consumer dreams: animation and the translation of america

CONSUMER DREAMS: ANIMATION AND THE TRANSLATION OF AMERICA by ERIC S. JENKINS (Under the Direction of Kevin M. DeLuca) ABSTRACT In the early to middle 20th century, the terms comprising the American dream shifted from the earlier Horatio Alger template frequently represented by Henry Ford. Rather than emphasizing hard work, the Disney version insists that all one needs is a dream. The Disney version is told through a constellation of metaphors including dream, fantasy, art, genius, children, wonder, magic, and illusion, interestingly the same terms through which debates over consumerism were waged. Indeed, this same period witnessed the spread of modern consumerism, featuring a cyclical and insatiable desire to consume. Both the forms and understanding of modern consumerism were translated to fit the conditions of consumer capitalism. This dissertation seeks to explain this shift, asking how the Disney version and modern consumerism were constituted. Developing one interpretation of McLuhan’s axiom “the medium is the message,” I argue that cinema and animation translated the American dream and modern consumerism. Critiquing explanations locating the origin of constitution in speakers, audiences, texts, or exigencies, I contend that the media of cinema and animation create “messages” through which the Disney version makes sense. These “messages” are modes, the historical, contingent ways of communicating that emerge from the new –

abilities enabled by animation and cinema. Modes are a perceiving as, ways of perceiving one thing through the frame of another, guiding the construction and reception of mediated texts. Modes are the origin of “messages” translated into cultural practice, shaping the Disney version and modern consumerism. The dissertation details the modes of cinema and Disney animation. The cinematic mode perceives material reality as an imaginary narrative, operating through an economy of projection and recording. Animistic mimesis perceives inanimate drawings as full of life, operating through an economy of semblance and play. These modes articulate to the Disney version and structure the habitus in ways conducive to modern consumerism. The cinematic mode encourages a form of daydreaming by creating camera-subjects seeking to manage their images to fit in or stand out. Furthermore, animistic mimesis provides training in commodity fetishism. By teaching audiences in how to see life in objects, animistic mimesis encourages the spread of modern consumerism.

INDEX WORDS:

Consumerism, commodity, commodity fetish, animation, Disney, cinema, American dream, media theory, mode

CONSUMER DREAMS: ANIMATION AND THE TRANSLATION OF AMERICA

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ERIC S. JENKINS B.A. University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1997 M.A., University of Texas, 2000

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA 2009

© 2009 Eric S. Jenkins All Rights Reserved

CONSUMER DREAMS: ANIMATION AND THE TRANSLATION OF AMERICA

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ERIC S. JENKINS

Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2009

Major Professor:

Kevin M. DeLuca

Committee:

Celeste Condit Thomas Lessl Jay Hamilton Roger Stahl

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to especially thank Dr. Kevin DeLuca for his insights and efforts throughout the extended revision process. Additionally, I would like to extend my gratitude to the members of my committee for their thoughtful comments and for taking the time to read and think through my work. Finally, I thank my wife, Allison Dunn, for emotional and intellectual support during a grueling process.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS........................................................................................................... iv CHAPTER One

Introduction ...............................................................................................................1 The American Dream as an Object of Analysis ..................................................5 The Disney Influence …………………………………………………………11 The Disney Version of the American Dream ....................................................15

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The Constitution of the American Dream ...............................................................23 The Rhetorical Situation: Exigence or Speakers as Origin? .............................24 The Constitutive Turn: Texts as Origin? ...........................................................29 Media Fragmentation: The Audience as Origin? ..............................................34 Media, Constitution, and the Rhetorical Situation ............................................40

Three The Mode is the Message: Media, Translation, and Constitution...........................55 Media as Translators .........................................................................................56 If the Medium is the Message, the Message is the Mode..................................65 Models of the Rhetorical Situation....................................................................75 The Critical Task ...............................................................................................79 Four

The Disney Version.................................................................................................87 A Magical Theory of Social Change.................................................................88 American Story: A Man with a Dream, Medium, and Know-How ..................97

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Moving On: Translating the Transfer..............................................................105 Five

American Daydream: Camera Subjects and Reels of the “Real”..........................110 The Technological Conditions of the Cinematic Mode ..................................111 The “Perceiving As” of the Cinematic Mode..................................................117 The –Abilities of the Cinematic Mode ............................................................125 Consumerism and the Cinematic Mode ..........................................................146

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Of Mice and Mimesis ............................................................................................166 Modes: From Cinema to Animation................................................................168 The Mimetic Mode in Fantasia.......................................................................179 The Features of Animistic Mimesis ................................................................182 Animistic Mimesis and the Commodity Fetish...............................................206

Seven Uncle Genius and the Kids (Are Alright?) ............................................................220 Transferring Persona: Uncle Genius ...............................................................221 Transferring to a Second Persona: The Child in All of Us .............................234 Communication as Transfer: A Model Rhetorical Situation...........................244 Eight Walt, Walter, Wall-E and Modern Consumerism .................................................251 Nine

Conclusion.............................................................................................................274

REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................287

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Chapter One Introduction What is the American dream? Is it something definite—do we know it when we see it? Or is it another nebulous metaphor, a favorite trope for the crafters of cultural messages? Can the American dream be anything to anybody with the right spin? At first glance, the latter seems likely. Those few academics who have studied the metaphor repeatedly confess frustration over the sheer diversity of uses for the phrase “American dream.” This conclusion is hard to deny; the openness and plurality of the metaphor seems necessary to admit from the beginning. For instance, users of the phrase “American dream” vary widely. 1 Americans are familiar with politicians of all stripes painting the dream in different strokes, from Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. 2 Beginning with its popularization in the 1930s, the phrase has served progressives and conservatives alike, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Karl Rove. Writers associate the term with proto-feminists such as Lucy Stone, Margaret Fuller, and Fanny Wright and labor union-organizers such as Terence V. Powderly, William H. Sylvis, and Eugene Debs. Commentators tie the dream to conservative icons, including the reverend Jerry Falwell and former attorney general Alberto Gonzales. Emblems of the American dream include everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Henry Ford, Abraham Lincoln to Walt Disney, Ross Perot to Clarence Thomas, Barack Obama to Oprah Winfrey. 3 An uncountable number of movies and television shows including Wall Street, The Firm, The Cosby Show, Face/Off, Kramer vs. Kramer, Malcolm X, and Bend it Like Beckham are also said to portray stories about the American dream. 4

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With such a diversity of rhetors, one might expect that the content of the American dream also lacks singularity. The dream usually refers to an idea or an imagining, but what idea or which image seems completely open. Rhetorical scholar Walter Fisher contends the American dream denotes two narratives—the rags to riches story of individual success and the egalitarian myth of national brotherhood. 5 Yet these two myths do not exhaust the various articulations of the American dream in cultural and political discourse. Just to list a few, the American dream is: the rags-to-riches tale, the get-rich-quick scheme, the middle class lifestyle, becoming a celebrity, another melting-pot metaphor, a true democracy, unity under God, a classless society, MLK’s dream of equality, the Declaration of Independence, the puritan ethic of hard work, universal education, Westward expansionism, capitalism over communism, security from fear, and the illusions peddled by the entertainment industry. 6 Ironically, the American dream is not even “uniquely American” in the eyes of Frederick Gentles. His genealogy of the metaphor begins with an idea in Ancient Greece, which evolves through Rome, and includes such forebears as the French John Calvin, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, the Germans Hegel and Wagner, and the British John Locke, Adam Smith, and Charles Darwin. Follow this timeline through the English Bill of Rights and the French Revolution, jump onto a ship with Columbus and a bunch of social outcasts to the Western hemisphere, and voila—a recipe fit for a pot, even if it is not melting. Gentles concludes, “The Dream is a mixture of economic, religious, democratic, national, and social elements woven together in a complex fabric.” 7 Surely. When a concept represents such a diversity of ideas, we can expect both praise and criticism to follow. One of the writers who first penned the phrase “American dream” was James Truslow Adams in his 1931 The Epic of America. 8 Adams saw the American dream as the dream of

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possibility—the idea that any person of any class or any background could climb the social ladder. He lauded the American dream as “the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and the welfare of the world.” 9 For Adams, writing during the Great Depression, the biggest two threats to the dream were monopolization by corporate profiteers such as Henry Ford and the reduction of men and women to selfish consumers. His was a call that progressives today might admire as daring but would almost certainly scoff at for being too-utopian. He says: There is no reason why wealth, which is a social product, should not be more equitably controlled and distributed in the interests of society… We cannot become a great democracy by giving ourselves up as individuals to selfishness, physical comfort, and cheap amusements. The very foundation of the American dream of a better and richer life for all is that all, in varying degrees, shall be capable…. It can never be wrought into a reality by cheap people or by ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. 10 Despite Adams’ insistence that it was “not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely,” most detractors see the American dream as precisely this—an expression of the consumer lifestyle. 11 In this take, chasing the dream car, dream job, and dream house results in a meaningless life of rote labor and escapist leisure. Critic after critic of consumerism equates the American dream with the fantasy images of the entertainment industry, what Guy Debord calls the Society of the Spectacle. 12 American analyst Daniel Boorstein writes, “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth.” 13 Indeed, much of the current political posturing around the “American dream” is fueled by a sense that the tank is empty—that cars and commodities do not bring fulfillment. As novelist and director J.G. Ballard quipped, “The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam....” 14

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Yet, through all this diversity of speakers, meanings, associations, and evaluations, the metaphor lives. In advertisement after advertisement, in political speech after speech, in the countless titles of news reports, movies, television shows, novels, and academic research, “dreaming” remains a popular vehicle. The metaphor gets gassed-up and rolled out at a mindnumbing rate. We are repeatedly assured that we can live, follow, own, drive, imagine, experience, feel, express, secure, protect, create and achieve our dreams, if we simply choose, buy, vote, travel, watch, attend, insure, provide, invest, and share in the right manner. Writing in 1977, Daniel Hearn could say, “Probably no idea has had greater appeal to the American imagination than the American dream of material success.” 15 Effects are notoriously tricky things to predict. Whether Hearn or Ballard is correct, the metaphor continues to circulate and serve as a common reference point. In circulation, the metaphor brims full of meaning and significance. We may disagree on how to define it, but like most ideographs, the metaphor stays alive through its ambiguity and flexibility in use. 16 There is no need to define it because the audience feels it is self-evident. The American dream expresses a deep desire, and we think we know it when we see it. The metaphor’s ongoing life coupled with its power as a national ideograph demands further investigation. A few scholars have ostensibly studied the American dream, treating the phrase as a placeholder for any goal or longing of the public. Hence, these analyses result in a smorgasbord of ideals in American thought emerging throughout the course of the nation’s history—from puritan asceticism to democratic populism to consumer abundance. None of these studies, however, examine the uses and circulation of the actual phrase “American dream.” For instance, Jim Cullen’s American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation may at first appear to follow the life of the metaphor. 17 Cullen divides his work into six chapters representing

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different versions of the dream. The chapters cover the following topics: Puritan immigrants’ dream of freedom from religious persecution, the Declaration of Independence’s dream of universal rights, Benjamin Franklin’s dream of upward mobility, King’s dream of equality, the suburban dream of home ownership, and the Hollywood dream of riches and glamour. Yet none of the first three chapters provide any historical evidence of the phrase “American dream.” This is because during the 18th and 19th centuries, the phrase had not entered common parlance. Approaches such as Cullen’s may be valuable for understanding the various goals of Americans across history, but they do little to tell us about how the metaphor operates in circulation. For example, why express goals, ideals, or longings as dreams? What makes the American dream American? Why does the metaphor continue to have such a robust life? What gives the American dream such “self-evidence”? The American Dream as an Object of Analysis Concluding with the variability of the American dream metaphor would leave us with a shoddy historical analysis and incomplete rhetorical criticism. After all, the metaphor first emerged in the early 20th century. Classifying various public goals and desires under the heading of the “American dream” is an academic exercise, one that undoubtedly reveals a great openness in association. This openness, however, runs counter to the metaphor’s supposed self-evidence, so what more can be said about the historical understanding of the American dream? I contend that the American dream is a metaphor, that this metaphor implies a perspective where fantasy is a real possibility, and finally that the metaphor emerges in the context of modern American consumer culture (the early 20th century). We will discuss in more detail the theory of metaphor in the following chapters. For now, it is sufficient to note that the American dream is a metaphor that entails viewing dreams as

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American. That is, this metaphor is not any dream, longing, desire, or fantasy but a uniquely American one. As the next section elucidates, metaphor is a perspectival figure whereby one term (dream) is seen through the frame of another (America). One of the primary theorists of metaphor, I.A. Richards, explains, “In the simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction." 18 Similarly, Kenneth Burke describes metaphor as perspectival; metaphor “tells us something about one character from the point of view of another character.” 19 In this sense, metaphor, as indicated by the Latin term, is a translation, the “‘carrying-over’ of an idea from one realm into another.” 20 If metaphor translates terms into perspectives, what perspective does the American dream offer? What is translated, and how does the American dream provide a new viewpoint? The American dream metaphor creates a perspective that sees fantasy as a real possibility. This is due to the contrasting relationship of the two elements of the metaphor: American and dream. We have noted that dreams stand for some kind of envisioned desire or longing. This sounds similar to Sigmund Freud’s theory, popular at the time of the American dream’s historical emergence, whereby dreams express wishes; they are wish-fulfillment in elusive, imagistic-code. 21 The dream represents a fantasy or an idealized vision. Such visions circulate in all forms of public media, from the campaign speech to the advertisement, the sermon to the cinema. In all these historical uses, the “American dream” represents a desirable fantasy. If the American dream were just a fantasy, it seems unlikely that it would have attracted such widespread use and attention during the early 20th century. Fantasies have been part of human culture from time immemorial. There is more to this metaphor. Metaphors garner their potency through contrast; the comparison births a new perspective. So, what comparative contrast is

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represented in the American dream metaphor? If the dream represents fantasy, then the American element stands for a real possibility. What makes the dream uniquely American is the connection to a long-held myth—the idea that America is the land of possibility. As the chronicler of the American frontier Frederick Jackson Turner liked to say, “America has been another name for opportunity.” 22 In cultural rhetoric, there are many versions. Columbus dreamed of wealth in paradise, persecuted religious pilgrims dreamed of a place to worship, American revolutionaries dreamed of freedom from imperial monarchies, frontiersmen dreamed of Westward-expansion, the log-cabin boy Abe Lincoln dreamed of one day rising to the office of President, immigrants dreamed of a new homeland, and on and on. Historians label one version the “success myth”—the belief that a hard-working individual can and will succeed, traced to Puritan roots. 23 This myth was popularized by Horatio Alger, the most prolific novelist of his generation. Every Alger story tells of a gritty and dedicated poor person who fights his way up the ladder to riches. Horatio Alger wrote in the late 19th century, to the first generation of Americans introduced to modern consumerism. In thirty years of writing, producing over one-hundred novels as “undoubtedly the most widely read author in the world,” Alger’s rags-to-riches stories weaned the imaginations of America’s first consumer generation. 24 As Kenneth Lynn states, “Generations of children were brought up on Alger; his version of the success myth was the way in which the world was interpreted to them.” 25 Some scholars equate the American dream with the Alger myth, however the success myth dates much later in the American context and the American dream represents something broader in common usage. 26 Yet this still provides a crucial clue to the perspective conjured by the metaphor. America was penned the “land of opportunity” precisely because many saw it as a place without history. In popular perception, America is a place of the future, which stands for

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potential. As Cullen adduces from his study of the American dream, “At the core of many American Dreams… is an insistence that history doesn’t matter, that the future matters far more than the past.” 27 Of course, the details of the dream vary across history but the story of potentiality and opportunity remains throughout. The American element of the dream suggests real possibilities, not unreachable fantasies existing on another plane. The contrast embodied in the American dream metaphor, then, is fundamentally between fantasy and reality. The American dream indicates a perspective that sees fantasies as real possibilities, potentially materialized in the course of our waking lives. In this sense, the American dream sets up a unique relationship between dreams and reality with specific obligations. The stress on possibility means that the American dream will only continue to attract and circulate if evidence of its reality seems to exist. The American dream becomes self-evident through its perceived actualization, when certain features of the cultural landscape become interpreted as proof of the dream’s possibility. The American dream achieves self-evident status through the popular recognition that dreams have become reality. What in the course of our waking lives might account for the popularity of this metaphor? The historical record is full of “images of possibility” which do not refer to the American dream or even dreaming as a primary metaphor. Why does the American dream speak to the audience of the early 20th century? Including Freud, dreams were certainly on the public mind. Everyone from the Surrealists to advertisers, Hollywood executives to staunch socialists, Walter Benjamin to Carl Jung insisted on the import of dreams. In my estimation, dreams grew to such a stature in public discourse because they seemed manifest in all the features of the newly emerging culture. For the first time, modern industrialism had provided an abundant bounty of never-before-seen wishes and desires in the form of consumables. Dreams had become reality. New technological

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discoveries such as the telegraph, telephone, and radio were demonstrating the material existence of an invisible world of waves and “ether,” frequently described as miraculous. 28 Further, consumerism seemed to encourage the indulgence of dreams, if only in spectacular form. The wonders of consumerism provided evidence for the reality of fantasy and proof of the American dream. Thus I agree with activist Horace Kallen who wrote in 1936, “‘The American Dream’ is a vision of men as consumers, and the American story is the story of an inveterate struggle to embody this dream in the institutions of American life.” 29 This emphasis on the link between the American dream and consumer culture is not to suggest that there are not other uses of the phrase. The American dream, for instance, is frequently tied to race and gender issues as well as national politics. The qualification of early American consumer culture serves to limit the objects of my analysis. This limitation is also based in a historical justification. The phrase “American dream” first emerges in the second decade of the twentieth century and finds more and more uptake throughout the middle of the century. Therefore I think the linkage to consumer culture is justified historically. Even in political or identity-based versions, the sense that the American dream denotes economic success remains, and the automobile, suburb, and the various products of the culture industry are persistently recognized icons of the American dream. Perhaps the connection between the American dream and consumerism is not surprising, since the metaphor relates fantasy and reality just as the features of modern consumerism raise questions about this relationship. As Colin Campbell, whose work offers one of the most compelling depictions of modern consumerism, states, “This dynamic interplay between illusion and reality is the key to an understanding of modern consumerism …, for the tension between the two creates longing as a permanent mode, with the concomitant sense of dissatisfaction with what is and the yearning for

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something better.” 30 The American dream seems historically tied to the rise and spread of modern consumerism in the early 20th century – a kind of insatiable and persistent desire to consume marked by frequent and rapidly changing fashion cycles – and thus this dissertation limits its analysis to this time period and seeks to explain why modern consumerism emerged at the time and why it was understood through the metaphor of the American dream. To summarize, the American dream is a dream because it is a fantastical vision, an American dream because it is a vision of possibility, and the American dream because it portrays a vision of possibility in a consumer culture. The American dream represents the possibilities of a world of consumerism. Versions include the dream of mass consumption, the dream of an automobile powered society, Hollywood dreams of a celebrity or fantasy life, and the dream of home ownership. Such dreams are not simply pleasurable dissipations or debilitating illusions; in the American frame, the dream holds the potential to become reality. People can and do achieve the American dream. Throughout the discourse of the 20th century, the lives of the people responsible for modern consumerism and the products they produce are translated into evidence of the American dream. Through such figures as John Wanamaker, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, and William Levitt, people “saw” the reality of fantasy. In products like modern appliances, the automobile, the motion picture, and the suburban house, the American dream materializes. Fantasies become reality, owned and experienced by a growing number of the populace. The public acceptance of these as indexical icons is indicated by the countless number of books, articles, interviews, speeches, broadcasts, and other public discourse that refer to these people and their products through the American dream metaphor. The self-evidence of this “real fantasy” depends on such indexes and

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icons, and this dissertation focuses on Walt Disney and animation to explain how the American dream becomes a readable and knowable image through these people and their products. The Disney Influence Before detailing the Disney version of the American dream, something should be said about the choice of Disney. Disney represents a perfect example of the American dream because of the corporation’s enormous impact on the development of modern consumer culture, its enormous artistic and economic influence, and, most especially, because of its central role in cultural discourse about the American dream and consumerism. From its vaulting into public fame in the late 1920s to his death and public eulogizing in 1966 to its afterlife as the moniker for one of the world’s largest corporate empires, perhaps no other name evokes so many ardent thoughts and feelings. Disney, the man and the corporation, is one of the most loved and hated, respected and despised, feared and reassuring names of the 20th Century. From his start in Hollywood in the 1920s till the present day, generations of parents and children have praised Disney for proffering educational, wholesome, and entertaining fare. Equally so, concerned critics have lambasted Disney for everything from spreading racist and gendered stereotypes, captivating audiences in a spectacle of escapism, and reinforcing an ideology of control and consumerism in the interest of an ever-growing corporate oligopoly. For all the commendation Disney has received in popular circles, the name inspires nearly as much condemnation in critical ones. As Stacy Warren claims: What is more universally reviled among cultural critics today than Disney? From virtually every theoretical position—whether neo-Marxist, postmodern, deconstructionist, postcolonial—it is almost taken for granted that anything the company does will result in a blandly homogenized sugary-sweet façade masking the ruthless and fundamentally undemocratic corporate activities and policies that are its underpinning, all willingly swallowed by a politically gullible public. 31 Despite all the celebration and reprobation, critics and admirers agree on one point: the widereaching and world-changing influence of Disney. David Kunzle opens the harsh critique of

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Disney in How to Read Donald Duck by claiming, “The names of the Presidents change; that of Disney remains. Forty-six years after the birth of Mickey Mouse, eight years after the death of his master, Disney’s may be the most widely known North American name in the world.” 32 From a more positive angle, the corporate authorized biography Walt Disney: An American Original by Bob Thomas concurs with Kunzle. Thomas wonders how one man could “produce so much entertainment that enthralled billions of human beings in every part of the world?” He quotes Walt’s friend Dwight D. Eisenhower as saying, “His appeal and influence were universal. Not restricted to this land alone—for he touched a common chord in all humanity.” 33 Some dispute Disney’s universality, but friends and enemies alike can hardly conclude otherwise about Disney’s appeal. Between the first major hit, Steamboat Willie, in 1929 and Walt’s death in 1966 (the period under investigation here), his company, life, and products were omnipresent features in the news media, with coverage exceeding every other American executive during the period. 34 Beyond ink in the press, Disney’s influence is measured by the number of awards received during this period. The company claims that Disney received over 950 honors during Walt’s lifetime, including a record 48 Academy Award nominations. 35 Disney won twenty-six Oscars and Seven Emmys. The honors were not limited to entertainment value either. Disney received the Congressional Gold Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the George Washington award from the Ford Foundation for spreading American ideals, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. 36 . The American Forestry Association honored Disney for “outstanding service in the conservation of American resources,” and California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Max Rafferty called Walt “the greatest educator of this century – greater than John Dewey or James Conant or all the rest of us put together.” 37 Mickey

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Mouse received a medal from the League of Nations and became a worldwide celebrity in the late 1920s and early 1930s. New York Times Magazine writer Frank Nugent exclaimed: Mickey Mouse is the goshdarndest single act of creation in the history of our civilization. He probably is more widely known than any President, King, artist, actor, poet, composer or tycoon who ever lived. The worlds that Alexander the Great conquered and Julius Caesar ruled were nutshell microcosms compared with that over which Mickey Mouse holds sway. 38 Another measure of Disney’s influence is economic. By 1966, over 240 million people had seen a Disney movie and another 80 million had purchased Disney merchandise. 39 The first ever full-length animated feature, Snow White, broke all the box office records of the time, sparked a major merchandising boom, and its video sales and theater re-releases have accrued billions in profit. 40 Disneyland and Disneyworld attract millions of yearly visitors and revived the struggling American amusement park, reshaping it into the modern theme park whose principles now inform most of the consumer landscape. 41 After a brief down period following Walt’s death, the Disney Company today is widely considered the progenitor and pinnacle of the post-Fordist, synergistic corporation. Synergy indicates the attempt by corporations to produce commodities in every form of popular media, from radio to television, toys to electronics. Disney controls over twenty TV and radio stations, the largest radio network in the U.S. serving 3,400 stations, three music studios, the television companies ABC and ESPN, five motion picture studios including Hollywood Movies, the number one movie distributor of the 1990s named Buena Vista, Hollywood Records, book publishing firms, sports teams such as the Anaheim Angels, theme parks, magazines, insurance companies, cruise lines, over 200 Disney flagship stores worldwide, and parts of A&E, The History Channel, Lifetime, and E! as well as selling the rights to merchandise their name and image on countless consumer products including toys, fashion, watches, art, and home goods. 42 Eric Smoodin concludes, “Disney has had its corporate finger in

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more sociocultural pies than perhaps any other twentieth century producer of mass entertainment.” 43 Their economic influence extends beyond the boundaries of the Disney Empire and exceeds the numbers at the bottom of the annual corporate profit ledger. Popular critic Naomi Klein credits the corporation with inventing branding, the currently dominant corporate philosophy behind the drive for synergy. 44 Furthermore, Disney has become a popular model in business circles, with numerous pundits rushing to detail The Disney Way. 45 For many what is truly significant about the ways of Disney is not the commercial but instead the artistic. Critic Jean Baudrillard describes Disney as “the precursor, the grand initiator of the imaginary as virtual reality.” 46 Disney can be seen as a progenitor because they are widelycredited with mastering, if not quite inventing, the art of animation. Discussions of Disney dominate the scholarship on the medium, and all other animation invariably faces comparison with Disney’s style. 47 At first, animation was perceived as a minor-economic and artistic interest and relegated to the realm of children’s entertainment. Largely because of Disney’s efforts, animation today has shattered those boundaries and greatly expanded its stature, playing a primary role in almost all popular entertainment and throughout a culture industry seeking to produce brand images animated with a life of their own. As scholar Paul Wells contends: Animation is arguably the most important creative form of the twenty-first century. Animation as an art, an approach, an aesthetic and an application informs many aspects of visual culture, from feature-length films to prime-time sit-coms; from television and web cartoons to display functions on a range of new communications technologies. In short, animation is everywhere. It is the omnipresent pictorial form of the modern era. 48 Animation’s omnipresence ensures its enduring influence on the cultural imagination. Billions share in the fantasies projected onto the screen. Animation seems to shape our collective dreams at a massive scale never before imaginable. To most observers, this is the best measure of animation’s influence and the source of its power. And since Disney is often regarded as a metonym

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for animation, many tie animation’s power to shape the imagination to Disney’s stunning popularity and size. Henry Giroux provides an example: “Disney’s power lies, in part, in its ability to tap into the lost hopes, abortive dreams, and utopian potential of popular culture.” 49 This power scares and delights; it is the source of the commendations and condemnations. Thus Disney has become the center-piece in an ongoing debate over the effects of entertainment media in a consumer culture. The debate attempts to explain the effects of the widespread practice of watching animation and thus translates into cultural discourse the mode of perceiving and consuming animation. One common metaphor in this debate is the American dream. The Disney Version of the American Dream Perhaps the most frequently cited and recognized icon of the American dream is Walt Disney, along with the media of cinema and animation his company helped pioneer. Although each version of the American dream expresses a story where fantasy becomes reality, each version also differs in some crucial respects. Each expresses an explanation for how social change may occur, how fantasies become reality. As an explanation for social change, each version also includes a model of communication (what I call a rhetorical situation) since communication plays a key role in any process of social change. The template remains similar in all the versions—a person has a dream, faces obstacles, and communicates that dream through a medium to an audience. Yet who is the speaker and the audience, what are the obstacles and the medium, and how the communication occurs all vary. For the Disney version, Walt Disney dreamed of making animation into an art form, overcame the competition of other producers and the limitations of craft, and thereby spread his dream to the American populace. Disney, the life story and the animation, are perceived to embody the American dream.

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The Disney version marks a dramatic shift from the typical American success myth and some earlier versions of the American dream told through Henry Ford and the automobile. Although this shift is more developed in Chapter Four, basically the American dream changes from the explanation associated with Ford and Alger that hard work was the key to making dreams a reality to what I call a “magical theory of social change.” In the Disney version, all one needs is a dream; the emphasis on hard work is jettisoned. Instead, those who follow their dreams, who wish upon a star, may see their dreams become reality. Accompanying this shift is also a shift in the model of communication underwriting this explanation. A new constellation of metaphors revolves around the Disney version. Rather than the terms work, male laborer, female consumer, efficiency, power, adventure, pioneer, and mass which frequently were tied to the Ford version, the Disney version emphasizes art, genius, spirit, vision, image, fantasy, imagination, children, magic, wonder, and innocence. Interestingly, this is the same constellation of metaphors through which critics and proponents alike understand modern consumerism—magic, fantasy, dream, illusion, image, child, art. The debates over consumerism continually rely on this constellation of metaphors to explain, defend, or criticize the wide-reaching effects of newly emergent consumer practices. Consumerism led to a debate over the status of art, provoked concerns over the role of fantasy and the imagination, galvanized criticisms of its effects on children and the spread of childishness, fomented worries over the political implications of a pathos of wonder and innocence, and spawned reevaluations of the functions of images and appearance. In short, not only has consumerism fundamentally altered the shape of American culture but it has also led to a different way of understanding and talking about that culture, particularly through the American dream metaphor. The American dream has influenced the cultural understanding of consumption and the commodity by shaping

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the cultural discourse about the practices of modern consumerism. As Lawrence Glickman remarks, “The practices of consumption have contributed to the making of the United States as a consumer society, but equally important—perhaps more so—has been the constant stream of talk about consumption.” 50 As Glickman notes and Daniel Horowitz’s Anxieties of Affluence illustrates, this discourse has been anything but exclusively celebratory. Americans have always had a conflicted and critical relationship with consumerism, evident in some heated and unrelenting cultural debates. Throughout these debates, Disney remains a central anecdote, example, and target as simultaneously one of the most cherished and despised players in the new consumer culture. Disney, then, became one of the essential representatives of the American dream, in both its positive and negative evaluations. Neologisms such as Disneyization and Disneyification express this assumed connection between Disney and modern American consumerism. For instance, Alan Bryman uses the phrase Disneyization to describe the features of post-Fordist capitalism: In essence, Disneyization is about consumption… Disneyization seeks to create variety and difference …. It exchanges the mundane blandness of homogenized consumption experiences with frequently spectacular experiences… To a significant extent, then, Disneyization connects with a post-Fordist world of variety and choice in which consumers reign supreme. 51 The central question of this dissertation focuses on the ways of talking about consumerism. I ask, why and how did the shift in the American dream take place? Why and how is this constellation of metaphors repeatedly and persistently attached to Disney and consumerism alike? What, in short, is the relationship of the changing practices of early to mid twentieth century American consumer culture and the discourse through which it is greeted and understood? This relationship is an ongoing concern of critical scholarship, typically treated through the metaphor of the base and superstructure, the economy and the culture. Yet such

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typical treatments often reduce discourse to a mere reflection of the base—the so-called real conditions of society—or an instrumental expression of particular interested parties. That is, the ideology of consumerism—with its constellation of metaphors—is simply a reflection of or tool for the perpetuation of deeper economic interests. Hucksters perpetuate the Disney version of the American dream for selfish gains. Although the role of interests, ideology, and power should not be dismissed, this dissertation challenges such a typical explanation. In challenging this explanation, my basic thesis may be summed up using Marshall McLuhan’s much ballyhooed axiom “the medium is the message.” The central claim is in a sense rather simple: Cinema and animation play a fundamental role in the practices of American consumer culture, and it is the translation of such practices that constitutes models such as the Disney version of the American dream and its associated constellation of metaphors. Scholars such as James Carey and John Durham Peters have illustrated how communication media alter a culture’s understanding of communication. Peters, for instance, argues that the spread of radio encourages the culture to see communication as dissemination rather than dialogue. 52 Carey argues that the telegraph split communication and transportation for the first time, allowing someone to communicate over long distances without traveling somewhere or sending a letter. 53 In doing so, the telegraph constitutes a model of communication as transmission. Communication becomes described as the transmitting or transfusing information (dots and clicks) along lines of electricity. While Carey and Peters’ erudite work serves as a model for this dissertation, few scholars have advanced this line of research, seeking to articulate other models of communication accompanying other media. This dissertation attempts such a development through the examination of cinema and animation. In so doing, it offers a revision to McLuhan’s axiom while remaining indebted, as are Carey and Peters, to his insights. Rather than “the

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medium is the message,” I argue that the translation of modes constitutes messages such as the Disney version of the American dream. In short, the modes of communication in animation and cinema are translated into linguistic discourse, resulting in a model of communication composed of a constellation of metaphors. The following chapters develop this thesis in more detail. Chapter Two expands upon the central question, showing how rhetorical and media scholarship has shifted from an instrumental understanding of communication to a constitutive one that views discourse as constituting subjects and situations. In this shift, the question of how and why constitution occurs emerges. When discourse changes shape, as with the Disney version, how can the scholar explain such changes? Chapter Three further supports the refinement of McLuhan’s axiom, defending the proposition that the translation of modes constitutes models of communication by defining the terms mode, translation, and model as well as outlining the critical task. Chapter Four further details the shift in the Disney version of the American dream, including the constellation of metaphors it includes, through a rhetorical analysis of popular media accounts and biographies of Disney. Chapter Five illustrates the mode accompanying the early to mid 20th century reception of live-action cinema, setting up a contrast with the modes of animation developed in Chapter Six. Chapter Seven returns to rhetorical analysis, more fully examining the model of communication—the constituted understandings of speakers, audiences, situations, and processes—through a survey of some central cultural debates about Disney, cinema, and animation. Finally, Chapter Eight spells out the implications of both the modes of communication (the media) and the models of communication (the message) for American consumer culture, while Chapter Nine summarizes the conclusions as well as arguing for the benefits of the theoretical approach outlined and executed throughout this dissertation.

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Endnotes for Chapter 1: Introduction 1

The variety of references to the American dream come from a number of sources. I list here the academic versions. Robert H. Fossum and John K. Roth, "The American Dream," BAAS Pamphlet No. 6 (1981), http://www.baas.ac.uk/resources/pamphlets/pamphdets.asp?id=6. Frederick Gentles, "It's Only a Dream," in Dream on, America; a History of Faith and Practice, ed. Frederick Gentles and Melvin Steinfield (San Francisco,: Canfield Press, 1971). Jim Cullen, The American Dream : A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (Oxford [England] ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Charles R. Hearn, The American Dream in the Great Depression (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977). Stewart Hall Holbrook, Dreamers of the American Dream, [1st ed. (Garden City, N.Y.,: Doubleday, 1957). Kenneth Schuyler Lynn, The Dream of Success; a Study of the Modern American Imagination, [1st ed. (Boston,: Little, Brown, 1955). James Nuechterlein, "American Dreaming," First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, no. January (2000), http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2505#gotop. Ernest G. Bormann, The Force of Fantasy : Restoring the American Dream (Carbondale ; Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985). 2 Walter Fisher explores Nixon’s version of the American dream. He argues the American dream is really two dreams: the materialistic, individualistic rags-to-riches story and the egalitarian, community-oriented moralistic myth of brotherhood. Nixon represented the first, while Goldwater stood for the second. Walter R. Fisher, "Reaffirmation and Subversion of the American Dream," Quarterly Journal of Speech 59, no. 2 (1973). This analysis is similar to Giles Deleuze’s analysis of the two poles of the American dream—the idea of great individual leaders and the notion of an egalitarian, melting-pot collective. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), 144. While I think these two poles (of individual and collective) are certainly an important element of the picture, I do not think they exhaust the whole. My first two chapters, however, develop more this dialectic between the individual and the mass at the heart of the American dream. 3 Most of these are common examples, frequently used when discussing the American dream. The Oprah example comes from Dana L. Cloud, "Hegemony or Concordance? The Rhetoric of Tokenism in `Oprah' Winfrey's Rags-toRiches Biography," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13, no. 2 (1996). A recent article investigates Obama’s re-interpretation of the dream. Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, "Recasting the American Dream and American Politics: Barack Obama's Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention," Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 4 (2007). Vanessa Beasley discusses Clarence Thomas and also mentions Ross Perot. Vanessa Bowles Beasley, "The Logic of Power in the Hill-Thomas Hearings: A Rhetorical Analysis," Political Communication 11, no. 3 (1994). 4 J. Emmett Winn, "Every Dream Has Its Price: Personal Failure and the American Dream in Wall Street and the Firm," Southern Communication Journal 68, no. 4 (2003). Herman Gray, "Television, Black Americans, and the American Dream," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6, no. 4 (1989). Tony Williams, "Face/Off: Cultural and Institutional Violence within the America Dream," Quarterly Review of Film & Video 18, no. 1 (2001). Wayne J. McMullen, "Gender and the American Dream in Kramer Vs. Kramer," Women's Studies in Communication 19, no. 1 (1996). Kumarini Silva, "Let's Talk Brown: Constructing the Dream/Constructing the Immigrant in Bend It Like Beckham" (paper presented at the Conference Papers -- International Communication Association, 2005). Kristen Hoerl, "Cinematic Jujitsu: Resisting White Hegemony through the American Dream in Spike Lee's Malcolm X," Communication Studies 59, no. 4 (2008). Also see, Joss Lutz Marsh, "Fitzgerald, Gatsby, and the Last Tycoon: The `American Dream' and the Hollywood Dream Factory," Literature Film Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1992). ———, "Fitzgerald, Gatsby and the Last Tycoon: The American Dream and the Hollywood Dream Factory--Part Two," Literature Film Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1992). 5 Fisher, "Reaffirmation and Subversion of the American Dream." 6 These are cited throughout. An interesting article on the get-rich-quick scheme, including the lottery and game shows as the American dream, is Matthew Warshauer, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: Changing Conceptions of the American Dream," American Studies Today Online (2003), http://www.americansc.org.uk/Online/American_Dream.htm. 7 Gentles, "It's Only a Dream." 8 James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston,: Little, Brown, and company, 1931). 9 Ibid., viii. 10 Ibid., 410-11. The Ford references occur a few pages earlier.

