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 Adorno's theo ry of aura, as the product of an ove rdetermined relay in his a rgum ent. For here, Adorno 's analogy between an artwork's "objective phenomenon of a
tance," a'nd n a ture w hen distanced from practical aims, mig ht be sa io to feed bac k "m elan choly" a nd "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, tone's gen e rality and abstractness should not distract us fr om the fact that it is always "about" something. Ironically, nothing d emon strates this better than Melville's affecti vely ambiguous novel, whose ato na l tone we hav e seen to be ulti matel), "about" the simultaneously o rderly and noisy character of tone itself.

l animatedness'

,I

II Moving Pictures: They A re (1912), scnes o f volumes with the overall title Conquests of SCience" turn one picture' movement to a high state of perfection, and

T rcderick A . Talhot announced that "A mericans ha ve broug ht the

HIlC

have produced somc astonishing pictures as a result of its appii ( Ition. " A technical explanation of "one turn one picture;" Talhilt's te rm for stop-motion animation, 'is offered by the c;xa mple of
!I ll: "popular film"

Animated Putty: "A lump qf this material was

, hn w 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 cl eve rly wrought as to be instantly identified.'" A nti cipatin g the an im ation technique that would be trad eIn ar ked decad es later in the Sta tes as Talhot's film featuring a lump of ea rthy matter seems
I ing

particularly

means for ex plaining stop-motion cinematography, gi ve n h ow

primitive this "trick" \vas perceived til be. Despite the novelty a nd sophistication associated with specia l effects in gener;:tl, thy stopmotion 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 com es 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

animatedness . 91

alternate process of shaping the putty a littk at a

time, and photographing every separate movement, is continued until the bust is completed.

I t is essential thaI the progress should be very gradual, or

else the material wo uld look as if it took shape hy spasmodic jumps and the illusion would be destroyed. (1\JP, 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 lI,1 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 film's 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

' n hands," or a "magical carpenter's 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 force"2-suggests a further irony: that 111)S based on a technically "back ward" and labor-intensive princiIe were precisely those that most spectacularly imagined the uto11 11 possibilities of a technology so advanced as to put an end to Ima n bbor altogether (MP, 238, 237).) In contrast to the "vigor ul spirit" of the saws and knitting needles "moved to action," huII1 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 deactitt'd persons, one could argue that what early animation technoly foregrounds most is th e 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," (t h e term I prefer) "animated ness." Indeed, the rudimentary asi 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 an1H.: 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
a.nd politically controversial Claymation television show The PJ. (1998-2001), tracing the affect's 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 eX<lminill,lot 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 problematil' 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 (f9 89- 1 99 6), giVIng new "life," "vigor," or "zest." to a cliche or
M

animatedness ' 93

'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 l\Ver of the inhuman entity in "Genghis Chan" to s'ilence and IIntractually obligate the racialized speaker similarly echoes Nietzhe's observation that "something of the terror that formerly atIlded 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 Yau's lump prom'ises not so much to' 'make a, I.l im for its own humanity, as to force the human whose voice it h.1\ appropriated into the social role of this promising-and therelu re regular and accountable-subject, If for Nietzsche "the long lllry of ho"v l'espol1Jibility originated" is that of how "one first 'Iukes men to a certain degree, , , uniform, like among lik e , , " , 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 posilion of model minority- that is, the person "marie" uniform, acw untable, and therefore safely "disattendable," at the cost of havIng his or her speech acts controlled by another:6

overfamiliar metaphor for one's inability to speak due to undis charged emotion: "a lump in my throat,"4 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 Yau's 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 po.,session 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 situation in which the "lump" responsible for this rhetorical disempowerment suddenly individuates into an agent capable of speak'ingjor ,t he 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 -

"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 exagger:ttedly emo- , t ianal, hyperexpressive, and even "overscrutable" image of most ral ially or ethnically marked subjects in American culture: from Ilarriet Beecher Stowe's ebullient Topsy (1852) to Warner
ITS'

hyperactive Speedy Gonzales (195)/ to the hand-wringing jcws, gesticulating Italians, and hot-tempered Greeks in films ranging from The Jazz Singer to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Versions of these excessively "lively" or "agitated" ethnic subjects ,lbound in American literature as well-for example, in Melville's

