Over the past few weeks Animation Studies 2.0 has explored the theme of animation and philosophy through posts by Deborah Levitt, Scott Birdwise, Carol MacGillivray, Robby Gilbert, and Bella Honess Roe. I had the privilege of curating this theme and, in the process, I was struck by the ways each post thinks animation or investigates how animation thinks, which is to say that they emphasize what animation does. Yet, I wonder what these posts do with and to animation and philosophy?
As is often the case in animation studies, I find the posts haunted by animation’s many definitions and descriptions. This hauntology[1], to adopt the Derridean phrase, characterizes the inconsistent, contradictory, or simply evolving presence of animation and its many forms. Given the when and where of one’s investigation into animation, the being of animation gains and discards different characteristics. What it is and is not at any given moment seems to haunt most analyses. For instance, how does animation’s “an-ontology,” as Levitt describes it, cohere with the photographic ontology of cel animation as described by Hannah Frank?[2] The answer to this question would seem to affect animation’s purchase on thinking and making multiple worlds (see Levitt’s post) and on animated cartoons expressing a “coming community” beyond-the-law (see Birdwise’s post). For Frank, film theory’s treatment of cel animation as lacking world-disclosing indexicality overlooks the photographic ontology of cel animation and therein the labor of its production. Does attention to the an-ontology of animation perpetuate similar errors? On the other hand, a forensic attention to medium specificity seems to diminish or disregard the political and ethical expressions that Levitt and Birdwise find in animation’s thinking. Is it too simple to treat this agonism as an unavoidable, unresolvable dialectic?
Carol MacGillivray’s post advances this inquiry by demonstrating how animation does not necessarily think in terms of screens and that screenless animation can reveal and disrupt screen-based, perceptual habits. Does this affirm the an-ontology description or does it shift animation’s ontology onto the temporal and spatial gaps, that Robby Gilbert contends are more fundamental to animation than any set of cartoon aesthetics?
Bella Honess Roe, in her post, turns to performance philosophy and acknowledges the basic ground of space and time, but states outright that “performance is a spectre that is present in all animation.” Isn’t the presence of this “spectre” a hauntological formulation? I suspect that Honess Roe would agree that performance philosophy does not resolve the contradictory presence or being of animation. And this leads me to perhaps what is most fun about considering animation’s ontology, which is that whenever a case is made for animation having a particular kind of being (even a non- or without- or plural-being), one can retort that that is merely an analysis of a particular kind of animation. This rhetorical move paradoxically critiques arguments about an-ontology by using the logic of an-ontology, or perhaps more accurately, hauntology. There is always some other definition or description of animation that exists as a potential that undoes and undermines whatever definition or description is currently under discussion. Is this ontological paradox merely rhetorical and conceptual? Is it grounded in any material technical practice? I suspect that it is grounded in technicity as such, but, when pushed, there is a technicity that grounds my thinking—namely, drawing and caricature.
Although Sergei Eisenstein primarily had early Disney animation in mind, his approach to animation is far-reaching and might be better described as advancing a myth of animation comparable to, but very different from, Bazin’s myth of total cinema [3]. The myth of animation includes bringing something to life, but Eisenstein also knew it as an effort to return to a primordial, essential form of life and possibility. In other words, the animated cartoon returns a viewer to a pre-logical state, to the realm of sensuous thought. Through this return the animated cartoon expresses “freedom from ossification” and “an ability to take on any form dynamically.” Eisenstein calls this quality of animation “plasmaticity”[4]. For Eisenstein, cartoon animation involves bridging divides that form in the individual that correspond to dichotomies prevalent in Western thought[5]. Christian divides between flesh and spirit and biological divides between individual organisms and different species are addressed by the transgressive, metaphorical, and paradoxical aspects of animated cartoons. Animated cartoons participate in a critique of modern categories, whether we think of them in terms of Latour’s hybrids or Haraway’s cyborgs.
The technical, material practice that seems to have had the greatest influence on Eisenstein’s thinking about animation is drawing and, therein, the capacity to fuse distinct entities and beings through caricature. This emphasis departs from theorists who emphasize the role of the multiplane camera or difference between frames[6]. The myth of animation that I find in Eisenstein has its roots in cartoon and caricature and montage-like combinations of signs, symbols, and bodies. Caricatures produce humor through incongruity and facilitate comprehension by overloading an image or figure with signifying icons, symbols, and indices. This creates a feeling that the image is revealing truth through a figure that is representationally false. This incongruous, conceptual overloading makes the figure highly readable and comic, but also on the verge of becoming. As a still image, it is caught in a transition and, therein, wants to be animated[7]. The hybridity and metalepses of cartoon animation grow out of its roots in drawing and caricature, which fuse together signs and overload figures with incongruous signs. But this overloading is not, strictly speaking, exclusive to caricature because signs and figures more generally can be loaded with any number of meanings. The meaning of a sign is not fixed; the stability of its presence relies on the equally unstable signs around it. This is the an-ontology that haunts technicity more generally and provides a groundless ground for animation.
