the fore in genres informed by the mode of comedy which ha trauitionally relied on the production of what Stanley Cavell call individualities rather than inuiviuuals or on the presentation of so cia I types operas villains and buffos Shakespeares clowns alld melancholics Jane Austens snobs and bores and the televisifln sitcoms neighbors and meddling mothers-in-law Althouh there remains an irreducible difference between types and stereo types or between social roles and individualities that IprojectJ par ticulai ways of inhabiting a social role this difference becomes t

pecially uneasy when it involves certain social roles that have becn drastically limited in ways tbat others have not34 Thus while tltt overwhelming emphasis on stereotype analysis in liberal medibull criticism often limits critical intervention to the analysis of the con tent of specific images or to assessments of the extent to which COli

temporary images conform to or d ev iate from previous ones it r

l11d Kristal Brent Zook have extensively explored-the tradition of viciously racist cartoons in American screen culture ensures that Ihe intersection of comedy with animation in the visual represen-lltion of racialized bodies becomes a particularly loaded issueis

T hus while arguments have been made for eel anirnations ideo-logically disruptive properties in its incipience as an early filin gcnre36 in products ranging from MGMs Bosko series in the 192 0S

tu numerous cartoon features in the following two decades (includ-ing Disneys Alice Hunting in Ajiica Warner Brothers Tokio Jokio md Walter Lantzs Jungle Jitteu and Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Ieat) two-dimensional animation became ooe of the most ally prominent technologies for the rev italization of extant racial stereotypes giving new life to caricatures that might otherwise have stood a greater chance of becoming defunct or inactiveY

Since the animated subjects in The PJJ are three-dimensional dolls made of spongy latex fitted over metal armatures hand-drawn eel animation is not the technology responsible for (what many critics viewed as) the aesthetically disturbing look of the television programs characters or for the disturbing -vay in which their bodies were made to move Yet this two-dimensional ancestor patented in the United States by Earl Hurd and John Bray in 19 15 nevertheless haunts the controversial sitcom through the pictorial separation process on which the older technology depends For as I will discuss in more detail shortly the stop-motion process used to Inimate the characters on The PJs inadvertently introduced a frag-

which clearly underlie the specific criticisms by Hutchinson and mentation of the body that recalls eel animations method of sepa- Lee The stakes of traditional stereotype analysis will continue If rating portions of a drawing onto different layers to eliminate the be high not only because depictions of raced subjects in the ma necessity for re-drawing the entire composition each movement media have been s() severely limited but also because raced subjeci phase (Thompson ICAT 107) As KristinThompson notes the continue to exert Jess control over how existing images are actualh slash system developed by Raoul Barre in the mid-I9IOS pro- deplQyed-ltluite often with symbolically violent effects MoreoVl1 vided an easily standardized and tbereforeindustrially amenable in conjunction with the continued haunting of black live-actioll method for this breakdown of figures into discrete parts such that television comedy by blackface minstrelsy-a legacy that critil a drawing of an entire character could be cut apart and traced such as J Fred MacDonald Herman Gray Robin Means Coleman onto different eels Oddly anticipated perhaps by the activation

mains important to acknowledge the reasons for this

I 10 animatedness

of isolated body parts (tearful eye heaving breas t) in Garris account of the reader animated by Douglass Narrative the s1t systems separation of the body at each stage of its movement i discrete portions and poses was particularly suited to tbe kind animation specific to modern Fordist production- that is to tnl

mation as automatization

Using the slash system the background might be on paper at the lowest level the characters trunks on one sheet of clear celluloid and the moving mouths arms and other parts on a top ee l For speech anel gestures only the top eel need be re-drawn while the background and lower cel are simply re-pho-tographed