94 . animatedness

animatedness . 95
HIde of screen representation ("made in the form of an animated 1I( .o n") .11 While all these meanings become spectacularly IIsed in Yau's "lump," the already counterintuitive connections in standard dictionary definition of "animated"-between the orlI 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. W ith such a surplus of "animations" at work in "Genghis "I ll ," it is as if Yau's poetic series is suggesting that to be "aniInl" in American culture is to be racialized in some way, even if Iln ation's affective connotations of vivacity or zealousness do not r eve ry racial or ethnic stereotype. Indeed, "Genghis Chan" IWS the exte nt to which animation remains central to the profion 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 AfriAmerican that most visibly harnesses the affective qualities of lin<:ss, 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 subject's natu or authenticity. Here, as epitomized in Stowe's character the affective ideologem e of animatedness foregrounds the rc:t: 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 Garrison's preface to the Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass (r845), we find this connection berl the physical and emotional aspects of "being animated" put Il rk in his testament to the slave narrative's authenticity, one he ge nre's standard features. Garrison directs us to the singuII lthorship and verisimilitude of Douglass' narrative, but also he text's to "move" the reader: "He who can peruse

novel The Confidence-Man (1857), where "Irish enthusiasm" is d scrihed as "flamlingl out" and irritating gentleman "of sense an respectability,"" and in Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers (192<;) where Sara Smolinksky's struggle with what she perceives to I her problema tic 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 littr;a ture and visual culture) African-American, the kind of exagger:lI emotional ex pressiveness I call animated ness seems to function a\ marker of racial or ethnic otherness in general. As Melville's 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 that."9 And though this exaggerated ex pressiveness is absent from th racial stereotype whose origins are allegorized in "Genghis Chan the image of the distllfbi.ngly "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 poem's tra fo rmation 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 w ithin 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 Barbera's 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"

96 . animatedness
[this narrative] v,tithout 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 ofmen."'1 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 involulll.1 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. .v ating the reader's desire to "seek the immediate overthrow" 01 entire system. There is an intim:1te link here, in other tween "animation" and the "agitation" that subtends our concq ll 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. Ga'rrison 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

animatedneJ's .

97

hin (r852): "The negro mind, impassioned and imaginative, alattaches itself to hymns and expressions of a vivid and pictoII nature; and as [the hymns were being sung], some laughed and "nc cried, and some clapped hands, or shook hands rejoicingly II h each other."1 3 In this passage, animation ' turns the exaggerd 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 differI l:ffects, is implied in Stowe's description of Uncle Tom himself:
Iys

N othing could exceed ... [the] earnestness of his prayer, enriched with the language of Scripture, which seemed .so entirel y to have wrought itself into his being, as to have become a pa rt of himself, <lnd to drop fr om his lips unconsciously. ... And so much did his prayer always work on the d evotional feelings of his audiences, that there seemed often a dange r th<lt 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 <If1 Ihide source that "drop[s] from his lips" without conscious n. H ence, the animation of the racialized body in this instance llives 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 poetry's signature and, according to Jonathan Cullc'r, 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." I> Here .one recalls the scene

98 . animatedness of Tom's enthrallment (and ventriloquization) by Scripture.. link between apostrophe, animation, and enthrallment can alslI found in Garrison's preface:
This Narrative contains many affecting incid ents ... but I think the most thrilling one of them all is th e description
DO UGLASS

animatedness . 99
Yet the "thinging" of the body in order to construct it, counIntuitively, 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 body's reobjectification, ht:ing animated, were paradoxically necessary to emphasize its onhood or subjectivity.
h .

gives of his feelin gs ... on the banks of the Chesa

pea ke Bay-viewing the receding vessels as they fl ew \vith th eir white before th e breeze, and apostrophiz ing them a.,

animated by the living spirit offreedom. Who can read th at passage, and be insensible to irs pathos and sublilIlity? ("P," 249, em ph:lsis add ed)

Ju st as Tom's prayer "workrsj on the devotional feelings" of dience, tlere animation beco m es a thrill that seems highly COl gious-easily trans ferr ed through the animated body to its tors. This transferability is reinforced by Ga rrison's 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 if the thrill comes from witnessing the animation of Douglass self, either by the sam e "living spirit of freedom" or through own expressive act of apostrophizing. Rega rdless of where we locate the thrill G a rrison describes, II important to note that both Stowe and Garrison find it necessary dramatize the an imation of racialized bodies for political purr' in Stowe's case, to d emonstrate the intensity of the slave's d tiona I feeling in order w support a Christian indictment of sla as a sin; in Garrison's , 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 body's ventriloquism or a physical manipulation of
n

Rc:y Chow, in her essay "Postmodern Automatons," argues that lim ing animated in this objectifying sense-having one's body I voice controlled by an invisible other-is synonymous with 'lini ng automatized, "subjected to [a manipulation] whose ori" are beyond one's individual grasp."16 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 belles 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 automatizaII 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 rca ses with one's increasing awkvvardness and helplessness" PA," 61). While Chow d escribes this simultaneous visualization d technologization as a condition of the modern body in general, also observes that certain bodies are technologized in more pro:lun ced vvays than others. Hence, "the automatized other ... takes \r form either of the ridiculous, the lower class, or of woman" I'A," 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 'a nimating' the oppressed women of their culIres but of making the automatized and animated condition of

100 .

animatedlless

animatednesJ' .