Eric Herhuth is Assistant Professor of Communication and Film Studies at Tulane University. His research areas include animation and film studies, aesthetics and politics, and media and film theory. He has published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Cinema Journal, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, and Theory & Event. He is also the author of Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture (University of California Press, 2017).
[1] The foremost expert working at the intersection of Derridean philosophy and animation is Alan Cholodenko. Thus, I defer to his expertise on the topic. My post is a humble effort to consider how animation critiques presence in a Derridean fashion through its own unstable being. For a discussion of hauntology, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York: Routledge, 2006), 10. For a discussion of hauntology and popular media, see Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Washington: Zero Books, 2014).
[2] Hannah Frank, “Traces of the World: Cel Animation and Photography,” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 11.1 (2016): 32-33. For a fuller account of animation’s “an-ontology,” see Deborah Levitt, The Animatic Apparatus: Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2018). In relation to hauntology, I find intriguing Levitt’s comparison between the an-ontology of animation—which emerges through simulacral otherness, the decoupling of bodies/images from biological destiny/reality, and the dissolution of boundaries between spectator and screen—and the indexical reality effect of live-action cinema. Both the outgoing cinematic regime and the current animatic apparatus seem to haunt through contradictions of being and presence. The former through the mummified change or presence-in-absence of live-action, photo-indexical cinema, and the latter through the otherness of simulacra and the “virtualization of life.”
[3] André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” What is Cinema, 2 volumes, trans./ed. Hugh Gray, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 23-27.
[4] Sergei Eisenstein: Disney, eds. Oksana Bulgakowa and Dietmar Hochmuth. Translated by Dustin Condren (Berlin: Potemkin Press, 2011), 15. Eisenstein also traces pre-logical, sensuous thought back to stages of totemism (46-9).
[5] It is worth noting the influence of Japanese theatre and visual representation on Eisenstein’s thought. I look forward to learning more about this. The most common place to find aspects of this in English is the excerpt from Eisenstein’s Film Form, “Beyond the Shot [The Cinematographic Principle and the ideogram],” Film Theory & Criticism, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 8th edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 12-23.
[6] See Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxiv.
[7] Eric Herhuth, “Overloading, Incongruity, Animation: A Theory of Caricature and Caricatural Logic in Contemporary Media,” Theory & Event 21.3 (July 2018): 641.
Dear Eric Herhuth,
Let me begin by thanking you for acknowledging my work, albeit in your endnote 1, as you put it, ‘at the intersection of Derridean philosophy and animation’,though it seems opaque why in the text you position endnote number 1 after these words ‘This hauntology‘.
If that constitutes an oblique acknowledgment of my work theorizing animation as the animatic after Derrida’s notion of the hauntological, then thanks for that, too.
But, frankly, I wish you had not, as you put it, ‘deferred’ ‘to my expertise on the topic of ‘Derridean philosophy and animation’ because it seems to have had the unfortunately consequence for me of removing precisely my expertise, my work and me from your essay.
Rather, I wish you had not only acknowledged but addressed my core, paradigmatic theorising of animation as the animatic, begun in 1991 in my Introduction to and essay ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or The Framing of Animation’ in The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, and my core, paradigmatic theorising of theanimatic after Derrida’s hauntological, the latter conducted in essays now numbering over a dozen, a theorising including in terms of my formulation of what I have called in a number of essays the Cryptic Complex of animation—all of which is synonymous with my 27 years of work on animation, the animatic and what I called since 1991 the animatic apparatusin my Introductions to my two anthologies and eleven essays.
I have no clue as to why you chose to reference, much less use, none of it.