This technique not only SJves labour time for a single art-ist but it abo allows speciali sation of labour That is one per-son may do the background while another does certain main poses of the character and yet another fills in the phases be-tween th ese major poses In fact the animation industry has followed this pattern with key animators (doing the major poses) i n-bt tweeners and opaqutrs (filling in the fi gures with opaque paint) in aOddition to those performing the spec ial -ised tasks of scripting and planning The specialisation process and the establishment of the first production companies for animated films took place about 1915-1917-at the same timc as the establishment of the Hollywood motion picture system in gene ral (also characterised by greate r and greater spccial-isati on of tasks-the factory system) (Thompson IC AT 07-IOR)

If Fordist or Taylorist automatization constitutes a specialized tYI of animation as Chow suggests the celluloid slash system could I d esc rihed as an animation technology that animated its I

turn- a functional doubling tha t not only recalls the antici pat t animation of Douglass read e rs by the scene of his own animatilll or by his act of animating by a postrophizing the ships but al

all ima tedlless I 1 I

li kes the capacity of Uncle Toms exagge rated responsi veness to h lical language to animate or enthrall the spectators of hi s own Il rn a tion-such that that there seemed often a dange r it would

I(gtst altogether in the abundance of the responses which brok e Il everywhere around him T hus it is not just the material basis of two-dimensional cel ani-Irion o r its explicitly racial-comic legacy that carnes to haunt The If mode of production (which involves the same automniza tion

11 bor as its technological pred ecesso r) but the antebellum mean-IIoS both racial and emotional that already haunt the former

fo re launching a more detailed analysis of how the three-Imensional animation technology in The PIs operates in a manner h bling the older racial emotional and technological connotations If tn imation to remain active within it Id like to reca ll a key scene

IlITl Ralph Ellison s hwisible lvfall in which similar questions con-rge Walking through midtown Manhattan Ellisons narrator sud-I1 ly finds himself part of a large r audience watching a black doll

Il ppeteered by Tod Clifton a Harl em community leader and ac-Wist he has admired

I moved in to the crowd and pressed to the front where at my feet T saw d square piece of cardboard upon which something was moving with furious action It was some kind of toy and I glanced at the crowds fascinated eyes and down again seeing it clearly this time deg A grinning doll of orange-and-black tis-sue paper with thin flat cardboard disks forming its head and feet and which some mysterious mechanism was causing to move up and down in a loose-jointed shoulder-shaking infu-ria tingly sensuous motion a dance that was completely de-tached from the black mask -lik e face Its no jumping-jack bur whut T thought seeing the doll throwing itself about with the fierce defia nce of someone performing a degrading act in public dancing -IS though it received a perverse pleasure from

I 12 cmimatedness animatedness 113

its motions And beneath the chuckles of the crowd I could hear the swishing of its ruffl ed paper while the same out-of-the-corner-of-the-mouth voice continued to spiel

Shake it up Shake it up Sambo the dancing dolL ladies and gentlemen

Shake him itretch him by the neck and set him down - Hell do the reit Yes

r knew r should get back to the district but r WaS held by inanimate boneless bouncing of the grinning doll and

struggled betvmiddoteen the desire to join in the laughter and to leap upon it with both feet when it suddenly collapsed and I saw the tip of the spielers toe press upon the circular cardboard that formed the feet and a broad black hand come down its fingers deftly lifting the dolls head and stretching it upward twice its length then releasing it to dance again And juddenly the voice didnt go with the hand 1R

I would like to foreground several aspects of this literary account of the racial body made into comic spectacle which eventually will

us for a closer investigation of how visual format in The 1 affects the ideologically complex questions of animated ness as an affecti ve quality the agency of mechanized or technologized hod ies and the comic representation of racially marked suhjects

