This text is about the animation of Higher Education learning, and the learning of animation in Higher Education. I have been pulled into writing the text by footnote 21 of renowned animation theorist and ‘poststructuralist’ thinker Alan Cholodenko’s “Computer Says No”, or: The Erasure of the Human (2015), and its curious inclusion of the university in the list of key institutions operating as the apparatus of the carceral regime. Following Cholodenko and counter to what I have been told at universities by university staff, I propose that the university is not above the student/teacher-as-prisoner/guard dynamic but is in fact host to that very same dynamic in its hyper form. That is, it becomes the hyperstudent/hyperteacher hyperdynamic wherein the student and teacher become indistinguishable, so, like the pigs and men in Animal Farm (Orwell 1945) it is already impossible to say which is which.
This is particularly relevant to animation studies because the broad definition of animation (as the medium of all mediums¹) has led to a loose and varied idea of what it means to teach or learn animation, allowing for the exchangeability and reversibility of the roles. What is more, the university application process screens for students who will take the role of the teacher by looking for eager and self-motivated students. That is, admission tutors are looking for students who do not need a teacher, who are already acting as teachers to themselves, who will in turn become a teacher to others. The self-motivated student motivates those around them. The self-disciplined student disciplines others, including disciplining the university staff—thereby hyperanimating the student/teacher dynamic as the hyperstudent/hyperteacher hyperdynamic. So even as it is the university’s role to demand, receive, observe, review, and return feedback to the student on them and their work—to keep them accountable—it is in the student’s teacherly nature to listen, give, get observed, and take the feedback—to keep the staff accountable in return.
As Alan Cholodenko describes it in “Computer Says No”, or: The Erasure of the Human (2015), accountability does not belong to second-order reality, but rather to third-order hyperreality. Hyperreality is the term used to denote the contemporary state of ‘reality’ in which the traditional notions of truth, meaning, reason, logic, etc. have accelerated or are accelerating to their limits and beyond, turning in on themselves, reversing their typical functioning, and evacuating them from themselves. It is described by Cholodenko (2020) as “a ‘new’ ‘reality,’ a ‘reality’ with at once too much and too little reality, a pure, total and empty ‘reality,’ a ‘reality’ without, in a word, ‘reality.’”. In hyperreality, then, discipline becomes hyperdiscipline, the pure, total, and empty form of discipline, such that discipline is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And accountability is what the disciplinary regime, theorised by Michel Foucault (1979, cited in Cholodenko 2015: 35), morphs into as it ‘lives on’ beyond its death. This turns the student/teacher dynamic into the hyperteacher/hyperstudent hyperdynamic in which the student is a student more student than student and less student than student at the same time – with the same being true of the teacher. The hyperstudent, once taught to the test by the hyperteacher, becomes a hyperexpert at being tested. Once taught how to be tested, the hyperstudent expects to be taught to the test and enforces being taught to the test. In this way the student is a student more teacher than teacher and the teacher a teacher more student than student.
When the hyperstudent hyperforces the hyperteacher to hyperteach, to hyperlecture, to hyperdo their hyperjob, they are performing the same vengeance that occurs between the native and the ethnologist described by Baudrillard in The Orders of Simulacra (1983). When asked a question, the native simulates an answer, gives the ethnologist exactly what they want, but nothing of the native, and so uses the power of the question/answer cycle to take revenge on the ethnologist. The student in turn only ever gives simulated responses, accepts that they are work for the teacher, and so make themselves work for the teacher. But the student as hyperstudent, wielding the new great power of emails which carry within them the threat of recorded communication, now enforce the asking of the questions—pay to be asked said questions—let the teacher assume the role of the punished, of the student and the native, who can and must only do what is being asked of them, teach to the test and nothing more, giving only what can be given, and so giving nothing. The hyperstudent and hyperteacher are no longer in a truly antagonistic relationship, and are instead simply rudely complicit in the other’s suffering as they, in unison, one and the same, claim victimhood. The hyperstudent/hyperteacher scenario is a simulation of learning, where any exchange of knowledge has been replaced by the question/answer cycle, where only academia’s image remains and responsibility is infinitely deferred.
The deferring of responsibility is not only not new, it is perhaps the only possible way to wield authority. But where once God was watching over us, now it is technology that keeps us accountable—including in animation courses. Student ID cards must be tapped in and out of classes to register them as present for the lesson. The teacher, spotting a student tapping in and immediately leaving, must announce this defilement of the system as criminal. The student must be held as accountable as the teacher, and it is in the register system and in grading that the student is kept accountable.
Grading is the ultimate form of deferred authority. See figure 1. The student’s awareness of their eventual grade is the threat of punishment for ignoring or refusing the teacher’s wisdom. With the system of grading being both utterly opaque and completely transparent, perfectly rigid and totally arbitrary, the direction is clear: perform well or do poorly. The ‘learning outcome’ categories are banal, vague, and overlapping; ignored by absolutely everyone, and exist to prove the organization of the university as an institution. Grading, by giving itself parameters, like Concept, Implement, Professionalism, Communication, etc., has added signs of transparency to the black box of grading. It is a defense mechanism, one which appears to work – where the appearance of working is enough.
In presenting versions of this argument to teachers, lecturers, students, and others, the question comes back to me: “What do you propose instead?” This question can only be answered one way, a simulated and short-circuited answer which gives nothing of me: “I do not propose anything instead.”
Notes
¹Following both what has been said by Samantha Moore in her talk You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough (2024) presented at the ‘40 Years of RCA Animation: Networks & Communities, Collections & Archives’ symposium; and more broadly what has been written by Alan Cholodenko in The Nutty Universe of Animation, The “Discipline” of All “Disciplines”, And That’s Not All, Folks! (2006).
References
Baudrillard, J. ‘The Orders of Simulacra’, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Phillip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
Cholodenko, A. “The Nutty Universe of Animation, The “Discipline” of All “Disciplines”, And That’s Not All, Folks!” In International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 3, Number 1 (2006).
Cholodenko, A. ‘“Computer Says No”, or: The Erasure of the Human’, in Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory, eds. Brad Buckley and John Conomos (England: Libri, 2015).
Cholodenko, A. ‘‘Like Tears in Rain’: The Crypt, The Haunted House, of Animation and Memory in the Era of Hyperreality’. Animation Studies: Peer Reviewed Online Journal for Animation History and Theory 15. (2020)
Available at: https://oldjournal.animationstudies.org/alan-cholodenko-like-tears-in-rain-the-crypt-the-haunted-house-of-animation-and-memory-in-the-era-of-hyperreality/ (Accessed 13/10/2025).
Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Moore, S. You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough. ‘40 Years of RCA Animation: Networks & Communities, Collections & Archives’ symposium, Royal College of Art, White City Campus, November 22 (2024).
Orwell, G. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (London: Secker and Warburg, 1945).
Samuel Regan-Edwards is an independent scholar residing in England and holds a First Class BA(Hons) in Animation. His recent work on hyperfilm and hyperTV hyperanimation has been published on animationstudies 2.0 and spark23.co.uk, as well as presenting at the 2025 Society for Animation Studies annual conference in London, UK.