101

. 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' one's individual grasp" and becomes "a spectacle whose 'aesthl" po\ver increases with one's 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 worker's repetitive wrenching movements in Modem but also, as Rosalind Krauss notes, "the kind of liber;l6ng 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 th e "liberatin.g 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 e'x ample, 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 Eisenstein's 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 body's subjection to power with signs of its ostensive dam-by encompassing not only bodily activity confined to Ii

and rigid, specialized routines (Fordist or Taylorist anima,n), but also a dynamic principle of physical metamorphosis by m 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 e nergy and meramorIl potential of the animated body make it a potentially subveror powerful body, whereas for Chow, the very qualities that nstein praises as liberatory-" plasmaticness," ela.sticity, and pI i},-are readable as signs of the body's utter subjection to power, lli rming its vulnerability to external manipulation and con- . I Although in the last instance Chow's pessimistic reading of the !lIlated-technologized body as a Taylorized body seems more lIasive than Eisenstein's optimistic one, the two perspectives 11 1 l:O a crucial ambivalence embedded in the concept of animal -ambivalence that takes on special weight in the case of raIt:lcd subjects, for whom objectification, exaggerated corporealor physical pliancy, and the body-made-spectacle remain doubly I.:hted 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' ll"fl technology's capacity to record and transmit images simultaILJsly."20 Recalling the similarly direct and. immediate impact of j.lliage on the racia:lized subjects in Stowe's Uncle Cabill: ness's "promise of presence and immediacy" has thu? been parIIla rly crucial to what Sasha Torres calls "the definitionally teleIt,d events" of the 1990S which "have involved, if not centered persons of color."21 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 TV's 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
il lS

lO2 .

ullimatedness

animatedness . 10]

of racial representa tion to television's representational while also indicating the primacy of "liv eness" 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 ri ous meanings, have on what race "looks Ii to viewe rs in a medium whe re liveness signifies Jive action and simulta neity between eve nt and t ransm ission-principles fu mentally opposed to th e stop-motion technology on which coni porary screen animation ofte n depends) \ Vhile it is the li ve b n casting even t that has mad e race central to tel evision, as Tor argues in "King TV," it cou ld be sa id that animation on tel evi ' ll foregrounds the centrali ty of li ve ness to the repr esentation 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," which, as Feu e r notes, is less an on tological reality thall id eological nne: " As television in fact becomes less and jess a '" medium , in the sense o f a n equ ivalence betwee n time of eve nt time of transmission, the medium in its p rac tices insists more more on the li ve, the immediate, the direc t, th e sponta neous, rea!."1l A lthough we have already see n-via the writings of 511 and Ga rrison- how a sim il a r ideology informs the rel ation tween animation and racia l id entity in ea rli e r m odes of cuhll production, the e pistemological infl ection linking these attri l to the raciali zed feeling concepts above (what a re vivac ious livel iness, and zea l if not affectiv e correla tes to "the immed iat c, d irec t, the spontaneous, [and] rea l" ?) makes telev isio n ali id ea l for exa mining anim:nion both as screen genre and as a technol. for the re p resentatio n of rac ial difference. At th e end of th e twen tieth cen tury, questions related to a ni tion and the politics of rac ial rep rese ntation rose to th e fore in bates surrounding F ox Telev ision's dim ens 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-midd le-class, and nOll-]jve-action cas t, as well

.\ l

to depict its cha racte rs in foamation, a three-dimensional, stop-

Illtion an im a ti on technique trademark ed by Will Vinton Studios

IIlce

producer of the infamous Ca lifornia RaI si n comme rcia ls , hich featured anthropomorphized black g rapes singing and I1cing to a classic Motown hi t).24 Introdu ced to the netwo rk 's

nc ur in the fall of 1998 and fea turing multicultural bu t primarily Irica n -Ame ri can cha racters living in an urban housin g project,

PIs genera ted controve rs y seve ral months prior to more widely
uhlici zed de bates over the "w hi tewashing" of netwo rk television, ,c ribed by K weisi Mfume as "th e most segregated industry in IlH :rica" during his Jul y 1999 keynote address to the 90th annual \ACP con vention. l > Sta rring Eddie Murphy (who w as also one I the producers) as Thurgood Stubbs, the superintendent of the tio nal Hilton-J:1cobs projects, th e program was soon the ta rget of Itic isms fro'lll a numbe r of g rass roots organizations, who accused a .ric ty of directions, includ ing th e Blac k Muslim g roup Project I.l m ic H ope, as well as the Coa lition against Media Exploitation, Il.l ed by A frican-American writer and activist Ea rl Ofari Hutch1'(111. In an interview on th e Cahle News N etwo rk (CNN) in Febull ry 1999, Hutchinson voiced his obj ec ti on to th e show: "It does 11 present an accura te or honest depiction of the African-Ame ri III