We can begin by noting that the narrator is simultaneously al

tracted and repelled by the sight of the doll being animatedHis d fort to negotiate responses at odds with one another- a desire III join in the auoiences laughter and a desire to destroy the ohjnt provoking it- suggests an ambivalence closely related to the Oil

tradictory qualities of the object itself the doll is grinning wbd it dances as if in empathetic attunement with the enthusiaSII lively response of its spectators yet it is also described as fief(( and defiant-words suggesting antipathy toward the audieoc II which it grins These affective contradictions call attention to Ih

disjunctive logic informing the total scene from the way the dolls spasmodic body movem ents arc described as completely d etached from its immobile mask-like face to the image of the animators voice suddenly not going with the animators hand Despite the insistent processes of mechanization at work nothing seems in sync in this scene- though it is precisdythe mechanization which makes the disjunctiveness visible In fact it is the very moment when Tod Cliftons body is disclosed as the mysterious mecha-nism making the doll move (his toe against the dolls feet his hand pulling the dolls neck) that this fragmentation and disruption of rhe synchronized movement takes place The human agent an-thropomorphizes the puppet as we would expect but the pU t1pet also mechanizes the human breaking his organic unity into so many functional parts pressing toe stretching hand commanding voice3 Like the slash systems separation of the drawn figures moving body parts from its immobile ones (and the automatiza-tion of human labor this technology fostered) or the animated hreast and eye that induce the anim ation of Douglass reader Clif-lons manual manipulation of the doll produces an animatedness rhat boomerangs back onto its human agent separating his own hody into isolated components and movements The nonliving en-1ity that is animated (or as Chow would say automatized) comes to lutomatize its animator

The unexpected mechanization of the human animator by the inhuman object he animates a situation we have already in the case of Yaus foul lump (a repulsive piece of matter in-vested vvith vigor and zest to the extent that it becomes capa-hie of overtaking and commanding the racialized speakers voice)

to represent the ultimate form of human subjection Here Ihe human agent is nltgtt only automatized or mechanized middotbut ir(ni-rally made so through the process by which he mechanizes an in-human entity hi s passive corporeally fragmented condition is thus r ngende red by his own animating activity Yet Ellisons scene of hoomeranged animation might also be read as an allegory for how

I 14 animatedness

the posrmodern automaton Chows metaphor for the subjected subject in general might acquire agency within his or her own all tomatized condition enabling the mechanized human to politica llv comment on-if not exert some form of direct resistance to-til forces manipulating him or her H ere we might take a closer look at the sentence with which the passage concludes And sudden I the voice didnt go with the hand If the hand is clearly Clifton hand and thus belongs to the animating agents body but the voi no longer corresponds to this body Ellisons sentence II

to ask whose voice is out of Cliftons mouth Regardless o(

whether the source can be identified we can pinpoint one (lfthe ill tended recei vcrs On one hand the voice vvho says Shake it LIP Shake it up Hes Sambo the dancing doll ladies and gentlemen is obviously directed at the collective audience enthusiastically wi r nessing the dolls animation- the middot ladies and gentlemen who Ir named and addressed But on the other hand the vo ice that in Ih same breath utters Shake him stretch him by the neck and him down seems to direct itself at Clifton issuing specific COlli

mands about how to move the doll to which Clifton immediatd responds (We hear the imperatives stretch him by the neck all

seL him dovvn then see Clifton do precisely that) In this sense Ih voice emanating from the dolls ventriloquist or animator and cl i rected primarily at those witnessing the spectacle of its animation is directed at the animator as well But the fact that Clifton is bcin addressed or hailed by this voice which is moreover a voice 1b1

does not correspond with his body doubly emphasizes that it i voice not his own It is as if Clifton is ventriloquizing the doll in 0 1

der to foreground his own ventriloquization or animation by a unidentified external It could even be said that Clifton alii mates the doll not only to comment polemically on his own an i mated condition (since what he docs to the doll and what the d docs to him indicate something being done to both man and dul l 1

multaneously) but also to contest his own seemingly unequivol status as the dolls true animator Yet in putting forth the stateli1(

animatedness 115

(rhaps I am not the true animator in this scene of racial anima-111 C lifton paradoxically exercises a critical albeit highly nega-

bull form of agency within the context of his dramatized subjec-111

r he excessively lively racialized doll in Invisible Man brings us II k to the three-dimensional animation technology at work in

PIs This racial comedy in which all humans are represented as made of metal and latex playfully inverts Henri Bergsons no-

n that the comic results from our perception of something rigid Ill echanical encrusted on the surface of the supple or living in