As for my notion of the animatic after Derrida, one key moment in a number of them characterising it is in my Introduction to The Illusion of life 2: More Essays on Animation(2007), where I write in Part IV:
…the animatic is prior and superior to animation, the condition of at once the possibility and impossibility of animation. Here it counters all tendencies to think of animation as fullness of being, presence, essence, as pure positivity, including, crucially, as metamorphosis so thought. While animation privileges becoming over being, the dynamic over the static, the mobile over the fixed—indeed, it shows and performs the impossibility of being, the static, the fixed—the animatic deconstructs and seduces such an opposition, likewise showing and performing the impossibility of becoming, the dynamic, the mobile.144
The animatic is an in-betweener. It would be what lies and operates between, forms the milieu, and at once enables and disenables all binary oppositions as simple oppositions. It is the in-between of inanimate and animate, death and life, non-motion and motion, non-metamorphosis and metamorphosis, the child and the adult, female and male, etc. In terms of the ‘both/and, neither/nor, at the same time’ of Derridean différance, it would be, for example, that which is both inanimate and animate, neither inanimate nor animate, at the same time. Moreover, it lies and operates within, always already incorporating the between inside, thereby disseminating all possibilities of fullness, totality, wholeness, including of identity and self-identity, disseminating the very possibility of definition, denotation, the literal, fact, etc., ‘as such’. The animatic thus makes every discipline always already between disciplines, interdisciplinary, an in-betweener.
The animatic: the groundless ‘ground’ of all arts, media, disciplines, institutions, etc., and of the subject, of culture, of world ‘as such’.
Do I not detect an echo of that last sentence in the final sentence of your blog?
Eric, given what I have just written, I cannot agree with your characterisation of the hauntological after Derrida, if that is what ‘This hauntology, to adopt the Derridean phrase’ is meant to describe.
But for me you are spot on when you say that animation haunts everything, meaning that for me the animatic (indeed my Cryptic Complex) is always already, never not, haunting everything and reanimating everything, including animation.
Hence animation—itself always already, never not, subject to the animatic as for me nonessence of Eisenstein’s essence of animation as plasmaticness—is never not differing from and deferring itself.
Which is to say that for me there is no essence to animation precisely because the animatic is for me nonessence.
This is a point I have made in a number of essays, that animation ‘itself’, including its very definition, is subject to the animatic, meaning it is always already, never not, reanimating, redefining, ‘itself’.
As for the hauntological, I write this in ‘“First Principles” of Animation’ (psuchéreferring to Homer’s spectre, psycheto the Greek soul, as in Plato and Aristotle):
The animatic is to animation what psuchéis to psyche, spectre is to soul, what for Derrida différanceis to presence, dissemination is to essence, the hauntologicalis to the ontological. Not simply different but radically, irreducibly Other, the animatic is ‘ur’ ‘in-betweener’ (with ‘ur’ in quotation marks henceforth to mark non-essence)—animation itself gifting us this term ‘in-betweener’! So while Norman McLaren declared ‘difference…is the…soul of animation’,15for me, Derridean différanceis the spectre of animation, is animation as the animatic.
Given that you do not present and address my work on the animatic and the hauntological after Derrida and given that you do not refer readers to my essays theorising the animatic as hauntological, and since I would like to think that a reading of them might assist in gaining an understanding of what the hauntological is for Derrida and thus for me, here is a partial but privileged list, somewhat annotated, including three essays published in the Society’s own Animation Studies:
1. ‘The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema’,Cultural Studies Review, vol. 10, no. 2, September 2004.
Here I elaborate what I call the Cryptic Complex of film animation, with the uncanny one component of it, another the spectre. [So wherever I mention the Cryptic Complex in entries below, assume the uncanny is treated there.] The hauntological. Spectatorship as spectreship.
It is available on line by googling its title.
2. ‘Still Photography?’, published in Afterimage, vol. 32, no. 5, March/April 2005, reprinted online in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, January 2008.
On Baudrillard on photography, on his photographs, and on photography and animation and the relation between them. Onpsuchéand psyche. The Cryptic Complex. The hauntological. Theorises the photograph in terms of animation, and vice versa.
3. ‘(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix’, Part II: ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Animation Studies’, Animation Studies, vol. 2, 2007. On psuchéand psyche. The Cryptic Complex. The hauntological.
4. ‘The Spectre in the Screen’, Animation Studies, Vol. 3, 2008. On Jacques Lacan and animation. On psuchéand psyche. The Cryptic Complex. The hauntological. Spectatorship as spectreship.
5. ‘(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix’, Part I: ‘Kingdom of Shadows’, in Animated Dialogues, 2007, published in 2009 on the Animation Studieswebsite. Tom Gunning’s cinema of attractions reanimated by me as animation of attractions. The Cryptic Complex. The hauntological. Spectatorship as spectreship.
6. ‘The “ABCs” of B, or: To Be and Not to Be B’, Film-Philosophy, Special Issue on Baudrillard and Film, vol. 14, no. 2, September 2010. On psuchéand psyche. The Cryptic Complex. The hauntological. Spectatorship as spectreship.
7. ‘(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix’, Part III: ‘Death and the Death of Death’, in Selected Writings From the UTS: Sydney International Animation Festival 2010 Symposium, ed. Chris Bowman, published by the Faculty of Design, Architecture & Building, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 2011. Republished online in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, January 2014.