or ca rryi ng a n antiblack message. These criticisms ca me from

community. It does present raciall y demea ning and offensive reotypes."2(, A similar criticism came from th e director Spike ( , who described the ca rtoon as "rea ll y hateful , I think , to black nple."z7 In sp ite of his polemicism , th e " I thi nk " in Lee's state-

w ilt
II11 S

reveals a cruc ial ambi vale nce over th e political a nd aestheti c

11 m

of The PJs, and over the use of anima ti on fo r the rep rese ntaof rac ial l minorities in gen eral -a n am bi va lence I lik e to

plore by focusing on some of th is techn ology's intended and unIL lided effec ts. The shocki ng quality that Lee, Hutchinso n, and oth e rs attribute
The PIs points to how the program fundamentally disrupted the 1l1ok" of race on mainstream netwo rk television, since the trad it

[04 .

anirnatedneH

anirnatedness . 105
li sms" binary. Though in doing so it risked the appearance of rel y 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 repreIl lUtion in the medium of television: one that ambitiously sought reclaim the grotesque and/or ugly, as a powerful aesthetic of.exIc ration, crudeness, and distortion, which late t\ventieth-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 d housing since Norman Lear 's Good Times (1974-1979), and unly animated program featuring nonwhite inner-city dwellers 1\ e Fat Albel't in the early 1970S (the decade of "socially relevant" ,wamming), The PIs also produced shift in the content of net,rk television.'; 1 As Armond White has noted, every joke on the IW "implies a correlated social circumstance,"3., enabling the proli 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 ind ividuals, 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 l'good visits the local HUD office, which he does in nearly ev'pisode. The sign greeting him displays a variety of sardonic ' ' <Iges, ranging from "HUD: Putting a Band-Aid over Poverty Years!" to "HUD: Keeping You in rhe Projects'since 1965." the: PIs also replaced the traditional sitcom's main social unit, nuclear family, with the community formed by the proj ect's inc h!rants. 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 i\1rs. Avery is too proud t;lke charity," the only way Thurgood can convince her to acII the food and health care supplies donated by tenants is by dis-

.'

tiona I in which racial minorities have had a presence In .arena has been through live-action representations of upwar< mobile nuclear through animated cartoons featuri the urban poor. In particular, Hutchinson's 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, simu lacra! realism volves the conviction that "an improvement in [the] social status African-Americansl can result from their mere depiction in rna stream television programming."2x 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 experi ence."" 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 Harper's 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 'm aterial 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

106 .

animatedlless

animatedness .

07

gU\sJng 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 Thurgood's cholesterol k :lnd blood pressure aren't 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 show's 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 it 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 f.lceless .... Til good's trek though a blizzard to retrieve his wife's journal left . hospital emergency room is interrupted by cops who stay in II

hi de "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 Enemy's '9I I 1 Joke' and its colorful, comic music video" ("TPJS," 10). I"his is not to say, however, that The PJs simply bypasses the isof 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 Z ook finds integral to the antiracist identity politics uf the t black-produced sitcoms in the early 1990S, which, unlike prejllS 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 Co,by living lin, or the framed photograph of Malcolm X prominently fca r t.! on the set of Roc (key examples cited in Zook's study), the It rences to black history and culture in The PJs are primarily refnees 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 Hiltonnbs , the actor who portrayed Freddie "Boom-Boom" WashingI I in Welcome Back Kotter. The m ere reference to the older situaIII com edy suggests a relationship between tokenism and gheuoIlion, 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 producse rious changes in the infrastructure of U.S. cities ('7PJS," 10). \'( 1 invoking Sherman Helmsley's "apartment in the sky" in the me song's description of th e Hilton-Jacobs as a "low-rent high'," and using Janet DuBois, singer and composer of the memorathem e song for The Jefferson,, as the voice of Mrs. Avery, The 'II constantly "confronts the legacy of th e 70S black sitcom-rather In simply joining in" ("TPJS," IO). The show also offered a run-

108 . animatedness
ning comme ntary 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 Walte r, whose signature trait il> 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 Cosby's 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 CO llll' 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: opera's villains and buffos, Shakespeare's clowns alld melancholics, Jane Austen's snobs and bores, a nd the televisifln sitcom's neighbors and meddling mothers-in-law. Althou}!h there remains an irreducible difference betwee n types and stereo types, or between social roles and "individualities that I.projectJ 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 Thus, while tltt" overwhelming emphasis on stereotype analysis in liberal medi. 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 mains important to acknowledge the reasons for this which clearly und erlie the specific criticisms by Hutchinson and Lee. The stakes of traditional stereotype analysis will continue
If

animatedne,'s .