PIs we have rigid structures encrusted with a layer of sup-I bull material 41 The animation of these three-dimensional Ilres takes place at two distinct levels the body and speech Like

lliuns representation of Clifton as animated by both the hand I the voice The Pfs dolls are endowed with the qualiti es of

not only by being physically manipulated but also by being Illriloquized by the voices of human actors So there are actually (I animating agents or agencies here the animator is the techni-If) who moves the dolls limbs into discrete poses to be photo-Irhed yet the process would be incomplete without the actors n lizations J( create the illusion that the spongy dolls We see are unified

HI autonomous beings The PIs stop-motion imaging technology lu ires that every movement by a character including the mouth

Itlvtrnents (which are choreographed to correspond to the words ken by the actor assigned to the character) be broken down into laquore te positions adjusted in small increments and shot one frame I time with each shot previewed on a digital video assist before

11111 recaptured on film But because the of the mouth are much faster more dynamic and more complicated

1ft the movements of arms or legs the animators end up using a Df about forty replacement mouths for each character rather n changing the configuration of a single mouth permanently d on the body2 We can thus see hovv the separation principle of

1 pound6 animatedness

early twentieth-century cel animation is reapplied in the three-dl mensional method Although the body parts are sculpted rath than hand-drawn on layers of celluloid the concept of detachin mobile from immobile elements remains essentially the same

Each PJs tharacter is thus given his or her own set of indepl11 dently molded plastic mouths corresponding to the pronunciatiol of discrete consonants and vowels Yet the technique of constanll attaching and reattaching differently shaped mouths poses the ltii i ficulty of ensuring that the forms are fitted in the exact locari each time as one of the shows directors informed me Sometillll they move a little to the side of the face and we get what is knowl

middot as slippery mouth syndrome which is quite painful to watch middot What results is an unintended excess animated ness on top of lit

intended functiunal one recalling the spasmodic jumps Tall)( describes as heing a threat to the illusion of Ii veliness in Animal Putty (MP 236) With every word spoken by the character III mouth slid es a bit from its initial position the longer a charaer speaks the mOre hismiddot momh gives the impression when viewed II

middot our television screens of threatening to fly off the body complcrd The mouths of The PJ characters could thus be described as little too animated particularly if ve view the mouth as subject to fa manipulationl whose origins are beyond ones individual gra i atmiddot two distinct levels already (Chow PA 61) through vocah tioll by an actor and through bodily arrangement by the animal ll And the characters are perhaps even suhjected to external malli l ulation on a third front gien the fact that the mouth function a symholically overdetermined feature in racist constructiom bull hlackness in the same way that eyes become overdetermined ecdochic sites of racial specificity in representations of Asiannes

Like the corner-of-the-mollth voice emanating from Clifton II unintended slippery-mouth effect in The PJs produces a disjllll tiveness that in turn facilitates animations uncanny redoubh ll the mouths create surplus movement apart from those origilla l

scripted for them assuming a liveliness that is distinct from I

animatedness 117

Ilk given to them by the animators and that exceeds their design ml control In this sense the ery sign of the racialized bodys au-ll1atization functions as the source of an unsuspected autonomy

I1 light be said that the excess liveliness produced by this particu-I body part suggests something like the racialized animated sub-l l S revenge produced not by transcending the princifi les of Itchanization from above but as in the case of Chaplins factory IJrker by obeying them too welH I n the consistency of their bodies then the characters in The Pfs

II attention to the uncomfortable proximity between social types lid stereotypes in a material yet highly metaphoric fashion by em-lrly ing the contradiction between the rigidity we typictlly asso-

lI e with social roles and the elasticity or plasmaticness hyper-Jli zed by screen animation which produces the visual effect of

hlracters constantly threatening their own bodily In this II I1Oer The Pfs reminds us that there can be ways of inhabiting a ial role t11at actuaLly distort its boundaries the status

f role from that which purely confines or constricts to the site I which new possibilities for human agency might he explored lcalling the distinction between rigidity amI elasticity central to