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For instance, the American dream is frequently tied to the automobile (as we will see throughout this dissertation) and the suburb. For the suburb connection, see Kristen Hoerl, "Monstrous Youth in Suburbia: Disruption and Recovery of the American Dream," Southern Communication Journal 67, no. 3 (2002). 12 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 2005 (1967)). 13 Daniel J. Boorstin and Daniel J. Boorstin Collection (Library of Congress), The Image; or, What Happened to the American Dream, [1st ed. (New York,: Atheneum, 1962), 240. 14 This is a quotation I found online in numerous places. See the “Ballard” entry on Wikipedia.org for instance. 15 Hearn, The American Dream in the Great Depression, 3. 16 Michael Calvin McGee is credited with coining the term “ideograph” to indicate certain words which become historically loaded with ideological meaning. They are “the basic structural elements, the building blocks, of ideology... the one-term sum of an orientation. The scholarship on ideographs has produced adept insights into “equality,” “family values,” “woman” and “man,” among others. Ideographic criticism follows the various uses of a term across history. This historical emphasis is critical, helping to ground analysis in a material milieu. Introducing time and, hence, change into any study promises to reap benefits. Thus I do not propose a single definition of the American dream, but promise to follow its historical trajectories. However, I think the difference between my approach and an ideographic one will be evident in the course of this discussion. Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality : America's Anglo-African Word, New Practices of Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Dana L. Cloud, "The Rhetoric of : Scapegoating, Utopia, and the Privatization of Social Responsibility," Western Journal of Communication 62, no. 4 (1998). Catherine H. Palczewski, "The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909 Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards," Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no. 4 (2005). Also see, Bryan J. McCann, "Therapeutic and Material Hood: Ideology and the Struggle for Meaning in the Illinois Death Penalty Controversy," Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2007). Davi Johnson, "Mapping the Meme: A Geographical Approach to Materialist Rhetorical Criticism," Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2007). James Jasinski, "Puritans/Puritanism as Ideograph," Review of Communication 2, no. 1 (2002). Fernando Pedro Delgado, "Chicano Movement Rhetoric: An Ideographic Interpretation," Communication Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1995). Fernando Delgado, "The Rhetoric of Fidel Castro: Ideographs in the Service of Revolutionaries," Howard Journal of Communications 10, no. 1 (1999). Dana L. Cloud, ""To Veil the Threat of Terror": Afghan Women and the in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism," Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 3 (2004). 17 Cullen, The American Dream : A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation. 18 I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 93. 19 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 503-04. For more on metaphor by Burke, see ———, Permanence & Change, an Anatomy of Purpose, [2d rev. ed. (Los Altos, Calif.,: Hermes Publications, 1954). 20 Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 504. I am indebted to William Franke for pointing out the Latin term for metaphor is translationes. See William Franke, "Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance," Philosophy & Rhetoric 33, no. 2 (2000): 139. 21 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1998). 22 Quoted in Fossum and Roth, "The American Dream." Para 34. 23 Lynn, The Dream of Success; a Study of the Modern American Imagination. Hearn, The American Dream in the Great Depression. John William Tebbel, From Rags to Riches; Horatio Alger, Jr. And the American Dream (New York,: Macmillan, 1963). 24 Lynn, The Dream of Success; a Study of the Modern American Imagination, 9. 25 Ibid. 26 In fact, most of the scholars cited here equate the American dream with the rags-to-riches success myth. Examples include Fisher, Cloud, Hoerl, and Nomai. Gubrium studies the American dram as a narrative form used by people to articulate their own identity. That is, she sees the American dream as a common framing mechanism for lif course stories that emphasize opportunity and the value of hard work. Aline Gubrium, ""I Was My Momma Baby. I Was My Daddy Gal.": Strategic Stories of Success," Narrative Inquiry 16, no. 2 (2006). Fisher, "Reaffirmation and Subversion of the American Dream." Hoerl, "Monstrous Youth in Suburbia: Disruption and Recovery of the American Dream." Afsheen J. Nomai and George N. Dionisopoulos, "Framing the Cubas Narrative: The American Dream and the Capitalist Reality," Communication Studies 53, no. 2 (2002). Cloud, "Hegemony or Concordance? The Rhetoric of Tokenism in `Oprah' Winfrey's Rags-to-Riches Biography." 27 Cullen, The American Dream : A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation, 184.

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See, for instance, Czitrom’s history of the emergence of radio and the telegraph. Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind : From Morse to Mcluhan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). Also, see John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 29 Horace M. Kallen, The Decline and Rise of the Consumer : A Philosophy of Consumer Coöperation (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1936), 198. I recognize Kallen’s use of the sexist terminology “man” to refer to all human beings, including women. I do not condone this use, but I think changing the terminology myself or inserting does not rectify the problem. There are historical and contextual reasons for the use of sexist language, so I choose to leave the language in place in any direct quotation. 30 Colin Campbell, "Consuming Goods and the Good of Consuming," in Consumer Society in American History : A Reader, ed. Lawrence B. Glickman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 26. 31 Stacy Warren, "Saying No to Disney: Disney's Demise in Four American Cities," in Rethinking Disney : Private Control, Public Dimensions, ed. Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 16. 32 David Kunzle, "Introduction to the English Edition," in How to Read Donald Duck : Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, ed. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (New York: International General, 1975), 11. 33 Bob Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Original (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 16, 354-55. I use Walt frequently in these chapters in order to distinguish between the Disney Corporation and the man. At times, when I use “Disney,” I intend to refer to both Walt and the company. 34 Eric Smoodin, "Introduction: How to Read Walt Disney," in Disney Discourse : Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 5. 35 The Disney company claims, from their website, are cited by Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (Cambridge, UK: Polity; Blackwell, 2001), 24. 36 Information on most of these awards and nominations is commonly known and cited. The George Washington Award reference is from Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 404. 37 Quoted in Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (New York: International General, 1975), 20. 38 Frank Nugent, "That Million-Dollar Mouse," in Walt Disney: Conversations, ed. Kathy Merlock Jackson (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 27. 39 Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 2006), xii. 40 See Ibid., 276-78. Also, Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Original, 143. 41 Alan Bryman, The Disneyization of Society (London Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publishers, 2004). 42 See Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy, 48-68. Also, Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, Culture and Education Series (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 2. 43 Smoodin, "Introduction: How to Read Walt Disney," 2. 44 Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000), 149. 45 Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson, The Disney Way : Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company (New York: McGraw Hill, 1999). 46 Jean Baudrillard, "Disneyworld Company," Liberation, no. March 4 (1996), http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-disneyworld-company.html. 47 Paul Wells makes this argument in all three books cited here. My research certainly bears out his claims. Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London ; New York: Routledge, 1998). ———, Animation and America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). ———, Animation: Genre and Authorship (London: Wallflower Press, 2002). 48 Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship, 1. 49 Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, 5. 50 Lawrence B. Glickman, "Born to Shop? Consumer History and American History," in Consumer Society in American History : A Reader, ed. Lawrence B. Glickman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 12. 51 Bryman, The Disneyization of Society. 52 Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. 53 James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, ed. David Thorburn, Media and Popular Culture: A Series of Critical Books (New York: Routledge, 1989), 203. Daniel Czitrom makes a similar point. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind : From Morse to Mcluhan, 8-14.

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Chapter Two The Constitution of the American Dream Here, I outline the central question of this dissertation—how did the constitution of the American dream take place? As we have seen, the American dream is not a singular metaphor but one with many versions, meanings, and associations. This dissertation focuses on one particular version associated with Disney and articulating a “magical theory of social change” that all one needs is a dream to make them come true. Previous rhetorical theorists offer many competing explanations for constitution which can be readily applied to the Disney version of the American dream. Some see the origin as stemming from a controlling exigence, such as the problems of 20th century consumer culture. Others locate the origin in various speakers, such as the corporate hucksters who benefit from the ideology of a magical theory of social change. Still other scholars locate the origin in texts such as those biographies and popular media accounts which portray Disney as an example of the American dream. Finally, some contend that audiences actively construct texts from the fragments of cultural discourse, making the receivers the proper origin of constitution. I contend that locating the origin of the Disney version in the exigence, speaker, audiences, or texts remains inadequate. Each approach assumes a meaningcentric, instrumental model of communication that neglects the role of media technology and mediation. Instead, these explanations for constitution rely upon an implicit conceptualization of situation based on oral discourse and of communication based on the written word. Consideration of electronic and other media technologies denies this notion of situation and communication alike. Most rhetorical situations today are far from the present, embodied, and pragmatic

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situations of oral cultures, and most communication is not simply the instrumental transmission of meaning or information. In place of these theories of origin, a revised theory of situation based in the work of Jacques Derrida and other media theorists demands a reconceptualization of constitution as the result of the process of mediation whose origin can not be found in the substances of speakers, audiences, texts, technologies, or situations but in an economy of forces—a mode—whose various, often contradictory and competing translations, shape the very perceptions of speakers, audiences, and situations. In short, the Disney version of the American dream is constituted through the translation of modes into a model rhetorical situation. The Rhetorical Situation: Exigence or Speakers as Origin? The American dream metaphor suggests that fantasy is a real possibility for the subjects of modern consumer culture. In the various versions, each story of the American dream depicts what scholars have called a rhetorical situation. Lloyd Bitzer, who coined the concept, describes the rhetorical situation as “a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence” which can be removed or resolved if discourse is introduced into the situation. 1 The exigence, the audience, and the constraints influencing the rhetor comprise the three primary components of any rhetorical situation. American dream narratives readily fit this template, depicting a rhetor (dreamer) who faces an exigence, negotiates the constraints, and communicates their dream to an audience, making the dream a reality. In the example discussed more fully in Chapter Four, Walt Disney communicates his dream of creating a new art form through the development of animation, overcoming the exigencies of competition with other animators and live-action movie studios. In Bitzer’s theory of the rhetorical situation, as well as the versions of the American dream, the assumption of an instrumental model of communication and a concomitant realist

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epistemology is apparent. 2 Discourse is viewed as a tool that mediates between the realities of audience, exigence, and rhetor. Discourse designates a means of turning thought (dreams) into action (reality). Bitzer makes clear that an instrumentalist model underwrites his conceptualization: “In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action.” 3 For Bitzer, the speaker, audience, and exigence all exist outside of discourse, which serves as a mediating means between speaker and audience, thought and action. Such an approach may be properly called realist due to the belief discourse mediates the separate, stable, and pre-existing realities of speaker, audience, exigence, thought, and action. The most important of these realities, for Bitzer, is the exigence, which in bold and unqualified terms “controls,” “dictates,” “prescribes,” “functions as the organizing principle,” and “calls the discourse into existence.” 4 In other words, the exigence is an external reality that determines the rhetorical response. Rhetoric mediates between the reality of this exigence and its potential amelioration in and through discourse. This conceptualization is realist in that the situational exigence represents the realities preceding and fundamentally conditioning the discourse. “So controlling is the situation that we should consider it the very ground of rhetorical activity….” 5 Bitzer’s rhetorical situation marks a foundational starting point for rhetorical criticism and has introduced an ongoing debate turning on the question of origin. In Bitzer’s realist and instrumentalist account, the situation constitutes the originating force behind rhetorical discourse. Thus, a committed Bitzerian analysis of the American dream would view the metaphor as a response to an exigence. Perhaps such an analysis would maintain the American dream responds to the exigence of mass consumerism. In the face of the widespread inequalities and mass conformism of consumer culture, an ideology of consumerism becomes necessary. The audience

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must believe consumerism offers the opportunity for their dreams to come true. The American dream responds to this call. The problem with such an interpretation is that it ignores the various contradictions and changes in meaning of the American dream. As we saw in the previous chapter, the American dream is employed by many different rhetors, in numerous variable contexts, and with widely divergent evaluations. Indeed, the various uses of the American dream seem to respond to different perceptions of the rhetorical situation. Whereas some versions of the American dream offer an upbeat narrative of the possibility of change in consumer culture, others portray the American dream as a dangerous illusion, while still others have nothing to do with the exigency of consumerism and instead focus on other political inequalities, imperfections, or urgencies. Furthermore, Bitzer’s realist epistemology entails an instrumentalist model of communication that must envision discourse as a transparent means of portraying reality. That is, the situation so clearly presents an exigence that any rhetor will interpret it in the same way and their discourse will simply and directly convey this reality. Once again, the history of the American dream metaphor denies such realism and instrumentalism. The interpretations of exigencies vary widely, as do the evaluations of the same exigencies, such as the extremely divergent conclusions about the effects of consumerism. Based on similar criticisms, Richard Vatz has called the rhetorical situation a myth. He takes issue with Bitzer’s “realist philosophy of meaning” that insists the exigence dictates the rhetorical response. 6 In contrast, he sees the speaker as the origin of rhetorical discourse. “No situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or independent of the rhetoric with which he chooses to characterize it.” 7 According to Vatz, discourse originates through a two-step process. The speaker first chooses which pieces of information to include and which to ignore; they then

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translate the chosen information into meaning. “Therefore, meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors.” 8 Vatz shifts the locus of a discourse’s origin from the situation to the speaker. The speaker, through an “arbitrary choice of characterization,” creates meanings by articulating a specific version of the situation. 9 Thus Vatz replaces Bitzer’s realist philosophy of meaning with a humanist one. The choosing, translating, and creating rhetor constitutes a meaningful reality, rather than simply reflecting a pre-existing exigence. This humanist philosophy of meaning shifts the critical task as well. The critic’s “paramount concern will be how and by whom symbols create the reality to which people react.” 10 This emphasis on the speaker, applied to the American dream, would lead to an explanation based on the interests of the speakers. Proponents perpetuate the American dream in order to advance their own interests. Richard Schickel relies on such a perspective in his criticism of The Disney Version: There were certain words—‘warm,’ ‘wonderful,’ ‘amazing,’ ‘dream,’ ‘magical’—that attached themselves to Walt Disney’s name like parasites in the later years of his life. They are all debased words, words that have lost most of their critical usefulness and, indeed, the power to evoke any emotional response beyond a faint queasiness. They are hucksters words. 11 In other words, hucksters constitute the Disney version of the American dream by choosing to defend Disney and then translating that defense into terms like dream and magic. Although specific interests (namely, the Disney Corporation) benefit from the Disney version of the American dream, seeing the speaker as origin precludes answering many questions relevant to the constitution of discourse. First, how can a collective phenomenon such as the metaphor of the American dream be attributed to only some speakers and not others? Which ones? Why did they choose the terms magic and dream? Vatz calls these choices arbitrary ones, based solely on the “phenomenological perspective of the speaker.” 12 Yet if the choices are arbitrary, why are

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dream, magic, child, innocence, and other terms so persistently connected to Disney, by proponent and opponents alike? Also, if such words are obviously the fare of hucksters, easily seen through and only able to evoke a faint queasiness, why then does the Disney version continue to circulate? Must the critic assume, then, that the audience is composed of suckers susceptible to the choices of hucksters? Further, what determines the perspective of the speaker? Why do these speakers choose to defend Disney? Contrary to Vatz’s claims, this notion of the speaker requires that rhetorical criticism become parasitic to philosophy, political science, sociology, or phenomenology to inform us of the real situation of the speaker. The rhetorical critic must analyze the socioeconomic status, identity, or phenomenological perspective of speakers in order to explain the origin of their discourse, why and how they made certain choices and translations. Thus Vatz’s humanist philosophy of meaning also relies on a realist epistemology, only shifting the “real” conditions from the exigence to the speaker. An instrumental model of communication necessarily accompanies Vatz’s realist epistemology as well. His notion of translation portrays discourse as a tool of the speaker; translation is a means for the speaker to turn their choices into meaning. Discourse can directly and transparently convey the speaker’s perspective and perceptions. In Vatz’s words, the speaker’s chosen forms and media “transmit these translations of meaning.” 13 Similar to Bitzer, Vatz sees discourse as a medium, a simple means for moving thought into meaning. Discourse mediates between the speaker and the audience, seen as two stable, separate, and pre-existing entities. Discourse and media do not shape the speaker and the audience or even the ways they perceive the world. Their interests and perceptions precede the event of discourse, which simply transmits the meanings based on these interests and perceptions. Thus both Vatz and Bitzer rely on a realist epistemology, an

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instrumentalist model of communication, and assume that the import of discourse rests in what it means, rather than how the process takes place. Whether the origin is the speaker or the situation, discourse remains ancillary, a means of transmitting meanings whose basis rests elsewhere in the exigencies of situations or the intentions of speakers. The Constitutive Turn: Text as Origin? In response to this instrumentalist, realist, and meaning-centric approach, rhetorical scholars have advanced an alternative theory frequently labeled the constitutive model. Rather than seeing discourse as the instrument of speakers and the reflection of real situations, the constitutive model maintains that rhetoric constitutes the very understandings of speaker, audience, and situation. We can see the beginning of this turn in Vatz’s critique of Bitzer, whereby the speaker’s discourse constitutes the exigence rather than emanating from it. Yet Vatz assumes a stable speaker and audience, whose real perceptions, choices, and translations dictate the shape of the discourse. Constitutive theorists maintain, in contrast, that discourse constitutes the perceptions and perspectives of speakers, audiences, and situations alike. One influential concept in the constitutive turn is the notion of persona. According to Robert E. Brooks, “Put simply, the concept of persona encourages rhetoricians to think of the ‘I’ created in a speech or writing as something constructed by the speaker or writer.” 14 Penned by Wayne Booth and advanced by Edwin Black, this explanation of persona still relies on a realist epistemology whereby the speaker is the origin of the discourse. 15 Black, for instance, uses the notion of persona and second persona to distinguish between the real speaker and the speaker pictured in discourse, as well as the real audience and the depicted audience. 16 Despite the realist epistemology, the beginnings of the constitutive turn are evident even in these early descriptions. With a theory of persona, the speaker and audience are not stable entities whose phenomenolog-

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ical perceptions precede the event of discourse. Instead, the understanding of the speaker and the audience is, at least in part, constituted by the discourse. Persona literally means mask, so the concept encourages the critic to see the speaker and audience as a series of masks constructed in discourse. For instance, Walt Disney’s persona as a “genius dreamer,” developed in Chapter Seven, is created through the various tellings of the Disney version of the American dream. Often, commentators portray Walt Disney’s persona as a “genius dreamer” while still maintaining a distinction between the real Walt and the persona. In fact, many critical accounts unmask this persona, insisting that Disney was far from a genius and much closer to an imperialist, a Dark Prince, or a jerk. 17 The notion of persona does not necessarily abandon a realist philosophy of meaning, does not make a complete turn towards a constitutive theory, until the whole world becomes seen as stage, a view made popular by theorists such as Irving Goffmann, Kenneth Burke, J.L. Austin, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida around the time of Disney’s heyday (the middle of the 20th century). If the whole world is a stage, then speakers and audiences are always personas, always wearing masks. If subjects are composed of a series of masks, of roles enabled by and enabling the exercise of power, then a realist epistemology becomes impossible. There is no “real” speaker under the masks, outside of the roles. Discourse constitutes speakers, audiences, and situations—not the other way around. As Jacques Derrida insists, “The concept of subjectivity belongs a priori and in general to the order of the constituted… There is no constituting subjectivity. The very concept of constitution itself must be deconstructed.” 18 According to a constitutive theory, Walt Disney and his fellow hucksters are not the origin of the Disney version of the American dream with its constellated metaphors—magic, wonder, childhood, innocence, artistic genius. What, then, happens to origin? From whence came the

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American dream? Derrida calls for a deconstruction of constitution, which entails a deconstruction of origin. Yet many constitutive rhetorical critics ignore or miss the essential importance of Derrida’s call and elide the question of origin by supposing discourse itself—the text—to be the constituting force and locus of origin. Derrida resolutely refuses the position that there is nothing outside the text, yet this has not prevented many of those working in the wake of Derridean deconstruction from such a perspective nevertheless. These critics may abandon a realist epistemology but they maintain the rhetorical situation’s heritage through a meaningcentric approach. To take an example, Maurice Charland’s essay “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois” examines the emergence of the independence movement in Canada’s Frenchspeaking province. 19 Charland asks how French speaking persons in Quebec came to understand themselves through the persona of the Peuple Québécois—a nation demanding independent sovereignty. Charland traces the constitution of the Peuple Québécois to two documents, the 1967 founding declaration and the 1979 “White Paper” proposal for Quebec sovereignty. According to Charland, these documents call their “audience into being.” 20 Charland focuses his analysis on these two documents, barely mentioning the historical factors surrounding their emergence. He makes clear that he sees texts as the constitutive force, not the people who use them or the practices they use to disseminate and read texts, stating, “This document, speaking in the name of the independence movement, as institutionalized in a party and a government, offers a narrative of Quebec history that renders demands for sovereignty intelligible and reasonable.” 21 In Charland’s take, these documents become the active agents, speaking, rendering, and hence constituting certain personas or subject-positions.

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Charland admits that all constitutive texts will not succeed, that the constitution of new subject positions is “possible only at particular moments.” 22 Yet Charland offers no explanation for why the Peuple Québécois became a successful persona at this particular moment, confessing that he elides the problem of context. 23 The problem with this elision is that his analysis reverses the proper order. Charland takes the texts expressing the constitution of a subject position—the locus of the constitution—as the constituting force or process. This reversal can treat subjects and situations as too malleable. It is impossible to deny that discourse constitutes subjects, but we also cannot deny that subjects are, to borrow from Charland’s primary theorist Louis Althusser, “always already” constituted. No single rhetorical act is responsible for constituting subject positions and every act must negotiate the prior acts and the previously constituted subjects and situations. When the constitutive view turns to texts for evidence of the process of rhetorical constitution, they court a position rightly regarded as sheer fantasy. Rhetorical subjects can not be conjured through words alone and neither can the constitutions be deconstructed with a single stroke. Discourse may constitute rhetorical subjects, but it does not do so simply by being uttered. Seeing texts as the origin of constitution cannot account for how and why texts circulate and thus cannot explain when rhetorical situations change, as they inevitably do, for instance in the shift of the American dream (outlined in Chapter Four) from the hard-working Ford version to the magical Disney version. The problem with Charland’s conceptualization is not the emphasis on persona or the constitution of subject positions but that it can not explain the process of constitution. Texts do not constitute subject positions but mark their constitution. Texts do not emerge ex nihilo but require cultural practices of perception, reception, and uptake which allow the various subjectpositions to “make sense” and hence continue to circulate. These cultural practices of reception

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and perception are fundamentally structured and conditioned by the media of communication and circulation. Media restrict some personas while opening-up others. For instance, in oral cultures, all knowledge is embodied, participatory, and subjective. For there to be knowledge, an individual person must express it in a particular time and place. With the advent of writing, knowledge can exist separate from the presence of a speaker. The separation of knowledge and speaker enables new personas by changing the understanding of both. As Ong and Havelock note, script creates the possibility of a detached, objective persona. 24 Indeed, most journalistic and academic writing discourages subjective and personal details about the author for the sake of an objective, authoritative persona. Or, for another example, scholars have demonstrated how computer-mediated-communication allows participants to construct a wide-range of subjectivities, even ones diverging from the person’s biological race and sex. A speaker who is a white male faces much greater difficulty constructing a persona as a woman or a black man in a live speech than they may online. Media enable certain personas while discouraging others; to quote Marshall McLuhan’s famous axiom, “the medium is the message.”25 McLuhan advocates a constitutive turn away from an instrumental notion of communication. Yet Charland’s textual and meaning-centric focus ignores an analysis of mediation and thus fails to attend to the ways and practices of communicating so crucial to McLuhan’s theories. Especially when critics assume that the constitutive model entails that the text is the origin of discourse, they miss McLuhan’s more radical implications. In such a view, the tendency is to once again focus on the meaning of the text, a position flatly denied by McLuhan’s axiom. Texts are treated as a coherent category, grouping together oral, audiovisual, and written varieties. The critic peruses texts for the content signaling a new constitution. Such an approach brings an instrumental model of communication in through the backdoor. Although it views discourse as

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the origin of constitution, rather than speakers or situations, discourse still functions primarily as a means of transmitting meaning. The text transmits a meaningful subject-position with which audiences identify. The text creates a persona such as the Peuple Quebecois by making it into a meaningful, understandable, and recognizable subject position. To conclude, viewing the text as the origin of constitution fails to abandon an instrumental model of communication and the assumption that constitution is a process driven by meaning and hence full of presence. These authors assume that rhetoric effectuates conscious, meaningful thoughts which explain their consequence. In other words, auditors choose to identify with the subject position in a text. The text is the origin of a meaning which causes the audience to identify with a role, to take up a mask, to see themselves as the Peuple Quebecois or the genius dreamer. Such an assumption lies at the heart of Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence. This perspective ignores the absence, slippage, spacing, and differance that Derrida illustrates, throughout his body of work, is an inherent part of communication. The emphasis on meaning leads to a textualist version of criticism, where the critic articulates the text’s meaning and equates this meaning with its rhetorical effectivity. 26 Meaning does not guarantee constitution or consequence. Such an approach cannot explain how constitution occurs, how certain metaphors find uptake and circulation, and hence elides questions about rhetorical consequence and social change. It leaves unanswered the question central to this dissertation— how did the constitution of the Disney version of the American dream take place? Media Fragmentation: The Audience as Origin? One other possibility immediately presents itself. Can the origin of constitution reside in the audience? Do audiences (through attention and selection) make texts? If constitution requires circulation, then it seems that audiences play a crucial role. According to Michael Calvin

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McGee, media proliferation has created a cultural situation of fragmentation that fundamentally alters the locus of textual construction. The sheer number of media and the speed at which they circulate make isolating a whole text difficult. 27 Instead, we live in an environment of rhetorical fragments flying “by so quickly that by the time you grasp the problem at stake, you seem to be dealing with yesterday's news, a puzzle that solved itself by disappearing.” 28 In our stunningly proliferating and rapidly circulating culture, texts have become fragments, fragments that are snatched and reappropriated—translated—continuously. For McGee, this fragmented condition does not eliminate the construction of texts. Instead, it shifts the locus of these practices. The audience and the critic reverse roles with speakers and writers. Rhetors produce truncated fragments such as advertising jingles or campaign slogans, loaded with a density of associations, which in turn cue audiences to produce a finished discourse. Within an atmosphere of swirling fragments rapidly emerging and then dissipating again, audiences piece together texts through a form of montage. Similarly, the critic should montage a text from the mass of circulating fragments, illustrating a cultural discourse not isolatable in any single fragment. 29 Thus the audience and critic are responsible for text construction, building a whole from the fragments. “In short, text construction is now something done more by the consumers than by the producers of discourse,” McGee concludes. 30

A similar argument is advanced by Benjamin and Michel de Certeau, who likewise contend the practices of reception and consumption are an active process of construction and production. As de Certeau remarks, “To a rationalized, expansionist, and at the same time centralized, clamorous, and spectacular production corresponds another production, called ‘consumption.’” 31 The conditions of fragmentation and the proliferation of media make paying attention to this second form of production a crucial necessity for the analysis of rhetorical constitution. Constitution takes place through the circulation of discourse and the active production of texts by 35

audiences, as they shift stances through the engagement of various modes. Only by analyzing the use of discourse can the critic comprehend the practices which cement constitution and, in turn, alter the first production. De Certau explains: Thus, once the images broadcast by television and the time spent in front of the TV set have been analyzed, it remains to be asked what the consumer makes of these images and during these hours. The thousands of people who buy a health magazine, the customers in a supermarket, the practitioners of urban space, the consumers of newspaper stories and legends—what do they make of what they ‘absorb,’ receive, and pay for? What do they do with it? 32 This shift to locating origin in audience reception represents a common move in cultural studies, with numerous scholars illustrating the resistive reads of various audiences. 33 The possibility of a diversity of audience interpretations, some even completely counter to the dominant or preferred reading, is often labeled polysemy. Polysemy indicates the multiplicity of meanings possible in a single text, once again emphasizing the active and productive role of the audience in textual constitution. Yet, as Celeste Condit argues, the extent of polysemy is often exaggerated, especially when considering texts of the mass media. 34 Audiences frequently decode television programs in exactly the same way but conclude with different evaluations, a condition she labels polyvalence. “Polyvalence occurs when audience members share understandings of the denotations of a text but disagree about the valuation of those denotations to such a degree that they produce noticeably different interpretations.” 35 Although occasional or partial polysemy (especially cross-culturally) occurs, polyvalence is the confirmed outcome of most audience studies. Polysemy, truly multiplictious decodings, remains rare. Since audiences decode the texts in similar ways, polyvalence means that the potential for polysemous reads of the resistive variety are often exaggerated, ignoring many textual and cultural conditions limiting their possibilities. For instance, the amount of work required to produce a resistive read means that many oppressed audiences will simply turn off the television

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or switch to other more desirable programming. Dominant groups, in contrast, garner more pleasure with less effort because of their ease of cultural and ideological identification. Further, differences in cultural capital and educational abilities often limit resistive reads. People with a strong social network and access to oppositional discourses are more likely to know about and be able to produce resistive reads. As Condit states, “While being human may mean having the ability to encode and decode texts, it is not the case that all human beings are equally skilled in responding to persuasive messages with countermessages. The masses may not be cultural dupes, but they are not necessarily skilled rhetors.” 36 Finally, polysemy ignores the ways that the textual framing favors the preferred and dominant reads of certain social groups, if only by giving presence to their codes. Framing often works to make invisible or shield alternative ways of presenting or envisioning issues. These limitations on polysemy do not repudiate the focus on audience and reception. Constitution requires circulation through the active attention and selection of audiences. Yet attributing the origin of constitution to audiences remains limited because it relies upon a static notion of the audience. The audience is viewed as a fixed entity that precedes and determines the text. In a critique of the rhetorical situation similar to mine, Barbara Biesecker indicts this assumption of the audience as self-evident and given. “What must be noted here is that theorists as diverse as Bitzer and Vatz predicate their views of audience on the common presumption that fixed essences encounter variable circumstances.” 37 This list of theorists should include audience-reception studies in cultural studies because they likewise presume the audience is a stable substance that encounters a variable, polysemous text. As such, this approach ignores the discursive constitution of audiences, as advocated by a fully constitutive theory. One such constitutive theory is Derrida’s, whose notion of differance, discussed in the following section,

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denies a substantive origin for constitution. Reading the rhetorical situation through the lens of differance, as does Biesecker, results in a much different notion of the rhetorical situation and the audience. “Rather, we would see the rhetorical situation as an event that makes possible the production of identities and social relations … Differance obliges us to read rhetorical discourses as processes entailing the discursive production of audiences, and enables us to decipher rhetorical events as sites that make visible the historically articulated emergence of the category 'audience'.” 38 McGee’s analysis moves in this direction since he argues, in other essays, that an audience such as the “people” is indeed a discursive construction. 39 Yet in the fragmentation essay, McGee locates the origin of the textual construction in the audience. Speakers and audiences remain the same but their roles shift. The audience, rather than the speaker, becomes the origin of discourse. Therefore, McGee attempts to tell this shift as a historical narrative, one recently caused by the spread of electronic media. While McGee should be commended for recognizing how media shift the roles of speaker and audience, his historical narrative seems to imply a singular shift that makes audiences into constructors and speakers into receivers. What McGee’s analysis misses is that the shifting of roles does not stop and is not a singular occurrence. The audience and the speaker are constantly shifting roles, taking new positions, due to emergence and spread of various media. Benjamin, for instance, notes how the spread of the printing press allowed more people to become authors as well as expanding a reading public. 40 Today, through reality television many more can lay claim to being an actor. In both instances, who are the rhetors and who are the audiences are changed by new forms of mediation. Media enable the shifting of stances, positions, and perspectives amongst all the constitutive elements of a rhetorical situation including the audience, the speaker, the text, and the perceived exigence. As

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Samuel Weber concludes, “It is the ability to impose this shift from state to stance that constitutes the power of media….” 41 Although McGee points in this direction, what he misses is the fundamental role of media in the constitution of rhetorical situations. Media did not simply come around recently and alter the rhetorical situation; they have always already constituted those situations, including the situations in much earlier and more oral cultures. The active role of the audience and the shifting from speaker to audience has been a permanent condition of communication, which is always mediated. Media position audiences, speakers, situations, and how they communicate, in an ongoing and ever-changing process. In short, attributing the origin of constitution to audiences ignores the interaction of audience, speaker, text, and situation. Simply reversing the origin from speaker to audience does not displace an instrumental model of communication because it still locates the origin in a substance rather than a relationship. A more complete account of origin would ask how audiences, speakers, texts, and situations are mutually constituted through positioning, through the movements of their differences and deferrals. A rhetorical situation can be conceived of as a particular relational form that enables certain perspectives or stances for audiences, speakers, texts, and situations. Origin, rather than located in the exigence, speaker, audience, or text, designates a process, play, or movement of mediation that alters the spatial and temporal perceptions of situations and constitutes an economy of forces enabling the continued circulation and uptake of various subject-positions. My thesis is close to that of Ian Angus: A medium of communication is not, fundamentally, a type of object but a relationship that mediates a social identity with the world… From this perspective, the media of communication that have been developed throughout human culture are expressions of the socio-historical Being of human life. They are the embodied rhetorical form that institutes, or establishes, a world. 42

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In short, media originate rhetorical situations. Further developing this thesis is the work of the following section. Media, Constitution, and the Rhetorical Situation Each of the previous approaches to constitution and the rhetorical situation discussed thus far rely upon an implicit media theory. Ironically, this implicit media theory is a hybrid one, drawing a conceptualization of situations from oral discourse and a conceptualization of media from written discourse. Bitzer’s claim that exigencies originate discourse depends upon a conceptualization of the situation drawn from oral culture, featuring the presence of speakers and audiences in situations of a real and pragmatic nature. Although Vatz and Charland critique Bitzer, what they share with him is a meaning-centric, instrumental model of communication based on written discourse. The aim here is to make these implicit media theories explicit in order to illustrate their inadequacies in an American culture featuring a multiplicity of mutually interacting electronic, oral, and written media. Instead of an instrumental model of media, I propose a constitutive one that views the constitution of subjects and situations as less the result of the transmission and interpretation of meaningful content and more the result of the ways and modes of making-meaning and using discourse. The privileging of oral discourse, what Derrida calls phonologocentrism, is evident in the examples employed by Bitzer to describe the rhetorical situation. Bitzer’s first example, for instance, borrows from Bronislaw Malinowski’s description of a fishing expedition by some indigenous people of the Trobriand Islands. 43 Bitzer insists that the fishing expedition illustrates the pragmatic and essentially situation-bound nature of discourse. Floating along in a canoe, the fishermen exchange customary phrases such as “Pull In,” and “Lift the Net” in order to address the ruling exigence—the success of the hunt. The need to catch fish dictates and directs their

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utterances, and the utterances convey a meaning that is directly interpreted and acted upon by the fishermen. The speaker and audience are present to one another and share a clear notion of exigence, situation, and meaning. Such clarity of purpose tied to the presence of speaker and audience is far from the norm in most rhetorical discourse today. Bitzer seems to agree, admitting that most rhetorical criticism does not deal with such “primitive utterances” but “with larger units of speech.” 44 Yet even in this qualification, as well as in his equivocation of rhetors and speakers, we can see the privileging and the assumption of oral speech. Because of this reduction of all discourse to speech Bitzer can maintain the differences between the fishing expedition and contemporary rhetoric are irrelevant, that “the clear instances of rhetorical discourse and the fishermen’s utterances are similarly functional and similarly situational.” 45 Bitzer’s other examples likewise further the privileging of oral discourse. He discusses Socrates’ Apology, Cicero’s speeches against Cataline, Lincoln’s Gettsyburg Address, William Lloyd Garrison preaching abolition, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Declaration of War, Winston Churchill’s Address on Dunkirk, and eulogies following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Each example consists of a situation where speakers use oral discourse to motivate an audience, and even in those examples such as FDR and the Kennedy eulogies which may have been broadcast on radio or television or printed in newspapers, Bitzer neglects to discuss the medium of transmission or even to consider the differences in situation which these variations in media may entail. This neglect cannot be rectified by the introduction of examples from other media. Instead, Bitzer’s conceptualization of the rhetorical situation fundamentally depends on an analogy with oral discourse. Locating the origin of rhetorical situations in a controlling exigence requires the assumption of a model of oral discourse, where the speakers and audiences are present in a

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situation and responding directly to the (transparent, apparent, present) exigence. As Walter Ong and others argue, oral cultures experience communication as pragmatic, present, embodied, and situational, the very features Bitzer maintains are common to every rhetorical situation. 46 Because in an exclusively oral culture discourse always occurs in the present, through speakers and audiences who share a location, discourse is experienced as a situational and pragmatic event. As Ong states, “The word in its natural, oral habitat is part of a real, existential present. Spoken utterance is addressed by a real, living person to another real, living person…, at a specific time in a real setting which always includes much more than mere words.” 47 Since words cannot be stored for later reflection, words are perceived to be actions, ephemerally bound to the time of their enunciation. The fisherman’s call to lift the nets is a demand, a charge, an act that sparks other subsequent actions. This is precisely the model entailed in Bitzer, who depicts the rhetorical situation as an act of discourse motivating further actions by the audience. The deficiencies of Bitzer’s oral-based model are best illustrated through Derrida’s critique of phonologocentrism and the metaphysics of presence. Derrida argues that iterability—the possibility of being repeated—is a structural necessity of any mark. 48 For discourse to operate, it must be iterable, able to be repeated in a different time or place. Without iterability, every utterance would be absolutely singular and unique, and thus the sharing or dissemination of knowledge would be impossible. Only if the American dream can be repeated in a different context, without the presence of its “original” speaker or audience, can the metaphor circulate and become a commonly recognized signifier. For Derrida, such iterability denies the determination of context or exigence for the constitution of discourse. Any discourse can leave its original context, abandon the presence of a controlling exigence, speaker or audience in its dissemination, in the new iterations. In the introduction, we have seen the ability to change

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context or re-envision exigence with respect to the American dream, whose various iterations portray an abundant variety of contexts and situations. Iterability denies the phonologcentrism of Bitzer and much of Western metaphysics. Rather than privileging oral discourse as a model for all communication, Derrida argues that iterability points to a prior, generalized writing. Just as writing enables the absence of the writer for the reader, the audience for the writer, and the context (a book may be read or quoted in a different context than that intended or assumed by the author), so does iterability point to the structural necessity of these absences in oral discourse. Even if in a specific instance (say Bitzer’s fishing example) the speaker, audience, and exigence are present, iterability—the possibility or potentiality of their absence in new iterations—remains a structural necessity. Without this possibility then the exchange of discourse would be impossible. Thus, Derrida sees the absences usually attributed to the written word as an inherent part of any use of language, a position he calls a generalized writing against the privilege of the spoken word and the assumption of present speakers and audiences. Derrida’s generalized writing basically indicates the necessity of a generalized mediation; his position entails viewing all communication as mediated. Yet, this notion of media is far removed from the one advanced by Vatz and Charland in their instrumental models of communication. The instrumental model of communication relies on a notion of mediation drawn from the phonologocentrism of Western, chirographic culture. The instrumental model sees media as a simple means of transmitting meaning, which exists outside of discourse and its mediation. Media are a tool—like the alphabet and writing—for transmitting the meaningful word. Phonologocentrism privileges this meaningful word and devalues writing as a secondary, ancillary, and inferior means of its transmission. With phonologocentrism, oral discourse is seen

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as unmediated, so it is no surprise that the instrumental model relies on a notion of media drawn through an analogy with writing. Derrida’s generalized writing, in contrast, denies that writing is secondary, ancillary, or inferior but is instead, through the necessity of iterability, the prior and structural condition of all discourse. Thus Derrida’s position repudiates the instrumental model of communication in Vatz and Charland alike. Vatz, like Derrida, notes the potential absence of a context or exigence. Yet Vatz assumes the speaker imbues the word with meaning, giving it a meaningful “presence.” 49 The speaker is the source or origin of meaning. Charland denies the speaker such a foundational role, agreeing with Derrida that the speaker may be absent in the dissemination and reception of written texts like the founding documents of the Peuple Quebecois. Yet Charland still locates meaning in the text, assuming that the signifiers inscribed therein give presence and existence to a particular meaning. The text originates constitution because it contains meaning. Derrida refuses this position. He not only points to the absence of speaker, audience, or exigence, a position advanced through the work of Vatz and then Charland, but is more fundamentally denying the presence of meaning, the stable connection between a signifier and signified. Iterability means that the signifier can be detached from its “original” signified, made to mean something else as we have seen with the American dream, and this procession, slippage, or play of meanings can not be reigned in by a final, determining speaker, audience, or context. Perhaps a superior concept to illustrate this absence of meaning espoused by Derrida is his neologism differance. Differance designates the differences and deferrals crucial to a system of meaning. Building upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Derrida agrees that signifiers only gain meaning through a structure of differential relations. Terms means only through their differences from one another—a cat is different from a hat-bat-rat-etc. This difference has the