The hyperCryptic hyperComplex. The war between the vampire and the zombie.
8. ‘“First Principles” of Animation’, Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2014.
A key summary of my Derridean theory of animation as the animatic. On psuchéand psycheThe Cryptic Complex. The hauntological. Spectatorship as spectreship.
I would suggest starting with ‘The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema’, my essay most visited in Academia.edu, then ‘“First Principles” of Animation’.
Then I would read the three parts of ‘(The) Death (of) the Animator, or: The Felicity of Felix’.
But Eric, given your special interest in drawing and drawing’s relation to animation, I must refer you to my essay ‘The Illusion of the Beginning: A Theory of Drawing and Animation’, Afterimage, vol. 28, no. 1, July/August 2000, which treats of the uncanny, the spectre and cryptic incorporation, even containing the word ‘hauntological’.
It’s that rare thing.
A text that not only states it offers a theory of drawing but actually offers a theory of drawing.
With the bonus of offering a theory of animation and animation’s relation to drawing, and vice versa.
If you send me your email address, I shall send it to you.
Finally, of course, I must remind the reader of my other core, paradigmatic theorising of the animatic, that is, after Jean Baudrillard, my other mentor, a theorising undertaken in many essays, including some of the above, one likewise synonymous with my work on the animatic and its apparatus, from ‘“OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR”: The Virtual Reality of Jurassic Parkand Jean Baudrillard’ (1997), in Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg, Sage Publications, London, 1997, reprinted online in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, January 2005, on.
But that’s another story.
Should anyone be unable to locate these essays, please email me.
My address is: alan.cholodenko@sydney.edu.au
Should anyone be interested in discussing the readings with me or in further readings, email me.
I hope what I have written and provided here is helpful.
Cheers,
Alan
Dear Alan,
There are a few reasons why I did not engage with your work in my blog post. First, I wanted to discuss the blogs posted on the Animation and Philosophy theme. Second, the posts are limited to 900 words and I wanted to mention Eisenstein and plug my own essay near the end. Third, I have read a fair amount of your work, but you have written many, many essays and I did not have the time to find the essays most relevant for my post. For these reasons, you became a kind of other other: “I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others” (Derrida, The Gift of Death, 69). But not really because I did mention you and direct people to your work.
But this is a boring answer to a boring question. My whole point for using the word hauntology was to suggest that animation scholars are stimulated by the inconsistent, unstable ontology of animation. The other posts on the Animation and Philosophy theme are interested in the ontology of animation but none of them agree exactly and that seems to be a common occurrence in Animation Studies. This is not the critique of presence that Derrida or you evoke when using the term, but I agree with you that the animatic, as you say, is a basic condition that facilitates the many definitions and ontologies of animation. In my reading, the animatic refers to the condition of signification described by terms such as trace and differánce (that signifiers always refer to other signifiers and that any presence inevitably relies on that which is seemingly not present and that a given meaning relies on other meanings) that makes possible a host of playful and contradictory manifestations, expressions, and practices to which animation film, film animation, and cartoons have special purchase. All things are actually subject to this condition and the problem of presence, but some forms of animation address it more directly than others.
So, yes, the last line of my post echoes your work even though I was not consciously thinking of it.
I have since reread several of your essays and found them to illuminate many of the challenges of thinking through this condition, although some challenges remain. It is clear enough that the contradictory mix of presence and absence, life and death, motion and stillness that one finds in Mclaren and Eisenstein supports your theory (McLaren’s interstitial definition refers to both absence and presence and Eisenstein’s dialectical definition refers to meanings generated through conflict and juxtaposition). And your writing is a constant reminder that the constitution of presence relies on a series of absences and deferrals. (For anyone unfamiliar with Derrida’s basic intervention see Geoffrey Bennington’s lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtLMNcpgYEs.)
This constant inclusion of contradictory and absent-but-present signifiers coheres with the explicit back and forth between animation concepts and animation practices that appears throughout your work. As you explain in “Animation (Theory) as the Poematic” your “idea was that animation as idea (concept, process, etc.) informs the animation film, and vice versa, so the animation film is open to the idea of animation, and vice versa” (10). This formulation suggests that the study of animation film lends itself to the study of animation concepts and vice versa. I find this approach immensely valuable to animation studies and to the intersection of animation and philosophy because it broadens the field of study and facilitates interdisciplinary work.