Igsons theory of laughter animatedness in The Pfs depends on llnething literally elastic encrusted on the surface of the me-hanica This elasticity is the sign of the bodys automatization Hl ce the pliancy of an object suggests its heightened vulnerahility

external manipulation) but functions also as the source of an IlIrlccounted-for autonomy As the slippery-mollth effect demon-Irltes the animation of the raced body seems capable of producing II excess that undermines the technologys power to constitute that locl y as raced

W hile the scene of Cliftons doll provided my first example of Inw the racialized body might produce this surplus animatedness II 1 lifelike movement exceeding the control and intention of its luld-be manipulators the redoubling of animation in this scene

explicitly figured as violent Emanating from Clifton s m outh

J 18 a17imatedness animatedl1ess J 19

and addressed to the mob around him the invitation to st rellh the dolls neck with its allusion to lynching invok es a fantasy of in flicting harm or injury to animated objects in which the n ltl rra lc himself becomes implicated though his in it iltll d es ire to leap UPI it with both feet is replaced by the slightly less violent ac t of spit ting on it instead I looked at the doll and felt my throltlt conslrit There was a fl ash of whiteness a nd a splatter like heavy rain strik ing a newspaper and I sa the doll go over backwards wilting il a dripping of frilled tissue the hateful head upturned 011 I outstretched neck still g rinning toward the sky (Ellison 1M of A flO tasy of aggress io n agaimt the doll invoked by its very own 11

imator (stretch him by his neck) thus leads to an act of real I

gression that stri ps it of its human qualiti es and agency turning II dancing fi gure in to a pile of wet paper More horrifi ca lly the lence inflicted on this anima ted body culminates in violence toW1

the human who anim ates it since the aftermath of E llisons da ll ing-doll episode is Cliftons murder by the police This murdlr d esc ribed as if in slow motion the narrator sees C liftons h suddenly crumpling with a huge wetness g rowing on his shill such that his death explicitly mirrors the doll wilted by the nai r tors wet spit (lM 426) The link between animation and viokn can not be dismissed here and it is a link that reinfo rces the I I turbing likeness between human animator and animated ohi e-C lifton s c rumpled body and the wilted bod y of the doll

H ere the act of animation begins to look inherently and II deemably violent If thi s is in fact the Cltlse the idea of an ulima l ohj ect animating its animator in turn can only have negative II

plications Yet when the narrator bter raises the possibility thai I aggressive behavior toward the puppet may have been indi rn I responsible for the murder of its puppeteer E lli son s text suggl th at the violence at stake here lies less in the dolls animation rli in its deanimation What results in both cases is the cessat ioll movemen t Seeing C lifton s bod y crumple the narrator destlll himsel f as unable to set [hisl foot down in the process of clim b

u rb just as crumplin g the doll with his spit replaced hi s ac t of II lg his foot to crush it (lM 426) The image of the narrator ar-In] in actio n with his foot in the air each time sugges ts that the In im ation of the doll (its fantasized and real disfiguration and version into dead matte r) lead s not only to the death of its hu-n operator but also to the deanimation of its hum an witness

ing him in his attempt to destroy the object as if to foreground fII mplicity Violence here takes the symbolic form of the bodys led motion as opposed to its mobilization moreover it is ag- il ln toward the an imated objec t that results directl y in bodi ly

111 and injury and not howeve r symbolically disturbing it may ( been the obj ects animation itsel f Once the narrator confronts Illssibility tha t this aggression m ight have heen misplaced the nirna ted doll as an ambig uou s symbol of both life and death

mssion and survi val becomes a burden he feels compelled to

(tn ltlnd safeguard ca rri ed in hi s briefcase along with a chai n-given to him by fo rmer slave Brother Tarp