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unique characteristic of also being a deferral. That is, terms gain meaning only negatively; we recognize a cat because it is not a hat-bat-rat-etc. Following definitions in a dictionary offers an insightful illustration of this deferral. Every definition refers to other terms, whose definitions in turn will defer the reader to still other terms and definitions. There is no proper beginning or origin for the dictionary (the language structure); there are only the differences and deferrals. Differance is not a substance, an entity which could be said to cause the emergence of a language system. It is instead the historical unfolding of the language system itself, the movement of deferral and the play of differences which constitute such a system, without ever being present in the sense of an empirical object. Derrida explains, “Retaining at the least the schema, if not the content, of the demand formulated by Saussure, we shall designate by the term differance the movement by which language, or any code, any system of reference in general, becomes ‘historically’ constituted as a fabric of differences.” 50 It is important to note that Derrida here argues that the movement of differance historically constitutes the language system, since many have critiqued Derrida for an ahistorical and thus apolitical theory of discourse. These accusations, largely based on a misreading (a misreading that Derrida’s position must regard as a necessary possibility given his emphasis on iterability), are common because Derrida’s notion of differance challenges the traditional, metaphysical conceptualizations of causality, history, origin, and source. 51 Typically causality designates, particularly in a Newtonian world view, one substance acting on another, causing effects. History is conceived as the unfolding of causes and effects, and origin is the first or primal cause, the cue ball that sets all the other billiard balls into motion. Yet differance, while historical and not transcendent or mystical, designates a movement, a play, rather than a substance. If differance can be said to be anything, it is most certainly not a thing. It has existence but no substance; it is

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the movement between the pool balls rather than the table, the cue, the player, or the balls. 52 The differences and deferrals take place, the movements occur historically, but the movements are prior to and constitutive of the things moved. (This is, admittedly, where any billiard ball analogy breaks down). “Since language … has not fallen from the sky, it is clear that the differences have been produced; they are the effects produced, but effects that do not have as their cause a subject or substance, a thing in general, or a being that is somewhere present and itself escapes the play of difference.” 53 The structure of differance relies on an economy, the term economy referring to a system of exchange that emerges from the opposition of two forces. Gayatri Spivak explains, “Economy is a metaphor of energy—where two opposed forces playing against each other constitute the socalled identity of a phenomenon.” 54 We might describe economy as a tensive structure, one in which the presence of contrasting forces creates an absent relationship. For Derrida, differánce or the trace designates the particular economy which enables a sense of present meaning. Raising this absent, nonlogical, nonconscious economic structure, reconstructing the structure of the trace or differánce, defines a Derridean deconstructive approach. The deconstructive task seeks the “origin” of “constitution” – both words use provisionally and under erasure to signal their difference from the traditional understanding – in an economy of forces producing the play or movement of differance and its resultant trace. “Differance is the nonfull, nonsimple ‘origin’; it is the structured and differing origin of differences.” 55 This is obviously a radically different notion of origin from those of Bizter, Vatz, and Charland who view the origin as a causal substance and locate it in the exigence, speaker, or text. With this different notion of origin comes a transformed notion of media, against the assumption of an instrumental model of communication where a medium is a means of transmitting meaning

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between two subject-positions. As Angus states, media is not here envisioned as a type of object (cinema or a book, for instance) but instead as a relationship, an economy of forces that enables a relationship between speakers and audiences as well as signifiers with other signifiers. In the following chapter, I label this notion of mediation a “mode” in order to clarify the confusion that comes with the common understanding of media as a technology of communication like cinema. The distinction between mode and media technology is crucial. Yet media technologies play a crucial role in modalities, as well as in Derrida’s critique of phonologocentrism, his articulation of a generalized writing, and his indictment of an instrumental model of mediation. In fact, Derrida points to the spread and proliferation of media technology as the primary reasons that deconstruction has become possible at this historical moment. Indeed, it is in this discussion at the beginning of Of Grammatology that Derrida most directly introduces the question of constitution proposed in this dissertation. Here Derrida broaches the issue of how his project becomes possible at this historical moment. He asks, “Why is it [the condition of a generalized writing] today in the process of making itself known as such and after the fact?” 56 He answers that the proliferation of media is central. Only as writing metaphors wear-down through the rising up of new media rise can a generalized writing be seen in relief. The extension of possibilities of information retrieval, including phonography and other means of storing language, has led to a proliferation of discourse without the speaking subject’s presence. “This development … teaches us that phonetic writing, the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West, is limited in space and time ….” 57 In this sense, Derrida’s body of work can be seen as central to media theory. His critique of phonologocentrism and argument for the generalizability of writing entails that all communicative exchange is a mediated affair. His answer suggests that rhetorical constitution

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occurs through changes in mediation, a position close to the one advocated here and made most famous in McLuhan’s axiom “the medium is the message.” Media shape even the theories of constitution and the rhetorical situation which seem to ignore or neglect to analyze mediation. Whereas the conceptualization of rhetorical situation seems borrowed from oral speech, the instrumental model of communication in Bitzer, Vatz, and Charland depends on implicit media theory based upon the written word. In fact, Ong describes this instrumental model as the “media” model of communication where communication is seen as “a pipeline transfer of units of material called ‘information.’” 58 According to Ong, such a model bears the conditioning of a chirographic culture because writing encourages a notion of speech as information and the text as a “one-way informational street” since the audience is absent at the moment of textual construction. 59 The written word allows people to see meaning as separate from speakers, as “information” with an independent and stable existence in texts. Meaning and knowledge no longer reside only in present situations and embodied speakers. Instead, the existence of writing allows words and meanings to reside in texts independent of speakers and situations. In such a model, the consequences of communication stem from the meanings communicated. The tendency therefore results to portray constitution as related to meaning and locate the origin in texts, a term which clearly evinces its written heritage. Today, however, the emergence and proliferation of electronic media radically alters rhetorical situations and with it the understanding of mediation and communication. Scholars have learned that media technologies alter the forms and perceptions of spatiality and temporality, an insight first developed in Harold Innis’ notion of time-biased and space-biased media. Innis contends that media shape social perception because they extend human influence in space and time. 60 For Innis, media will either have a space-bias or a time-bias depending

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mostly on the durability and weight of the media’s materials. A heavy and durable medium, like sacred stone tablets or hieroglyphs on Egyptian ruins, promote the dissemination of knowledge over time but do not extend their reach over space very far due to the difficulties in transport. A light and flexible medium, such as written words on paper or clicks of electricity with the telegraph, promote the dissemination of knowledge over space. With dissemination over space also comes control. Innis sees a startling space-bias in modern media, intimately connected to the scale and expanse of monopoly, Empire and, concomitantly, war. 61 Innis thought of media’s affects on space and time as a duality; a media either had a space or a time “bias,” meaning it was inclined to extend human reach over either space or time. 62 This duality perhaps oversimplifies the effects of media, but his basic point remains nevertheless— media alter the forms and perceptions of space and time. For instance, the experience and idea of “real time”—the notion that people in very distant places can share the same time—only comes with the broadcasting abilities of radio and television. Radio and television create real time by allowing people to share the time of a broadcast programming, apart from sharing the same space. Before such broadcasting, the idea that one might share time without sharing space was nonsensical, unthinkable because impossible to experience. What happens with the introduction of new media is both a new experience of space and time as well as the new perceptions and conceptualizations that come with those experiences. Thus Chapters Five and Six detail the ways cinema and animation alter the practices of communication and concomitantly the experiences and perceptions of space and time. Cinema and animation fundamentally change the spatiality and temporality of the rhetorical situation, further illustrating the limitations of a model based on oral discourse. As Samuel Weber states, “What is changing through the spread of electronic media … is the nature of the

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situation, of the ways in which people, things, and events are localized and hence, determined, perceived, and understood. And all this is changing because the structure of place itself is being altered.” 63 We have seen some of these changes in Derrida’s notion of iterability. Teletechnologies allow Derrida to recognize the iterability of discourse by spreading situations without the presence of speaker, audience or context. Another key term for Derrida is dissemination, meaning the broadcasting or spreading of messages to a dispersed and often unknown audience, as with the example of real time. Both Derrida and John Durham Peters show how new technologies of dissemination such as the telegraph, television, and radio lead to heterogeneous situations, situations with a multiplicity of audiences and contexts, leaving neither an exigence, author, text, or meaning with control over the whole. 64 In short, the media are the message, or, as more precisely developed in the following chapter, the modes are the message. The emergence of new media shapes modes, and modes define the shape of 20th century consumer culture, consequently altering the constitution of discourses such as the American dream which seek to explain this culture. Such a process of constitution is evident even in the theoretical trajectory traced in this chapter. Media technologies have led many theorists like Derrida to recognize the condition of a generalized writing or a generalized mediation. They have also required a transformed understanding of situation, constitution, mediation, and communication. Rather than describing situations as present and transparent exigencies, electronic media necessitate a view of the situation which includes distant, heterogeneous, and often conflicting speakers, audiences, and exigencies. Rather than locating the origin of constitution in the exigence, speaker, or text, media encourage a more dynamic notion of origin as a movement or play produced by an economy of forces. Finally, new media technologies have necessitated a revaluation of the instrumental model of communication.

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Instead of a means or tool of transmitting meaning, media represent a locus of communicative relationships. They are, in Weber’s interpretation of Walter Benjamin, “a dynamic space ‘in’ which something happens.” 65 What happens in this dynamic space is the constitution of texts, exigencies, and the personas or subject-positions of speakers and audiences. Thus we cannot see texts, exigencies, speakers, or audiences as the origin of the constitution of rhetorical situations. But neither is the origin the media technology, which are substances rather than economies or relationships. Although media technologies shape and limit the perceptions and experiences of space, time, and communication, they do not determine the constitution of the rhetorical situation. Instead, the origin of constitution lies in the absent, nonlogical structure of a relationship, an economy of forces that enable the differance producing the so-called identity of speakers, audiences, and situations. In the following chapter, the term mode designates this economy which makes perception and communication possible. A mode is a way of sensing or communicating, of interpreting and employing discourse, that constitutes a particular relationship between speaker, text, and audience. It is through the various translations of these modes—their movement from one medium such as animation into another such as language—that a constituted rhetorical situation emerges. That is, the translation of the modes of watching cinema and animation into language constitutes the Disney version of the American dream. This notion of translation, like the conceptualization of origin, constitution, media, and communication, is quite different from the common interpretation expressed earlier by Vatz. Thus further developing this revised notion of mode and translation is the work of the next chapter.

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Endnotes for Chapter Two 1

Lloyd F. Bitzer, "The Rhetorical Situation," Philosophy & Rhetoric 1, no. 1 (1968): 6. For his realist epistemology, a quotation from the conclusion is appropriate: “In our real world, however, rhetorical exigences abound; the world really invites change—change conceived and effected by human agents who quite properly address a mediating audience. The practical justification of rhetoric is analogous to that of scientific inquiry: the world presents objects to be known, puzzles to be resolved, complexities to be understood….” Ibid, 1314. 3 Ibid, 4. 4 Ibid, 6, 5, 11, 7, 2. 5 Ibid, 5. 6 Richard E. Vatz, "The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation," Philosophy & Rhetoric 6, no. 3 (1973): 154. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid, 157. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid, 158. 11 Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York,: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 10. 12 Vatz, "The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation," 154. 13 Ibid.: 158. 14 Robert E. Brooke, "Persona," in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 569. 15 The concept of persona is usually traced to Wayne Booth. See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction ([Chicago]: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 16 Black is explicit in his distinction between a “real” speaker and the persona in his discussion of Gore Vidal: “The Vidal description… is clearly illustrative of the distinction we have become accustomed to making—the distinction between the man and the image, between reality and illusion. And we have to acknowledge that in an age when seventy percent of the population of this country lives in a preprocessed environment, when our main connection with a larger world consists of shadows on a pane of glass, when our politics seems at times a public nightmare privately dreamed, we have, to say the least, some adjustments to make…. But however revised, we know that the concept amounts to something, that the implied author of a discourse is a persona that figures importantly in rhetorical transactions.” Edwin Black, "The Second Persona," Quarterly Journal of Speech 56, no. 2 (1970): 111. 17 See, for example: Marc Eliot, Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince (New York: HarperPaperbacks, 1994). Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (New York: International General, 1975). 18 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy (Evanston,: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 84-85f. 19 Maurice Charland, "Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois," Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987). 20 Ibid.: 134. 21 Ibid.: 138. 22 Ibid.: 141. 23 Ibid.: 147. 24 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982). Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of University of Harvard Press, 1963). 25 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet Books, 1964). 26 For instance, Douglass critiques Lakoff and Johnson for this emphasis on what a metaphor means, contending it results in a static (or abstract) notion of metaphor that ignores the active process of metaphorical meaning-making. David Douglass, "Issues in the Use of I.A. Richards' Tenor-Vehicle Model of Metaphor," Western Journal of Communication 64, no. 4 (2000). 27 The difference between McGee’s position and Derrida’s should be evident in Derrida’s work. He isolates authors and their corpus and reads them intently and carefully, sometimes line-by-line. These works are not, for Derrida, fragments circulating at a breakneck pace. Derrida’s reception of these texts runs counter to the way most texts are received today. 2

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Michael Calvin McGee, "Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture," Western Journal of Speech Communication: WJSC 54, no. 3 (1990): 286-7. 29 Benjamin calls for a similar method of montage. Seeing cultural practice as a rhetorical text, the critic selects quotations and engages in the method of montage. “This work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage.” Walter Benjamin, "On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress," in The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1999), 458. [N1,10] In another selection, Benjamin states: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.” Benjamin, "On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress," 460. [N1a,8] The critic gathers quotations, what McGee might call rhetorical fragments, from practices of art, architecture, advertising, manufacturing, design, popular discourse, academic discourse, movies, plays, films, literature and the like. From there, they arrange the fragments into a montage that reveals the dialectical image. In this dissertation, I montage an image of the American dream from quotations borrowed from critical texts, advertising, public relations, automobile design, the practice of automobility, streets and roadsides, Disney movies, popular reviews, classical and rock n’ roll music, drawing techniques, cinematic techniques, technologies like the multi-plane camera, and various other cultural practices such as driving, watching movies, children playing and people-watching. 30 Ibid.: 288. 31 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xii. 32 Ibid., 31. 33 This movement was popular in the 1980s and early 1990s in cultural studies. Perhaps the most famous proponent is John Fiske. John Fiske, Television Culture (London ; New York: Methuen, 1987). ———, Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 34 Celeste Michelle Condit, "The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6, no. 2 (1989). 35 Ibid.: 106. 36 Ibid.: 111. 37 Barbara A. Biesecker, "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of Diffã©Rance," Philosophy & Rhetoric 22, no. 2 (1989): 123. 38 Ibid.: 126. 39 Michael C. McGee, "In Search of the 'People': A Rhetorical Alternative," Quarterly Journal of Speech 61, no. 3 (1975). 40 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 33. 41 Samuel Weber, Benjamin's -Abilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 113. 42 Ian H. Angus, Primal Scenes of Communication : Communication, Consumerism, and Social Movements, Suny Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 51-53. 43 Bitzer, "The Rhetorical Situation," 4. 44 Ibid, 5. 45 Ibid. 46 Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 47 Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 101. 48 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 49 He uses Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s notion of presence. Vatz, "The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation," 157. 50 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, 141. 51 Derrida mocks the idea of mis-reading, and other misses, since his theory insists these misses are inevitable and fundamental. Iterability means there is no proper, correct reading. Signification is always marked by absences, by misses. See ———, Limited Inc. 52 The phrase “existence but no substance” is borrowed from Barbara Biesecker in a seminar entitled “Visual Rhetoric” at the University of Georgia in the Fall of 2008. 53 Ibid, 141.

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Translator's Preface," in Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), xlii. 55 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, 141. 56 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Corrected ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 10. 57 Ibid. 58 Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 176. 59 Ibid, 177. 60 Most of my interpretation stems from the essay entitled “The Bias of Communication,” in Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964). 61 See particularly “A Plea for Time,” in Ibid. 62 Most of my interpretation stems from the essay entitled “The Bias of Communication,” in Ibid. 63 Weber, Benjamin's -Abilities, 114. 64 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University Press, 1981). John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 65 Weber, Benjamin's -Abilities, 118.

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Chapter Three The Mode is the Message: Media, Translation, and Constitution This chapter seeks to build upon and refine McLuhan’s axiom, “the medium is the message.” It focuses on one of many possible interpretations of the axiom, an interpretation specific to the question of rhetorical constitution. This interpretation takes the axiom very literally, arguing that communication media are largely responsible for the variety of messages that emerge in a particular generation or historical era. Media provide perspectives through which certain conceptualizations of audience, speaker, text, and situation emerge; from these stances, various rhetorical situations such as the Disney version can “make sense.” Media, then, work like metaphors by providing frames or perspectives. Neil Postman makes a similar point, further clarifying the “message” in McLuhan’s axiom: A message denotes a specific concrete statement about the world. But the forms of our media … do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definition of reality. Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like. 1 These perspectives are made possible (they become –able) by communication media but are never guaranteed. What can be forgotten or most difficult to analyze in media theory is the relationship amongst media, the fact that our culture is home to numerous forms and ways of communicating through a wide-variety of technological devices. No media technology exists in an isolated environment, a condition increasingly made clear by the convergence of older media through the digital and computer revolution. Thus no single media can guarantee or determine a particular perspective emerges. “What is new about new media comes from the particular ways

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in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media,” in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s words. 2 Language is but one medium through which human beings grapple with the variety of communicative practices defining their existence. Describing rhetorical constitution, then, requires a theoretical concept that accounts for this relationship between language and other communicative practices. I argue that the concept of translation, similar to Bolter and Grusin’s remediation, is precisely this concept. The medium is the message in the sense that media translate modes of perception from one form to another. The Disney version of the American dream is the language-based translation of a mode of perceiving Disney animation. The metaphors of child, magic, dream, art, genius, wonder, innocence, and fantasy “make sense” when translated from the mode of perceiving Disney animation, what I call animistic mimesis. Media as Translators Whereas Vatz saw the speaker as the motive-force behind translation, and McGee depicted an audience translating fragments into texts, “the medium is the message” entails a different notion of translation and origin. Here, origin means original, not fundamental, natural, or permanent. This is not a causal notion of origin but a material one. Modes are the original material from which rhetorical constitution springs. Modes can be translated, just as one might translate an original, but this process is not necessarily wedded to fidelity since the movement from one medium to another requires a transformation as well. The “original”—the mode of animistic mimesis—is translated into language as a model of communication. The translation of modes constitutes discourse like the Disney version of the American dream. This translation process is different from Vatz and McGee because it is mediated rather than driven by human subjects. As McLuhan first recognized:

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(T)echnologies are ways of translating one kind of knowledge into another mode…. All media are active metaphors in the power to translate experience into new forms. The spoken word was the first… Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered and outered senses. 3 The Disney version of the American dream emanates from the translation of the cinematic and animistic-mimetic modes into a model rhetorical situation. The experience of these modes is translated into the medium of language, creating a constellation of metaphors that seem to “make sense.” The transferability of animistic mimesis readily lends itself to a metaphoric comparison with the terms dream, magic, child, innocence, wonder, art, genius, image, and fantasy. In the translation of mode to model, language as a medium operates through what Benjamin calls “nonsensuous similarities,” similar to McLuhan’s claim above. 4 In other words, language manifests the –ability to transform sensuous or cognitive experience into nonsensuous metaphors through a kind of mimetic comparison. This mimetic –ability of language is itself a translation of an older, more primeval mode, the –ability to read the similarities of the sensuous world: If, at the dawn of humanity, this reading from stars, entrails, and coincidences was reading per se, and if it provided mediating links to a newer kind of reading, as represented by runes, then one might well assume that this mimetic gift… very gradually found its way into language and writing in the course of a development over thousands of years, thus creating for itself in language and writing the most perfect archive of nonsensuous similarity. In this way, language is the highest application of the mimetic faculty—a medium into which the earlier perceptual capacity for recognizing the similar had, without residue, entered to such an extent that language now represents the medium in which objects encounter and come into relation with one another. 5 For Benjamin, the term for this movement and transformation of ways of reading is translation, and translation represents the fundamental basis for a theory of language, media, and constitution. Translation creates a relationship between two texts and between two media. Translation shows how one text becomes transformed into another through the mediation of a new technology. For instance, reading the stars becomes translated into reading the runes which becomes translated into reading the written word. Thus translation is the ideal concept for an

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analysis which seeks to uncover the relationship of media, the movement between mediated experience and the linguistic medium. This notion of translation, however, is different from the common understanding of translating an “original” into another language by transmitting meaning. As Roman Jakobson elucidates, there are many forms of translation, including the common type known as interlingual translation, an intralingual translation or paraphrase, and intersemiotic translation from one type of discourse to another (from gestures to word, or words to images). 6 Intersemiotic translation is our primary concern and is similar to what Bolter and Grusin label remediation, “the representation of one medium in another.” 7 Most people are familiar with the ways computers have remediated television, radio, literature, and the press, to list just a few. Thus they contend, “(R)emediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media.” 8 Yet my perspective maintains that translation is an inherent function of all communication media, perhaps made more evident in newer media but not the exclusive property of the digital. Therefore I use the term translation to indicate how this process is an enduring feature of all media, not just digital media as Bolter and Grusin imply. 9 Furthermore, Bolter and Grusin’s treatment of remediation at times makes the process seem like a strictly technical one as one media reappropriates techniques, styles, or content from another. Translation, as well shall see, is also a creative process, limited, but not defined or determined, by technical properties. Viewing translation as a creative process also alters the common understanding of the appropriate criteria for a translation. While fidelity might be the criteria for some translations, other types, especially intersemiotic, make fidelity a subjective standard and require the translator’s creative input. At times the translation remains faithful to the original but more often the new media transforms the perception of both the original and the translation. “Our culture

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conceives of each medium or constellation of media as it responds to, redeploys, competes with, and reforms other media.” 10 It may sound strange to describe translation as a creative, constitutive process. From the perspective of a single text, few would argue that the translator constitutes a new expression. Typically, translation is viewed as a simple process of the transferal of meaning from one language system to another. In contrast, Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” provides a framework for seeing translation as a creative, even essentially constitutive practice. Translation is not the transmission of meaning or information but a mode for relating ways of meaning, the mode of modes, a mode mediating other modes. Benjamin begins the essay by insisting that the essential quality of a work is not about communication, meaning, or the imparting of information. Any translation that seeks to perform a transmitting function can only transmit the inessential—the meaning or information. “This is the hallmark of bad translations.” 11 Instead, the essential quality of a work resides in its mode, its ways of meaning which result in “emotional connotations” between the lines, so to speak, “the point where work, image, and tone converge.” 12 Thus a word-for-word translation strips the original of its truth and beauty, empties it of its essential mode by reducing it to mere information. This outcome is particularly the case because language is a living force whose modes or ways of meaning continually evolve. By the time a work reaches its age of parentage, both the original and the translated language have transformed. Benjamin opines, “Even words with fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process… What sounded fresh once may sound hackneyed later; what was once current may someday sound quaint.” 13 A good translator, then, must engage in a double operation: follow the maturing of the original language and initiate “the birth pangs of its own.” 14

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In this double operation, we can see that translation operates according to an economy. This economy moves between the original and the translation, between fidelity and freedom, and between the translatable and the nontranslatable. Rather than the typical conception regarding freedom and fidelity as conflicting tendencies, Benjamin recognizes freedom and fidelity as the opposing forces of an economy or dialectic defining the mode of translation. The original issues a demand for survival, a demand to spread and find new roots, to which the translator responds. This demand issues forth because the original seeks to be received, to be transported elsewhere. “Put another way, the work can only make a name for itself… by having that name travel, take leave, go elsewhere and become another name, in another language,” according to Weber. 15 This demand foments a trajectory towards fidelity. At the same time, however, the original remains singular and unique to the extent that something remains in it that cannot be communicated, that is not translatable. The original is a singular fusion of content and form, a particular way of signifying (a mode) not simply something signified. Even when all the signified contents are transmitted, the singularity of the original fusion remains; the translation must necessarily break apart the fusion of content and form. This singularity or “nucleus,” although the primary concern of the translator, remains forever elusive. As Benjamin states, in a characteristically eccentric analogy, “Unlike the words of the original, it is not translatable, because the relationship between content and language is quite different in the original and the translation. While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds.” 16 This impossibility, this nontranslatability, exerts a pressure on the translator towards freedom. They must take on some artistic license in order to most closely translate the original’s nucleus, its way of signifying. Thus the obligation to fidelity must

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not reign exclusively, especially fidelity to the inessential meaning. Instead, the mode of translation operates through an economy between fidelity and freedom, between the translatable and the nontranslatable. “(A) translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language…” 17 What is this “greater language” to which Benjamin refers? Why does he so value translation for a theory of media and constitution? 18 What role does it play in the question of the constitution of discourse? For Benjamin, translation is the primary force behind the growth and decay of discourse, the rising up and wearing away of metaphor. As such, translation describes the process of constitution. Since constitution is concerned with circulation and uptake, a theory of constitution must assume that discourse has a cultural life of which the initial production of a work is only a small stage. 19 The stage of translation marks the entrance into a work’s age of fame, its age of parentage. In Benjamin’s terms, the original enters its “afterlife,” a period of “most abundant flowering.” 20 The translator speaks to a different rhetorical situation than the original and from there translates a new bloom. The new bloom then potentially provides, if it thrives, sprouting seeds for cultural growth. The new bloom introduces references, allusions, metaphors, forms, styles and characters for future appropriation. The successful translation is “destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal.” 21 Translation ensures the growth of discourse by revealing a greater relationship amongst languages, what Benjamin calls the “true” or “pure” language. Here, some interpreters hesitate, thinking this “pure language” reveals Benjamin’s theological commitments. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence denies any “pure” language and reveals the violence of such

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theological and ontological positions. Likewise, the appeal to truth seems to go against the metaphorical nature of knowledge advocated here. As Derrida remarks, “The origin of philosophy is translation or the thesis of translatability….” 22 Translation, in the common sense, is philosophy’s thesis because philosophy presupposes knowledge outside of language. Since knowledge is transcendent, it must be possible to translate it into another language. Philosophy attempts to master plurivocality and thus wherever translation fails so does philosophy. Yet it is Derrida that reminds us this is an inappropriate read of Benjamin’s conceptualization of translation. 23 Philosophy places its belief in translation in the common sense of transferring a meaning from one language to another. Benjamin’s notion of translation is broader and abandons philosophy’s desire for fidelity and faith in pure transmission. Translation is a creative act that ensures the survival of the original without being wedded to it. The task of the translator is not to reproduce or copy but to respond to the original’s demand for survival. The translation is not merely derivative of the original. The translation responds to the desire to be translated inherent in the original, making the original indebted in advance to the translation and establishing a reciprocal relationship between original and translation. Translation is therefore not about communication or information or representation or reproduction. 24 Instead, the translator aims to assure the survival and the growth of the original. As Derrida remarks, discussing Benjamin’s notion of translation: Translation augments and modifies the original, which, insofar as it is living on, never ceases to be transformed and to grow… This process—transforming the original as well as the translation—is the translation contract between the original and the translating text. In this contract it is a question of neither representation nor reproduction nor communication; rather, the contract is destined to assure a survival, not only of a corpus or a text or an author but of languages. 25 The true language is the mode, language as form rather than content. Pure language is not purified of anything but is language without regard to content, to presence, to meaning. Pure

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language reveals what makes language a language, its ways or modes of signifying. As Derrida states, “This is what we learn from a translation, rather than the meaning contained in a translated text…. We learn that there is language, that language is of language…. The promise of a translation is that which announces to us this being-language of language….” 26 This pure language is similar to McLuhan’s famous axiom, “the medium is the message.” Translation reveals the “message” (the mode) of the media. It reveals the pure language, the being-language of language as form. Through translation, people learn the “message” of the medium. Translation exposes the pure language—the modes of signifying—through which all languages (read: media) relate. 27 In fact, Benjamin states, “Translation is a mode.” 28 Translation is the mode of modes, the mode which reveals the relationship between ways or modes of signifying. It is in this way that translation illustrates and embodies the kinship between languages responsible for constitution, the properties shared in the movement from one media to another, for instance in the movement from watching animation to the Disney version of the American dream. This is not kinship in the sense of a family of languages. Benjamin is not saying that translation reveals how English borrowed from French. Instead, translation shows the kinship between original and translation, what they share as language. Translation unearths, through the contrast, what ways of meaning the original and translation share, how they express rather than the content of the expressions. Translation makes manifest the common root or common soil of the texts, their very kinship which ensures the survival of the original. Translation does not re-present the original but constitutes a larger ensemble of pure language shared by the original and the translation. “Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages.” 29

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By expressing the relationship between media (languages), by revealing a variety of modes, translation accounts for the process of constitution. Translation is the prime motive-force behind the life of discourse. Translation is the historical process of the change of media-metaphors, their growth and their decay, their life and their death, as they move from the literal to the figurative and (sometimes) back again. Benjamin puts it this way: “If, however, these languages continue to grow in this manner until the end of their time, it is translation which catches fire on the eternal life of the works and the perpetual renewal of language. Translation keeps putting the hallowed growth of languages to the test….” 30 In short, the theory of translation is the theory of the change of language; through translation, the life of language and its metaphors grow and mature. Translation manifests the kinship of texts, their shared mode exposed in the movement from one medium to another. Thus translation is the constitutive rhetorical process. The translation of modes constitutes messages such as the Disney version of the American dream. No single rhetorical act constitutes a persona, 2nd persona, or perceived exigence. Only through repeated translation does the expression live; once it reaches a certain maturity, the translated elements achieve the status of perceived historical agents. For instance, the “child” evoked in the model of communication of the Disney version becomes a point of recognition and debate over the cultural effects of cinema and animation, sparking a moral crisis replete with a wave of sociological studies and calls for censorship in the middle 20th century. Children, of course, actually exist and watch Disney animation but never exactly in the shape depicted. In fact, the various portrayals of the child and evaluations of animation’s effects on children vary widely and often conflict. Chapter Seven illustrates these various, conflicting interpretations. Yet, each interpretation shares a similar constellation of metaphors, including the genius and the child, because the model of

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communication shares a kinship with the mode of animistic mimesis. The mode of animistic mimesis—its way of signifying, of “making sense”—shares a kinship with the personas of the child and the artistic genius, its transferability shares similarities with magic, fantasy, and the dream, and its sensuous experiences share a nonsensuous similarity with the metaphors of innocence and wonder. Thus despite the conflicting interpretations and evaluations, the model and its constellation of metaphors persist. If The Medium is the Message, the Message is The Mode “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception.” –Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” 31 Translation reveals, renews, and transforms modes. Modes are the “origin” of rhetorical constitution. The translation of the mode of animistic mimesis into language becomes, in the middle of the 20th century, a model rhetorical situation expressed in the Disney version of the American dream and its constellation of metaphors. What, then, is a mode? And how are modes distinguished from media? First, let us address the question of media. When McLuhan declared the medium is the message, some critics were hesitant because the term message typically denotes a meaningful content. Message implies a meaning-centric focus that assumes the significance of media stems from its signifieds. McLuhan’s axiom was actually designed to counter such a view, and a constitutive media theory denies this meaning-centric focus, as we witnessed in the last chapter. Media theory maintains that the effects of television, radio, cinema, and other media take place regardless of the content of the messages disseminated by those media. The term “message,” however, can still create confusion because the significance of media does not stem from its message contents, as Postman contends above. Likewise, such confusion is why Weber insists

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that Benjamin would reject McLuhan’s axiom. Weber, who sees in Benjamin a distinctly Derridean theory of media, believes the axiom confounds medium and message. 32 The significance of media results not from their actual, present meanings but rather from the virtual, relational possibilities of meaning-making, the modes that media enable. For Benjamin: The medium is never simply actual, never simply real or present, much less ‘the message’ that it seems to convey. Rather, it consists in the suspension of all messaging and in the virtuality that ensues. Such virtuality makes its force felt as an intervention: the media is what comes between, stretching apart everything that would be present to itself. 33 Although the warning to avoid a meaning-centric focus remains valuable, when McLuhan is read closely his conclusions stand in close proximity to those of Postman, Weber and Benjamin. 34 McLuhan is not saying that media cause meanings but that media create changes in the ways humans relate and communicate, changes whose significance matters far more than any sum of meanings they may or may not contain. His axiom is intended as a criticism of the meaning-centric, instrumental media-effects scholarship dominant at the time of his writing. He reappropriates the term “message” from this scholarly heritage to give it a radically different implication. Therefore, when I place the term “message” deliberately in quotation marks it designates McLuhan’s sense—not a meaningful content but a socio-cultural imprinting that cannot be denied, even if it never enters into conscious thought. The media are the “message,” but not in the sense of content deciphered by the audience. The “message” is the way mediation alters cultural perceptions and ways of communicating, especially the perceptions and forms of space and time. The message is not something either consciously or unconsciously perceived but, like the trace, a non-present, nonconscious economy which opens the possibility of perception. Media, then, work by structuring the cultural habitus rather than by imparting information into the audience’s consciousness. As Benjamin contends, humans adapt to changes in the sensorium

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not by the optical means of contemplation but by the tactile means of habit. 35 Media work through the repeated establishment of habit much more than conscious interpretation. Rather than messages as presumed carriers of meaning subject to conscious interpretation, a refined understanding of McLuhan’s axiom points towards “messages” as changes in the human sensorium and habitus. “For the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” 36 These changes are conditioned by history, organized by the empirical alterations in media and mediation. The “message” of media is how they alter the modes of perception of a certain historical period, as Benjamin argues in the prelude. In short, if the medium is the message, the message is the mode. Distinguishing media and modes accounts for the interaction and mutual affection of media and therefore avoids the reduction of origin to a technological substance. Although media contribute to the shape of modes, limiting their possibilities, they do not determine them. For instance, without writing, the form of elongated, abstract reasoning necessary for physics is impossible, but writing does not guarantee physics. Cultures existed for centuries, and continue to thrive, with writing yet without physics. Only a scientific mode of writing, a specific set of perspectives and metaphors, leads to physics. This lack of determinism can be seen historically with the emergence of film which sparked attempts by painters, writers, and architects to translate the cinematic mode into their medium. Stephen Kern, for instance, points to the literature of James Joyce and the art of surrealism and cubism as representative examples of the attempt to translate the cinematic mode. 37 The cinematic mode discussed in Chapter Five, like all modes, is contingent and historical. The American culture of the early to mid 20th century perceived cinema in a particular way, based on a translation of modes from photography and literature. Photography was largely

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perceived at the time as a transparent portrayal of material reality; therefore, cinema was widely described as the extension of photography to motion. Cinema was perceived as the capture of material reality (often called live-action). Yet cinema captures this material reality to create an imaginary narrative, through a translation of narrative devices and stories from literature. Thus the cinematic mode of the time entailed the perceiving of material reality as an imaginary narrative. As Lev Manovich says, “Cinema is the art of the index; it is an attempt to make art out of a footprint.” 38 This mode was historical and contingent, most manifest in the Golden Age of Hollywood and through what Christian Metz calls the “supergenre” of cinema—the fictional, narrative-based live-action film. 39 The cinematic apparatus, however, is not limited to this supergenre or this mode of signifying. As Manovich argues, for instance, the spread of digital cinema has fundamentally transformed cinema, away from the perception of material reality based in photography and towards the perception of an imaginary life, closer to animation and based in the graphic arts. 40 Perhaps certain technologies—like oil painting—make the translation of the cinematic mode more difficult whereas others—like a movie camera—readily enable them. The film apparatus makes possible the cinematic mode but does not determine that any particular iteration will emerge. Media technology set limits on the possible translations of modes, but do not guarantee the emergence of specific modes, which depend on a culturally and historically specific process of translation. Modes should be seen as the origin of these translations, the original cultural material that is subsequently translated and transformed. Media are not determining but instead enabling and disabling of modes. This conceptualization of media as enabling and disabling possibilities draws upon what Weber calls Benjamin’s –abilities. 41 Examples of –abilities from Benjamin include citability, communicability, impartability, knowability, recognizability, legibility, and, in his most famous

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“The Work of Art” essay, reproducibility. 42 Translatability is another example that plays a significant role for media theory. (In this dissertation, transferability represents the –ability enabled by the mode of animistic mimesis). –Abilities are starkly different from an ability possessed by a subject, such as a speaker’s ability to translate their choices into meaningful discourse. An –ability is defined by the dash, the gap, the absence marking the economy of a relationship. As with iterability, –abilities describe a structural necessity – a potentiality or virtuality – rather than an empirical, existent substance. Iterability, for instance, is the structurally necessary possibility of repetition, of new iterations, not the iterations themselves. The –ability remains whether the discourse is ever repeated, just as the possibility of particular forms of mediation remain whether people actually engage them (for instance, the possibility for montage was enabled by the film camera long before it emerged historically). Media create a relational economy that makes certain –abilities into a virtual possibility, virtual in the sense that its existence does not require actualization. Instead, the virtuality of media creates the possibilities of certain actualizations, the potentiality of various perceptual and discursive constitutions that remains whether ever actualized. Media “cannot be measured by the possibility of self-fulfillment but by its constitutive alterability,” by the differing and deferring movements of an economy. 43 For instance, according to our example here, animation enables a transferability between the movements of the character and the emotion of the audience. That is, the gestures can be seen as signs of life, as emotional expressions. As developed more in Six, animation makes the transferability of semblances to the screen and emotion to the character possible. Modes, in contrast, are the specific and particular results enabled by the –abilities of media. Modes are the historical, embodied form of perception. A mode is a way of signifying, shared

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between speakers, audiences, and texts. Modes are a perceiving as, a way of receiving and interpreting texts. As Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen describe, modes are “a system of social deixis which ‘addresses’ a particular kind of viewer, or a particular social/cultural group, and provides through its system of modality markers an image of the cultural, conceptual, and cognitive position of the addressee.” 44 In this sense, each mode is also a metaphor; it provides a perspective from which certain reads make sense. Modes constitute perspectives though which certain things become perceivable and others invisible or insignificant. Modes direct the perception of space and time as well as other features of form and content. To take an example from a medium that is a close heir to animation, Scott McCloud shows how comic book artists developed different techniques for drawing gutters, the space between frames, to direct the reader to perceive different kinds of transitions in time and space such as flashbacks or a progression of moments. 45 This notion of modes builds off my earlier work, where I isolated the “judgmental mode” of news media photography and the “iconic mode” of Apple’s iPod ads. 46 This dissertation continues and refines my work by emphasizing the dual relationship in modes between text and audience. Modes are perhaps best conceived as liminal or in-between, a relational structure between speaker-text and text-audience. Modes are cued by formal features of the text but also require participation of audiences who take the cues and perceive according to the mode. In this way, we might think of a mode as an enthymeme. This liminality precludes locating the origin of the mode in any single speaker, audience, or the text. All play a crucial role in the completion, repetition, and circulation of a mode. Thus modes are fundamentally cultural and historical; they are embodied forms of perception that constitute a shared world. Kress and van Leeuwen, who argue modes guide what a culture or group considers credible, real, or truthful, explain:

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“What one social group considers credible may not be considered credible by another. This is why we see modality as interactive, rather than ideational, as social, rather than as a matter of some independently given value. Modality both realizes and produces social affinity, through aligning the viewer (or reader, or listener) with certain forms of representation, namely those which the artist (or speaker, or writer) aligns himself or herself, and not with others. Modality realizes what ‘we’ consider true or untrue, real or not real… To the extent that people are drawn into this ‘we’, new values, new modes of thinking and perceiving can establish themselves.” 47 This liminality demarcates modes as a relational structure. As such, modes work through an economy, or what Benjamin calls a dialectic. The economy of the mode is the origin of the perception, opening the possibilities of appearance and signification as Derrida argues. For instance, Kress and van Leeuwen discuss the modality of photographic naturalism, “the dominant standard by which we judge visual realism.” 48 The standards of photographic naturalism are defined according to economies or scales related to color, depth, brightness, contextualization, and abstraction. Too much color saturation makes the image diverge from photo naturalism, yet at the same time too little saturation does likewise. Too much or too little saturation can make the image appear, in the mode of photographic naturalism, less real. Photographic naturalism is defined by an economy between these poles. Another example comes from Bolter and Grusin who describe the competing tendencies towards hypermediacy and immediacy in digital media. 49 Immediacy is similar to photo-realism, a seemingly transparent presentation of the real. Immediacy seeks to erase or efface the mediation, to give the audience the sense of entering the frame, the screen, or the scene. Hypermediacy, on the other hand, acknowledges and pursues the pleasure of mediation, often through the employment of spectacle and the proliferation of interfaces for user manipulation. Although Bolter and Grusin seem to consider these mutually exclusive tendencies, elsewhere I have argued that hypermediacy and immediacy are better seen as an economy, particularly with video games. 50 Video games balance