I also cite your “Poematic” essay because I appreciate your defense of critical theory and critique of the post-theory Bordwellian turn in cinema studies. As you say in the “Poematic,” “What is traced in, what specters, logocentrism, reason and logic is their at once excluded and included radical other, what cannot be subsumed by logocentrism, reason and logic but rather subsumes them, what I call the animatic” (11). In the “Poematic” you make the point that the animatic deconstructs logocentrism, which places it in the tradition of critiquing Enlightenment reason and its role in the horrors of the twentieth century and so on. The animatic, then, is a critical resource with the political capacity to challenge a variety of modern habits of thought. I think this is what you mean in your “First Principles” essay when you argue that animation has privileged the primitive, the primal, the loony, the child, the nonhuman, etc., while cinema has privileged the sane, the civilized, the adult, and the human, and that theorizing the illusion of life is inseparable from theorizing the life of illusion (102).
Moreover, the “Illusion of the Beginning” essay, which you recommended, is interesting because it draws together a series of concepts such as “trace” and “seduce” that share an etymological and associative relation to “drawing.” In this essay your description of the animatic becomes a description of the graphematic: “whose logic and process is that of iterability, the repeatability and divisibility of the mark that comprise the condition of possibility of origin, identity, presence, essence, which are never present precisely because of the logics and processes of the graphematic, iterability, the trace” (9). This essay demonstrates how drawing, the graphematic, and the animatic adhere to the same deconstructive logic and it is worth including another quote (for anyone still reading this and following along): “This is what the graphematic, the animatic and the beginningend show us—that a certain indetermining and suspending of distinctive opposition in a complicated dizzying coimplication of opposing terms and attributes always already defers the possibility of definitive fixed understandings of things, including of themselves, which both need to be and are impossible to be thought—even as they perform this indetermining and suspending for us” (11). This dense passage provides a remarkably succinct description of the condition of signification, which includes a sense that it envelopes everything and that it keeps things moving by preventing fixed and stable meaning.
Your use of “seduce,” “draw,” and “trace” in this essay convey a sense of inescapability or irresistibility. I also noticed that you use the word “conjure” in your “First Principles” essay to describe the effect of the animatic condition. I appreciate this kind of language because it suggests that the animatic condition influences, shapes, maybe even inspires and animates a variety of actions, behaviors, and thoughts. Human agency does not disappear, but the animatic conditions what is possible. And even though this conditioning by way of the animatic “defers the possibility of definitive fixed understandings,” it provides a universal condition for explaining why nothing is universal.
In every case, in every example, everything is subject to the condition of signification, the trace, and differánce. This lends an appearance of homogeneity to each of your arguments and even though this logic affirms that there is no pure beginnings or transcendental signifiers or “reconciling everything in a unified theory” (“Illusion of the Beginning” 11), your description of the animatic pursues universality. Hence your appreciation of Hawking’s and Hartle’s “‘no-boundary’ proposal—that the universe is a sphere, at once bounded and boundless, finite and infinite, without a beginning or an end.” And shortly after this you add, “the animatic operates not only at the limits of the macro-cosmos and the micro-cosmos but everywhere” (“Illusion of the Beginning” 11). (Surely Derrida deals with this problem somewhere).
The universality of the animatic condition makes it difficult to deploy as a theoretical concept because it gives all phenomena a similar contradictory, unstable, animated appearance. This is distinct from Levitt’s an-ontology which refers to a historically specific media environment, the animatic apparatus, in which bodies and images are less tied to the world and biological destiny. Most accounts focused on the ontology of animation tend to be more narrowly focused on a historically specific medium/experience/practice. This is the case for the blog contributors concerned with performance (Honess Roe) and screenless animation (MacGillivray). It is also the case for arguments like that of Eric Jenkins, who, in his “Another Punctum” essay, describes the “never-has-been” quality of animated characters contra the “has been,” indexical quality of live-action characters. I mentioned Hannah Frank’s account in my post and it too is a more narrowly focused ontological argument. I think Scott Birdwise’s discussion of Agamben is closest to drawing upon the animatic in that it works with the idea of “inoperativity” as essential to the human condition. This is a very helpful example because it returns to a political deployment of the condition and I think this kind of usage is a strength in your development of the animatic as a theory. Deploying the theory in a political context—or, following Derrida, and ethical domain—adds particularities (powerful forces, competing organizations and voices, etc.) to the otherwise all-encompassing condition and in such cases it is inspiring to find the animatic as a condition that resists fixed understandings and generates possibility.
Dear Eric,
Thank you for your reply to my Comment on your blog.
I am most appreciative of and most impressed with your generous, considered presentation of and response to my work on the animatic and the hauntological after Derrida and fine, complex, scholarly address of, engagement with and elucidation of it, to say nothing of contribution to it.
It was far from my intention to solicit a reply of such length, breadth and depth.