Wi thout losing sight of the seriousness of this SCene from Elli- IIOVel I would like to conclude by interrogating the possibility lureclosi ng cornie animJtion altogether as a stra tegy for repre- lung nonvvhite characte rs O ne ViLLage Volce critic a rgues for II a possibility in his PfJ rev iew Whjle I dont bel ieve that any hn ique should be rejected o ut of hand I might make an excep-1 ro r claymation whose golliwog aspects come unpleasa ntl y III il nd center when used to depict nonwhites as here( This ar- IIlt n t for rejecting an imation entirely in the depiction of racial ly rk ed characters hinges on a reference to the techniques propen- [i r the g rotesque an aestheti c based on crudeness and disto r-

t Yet in the las t PJs episode by Fox prior to the shows lI d lation and its subsequent move to the currently more black Il icr Brothers network the shows writers seemed to offer a di- I response to thi s critical position in a moment I think of as

pisodes lump scene In this episode (a Christm as Special u lcast o n D ecember 17 1999) two of the Hilton-Jacobs resi-

J 20 animatedness

dents Thurgoods Latino chess partner Sanchez and his K brother-in-law Jimmy rummage in the basement to find makt

for the projects annual Christmas pageant Since they 1 a baby-Jesus doll for the nativity scene Sanchez hunts for a s tute and pulls a lumpy crudely anthropomorphized object out box The object resembles a Mr Potato Head toy but on closn spection middotseems to be an actual potato or rather a Claymatiol1 foamation replica of an actual potato with eyes nose and loosely arranged on its surface to resemble a face Sanchez su using the potato to represent the baby Jesus Jimmy skepticalh sponds I dont know-this thing is pretty freaky It might children At the same time we see Thurgoods head appear ill I right background symmetrically juxtaposed with the pow the left foreground The parallel between the shows star and clay blob is reinforced by the manner in which the camera Ii on this shot The shot further contrasts its ensembk of bad crldely animated characters (Jimmy + Thurgood + potato) the statue of the black Wise Man propped up in the opposi l ner-a good realist representation of a human that is ironi

only trllly inanimate figure in J scene -vhere dolls debII aesthetic properties of dolls Or more specifically a scene in wit doIls representing humans engage in a debate about whcJl Il lump looks human enough to qualify as a doll

Recalling the invisible mans repeated description puppet as obscene (1M 42R) the description of the II crudely humanizeeJ object as pretty freaky seems poin t aimed at the shows detractors implicitly equating charges 1 progranlS antiblack characterization with a fearful overreaClill crudely anthropomorphized objects in general regardless Oflh cial identity assigned to them This comment is reinforced I later moment in the Slme episode----one as crudely dcconstrlll I as the lump seems crudely animated-which highlights tht

prinCiples of disjunction and detachability at work in the SCI

animation from Invisible A1an In a moment of distress which

J 22 animatedness animatedness 123

pels Thurgood to pray to the Hilton-Jacobs baby-Jesus subsl (the potato) he anticlimactically discovers that he has to real and rearrange its facial features first since all of these parts t slid off the lumpy object onto the floor Slippery-mouth syndn once again Thus the last Fox Pfs episode offered its audience a tle mise en abyme of its own mode of production in which crudeness and distortion attributed to its foamation character came hyperbolized in J very poorly animated potaro

VVe have returned full circle to the foul lump in Gel Chan Private Eye Yaus relatively unusual format- a seri twenty-eight numbered poems each bearing the same title 11 lished over a span of eight years and across three collectioll his wfiting-demands that each poems rel a tionship to the Genghis Chan be reconsidered as the sequence unfolds IiI succession of jdentically captioned but visually different pictur cartoon p1nels The aesthetic of mechanical reproduction su_ by this serial format reinforces the link between Yau5 poem 1

modern screen practices as already im plied by the titles to the animated cartoon and live-action versions of Charlie ( At first the name in the titles clearly seems to designate the pc first-person speaker an I whose overtly stylized hard-boiled guage suggests a subjectivity that is always already characlll type-perhaps even a cartoonish type produced not just by a ticular filmic or televisual genre but by a fi Imic or televisual I

dium I am just another particle cloud gliding on the screen I am the owner of ope pockmarked tongue I park it on the I1n between sure bets and bad business (Yau RS 194) Like a pr ected mass of photons the I described as just another parl l cloud gliding on the screen inhabits a landscape marked by typically surreal imagery which persistently Jisru pts and I r forms the topoi of 19305 and 1940S crime fiction I was floal through a cross section with my dusty wine glass when shc tered