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the opposing forces of immediacy and hypermediacy, giving both a sense of realistic immersion and the pleasurable control of a virtual gaming experience. Chapters Five and Six illustrate two modes accompanying cinema and animation—the cinematic mode and animistic mimesis. With animistic mimesis, an economy of semblance and play directs the differences and deferrals, what the audience sees and does not see, how they read the text. The reception moves by oscillating between semblance and play, with the tension between the two defining the process. The mode is a movement from semblance to play, play to semblance. The animation must maintain semblances to real life but never be too close. Mickey must both look like a mouse and not. His image must have semblances but also a healthy dose of play. It is the tension, the oscillation between semblance and play that enable the perception of animated characters as living, expressing, and feeling beings. Nothing guarantees adherence to these modes, but as media spread they serve as persistent reminders and continual opportunities to engage in the mode. When engaged, modes shape cultural perceptions. Through the various translations, the culture learns the formal message, learns about the being of the mode. The “message,” if it had to be reduced to linguistic paraphrase, would simply be, “This mode is possible.” Some may miss the “message” or interpret this existence in contradictory ways. But the translations provide lessons in the existence of the mode nonetheless. This conceptualization of modes draws heavily from Benjamin’s massive unfinished The Arcades Project. 51 In it, Benjamin focuses attention on such consumers as the flâneur, the collector, the gambler, and the moviegoer as well as trends in home décor, shopping, and fashion, articulating how these practices are based on a modal economy. The Arcades, a prototype of malls or department stores, were covered passages in 19th century Paris lined with stores. The flâneur was a type of pedestrian who frequently wandered through the Arcades. The

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flâneur, however, did not seek purchase or passage to another section of the city; they were not shoppers or pedestrians. They communicated with the Arcades in a unique respect, a way Benjamin describes as the colportage of space. 52 That is, the flâneur sees the Arcades as a labyrinth full of hidden mysteries. 53 The Arcades are a mystery story constructed by the flâneur, who sees as a detective and in turn peddles their detections in the form of written books or oral narratives. The flâneur wanders the Arcades, at a turtle’s slow place, seeing not just buildings, crowds, and commodities but a landscape shot through with mysteries of far-off times and places. 54 “The space winks at the flâneur.” 55 “The street conducts the flâneur into a vanished time.” 56 The flâneur’s intoxication with such mysteries stems from a particular modal economy, a way of seeing and constructing texts through a system of metaphors. The mode of flânerie enables a specific legibility of the city and its Arcades. Benjamin calls it an illustrative seeing, whereby the flâneur constructs texts to accompany the images they witness. 57 The flâneur views the physiognomy of the city as evidence of its deeper mysteries. The flâneur sees the material Arcades but also invests what they see with an abstract knowledge, a knowledge which traveled from flâneur to flâneur by word of mouth and was often codified in popular literature of the time. 58 Armed with these “dead facts” the flâneur experiences the city as an interior, as familiar to them as the inside of their homes. 59 They perceive the city’s features as “something experienced and lived through.” 60 Such seeing-as operates through a modal economy or dialectic. The dialectic of flânerie creates a tensive economy through the mediation of the crowd. 61 On the one hand, the flâneur feels viewed by all, like a suspect among the crowd. This creates the opportunity to construct texts about the suspects; the faces of the crowd offer themselves as images for the projection of

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deep secrets. On the other hand, the flâneur feels hidden, undiscoverable, one of a mass of faces whose deeper secrets are hidden by the jumbling indistinctness of the crowd. Cloaked by the crowd, the flâneur sees as a detective, moving surreptitiously through the crowd, uncovering the mysteries behind the physiognomy of the city and its inhabitants. In other words, flânerie, as a form of reception and hence textual construction, works via an economy of the visible and the hidden, physiognomy and mystery, each discernable through the mediation of the crowd. They see the streets crowded with suspects and view it as a detective, hidden amongst the mass. They see the visible physiognomy of the city as evidence of its hidden mysteries. Operating through an economy, modes are not about presence, a substance of place or identity or ideology that guarantees their outcome. The flâneur is not simply a person who strolls through the arcades, or a white, bourgeois male of the late 19th century, or a duped consumer falling for the commodity fetish. In de Certeau’s terms, what defines the flâneur is not their status or location in the strategic place of society. What defines them is a difference in tactic, differences that “refer to the modalities of action, to the formalities of practices. They traverse the frontiers dividing time, place, and type of action into one part assigned for work and another for leisure.” 62 Modes are the practices through which humans experience their existence. Thus it is crucial to pay attention to modes and distinguish them from media because modes are the historical, embodied form of perception enabled by media. They are the messages of media. Communication media produce –abilities that enable and limit various ways of communicating, particularly by altering social spatiality and temporality. These –abilities are virtual potentialities, and modes are their actual realization. Media enable translations; they create a certain translatability. Modes are the specific translations. Media translate modes into new forms, providing cultures with new ways of communicating. As the modes spread, they

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create new ways of perceiving and relating that shape the cultural habitus. One way they do so is by constituting new rhetorical situations when the newer cultural modes are in turn translated into language. The mode is the original text that, when translated, constitutes the Disney version of the American dream and its constellated metaphors. In short, the translation of modes constitutes models of the rhetorical situation like the Disney version of the American dream. That is, the mode of the animated movie viewer (animistic mimesis) is translated into discourse as a model of communication that underwrites the Disney version of the American dream. Models of the Rhetorical Situation As a media technology, language also works through modes, modes that I designate as models in order to keep the concepts distinct. The modes of animation and cinema are translated into models of communication underwriting the Disney version of the American dream as well as its critics. Each model is a constructed rhetorical situation including a persona, second persona, a medium, a perceived exigence, and a theory of communication. I borrow the term model from Black and Ricoeur, who make the comparison between models and metaphors. For both, models are methods of interpretation practiced in language. Black says, “The heart of the method consists in talking a certain way.” 63 As a way of talking, models designate a system of metaphors. Paul Ricoeur contends that seeing metaphors as models shifts the critical focus to an extended constellation of metaphors similar to an allegory. 64 The model guides the constellation in its various iterations by providing an economy or system of metaphoric resources. Ricoeur says, “This imagination mingles with reason by virtue of the rules of correlation governing the translation of statements concerning the secondary domain into statements applicable to the original domain.” 65 In Chapters Four and Seven, a model of communication as the artistic genius transferring to the child (in all of us) is illustrated in a wide variety of texts about Disney.

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This understanding of models as systems or chains of metaphors once again draws heavily on the work of Derrida, as well as Ricoeur who advances a distinctly Derridean theory of metaphor. Derrida refuses an assumed, stable connection between signifiers and signifieds because he insists on a fully constitutive theory that views knowledge as based in metaphor. Metaphor, as its etymology indicates, is a movement—a transferal or translation—and thus this movement precludes any stable, present linkage between what is said and what is meant. What is said (the signifiers) are metaphors, defined through the movement of their differences and deferrals. A metaphor comes to “mean” only by its relation with something else, only through the spacing and absences between terms. Derrida thus denies the great dream of philosophy to uncover universal truth outside of discourse through the ouster of metaphor. Instead, truth itself is wholly constituted by metaphor, a position whose lineage extends from the Ancient Greek Sophist Gorgias to one of Derrida’s most direct intellectual forebears, Friedrich Nietzsche: The ‘thing in itself’ (which is precisely what the pure truth … would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relation of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor… Thus the genesis of language does not proceed logically in any case, and all the material within which the man of truth, the scientist, and the philosopher later work and build, if not derived from never-never land, is at least not derived from the essence of things. 66 In this quotation we can see the concern with constitution—the “genesis of language”—as well as the insistence that its origin does not proceed logically, from the essence of things such as situations or speakers. What Nietzsche and Derrida point to is the reliance of knowledge on discourse and hence metaphor. They thereby channel the question of constitution into a question about the historical constitution of metaphors. Indeed, Derrida’s work can be seen as the rhetorical criticism of metaphysics through the deconstruction of its dependent metaphors.

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Metaphor might even be the “god-term” for Derridean deconstruction since Derrida aims to trouble the presence of knowledge, logic, structure, and the subject. 67 As he states, “Metaphoricity is the logic of contamination and the contamination of logic.” 68 Metaphor is always a movement, a transferal or translation rather than a presence. It is the spacing, the gap between terms, that defines metaphor. Metaphor remains dependent upon differánce and the play of absence and presence, speaker and audience, thought and unthought, said and unsaid. 69 Deconstruction insists on this play between absence and presence or identity and difference whereby each conditions the other. Thus Derrida points out the tensions in metaphysic’s guiding metaphors by illustrating the aporias perpetually at their heart. For instance, in “Plato’s Pharmacy” Derrida deconstructs Plato’s Phaedrus by throwing into relief the tension in the metaphor of the pharmakon. 70 The pharmakon grounds Plato’s distinction between writing and dialectic, between true and false love. Yet the term contains a double meaning of both cure and poison on which Plato’s metaphysical distinction depends. For Derrida, this tension is not resolved in Plato’s thought but remains fundamental despite the contradiction. The presence of the pharamakon as cure depends on its absence as poison and vice-versa. Derrida frequently refers to this as a structure of differance, which stands for both difference (between poison and cure, i.e.) and deferral (the constant play between the two, where one is evoked only by deferring the opposite). By deconstructing a model or system of metaphors, the critic can point to the curious reversals and aporias resulting from the life of the metaphor. This dissertation attempts to uncover these aporias through the analysis of personas. The American dream constitutes certain personas which evince a contradiction in cultural discourse. Seeing animation through the frame of the American dream results in seeing both the genius and the huckster, the wondrous child and

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the naïve childish. In other words, while the terms child and genius remain constant, their signifieds evince a movement that results in paradoxical, contradictory aporias whereby the genius and child mean opposing, even incompatible things. The focus on models allows the critic to account for both difference and sameness in cultural debates. It explains why certain metaphors persist, yet accounts for the differences in their evaluations and interpretations. Such a perspective lies at quite a remove from traditional ideological critique, which often views discourse as simply a reflection of economic interests (or what is sometimes called the base). The American dream, for instance, is not simply the instrumental perpetuation of corporate and capitalist ideology or the mere reflection of “real” material conditions. Collective dreams like the American dream are not representations but, as Benjamin says, expressions. 71 The base does not determine the superstructure; the economy does not determine culture. Instead, cultural practices are the expression of economic conditions, just as a dream might express the sleeper’s physical conditions in fantastical code. 72 As expression, Derrida shows that cultural practices are subject to slippage, to the play of differance. This means that the translations contradict, even critique each other. Nonetheless, the translations still orbit around the same constellation of metaphors. This constellation results from the economy of differences and deferrals on which they are based. That is, the translations may vary and clash but they will vary and clash over the same constellation of metaphors, over similar points of stasis. In the following chapters, I reveal the constellation of metaphors around which the debates over animation, cinema, and Disney revolve. As the cinematic and animistic modes are translated into discourse, a model of communication containing a series of metaphors appears. This model sets the terms of the cultural debates, including the critical as well as celebratory interpretations of consumer practices and the American dream.

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Critical Task What happens to ideology, power, and resistance then? If the critic denies the causal role of ideology and interests in rhetorical constitution, then do they simply ignore them? Is it not a more accurate explanation for the constitution of the American dream simply that it serves the interests of corporate and political elites alike? This instrumental-ideological position has been critiqued throughout this dissertation, yet even if the constitution of the American dream is not determined by powerful interests, the ideological outcome remains. For instance, even if the cause of flânerie is not identification with the bourgeoisie, the outcome of the flaneur’s practices remains so. Benjamin illustrates that the flâneur’s mode encourages empathy with commodities similar to commodity fetishism. In short, seeing the city’s faces as full of deep mystery amounts to (trains people in) seeing commodities as full of a mystical power beyond their use-value. Likewise, animation and cinema do not only change how American culture understands consumerism through the constellated metaphors of a model; they also alter how people consume by translating the modal perceptions of that culture. In Chapters Five and Six, I argue that the modes of cinema and animation train audiences in new forms of perception conducive to the spread of modern consumerism. One of the central questions for historians and sociologists of modern consumerism is why and how consumption, which has existed from time immemorial, achieved in the 20th century a perpetual and insatiable status. That is, why are modern consumers driven to repeatedly consume, to engage in the ever-changing renewal of fashion cycles, despite the lack of added use-value? The answer is obviously related to Marx’s commodity fetishism, but the question remains why did the 20th century witness an explosion and proliferation of fetishism? In the following chapters, I offer a partial explanation for modern consumerism, arguing that the new modes constituted by cinema and animation encourage this perpetual drive

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to consume. The cinematic mode encourages a form of daydreaming that positions consumers to both watch as and be watched by a movie camera. This condition encourages people to contort themselves to the camera and foments a desire to stand-out or fit-in, the two most common explanations for modern consumerism. Furthermore, animistic mimesis trains audiences in a particular form of daydreaming through inanimate objects, encouraging them to see life in commodities. This perception of life in commodities is precisely how Marx describes the commodity fetish. Thus animistic mimesis spreads commodity fetishism by training audiences in the mode necessary to perceive the commodity as fetish. The modes of cinema and animation allow the ideology of a Disney version of the American dream to “make sense” and instructs viewers in the practices of self-display and commodity fetishism responsible for the rise of modern consumerism. These ideological outcomes mean that the critic still needs critique, still must make judgments. Of course, these judgments and critiques are themselves based on metaphor, without any privileged or present access to truth. Yet this realization does not spell impotence for the critical task. Instead, the critic seeks to portray a dialectical image, contrasting the American dream with an image of the past as nightmare. Looking backward, the critic depicts history as a series of catastrophes standing in stark contrast to the promises of the American dream. Benjamin describes the critical task through an analogy with Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus.” The Angel’s face is turned to the past and “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” 73 The materialist historical critic views the past like the Angel, as an ongoing state of emergency and a document of barbarism. 74 Seeing history as a series of problems or catastrophe, the critic constructs a dialectical image of the American dream by contrasting its constituted rhetorical situation with the failures and

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calamities of the historical record. The critic can show that the American dream, as constituted, offers a failed and illusory solution to those rhetorical situations, to the desire and demand for social change. This critical perspective requires a dialectical presentation of history as well. Benjamin faults the traditional Marxist dialectic for too easily establishing oppositions between the negative and positive outcomes of an epoch. That is, they view dialectics as an opposition, hoping that one side of the opposition can oust the other in the historical progression towards synthesis. This notion of dialectics is also critiqued by Derrida, who sees a violent attempt to control the other underwriting such oppositional binaries (i.e. speech is valorized over and against writing, man over and against woman, etc.). Benjamin faults Marxist dialectics with a similar attempt to establish hierarchy through oppositions between the productive, lively, positive, active side and the negative, “abortive, retrograde, and obsolescent.” 75 This move is based on a too-easy determinism. He argues, like Derrida, that this very negation depends on an economic structure; the negative “has its value solely as a background for the delineation of the lively, the positive.” 76 In its stead, Benjamin calls for a notion of dialectics as an economy, the force produced between positive and negative charges. The critical task is not to show the negative alone, hoping to exorcise ideological influence through the force of critique. He calls for a new partition to be applied to the negative “so that, by a displacement of the angle of vision …, a positive element emerges anew in it too—something different than previously signified.” 77 Seeing the positive is crucial to winning the energy of memory, images and imagination for revolutionary change. The critic continues to apply this partition until the dialectical image emerges.

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Constructing this dialectical image of the American dream requires contrasting the positive elements of the metaphor—the desire for social change—with the series of historical catastrophes to which the American dream attempts to respond. The American dream is a collective dream of social change. In the versions examined here, the American dream suggests that change is possible for the determined dreamer who wishes upon a star. The dialectical image counters this air of optimism, this “bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors,” with a pessimism based in history. 78 The American dream’s desire to explain social change is beckoned by the unemployment, homelessness, ecological plight, alienation, separation, and poverty gap caused by capitalist mass consumerism and commodification. The dialectical image shows that the versions of the American dream constructed to overcome this “impasse” are utter failures, responsible for many of the ongoing nightmares. Disney’s story, held up as an exemplar of the American dream, has squelched the possibility of social change, leaving only the empty shell of desire. Disney’s corporatization of the modes of communication has been the monopolization of the means of social change, the commodification of our dreams and desires. The rampant monopolization and consolidation of the media, the tireless and punishing pursuit of copyright lawsuits, the exclusion and ostracization of artists with different dreams, and the widespread feelings of alienation, loneliness, emptiness and boredom all provide the invisible ink that underscores the historical pessimism of this dialectical image. 79 They are what the reader should read between the lines, as the critical backdrop to the version of the American dream presented in this dissertation. This dialectical image of the American dream contrasts the utopian desire spelled out in the metaphor with the series of catastrophes that have left the desire for change in a state of impending foreclosure. Before getting to these implications in Chapters Five, Six, and Eight, we start with the constitution of the Disney version of the American dream.

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Endnotes for Chapter Three 1

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death : Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1986), 10. 2 J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation : Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 15. 3 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet Books, 1964), 63-64. 4 Walter Benjamin, "Doctrine of the Similar," in Selected Writings: Volume 2, Part 2, 1931 - 1934, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999). 5 Ibid., 697. 6 Roman Jakobson, "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000). 7 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation : Understanding New Media, 45. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. They seem to agree that remediation precedes the digital, since they list many examples prior to the digital age. 10 Ibid., 55. 11 Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 69. 12 Ibid., 78, 81. 13 Ibid., 73. 14 Ibid. 15 Samuel Weber, Benjamin's -Abilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 61. 16 Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens," 75. 17 Ibid., 78. 18 Benjamin remarks in the “On Language” essay that translation is not an afterthought but the deep grounding of a theory of language. Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man," in Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 69-70. 19 Appadurai makes the same argument about commodities. Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in The Social Life of Things : Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Appadurai states, “Let us approach commodities as things in a certain situation, a situation that can characterize many different kinds of thing, at different points in their social lives. This means…breaking significantly with the production-dominated Marxian view of the commodity and focusing on its total trajectory from production, through exchange/distribution, to consumption.” Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," 13. 20 Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens," 72. 21 Ibid. 22 Jacques Derrida and Christie McDonald, The Ear of the Other : Otobiography, Transference, Translation : Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 120. 23 Ibid. 24 Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens," 69. 25 Derrida and McDonald, The Ear of the Other : Otobiography, Transference, Translation : Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, 122. 26 Ibid., 124. 27 I concur with Benjamin who sees multiple types of languages beyond the linguistic use of words, such as a language of animation. He says, “There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents.” Benjamin, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man," 62. 28 ———, "The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens," 70. 29 Ibid., 72. 30 Ibid., 74.

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31

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 23. 32 Weber, Benjamin's -Abilities, 118. 33 Ibid., 113. 34 For instance,McLuhan remarks, “Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement.” McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 39. 35 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Michael William Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002), 120. 36 McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 24. 37 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918: With a New Preface (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 38 Lev Manovich, "What Is Digital Cinema?," in The Digital Dialectic : New Essays on New Media, ed. Peter Lunenfeld (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 174. 39 Christian Metz, "The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study," in Apparatus, Cinematographic Apparatus : Selected Writings, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980). 40 Manovich argues that history has come full circle. Cinema, which grew out of animation, is returning to its roots. “Digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements… Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its boundary, only to become one particular case of animation in the end.” Manovich, "What Is Digital Cinema?," 180. I concur with Manovich and believe that this conclusion further justifies the focus of this dissertation. A historical understanding of animation is crucial to the analysis of newer, digital media, including digital cinema. 41 In relation to one of Benjamin’s –abilities, translatability, Weber takes issue with the first English translation of “The Task of the Translator” which reads, “Translation is a mode.” Weber argues that the term “form” is a more appropriate translation because mode suggests a wholeness or harmony in traditional aesthetic theory. Although I find the caution against seeing mode as a harmony rather than an economy as valuable, I believe the concept of “mode” reads more clearly in English than “form.” In English, form suggests a substantive, not a process or an – ability. Perhaps a single translation is a form, but translation as a mode is defined by translatability. At other places in Weber’s book, the use of the term mode seems to jive very well, for instance in the translation chapters where he discusses the difference between meanings and ways or modes of meaning (72-73). In the introduction, he describes iterability as “a distinctive mode” (5). Elsewhere he states, “Language, in short, names a modality rather than a substance or a substantive. It describes the possibility of a particular way of being: that of being communicated, communicability” (117). Weber, Benjamin's -Abilities. 42 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003). 43 Weber, Benjamin's -Abilities, 42. 44 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (London: St. Edmundsbury Press, 1996), 178. 45 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics ([Northampton, MA]: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993). 46 Eric S. Jenkins, "Seeing Katrina: Perspectives of Judgment in a Cultural/Natural Disaster," Visual Communication Quarterly 14, no. 2 (2007). ———, "My Ipod, My Icon: How and Why Do Images Become Icons?," Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 5 (2008). 47 Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 176. 48 Ibid., 163. 49 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation : Understanding New Media. 50 Eric S. Jenkins, "Wii Extended: Video Games, Gender, and the Narcissistic Desire," (2008). [Unpublished manuscript]

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51

As Susan Buck-Morss explains: The Passagen-Werk was to be a ‘materialist philosophy of history,’ constructed with ‘the utmost concreteness’ out of the historical material itself, the outdated remains of those nineteenth-century buildings, technologies, and commodities that were the precursors of his own era. As the ‘ur-phenomena’ of modernity, they were to provide the material necessary for an interpretation of history’s most recent configurations…Benjamin’s goal was to take materialism so seriously that the historical phenomena themselves were brought to speech.” Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1989), 4. 52 Walter Benjamin, "The Flâneur," in The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1999), 418. [M1a,3] 53 Ibid., 429. [M6a,4] 54 Benjamin remarks about a favored flâneur pastime of walking turtles on leashes through the Arcades. He says this is indicative of the flâneur’s pace. Ibid., 422. [M3,8] He states, “We know that, in the course of flânerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment.” Benjamin, "The Flâneur," 419. [M2,4] 55 Benjamin, "The Flâneur," 418-19. [M1a,3] 56 Ibid., 416. [M1,2] 57 Ibid., 419. [M2,2] 58 Ibid., 417 [M1,5] 59 Ibid. Benjamin discusses the city becoming interior throughout this section on the flâneur. See Ibid., 423. [M3a,4] 60 Ibid, 417. [M1,5] 61 Ibid, 420. [M2,8] 62 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 29. 63 Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 229. 64 Paul Ricœur, The Rule of Metaphor : Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto ; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 243. 65 Ibid., 241. 66 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," in Philosophy and Truth : Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 82-83. 67 God-terms designate the ultimate terms in a rhetorical argument, on which values of argument are based. See Richard M. Weaver, "Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric," in The Ethics of Rhetoric (Chicago,: H. Regnery Co., 1953). 68 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University Press, 1981), 149. 69 Franke points out that the Latin etymology refers to translation and the Greek refers to transport. William Franke, "Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance," Philosophy & Rhetoric 33, no. 2 (2000): 139. 70 Derrida, Dissemination. 71 Benjamin states, “The superstructure is the expression of the infrastructure. The economic conditions under which society exists are expressed in the superstructure—precisely as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection but its expression in the content of dreams, which, from a causal point of view, it may be said to ‘condition.’ The collective, from the first, expresses the conditions of its life. These find their expression in the dream…. Walter Benjamin, "Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological Nihlism, Jung," in The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1999), 392.[K2,5] 72 ———, "On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress," in The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1999), 460. [N1a,6] 73 ———, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257. 74 Ibid., 256, 57. Benjamin argues that the working class’s anger and spirit is nourished by such images “of enslaved ancestors.” 260 75 Benjamin, "On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress," 459.[N1a,3] 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid.

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Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 1 1927-1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 216. 79 Benjamin states, “The events surrounding the historian, and in which he himself takes part, will underlie his presentation in the form of a text written in invisible ink.” Benjamin, "On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress," 476. [N11,3]

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Chapter Four: The Disney Version This chapter starts the rhetorical analysis of the Disney version of the American dream to illustrate the constitution of a differently understood rhetorical situation in the middle of the 20th century. Disney is a well-known figure of the American dream. In biographies, the news media, and corporate discourse, Disney is repeatedly portrayed as representative of the American dream. The purpose is to illustrate how Walt Disney and animation are translated into a specific version of the American dream. This version differs starkly from the typical Alger-mold, as best represented in early 20th century rhetoric through the figure of Henry Ford. This version suggests that social change results from dreaming, that all it takes is a dream to make one’s dreams come true. The theory of social change, what I call a magical theory of social change, underwrites the various stories of Disney’s life as they circulate in biographies and popular media. My analysis of these stories reveals that this interpretation of social change relies upon a model of communication as transfer. The transfer is a dual transfer, from artist to image and image to audience. The stories maintain that Walt Disney’s dreams came true because he transferred his dream to the silver screen and, in turn, those dreams were transferred to the culture at large. Disney changed the world, and, in turn, the world translates Disney into a story of social change. Disney is translated through the frame of the American dream. One final note, at times I use “Walt” to refer to Walt Disney in order to distinguish between the person and the corporation Disney. I apologize for the colloquial nature of this usage, but it is the easiest way to distinguish

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the two. We begin with how the Disney version of the American dream shifts the terms for understanding social change. A Magical Theory of Social Change The association between Disney and the American dream is so widespread to be almost taken for granted. Walt’s life story, the corporation’s rise to prominence, the art form of animation, and the themes of Disney features are all tagged with the metaphor of the American dream. As Kathy Jackson says in her introduction to a collection of news media interviews, “Disney seemed to be the personification of this American moment and the American Dream.” 1 The perception of Disney as representative of the American dream persists today. In the international audience study entitled Dazzled by Disney, respondents from every country linked Disney and the American dream. 2 The response of a 19 year old male from Cyprus is typical. “Disney shows us the U.S. is the best country in the world. U.S. is a dream country, and you can do whatever you want in the U.S.” 3 Not every reference to the American dream is so upbeat; many take Disney’s American dream as proof positive of the delusional and dangerous nature of their products. Yet critics and supporters alike repeatedly see a connection between Disney and the dream. Perhaps the strongest source of this connection is Walt Disney. Many accounts tell his life story according to the typical American template; he was a man with a dream who found a medium to express it and the know-how to make it a reality. Walt came from a humble Midwestern upbringing, priming his story for an Alger-esque treatment. By 1934, the New York Times Magazine would call Walt the “Horatio Alger of the cinema … who through industry, courage, and all the other Algerian virtues achieved international recognition.” 4 That same year Fortune Magazine would proclaim, “Enough has been written about Disney’s life and hard times already to stamp the bald, Algeresque outlines of his career as familiarly on the minds of many

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Americans as the career of Henry Ford or Abraham Lincoln.” 5 Today, Nicholas Sammond argues that Walt’s Alger-story remains the most enduring element of the Disney legend. 6 Through the repeated corporate and popular portrayals, Walt is perceived as “the archetypal American rags-to-riches story.” 7 In addition, various scholars and historians see Walt as the personification and affirmation of the American dream. 8 Gregory Waller, for instance, notes the persistent linkage, “Seen through the rose-tinted prism of popular journalism, Disney’s life story became a homespun mythic saga and a reassuring affirmation of the American Dream.” 9 What is Walt’s dream, according to popular accounts? The short answer is to make animation into a respected art form. Biographers and journalists frequently trace this dream to his preHollywood days in Kansas City. They retell Walt’s story of the train ride he took from Kansas City to Hollywood to get a fresh start in animation. A man on the train asked him what was his business in Hollywood, and Walt replied “I make animated cartoons.” Apparently, the gentleman looked at Walt as if he was crazy. Walt put it this way, “It was like saying, ‘I sweep up the latrines.’” The incident angered him, and he later recounted that he thought of that man on the night Snow White premiered to record-breaking box office success in 1937. 10 Many friends and co-workers also report that Walt believed animation would become a new art form, one beyond the silly gags and crude drawings of its early days. 11 As artist Millard Sheets reported after a conversation with Walt, “Walt felt that a new art would be born, a new concept of motion pictures. This was his whole dream.” 12 Walt’s dream and the medium for its expression were also tied together in popular discourse. He reportedly dreamed of making animation into a respected art form, and animation is often linked to dreams. The connection dates to the earliest animated movies. Windsor McCay, considered by most to be the first and best early animator, called his debut series Dreams of

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Rarebit Fiend, after his comic book of the same name. 13 Another early pioneer, John Bray, released his first work in 1913 entitled The Artists Dream. 14 These cartoons used the dream as a framing device for the audience to indicate they were witnessing events taking place in a dream. Donald Crafton notes that the dream framing device is one of the most important animation codes, frequently used to demarcate between fantasy and reality. 15 Even Disney’s first series, based on Alice in Wonderland, employed a dream sequence. 16 The connection also stems from similar qualities of animation and dreams, especially as dreams were understood at the time of animation’s emergence. Just as in dreams, images in animation seem to move freely and metamorphize at will. Animation can make any image come to life, can show boundless forms of motion, and is not limited by the strictures of reality or the demands of fidelity. As Robert D. Feild remarked in his 1942 study of and homage to The Art of Walt Disney, “There is virtually no effect it cannot achieve, no deception it cannot penetrate. Forms can be made to fade in and out of one another with ghostlike impunity; gravity can be ignored; the whole physical world can be reduced to the stuff of dreams.” 17 Furthermore, Sigmund Freud influential theory of dreams, popular at the time, described dreams as expressions of wish fulfillment. Animation likewise seemed to provide the means for collectively portraying such fantastical wishes. 18 Whatever the animator wishes may be projected on the screen, just as whatever the dreamer wishes can find shape in their imagination. Noting such similarities, author and poet E.E. Cummings declared in 1930 that animation was the language of “Miracles and Dreams.” 19 In 1936, critic and Broadway playwright William Kozlenko connected both the medium of the artist and the pleasure of the audience with dreams; both the image transfer and the audience transfer were like dreams. The artist “crosses the bridge” into a world

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of “unlimited movement, which is of course, the dream,” and like dreams, audiences enjoyed the images as a form of wish fulfillment. 20 So far, Disney’s connection to the American dream seems typical, following the Alger mold and composing a story of a fantasy become reality. Yet the Disney version of the American dream departs and diverges from the typical American success myth exemplified in an earlier version of the American dream told through the story of Henry Ford. Translated into the American dream template, Disney marks a shift in the rhetorical constellation composing the American dream. Prior to Disney, Ford was the primary example of the American dream. Discussions of Henry Ford cannot seem to resist the dream metaphor. William Simonds portrays the Model-T as Ford’s dream car, pursued through his accompanying dreams of mass production. 21 Ford was a “man with a dream,” who “typified Americanism.” 22 For Charles Murphy, “He was the businessman, source of the new economic dispensation, the embodiment of the American Dream—the farm boy who became a billionaire.” 23 James Brough speaks of Ford’s dreams of a universal car, of vertical integration, and even of a mass produced tractor! 24 Ford’s associates took up the dream discourse as well. Reflecting on Ford’s employment as a young man at the Edison Company, Alexander Dow declared, “Henry even at this time had the dream of an American-made automobile to be in common use.” 25 Likewise, Ford advertisers never ceased to roll-out the dream metaphor. As late as 1963, Ford ads pitched the fancies of their founder, declaring, “Henry Ford had a dream that if a rugged, simple car could be made in sufficient quantity, it would be cheap enough for the average family to buy.” 26 Ford contributed significantly to the public perception of his life through interviews and selfpublished books. Importantly, this perception was quite distant from the persona of a typical dreamer. Ford preferred the populist persona of Progressive era America, including its worldly

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pragmatism and dedication to work. If Ford subscribed to dreaming as a metaphor of social change at all, then his explanation certainly minimized the import of dreams. For him, work, much more than dreams, drove progress. He so frequently repeated Thomas Edison’s saying, “Success is one-tenth inspiration and nine-tenths perspiration,” that Ginny Olson catalogs it under “Fordisms.” 27 Ford deeply admired Edison’s determination and a few of Edison’s early words of encouragement motivated him to work harder on his Quadricycle. 28 Ford glowingly proclaimed, “The American spirit of endeavor as represented in its fullness by Thomas Alva Edison is the real wealth of the nation.” 29 His admiration reveals the fundamental importance of work in Ford’s theory of social change. About one-third of Olson’s Fordisms stress the centrality of work. These include: “There will never be a system invented which will do away with the necessity for work.” “When a man is free to work he has achieved the truest success and satisfaction.” “The most valuable commodity in the U.S. is going to be old-fashioned common sense and work.” “America is not a land of money but of wealth—not a land of rich people but of successful workers.” “We are in a different era and we have got to face it and recognize there is only one thing in the world that makes prosperity and that is work.” 30 In all these sayings, Ford sounds like a devotee to “the spirit of modern capitalism” as analyzed by Max Weber and epitomized by Benjamin Franklin’s penny-saving philosophy. 31 This spirit of modern capitalism values work for its own sake because work ensures personal virtue and drives social change. Thus, Ford and the automobile are frequently translated into a version of the American dream that emphasizes labor and work and includes a whole system of metaphors such as the laborer, the consumer, adventure, action, motion, self, machine, man, woman, choice, purpose, and transport. Throughout this string of metaphors, the emphasis on work is apparent. The Ford

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version is thus frequently told according to the typical, Algeresque template emphasizing hard work as the means to climb the social ladder. A different constellation of metaphors coalesce around the Disney version: magic, fantasy, children, genius, family, art, culture, image, imagination, and emotion. One of the first and harshest Disney critics, Richard Schickel, was also one of the first to note the constellation: There were certain words—‘warm,’ ‘wonderful,’ ‘amazing,’ ‘dream,’ ‘magical’—that attached themselves to Walt Disney’s name like parasites in the later years of his life. They are all debased words, words that have lost most of their critical usefulness and, indeed, the power to evoke any emotional response beyond a faint queasiness. They are hucksters words. 32 Schickel’s utter contempt proceeds from his belief that Disney perverts the American dream. In Disney’s American dream, the theory of social change is quite different from Ford’s version and can be summarized as “all it takes is a dream” or the magical theory of social change. The translation of the American dream through Disney drops Ford’s emphasis on hard work. Rather than ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration, Disney reverses the formula, placing the emphasis on the dreams rather than the work. Rather than work, dreams require magic—the magic of having a dream. Schickel states in his aptly titled The Disney Version: Walt Disney belonged to a special, American breed, middle class and often Midwestern in origin. He was the sort of man who possesses and is possessed by a dream that seems to be particularly and peculiarly of this land of a time only recently past. It is a dream now much satirized but, for all that, no less common among the middle-aging generation. Simply summarized it is that ‘it only takes one good idea…’” 33 In more ways than one, this interpretation of social change is sheer delusion. This delusion lies at the root of Schickel’s beef with Disney. He correctly acknowledges that the version overemphasizes the possibilities and downplays the obstacles. Yet the idea that “if you can dream it, you can do it,” that “all your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them,” that “when you wish upon a star your dreams come true,” and that there are not “any

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heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true” became the popular interpretation of Disney’s accomplishment nonetheless. 34 In both Walt and the company’s rhetoric, this “all it takes is a dream” motif was a common vehicle. The popular media and academic takes often advance this version as well. Scholar Luca Raffaelli marvels at this new articulation of the American dream: “It is truly remarkable how Disneyan discourse manages to merge with the American model… Cinderella’s dream is an ambitious one: but everything is possible in America so long as you hold onto your dreams, as long as you don’t throw away the opportunity when it comes….” 35 Shortly after Walt Disney’s death in 1966, this version of the American dream was still circulating. Journalist Norman Vincent Peale hailed Disney as proof of the power of positive thinking: “In America motivated dreams can come true… When you get discouraged and feel like throwing in the sponge, just remember Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse.” 36 Even hard-headed business analysts credit the dream as the primary mechanism responsible for Disney’s success. For instance, Bill Capodagli and Lyn Jackson, authors of The Disney Way, conclude, “Far from being a hindrance, dreaming was the wellspring of Disney’s creativity.” 37 Of course, such biased parties as the media, corporate marketers, and business analysts should rarely be taken at their word. Having a dream does not guarantee either success or even the dream’s realization, and corporate hucksters benefit from peddling beliefs otherwise. I do not deny this interpretation is huckster-ish as long as we do not deny that the interpretation has found uptake in popular rhetoric nevertheless. The question of this dissertation is how—how did rhetorical constitution take place? How did the accepted version of the American dream change under Disney, and why were terms such as magic, children, family, culture, genius, uncle, imagination, and dream so frequently attached to Disney and this version of the American

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dream? Assuming that this version and these metaphors resulted simply from the impositions of hucksters fails to explain the cultural investment and uptake. As argued throughout Chapter Two, such an ideological explanation ignores the active process of reception and hence misses the desires inspiring the rhetoric’s continued circulation. The ongoing translation of Disney according to these metaphors operates through a certain logic, an economy, but this logic is not reducible to the interests and intents of the powerful alone. Indeed, while Ford’s interpretation of the American dream and social change led to some utopian predictions, Disney’s version is utopian at its heart, and this utopianism has attracted many people. Happiness, joy, magic, wonder—these are the payoffs from any utopian scheme. Disney summons us to a prior age when mystery remained and magic ruled. Plus, the notion that ideas can shape reality is the utopian dream par excellence. As Brian Sibley apprehends: Walt Disney was essentially a Utopian. He once said – and it is quintessentially a utopian view – ‘I can’t believe that there are any heights that can’t be scaled by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true’. It suggests that in real life man is infinitely perfectable – just like the art of animation; just like Mickey Mouse. 38 Importantly, this utopian dreaming is also a great source of pleasure, a fact on which Disney capitalizes to the tune of trillions in profits and a massive corporate empire. As early as 1936, Kozlenko recognized the pleasure of animation’s transfer: What takes place before our eyes on the screen, takes place similarly in our dreams, and the pleasure we get from witnessing how easily Mickey Mouse … solves the most difficult problems in an almost haphazard way, is a pleasure transferable to ourselves. 39 Of course, Walt Disney was not naïve enough to believe that all dreams came true; that simply imagining something turns it into reality. Yet, like the various versions of the American dream seen through the frame of Disney, he did place the emphasis on dreaming, downplaying Ford’s insistence on the role of work. Disney characters do not labor; they “whistle while they work.” Although the Disney Studio employed over 1,000 workers and hence required a

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specialized division of labor similar to Fordism, observers insist that the fun atmosphere and the creative freedom were starkly different from the mind-numbing and spirit-sapping repetition of a Ford factory. The studio was repeatedly lauded by employees and the press for being an open, democratic, and fun environment. Feild describes a “pleasurable” workplace with an emphasis on “freedom.” 40 Fantasia star and esteemed music critic Deems Taylor exclaimed, “How can you grow up in this atmosphere, for God’s sake? It’s like living in Santa Claus’s workshop.” 41 Capodagli and Lynn claim that such a work atmosphere is part of the secret of Disney’s way. After a major labor strike in 1941, many employees lamented the lost, youthful spirit of the studio. One anonymous artist said: The spirit is irretrievably gone… You can’t imagine what fun it was to work at Disney’s… If you had an idea you could shout ‘Eureka’ down the halls and get paid for your idea… Oh well, it was only a dream, anyway… We are not made of the stuff of dreams today. We are the masses, each cast from a single mold…. 42 This employee’s dream may be dead, but the “all it takes is a dream’ interpretation of social change lives on. Walt summarized the interpretation, “Everybody can make their dreams come true. It takes… a dream – faith in it – and hard work. But that’s not quite true because it’s so much fun you hardly realize it’s work.” 43 The strikers, along with the inkers, painters, assistants, secretaries, and janitors at Disney, probably did not share Walt’s working pleasure. Undeniably, producing Disney animation requires the hard and often joyless labor of thousands. Yet for Disney, having a dream was the most important element because, in his dream, the dream and the medium of its realization were the same thing. Walt dreamed of making animation into an art and achieved this dream by making animation. The magic lived through both the technological wonder of making animation and the finished product projected on the screen. The doing was the dream, and the finished product communicated that dream. This theory of social change certainly