109

:l11d Kristal Brent Zook have extensively explored-the tradition of viciously racist cartoons in American scre en culture ensures that Ihe intersection of comedy with animation in the visual represenl:ltion of racialized bodies becomes a particularly loaded issue. is T hus, while arguments have been made for eel anirnation's ideologically disruptive properties in its incipience as an early 'filin ' gcnre,36 in products ranging from MGM's Bosko series in the 19 2 0S tu numerous cartoon featur es in the following two decades (including Disney's Alice Hunting in Aji"ica, Warner Brothers' Tokio Jokio, .md Walter Lantz's Jungle Jitteu and Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie I!eat), two-dimensional animation became o.oe of the most ally prominent technologies for the rev italization of extant racial stereotypes, giving new "life" to caricatures that might othe rwise have stood a greater chance of becoming d efunct or inactiveY Since the animated subjects in The PJJ are three-dimensional dolls made of spongy latex fitted over metal armatures, handdrawn eel animation is n ot the technology responsible for (what many critics viewed as) the aesth etically disturbing "look" of the television program's 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 1 5, neve rtheless 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 fragmentation of the body that recalls eel animation's method of , " sepa- . rating portions of a drawing onto different layers to eliminate the necessity for re-drawing the entire composition each movement phase" (Thompson, "ICAT," 107). As KristinTh ompson notes, the "slash system" developed by Raoul Barre in the mid-I9IOS pro-. vided an easily standardized and tbe reforeindustrially amenable. method for this breakdown of figures into discrete parts, such that "a drawing of an entire character could be cut apart and traced onto diffe rent eels." Oddly anticipated, perhaps, by the activation

not. 34

be high, not only because d epictions of raced subjects in the ma \ media have been s() sev e rely limited but also because raced subjeci continue to e,xert Jess control over how existing images are actualh deplQyed""-<luite often with symbolically violent effects. MoreoVl"1 in conjunction with the continued haunting of black, live-actioll television comedy by blackface minstrelsy-a legacy that critil such as J. Fred MacDonald, Herman Gray, Robin Means Coleman

I 10 .

animatedness

all ima tedlless . I 1 I

of isolated body parts ("tearful eye," "heaving breas t") in Garris! account of the reader "animated" by Douglass' Narrative, the s1.t system's separation of the body, at each stage of its mov ement, i discrete portions and poses was particularly suited to tbe kind ! animation specific to modern Fordist productionmation as automatization: Using the slash system, the back grou nd might be on paper at th e lowest level, the charac ters ' 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 redrawn, while the background and lower cel are simply re-photographed. This technique not only SJves labour time for a single artist, but it abo allows speciali sation of labour. That is, one person may do the background, while another does certain main poses of the character, and yet another fills in the phases betwee n th ese major poses. In fact, the animation industry has followed this pattern , with key animators (doing th e major poses), "i n-bt twee ners," and "opaqutrs" (filling in the fi gures with opaque paint) in aO d dition
to

li kes the capacity of Uncle Tom's exagge rated responsi ve ness to h lical la nguage to animate or e nthrall the spectators of hi s own Il rn a tion-such that "that there seemed often a dange r it would I(>st altogether in the abundance of the responses which brok e
Il

that is, to :tnl

eve rywhere around him."

T hu s, 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 autom.ni za tion

1.1 bor as its technological pred ecesso r), but the antebellum mean-

IIo:S, both racial and emotional, that already h a unt the former.
fo re launching a more detailed analysis of how the threeIm ensional 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, I'd like to reca ll a key scene
IlITl

Ralph Ellison 's hwisible lvfall in which similar questions con-

rge.
W alking through midtown Manhattan, Ellison's narrator sud I1ly finds himself part of a large r audience watching a black doll Il ppeteered by Tod Clifton, a Harl em community leader a nd acWist he has admired:

those performing the spec ial I moved in to the crowd and pressed to the front where at my feet T saw
d

ised tasks of scripting and planning. The specialisation process and the establishment of the first production companies for animated film s took place about 1915-1917-at the same timc as th e establishment of the Hollywood motion picture system in gene ral (also characterised by greate r and greater spccialisati on of tasks-th e "facto ry" system). (Thompson, "IC AT,"

square piece of cardboard upon which something

was mov ing with furious action. It was some kind of toy and I glanced at the crowd's fascinated eyes and down again, seeing it clearly this time... 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, infuria tingly sensuous motion, a dance that was completely detached from the black, mask -lik e face. It's no jumping-jac k, 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

!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 tec hnology that animated its
I

turn- a functional doubling th a t not only recalls the antici pat t: animation of Dougl ass ' rea d e rs by the scene of his own animatilll or by his act of animating, by a postrophizing, the ships, but al

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-ofthe-corner-of-the-mouth voice continued to spiel:
Shake it up! Shake it up!