As I wrote to you personally after my Comment, I just wanted to make in that Comment what I hope is a worthy contribution to your blog and its theme of animation and philosophy.
I would find it rewarding if readers profit from what I have written.
I reiterate that wish in terms of what I write here of your reply to my Comment.
I will not comment on the work of the others in your series.
Yes, as I write in my Introduction to The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation (2007), for me the animatic is idea, concept, process, performance, medium and milieu, making it an in betweener, including in between opposites, within each opposite, as well as forming the milieu within which opposites ‘reside’.
There is one thing I most must address and correct in your reply.
For Derrida, the hauntological is not a critique of presence, of ontology, of the ontological.
It, and other such supplementary terms in his repertoire, are not critiques of the hierarchically privileged terms for which they are supplements.
Derrida has made it clear his work is not a criticism nor critique of those hierarchized terms.
For him, it is impossible for one to think, live and function without them, without ontology, presence, essence, etc.
As I stated of his work when I introduced Derrida at Sydney Town Hall in 1999:
For me, the greatest provocation of his work is its constituting at once a challenge to the assumptions informing the ideas, discourses, systems and institutions of our culture even as it seeks to establish the very condition of their possibility, and, as he discovers, likewise impossibility. This is what ‘deconstruction’ is all about. Deconstruction. Not destruction, as his work is so often misunderstood to mean. And not simply analysis either. Rather, at the least the marking of the irrepressible trace of the radically other never not operating within the structures of the ‘same’, the marking of the moment, the ‘spot’, where the text ‘turns on’ itself.
Here, I would hasten to add, ‘Deconstruction’ includes highlighting a certain impossibility in the very idea of the Introduction, which is necessarily playing itself out here but which circumstance prevents my remarking upon, further.
Derrida’s work has been not only inspirational but revivifying to that of many academics worldwide, in philosophy, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, as is well known, and in many other disciplines too, including art history and theory and film studies. His deconstruction of ‘the major determination of the meaning of Being as presence’ [Positions, p. 7] in Western philosophy, his deconstruction of phallogocentrism, his shaking of such metaphysical givens as totality, oneness [unicity], purity, presence, self-presence, essence, origin, identity, of the Platonic notion of speech as fullness of presence, his elaboration through his readings of notions that may well inform discussion tonite and tomorrow, undecidable seismic, shock-ing notions such as writing, différance—the differing and deferring characterising the systematic and regulated play of difference in ‘language’—dissemination (the doubled, divided, unproductive expenditure), the supplement, the frame, the hymen (at once both unveiling and veiling), the pharmakon (at once both poison and cure), the gram, the graph, the trace, the spectre, the cryptic incorporation of Abraham and Torok—the list of these hybrid, aporetic, supplementary terms is potentially infinite—his deconstruction of the binary oppositional form of Western metaphysical thinking, including the bias toward presence inscribed and hierarchised therein, his foregrounding of the play, the movement, the ‘life’, of textuality, of the referral, the detour, the delay, disappearance, distance, destitution, death—all this, and more, much more, has reanimated the work of many scholars.
‘Deconstruction’ is at once both most faithful to philosophy and most violent to it. Operating on both sides of the horizon of philosophy at the same time, ‘deconstruction’ is at once both philosophy and not-philosophy, therefore neither simply philosophy nor simply not-philosophy. ‘It’ is the frame, the hymen, the pharmakon, [etc.,] of philosophy. ‘It’ not only ‘thinks’ the limit, the between, the undecidable, the impossible, including of philosophy, but performs them, and vice versa. A philosophy of seduction, a seduction of philosophy, making philosophy ‘enter the realm of metamorphosis’ despite itself, this gift of Derrida’s work and what is at stake in it remain open to the future, indeed to whatever may happen tonite.
[Here I must add a note of correction of the above: where I have ‘at once both unveiling and veiling’ and ‘at once both poison and cure’, that was a simplification for the audience. It needs to be ‘at once both unveiling and veiling, neither simply veiling nor simply unveiling’ and ‘at once both poison and cure, neither simply poison nor simply cure’.]
So deconstruction is not the same as destruction.
Nor is it critique nor Critical Theory.
It is a process not only of the subject but of the object, the world, the universe itself, as I wrote in ‘Animation (Theory) as the Poematic: A Reply to the Cognitivists’, and elsewhere.
And it is a process always already, never not, happening, regardless of any subject’s intentionality or volition.
The hauntological is for Derrida at once the condition of possibility and impossibility of the ontological—of presence, essence, purity, oneness (unicity), totality, wholeness, origin, identity, self-identity, etc.
It is what at once enables and disenables ontology as ontology, essence as essence, presence as presence, etc.