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requires labor, but laboring to dream. The labor is a form of communication—laboring to transfer images to surfaces and ideas to audiences. American Story: A Man with a Dream, Medium, and Know-How The Disney version of the American dream maintains that social change occurs by having a dream. It advances a magical theory of social change, one accompanied by a constellation of metaphors including fantasy, magic, dreams, wishes, emotions, children, geniuses, art, culture, and imagination. The story of Disney’s success is repeatedly adduced as proof of the American dream to the point where Disney’s rise has become an accepted version. Some general features of this story persist through all the various retellings. Disney is portrayed as a man with a dream who transfers his dream through a medium to an audience. Thus this version of the American dream is based upon a model of communication as transfer. Capodagli and Lynn describe this transfer as the unique characteristic of Disney’s talent: “It is no easy matter to convey a dream. Dreams are, by nature, deeply personal experiences. But true to his imaginative genius, Walt Disney was able to transform his dreams into stories that effectively articulated his vision to others.” 44 Famous Russian movie director Sergei Eisenstein also saw Disney’s genius as one of transfer. He marveled at how Disney “transports into one world what he has seen in another, into the spiritual world, what he has seen in the physical world.” 45 Although those who connect animation and transfer are numerous, the most well-known and widely cited depiction of the practices and principles of Disney animation is entitled The Illusion of Life. 46 Two respected veteran animators, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, penned this corporate-sponsored manual on Disney’s technique. The “illusion of life” style they outline represents the most common way to describe Disney’s techné. 47 In the introduction, Thomas and Johnston spell out the importance of communication and the model of transfer:

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Walt was basically a communicator, and in the animated film he found astounding potential for expressing his ideas. The cartoon drawing always had been a very simple and direct graphic form, and whether it was for social comment or just amusement it had to present a unified, single idea with nothing complicated, extraneous, or contradictory in its makeup. When the cartoon was transferred to film these elements still applied, and nothing was drawn that was not part of the idea. 48 Here, Ollie and Johnston describe the first transfer, from the artist to the image, what I call a surface or technical transfer. The first transfer includes the series of transfers from story-idea to drawing to celluloid to movie screen. The artists engage in a series of transfers to create an illusion of life. Thomas and Johnston quote director Dave Hand: Our entire medium is transference of thought. The thought is created first in the mind of the storyman … then transferred to the director, who attempts to transfer it to the animator. This is where the big problem of transference comes, because the animator then attempts to transfer it pictorially. He takes it out of the intangible, and places it in the tangible form, in picture, for transference back to the mind of the audience …. 49 Since each second of animated action requires twenty-four drawings and each drawing must be drawn on paper, traced onto celluloid, sometimes painted, synchronized with the sound, and finally projected onto the screen, an animated movie requires a large number of such transfers. The sheer number of transfers necessitated an extensive industrial studio, employing over onethousand during Disney’s height in the 1940s. According to Thomas and Johnston’s popular narrative, Disney animation evolved from the early years (the 1920s) to the Golden Age of the 1940s by developing an illusion of life style. Their earlier style featured narratives based on gags and drawings wedded to two-dimensional graphic narrative. The term “animate” indicates movement, and many of the early cartoon movies were simply that—moving lines. The Mickey Mouse of the Steamboat Willie era (See Figure #1), for instance, was drawn by tracing circles from a quarter and two nickels. Mickey was composed of flat lines for the flat page. The novelty and attraction of this early animation stemmed from seeing drawings move, adding the fourth dimension to the two-dimensional

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compositions. The figures, however, lacked three-dimensionality, depth and life-like realism because the early artists draw from a heritage of graphic illustrations in books. 50 Artistic and technological limitations restricted the characters to flat lines on flat pages. In response, animators relied on a continuous series of gags—pranks and jokes of the slapstick variety heavy with bodily humor. Gags de-emphasize character and instead foreground the novelty of motion. Gags rely on motion for their comic effects. In Steamboat Willie, Mickey cranks on a goat’s tail, tugs and smashes a cat, squeezes a goose, plays xylophone on a cow’s teeth, and molests a group of piglets and their mother. When prodded, each animal emits a noise synchronized to the music. Gags were an effective vehicle to deliver the novelty of movement but were more limited with three-dimensional characters inhabiting the four-dimensional space of cinema. The first step in Disney’s evolution was rubber-hose drawing (see Figure #2), which brought curves and bends to the straight and flat drawings. The rubber-hose look enables a better illusion of movement but makes the characters’ limbs look like wet noodles. The movement looks appears stiff but at the expense of realism; the figures lack depth and weight. According to Thomas and Johnston, Walt hated the rubber-hose approach because he was in pursuit of an “illusion of life.” 51 Many Disney animators have told the same story numerous times, but I will let Walt issue the charge: Our most important aim is to develop definite personalities in our cartoon characters. We don’t want them to be just shadows, for merely as moving figures they would provoke no emotional response from the public. Nor do we want them to parallel or assume the aspects of human beings or human actions. We invest them with life by endowing them with human weaknesses which we exaggerate in a humorous way. Rather than a caricature of individuals, our work is a caricature of life. 52 So, the story goes, the Disney animators sought tirelessly to develop a know-how capable of producing this illusion of life. Disney initiated a series of drawing classes focused on the analysis of actual movement. Walt insisted, “I definitely feel that we cannot do fantastic things based on the real unless we first know the real.” 53 Over time, the animators developed a language to

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describe their art. The first key term is “squash and stretch,” which designates the style of character drawing that replaces rubber hose. Even Mickey underwent squashing and stretching into his familiar pear-shape as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia. Thomas and Johnston call “squash and stretch” the “most important discovery” because it solved the rigidity of movement while providing the figures with a sense of three-dimensionality. Squash and stretch (see Figure #3) describes two things: the range of shapes for the character and the principle of the movement. The character could range from a squashed position, as if being flattened by a heavy object, to a stretched position, as if trying to reach the fruit on the tallest branch. The characters moved by oscillating between squashing and stretching, similar to the way real bodies move under the pressure of their own weight. The figures kept a constant volume and simply oscillate between squashes and stretches. Perhaps Thomas and Johnston can better explain: Immediately the animators tried to outdo each other in making drawings with more squash and stretch … eyes squinted shut and eyes popped open; the sunken cheeks of an ‘inhale’ were radically different from the ballooned cheeks of a blowing action … Through the mid-thirties, everyone was making two drawings for every conceivable action, and by working back and forth between the squash position and the stretch we found we could make each position stronger in both action and drawing. 54 According to Thomas and Johnston, other important advancements for the illusion of life included the techniques known as anticipation, follow-through, overlapping action, and secondary action. Each technique mimics real movement. Anticipation develops the audience’s expectation for what is about to happen by preceding every major move with a set-up move held for a count. Follow-through is basically the reverse, accentuating the ending of a movement. Disney animators accentuated and exaggerated people’s real movements of anticipation and follow-through. The animators also learn to draw movement in arcs and avoid “twins,” two limbs in the same position or performing the same gesture. They learned all of these principles from watching and studying actual movement, like a later-day Eadweard Muybridge.

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The illusion of life was also enhanced by the use of actors with natural voices, the addition of color, better storytelling, and, most importantly, the multi-plane camera. 55 The multi-plane camera arranged the background, foreground, and figure drawings on six different levels, giving the pictures an illusion of three-dimensional depth similar to live-action cinema. The camera could then move within these levels, allowing close-ups and long shots as well as a variety of cinematic framings. The multi-plane camera enabled animation to leave behind the world of graphic narrative for the world of the silver screen. The viewer’s perspective can be adjusted in relation to the world of the screen by changing the angle and framing of the multi-plane camera, moving in closer to or further from the background or foreground arranged on separate planes. The illusion of life not only directed new developments in the techniques necessary for the first transfer, it also motivated a new goal for the animator, directing them to seek communication through a second transfer. The illusion of life aimed to create an emotional stirring in the audience, to entice them to transfer their emotions and feelings to the moving drawings. Early in their introduction, Thomas and Johnston make clear the importance of this second transfer to their art form. They express astonishment that “animation had the power to make the audience actually feel the emotions of a cartoon figure.” 56 They insist, “Conveying a certain feeling is the essence of communication in any art form. The response of the viewer is an emotional one, because art speaks to the heart. This gives animation an almost magical ability to reach inside any audience and communicate with all peoples everywhere, regardless of language barriers.” 57 The transfer of emotions from the audience to the character was Disney’s essential goal because without it the illusion of life would fail. The characters, no matter how refined the techniques, remained obviously artificial, drawn caricatures not real animals or people. Seeing the characters as living required a high level of audience investment and participation, like an

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enthymeme or a play. “Fortunately, animation works in the same way. It is capable of getting inside the heads of its audiences, into their imaginations. The audiences will make our little cartoon character sad—actually, far sadder than we could ever draw him—because in their minds that character is real. He lives in their imaginations.” 58 At times, the illusion of life was equated with realism, and some such as Eisenstein, famed art critic Erwin Panofsky, and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer critiqued Disney for abandoning the anarchic and fantastical early years for more realistic depictions like Bambi. 59 Yet in the illusion of life, the “life” part does not refer to the actually existing lifeworld but the life of feeling, the life of emotion. Bambi lives in and through spectators’ imaginations, through their emotional transfers. Almost as if responding to Eisenstein’s critique, Thomas and Johnston remark, “If we had drawn real deer in Bambi there would have been so little acting potential that no one would have believed the deer really existed as characters. But because we drew what people imagine a deer looks like, with a personality to match, the audience accepted our drawings as being completely real.” 60 So, the illusion of life technique is not strict realism; instead, it seeks to balance caricature and portraiture, illusion and life, imagination and animation. Disney’s search for more realism is due to the desire to give the fantasy-worlds a level of plausibility. It is realism in the sense of Constantin Stanislavski’s naturalistic acting method. The animated character must appear to be an actual character, driven by internal motivations, just as the actor should seek to “become” the role. Indeed, Disney animators studied Stanislavski, relied on live-action video of actors, and the illusion of life style is also called “acting animation.” 61 The best animators were called the “best actors,” those who could feel and know the internal dynamics of a character. Animator Bill Tytla is considered the master of this approach. Donald Graham, the instructor of Disney’s live-

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movement art classes, described Tytla’s approach to acting-animation in these terms: “He does not animate forms but symbols of forces… this is a revolutionary conception… instead of seeing a character as a round body, beautifully modeled in drawing, he sees the animating forces inherent in it.” 62 The plausibility of the character’s internal motivations, of their emotion, bestows an illusion of life. The realism is a realism of feeling. Such realism allows the audience to identify with the characters and establish an emotional connection. People laugh at the two-dimensional Felix the Cat, but it is difficult to feel sorry for him when he gets banged or bruised yet again. The dwarves, on the other hand, create many a teary-eye when they express their sadness over Snow White’s passing through realistic sounds and gestures. Mimicking reality is necessary to allow the audience to ignore the artifice and connect themselves to the fantasy-world and characters on the screen. In Thomas and Johnston’s words, “Audiences have to be impressed, absorbed, involved, taken out of themselves, made to forget their own worlds and lose themselves in ours for cartoons to succeed.” 63 The realism is not the actuality of the waking-world but is instead the plausibility of the world of dreams. At times, in grappling to explain this position, Disney animators referred to this realism as “conviction” or “sincerity.” 64 In order to spark identification and thus move the audience, they must be convinced the characters are sincere and internally-motivated, even if the life is fantastical. As such, Disney rejected strict realism and insisted on the connection between realism and exaggeration in animation. Sadness should appear plausibly sad but be exaggerated to the point of “a caricature of realism.” 65 The realism allows audience identification but not through the simple replication of live-action. Walt clarifies in a memo to the animators:

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A good many of the men misinterpret the idea of studying the actual motion. They think it is our purpose merely to duplicate these things … Comedy, to be appreciated, must have contact with the audience… By contact, I mean that there must be a familiar, subconscious association. Somewhere, or at some time, the audience has felt, or met with, or seen, or dreamt, the situation pictured… Therefore, the true interpretation of caricature is the exaggeration of an illusion of the actual, possible or probable. 66 In short, the illusion of life depends upon a dialectic between illusion and life, an economy of semblance and play, of movement and emotion, of surface and audience. As Michael Barrier concludes about Disney animation, “[F]antasy and fact do not merely coexist; they reinforce each other continuously.” 67 This dialectic underwrites the interpretation of Disney animation through a model of communication as dual transfer. The dialectic operates by balancing the extremes of realistic and plausible life in the characters and the exaggerated and caricatured illusion of the animated world. Exaggeration and caricature is the stuff of fantasy, of dreams. These illusions provide the audience with the pleasure of fantasy, tapping into their desires for another world where things do happen differently and dreams can come true. The illusion signals entrance into the world of the imagination, a world, as we shall see, perceived to be connected to children. The balance between imagination and plausibility allows the cartoons to move beyond seven-minute series of gags into the realms of narrative, plot and character. In short, the illusion of life transfers real emotion into the fantastical world. Walt credits Disney’s success with precisely this—the ability to give their features “heart,” “pathos,” and “hit [the audience] in an emotional way.” 68 This is a form of communication, a way of transferring the ideas of story and artist to the drawings, the screen, and finally to the audience. To some, such as Thomas and Johnston, this emotional transfer is the very essence of communication. 69 To others, such as Raffaelli, the art of communication is the very essence of Disney:

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For Disney, art was, above all, the art of communication: to communicate in the sense of being able to make oneself understood; to tell a story and express the feelings … clearly; and to find, without renouncing artistic potential, the way and the form through which the images, the music and the text can come to touch the most sensitive emotional chords. 70 Moving On: Translating the Transfer In biographies and other popular accounts, Disney is held up as living proof of the possibility of the American dream. The Disney version of the American dream proffers a magical theory of social change, suggesting that dreams come true for those who create and hold onto their dreams. In these stories, Walt Disney was a determined dreamer, who followed his dream and transferred it to the silver screen. Those dreams were subsequently transferred to his audience, forever changing the cultural landscape. This version of the American dream is constituted through metaphor. Biographers and others who tell the Disney story portray Disney through the frame of the American dream; they see Disney as evidence of the possibility of achieving your dreams. This metaphor works through an economy between the real and fantasy, life and illusion, emotional and surface transfers. Yet, these biographers and social commentators are not the causal origin of this version of the American dream. Their works verify the constitution of a new version of the American dream, but the Disney version is not constituted by these works alone. Seeing Disney as the American dream is a later metaphor, one that occurs after the effects of Disney have already taken place. Biographers and other observers view the cultural and social responses to Disney and then translate those responses through the metaphor of the American dream. Disney, we might say, occupies the locus of the literal in the metaphoric structure and the American dream occupies the figurative locus—Disney is the American dream. A constitutive theory recognizes, however, that Disney itself is a metaphor, one that in these tellings of the American dream is forgotten and taken to be literal. To understand how this version of the American dream is constituted, we must

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turn to another metaphor. We must ask: How did the culture see Disney? If Disney is the American dream, what is Disney? The following two chapters examine the cultural modes of cinema and animation through which Disney was perceived. These modes present narrators with the material to translate into the Disney version of the American dream. As we shall see, these modes shape cultural perception in such ways that the Disney version and a model of communication as transfer “make sense.” The cinematic mode and animistic mimesis work through an economy which readily articulates to the model of communication and its associated constellation of metaphors including dream, fantasy, magic, wonder, innocence, child, art, and genius. Not everyone, however, is as sanguine as these American dream narrators presented in this chapter. Others see through the same modes, utilize the same series of metaphors, and shudder at the prospects. Through the various translations of these modes, Disney has become the centerpiece in an ongoing debate over the social effects of entertainment media in a consumer culture. Therefore, after illustrating the modes in the following two chapters, I take up again the rhetorical analysis of Disney by addressing this cultural debate in Chapter Seven. I illustrate how the debate is underwritten by a model of communication as transfer, translated from the mode of animation. The model portrays a rhetorical situation with two major personas involved in the communicative transfer—the child and the genius. In short, the model conceives of the speaker as an artistic genius (or a huckster) transferring dreams to an audience of children (or the childish). Essentially, this debate worries over a single fundamental question: What is happening to our dreams?

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Endnotes for Chapter Four 1

Kathy Merlock Jackson, "Introduction," in Walt Disney: Conversations, ed. Kathy Merlock Jackson, Conversations with Comic Artists (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), xii. 2 Janet Wasko, Mark Phillips, and Eileen R. Meehan, Dazzled by Disney? : The Global Disney Audiences Project (London ; New York: Leicester University Press, 2001), 50-51. 3 Ibid., 51. 4 Quoted in Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 47. 5 Ibid. 6 Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 26. 7 Ibid., 30. 8 See Jackson, "Introduction," xii. Sean Griffin, Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the inside Out (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 23. Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, 31. 9 Gregory A. Waller, "Mickey, Walt, and Film Criticism from Steamboat to Bambi," in The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology, ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980), 53. 10 The story is reported in numerous sources. See for instance Stefan Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story (New York: Scribner, 1997), 108. 11 Another example of Walt’s dream comes from Luca Raffaelli. “Walt’s dream was to tell the world wonderful stories just as his mother had told him in the happiest days of his childhood, but to tell them to a crowd, a crowd which would become united thanks to those stories and to his films.” Luca Raffaelli, "Disney, Wanrer Bros. And Japanese Animation: Three World Views," in A Reader in Animation Studies, ed. Jayne Pilling (London: J. Libbey, 1997), 119. 12 Quoted in J. Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 297. 13 John Canemaker, "Winsor Mccay," in The American Animated Cartoon : A Critical Anthology, ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980). 14 J. Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12. 15 Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928, University of Chicago Press ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 342. 16 Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story, 57. 17 Robert D. Feild, The Art of Walt Disney (New York,: The Macmillan Company, 1942), 15. 18 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1998). 19 E.E. Cummings, "Miracles and Dreams," in The American Animated Cartoon : A Critical Anthology, ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980). 20 William Kozlenko, "The Animated Cartoon and Walt Disney," in The Emergence of Film Art; the Evolution and Development of the Motion Picture as an Art, from 1900 to the Present, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York,: Hopkinson and Blake, 1969), 246-47. Also see, Paul Wells, Animation and America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 13. 21 William Adams Simonds, Henry Ford, His Life, His Work, His Genius, Rev. 1946. ed. (Los Angeles,: F. Clymer, 1946), 107, 04. 22 Ibid., 279. 23 Charles J.V. Murphy, "Mr. Ford's Legacy," in The Best of Ford; a Collection of Short Stories and Essays, ed. Mary Moline (Van Nuys, Calif.,: Rumbleseat Press, 1973), 334. 24 James Brough, The Ford Dynasty : An American Story, 1st ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), 50, 155, 205. 25 Quoted in Ibid., 50. 26 Quoted in Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America (Ann Arbor,: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 234. 27 Ginny Olson, "Fordisms: A Collection," in The Best of Ford; a Collection of Short Stories and Essays, ed. Mary Moline (Van Nuys, Calif.,: Rumbleseat Press, 1973), 343.

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Steven Watts, The People's Tycoon : Henry Ford and the American Century, 1st ed. (New York: A.A. Knopf, 2005), 45. 29 Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther, "The Habits Which Make Edison the Greatest American," Cosmopolitan (1930): 208. 30 Olson, "Fordisms: A Collection." 31 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, [Student's ed. (New York,: Scribner, 1958). 32 Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York,: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 10. 33 Ibid., 41-42. 34 All of the quotations come from Walt Disney, "Walt Disney Quotations," Thinkexist.com, http://thinkexist.com/quotes/walt_disney/. 35 Raffaelli, "Disney, Wanrer Bros. And Japanese Animation: Three World Views," 117. 36 Norman Vincent Peale, "The American Dream Still Bursts Forth," Spokesman Review Sunday Magazine, July 2 1972. 37 Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson, The Disney Way : Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company (New York: McGraw Hill, 1999), 6. 38 Quoted in Wells, Animation and America, 106. 39 Kozlenko, "The Animated Cartoon and Walt Disney," 247. 40 Feild, The Art of Walt Disney, 80, 75. 41 Quoted in Bob Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Original (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 153. 42 Quoted in Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, 227. 43 Quoted in Ibid., 397. 44 Capodagli and Jackson, The Disney Way : Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company, 15. 45 Sergei M. Eisenstein, "Chapter Ii," in Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), 39. Similarly, Paul Wells contends the ability to “transpose and translate” is a necessary, inherent element of animation. Wells, Animation and America, 42-43. 46 Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 1st ed. (New York: Disney Editions, 1981). 47 Ibid. Although Thomas and Johnston published this work in 1981, after the time period I am mostly confining myself to (1929-1966), their work is still a valid representation of the discourse about Disney animation because they are veteran animators of Disney’s Golden Age, they quote and cite many incidents throughout this period, they describe techniques also depicted in popular news media of the time, and their phrase “illusion of life” was developed and cited frequently before 1981. During the height of Disney’s Golden Age sparked by the 1937 release of Snow White, Field’s 1942 study is also frequently cited and referenced. His descriptions are very similar to Olli and Johnston, especially on the issue of communication as transfer. He describes the need for animators to make bold, caricatured drawings due to the number of transfers involved in animation, from pencil test to drawing to inking to celluloid to screen. He also depicts the audience transfer into a fantasy or dream world, such as when he states, “Although to enter the world of the imagination under Walt Disney’s guidance is no difficult task, it conveys with it one responsibility: we must be prepared to recover a quality of youthfulness that many of us have been forced to surrender.” Feild, The Art of Walt Disney, 53. 48 Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 23. 49 Ibid., 81. 50 This is a common take on the evolution of animation. For the term “graphic narrative,” see Norman M. Klein, Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (London ; New York: Verso, 1993), 3-18. Norman Klein labels this form of animation the “graphic narrative,” illustrating how early animation simply brought movement to the flat characters drawn for the novels and comic strips of the nineteenth century. Steamboat was the first animated short to feature synchronized sound, and hence one of the first steps away from the graphic narrative heritage. Yet Steamboat still primarily relies on movement for comedic effect. Silent cartoons such as Felix the Cat depended even more on a running series of visual gags and had a hard time adapting to the technological and artistic developments. 51 Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 45. 52 Quoted in Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, 132. 53 Quoted in Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, 108. 54 Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 48.

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55

Better storytelling refers to what Walter Fisher calls narrative probability—the plausibility of the narrative within its fictional world. Walter Fisher, "Narration as Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument," Communication Monographs 51 (1984). 56 Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 15. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 19. 59 Famous Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, for instance, loves the early Disney where anarchic metamorphosis reigns, where characters are formed with infinitely malleable plasma, where the animator exercises the power of a god unbridled by the realities of nature or an alienating Fordist economic system.59 He hates the sentimental realism of later Disney such as Bambi. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), 99. See Panofsky’s critique of Fantasia and later Disney, first published in 1934, in Erwin Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," in Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 239. First published in 1960, Kraucer deplores Disney’s “increasing attempts to express fantasy in realistic terms.” Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film : The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 89. 60 Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, 149. 61 The reliance on actors and Stanislavsky’s method is throughout Thomas and Johnston. For the emphasis on the need for an animator to be an actor and the use of live actors for a model, see Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 18, 100, 09, 25, 223, 319-31, 473-78, 87. For evidence Disney animators read and used the Stanislavsky method, see Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, 128. Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London ; New York: Routledge, 1998), 104-07. 62 John Canemaker, "Vlad Tytla: Animation's Michelangelo," in The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology, ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980), 82. 63 Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 34-35. Watts refers to the style as “acting animation.” Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, 109. 64 Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, 268. 65 Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 65-66. 66 Quoted in Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Original, 125. 67 Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, 4. 68 Quoted in Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Original, 278. 69 Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 15. 70 Raffaelli, "Disney, Wanrer Bros. And Japanese Animation: Three World Views," 119.

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Chapter Five: American Daydream: Camera-Subjects and Reels of the Real The history of cinema draws from a complex technological and artistic heritage traced to nearly every other media and art form of the early 20th century. Cinema proceeds from advances in photography, film, and mechanics and aadpats content, styles, and techniques from literature and theater. Cinema is truly a creature of its time, a strange mutation of contemporary developments in industry and culture, in science and art, and in technology and fashion. The cinematic mode unfolds through the historical negotiation of these technological, economic and artistic precursors, producing a translation both like and unlike its forebears. This translation is not simply a new technological instrument but, as Gilles Deleuze contends, embodies a new organ of perceiving and thinking modern reality. 1 Cinema produced a new mode that would dominate the culture and entertainment industry of 20th century America as well as representing and redefining consumerism and the commodity. Given cinema’s complex heritage, any analysis of the cinematic mode must be a historical and comparative one. Only through a historical comparison with these other technologies and art forms can the distinctness of the cinematic mode be ascertained. This comparison has been pursued by many scholars seeking to understand the cinematic medium, thus this chapter largely gathers together and synthesizes the work of many film theorists including Deleuze, Arnheim, Panofsky, Kracauer, Benjamin, McLuhan, Barthes, Sontag, Bazin, Eisenstein, and Metz. While each contributes some insights, the synthesis presented here is organized around my conceptualization of modes and thereby attempts to offer a unique contribution from amidst this

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significant body of work. To preview my claims, cinema relies technologically on photography and a mechanical system for linking and projecting the images. It retains similarities to the reproducibility of photography, the legibility of literature, and the watchability of theater while also adding a transposability of viewpoints. Through these –abilities, the cinematic enables the perception of material reality as an imaginary narrative. The cinematic mode’s dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, an economy of recording and projecting, creates the possibility of seeing material reality as an imaginary narrative. Let us begin with a brief note on the technological conditions of film. The Technological Conditions of the Cinematic Mode Through the technological conditions of cinema, we can begin to discern the outlines of an economy or dialectic of the cinematic mode. 2 Cinema first requires the development of the photograph, frequently traced to Louis Daguerre’s early 19th century invention of the daguerreotype. Yet the daguerreotype required long exposure times and was imprinted on a silver-coated metallic plate that was not reproducible. Such conditions were unsuitable for cinema, which required equidistant snapshots and reproducible images. Thus the invention of celluloid in the 1860s and Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1870s motion-study photography represent more direct technological influences. 3 Apparently in response to a bet with the railroad tycoon Leland Stanford over whether all four hooves of a galloping horse ever left the ground, Muybridge developed a system for taking snapshots at rapid, equidistant intervals. Muybridge thereby illustrated photography’s ability to capture movement by turning instants into spatialized images. Yet Muybridge simply dissected movement and never pursued the projection of still images back into movement. Cinema requires another technological advance—the ability to link and

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project the images in rapid succession. This advance evolves through the adaptation of techniques for the projection from such technological precursors as the zoetrope and the praxinoscope. 4 The zoetrope and praxinoscope work like picture flip-books, rapidly projecting succeeding images to create the illusion of movement. The illusion works because of the persistence of human vision, an effect called afterimages. When applied to photographs, inventors needed ways to move the images and keep them in place, thus three other advances were essential: the invention of the film strip, perforating the edges of the strip to give the machine something to grab and pull, and a mechanism for grabbing and pulling the strip. 5 Key figures in these often overlooked innovations of the late 19th century include Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope as well as Auguste and Louis Lumière’s Cinematograph. Benjamin notes that the mechanism for projecting images is similar to the assembly line, which is roughly contemporaneous with cinema. 6 In short, cinema depends upon photography for capturing images and a mechanism for linking and projecting the images in rapid succession. In these two technological elements can be seen the beginnings of an economy or dialectic of the cinematic mode. Benjamin describes the dialectical structure this way: “Discontinuous images replace one another in a continuous sequence.” 7 In other words, photographs create discontinuous images by plucking them from the flow of time, captured and stored on celluloid. The movement mechanism then projects the images in succession, creating a perception of continuous movement. These dual technological conditions map onto the two major production processes of film making—shooting and editing. Like photography, the filmmaker shoots pictures of the scenes and actors. After accumulating the shots, the filmmaker then edits the shots, arranging them for their continuous projection. By shooting and editing the filmmaker creates the two basic

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elements of any film, known in film theory as the shot and the montage. Sergei Eisenstein, one of the first great directors, points to these as the essential features of cinema: “Primo: photofragments of nature are recorded; secundo: these fragments are combined in various ways. Thus, the shot (or frame), and thus, montage.” 8 Deleuze describes the shot as a set of elements falling within a particular frame. Through framing, including setting the distance and angle of the camera, the filmmaker produces a shot. Yet films are not exclusively composed of a single shot. Instead, multiple shots are recorded which put “bodies, parts, aspects, dimensions, distances and the respective positions of the bodies which make up a set in the image into variation.” 9 Through this variation, the film creates the perception of continuity, what Deleuze calls the whole of the film. “The shot in general has one face turned to the set… and another face turned towards the whole, of which it expresses the – or at least a – change.” 10 It is through montage, the linking together of various shots, that the filmmaker creates the whole. Once again in Deleuze’s terms, “Montage is the determination of the whole… by means of continuities, cutting and false continuities.” 11 The montage creates the sense of a continuous whole by linking together discontinuous shots. Much of the early cinema did not move the camera and thus did not explore the possibilities of montage. Films featured everyday street scenes, or immobile cameras recording theatrical performances. This use of the motion picture camera did not constitute what I am referring to as the cinematic mode. Only with the development of montage does the cinematic mode emerge. This is why Eisenstein accords so much import to the montage, whose genealogy he traces to the famous early American filmmaker D.W. Griffith. 12 The montage enables cinema to become an art form going beyond the mere recording of real occurrences or fictional performances. Eisenstein and Deleuze catalog an impressive variety of types of montage, beginning with Griffith’s parallel montage that would

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oscillate between the actions of protagonists and antagonists. That is, there are many different types of continuity that a montage might express, such as Griffith’s continuity in the conflict between good and evil. Despite their importance, it is not crucial to catalog the varieties of montage to understand the basic outline of the cinematic mode. The cinematic mode works through photography and projection, through shot and montage, through the linkage of discontinuous images into a continuous whole. There is one other pair which should be mentioned to further clarify the cinematic mode. The dialectic of continuity and discontinuity extends as well to the viewing process. Watching a movie, the audience must both identify with the camera, taking up its point-of-view in order to see what is inside the frame, as well as record the sequence of images. In other words, the viewer must act similar to a motion picture camera, both projecting with their eyes and recording with their memories. Christian Metz argues that such seeing-as a motion picture camera is possible because the camera works in a similar manner to human visual perception. 13 Both consist of the double movement of projecting and recording, seeing and memory. Metz’s comparison should help clarify: When I say that ‘I see’ the film, I mean thereby a unique mixture of two contrary currents; the film is what I receive, and it is also what I release, since it does not pre-exist my entering the auditorium and I only need to close my eyes to suppress it. Releasing it, I am the projector, receiving it, I am the screen; in both these figures together, I am the camera, which points and yet which records. 14 The viewer replicates what the camera sees by taking the position of the camera, establishing a point of view. The camera moves, and so does the viewer’s perspective. Viewers release the film by opening their eyes and taking up the proper perspective. 15 The diegetic space changes according to the various points-of-view. This necessity to identify with the camera’s point-ofview explains McLuhan’s anecdote about a small African tribes’ struggles with interpreting

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motion pictures. The tribal audience did not understand that they were supposed to identify with the camera. Instead, seeing the screen as a logical and bounded space separate from themselves, they wondered what happened to the chicken which wandered off the right corner of the screen. 16 Watching cinema, then, is not an automatic process, one that can be done without any training. The viewer must learn perspective, to see from points-of-view, and to identify with the camera in order to comprehend. They must learn to project and record, to identify with the camera’s perspective and then link the discontinuous sequence of images into a continuous whole. The perception of movies relies on a tension between the poles of projection and recording. The viewer must become a dual apparatus of seeing and recording. Only by recording the succession of scenes can the viewer decipher the “whole” of the film. 17 This recording entails remembering the basic plot or following the dialogue but is also more significant than these basic procedures. The viewer must remember the content of the film but they must also record the points-of-view they are offered. Recording when the camera pans to the hidden murder weapon under the couch or shows a close-up of a speck of blood on the villainess’ glove is crucial to movie comprehension. Viewers instinctively know that the camera moves in relation to them, and thus quietly ask, “Why did the camera show me that?” As Deleuze notes, “(T)he frame teaches us that the image is not just given to be seen. It is legible as well as visible.” 18 This is why most cinema theorists accord so much import to montage. Directors often convey meaning through the relationship, the linkage, of a series of images. Only by recording the sequence can the audience follow the gist of the diegesis. In fact, this economy between recording and projection exists in every single image, twentyfour times per second, due to the physical condition of human visual perception known as the

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afterimage. The afterimage designates the persistence of human vision, the fact that one image remains stained on the retina for a moment after it passes. When we watch movies, the afterimage causes us to see continuous movement despite the fact that what is actually projected is a series of static images. Instead of seeing static images strung together, viewers see fluid movement because of the afterimage. In the cinematic mode, viewers see discontinuous and static images as continuous and moving ones. Thus in every single moment, the viewer simultaneously sees the past and the present; their eyes remember the older image while taking in the newer one. At once, viewers see the new image and the afterimage. Projecting and recording exist simultaneously. The afterimage is why Keith Broadfoot and Rex Butler contend that the appropriate visual representation of the cinematic mode is a circle. 19 A circle is a form where every point is both a beginning and an ending, just as every image in cinema is simultaneously new-becoming and old-fading, emergent sight and disappearing memory. Their description will be crucial when we turn to the differences between live-action and animated cinema. As they indicate, the viewer embodies the circle, the shape on which each point is both a beginning and an ending. Thus it is not that the viewer enters the screen but instead that the viewer becomes the screen: It is only when the eye mistakes two different occurrences of the same event—separated by the entire span of the circle—that movement actually occurs… And this is why it is possible to say that in cinema, as in Duchamp, it is the spectator himself who enters into the work, becomes the surface on which the work is inscribed. If in cinema we can never see the surface of inscription, if the surface on which the film is projected is always invisible, this is only because the eye that would see this is itself the screen. 20 Broadfoot and Butler here conflate entering the scene and becoming the screen, a distinction which will be crucial, in the following chapter, to deciphering the uniqueness of animation’s mode in comparison with cinema. Yet they do help isolate an economy of scene and screen, of

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projection and recording, of viewer and narrative space fundamental to the cinematic mode. Without these economies, there is no perception of a movie. The “Perceiving As” of the Cinematic Mode Technically, the cinematic mode depends upon a dialectic between continuity and discontinuity, between shot and montage, and between projection and recording. What, however, is perceived through this economy? If a mode is, like a metaphor, a way of perceiving as, what are the terms of this metaphor? If modes direct how audiences make texts, what texts do they make in the cinematic mode? The short answer is that the cinematic mode perceives material reality as an imaginary narrative. 21 The emphasis on imaginary narratives further specifies the cinematic mode as one particular use of the motion picture camera from among many possibilities. The cinematic mode refers to what Siegfried Kracauer calls story-films. 22 This classification includes the narrative cinema typical in Hollywood productions and excludes other uses of video cameras including documentaries, news reels, and experimental films. The cinematic mode is proper to story-films and entails perceiving discontinuous fragments of material reality—moments of a former here and now—as components of a continuous, imaginary narrative. The poles of a metaphoric economy oscillate between the real and the imaginary, similar to the American dream’s emphasis on the reality of fantasy. As art historian and film theorist Rudolph Arnheim notes, “Thus we can perceive objects and events as living and at the same time imaginary, as real objects and as simple patterns of life on the projection screen; and it is this fact that makes film art possible.” 23 This mode of perceiving material reality as an imaginary narrative explains two tendencies in the historical reception and artistic development of cinema. These two tendencies incline towards the realistic and towards the fantastical. Some people lauded and some criticized cinema for its

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realism, while still others praised or lambasted film for its fantastical possibilities. Let us start with realism. Given cinema’s technological dependence on the photograph, many greeted the invention as an extension of photography to the realm of time and movement. By the turn of the 20th century, photography was widely perceived as a faithful tool for capturing reality. The photograph’s ability to dependably reproduce whatever was placed in front of the lens led to its esteem as a device for truth and scientific accuracy. 24 This belief persists even today, although Roland Barthes argues that the sentiment has waned in the latter half of the century. 25 Yet at the time of animation’s first appearance, the fidelity of the photograph was an accepted cultural assumption. Upon watching the first great animator Winsor McCay’s 1914 Gertie the Dinosaur, the Chicago Examiner’s vaudeville critic made clear this assumption, stating, “Thus the camera, that George Washington of mechanisms, at last is proved a liar.” 26 As we can see in this critic’s remarks, the assumed fidelity and truthfulness of the photograph was extended to the motion picture camera in its early iterations. One result of this extended assumption was a debate over the status of cinema as an art. Critics held that the motion picture camera simply reproduced reality, thereby disqualifying it as an art. Proponents countered that the use of light, staging, acting editing, and the linkage of images makes cinema undoubtedly an art. 27 Eventually, movies appeared featuring fictional scenes and characters, the staging of props and lighting, special camera angles like the close-up, trick camera effects, montages, and fades, cuts and dissolves that functionally disqualified this debate. After cataloging these techniques, Rudolph Arnheim, for instance, concluded against those who saw film as the mere mechanical reproduction of reality and for film’s status as an art: (W)e have examined in detail the various aspects of filmic representation and have found that even at the most elementary level there are significant divergences between the image that the camera makes of reality and that which the human eye sees. We found,

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moreover, that such differences not only exist, but that they can be used to mold reality for artistic purposes. 28 Evident in this debate and in Arnheim’s response is an economy between reality and the imaginary that undergirds the historical development of cinema. Cinema’s technological dependence on the photograph lends it a presumption and sense of realism since the images reproduce actually-existing material. The motion picture camera’s ability to record moments in time and position the spectator as if they were there witnessing the events fomented a perception of realism. On the other hand, the ability to interrupt the continuity of time and space, to move the spectator’s point of view and chop time into manipulable segments, seemed to place film into the world of dreams or fantasies and encouraged the exploration of montage, special camera effects, and other artistic devices. Cinema borrowed from theater and literature to further facilitate its explorations into the imaginary. Soon, live-action movies used the realistic sensations to construct completely fantastical worlds; they constituted a mode of perceiving real sensory inputs as elements of make-believe narratives. Similarly, film theorist Siegfried Kracauer sees two basic properties of film that he labels the realistic and formative tendencies. For Kracauer, these tendencies sprout from the nature of cinema. 29 Cinema’s nature, its specific properties as a medium, lies in the ability to capture “actually existing physical reality,” on the one hand, and to explore “staged illusion,” on the other. 30 The historical record provides evidence for these tendencies. Benjamin contends that it is at the extremes of practice that one can most clearly discern the dialectical structure of a mode, and, at nearly the outset of cinema, two filmmakers explored the extremes of the medium’s affinities. “Their prototypes were Lumière, a strict realist, and Méliès, who gave free reign to his artistic imagination. The films they made embody, so to speak, thesis and antithesis in a Hegelian sense.” 31 Lumière, along with other early filmmakers, focused on the simple picturing of

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everyday life. Their films featured such stimulating verité as trains passing through tunnels, workers taking their lunch hour, and horses in full gallop. As audiences grew accustomed to seeing reproduced movement and as the technological attraction wore down, directors moved towards more fantastical portrayals. “Lumière’s hold on the masses was ephemeral… The sensation had worn off; the heyday was over.” 32 Arnheim passes on an illustrative story from American director Cecil B. de Mille. He tells of de Mille’s struggles to sell a film featuring a new lighting technique because the shadows did not allow the actors to be shown in full. Eventually, de Mille found success by comparing the technique to Rembrandt. Arnheim draws the following conclusion from the anecdote: This story shows to what extent our ways of seeing has changed in the last few years. Nowadays even the general public is accustomed to light effects such as those with which de Mille experimented then. But in those days film meant the reproduction of natural objects, and any formative intrusion was regarded as distracting from truth to nature, that is, from the fundamental object of film. 33 Although Arnheim here portrays cinema as an evolution from its early, mechanical days to its fulfillment as an art form apt for illusion, Kracauer shows that, in actuality, the formative tendency existed from the outset, borrowing techniques and narratives from theater and literature alike. Even before the turn of the century, former theater director George Méliès pursued fictional plots and magical illusions “out of the artist’s delight in sheer fantasy.” 34 While the photograph allowed the motion picture camera to capture material reality, Méliès was one of the first to discover that editing and framing could dramatically alter the perception of that material reality. Méliès employed toys, staged scenes, fairy-tale plots, and camera tricks to explore the realms of dream and fantasy. Whereas Lumière’s films showed actual trains coming and going, Méliès’ pictured model trains floating into outer space in The Impossible Voyage, a feat perhaps most famously duplicated in the original Star Wars trilogy. Apparently, Méliès accidentally

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stumbled upon the first camera trick—the stop motion trick—when he ran out of film while shooting a street scene. Upon watching the film, pedestrians seemed to suddenly disappear. From accident, invention springs; Méliès began to systematically explore camera tricks. According to Kracauer, “Drawing on both photography and the stage, he innovated many techniques which were to play an enormous role in the future—among them the use of masks, multiple exposures, superimposition as a means of summoning ghosts, the lap-dissolve, etc.” 35 Méliès first, primitive steps would find their more complete development in such innovations as moving the camera and the montage. 36 Another historical example of this play between the real and the imaginary is the development of sound in motion pictures, a development advanced by Disney’s synchronization of sound and movement begun with Steamboat Willie in 1929. Beginning in this time period, sound was quickly employed to strengthen both the realistic and the imaginary poles. First, sound bolstered the sense of realism by putting dialogue and sound effects into the diegetic world. Characters speak, props clang, explosions boom, car’s roar, all in ways similar to and familiar from real life. However, this was not the only use of sound. Even before the “talkies,” cinema theaters often would employ musicians for accompaniment, playing at different tempos and with different tones to help set the mood. With the marriage of sound and film, this practice is extended and refined. Music and other noises reinforce the imaginary pole of the cinematic mode by giving scenes an aural layer not emanating from the diegetic world but instead supplementing it. Perhaps the most familiar example is the use of ominous music in horror films to build the sense of suspense. The sound of a character’s heavy-breathing gives the action a sense of realism while the frightening music plays on the audience’s imaginations.