disjunctive logic informing the total sce ne, from the way the doll's spasmodic body movem ents arc described as "comple tely d etached" from its immobile, mask-like face, to the image of the animator's voice suddenly "not going with" the animator's hand . Despite the insistent processes of mechanization at work, nothing seems in sync in this scene- though it is precisdythe m echanization which makes the disjunctiven ess visible. In fact, it is the very moment when Tod Clifton's body is disclosed as the "mysterious mechanism" making the doll move (his toe against the doll's feet, his.hand pulling the doll's neck) that this fragmentation and disruption of rhe synchronized movement takes place. The human agent anthropomorphizes 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 voice,3? Like the slash system's sepa ration of the drawn figure's moving body parts from its immobile ones (and the a utomatization of human labor this technology fostered), or the animated hreast and eye that induce the anim ation of Douglass' reader, Cliflon's 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 en1ity that is animated (or, as Chow would say, automatized) comes to ;lutomatize its animator. The un expected mechanization of the human animator by the inhuman obj ect he animates, a situation we have already in the case of Yau's " foul lump" (a repulsive piece of matter invested 'vvith "vigor" and "zest" to the extent that it. becomes capahie of overtaking and commanding the racialized speaker's voice), to represent the ultimate form of human subjection. Here Ihe human age nt is n<> t only automatized or mechanized but ir(;nirally made so through the process by which he mechanizes an inhuman entity; hi s passive, corporeally fragmented condition is thus r ngende red by his own animating activity. Yet Ellison's scene of hoomeranged animation might also be read as an allegory for how

Sambo, the dancing dolL, ladies and gentlemen.

Shake him, .itretch him by the neck and set him down, - He'll do the re.it. Yes!. ...

, r knew r should

get back to the district but

r WaS

held by

inanimate, boneless bouncing of the grinning doll and

struggled betv.een 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 spieler's toe press upon the circular cardboard .that formed the feet and a broad black hand come down, its fingers deftly lifting the doll's head and stretching it upward, twice its length, then releasing it to dance again. And j'uddenly
the voice didn't 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 ra.cially marked suhjects. We 'can begin by noting that the narrator is simultaneously al tracted and repelled by the sight of the doll being animated:His d fort to negotiate responses at odds with one anothe r- a desire III join in the auoience's 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

14 . animatedness

animatedness .

115

the "posrmodern automaton," Chow's 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 ex ert 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 didn't go with the hand." If the hand is clearly Clifton' ha nd and thus belongs to the animating agent's body but the voi, no longer corresponds to this body, Ellison's sentence II to ask whose voice is out of Clifton's 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! He's Sambo, the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen ' is obviously directed at the collective audience enthusiastically wi r nessing th e doll's a nimation- the '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 doll's ventriloquist, or animator, and cl i rected primarily at those witnessin"g 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 1b.1 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 doll's true animator. Yet in putting forth the stateli1(

!'('rhaps I am not the true animator in this scene of racial anima111 ,"

C lifton paradoxically exercises a critical, albeit highly nega 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 m.etal and latex playfully inverts Henri Bergson's 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 sup41 I material. The animation of these three-dimensional Ilres takes place at two distinct levels: the body and speech. Like lli "u n's 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 techniIf) who moves the dolls' limbs into discrete poses to be photoIrhed, yet the process would be incomplete without the actors' nlizations.
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 Itlvt:rne nts (which are choreographed to corr'e spond to the words ,ken by the actor assigned to the character), be broken down into re te positions, adjusted in small increments, and shot one frame I time, with each shot previewed on a digital video assist before 111,1.1; 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

D f about forty "replacement mouths" for each character, rather

n changing the configuration of a single mouth permanently d on the body:2 We can thus see hovv the separation principle of

6 . animatedness

animatedness .

117

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 indepl'11 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 <ii i ficulty of ensuring that the forms are fitted in the exact locari.. each time; as one of the show's directors informed me, "Sometillll' they move a little to the side of the face and we get what is know l as 'slippery mouth ' syndrome, which is quite painful to watch. What results is an unintended, excess animated ness on top of lit intended, functiunal one, recalling the "spasmodic jumps" Tall)( d escribes as heing a threat to the illusion of "Ii velin ess" in Animal Putty (MP; 236). With every word spoken by the character, III m o uth slid es a bit from its initial position; the longer a charaer speaks, the mOre his momh gives the impression , when viewed II 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 one's individual gra' i at 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, gi\'en the fact that the mouth functi on, a symholically overdetermined feature in racist constructiom hlackness, in the same way that eyes become overdetermined, ecd'ochic 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 animation's uncanny redoubh ll the mouths create surplus movem ent apart from those origilla l! .' scripted . for them, assuming a liveliness that is distinct from I