It was late Ind we were getting jammed in deep I was on the other side staring at tht snow covered moon pasted above the park foul lump started making promises in my voice (RS 89)

c ry first poem in the Genghis Chan series thus ends by per-I lling a confusion between human subjects and inhuman ob-

the last line foregrounding the lumpishness of the speaker I tmiddot speakerliness of lumps In contrast to the Romantic lyric tra-III in which animation conventionally takes the form of apos-he animation here depends on an inversion of the Romantic rica I device instead of a subject throwing voice into an inhu- entity in order to anthropomorphi ze it ur turn this object another subject who can be addressed (0 Rose) we have a

human object that becomes animated by usurping the human Ih rs voice from a position inside the humans body Yet the re-(I f this ambiguous moment of animation is another slippery-

11th effect For in appropriating the Is voice and agency the Ip immediately questions the connection between the proper Ill Genghis Chan and the poems first-person speaker Per- it is not Genghis who is speaking in all the poems that follow

Instead the foul entity residing in his throat It is key that this II of the 1s voice takes place in the first poem As the series l) rcsses moreover the ambiguity surrounding the identity of peaker becomes increasingly pronounced In the last poem that

jlclrs in Radiant Silhouette the I vanishes completely and is re-lnl by the second-person You in a series of commands You

II grasp someones tongue with your teeth and pull You will fe r the one that bleeds on the carpet to the one that drools on Ir (Yau RS 195) By the conclusion of the series we can longer be certain who is speaking in the poem or what is being

It rred to by its title (Who is Genghis Chan Is Genghis ChJn

l24 animatedness animatedness middot 125

a who or a what) We can he sure ho-vever of the gap that 01 betveen the human speaker and his own voice and body Henc the proper name in the series title stands for neither person thing but for a specific relationship-the discontinuity introdl between the speaker and his voice between a body and its tong between a poem and its title-Genghis Chan could be descri as a term that designates animations ability to undermine its I

traditional status as a technology producing unified racialized jeets And since this relation of discontinuity intensifies as Yau quence progresses what it seems to offer in its totality is less a I trait of someone named Genghis Chan than a flickerbook I demonstration of the technique of Genghis Channing

Like the unintended surplus animation in The Pfs which suited when a racitlized body part became increasingly deth I from its fixed position the more it was made to speak the Ge l Chan Private Eye series in Radiant SiLhouette culminates ill r disemhodied sites of vocalization a tongue parked on a hedgtmiddot other bleeding on the carpet or (less preferably) drooling III

sleeve While undeniably grotesque Yaus reanimation of thl ways already animated raeialized body ultimately pits a killd material elasticity against the conceptual rigidity of racial SIn

types recalling the sponge a blob-like object similar to tongue and particle cloud to which the speaker earlier likens I self Given this combination of elasticity and self-discontinll Genghis Channing might be described as a practice of threar ing ones own limii (or the roles in which one is capturea and fined) not by transcending these limits from above but by inv(1111 new ways of inhabiting them

Like the scene from I1lvisibLe Man and ThePfs Yaus series gests that racial stereotypes and cliches cultural images thaI perversely both dead and alive can be critically countered nol by making the images more dead (say by attempting to stop rI circulation) but also though in a more equivocal fashion by mating them Thus while animatedness and its affective COli

liness vigor zest) remain ugly categories of feeling reinforcing historically tenacious construction of racialized subjects as ex 1l ly emotional bodily subjects they might also be thought of Ihgories of feeling that highlight animations status as a nexus 11Iltradictions with the capacity to generate unanticipated social