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Over the course of cinema’s historical development, in both the criticism and practice of film, these two tendencies are repeatedly evoked and extended. One side praises the realistic imagery of cinema and advances a style beholden to realism. Film critic and theorist André Bazin, for instance, esteems the work of the Italian neorealists who rely on a documentary style, nonprofessional actors, and actual settings and situations, and who discourage the use of editing and camera tricks. Likewise, art historian and critic Erwin Panofsky celebrates cinema for organizing and employing actual physical reality, even if the story is fantastical or mythical. As such, “It is the movies, and only the movies, that do justice to the materialistic interpretation of the universe….” 37 The other side extols the wondrous fantasy of the cinema and furthers the exploration of fictional worlds from the ancient past to the distant future, the deep undersea to the furthest reaches of outer space. These commentators see in film the unique ability to portray the supernatural, the fantastical, worlds of dreams, fairy-tales, legends, myths, and science-fiction. For instance, in 1912 Heinz Ewers praised Thomas Edison as the inventor of the movies because “he returned fantasy to the matter-of-fact world.” 38 In 1911, Adolph Slaby exclaimed that in the movies, “Every dream becomes real.” 39 By 1914, Hugo Munsterberg published The Film: A Psychological Study which concluded, “The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness… It is a superb enjoyment which no other art can furnish us.” 40 And in 1935, Czech poet and novelist Franz Werfel said, “Film has not yet realized its true purpose, its real possibilities…. These consist in its unique ability to use natural means to give incomparably convincing expression to the fairylike, the marvelous, the supernatural.” 41

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These two divergent emphases in the practice and criticism of film can be seen in Kracauer and Arnheim, our two representative theorists. Kracauer values first and foremost the realistic tendency in film. He claims that the aesthetic achievements of a medium are more successful and satisfying “if they build from the specific properties of that medium.” 42 To Kracauer, the cinema’s specific properties stem from its reliance on the photograph and hence require emphasizing the realistic tendency. Thus films should stick closely to recording and revealing physical reality in order to claim “aesthetic validity.” 43 Sticking close to physical reality entails an affinity in film for motion such as chases or crowded streets, inanimate objects, the familiar and everyday, refuse, the unstaged, and the flow of life. While filmmakers may engage in the formative tendency, they must ensure that the realistic tendency takes the lead to maintain a proper balance. 44 The realistic tendency should prevail because: ONE THING IS EVIDENT: whenever a film maker turns the spotlight on a historical subject or ventures into the realm of fantasy, he runs the risk of defying the basic properties of his medium. Roughly speaking, he seems no longer concerned with physical reality but bent on incorporating worlds which to all appearances lie outside the orbit of actuality. 45 Kracauer’s argument is foreign to Arnheim. Arnheim reverses Kracauer’s hierarchy by valuing the artistic and fantastical over the realistic. According to him, the tendency towards naturalistic realism resulted from economic and technological impetuses rather than artistic ones. The engineer, opposed to the artist, sought “to imitate real life” through the development of stereoscopic quality, color, and sound. 46 The artistically untrained public also desired naturalness in film pictures. “Every step that brings film closer to real life creates a sensation. Each new sensation means full houses.” 47 We might say that with each introduction of new film techniques such as synchronized sound or color, the medium was the message. Audiences seemed to gobble up the technological spectacle, and producers certainly got the memo. To Arnheim, these

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influences were an unfortunate result. The financial and technological pressures led cinema further away from its true calling as an art. The desire for color and sound, for example, undermines the artistic innovations in silent and black-and-white films such as an expressive acting style and lighting techniques playing with the contrast of dark and light. The desire for more realistic naturalness “is the wish of people who do not know that the artistic effect is bound up with the limitations of the medium and who want quantity rather than quality. They want to keep on getting nearer to nature and do not realize that they thereby make it increasingly difficult for film to be art.” 48 Today, the claim that color or sound brings cinema closer to the reproduction of real life and further away from the imaginary seems denied by, at the very least, every new science-fiction or Disney movie. Few people today see film as the mere reproduction of reality, and most would grant it the status of art regardless of the fact that most movies are much closer to swill than Shakespeare, to refuse than Rembrandt. Arnheim’s academic debate over the status of film as art proved fruitless. The more important issue is and was, as Benjamin remarks, how did film alter the character and perception of art? 49 This alteration did not occur because museums, art critics or historians sat down and hammered out a consensus. Art changed because the reception and perception of it changed with the spread of cinema. The cinematic mode affected the very understanding of art, as we will see in more detail in Chapter Seven. Both Arnheim and Kracauer are responding to this changing perception, through the terms of a modal economy. Cinema’s reliance on the photograph, the photograph’s cultural assumption of fidelity, the popular fascination with the ability to reproduce movement, and the economic incentives of further advances in naturalism all work together to create realism as one pole of the cinematic mode’s economy. Cinema’s use of editing and montage, the fascination with trick

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shots and moving cameras, the economic incentives of more fantastical stories, and the influence of theater, literature, and other art forms on filmmakers all work to create the imaginary as the other pole. There is no need, like Kracauer, to worry about the proper balance or, like Arnheim, to fret that the realistic will overtake the fantastic. Benjamin calls such debates in early film theory “obtuse and hyperbolic.” 50 The real significance of film rests not in either realism or the imaginary. Focusing on either the realistic or fantastical tendencies of film misses the terms of their mutual relation and implication. Cinema works through this very economy, employing material realities in order to create imaginary worlds. Cinema is recording and editing, real movements and fantastical ones, real spaces related to imaginary spaces, real time related to imaginary time. Cinema blends the –abilities of photography, literature, and theater. Through this blending, art would no longer be exclusively about either the beautiful semblance of reality or the creation of a fantastic illusion. The cinematic mode brings the two into relation; it relates the real and fantasy. The following section explores this mode in more detail through a comparison of the –abilities of cinema, photography, literature, and theater. The –Abilities of the Cinematic Mode The cinematic mode is an interesting hybrid of –abilities, best revealed through a comparison with its artistic and technological cousins including photography, literature, and theater. Like photography, the cinematic mode depends upon a certain reproducibility which allows the fragments of material reality to be uprooted from their here-and-now and transported to a site in front of the audience. However, unlike still photography, cinema can portray the unfolding of narrative time, similar to literature and theater. That is, cinema entails a certain legibility that allows the fragments of reality to be read as a narrative. Yet unlike literature, this legibility is not, by and large, the product of reading and interpreting language. Instead, like theater, the

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narrative is conveyed through a watchability. Unlike theater, however, the illusion is not produced by the direct viewing of the audience. Instead, the illusion is of a second-order, the result of editing and montage. Through editing and montage, cinema enables a transposability denied to the theater which depends on a clearer demarcation between the diegetic space of the stage and the real space of the audience. Let us begin with photography. Photography, as a basic element of cinema, enables a reproducibility crucial to the cinematic mode. In fact, reproducibility contributes to both sides of the dialectic between the continuous and discontinuous, the imaginary and the real. First, the reproducibility of photography promotes a certain level of realism by allowing the camera to capture fragments of space-time. Filmmakers can capture and reproduce split-second images of anything under the sun. Of course, filmmakers sometimes take pictures of replicas, models, or facades, not of the “real” thing. Yet, nonetheless, these replicas, models, or facades are still elements of material reality. In fact, they are often used in place of the larger, more distant, or more difficult to employ scenes or props in order to give the impression that the real, material thing was present in the frame. Reproducibility, thus, enables the audience to see fragments of material reality, from the actors and their clothing to the scenes and their props. Second, reproducibility grants access to the fantastical as well. The camera, by showing aspects of material reality inaccessible to the human eye, opens up a whole new world to the imagination. By greatly magnifying things, or penetrating their surface, or approaching them from a difficult angle, or slowing down or speeding up movement, the camera can reveal previously unseen and unknown aspects of reality. Reproducibility, then, is not simply a rote copying of what the human eye sees but the opening up of a whole new world of vision. As Benjamin states, “For example, in photography it can bring out aspects of the original that are

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accessible only to the lens (which is adjustable and can easily change viewpoint) but not to the human eye; or, it can use certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, to record images that escape natural optics altogether.” 51 Although these aspects are part of material reality, they are aspects previously inaccessible to the eye before photographic reproducibility and hence only existent in the imagination. Someone might imagine all four hooves leaving the ground, but they could not see them until the development of Muybridge’s camera. There remains another way that reproducibility enables the dialectic of real and fantasy. Reproducibility allows the photographer to capture moments of the here and now, creating the perception of material reality. Yet, once captured, reproducibility means that the here and now of the image is stripped away, permitting the movement of the image to a different time and place. At one point in the “Work of Art” essay, Benjamin describes this –ability as making the image detachable and hence transportable. 52 Where is the image transported? It is transported to an imaginary world, placed in front of the audience. “Above all else, [reproducibility] enables the original to meet the recipient halfway….” 53 This detachability of the here and now of material reality allows cinema to transport those fragments into an imaginary there and then, to become parts of a narrative. It creates the possibility of editing and montage so crucial to the production of a movie. Benjamin describes the unique here and now of material reality as its aura. The aura is “a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch.” 54 The aura of a work of art, its uniqueness and authenticity, also stems from its singular residence in a particular here and now, its embeddedness in a ritual or cultural tradition. Thus

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photography, by ripping the object from its space and time, from its unique presence in the here and now, betokens the decay of the aura. Film takes this process even further, making it the most powerful agent of this destruction of aura. Benjamin concludes: It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced. 55 Reproducibility drains the aura from material reality, enabling it to be moved closer to the mass audience and thereby overcoming that “unique apparition of a distance” present in the perception of a singular here and now. The Legibility of Literature While the photograph’s reproducibility is a crucial component of the cinematic mode, some important differences with still photography remain. The major difference between photography and cinema is not reproducibility of the images but how the images are linked together. With a photograph, there is no linkage, or at the very least, if a series of photographs are arranged, the viewer completes the linkage, not the apparatus. 56 The photograph does not unfold over time. Although the photograph positions the viewer to see from a point-of-view, this point-of-view does not change. If we assume that what is inside the photo represents the narrative space, this space is stable; the image is a pose. The image space is posed, frozen and unchanging over time. This condition leads Barthes to insist upon a fundamental difference between film and photography. 57 Arnheim agrees, “A motion picture in itself is an event: it looks different every moment, whereas there is no such temporal progress in painting or sculpture. Motion being one of its outstanding properties, the film is required by aesthetic law to use and interpret motion.” 58 Cinema depends on the continuous linkage of images to create the illusion of movement; there are no stable poses and any one snapshot can not be privileged over any other (each flashes by in

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1/24th of a second). It is the linkage of these snapshots that creates the illusion of movement. This linkage occurs through the relation of viewer space and diegetic space, and the linkage means cinema has an affinity with art and illusion, especially with the narrative time of literature. Although still images may convey narrative scenes, this is a translation of narrative from its temporal unfolding into its spatial representation. 59 Viewers can interpret a narrative from a still image but they do not perceive the unfolding over time. I like how Kress and van Leeuwen put it: “Doings and happenings have been turned into things. The dynamic of action has been changed into the static of relations.” 60 This narrative is constructed in the viewer’s imagination rather than being represented on the page or the screen. This is why, with photography, “captions become obligatory” in order to give the viewer some direction for their interpretation. 61 With film, such guidelines for reception are, instead, present in the images. As Benjamin states, “The directives given by captions to those looking at images in illustrated magazines soon become even more precise and commanding in films, where the way each single image is understood seems prescribed by the sequence of all the preceding images.” 62 Whereas a photograph’s image may seem to represent a narrative, this is not what happens with film. A film does not take a picture that embodies an entire story. No single shot constitutes the whole; each flashes by in 1/24th of a second, denying any one a privileged status. Instead, a film shows a narrative through the secondary process of editing and montage. It is the arranging and linking of various scenes that constitutes the narrative, rather than the interpretation of the audience. As such, this element of cinema stands in close proximity to the narrative of literature. Literature also arranges and links scenes in order to tell a story, and the significance of each scene depends upon its location in and articulation to the whole. McLuhan makes the connection, “The business of the writer or film-maker is to transfer the reader or viewer from one world, his

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own, to another, the world created by typography and film … The reader or spectator had become a dreamer under their spell, as René Clair said of film in 1926.” 63 Thus cinema, unlike photography, maintains a legibility of narrative similar to literature. In both literature and film, the viewer reads a narrative. For McLuhan, this similar legibility was crucial to the popularity of cinema: “The close relation, then, between the reel world of film and the private fantasy experience of the printed word is indispensable to our Western acceptance of the film form.” 64 The historical influence of literature on film is well-established, with many movies basing themselves on books and with directors employing narrative conventions drawn from prose. McLuhan follows, “Even the film industry regards all of its greatest achievements as derived from novels, nor is this unreasonable.” 65 For instance, Eisenstein traces the heritage of American cinema to the writings of Charles Dickens. Eisenstein claims that D.W. Griffith, the inventor of montage, was inspired by Dickens and carried around a copy of a Dickens’ novel on his sets. 66 Just like Dickens, Griffith develops characters “who seem to have run straight from life onto the screen,” relies on atmosphere to express the inner world of his characters, and hatches the extraordinary and fantastic from the banal and mundane. 67 Most importantly, Griffith borrowed the form of parallel action in Dickens, which jumps from scene to scene instead of going in a linear fashion, and translates this technique into the montage. 68 Thus, the cinematic mode works through a narrative legibility similar to literature. In both, the audience reads a narrative. In both, the narrative is portrayed through the linkage and arrangement of scenes. More important than how cinema borrows from literature, however, is how the two compete. At the time of cinema’s introduction into popular culture, literature was the primary reservoir of fantasy-worlds for an audience’s enjoyment. America was a reading culture, gobbling up Alger novels and other works at a rapid pace. Media theorist Neil Postman details the high-literacy

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rates of 19th century Americans, the staggering sales figures of popular works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the widespread adulation Americans poured onto writers such as Charles Dickens when they visited the country. 69 This literate audience was primed for the narrative devices of cinema, accustomed to transferring their imaginations into fantasy-worlds. However, the ease and entertainment value of cinema meant that film did not simply supplement literature. As cinema rose into public prominence, literature declined. Literature did not quite go the way of the horse, yet cinema proved a formidable rival. Postman credits television with delivering the most damage to literature’s audiences, but he blames cinema for starting the trend. 70 The competition between cinema and literature is a result not just of their similar legibilities but also from their differences. Cinema emerges in an American culture accustomed by literature to transferring their imaginations to narrative-worlds, yet how that reading occurs alters notably. The legibility is different because what viewers read is distinct. With literature, the author writes words and the reader interprets them into images, meanings, and feelings of a story. In cinema, the viewer watches images and interprets them as narrative. What the filmmaker shows, the audience (usually, barring eccentricities of place and person) sees. Whereas literature is a legibility of words, cinema represents a legibility of sight and sound. The cinematic mode is the reading of material realities, of things seen and heard, as an imaginary narrative. It positions the viewer to witness material occurrences and read them as part of a story. The cinematic mode entails reading points-of-view; literature entails describing points-of-view. Here, an objection must be raised. Are we simply talking about point of view? And if so, doesn’t literature employ the point-of-view? Literature certainly describes points-of-view but it does not position its reader to take in sensory inputs. The reader can read about the action from a

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character’s point of view, but they always read the story, not see it. The action is depicted through words not exhibited in images. Literature depends on description to create images. The reader must translate from the description to an image. Literature moves from words on the page to the reader’s interpretation into images and perceptions. The second step is more of a creative transformation, one that will vary from reader to reader unlike cinema. In cinema, each viewer sees the same images from the same points-of-view, even if they read them differently. In literature, readers may imagine a point-of-view or the details of a scene, but they do not see them with their eyes. To clarify, a distinction between viewer space and narrative space will be helpful. Viewer space indicates the real, present space of the person reading the movie or book. The narrative space, or diegetic space, designates the space of the world portrayed on the paper or the screen. In literature, narrative space and viewer space remain very distinct and do not intersect. With a book for instance, everyone assumes the divide between narrative and reader space. It does not matter where the reader reads, and the author would have no way of knowing where the reading occurs in order to adapt the narrative space to the viewer space. Of course, the author might adapt their fictional world to the culture of their primary audience. But they do not and can not adapt the narrative space to the particularities of any one reader’s point-of-view. They can describe points-of-view and ask the reader to imagine them, but they cannot position the viewer at an actual point. Both narrative space and reader space stay confined in their own worlds. Roland Barthes goes so far as to claim, following Jean Paul Sartre, that reading is the death of the image; “if this novel ‘takes’ me properly, no mental image.” 71 Whether Barthes and Sartre are correct about the absence of images in reader experience, the reader’s actual perspective never changes; they remained gazing downward, a foot or so away from the pages. In cinema, in contrast, the reader’s actual perspective—their viewer space—is altered in relation

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to the diegetic world. The shifting of points-of-view helps compose the narrative. Cinema and literature each require legibility, but in literature, the reader reads words to envision the narrative. In cinema, the viewer reads seen-scenes. In other words, the readable-images of cinema are external to the individual viewer whereas the readable-images of literature are internal. This is why many media theorists such as Ong and David Abram argue that literature created the perception of the interiority of the individual. 72 Solitary readers seem to explore worlds existing wholly in the depths of their imagination. This idea of the in-depth individual had profound effects on literature, which turned increasingly to complex characters with internal motivations, and scholarship, which presumed the depths of consciousness and the unconscious are located within the individual. Freud is but one of many examples. As Ong states: [Writing and reading] engage the psyche in strenuous, interiorized, individualized thought of a sort inaccessible to oral folk. In the private worlds that the generate, the feeling for the ‘round’ human character is born – deeply interiorized in motivation, powered mysteriously, but consistently, from within. 73 In contrast, the cinematic mode creates similar imaginary worlds but from the materials of external reality. The legible images of a book will vary from reader to reader. Most of the unique visual elements of the characters, scenes, and actions must be interpreted; readers must form their own mental pictures of the story. This is why every reader has a different image of the same book, and why many people feel movies based on books never live-up to their expectations. The images the movie portrays will necessarily diverge from the one the reader has constructed. The legible images of cinema, in contrast, are shared as a collective reality. As Benjamin remarks: Thanks to the camera, therefore, the individual perceptions of the psychotic or the dreamer can be appropriated by collective perception. The ancient truth expressed by Heraclitus, that those who are awake have a world in common while each sleeper has a world of his own, has been invalidated by film—and less by depicting the dream world

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itself than by creating figures of collective dream, such as the globe-encircling Mickey Mouse. 74 This difference between the interiorized legibility of literature and the exteriorized legibility of cinema boils down to a difference in spatiality. Literature must necessarily keep the spaces of the imaginary world and the external, real world distinct. The narrative unfolds internally, in the viewer’s imagination, whose real point-of-view remains gazing downward, usually in a location isolated from the sensory distractions of the external world. With cinema, the viewer space and narrative space are related. The narrative unfolds externally, through the constant positioning of the viewer to take in external cues. This is a different spatial realm from the internal world of the individual’s imagination and unconscious. Benjamin coins the term “optical unconscious” to describe this space, a phrase which once again illustrates the economy of reality and fantasy. 75 The optical signals actual, external images processed with the human eye. The unconscious signals the imagination, the realms of dreams, psychoses, the supernatural, and the fantastic. Only cinema uses the optical to reveal the unconscious. The cinematic mode is a unique, spatial dialectic relating everyday, material realities to a space of adventure, mystery, and the imaginary. It reveals the realm of the unconscious—imagination, fantasy, dream, fiction—through the display of material realities. The Watchability of Theater What, then, of the comparison with theater? If literature’s legibility is not external, not optical, not a watchability, this –ability is seemingly provided by the theater. Audiences watch the action and dialogue unfold on the stage. Furthermore, theater seems to be reproducible, either in another performance or through watching theater on a video or movie screen. 76 In fact, much early use of the movie camera simply recorded theatrical presentations. Yet, such uses are not the cinematic mode. Once again, theater lacks the ability to relate viewer space and narrative space

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proper to the cinematic mode. It thus provides no access to the optical unconscious. This is because cinema relies on a transposability denied to theater and crucial to the perception of an optical unconscious. Theater actors may adapt to the present viewers, but theater nevertheless clearly demarcates the space of the viewer and the narrative space. There is usually a “fourth wall” separating the viewer space from the performance space. The performance occurs on a stage, a word that indicates its difference from real, everyday space. Very literally, everything on the stage is staged. Of course, some avant garde productions attempt to violate the theatrical convention of the fourth wall. Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater represents one such attempt to break down the fourth wall and encourage viewer reflection on the socio-historical construction of the play, a reflection he names the “alienation effect.” 77 Thus Benjamin compares epic theater to film, reminding us once again that modes are not strict divisions based simply on media or art form. 78 Yet some important differences with film remain. Even when the fourth wall is violated, this occurs in order to bring the viewer into the demarcated diegetic space; the viewer becomes part of the performance. The viewer’s real space is not related to the diegetic space; it is included within the narrative world. Even if we go to see the most radical avant garde performance challenging the fourth wall, we still go to the theater, a location clearly bounded and designated for diegetic worlds. Such performances, in fact, recognize the marking off of diegetic space as a fundamental condition of the theater and seek ways to play with this condition. Theater’s fundamental demarcation of viewer and diegetic space means that, as Susan Sontag argues, the distinction between on-stage and off-stage does not make sense when applied to the screen. The camera-viewer can go anywhere in the movie world; in the screen, the whole world’s a stage. The theater can portray all types of fantastical narrative worlds, but it can only do so on

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the stage. Thus theater is more limited to the logical use of space. 79 Sontag concludes, “The theatre’s capacities for manipulating space and time are, simply, much cruder and more labored than film’s.” 80 André Bazin makes a similar point, illustrating how theater décor is designed to demarcate the fantasy world and direct attention to the actors. He says, “There can be no theater without architecture … Its appearances are turned inward facing the public and its footlights. It exists … as the painting exists by the virtue of its frame.” 81 The movie screen has an edge but this edge does not work like a frame in the same way. Although the screen demarcates the narrative space, film works by manipulating the relationship of this narrative space and the viewer space. It is not, as many like Broadfoot and Butler above have claimed off-hand, that the viewer “enters the screen.” The viewer’s real space does not change and the viewer does not actually move. The reverse is more apt. The narrative space comes out into the viewer’s space; that is, the diegetic space changes shape and perspective in relation to the viewer. Noting this reversal, Benjamin sees film as the extension of the masses’ desire for closeness, a comparison he makes through the analogy of the magician and the surgeon. 82 The moving pictures come closer – in more intimate relation – to the viewer’s space, moving within a range in relation to the viewer. The screen’s world can come nearer or go further away; the viewer can be positioned above the dialogue or below the hood of the car. The viewer takes the perspective of a god or an ant. The viewpoint becomes more or less enframed, more or less obscured. Some might dispute the characterization that cinema represents the desire of the masses to get closer. 83 In a way, film distances the viewers from the actors. The actors perform in front of the camera, which records them in a space and time quite distant from the moment of viewing. In another way, however, this fact further illustrates the uniqueness of cinema in relation to theater.

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Although the audience is distanced from the actor, they are brought closer to the role. The diegetic world of the role changes shape in relation to the viewer. Indeed, film separates the actor and the role in a way denied in theater. “The artistic performance of a stage actor is directly presented to the public by the actor in person; that of a screen actor, however, is presented through a camera, with two consequences.” 84 The first consequence is that the film actor’s performance becomes fragmented, subject “to a series of optical tests.” 85 The series of optical tests are the various movements of the camera. As the camera moves in for a close-up or away for a long shot, or takes on the perspective of the protagonist or takes in the scene from an askew angle, the viewer is brought closer to (their space is related to) the role. In other words, a theater actor’s performance is experienced as an integral whole of actor and role. The film actor’s performance, in contrast, occurs in various locations over an elongated period of time during the shooting of the film, often shot in disjointed and disconnected fragments rather than proceeding in strict linear order. The performance of the role that the audience sees is existent only on the screen, taking place through the camera which “continually changes its position with respect to the performance.” 86 Second, this condition denies the film actor the ability to adapt to the present audience as in the theater. Without such personal contact, the audience gains the position of a critical distance. Distanced from the actor, they are brought closer to the role. “Consequently, the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing.” 87 In the experience of shooting the film, the camera replaces the audience. The actor performs for the apparatus, rather than a live audience. Benjamin quotes Luigi Pirandello, “The film actor feels as if exiled… The little apparatus will play with his shadow before the audience, and he himself must be content to play before the apparatus.” 88 Thus the actor is dismissed, dispelling the aura. The “unique phenomenon of a distance” relies on the presence of the live actor, whose

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embodied self enables a distinction between the staged role and the actual person. With the actor gone in film, the aura dissipates and the role is brought closer to the audience. Viewers never see the actor and thus never experience the distance of an auratic mode. Instead, the film presents merely “shadows” of the actor, shadows which compose their role. In short, the scenes of the movie come closer to the viewer because the viewer is constantly put in the position of the camera, which is inside the world of the action. This world changes shape according to where and how the camera is moved, and thus changes shape based on the position of the viewer-camera. Bazin comes close to isolating this feature of cinematic space but confuses it in his desire to salvage realism as the unique language and style of the screen. He diagnoses this use of space as “that realism of space without which moving pictures do not constitute cinema.” 89 However, as Sontag points out, cinema is very effective at the alogical and unrealistic use of space, such as when we are shown the inside of objects or when a close-up makes a character appear larger than life. It is not that film relies on a realism of space but that cinema always relates the diegetic space and the viewer space in ways impossible for theater or literature. 90 The relation of narrative and viewer space is what Bazin describes as “the common denominator between the cinematographic image and the world we live in,” even if he mislabels this denominator as the realistic use of space. 91 If this relation of viewer space and diegetic space entails realism, this is not a realism confined to normal human visual perception. In fact, the optical unconscious is precisely about the ability to see space alogically, even at times tearing the things pictured from their real coordinates of space and time. Take the montage. Sometimes, a montage is designed to convey a metaphoric, symbolic, or affective linkage between the images rather than a progression in space-time. Arnheim notes that certain kinds of montage are distinguished because “the shots

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which follow one another have no space-time connection but only one of substance.” 92 A series of images flashing a smiling child, a rising sun, and a budding flower might convey innocence or rebirth. A series of images featuring a waving flag, a military parade, and an iconic monument might represent patriotism. These images do not necessarily take place within the space-time of the unfolding narrative but work more as descriptions of context used to portray a mood, meaning, or emotional state. Once again, this use of descriptive montage is similar to literature. According to Seymour Chatman, description in literature occurs in “discourse time” which marks a stoppage in the story time, the progression of narrative events. 93 The narrative spacetime is suspended while the point-of-view is described. Montage, in these examples, similarly suspends the narrative space-time to convey meaningful content. Another example is the close-up. Close-ups are often used to convey affect. The camera moves in on the face of a shocked or frightened or angry person to show more clearly their emotional reaction. Even if the reaction occurs as a response to the events of the narrative, the close-up rips the face from the moment to hold it up for expressive display. Often, the close-up will show the expression longer than the actual response could have lasted; the close-up detaches the face from its surroundings to put it in relief. The close-up thus turns the face into a signifier, one removed from the narrative time to serve the purpose of description. This point has been made by screenwriter Julius J. Epstein and further developed by Deleuze. In Deleuze’s terms, the close-up “abstracts [the face] from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of Entity.” 94 This Entity is an expression of affect, working similar to the icon which also conveys an abstract, symbolic or emotional state through concrete means. 95 The close-up and the montage, with their ability to abstract from the spatio-temporal coordinates of the narrative, have been imitated in theater but many of the possibilities for seeing

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the optical unconscious are denied or more laborious in theater. 96 As we noted earlier, it is the particularly –ability of photography to show aspects of reality inaccessible to the human eye without technological assistance. The camera’s possibilities of moving, stretching, isolating, slowing down or speeding up, enlarging or reducing can reveal to the viewer “a vast and unsuspected field of action” through the “exploration of commonplace milieux.” 97 Once again, an economy between the real (“commonplace milieux”) and the imaginary (the vast field of action) is evident. This field of action is the optical unconscious, made possible by the camera and difficult if not impossible in live theater. Benjamin explains: With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended… Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. ‘Other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. 98 Perhaps a more exacting term for this –ability is transposability. In the cinematic mode, the viewer’s point-of-view is transposed in ways mostly denied to theater. In the theater, the viewer’s point-of-view is typically singular; they rarely move around the room to get better angles and certainly do not constantly oscillate their position. In the cinematic mode, the viewer is shown close-ups closer than any actual point-of-view or sees movement slowed-down beyond physical possibilities. The viewer sees from the point-of-view of the protagonist, then the antagonist’s, then sees both from the side. The viewer jumps instantaneously across time in flashbacks or flash-forwards or across space, moving from one street, building, city, country, or even planet to the next. The theater can change times and places but usually requires a change of staging and scene to do so. The instantaneous shifting, especially the rapid transposing common in many movies, is largely impossible in live-action theater that does not make use of the motion picture camera and projector.

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To summarize, the cinematic mode is a unique hybrid of –abilities from other media and art forms. Like photography, the cinematic mode is reproducible but, unlike photography, it unfolds over time, allowing a legible narrative. Like literature, the cinematic mode is legible and transposable, as in the example of Dickens’ parallel montage, but the images created and transposed are watchable, composed of external materials rather than internal imaginings. Like theater, the cinematic mode is watchable, but unlike theater, the watching occurs through a transposability that reveals an optical unconscious difficult or even denied in live theater. The cinematic mode is a way of seeing material reality as imaginary narrative that occurs through reproducibility, legibility, watchability, and transposability. These –abilities enable viewers to envision a continuous narrative from discontinuous images. The reproducibility and transposability allows discontinuous images to be pieced together to form a continuous narrative, one produced through the viewer’s reading of legible images. Before moving on to discuss the “messages” of the cinematic mode, one final comparison between the temporality of reception of film, photography, and literature will help further distinguish. The temporality of the cinematic mode Another difference important to the cinematic mode is the temporality of reception, especially in comparison with still images (photography, painting, graphic arts) and with literature. The difference is related to the question: how long does the receiving take place? With still images and literature, the question bears no meaning because the reception-time varies with every person. In the cinema, the answer is always the same—each transfer lasts exactly 1/24th of a second. The cinema apparatus projects at a pace of 24 snapshots per second, the number of clips necessary so that the afterimage bleeds into the following image continuously. Afterimages ensure that viewers see two images blurring into one, giving the illusion of motion rather than a

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sense of two distinct poses. This physiological process allows the camera to replicate movementin-time by spatializing time, by turning moments-in-time into snapshots with their own physical location on the reel. This is what Deleuze points to with the term “any-instant-whatever.” 99 Panofsky also recognizes film’s ability to spatialize time. 100 With film, time can be measured in length. The number of shots adds up to the length of the film, and the length equates to running time. Filmmakers refer to the recorded film as “footage.” In literature and the graphic arts, by and large, the viewing or reading time is determined by the individual. Take reading, it does not make sense to say a sentence has a length of time. The sentence, when read, has a duration, yet the duration varies for each reader and may even be skipped by some (aghast!). Scholars of literature distinguish between story time (of the narrative), discourse time (of the narrator, moments of description), and reader time, the time it takes to read the book. 101 Reader time includes the time it takes to read both story time and discourse time. Reader time varies for each reader and even each reading by the same reader. The reader can stop, contemplate, re-read, skim, skip-ahead, or meditate; the reader determines the pace. Literature can play with narrative time but it can only suggest reader time; they can not be put into relation. Given the independence of viewing time, admirers and aficionados of the arts and literature trumpet an ideal of contemplative reception. Viewers or readers should read and reread, pause to think, pass over the same surface again with their eyes. Although the ideal is rarely achieved, the idea it contains expresses something important about the temporality of reception. Readers control the reading time, and thus measured and substantial contemplation is held as the ideal and contrasted with distraction, those viewers who do not invest the “appropriate” amount of

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time. Since the viewer controls the time, normative arguments become the way to discipline the audience, to instruct them in the appropriate contemplative mode. Film takes this instruction out of the realm of didactics and into the realm of mechanics. Viewer time never varies. Even if I leave for the bathroom, the movie continues to run. Obviously, DVD players add some level of control, but the length of the film is not changed by the viewer, even if they skip scenes. 102 Each picture is a duration, exactly and always 1/24th of a second. The content is a moment in time. Time/motion goes into the camera, is split up into instants and then projected back into time/motion. In short, while theater, literature, and cinema spatialize narrative time so that the characters and events may move about in this time, only the cinema spatializes viewer time. In order to see the film, we must invest a precise amount of viewer time because the film is filled with that much time. The director can present objects, in real viewer time, as long as they wish. Attention can be directed to the bloody fingerprint on the doorknob for five seconds or focused on the hero fading into the horizon for a full minute. Since viewer time is translated by the motion picture, any sort of contemplative mode must also transform. Of course, Ron Burnett convincingly contends that viewers engage in a sort of reverie while pondering or, in our terms, reading the film. 103 Legibility requires some processing time. Yet viewer time is not controlled by the viewer, and the temporality is less contemplative and more what Benjamin describes as the shock effect of cinema. The cinematic mode shocks the viewer with a continuous strong of images. As soon as we see one image, another replaces it. The viewer as surface, as screen, must move on with the picture, exposing themselves to the shock of imprinting. To see as a camera we must become like a camera, seeing and recording the sensory input that comes before our lens. Before a painting (or a book) the viewer might fall into contemplation, giving into an unbounded string of associations. With cinema, this is not possible.