Ilk" given to them by the animators and that exceeds their design ml control. In this sense, the \'ery sign of the racialized body's au'll1atization functions as the source of an unsuspected autonomy. I1 light be said that the excess liveliness produced by this particuI body part suggests something like the racialized,' animated subl l 'S " revenge," produced not by transcending the princif'iles of It'chanization from above but, as in the case of Chaplin's factory ' IJr ker, by obeying them too wel!.H In the consistency of their bodi es, 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 emlrly ing the contradiction between the rigidity we typic.tlly asso,.lI e with social roles and the elasticity or "plasmaticness" hyperJli zed by screen animation, which produces the visual effect of h.lracters constantly threatening their own bodily In this 1Oer, The Pfs reminds us that there can be ways of inhabiting a ' II I ., 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. l'calling the distinction between rigidity amI elasticity central to I'gson's theory of laughter, animatedness in The Pfs depends on 'lln ething literally elastic "encrusted on the surface" of the mehanica!. This elasticity is the sign of the body's 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-mol,lth effect demonIr:ltes, the animation of the raced body seems capable of producing II excess that undermines the technology's power to constitute that locl y as raced. W hile the scene of Clifton's doll provided my first example of In w 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

18 . a17imatedness

animatedl1ess .

19

and addressed to the mob around him , the invitati on to "st rell'h the doll's n eck , with its allusio n to lyn chin g, invok es a fantasy of in flicting harm or injury to animated objects in whi ch the n<l rra lc himself becomes implicated , tho ugh hi s in iti<ll d es ire to "leap UP"I it with both feet" is replaced by the sl,ightly less vi olent ac t of spit ting on it in stead: " I looked at the doll and felt my thro<lt conslrit There was a fl as h of whiteness a nd a splatter like heav y rain strik ing a newspaper and I sa"\' the doll go ove r bac kward s, wilting il a dripping of frilled tissue, the hate ful head upturned 011 I outstretched neck still g rinning toward th e sky" (Ellison, 1M, of ' A flO tas y of aggress io n agaimt the doll invok ed by its very own imator ("stretch him by his neck") thus lead s to an act of real dancing fi g ure in to a pil e of wet pape r. More ho rrifi ca lly, the \ le nce inflicted on this anima ted body culminates in violence
toW,1

u rb, just as crumplin g the doll with his spit replaced hi s ac t of

II lg

h is foot

to

crush .it (lM, 426). The image of the narrator a r-

In]

in actio n, with his foot in the air eac h time, su gges ts th at the

In im ation of the doll (its fantasized and real disfigurati on and " " version into d.ead matte r) lead s not only to th e death of its hun ope rator but also to the deanimation of its hum an witness, .ing him in his attempt to d estroy the object as if to foreground fII mpli city. Violence he re takes th e symbolic form of th e body's ' led moti on, as opposed
\ il ln
111

to

its mobilization; moreover, it is ag-

towa rd the an imated obj ec t that results directl y in bodi ly

.11
,I

a nd injury, and not, 'howeve r symbolically disturbing it m ay (' been, the obj ect's anim ation itsel f. Once the narrator confronts I'llssibility tha t this agg ression m ight have heen misplaced, the nirna ted doll, as an amb ig uou s sy mbol of both life and death,

gression that stri ps it of its hum an qualiti es and agency, turning II

m:ssion and survi val, becomes a burde n h e feels compelled

(t' n

to

th e human who anim ates it, since th e aftermath of E llison's da ll in g-doll episode is C lifto n's murder by th e police. Thi s murdl'r d esc ribed as if in slow motion : the narrator sees C lifto n's h", "suddenly crumpling" with "a huge wetness g rowing on his shill such th at his death explicitly mirrors the doll " wilted" by the nai r to r's wet spit (lM, 426). The link between animation a nd viokn can not be dismissed he re, and it is a link that reinfo rces the .II turbing like ness between hum an animator a nd animated ohieC lifton 's "c rumpl ed bod y" and the wilted bod y of th e doll. H ere the act of a nimation begins to look inherently and II d eemably violent. If thi s is in fact the C<lse, the idea of an ;u'lima l ohj ect "anim a ting its animator in turn " can only \have negative
II

<lnd safeguard , ca rri ed in hi s briefcase al o ng with a chai n-

given to him by fo rmer sla ve Brother Tarp. Wi tho ut losing sight of the seriousness of this SCene from Elli\ IIOVel, I would like
to

conclud e by interrogatin g th e possibility

lureclosi ng cornie anim:Jtion altogether as a stra tegy for re prelu ng nonvv hite characte rs. O ne ViLLage Volce critic a rgues for

II a possibility in his PfJ rev iew: " Whj le I do n't bel ieve th at a ny hn ique should be rejected o ut of hand , I might make an excep1 III

ro r claymation . .. whose golliwog as pects come unpleasa ntl y il nd ce nter when used to d epict nonwhites , as here.";(' This ar-

IIlt' nt for rejecting an imatio n entirely in the depiction of racial ly rk ed characters hinges on a reference to the technique's pro pe n[i'r the g rotesque, an aestheti c based o n crude ness and disto rYet in the last PJs episode by Fox prior to the sh ow's lI d lation a nd its subseque nt move to th e curre ntly "mo re black"
t.