As are other such supplementary terms in respect of their hierarchically privileged terms.
So it is wrong to speak of that opposition as simple opposition, as simple contradiction.
In fact, for Derrida it is a crise du versus, a crisis of the versus, as I write of the animatic apparatus that is animatic automaton in my essay ‘Speculations on the Animatic Automaton’ in The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation (2007):
In the Introduction to THE ILLUSION OF LIFE, I characterise the illusion of life of animation as bearing a privileged relation to Freud’s uncanny, as the uncanny reanimation by animation film, film animation and the animatic apparatus of the world in and as simulation. Not only is the animatic automaton that is this animating apparatus a simulator, it is a simulation—an ‘animate inanimate’—an ‘apparatus of the “uncanny’’’ that, doubling, replicating, world, indetermines and suspends all distinctive oppositions, including that of film ‘versus’ world, etc. (Derrida’s crise du versus)—thereby indetermining ‘itself’. Which is to say that the apparatus of the animatic automaton is itself a ‘defining’ technology.
Deconstruction’s at once double turn is double trouble, a crisis of opposition, a crisis of simple either/orism.
it is aporia, a logically irresolvable contradiction.
And it is not simply unstable.
Rather, it can be thought after Derrida as both stable and unstable, neither simple stable nor simply unstable, at the same time.
As chiasmatically at once the instability of stability and stability of instability.
And astonishingly, this aporetic, chiasmatic condition is the history of Western metaphysics for Derrida!
And it’s been a long history, one ever since Plato.
And it is one that has always already, never not, deconstructed itself as it has gone along.
And that means that that crisis of the versus, of opposition, of either/orism, is nothing new.
In that sense, it is no crisis at all!
Just business as usual.
As I wrote in my Introduction to The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (1991) of the essays in the book (the latter part of which you quote in your reply to my Comment):
…many of the essays problematize by their very thinking of animation any simple distinction between animism and mechanism, life and movement, as their thinking of animation would problematize any simple distinction between animation as film and animation as idea.7
Such a challenge to either/orism, including the either/orism of the dictionary’s split between ‘a making alive or lively (an animated conversation) or an imparting of motion or activity (animated cartoons)’, would be a challenge which arguably animation would itself pose to its (or any) definition, a challenge which the doubled definition itself already marks. Even more, that this is what animation itself tells us—that a certain indetermining and suspending of distinctive opposition in a complicated dizzying coimplication of opposing terms and attributes always already defers the possibility of definitive fixed understandings of things, including animation, which both needs to be and is impossible to be thought.
Such a coimplication is inextricable.
It forms a knot that cannot be unknotted by either party without both being lost at the same time.
Their knotted coimplication proceeds from a double necessity and a double impossibility, the at once impossible necessity and necessary impossibility of each and of their relation.
The at once impossible necessity and necessary impossibility of the hauntological animatically animates the once impossible necessity and necessary impossibility of the ontological, and vice versa, thus animates that of their relation.
Which means that, so as long as the hauntological exists, the ontological exists, and vice versa.
And as long as that knot exists, animation as the animatic exists, the animatic apparatus exists.
Therefore animation exists.
I’ll leave you with these few paragraphs from my ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or The Framing of Animation’ in The illusion of Life (where note 44 refers to Mallarme’s Mimique, quoted in Derrida’s ‘The Double Session’, and pharmacy refers to Plato’s pharmakon, of which Derrida writes in his essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, referred to by note 46):
The animatic apparatus, enveloping what is ‘represented’ in and on the screen and its audience in the theatre, operates according to the vibratory, suspensive, oscillating (il)logic of the supplement, of the simulacrum—writing. The animatic apparatus as hymen (in this sense as film):
…hymen (out of which flows Dream), tainted with vice yet sacred, between desire and fulfillment, perpetration and remembrance; here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance of a present. That is how the Mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or the mirror: he thus sets up a medium, a pure medium, of fiction. 44
The projector/stylus writes with the iridescent light of the doubled sun on an always already inscribed page/screen/hymen with Acme disappearing/reappearing ink in a camera obscura/nocturnal theatre of Plato’s Cave and Mallarmé’s antre (cave).
Too, the animatic apparatus is the pharmacy, whose magical, seductive, dangerous supplements are both curative and poisonous at the same time. The animatic apparatus (of movies, cinema) is a medium of the entre- (the between) and the trans-, that is, of transportation, transformation, transmutation, operating according to the trope. The toon in this sense is zootrope, the troping/turning/disseminating of the zoon. Thus here too lies a tie between ‘cartoon animation’ and ‘live action film’ and the optical toys which were their precursors, optical toys significantly called ‘philosophers’ toys’.45 Derrida writes, ‘Metaphoricity is the logic of contamination and the contamination of logic’.46 Metaphor, from the Greek metapherein, means ‘to transport’.