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“The train of associations in the person contemplating it is immediately interrupted by new images. This constitutes the shock effect of film, which, like all shock effects, seeks to induce heightened attention.” 104 If this mode is a form of heightened attention, it is certainly at a far remove from the form of attention preferred by the contemplative mode. In fact, this form of attention seems a lot more like distraction, never able to fix itself on one image or even scene. Benjamin thus calls it a “reception in distraction.” 105 In this phrase, we can see once again the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity as well as Benjamin’s conceptualization of dialectic as an economy and not an opposition. The traditional arts saw attention and distraction as a mutually exclusive opposition. Reception in distraction, in contrast, indicates that there is a form of attention made possible through distraction. A continuity of reception emerges from a discontinuity of image-flow. The difference between reception in distraction and the contemplative mode is a reversal of direction. With the contemplation of art, the viewer or reader “enters into the work,” that is, they construct the work by investing their viewing time. 106 I think here of the art critic T.J. Clark who spent an entire year returning to the same paintings and writing about what and how he saw differently from day to day. 107 The viewer actually becomes part of the work. Their investment of time and attention is part of its constitution. They give the work a temporal unfolding. With the cinematic mode, in contrast, the viewer surrenders their time to the control of the film. They invest a certain amount of time, and where their attention goes is controlled by the film. The viewers become the screen and “absorb the work of art into themselves.” 108 They viewer does not enter into the work to give it time; the film enters into the viewer and dictates their time. More precisely than Benjamin, however, what is happening is not the entering of the film into the viewer but viewer time becoming controlled, similar to the way the cinematic mode

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relates viewer space and narrative space. The narrative time unfolds by using viewer time, directing 5 seconds of attention here or a minute there. With literature and the graphic arts, the works cannot use viewer time or relate it to the narrative time. Books and paintings can beckon or suggest viewer time but not control it, and the audience’s interpretation does not depend upon how long the reading or looking took place. The painter cannot determine if the viewer glances or gazes and thus cannot use the difference between a glance and a gaze to suggest meaning. In contrast, the cinematic mode often requires the interpretation of how long we look. Eye contact can become an ominous stare, an innocent glance can become a creepy glare. In other words, with the ability to control viewer time, viewing time can become a meaningful content. Reception in distraction is a form of distracted attention that nevertheless constitutes a certain mode of reception. Benjamin suggests this form is less contemplative and more habitual. People learn to watch movies in the cinematic mode similar to the way they learn to negotiate architecture—not by reflection but by practice, absorbed or incorporated into their very bodies. “Even the distracted person can form habits.” 109 These habits, these “messages,” will play a crucial role in modern consumer culture, as we shall see. For Jonathan Beller, the control of viewer time is the important “message” of cinema. Beller makes an insightful comparison between Marx’s labor theory of value and the cinema by arguing that the viewer’s attention is the new form of labor expropriated by capitalists for surplus value. 110 Cinema requires the labor of the viewer, a labor measured in time and consisting of their attention. Thus for Beller, cinema initiates and epitomizes post-Fordist capitalist production. Similar to Fordism, it standardizes and controls labor, but it moves beyond labor as motion into a form of labor as attention. Watching cinema requires the labor of engaging in the cinematic mode, and, as such, capitalists seek to

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exploit that labor for surplus value. Beller’s conclusions point to the importance of the cinematic mode for post-Fordist capitalism. Yet Beller misses the important “message” of the cinematic mode. Controlling viewer time is nothing new; any theater performance also controls the viewer time. Furthermore, capitalizing on attention is one of the oldest professions; people have made a buck with entertainment—filling leisure time—for millennia. Rather than suggesting that making a buck off attention initiates the post-Fordist era, it seems more apt to say that cinema is simply Fordism applied to the entertainment industry. The act of selling entertainment is not new; the uniqueness is the scale, efficiency, and the technological advance, those same defining characteristics of Fordism. What defines post-Fordism is not so much a new form of production—Fordism, the factories, and the assembly line all still exist in plenty, especially at major motion picture studios—but that production becomes driven by consumer preference. Rather than mass production driving down cost and hence promoting consumption, consumption now drives production, leading to an emphasis on brand image, vertical integration, and a diversity of choices. 111 This is the lesson of Disney for the post-Fordist world, not that capitalists are capitalizing on our attention. The important question is: how are consumer desires so constantly generated? Why and to what do people pay attention? The “messages” of the cinematic mode—its seeing reality as fantasy, its reception in distraction, its dialectic of continuity and discontinuity—are at least part of the answer. Consumerism and the Cinematic Mode Cinema’s Space Message Although closely related, I distinguish between the cinematic mode’s impacts on the perceptions of space and time. What is the “message” of the cinematic use of space? How does

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the altering of the relationship of viewer space and narrative space change cultural perceptions? Cinematic space conveys that people can create fantasy worlds through the positioning of themselves as viewer-recorders. In other words, people learn to look as a camera; cinema trains modes of seeing similar to the video camera. People learn that a juxtaposition of viewpoints can be strung together to tell a story. The mode trains people to frame, project, and record. It teaches that seeing like a camera, even when focused on “real” objects, can produce the most pleasurable experiences. It shows that altering viewer space can produce stories, can help transfer us into fantastical worlds. The cinematic mode teaches that what we see might be made up of actual moments of reality but, arranged and edited, can produce fanciful worlds. In short, the cinema teaches people to daydream, the daydream once again indicating an economy of real (the wakeful day) and fantasy (the dream). Metz has also made the comparison: “The filmic situation brings with it certain elements of motor inhibition, and it is in this respect a kind of sleep in miniature, a waking sleep… The filmic state embodies in a weaker form certain economic conditions of sleep. It remains a variant of the waking situation but less remote from sleep than most of the others.” 112 Of course, people daydreamed before the advent of cinema. Children often imagine entire worlds surrounding their favorite stuffed animal or action figure. In the eyes of a child, seat cushions become forts and sticks become swords. It is not that film inaugurated the process of daydreaming or even of seeing the world as a camera. Yet the spatiality of daydreaming in the cinematic mode remains unique. Rather than daydreams produced in the subject’s imagination, cinema creates an external daydream presented to an audience. As the cinematic mode puts viewer space into relation with diegetic space, cinema relates external images to the viewer’s imagination.

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Recognizing the differences between such internal, individual daydreams and the cinematic mode, Metz concludes that the two modes compete, that cinema dampens the desire for the daydream. 113 Yet, the spread of cinema accompanies the spread of a modern faculty of daydreaming crucial to the insatiable desire to consume. Perhaps the form of daydreaming has been translated by the cinematic mode, but Metz’s claim that daydreaming has declined with the advent of film seems unsustainable. Cinematic daydreaming spread a mode of daydreaming readily and eagerly applied to other types of consumption. Motion pictures, rather than competing with daydreams, provide constant reminders that this process can occur, and trains viewers in the tactics of a mode of daydreaming central to the insatiable desire to consume, what Colin Campbell calls the spirit of modern consumerism. Campbell’s insightful look at the spirit of modern consumerism points to the central role of daydreaming in generating a constant, insatiable desire to consume. 114 This perpetual desire is an ongoing dilemma for the theorization of modern consumerism; the desire to consume is sempiternal but only recently has the desire become so diffuse and so insatiable. Modern consumerism depends upon this incessant, never satiated desire. In pursuit of an answer, Campbell distinguishes between daydreaming and pure fantasy. In fantasy, the imagination is unrestricted by reality, such as in fantasies of time travel or becoming invisible. In contrast, the daydream begins with the materials of reality such as the person, the things they see, or the people they know, and constructs pleasurable and often exaggerated scenarios, but ones which stay within the realms of plausibility. People daydream about dating the person they have a secret crush on, or about telling the boss how they really feel, or about hitting the winning home run in tonight’s softball game.

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For Campbell this form of daydreaming, what he calls modern hedonism, is a faculty not widespread before the last two centuries. What is different about modern hedonism is the relationship between imagination and the real world, or, we can say, the relationship of the viewer space and diegetic space. Once again, these two spaces are blurred. In traditional hedonism, imagination plays a key role in desire, but the desire does not stem from the imagining itself but from the achievement of real pleasure. There is still a strict boundary between the viewer’s space and the imagination. The traditional hedonist was subject to their imaginations and desires, with little room for self-conscious editing. If their imagination constantly dwells on feet as a fetish, they could do nothing but pursue feet in order to fulfill the desire. In daydreaming, the dream begins from the viewer’s space and is projected in enjoyable directions. The modern viewer is more restricted in their fantasies, bound to their real space and its plausibilities, but also more in control over their direction. Daydreams, just like movies, depend on self-conscious editing and direction. When we people watch or daydream about experiences with a new commodity, for instance, our editing and control is the crucial element of the construction of the fantasy. The connection with a cinematic mode of seeing is evident in Campbell’s own words (emphasis mine): [Daydreaming] may take place in a more or less ‘directed’ fashion, with the individual perhaps content at times to allow the imagery to evolve ‘as it wishes’, whilst at others ‘intervening’ to make ‘adjustments’… The way in which mental images are most likely to be modified in imagination so as to deviate from a ‘realistic’ path is by the simple omission of those elements which, although inherent in life, interfere with the pursuit of its pleasures. Just as in romantic novels and films, heroes and heroines rarely have hiccups, headaches or indigestion unless this proves essential to the plot, so too are our dreams purged of life’s little inconveniences. 115 Editing and directing daydreams makes them great sources of pleasure while the imagination of the traditional hedonist might equally be a source of torment as it is a source of pleasure. In this sense, the fantasies of the traditional hedonist are closer to dreams and their uncontrolled

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nightmares than to daydreams. Daydreams can edit out the little inconveniences of life as well as its pain and struggle. Fantasizing about being invisible might bring some measure of desire, but it is the desire of the imagination, not the feeling of actually being invisible. In the daydream, these feelings and emotions are blurred. Distinguishing between the fluttering in our heart that we get from daydreaming about falling in love and the same fluttering from actually falling in love is much more difficult. 116 This is because the real and imaginary space are blurred. Sensory faculties transfer into the world of the narrative, thus emotions evoked by fictional or real occurrences feel similar. This emotional experience can be desirous. People can enjoy the play between the real and the imaginary; the daydream pleases by producing a similar sensation to real feelings. Campbell explains, further connecting movies and daydreaming: In this sense, the contemporary hedonist is a dream artist, the special psychic skills possessed by modern man [sic] making this possible. Crucial to this process is the ability to gain pleasure from the emotions so aroused for, when the images are adjusted, so too are the emotions. As a direct consequence, convincing day-dreams are created, such that individuals react subjectively to them as if they were real. This is the distinctive modern faculty, the ability to create an illusion that is known to be false but felt to be true. The individual is both actor and audience in his [sic] own drama, ‘his own’ in the sense that he constructed it, stars in it, and constitutes the sum total of the audience. 117 In short, the daydream is a mode of seeing based on an economy of real sensory inputs and imaginary narratives. It uses the elements of everyday life to construct a pleasurable fantasy. Campbell notices the similarities between film and daydreams, saying “In other words, people enjoy these images in much the same manner they enjoy a novel or a film.” 118 At the same time, he denies media any constitutive role in the modern faculty of daydreams, insisting that they provide materials for daydreams but are not daydreams themselves. This is undeniable; materials from movies are used to daydream, and movies are objects, not psychological processes. Yet this is the advantage of a media theory based on the concept of modes and their translation. The

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daydream and the movie are different translations, different iterations, of a shared kinship. In the movie and the daydream, individuals engage in a related but different mode of communicating. Despite his disavowal of the constitutive influence of media, Campbell relies on an implicit media theory. He traces the emergence of modern hedonism to a “Romantic ethic,” indicating the Romanticism movement of the early 19th century. While Campbell treats this as a movement, including music, painting, and poetry, most of the evidence for his claim comes from writing, particularly literature and philosophy. Campbell represents Romanticism through writers such as Rousseau, J.S. Mill, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. Campbell acknowledges the primary role of the written word in his theory: Only if the individual is himself in control of the employment of symbolic resources can true emotional self-determinism emerge. For this reason, a decline in the importance of the collective symbolic manipulation of emotion is important. Literacy, in conjunction with individualism, would seem to be the key development in this respect, for this grants the individual a form and degree of symbolic manipulation which was previously restricted to groups. 119 The dilemma Campbell’s take raises is how are literature and motion pictures different media? Also, why does the insatiable desire to consume of modern hedonism seem to emerge in the 20th century, much later than the spread of literacy due to the printing press? I think Campbell’s quotation indicates a difference. If literature constructs a mode of seeing, it is an internal, individualized one. The reader gazes down at the page, and the action takes place inside their head. So, they are accustomed to shutting out the outside world around the reader space in order to “see” an inner, imaginary world. After the transition from manuscript culture where readers tended to read aloud, today readers usually read in silence, away from the distractions of the public hustle-and-bustle. 120 Readers ignore all other visual cues except the words on the page. Further, a reader has little to no visual guidance and must construct the image for

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themselves. Most of the unique visual elements of the characters, scenes, and actions must be interpreted; readers must form their own mental pictures of the story. Movies, on the other hand, teach how to construct daydreams through outward, not inward, projection. A camera can not look inward, and so can not produce the kind of daydream experience of reading a book. A motion picture must use images to construct imaginary worlds through the careful processes of editing, direction, and cutting. So, the cinematic mode allows us to construct daydreams from the surrounding milieu. We can daydream in and about the public, not alone with a book or lost in my thoughts. As Jodi Dean remarks, “Indeed, one might say that celebrity subjectivity presents an exaggerated version of the modern sense of life as something that is narrated, that it is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. We are the content of our stories.” 121 The stories are not wholly in our control; the people we watch may turn on us. We play the daydream director, cutting and splicing, adding sound and effects. And we are not wholly separate from the world of the daydreams; those we watch might watch back. Our stories might cross; I might project myself into a fanciful interaction with a beautiful woman. Or they might not, as I imagine the shady dealings of a child molester at the mall from a safe and detached position. Once again, viewer space and narrative space are blurred and related in ways they never are with a book. The motion picture instructs us in a mode of seeing as a camera, a cinematic mode, which shows how to construct daydreams from the outer world by projection and recording, looking and imagining. Literature teaches daydreams as well, but daydreams through words, produced internally in the imagination. A reader might translate this mode into modern daydreams, but this translation is not necessarily suggested by or emulated in the mode of reading.

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If Campbell is right that the pleasures of daydreaming stem from creating false images felt to be true, then cinema seems to be the quintessential medium. If “day-dreaming can perhaps best be envisaged as an activity which mixes the pleasures of fantasy with those of reality,” then movies best represent the cultural practice of daydreaming. 122 The cinematic mode entails perceiving reality as fantasy; it blurs the boundaries of viewer space and narrative space. Motion pictures do more than provide symbolic resources for daydreams; they instruct people in a mode of seeing that allows them to construct their own. The cinematic mode democratizes and spreads the faculty of daydreaming well beyond literacy, since literacy is restricted by educational training. As such, the cinematic mode entails a crucial “message” for modern consumerism, the “message” of the possibilities and pleasures of daydreams. Cinema’s Time Message What is the “message” of the cinematic medium in relation to time? How do cultural perceptions change shape through the spread of a reception in distraction? The message is that time can be spatialized, that people can capture moments and use them to tell stories, to project an image. Time becomes seen as storable, editable, controllable. As Kittler contends, cinematography, a term derived from writing, stores visual time in the same way writing stores words. 123 With the phonograph and cinema, the storage monopoly of the written word is shattered and a new form of the archive emerges. Ever dependent on the archive, the military, the state and giant corporations were the first to see the advantages of the motion picture. 124 Time became object and thus time can become money, through the C-M-C cycle isolated by Marx. It should be no surprise that Hollywood is quickly monopolized by a few large corporations and remains today an oligopoly headed by multi-national media giants such as Disney.

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Yet this is not only a message garnered by the rich and powerful and controlled exclusively by those with massive industrial studios. Watching movies, the viewer learns two undeniable realities. First, that each moment of our lives, we project an image. As Benjamin states, “Any person today can lay claim to being filmed.” 125 Second, that with careful editing and direction, we can take those moments, those images, and tell stories, even create pleasurable and fanciful worlds. We may not own motion picture Studios, but we can easily translate these lessons into other mediums—scrapbooks, facebook, youtube, and camcorders at weddings, birthdays, retirements, and other parties. We can imagine the pleasurable experiences that buying a new car or new clothes could create. We too can take our moments, juxtapose and edit them, and create stories about ourselves or others. With the help of the cinematic mode, we too can spatialize time. In short, people learn to make continuous narratives from the discontinuous and distracted states of their lives. The cinematic mode trains people in a reception in distraction central to the conditions of modern living. Modern consumerism forces people to play multiple roles, pulling individuals in numerous directions for the purposes of employment, raising a family, consumption, and entertainment. “(T)he accelerated pace of life, the rapid transitions of modern media, the press of commodities and their programmed obsolescence, and so on” makes for a distracted and discontinuous life experience. 126 The cinematic mode teaches people reception amidst such distraction. It teaches them how to take these disparate experiences and mold them into a continuous whole, similar to a film’s montage. Their discontinuous experiences can be seen as parts of a continuous whole, part of our own personal movies. The existence of cinematic time, then, cues cultural perceptions in similar ways to the cinematic use of space. In a sense, the message is the flip-side of the first. People sense that if

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they can look as a camera then they can be watched by a camera as well. Dean states, “To register as a subject in technoculture, one has to present oneself as an object for everyone else.” 127 People become subjects of the camera in both senses. They are the subject acting through the predicate camera, taking motion pictures of the surroundings to construct daydreams. They are also subjects of the camera, those under its watchful eyes. Thus the age of surveillance is also the age of exhibition. 128 Cameras are both projector and recorder. Looking as a camera, we become both filmmaker and filmed. For Dean, this conclusion ensures the “literalization of the actor in the public sphere.” 129 Those persons most subject to the camera, such as politicians and celebrities, know very well the requirements becoming an actor brings. Benjamin elucidates: The direction of this change is the same for the film actor and the politician, regardless of their different tasks. It tends toward the exhibition of controllable, transferable skills under certain social conditions, just as sports first called for such exhibition under certain natural conditions. This results in a new form of selection—selection before an apparatus—from which the champion, the star, and the dictator emerge as victors. 130 For sure, the existence of such modes of seeing does not guarantee that every moment we are being filmed, or that we always contort ourselves as such. But the faculty is envisioned, materialized in every film. People learn to look as a camera and also how to contort themselves under its gaze. Just think of the ways that people act differently in the presence of camcorders. They feel called upon to do something memorable, to make an impression with their image. They are expected to transfer life and motion to the film, to animate it with themselves. Some will shy away from the camera for this very reason. Others learn better how to contort themselves favorably for the camera and are rewarded for their efforts with celebrity, which basically means that their entire lives become subject to the camera—from their motion pictures to the paparazzi outside the door.

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Celebrity actors can serve as another fruitful example. Leo Braudy notes that movie actors accrue a residual image accumulating from their previous roles. 131 Denzel Washington’s or Angelina Jolie’s “image” persists with them. The culture recognizes this persisting image in the form of gossip shows and columns. In turn, the actors are expected to “play themselves” and criticized for diverging too far. How do people know if actors are “playing themselves”? Viewers think they can get a sense of the “real” Will Smith through his movie roles. How does this residual image persist? Braudy deduces that some residue remains because of cinema’s use of time: Movies therefore stand between the strongly social emphasis of theater and the strongly individual emphasis of novels, incorporating elements of both. At a play we are always outside the group, at the footlights. But at a film we move between inside and outside, individual and social perspectives. 132 What Braudy is discussing, once again, is the blurring of viewer space-time and narrative space-time. Film depends on capturing actual moments, whether fictionalized or not, therefore we sense that we share a moment with the character. Braudy shows how this is not the case with theater actors. They might gain a reputation for excellence, but not for playing roles “like themselves.” A distance remains between the actor and the role. In the theater, the audience has little expectation of discovering the true person behind the mask. In fact, the best theater actors are considered to be those who can play a multitude of roles. The theater, with its space-time marked off from the viewer, expects masks and demands staging. Braudy concludes, “The film actor emphasizes display, while the stage actor explores disguise.” 133 A movie, by blurring viewer and narrative space-time, relies on a little confusion between the mask and the person. Some audience members think they can separate the two, believing they can divorce the fiction of the story from the actuality of the moment. As such, audiences expect film acting that is authentic, genuine, from the heart. The widely-prescribed Actor’s Studio and Stanislavsky

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approaches to film acting emphasize “becoming the character,” even to the point of imitating some of the character’s (fictional) daily routines. These acting criteria emerge due to the temporal relations of the cinematic medium. Braudy spells out the basic principle: “Film actors play their roles the way we play ourselves in the world.” 134 Perhaps more exactly than Braudy—both film actors and ourselves play roles under the lens of the camera. It is not as if the way people act in a movie is the way people have always acted naturally. No, the introduction of the motion picture introduces a widespread awareness of how to look as a camera. Such looking necessarily leads to a widespread awareness that camera’s may be watching, that we should be conscious of the image we project, that we are expected to provide our life and motion to animate the shots. As subjects of the camera, daily habits and the cultural habitus radically transform. People contort themselves as and contort themselves to the lens. With photographs, people could pose or attempt to avoid capture. With movie camerasubjects everywhere, one acts—naturally—all the time. One’s image is always being projected. These changes transformed the very notion of the American dream as well. This sense of time-space is easily translated into the perfect fantasy of the American dream. With spatialized time, yes you too can turn your moments into an example of the American story. You can mold, edit, and control your image, turn it into a commodity, and become immortal through the traces of yourself left behind, those reels of the “real.” The American dream, especially Disney’s magical version where all you need is a dream discussed in Chapter Four, is precisely this fantasy. With nothing but an image, a person can achieve the fame and fortune reserved for those who master the time-space of our cameras. There is more. The “message” is extremely profitable for consumerism as well. The idea that we have an image, that we are watched by human-cameras, drives many to comport themselves

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in ways beneficial to powerful corporations and the ideology of consumerism. Under the lens, subjects are encouraged to distinguish themselves, to act and exhibit for individual distinction. Fashion was the primary example for Benjamin, who saw the continual fashion cycle as the grease for the wheels of modern consumerism. The connection between cameras and both the desire for fashion and the fashion industry is obvious. Yet this is more than technological coincidence. Fashion has extended to home goods, automobiles, entertainment, and nearly every sundry commodity. Critics from Pierre Bourdieu to Thorstein Veblen, Virginia Postrel to Thomas Frank, Fredric Jameson to Jean Baudrillard have observed the affinity between contemporary capitalism and the drive for distinction, difference, and individuality. 135 The consumer economy provides materials for individuals to construct their own image, and thus thrives in an environment where people seek uniqueness and distinction. Some critics of consumerism such as Theodore Adorno and Kalle Lasn might take issue with the claim that the desire for uniqueness and individuality drives consumerism. 136 They see the exact opposite: a ceaseless push towards standardization and conformity motored by the desire to “keep up with the Joneses.” 137 In my opinion, this is not a contradiction; both explanations make sense in a perceptual habitus accustomed to the cinematic mode. Standardization, conformity, and keeping up with the Joneses require an active process of looking and comparison, a constant shifting of position similar to a movie camera. Even fitting in is a desire to blend into the background, one encouraged by a world of eagerly peering camera-subjects. Thus the two most predominant explanations of modern consumerism draw fuel from a cultural habitus accustomed to the cinematic mode. In an environment filled with camera-subjects, standing out and fitting in are not oppositional explanations but mutually necessary results.

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Trying to stand out or fit in (both are roles on the screen), people project and record fragments to construct an image. If we want to be a figure, the process prefers the bold and the distinct, fueling fashion cycles. Even the attempt to not have an image is interpreted as a particular “look” in a culture brimming with camera-subjects. As we project ourselves for the camera’s record, an obsession with image fuels a consumerism bent on selling and packaging them. McLuhan’s insight makes more sense in this light, and further troubles Campbell’s timeline for modern consumerism:

The movie… offers as product the most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams. It is, therefore, not accidental that the movie has excelled as a medium that offers poor people roles of riches and power…. It meant that in the 1920s the Ameri-can way of life was exported to the entire world in cans. The world eagerly lined up to buy canned dreams. The film not only accompanied the first great consumer age, but was also incentive, advertisement, and, in itself, a major commodity. 138 To become a commodity, the image had to become an object, requiring the spatialization of time. With time under control, consumerism finds a new plane. Time directly becomes money. With a culture accustomed to the capture of time and image, consumerism accrues the fuel of millions of watchful camera-subjects desiring to stand out or fit in. The cinematic mode is the perception of a consumerist world breaking through the previously ephemeral boundaries such as time. Panofsky, whose description is close to mine, deserves the last word, with my emphasis pointing us to the following chapter: “It is the movies, and only the movies, that do justice to that materialistic interpretation of the universe which, whether we like it or not, pervades contemporary civilization. Excepting the very special case of the animated cartoon, the movies organize material things and persons, not a neutral medium, into a composition that receives its style, and may even become fantastic or petervoluntarily symbolic, not so much by an interpretation in the artist’s mind as by the actual manipulation of physical objects and recording machinery. The medium of the movies is physical reality as such:… 139

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By way of summary, the cinematic mode entails two crucial “messages” for the translation of the American dream and the ideology of consumerism. First, the cinematic mode instructs people in a form of daydreaming, a mode of seeing as cameras which blurs present reality with pleasurable fantasy. Second, the cinematic mode shows us that our moments in time are imageprojections potentially appropriated in other people’s imaginations. In short, it teaches that people can see like a camera and thus can be seen like a camera. Such messages are easily translated into a version of the American dream. They teach that all we need is a dream to guide the fashioning of our image, and we too might become a star and climb the social ladder. It is the American dream of celebrity, what I will call the magical, Disney version. Such messages are also easily translated into profitable marketing and commodity-production. A culture accustomed to projecting and remembering images will frequently and repetitively be both monitoring the Jones and seeking the fashion that will make them stand out. What, then, about the very special case of animation? What “messages” does it entail?

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Endnotes for Chapter Five 1

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), 7-8. 2 For one version of the technological evolution of cinema, see Rudolf Arnheim, "The Thoughts That Made the Picture Move," in Film as Art (Berkeley,: University of California Press, 1957). 3 For a great discussion of Muybridge, see Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003). 4 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Writing Science (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 115-19. 5 Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, 5. 6 Walter Benjamin, "The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression," in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). 7 Ibid., 340. 8 Sergei Eisenstein and Jay Leyda, Film Form; Essays in Film Theory, [1st ed. (New York,: Harcourt, 1949), 3. 9 Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, 23. 10 Ibid., 19. 11 Ibid., 29. 12 Eisenstein and Leyda, Film Form; Essays in Film Theory. 13 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 14 Ibid., 51. 15 Thus Metz concludes that cinema gives the sense of the “all-perceiving subject,” tapping into a passion for perceiving. Ibid, 45. 16 Marshall McLuhan, "Guttenberg Galaxy," in Essential Mcluhan, ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 131-33. 17 Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image. 18 Ibid., 12. 19 Keith Broadfoot and Rex Butler, "The Illusion of Illusion," in The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications, 1991). 20 Ibid., 282. 21 Of course, the emergence of digital video production problematizes my emphasis on ”material reality.” However, this project is a historical one, focusing on cinema’s history until the death of Walt Disney. At the time, digital video did not exist, so anything shown on the screen was material from actual, physical reality. Furthermore, CGI and other digital images seem to extend from the heritage of animation, discussed in the following chapter. 22 . Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 35. 23 Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley,: University of California Press, 1957), 29. 24 Many scholars have noted this belief. See, for instance, Cara A. Finnegan, "The Naturalistic Enthymeme and Visual Argument: Photographic Representation in the Skull Controversy," Argumentation and Advocacy 37 (2001). 25 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 26 Quoted in Stefan Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story (New York: Scribner, 1997), 33. 27 Arnheim, Film as Art. 28 ———, "The Thoughts That Made the Picture Move," 127. 29 Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, 27. 30 Ibid., 28, 32. 31 Ibid., 30. 32 Ibid., 32. 33 Arnheim, Film as Art, 73. 34 Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, 32. 35 Ibid., 33.

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36

Eisenstein tells the history of the montage, borrowed from D.W. Griffith who apparently was translating some literary techniques of Charles Dickens. Eisenstein and Leyda, Film Form; Essays in Film Theory. 37 Erwin Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," in Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 247. 38 Quoted in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 154. 39 Quoted in Ibid., 167. 40 Hugo Münsterberg and Richard Griffith, The Film: A Psychological Study, [Dover ed. (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Pub., 1970), 95. 41 Quoted in Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 29. 42 Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, 12. 43 Ibid., 37. 44 Ibid, 39. 45 Ibid, 77. 46 Arnheim, Film as Art, 65. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 75. 49 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 28. 50 Ibid., 29. 51 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Michael William Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002), 103. 52 “But now the mirror image [Bild] has become detachable from the person mirrored, and is transportable. And where is it transported? To a site in front of the masses.” Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 33. 53 Ibid., 21. 54 Ibid., 23. 55 Ibid., 22. 56 Of course, the photo essay links photos in different ways that should not be ignored. But this linkage is very different from the cinematic mode. See W. J. Thomas Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 281-322. 57 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. 58 Arnheim, Film as Art, 181. 59 Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (London: St. Edmundsbury Press, 1996). 60 Ibid., 59. 61 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 27. 62 Ibid. 63 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet Books, 1964), 249. 64 Ibid., 250. 65 Ibid. 66 Sergei Eisenstein, "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," in Film Form; Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay Leyda (New York,: Harcourt, 1949). 67 Ibid., 199, 206. 68 Eisenstein sees the montage as the primary element of film form, and Gilles Deleuze accords the montage similarly significant status. Eisenstein says, “Cinematography is, first and foremost, montage.” ———, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram," in Film Form; Essays in Film Theory, ed. Jay Leyda (New York,: Harcourt, 1949), 28. For an extensive discussion of the import and types of montage, also see, Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image. 69 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death : Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1986), 30-43. 70 Ibid. 71 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 89.

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David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996). 73 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), 153. 74 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 38. 75 Ibid., 37. 76 Of course, Peggy Phalen argues live performance is valuable because it evades reproducibility. Phil Auslander, however, has made a compelling argument that live performance is also reproducible. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993). Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999). 77 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett, trans. John Willett, [1st ed. (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1964). 78 Walter Benjamin, "What Is the Epic Theater? (Ii)," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Wiritngs Volume 4 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2003). 79 Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York,: Farrar, 1969), 108. 80 Ibid, 109. 81 André Bazin and Hugh Gray, What Is Cinema? (Berkeley,: University of California Press, 1967), 104-05. 82 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). 83 Ibid, 255. 84 Ibid, 259. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid, 260. 88 Ibid. 89 Bazin and Gray, What Is Cinema? , 111. 90 Sontag, Styles of Radical Will. 91 Bazin and Gray, What Is Cinema? , 108. 92 Arnheim, Film as Art, 91. 93 Seymour Chatman, "What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (and Vice Versa)," Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980). 94 Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, 96. 95 For a description of icons as the portrayal of an abstract symbolism through realistic features, see Eric S. Jenkins, "My Ipod, My Icon: How and Why Do Images Become Icons?," Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 5 (2008). 96 Of course, theater can employ film, as many recent productions have begun to do. Sontag notes that theater is not a media technology in the same way as film since theater can incorporate other media. Sontag, Styles of Radical Will. 97 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 37. 98 Ibid. 99 Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image. 100 Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures." 101 See Chatman, "What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (and Vice Versa)." Also, George Bluestone, Novels into Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961). 102 DVD players have a significant influence on the cinematic mode not discussed here. Although they allow more control over viewer-time, they do not allow complete control, and it seems reasonable that a vast majority of movie watching, even on DVD, happens straight through from beginning to end. Few viewers pause, rewind, fast forward, and stop enough to meet the ideal of a contemplative mode, although it seems this is how many scholars write about movies. Once again, however, this possibility demonstrates the translatability of modes. 103 Ron Burnett, Cultures of Vision : Images, Media, and the Imaginary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 104 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 132. 105 He states, “Reception in distraction—the sort of reception which is increasingly noticeable in all areas of art and is a symptom of profound changes in apperception—finds in film its true training ground. Film, by virtue of its shock effects, is predisposed to this form of reception.” ———, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 40-41. 106 Ibid., 119.

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T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death : An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 119. 109 Ibid, 120. 110 Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2006). 111 These trends are perhaps best spelled out by Naomi Klein. Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000). 112 Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, 116-17. 113 Metz offers little support for the claim that cinema and the daydream compete, other than the differences between the two. The main difference, according to Metz, is that cinema includes an irreducible “materialization” of images and sounds lacking in the daydream. In other words, the cinema is a form of daydreaming through externally perceived sights and sounds, whereas the daydream occurs more internally. This explanation is apt but does not entail competition between the two modes. In fact, daydreams often employ the materials of externally perceived sights and sounds. Although the daydream is more individually oriented rather than collectively perceived, it is equally plausible to see the individual daydream as an internally-applied form of the cinematic mode, or perhaps vice-versa—the cinematic mode is an externally-produced form of the daydream. Ibid., 135-36. 114 Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford, UK ; New York, NY, USA: B. Blackwell, 1987). 115 Ibid., 83-84. 116 Of course, actually falling in love may provide a longer and more intense sensation of fluttering. But the daydream can produce the same sensation. 117 Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, 78. 118 Ibid, 92. 119 Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, 72. 120 Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 121 Jodi Dean, Publicity's Secret : How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 125. 122 Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, 85. 123 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 3. 124 The connection between the motion-picture camera and the military is intimate. See Ibid. Also see, Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London ; New York: Verso, 1989). The Foucault reference is to Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, [1st American ed. (New York,: Pantheon Books, 1972). 125 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 262. 126 Howard Eiland, "Reception in Distraction," in boundary 2 (Duke University Press, 2003), 57. 127 Dean, Publicity's Secret : How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy, 125. 128 Bennett argues that the disciplinary society based on surveillance and analyzed by Focuault was at the same time a society based on an exhibitionary complex and apparatus as well that helped ensure the smooth functioning of discipline and surveillance. “A site itself, it [the Eiffel Tower] becomes the site for a sight; a place to see and be seen from, which allows the individual to circulate between the object and subject positions of the dominating vision it affords over the city and its inhabitants.” Tony Bennett, "The Exhbitionary Complex," in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (London ; New York: Routledge, 1996), 106. 129 Dean, Publicity's Secret : How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy, 124. 130 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 128. 131 Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films, 1st ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976). 132 Ibid, 196-97. 133 Ibid, 197. 134 Ibid, 198. 135 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class : An Economic Study of Institutions, A limited ed., The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature (Franklin Center, Pa.: Franklin Library, 1979). Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Virginia I. Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic 108

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Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, 1st ed. (New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 2003). Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis, MO.: Telos Press, 1981). 136 There will be an extended discussion of Adorno in the next chapter. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class : An Economic Study of Institutions. Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam : The Uncooling of America, 1st ed. (New York: Eagle Brook, 1999). 137 “Keeping up with the Joneses” is Veblen’s phrase. He argues that people consume in order to seek status, which motivates more consumption in an attempt to keep up with your social circle. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class : An Economic Study of Institutions. 138 McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 254-55. 139 Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," 247.

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Chapter Six: Of Mice and Mimesis What of the very special case of animation? Disney did not make live-action movies until much later in the history of the medium. Why study Disney if the point is about live-action cinema? This chapter is concerned with distinguishing the modes of live-action cinema and animation, but any consideration of animated cinema must address the modes, contexts, and conditions of live-action cinema because of animation’s dependence on cinema’s theaters, technologies, and studios. In early cinema, animation and live-action features coexisted on the film bill, forcing live-action and animation into competition. This competition presented animation with a significant dilemma due to cinema’s spatialization of time. A seven-minute animated short, typical in the early-days, requires over 10,000 drawings. The magnitude necessitates numerous animators and a large, coordinated industrial production, especially given the number of steps involved in the process. Unfortunately, seven minute openings to the film bill received only a small portion of the proceeds, most of which are reserved for the much longer main feature. The amount of capital and labor necessary to produce an animated short were not justified by the small profits. Feild concludes, “Films cost money and in the last analysis cost is determined by the length of the film. From this point of view time was money.” 1 In other words, when time becomes spatialized, it can be turned into an object of capital. For Disney and other animators, time and money were running out. By the late 1920s, animation was in economic crisis and on the verge of extinction.

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Disney depended on cinema’s theaters to circulate their product, thus they adapted to the conditions of cinema. Declining economic prospects led Disney to borrow heavily from the cinematic mode. Many biographers credit this state of affairs with encouraging Disney to pursue full-length features. Animation adjusted to the four-dimensional space of the cinema screen by moving towards full length features and away from the less profitable animated shorts filled with gags and graphic narrative. Disney turned to full-length features and employed many of the same narrative and cinematographic devices of live-action movies. This development proceeded particularly through the invention of the multi-plane camera which gave a sense of depth to the two-dimensional drawings. With the multi-plane camera, animation begins to imitate the modes of seeing of cinema, enabling a transposability that alters the diegetic space in relation to the viewer space through montage and alternating points-of-view. Animation extends the perceived spatial relationships developed in the cinema by borrowing modes from live-action cinema. 2 Animation and cinema, then, remain intricately connected to the point where Panofksy may be too hasty in categorically dividing them. Indeed, Paul Watson warns against an “artificial opposition” between animation and cinema due to their intertwined histories, techniques, and coexistence even in the same film. 3 Animation provided some technological precursors for cinema and paved the way for the film camera since the earlier invention of devices including the praxinoscope, zootrope, and stroboscope projected drawings into an illusion of movement. 4 To Watson it is therefore more appropriate to see live-action as a form of animation. “(B)oth create an illusion of life through what is first and foremost an animatic apparatus.” 5 The relationship between cinema and animation is undoubtedly more complex than a strict opposition. Both instruct in a mode of seeing similar to the daydream. Both

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work through a dialectic whereby viewers see discontinuous images as a continuous narrative. And both control viewer time; the continuous flow of images requires a reception in distraction. Given these similarities, we could consider animation as training for watching live-action movies. With the widespread practice of weaning children on animation, this conclusion is not far from the truth. Yet people can learn the cinematic mode without the assistance of animation. There is more to the story than seeing animation as merely a precursor to film or, like Watson, contending that all film is animation. Animation deserves study as a medium of its own, one encouraging a different mode of perception, especially because many theorists ignore animation or, like Benjamin, tend to conflate animation and cinema. Thus, in the next section, I distinguish the modes proper to cinema and animation before further detailing animation’s mode of animistic mimesis through a reading of Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia. Modes From Cinema to Animation The conflation of live-action and animated cinema ignores some differences in the mode accompanying animation (although animation’s mode is, at times, imitated in live-action as well). Between the two mediums, the perception of time is different because the content of animation is not material reality. Animation is not composed of spatialized moments captured in snapshots. The snapshots take place much later in the process, after the drawings that give the illusion of movement are already completed. These drawings never moved; they were never moments in time. Instead, animation creates the illusion of cinematic time through the projection of still-drawings. Animation is the artistic imitation of cinematic motion. Its content is fundamentally different, as said by animator Alexandre Alexeieff, “Contrary to live-action cinema, animation draws the elements of its future works from a raw material made exclusively of human ideas, those ideas that different animators have about things, living beings and their

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forms, movements and meanings.” 6 Panofsky must except “the very special case of the animated cartoon” because the content is not “physical reality.” In this way the animatic apparatus is different from the cinematic, and hence the “message” of animation is not that we are subjects of the camera. No one can infer from the existence of animation that a live-action camera exists. Indeed, the praxinoscope and other “flip-book” projection devices historically precede the movie camera. The movements might look similar to real life, but there is an interpretative process at play nonetheless. The audience is almost always aware that these are illusions, not actual moments and movements. It is difficult to imagine that these drawings might gaze back and might capture our moments as well. Further, viewer’s can hardly imagine they are witnessing the real person behind the role as they do with live-action. Whereas the viewer might think they experience the real Will Smith in one of his roles, the idea that they see the real Mickey Mouse is nonsensical. The viewer records moments of Smith’s time; they create Mickey’s existence. Rather than becoming the screen for recording, the viewer becomes the animating force through which moments of time are constituted. In the cinematic mode, the economy is defined by the poles of projection and recording; the viewer looks like a camera and acts like a screen. The cinematic mode moves between projection and recording, between projector and screen. Therefore, I argued that the diegetic space comes out into the viewer space, making the viewer into a screen and requiring their continual recording to follow the “whole” of the film. 7 In animation, since it employs the cinematic mode, the viewer likewise must project and record. But animation adds a mimetic mode, forming a new economy. In the mimetic mode, since the viewer is not recording moments of time, the viewer enters the screen and creates the impression of life. The viewer shifts roles from a passive recorder to an active creator of time. Animation requires that the viewer construct an illusion of life from

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objects without life. In short, the mimetic mode is a form of metaphoric seeing as—seeing drawings as full of life, having agency and a world of their own. Similar to Watson, Stefan Kanfer contends that an “illusion of life” is an inadequate definition of animation because all film gives this illusion. Although I agree that all film portrays an illusory life, I still hold to this definition because live-action creates the illusion from life, from moments in time. Animation creates an illusion of life from drawings which never live in time. The difference is subtle yet important for the way animation shapes cultural perceptions and communicative habits. Animation trains viewers in a mode of seeing where they see the synchronized movements and sounds of drawings and, through a kind of metaphoric comparison, envision life in those objects. In other words, the viewer sees the semblance of movement and invests the moving figure with the feelings of life. Barthes describes a similar dual transfer process in relation to photographs which capture the viewer’s attention: “In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation.” 8 Although Barthes is concerned here to distinguish photography from cinema, his reference to animation further distinguishes the cinematic and mimetic modes. He argues that in cinema the image is already animated, already brimming with captured moments of time and life. Neither animation nor photography meets this criterion. Photography captures a that-has-been and thus contains the punctum, that sharp reminder, of death. 9 Animation creates an illusory life from the never-will-be. Barthes quotation shows why the mimetic mode best exemplifies the –ability unique to animation, what I call transferability. Transferability is a dual transfer unique to animation: the image animates us (we see similarities through the sound and movement) and we animate it (we play, enter into its world and give it our life).