plications. Yet when th e n a rrator bter raises the possibility thai I aggressive behavior toward the puppet may have bee n indi rn I responsible for the murd er of its puppeteer, E lli son 's text suggl th at the viole nce at stake here lies less in the doll's animation rli in its deanimation. What results

in both cases is the cessat ioll

Il icr Brothers network, the show's writers seem ed

to

offer a di-

movem en t. Seeing C lifton 's bod y crumple, the narrator dest'lll him sel f as unabl e to "set [hisl foot down" in th e process of cli m b

I response to thi s critical position, in a m o m ent I think of .as ' pisode's "lump" scene. In this e pi sode (a "Christm as Special" .u lcast o n D ecember 17, 1999) , two of the Hilton -Jacobs resi-

J 20 .

animatedness

. dents, Thurgood's Latino chess partner Sanchez and his K, brother-in-law Jimmy, rummage in the basement to find makt for the project's annual Christmas pageant. Since they 1 a baby-J es us 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 seems 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 don't know-this thing is pretty freaky. It might " children!" At the same time, we see Thurgood's head appear ill I right background, symmetrically juxtaposed with the pow " the left foreground. The parallel between the show's 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 cr\ldely 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 trl!.lly inanimate figure in J scene \-vhere dolls deb:II' 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 man's repeated description puppet as "obscene" (1M, 42R), the description of the II crudely humanizeeJ object as "pretty freaky" seems poin t aimed at the show's detractors, implicitly equating charges ,.1 progran'l'S 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 S,lme 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 th e "foul lump" in "Gel! Chan: Private Eye." Yau's relatively unusual format- a seri. twenty-eight numbered poems each bearing the same title. 1'1 lished over a span of eight years and across three collectioll' his wfiting-demands that each poem's rel a tionship to the, "Genghis Chan" be reconsidered as the sequence unfolds, IiI.. succession of jdentically captioned but visually different pictur cartoon p;1nels. The aesthetic of mechanical reproduction su_ by this serial format reinforces the link between Yau'5 poem, modern screen practices, as already im plied by the title's 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 eve n a cartoonish type produced not just by a ticular filmic or televisual ge nre but by a fi Imic or tele visual 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."
.1

It was late

Ind we were getting jammed in deep. I was on the other side, staring at tht snow covered moon pasted abov e the park. \ foul lump started making promises in my voice. (RS, ,89) \c ry first poem in the "Genghis Chan" series thus ends by perI lling a confusion between human subjects and inhuman ob the last line foregrounding the lumpishness of the speaker, I t speakerliness of lumps? In contrast to the Romantic lyric traIII , in which animation conventionally takes the form of apos,he, animation here depends on an inv ersion 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 hum an object that becomes animated by usurping the human Ih :r's voice from a position insid e the human's body. Yet the re(If this ambiguous moment of animation is another slippery 1th effect. For in appropriating the "I "'s voice and agency, the 1 Ip immediately questions the connection between the proper Ill' "Genghis Chan" and the poem's 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 ''1'''s voice takes place in the first poem. As the series

l).: rcsses, moreover, the ambiguity surrounding the identity of 'peake r becomes increasingly pronounced. In the last poem that jlc':lrs in Radiant Silhouette, the "I" vanishes completely and is relnl by the second-person "You" in a se ries of commands: "You II grasp someone's tongue with your teeth and pull / You will fe r th e 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 spea king in the poem or what is being It rred to by its title. (Who is "Genghis Chan"? Is Genghis Ch:.Jn

l24 .

animatedness

animatedness.

125

a who or a what?). We can he sure, ho\-vever, of the gap that 01 be!t\veen 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 animation's 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 raci;;tlized body part became increasingly det:h 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 hedgt, other bleeding on the carpet or (less preferably) drooling III sleeve. While undeniably grotesque, Yau's reanimation of thl ways already animated, raeialized body ultimately pits a killd material elasticity against th e conceptual rigidity of racial SIn ,t ypes, 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 one's own limi\:.'i (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, Yau's 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

lin ess, vigor, zest) remain ugly categories of feeling reinforcing hi storically tenacious construction of racialized subjects as ex:" 1\'l:ly emotional, bodily subjects, they might also be thought of Ih.:gories of feeling that highlight animation's status as a nexus 1 1Iltradictions with the capacity to generate unanticipated social 11 111gS and effects-as when the routine manipulation of raced Ill'S on screen -results in an unsuspected liveliness undermining II I,ttion's traditional role in constituting bodies as raced. Thus, 'as t1ft:ctive spectacle that Garrison finds "thrilling," Stowe ." impasil lig," and Ell ison's 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 Gene'ban's parked tongue, in the uncertain territory between "sl,lre .Ina bad business."

mating them. Thus, while animatedness and its affective

COli