11 111gS and effects-as when the routine manipulation of raced IllS on screen -results in an unsuspected liveliness undermining II Ittion s traditional role in constituting bodies as raced Thus as t1 ftctive spectacle that Garrison finds thrilling Stowe impas-il lig and Ell isons narrator obscene animation calls for new

of understanding the technologization of the racialized body I ll as the uneasy differential between types and stereotypes-if through a slippery-mouth method riskily situated like Gen-ebans parked tongue in the uncertain territory between sllre Ina bad business

90 a17imatedness

Americans is not only one of the simplest of trick one of the most tedious to perform

The lump of material lies on the table The camera is set up The modeler advances to the table whilst the shutter is closed and moves the cby slightly towards the desired result He then steps our of the picture and the camera handle is turned sufficiently Lo expose one picture and to cover the lens again The modeler comes forward once again and advances a little further with his work a fter which he retires from the scene and the second stage is recorded upon the next picture [ 1 This alternate process of shaping the putty a littk at a time and photographing every separate movement is contin-ued until the bust is completed

I t is essential thaI the progress should be very gradual or else the material would look as if it took shape hy spasmodic jumps and the illusion would be destroyed (1JP 236)

Harking back to the familiar medium of still photography film an imation was thus seen as a kind of technological atavism As Tallll writes It will be observed that this magical effect is not pn duced in accordance with the generally accepted principles gover n ing cinematography It is merely a series of snap-shots taken at en tain intervals and could be produced just as well hy a hand-calllc-t if one had sufficient plates or film (MP 236) The simuitanco lI1 basic yet exceptional character of this special effect is underscor by the ideological fantasy which Animated Putty seems to that of an agitation that is quickly stilled and even seems COIl

niently to resolve itself as the films lumpen protagonist is trail formed into cleverly-wrought images of humans of unmistabhl social distinction a bust of the King of the American Presidl or some other illustrious personage (MP 236)

The fact that such preclassical trick films scenes of production in the absence of human agents-for install( a film in which a stocking [is] knitted before the audience by I

animatedness 91

n hands or a magical carpenters shop picture in which tools rt manipulated without hands and where the wood is planed

W I1 chiseled and fashions itself into a box by an apparently Y te rious and invisible force2-suggests a further irony that 111)S based on a technically backward and labor-intensive princi-Ie were precisely those that most spectacularly imagined the uto-11 11 possibilities of a technology so advanced as to put an end to Iman bbor altogether (MP 238 237)) In contrast to the vigor ul spirit of the saws and knitting needles moved to action hu-II1 S appear strikingly inert in most of the dimensional animation

Ims cited by Talbot as in the case of a short depicting a shoeshine 1 11 going to sleep at his task and the footwear cleaning itself hi le he dreams brushes running to and fro to remove the dust Iply the blacking and to give a vigorous polishing off (MP 235) rom this ambiguous interplay between agitated things and deacti-ttd persons one could argue that what early animation technol-y foregrounds most is the increasingly ambiguous status of hu- 11 agency in a Fordist era These questions of agency will figure ptl rtantiy in this chapter as we focus on one of the most basic )5 in which affect becomes socially recognizable in the age of

ln hanical reproducibility as a kind of innervation agitation (the term I prefer) animatedness Indeed the rudimentary as-

i I of stop-motion technology parallels the way in which the af- live state of being animated seems to imply the most basic or lI1i mal of all affective conditions that of being in one way or an-1H r moved Bllt as we press harder on the affective meanings of animated- we shall see how the seemingly neutral state of being moved omes twisted into the image of the overemotional racialized

liect abctting his or her construction as unusually receptive to lernal control This surprising interplay between the passionate n l the mechanical vill be our focus as we move through readings

lexts by William Lloyd Garrison Frederick Douglass Harriet cher Stowe Ralph Ellison and the short-lived but aesthetically
















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animatedness 117


























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Ngai, "Animatedness"

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Transcript of Ngai, "Animatedness"