All of which always already merely ‘begins’ to both exemplify and complicate Norman McLaren’s definition of animation as ‘not the art of drawings-that-move, but rather the art of movements-that-are-drawn’,47 which complicating includes the undoing of the either/orism of drawings as opposed to movements. Thus, this ‘opposition’ is turned, ironized and deconstructed in the (mobility of the) trope that Jessica wields at every turn, including her ‘self’-description—the trope marking, as does McLaren, that ‘what happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame’48 (but between must at the same time be thought of as within, in this sense sliding onto on). But even further, the drawn is likewise not drawn, exists in a state of nonmovement, of movement and nonmovement at the same time, what Derrida calls mouvance,49 the oscillation between active and passive of the interval. Like Jessica‘s drawn, McLaren’s word drawings slides from, is drawn from, noun towards gerund—itself a mobile pivot—and drawn back again in an indeterminate oscillation of the hama (a slide and oscillation which, like the gerund, the dash between his words also marks). Moreover, the of of ‘of the interval’, ‘of the hama’, this turning double genitive, likewise marks, frames, is the frame of, turning ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ into ‘The Framing of Roger Rabbit’, that is, both ‘of’ and ‘by’ at the same time… The frame is always already the frame of the frame. It is not only that which frames but that which unframes at the same time, including unframing itself as obedient to its very principle of framing, as that which (con)fuses and separates.
Animation can never be thought outside death. Georges Bataille suggests that it is only when one is dead that one can know what life is, only then that the final revelation of man to himself can occur; but when one is dead, one cannot know any longer, which means that one can never know life nor death, the animate nor the inanimate as a fullness of presence.50 Otherwise, the trace of the trace, différance, dissemination, where metaphoricity suspends the proper, where the littoral (the bord) suspends the literal, including, of course, this writing, which is bad (and good) for being drawn— framed—this way. Living on in the suspended sentence of Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Two other points.
First, I don’t see Eisenstein’s definition of the plasmatic—that formless form that, giving all form, is ungivable as such—as dialectical, a term and concept formulated late in his career and life, not in his Marxist heyday in the 1920s.
Far from it.
Second, you have left out a part of the ‘no-boundary proposal’.
It should read: that the universe is a sphere, at once bounded and boundless, finite and infinite, with and without a beginning and an end.
Finally then, Eric, as I indicated at the end of my first reply, there’s my other core, paradigmatic theorising of the animatic, that is, after Jean Baudrillard, my other mentor, a theorising undertaken in many essays, one likewise synonymous with my work on the animatic and its apparatus, from ‘“OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR”: The Virtual Reality of Jurassic Park and Jean Baudrillard’ (1997), in Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg, Sage Publications, London, 1997, reprinted online in International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, January 2005, on.
But that’s for another day.
And thanks again for your animated and animating presentation and exegesis of my work on the hauntological and the animatic after Derrida.
Best,
Alan
Thanks, Alan, for the clarification.
What you say about deconstruction as “a process always already, never not, happening, regardless of any subject’s intentionality or volition” makes a lot of sense. It helps me think about my relation to deconstruction.
Also, it helps to read your explanation of deconstruction as a condition that is not new or even unfamiliar:
“that crisis of the versus, of opposition, of either/orism, is nothing new.
In that sense, it is no crisis at all!”
I think the fact that deconstruction refers to a condition, not a critique, leads me to the political point of thinking about what to do with it or how to respond to it. I cannot help but believe that thinking about this condition leads to or facilitates critique because of its basic troubling of assumptions. To be really simplistic, when thinking about the trace and differance, on a basic level, I feel that I am bringing that which was hidden/forgotten/marginalized (but always there) into view. As a method, it seems to ask a reader to look for what is not there that constitutes what is there. I cannot help but feel that I am engaged in some kind of political and ethical activity.
But I take your point that deconstruction is not critique and is not destruction.
I recall during my early graduate training that my professors were obsessed and well-versed in Derrida’s ideas and texts, but many of us graduate students were already looking for something else to obsess about. We came after the strong reaction to Derrida’s intervention. It was not a crisis for us because it did not undo or challenge our training. It was part of our training whether we understood it or not.
Anyway, I really appreciate your dialogue and found it quite rewarding. Maybe next time we can give Baudrillard a try.
Cheers,
Eric
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[…] Herhuth, Eric. “The Ontology, An-Ontology, and Hauntology of Animation.” Animationstudies 2.0. December 31, 2018. Accessed January 28, 2021. URL: https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=2818 […]