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Further developing this notion of transferability should help distinguish the cinematic mode from Disney animation’s mode of animistic mimesis. In one sense the cinematic mode aims at a transfer—the transfer of the audience into the diegetic world. As McLuhan was quoted in the previous chapter, “The business of the writer or film-maker is to transfer the reader or viewer from one world, his own, to another, the world created by typography and film.” 10 Even before cinema, a similar transferal occurred in literature. Yet animation’s sheer number of transfers makes it perhaps the exemplary medium of transferability since the process involves numerous surface transfers from idea to drawing to photograph to film to the screen. Additionally, animation involves another sense of transfer that makes transferability a property unique to Disney animation. This second sense of transfer deserves some clarification. Both the definitions and interpretations of transfer contain two very different notions. The first notion of transfer is the conveying of content from one surface to another, such as photographing or tracing a drawing, both key steps in the animation process. This notion is associated with stamping, impressing, hammering, tracing, or depressing. Many accounts identify the fundamental role of transfer in animation. Eisenstein claims that the appropriate word for this process is transposing because Disney “transports into one world what he has seen in another, into the spiritual world, what he has seen in the physical world.” 11 Disney director Dave Hand describes the transfer as the movement from intangible story (surface #1) to tangible image (surface #2) and declares, “Our entire medium is transference of thought.” 12 Actually, this is a great simplification of the process because animation requires a large number of surface transfers. Typically at Disney, the transfer moves from the story to the storyboard, a series of preliminary sketches hung vertically and arranged horizontally in narrative order to help visualize the story’s coherence. Then from the

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storyboard, the animator transfers the narrative action into rough drawings. The rough drawings are transferred into “pencil tests” where the animator projects the rough drawings in sequence to see if the movement is working to their liking. The rough drawings and pencil tests are then transferred by assistant animators to the full drawing, including all of the “in-between” drawings that give the illusion of continuous movement. Tracers then transfer the full drawings onto celluloid film, including the transfer of ink and color onto the cels. The cels are then transferred to film by shooting a series of photographs in the proper order. Through the projector, the film is finally transferred to the screen. 13 The second notion is transfer in the sense of passing from one person to another. Above, McLuhan indicates that the viewer is transferred into the film’s world. Further, Disney director Hand concludes his realization about animation’s reliance on transfer with the statement that “picture presentation is clearer than any other means of transferring thought from one person to another.” 14 This transferal of thought, idea, and emotion is the ultimate goal of Disney’s art, according to animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. 15 Disney animators measure the picture’s success by whether the audience “reads” the idea or “feels” the emotion. 16 The studio’s biggest worry at the release of Snow White was whether the transferal would be completed and the audience would be moved. Employees reported that they knew they had a hit when the audience was “bursting into spontaneous applause,” “bouncing up and down” in their seats, and even crying with the dwarves as they mourn Snow White’s poisoning. 17 So, in the second sense, transfer refers to audience response and is the primary goal of animation. In Walt’s words, “The most important aim of any of the fine arts is to get a purely emotional response from the beholder.” 18 According to Thomas and Johnston, this transferal to the audience is crucial to the illusion of life: “[Animation] is capable of getting inside the heads of its audiences, into their

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imaginations. The audiences will make our little cartoon character sad—actually, far sadder than we could ever draw him—because in their minds that character is real. He lives in their imaginations.” 19 We might think of this second notion of transfer as the process of reception whereas the first indicates the mechanics of production. In both senses of transfer, the initial content to be transferred is assumed to be the ideaimage. 20 At the production level, an image is transferred through many steps to the screen. At the reception level, a mental idea is transferred from artists to audience. This dual content of ideaimage might remind the reader of Plato’s eidos, most famously represented in his allegory of the cave. Eidos connotes both idea and image and indicates the ideal forms Plato sees as the abstract models for all true human thought. Indeed, the model of communication as transfer is Platonic at root. McLuhan notes the connection through the observations of W.B. Yeats, who “saw the movie as a world of Platonic ideals.” 21 Historian Neal Gabler contends that Walt concretized his ideals from the “Platonic images in his head.” 22 This prospect can be horrifying to academics who have sought a way out of Plato’s cave. As Karen Klugman gasps, “The world is falling deeper and deeper into a vortex of simulacra …. Worse than being trapped in Plato’s cave, we are now stuck in Pluto’s doghouse.” 23 The comparison to Plato does not end with the content of the transfers, however, but extends to the process as well. In the allegory of the cave, people never perceive the eidos directly; they only get rough approximations as the image is projected into shadows on the wall of the cave. Humankind’s access to truth remains inevitably partial, based on distorted shadows. There is a similar distortion and limitation at play in animation. We might think of animated characters as shadows cast on the screen from the artists’ or storytellers’ thoughts. Due to the number of transfers and the material limitations of each, some ideas and images are difficult if not

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impossible. Instead, the animator must distort through caricature and exaggeration in order for the audience to approximate the idea-image. Transfers require simplification, typification, and exaggeration. Subtle actions, fine lines, and complex motivations or emotions are ruled out by the difficulties of transfer. Animators must draw in thick and dark lines so they remain identifiable after tracing, inking, coloring, copying, photographing, and projecting on the screen. Directors rely on dynamic and typified characters so that their actions and motivations could be easily interpreted by the audience. Storytellers simplify narratives and avoid complex emotions so that the primary ideas were conveyed. The delicate and the subtle, whether in image or idea, are not the best material for the animated form. Thus Thomas and Johnston call animation a crude medium, concluding: The cartoon drawing always had been a very simple and direct graphic form, and whether it was for social comment or just amusement it had to present a unified, single idea with nothing complicated, extraneous, or contradictory in its makeup. When the cartoon was transferred to film these elements still applied, and nothing was drawn that was not part of the idea. Background, costume, character, and expression were all designed for succinct statement. 24 The entire technical evolution of animation, all the way to the highly-naturalistic computer generated images of today, is the attempt to overcome this limitation. Animators constantly seek to redefine what is considered animatable, what is bold and distinct enough for transfer. Only transferable images can enable the audience transferal as well, can enable Mickey Mouse to come alive in and through the audience’s imagination. Transferability, the –ability to transfer semblances to a surface and to transfer audiences into a fantasy world, is very similar to what some scholars call mimesis. In one of the most insightful looks at Disney’s commercial success, Maria Wickstrom illustrates the central importance of mimesis. Borrowing Benjamin’s notion of mimesis, she describes mimesis not as the relationship of an original and a copy but as a transfer between them, where one mimics in another surface

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(their body) what they see with their eyes. This imaginary experience “helps us to understand the profound pleasure humans are able to take in the play of the real and the made-up.” 25 Mimesis blurs the boundary between self and object, turning each into a plastic and adaptable form. In such mimetic modes of seeing, the connection to animation is apparent: “A mimetic relation to the world … is a ‘spiritualized’ world, with animals, plants, and humans miming, becoming one another, giving the self away, into an exchange with otherness….” 26 Benjamin’s reflections should help elucidate the economy of the mimetic mode. Benjamin points out the close connection between a mimetic mode and children. Children are the most able to see with “pure eyes” and engage in an economy of semblance and play crucial to the mimetic mode. 27 In other words, children often see through the mimetic mode; they notice similarities in objects and then project their life into that world in order to play. Benjamin states, “Children’s play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behavior, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill and a train.” 28 In the economy of the mimetic mode, the child sees similarities in objects and then imagines those objects as existing in a world of their own, animated and full of life, into which they might project themselves in order to play. The crucial difference between the cinematic and mimetic mode is a reversal of direction; rather than the images coming out into the viewer space for their recording, the viewer enters into the diegetic world to invest it with life and emotion. Benjamin gives an example from children’s books: The objects do not come to meet the picturing child from the pages of the book; instead, the gazing child enters into those pages, becoming suffused, like a cloud, with the riotous colors of the world of pictures. Sitting before his painted book, he makes the Taoist vision of perfection come true: he overcomes the illusory barrier of the book’s surface and passes through colored textures and brightly painted partitions to enter a stage on which fairy tales spring to life. 29

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Benjamin’s memories of his childhood provide an abundance of examples for this mimetic mode. Benjamin recalls the similarities he saw in the Berlin of his childhood and the play that these similarities afforded. The mimetic mode allowed him to create worlds from courtyards, Market Hall, cabinets, and hiding places. It allowed him to see life in telephones, snow, soap bubbles, and the moon. One of his favorite examples was the otter at the zoo. 30 His description of the character would fit perfectly in a Disney movie. The otter was “a pampered animal,” “the sacred animal of the rainwater” complete with a “temple” and always occupied with the affairs of the deep. “And it would whisper to me of my future, as one sings a lullaby beside the cradle.” 31 Another example, perhaps even more reminiscent of a Disney movie and certainly illuminating of the mimetic mode, is his family’s cheap Chinese porcelain: But of all the things I used to mimic, my favorite was the Chinese porcelain… I was nonetheless captivated by them, just as if I already knew the story …. The story comes from China and tells of an old painter who invited friends to see his newest picture. The picture showed a park and a narrow footpath that ran along a stream and through a grove of trees, culminating at the door of a little cottage in the background. When the painter’s friends, however, looked around for the painter, they saw that he had left them—that he was in the picture. There he followed the little path that led to the door … and disappeared through the narrow opening. In the same way, I too, when occupied with my paintpots and brushes, would be suddenly displaced into the picture. I would resemble the porcelain which I had entered in a cloud of colors. 32 In this sense, the mimetic mode reverses the transfer of the cinematic mode. Rather than projecting the diegetic space into the real viewer space, rather than using the viewer as a surface, the viewer becomes the writer, projecting themselves into the diegetic space so that they might inscribe. As Benjamin says, “The child inhabits them … Children fill them with a poetry of their own. This is how it comes about that children inscribe the pictures with their ideas in a more literal sense: they scribble on them.” 33 This conclusion dovetails well with McCloud’s work Understanding Comics. 34 McCloud argues that the low level of detail in the cartoon image encourages the viewer to identify with the characters. This identification occurs because the

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viewer participates in the construction of the image. The viewer fills in so much of the detail that they feel they are participating in the image-world. Obviously, in the animated cartoon, the viewer must not only fill-in the detail of the characters but must also participate in the action by seeing life where there is none. The animated motion picture thus materializes the mimetic mode. Viewers see life-like semblances in the drawing’s motions and sounds and then play with the semblances by lending the drawings their life and emotion. Whereas the cinematic mode reminds us of the images we project, animation reminds us of our childhood; it shows anew how to give life to objects, how to animate the inanimate through our daydreams, how to turn couch pillows into a fort or mud into pies or sticks into swords or stuffing into animals or mice into men. Rather than witnessing the reproduced movement of animate beings, viewers perceive objects as animated. This is a different experience than either people watching or the feeling you are being watched. There is a different relationship than the camera-subject to other camera-subjects. It is a relationship of camera-subject and object. It is closer to fantasy but still draws upon the actual emotional responses of the viewer and is thus a form of imaginative daydreaming. Benjamin describes the imagination as a de-forming process because it begins with outer forms and de-forms them for their fit into imaginary worlds. 35 Such deformation is not the traditional hedonist, fantasizing about achieving the object of their desire. This is the modern hedonist, enjoying the daydream for the emotions it brings. The animated mode is different from literature because in it, like film, the viewer dreams through objects from the outside world, not through words experienced internally. The viewer space still mingles with the diegetic space. But like literature and much more so than cinema, animation gives more control to the viewer. With animation, viewers are not bound by the actions of others, either being watched or watching us. They can daydream through objects

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which are more significantly subject to the audience’s inscription. Of course, live-action cinema can use objects to symbolize and convey meaning. Kracauer contends that this is unique to cinema over the theater; film can concentrate attention on objects through close-ups, equipping viewers with sensitivity to the meaningful possibilities of objects. 36 Although objects may express meaning in live-action film, they never move without the aid of trick-photography, CGI, models, or drawings that are all related to animation. Both may use objects to speak meanings; the difference is that only animation gives movement to the inanimate and thereby allows the viewer, through the mimetic mode, to envision life in objects. The fundamental techniques of live-action and animation illustrate the modal differences. The primary technique of film is editing. The camera records everything in front of its lens, including things out of place in the narrative world such as boom mikes and the backsides of studio facades. If the actor does not project the correct emotion, another take is ordered. After shooting the film, the director and others sit down with a massive amount of footage and shrink it to the desired length. From hundreds of hours, the film is reduced to a few. The editor cuts out the bad acting (hopefully), the misplaced objects, and all of the mechanical apparatus that might give away the artifice. They then splice together, through montage, a motion picture of ever-shifting points-of-view. Editing exemplifies the artistic, creative element of cinema. The editor primarily engages in cutting, slicing, subtracting, and splicing. Animation, in contrast, is an additive art; editing plays a secondary role. The camera enters the picture at the final stage, after transfers from drawing to celluloid. The camera rarely captures the unnecessary, and its world is not full of boom mikes and other inconveniences burdening the filmmaker. The gestural acting can be perfected from the start; it does not require multiple takes. Editing is not responsible for constructing the motions, as when the filmmaker moves the

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audience through the diegetic space. In animation, drawings constitute the motion; they produce the illusion of motion where there was none before. Directors can edit out those illusions which do not convey the desired result, but this process occurs much later and is not the creative element but more like redacting a second draft of a paper. After editing, a movie never looks like what the crew members experienced on-site. After editing animation, the differences are much less significant. Once again, cinema and the cinematic mode are composed of acts of recording and editing; animation and the mimetic mode are composed of acts of recognition and creation. Recognition and creation are just one part of the economy of the mimetic mode I have outlined here. The economy is composed through a series of dialectics, forming a whole chain of metaphoric structures including recognition-creation, semblance-play, surface-emotion, and synchronized movement-life. Only through this metaphoric economy does perception of an animated film (at least of the Disney variety) exist. Of course, someone may refuse to play, may reject the emotional investment. This does not eliminate the economy but simply short-circuits the mode. A mode is a structural possibility, an –ability, existent whether or not it is actually materialized. In the next section, I describe in more detail the mimetic mode, seeking to expand upon the insights of Benjamin and Wickstrom. The mimetic mode is a particular mode of communication as transfer, one exemplified in Disney’s critically acclaimed movie, Fantasia. 37 The Mimetic Mode in Fantasia “So the explanation for the huge popularity of [Mickey Mouse] films is not mechanization…; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them. —Walter Benjamin. 38 In this section, I examine Fantasia to illustrate five characteristics of the mimetic mode: its distinctness from mere copying, its synaesthetic experience, its blurring of the boundaries between subject and object, its magical nature, and how this magic relies on auratic objects. The

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mimetic economy of semblance and play articulates to a system of metaphoric tensions, including the tensions between subject and object, body and image, and the transfers of surface and affect or what Frazer calls the laws of similarity and contact. 39 Disney’s popularity is not simply mechanization (the novelty of their techniques) or misunderstanding, the audience being duped into supporting counterproductive ideologies. Disney’s popularity is the popularity of this mode—seeing our own life in the images. Before proceeding, a few words need to be said about the choice of Fantasia. Since its release in 1940, Fantasia’s critical acclaim has steadily grown to the point where many consider it an animated masterpiece. 40 The choice of Fantasia was not made, however, because of its popularity but because of the heated dispute it brewed. At the time of its release, Fantasia was a box office flop and faced mix reviews from critics. In particular, music critics lavished scorn on the effort, most feeling that the cheesy and simplistic images diluted or distorted the music’s power. The lines between high and low culture seemed to be eroding; in fact, they were impossible to locate in an animated film that deployed a performance from one of the most respected orchestras in the world, Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra. Some critics fought against the erosion, lambasting Fantasia in favor of “true” art. Perhaps the harshest critic, Dorothy Thompson, caused quite a stir when she declared Fantasia was a “nightmare,” “brutal and brutalizing,” that made her feel “as though I had been subject to an assault.” 41 She concluded, “All I could think to say of the ‘experience’ as I staggered out was that it was ‘Nazi.’ The word did not arise out of an obsession. Nazism is the abuse of power, the perverted betrayal of the best instincts, the genius of a race turned into black magical destruction, and so is Fantasia.” 42 Thus Fantasia provides an instructive moment in the cultural changes being wrought by the spread of cinema and animation, particularly the blurring of high and low culture and the

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changing notion of art detailed through the analysis of “genius” in Chapter Seven. Although I take issue with Thompson’s claims, she points here to the second reason for my choice of Fantasia by referencing magic. Magic is intimately related to the mimetic mode, as we shall see, and Fantasia most fully represents this mode because it relies primarily on devices unique to animation rather than borrowing heavily from the narrative codes of cinema and literature. Most of the scenes in Fantasia do not rely on the cinematic mode, employing less montage, less narrative progression, and less oscillation of viewpoint in favor of a frontal camera angle more similar to the position of theater viewers. Further, Fantasia lacks dialogue and plot, featuring images inspired by and synchronized with classical orchestra pieces such as Bach’s “Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor,” Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite,” Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” and Beethoven’s “The Pastoral Symphony.” Fantasia is a musical term referring to free-form music, and Fantasia is much more free-form than the typical Disney movie which relies on plots, characters, and other cinematic devices. In Fantasia, figures move to the music, often dancing as with the ballet of hippopotami, alligators, and ostriches in the scene set to “Dance of the Hours.” Sometimes abstract forms predominate, transforming color and contour to produce constantly shifting, amorphous imagery as in the introductory segment, “Toccatta and Fugue.” A couple of the sections include an identifiable story, such as the concluding scene “Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Marie” and the most famous scene, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” starring Mickey as the apprentice. Yet the lack of dialogue, the episodic organization, the frontal camera angle, and the emphasis on allowing the music to drive and inspire the images indicates the difference between Fantasia and a typical live-action or Disney-animated movie. By relying less on cinematic devices, Fantasia comes the closer than most Disney movies to expressing the differences between animation and cinema and will thus help explicate the

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mimetic mode. As John Canemaker says, “If animation does best what can’t be done in liveaction, then Fantasia is a lasting testament to its most extraordinary and lasting accomplishments.” 43 Other scholars have noted how Fantasia is intimately related to the practice of animation, but their analysis has lacked a media theory lens, focusing instead on the content of the movie. For instance, Susan Willis writes an insightful piece based on the claim, “Simply put, Fantasia is an allegory of animation.” 44 I am more interested in describing the formal features of Fantasia because I see the film as a materialized allegory for animation. This allegory does not re-present animation through figural means, but presents and embodies its magic. Animation speaks for itself, so to speak. In other words, the mimetic mode is fully present in Fantasia; the formal features invite the reader to complete the transfer, to enliven the motion, to participate in the communication, to share the communion. Therefore, Fantasia offers the ideal text to explicate the mimetic mode, specifically the five features of what I call animistic mimesis. The formal features cue the audience to a certain mode of reception; the mode guides the interpretation of form and hence the process of textual construction. The Features of Animistic Mimesis The first feature of animistic mimesis is more of a clarification than a formal feature: the mimetic mode is not a simple imitating or rote copying. This clarification is necessary because the term mimesis is a conflicted one in Western thought, and I am seeking to clarify a specific mode of communication in cinematic animation, what I call animistic mimesis. 45 There is a heritage of thought, extending from Plato to Romanticism to Kurt Cobain, where mimesis is seen as copying and condemned for being unoriginal and influenced by popularity rather than the true. Viewed in this negative light, the trope of imitation has been used by the powerful to justify the existence of racist institutions like slavery and practices like eugenics. 46 Unsurprisingly, the

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oppressed are repeatedly judged to be mere imitators, while the dominant dominate “true art.” This perspective is inherently reductionistic for it reduces a wealth of communicative practice to a simple judgment of imitation. I think, instead, there are a wide variety of types of mimesis, and they should be studied independently. Animistic mimesis, for one, is most certainly not a rote copying. It works, instead, through an economy of imitation (semblance) and creation (play). Take Fantasia, the very idea of imitation here is confounded. What is imitating what? Are the images imitating the music? Most of the music critics who detested Fantasia seem to think so. Of course Fantasia would fall short when viewed in this light; how could anything look as beautiful, ominous, or peaceful as the highly-revered music sounds? Of course, looks and sounds can be equally beautiful or frightening, tormented or contented. The point is simply that images are not sound waves. Fantasia is inherently a translation, not a mere imitation. Fantasia is a sort of video remix of the music, not an orchestral performance. Judging Fantasia’s combination of images and sounds only according to the standards of the music seems, at best, extremely stingy and at worst, suspicious. What images could possibly meet the expectations and live up to these esteemed sounds? Not everyone saw through the eyes of music critics, however. Many accepted the invitation to animistic mimesis and helped complete the transfer. For them, Fantasia was not only about the music but was a total sensory experience. Feature #2 This total-sensory experience is the second characteristic of animistic mimesis. The magic of Fantasia is the transfer of sight and sound into a synchronized, synaesthetic whole. Synaesthesia means the transfer from one sensory input to another. Animistic mimesis is more a fusion of sight and sound than either independently. Viewers do not simply hear the music; they see it as alive. They do not see images alone; they see figures compelled and sometimes created by the

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music itself, as in “Tocatta” when the orchestra’s silhouettes transform into abstract bands of color, rolling hills, and violin clouds. Separating the fusion of sight and sound is impossible. The impossibility of separation irritated many music critics who felt they could no longer hear the music because it was drowned out by images. 47 Yet it is precisely the fusion of sound and movement that encourages the viewer, engaged in the mode, to see the figures as full of life. Disney represents this synaesthetic fusion through the image of the Sound Wave appearing after the intermission. Deems, the narrator, introduces the audience to the Sound Wave, a white straight line shimmering nervously. Deems claims he “ran into” Sound Wave around the studio, a kind of “shy” fellow, but he soon realized Sound Wave is someone “very important” to Fantasia, an “indispensable member” whose great possibilities almost nobody had noticed. 48 This is because, as Deems tells us, every beautiful sound creates an equally beautiful picture when traced into a Sound Wave. Deems then proceeds to use Sound Wave for an audience tutorial. They demonstrate some sounds from high to low pitches, each with different colors like the distinctness of brass, string, and percussion instruments. Sound Wave turns yellow-green, with wide loopy waves for the harp. The violin makes him fuzzy, like television static, with sustained and vibrating yellow-red lines. Sound Wave becomes wide and flat, with multiple folds that look like hot dogs when the bassoon blows. The cymbals explode in yellow, rapid, erratic, shocking, loud lines. Sound Wave embodies Fantasia’s fusion of sight and sound, and Deems insists on its importance in order to instruct the audience in the preferred mode. Yet there is more to the synaesthesis of animistic mimesis than the fusion of sight and sound represented by Sound Wave. Disney pursued a synaesthetic experience, not simply a caricature of sound-image transfers. Disney realized that the orchestra would not sound as full and beautiful coming out of the mono-speakers of 1940s America, since mono lacks the range of left to right

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that a live orchestra possesses. Disney engineers worked to develop stereophonic sound to imitate this left to right movement, and what they called Fantasound debuted with Fantasia. Disney spent a reported $85,000 per theater to equip them with Fantasound, and thus Fantasia only debuted in the first run in some twelve theaters. 49 The principles of Fantasound are the basic principles of stereo sound commonly used today in homes, cars, and movie theaters alike. Fantasound surrounds and envelops the audience, producing sound that moves from front to back and left to right. With dimmed lights and enveloping sound, the audience was in for a fully sensory experience, furthering the fusion of sight and sound. The fusion of visual and aural sensations attempts to produce a transfer in the second sense— the audience’s emotional transfer, the giving of life. In this sense, animistic mimesis is more about touch than either sight or sound or even their fusion. This is not the physical sensation of touch but emotional touching—an inner stirring, disturbance, or e-motion. It is this sensation we refer to when we say we were touched or moved by a piece of art or a particularly powerful experience. It is an emotional touch experienced when the first transfer reaches its mark and the audience reaches out to greet it and thereby completes the transfer. 50 The total-sensory experience helps evoke this emotional touching by encompassing the audience in the scene. The fusion of sensory inputs adds to the similarities the audience perceives between the (fake) drawings on the screen and their own (real) life experiences. The synaesthetic experience enables the audience to feel a profound sense of connectedness and thus encourages them to complete the emotional transfer. This explanation helps clarify a rather perplexing claim made by McLuhan. He states, “It begins to be evident that ‘touch’ is not skin but the interplay of the senses, and keeping in touch or getting in touch is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell.” 51 Of course,

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McLuhan is not denying the existence of a sense of touch produced by skin touching another surface. He is pointing to another experience of being touched, an emotional experience, and, importantly, he connects this experience to a sort of synaesthetic transfer. As he proposes, “It may very well be that in our conscious inner lives the interplay among our senses is what constitutes the sense of touch. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind?” 52 Touch is a useful metaphor for this internal emotional stirring because, as Maurice MerleauPonty and David Abram remind us, even the physical, external sense of touch is a dual process of transfer. 53 “To touch the coarse skin of a tree is thus, at the same time, to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree.” 54 In Disney animation, the physical sense of touch is one sensory input noticeably lacking, but the fusion of other senses helps simulate the synaesthetic, embodied experience of everyday life. Psychical experience is never simply sight or hearing or touch or smell or taste in isolation; all exist in relationship, and simulating this relationship encourages the viewer to transfer themselves into the diegetic world. It enables a metaphoric economy, seeing moving and sounding drawings as life. In almost every aspect, Fantasia is aimed at producing this emotional touching through a synaesthetic experience. The music selections convey an emotional tone, moving the audience from the edge of their seats to floating in the air with flittering of the flutes. Scenes move from dusk to dawn, from fall to summer and from the beginning of time to the present, all common vehicles of emotional metaphors. Visually, the characters are ominous or reassuring, graceful or gangly, playful or mischievous, curious and naïve, wise and vengeful. Each signals clearly the emotion with which the audience is supposed to greet the character’s presence. Viewers (are cued to) sympathize with the curious and naïve apprentice Mickey. They respect the wise and

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vengeful Sorcerer. They shrink in fear at the sight of the mountain top transforming into the giant stone demon Chernabog under the cover of dark. They admire the power of nature represented by the white-clad, feminine fairies whose every touch enlivens the trees, flowers, mushrooms, and pools of water. They pity the shy, neglected, and nervous Sound Wave, and they awe the tremendous violence and power of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus. Even the dominant themes of Fantasia reflect common emotional advice, such as “do not take oneself too seriously” in the parody of ballet through dancing hippos and “hope rises with the new day” in the ballad of Ava Marie following the nighttime rule of Chernabog. The more abstract episodes without identifiable themes also express emotion through a synaesthetic transfer. “Toccatta and Fugue” perfectly represents the blending of senses to cue an emotional response. In the scene, shadowy silhouettes of the orchestra are cast on a white dome wall above and behind the real orchestra. The orchestra’s and conductor’s silhouettes slowly bleed into and blend with the new images forming on the wall. The musicians transform into abstract images of rolling bands of color and cloud-like formations. Eventually, some of these abstract images begin to resemble the music in turn, with animate cloud-violins and bow strings stroking to the music as they float above the scenery. Each change in the music produces changes in the images. Tocatta and Fugue is the opening act, and the Sound Wave is the introduction after the intermission. Each launches a kind of audience tutorial, instructing members to experience the synaesthetic blending of music and image through a mimetic mode. Another central element of the synaesthetic experience is color. In fact, color is crucial to synaesthesia. Leslie reminds us that “synaesthesia was also known as ‘coloured hearing’, and colour was often its most sriking cloak.” 55 The “Rite of Spring” episode exemplifies Disney’s use of color. The scene visually tells the story of the natural history of the earth, from the

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expanding universe that forms the stars of our galaxy to the chaotic volcanic beginnings of earth to the age of the dinosaur. In “The Rite of Spring,” color does not simply fill the lines of the figures but instead it spills over and leaves traces; in other words, color transfers from one surface to another. Comets leave trails of sparkling light in the dark universe. Radioactive purple clouds hover over the atmosphere, seeming to infect their surroundings through their radiance. Bubbling and exploding lava splashes light on the surrounding rocks, filling the entire screen with a red tint. Swirling grey gasses lighten the scene before exploding in bursts of red, orange, and yellow. Stormy white winds mix with the red environment to form purple wafts. Water bubbles and mutating amoeba create shifting blues and greens in their liquid milieu. Dinosaurs change color as they cover their faces with dirt and food, or dip into the water, or when rain bounces off their skin. Lightning fills the screen with a flash of transparent white. All of these examples illustrate the important interplay between light and color, as in Goethe’s theory of color. 56 Darkness casts an ominous shadow over the colors, muting them in grey, whereas bright lights bring out the colors. Light and dark enable the transfer of color between figures. As new shades of light like lightning, fire, or the refraction of rain emerge, the colors change. Therefore, water and fire play a crucial role in the movement of light and hence color. Water, smoke, and fire exist in every scene in Fantasia. 57 As fire flickers and sparks, as water ripples and drips, the light sources are refracted and reflected differently, making the colors of the figures bleed, blend, and transform. Color transfers through the medium of light. The colors do not stand alone but instead blend and mix. The colors touch each other while at the same time being touched. The color visualizes the communication between self, other, and environment. This contrast between light and dark, reflected in the colors, further conveys the

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emotional tone. As Leslie states, “[Disney’s] standard semiosis … shows darkness aligned with evil and chaos, while light sketches goodness and harmony.” 58 Such use of color enables two formal effects that reflect the economy of semblance and play. First, color allows Disney to address one of the dilemmas of their early animation: the lack of depth. The shifting colors can suggest depth through the use of shadowing. In fact, Disney frequently muted the background colors in order to make the foreground figures stand-out and seem more dynamic. As Neupert concludes, “(T)he Disney image typically uses a pale background with colors that allow the main characters to be painted with brighter harmonious colors but also bright spots of contrasting color, lending distinction, personality, and depth.” 59 So, Disney’s use of color enables their images to have a higher semblance of life. Second, the color paints the scenes with an emotional tone. Color is one of the many sensorychannels tapped into in pursuit of an emotional transfer. The colors become purely emotional; they portray the narrative conflict and cooperation between figures. The red glare of lava conveys an angry and violent tenor, and the ominous shadow of Chernabog fills the screen with a dark grey fear. This color is not so much seen as it is felt like music. In Leslie’s words, “Scene by scene, whole sections of Fantasia were colour-keyed… All the colours were keyed psychologically, matching the changes in emotions being expressed by the actions.” 60 In a sense, Disney’s color is living; it is fully animated. For instance, in the “Pastoral Symphony,” the rainbow goddess streaks across the sky and the colors of the rainbow stain the air and drip onto the ground and into the water, further coloring the landscape. This color moves, bleeds, seeps and stains. It lives on its own, outside the boundaries of the figure of the rainbow. The emotion of the figure transfers between figures through the play of their colors.

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In these two functions of Disney’s use of color—realistic depth and emotional tone—we once again see a distinct dialectic at the heart of animistic mimesis. The dialectic is between real and fantasy or between actual similarities and pleasurable play. The color enables a better illusion of depth, providing the sense of realism, while at the same time enabling an imaginary fantasy world where emotions show themselves distinctly, in living color. As J.P.Telotte concludes about Disney’s use of color, “Its color scheme is clearly designated not only for a naturalistic effect, but also to advance the principles of caricature.” 61 Disney was one of the first Studio’s to use color in this manner. Animating color was the crucial development leading to public and critical acceptance of color pictures. Many 1930s movies that attempted to use the newly developed Technicolor process were a box-office and critical failure. The public seemed to prefer black and white movies, and the huge expense of Technicolor was a significant factor limiting the emergence of color. 62 Some critics went so far as to claim that color was destroying cinema’s ability to be an art form. Barthes, for instance, saw color as an artificial addition that always makes the picture seem inauthentic. 63 In a 1938 New York Times article, Robert Edmond Jones correctly diagnosed the problem. He argued, “Black –and-white thinking still dominates the screen” because movies lacked color composition as artists understand it. 64 Rather than attempt to use color for artistic purposes, directors were judging Technicolor a success if the audience simply did not notice it. The basic problem was that Hollywood was not making color pictures “but colored pictures.” 65 Movies added color after the fact, like filling within the lines on a children’s coloring book. This relied upon a static notion of color, one inappropriate for the moving picture. Disney’s use of color would change Hollywood practice. Disney signed an exclusive rights agreement with Technicolor and premiered their first color short entitled “Flowers and Trees” in

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1932. 66 Not surprisingly, the film was a huge success, and Disney was hailed as one of the first studios to use color effectively. Disney’s colors moved and, hence, helped move the audience. Jiminy Cricket, for instance, featured 27 different shades to match the changing light and the changing moods. 67 Jones concludes, “This movement, this progression of color on the screen is in itself an utterly new visual experience, full of wonder. The color flows from sequence to sequence like a kind of visual music and it affects our emotions precisely as music affects them.” 68 Today, Disney is cited as a model for the use of color throughout Hollywood. 69 Disney’s use of color compares to Benjamin’s theory about children’s view of color. Children have to be taught to color within the lines. Their colorings spill over and mix with other colors. Thus they see color as animated not the deceptive cloak or artificial addition Barthes sees (and most adults according to Benjamin). As Benjamin states, “Color is single, not as a lifeless thing and a rigid individuality but as a winged creature that flits from one form to the next. Children make soap bubbles.” 70 Children are attracted to soap bubbles and magic lanterns because they like the ways colors shimmer and change intensity under the light. Colors bleed and blend; they transfer from one figure to another. According to Benjamin, color is not about form for children; color is pure mood, expressing children’s pure receptivity. In Disney, color is this total sensory experience, an emotional movement accompanying communication as transfer. To sum, animistic mimesis, as a mode of transferability, invokes an emotional touch through the pathways of a synaesthetic experience. From color to music to figuration to theme, Fantasia presents and cues this total-sensory experience. “Walt gave it to you with all your senses involved, except smell, and he was always working on that,” remarks animation historian John Culhane. 71 Although physical touch, taste, and smell are not present, the other sensory inputs

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fuse in order to produce an emotional response from the audience. Michael Taussig, in his masterful work on the mimesis of the Cuna Indians, explicates the experience: Furthermore, the senses cross over and translate into each other. You feel redness. You see music. Thus nonvisual imagery may evoke visual means… You may also see your body as you feel yourself leaving it, and one can even see oneself seeing oneself—but above all this seeing is felt in a nonvisual way. You move into the interior of images, just as images move into you. 72 Walt and Stokowski considered piping smells into the theater during Fantasia, providing further testament that a total-sensory experience is Disney’s aim and mode. One can only wonder what smells they would have chosen, but many scholars argue that smell is one of the most powerful sensory routes to animistic mimesis. Bronislaw Malinowski, in his widely-known work on the practices of magic by people he terms “savages,” contends that smell “is the most important factor in the laying of spells on people.” 73 Magic is perceived to be the most potent when it enters through the nose. Horkheimer and Adorno concur: “Of all the senses, that of smell… bears clearest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become ‘the other.’ … When we see we remain what we are; but when we smell we are taken over by otherness.” 74 Smell touches and moves emotionally to repulsive disgust or pheromone-lust. Disney’s aim, then, to encourage the viewer to become the hippo, to enter the screen, would be well served by making the auralvisual fusion include smells as well. Although never implemented, the fact that they pondered it can be considered in the light of their aim to fulfill the synaesthetic characteristic of animistic mimesis. The more complete the sensory-experience, the more immersed the audience, the more likely they are to experience the touching of animistic mimesis’ transfer. Feature #3 Smell also helps clarify the third characteristic of animistic mimesis, the blurring of the boundary between self and other. Smell blurs the boundary of self and other because an

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emanation from the other enters into the self through the nose. Smell transfers; with a whiff, a person becomes “taken over by otherness,” as Horkheimer and Adorno say. Horkheimer and Adorno fear mimesis because they envision it as becoming the other, a dangerous prospect when everyone desires to become-Hitler, for instance. Yet animistic mimesis is not exclusively becoming the other, but the blending of self and other, subject and object. The total sensory experience of animistic mimesis is a sense of communicative nirvana, a feeling of contact assuring participants that communion has been achieved. This contact does not require letting completely go of oneself. It is instead a dual transfer between self and other. Horkheimer and Adorno warn against modernity’s return to primitivism because they see mimesis being replicated in the culture industries of the day. Yet they group all cultural media and modes together, reducing a vast array of communicative practices to a singular notion of mimesis as a loss of self and a becoming other. This is why I insist on the specificity of animistic mimesis. What occurs in this mode is a blurring of self and other in the dual transfer, one with utopian and dystopian implications. 75 Fantasia continuously portrays the boundary crossing between self and other. Shapes and figures repeatedly morph. In “The Nutcracker Suite” what appears to be seaweed turns out to be a goldfish while what seems to be lifeless leaves floating with the wind turns out to be tiny dancers performing a ballet in the air. In “Toccatta and Fugue,” the orchestra transforms into shadowy silhouettes that then merge into shifting images which eventually take the form of notes and instruments. Walt described the effect as “like something you see with your eyes halfclosed” or like something you see on a shadowy, dark night. 76 Fantasia frequently employs shadows and silhouettes, as figures morph from shadow to substance and back again. Leslie compares this technique with German expressionism, citing the

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example of Mickey chopping the animated broom into bits, a scene shown only in shadow. 77 After Mickey splinters the broom, the world of shadows comes to life. In shadow, we see each of the splinters grow to full size and come alive, unleashing an uncontrollable army of laboring brooms. Shadows once again illustrate the dual transfer. Shadows blur the division between figures since a shadow is cast from one figure onto the next and often subsequently transforms into a new shape itself. Shadows which appear to be one thing often turn out to be another, a perceptual experience responsible for many children’s nightmares. Shadows transfer from one figure to another, and their amorphousness allows an abundance of opportunities for the recognition of similarities and the imaginary entrance into a world of shadows. The phrase “play of shadows” demonstrates the blurring of boundaries of animistic mimesis and points, once again, to Benjamin’s insistence that mimesis relies on a dialectic of similarity and play. The main characters represent such boundary-blurring hybridity as well. Centaurs, top-half human and bottom-half horse, star in “The Pastoral Symphony.” A centaurette servant named Sunflower is part African human, part donkey, and two attendants to Bacchus are part Amazonian, part zebra. Fairies, demons, unicorns, flying horses, cherubs, sun gods, and rainbow goddesses express both human and supernatural characteristics. Fish, leaves, amoeba, and fungi move in a human manner, with apparent purpose and intent. Such anthropomorphism is common in animation; many theorists note the continual tendency to the animistic. Eisenstein, in fact, attributes Disney’s appeal to the attractiveness of a prelogical animism. He follows A.N. Veselovsky’s definition of animism: “We involuntarily transfer onto nature our own experience of life, which is expressed in movement, in the manifestation of a force directed by a will….” 78 Yet this is not only a transferal of human qualities to animals, but a dual transfer from animal to human and human to animal, “the substitution of man by animal, and of animal by man.” 79 I

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attempt to indicate this dual process through the specificity of animistic mimesis—the human and animal, the self and the other, mutually exchanging. 80 Eisenstein compares this dual transfer to the Borro Indians who believe that they are simultaneously humans and red parrots. He sees the process as “the very earliest, most ancient type of metaphor—directly motory.” 81 In other words, the merging of self and other is sensed through the perception of motion and a metaphoric comparison to (human) life. Viewers see movement as the expression of life, envisioning the characters “moved by an innate, independent, volitional impulse.” 82 For Eisenstein, in animism there is no differentiation between subject and object; the two, as with the Borro Indians, are seen as indivisible. Disney’s hybrid characters embody this indivisibility. Perhaps the best example of this blurring of subject and object and human and animal is Disney’s most famous character—Mickey Mouse. In popular commentary, two questions are often raised: Is Mickey a mouse or a man? And, Is Mickey a man or a woman? Mickey lacks many of the typical gender markers, and his falsetto voice led many to raise the gender question and even to suggest that Mickey was homosexual. 83 The clearest indicator that Mickey was supposed to be a heterosexual male was Minnie, whose affections Mickey pursues zealously in many of the early shorts. Mickey and Minnie were drawn the same way, but Minnie featured skirts, high-heeled shoes, eyelashes, and feminine mannerisms to signify her as woman. 84 Mickey’s ambiguous gender becomes more distinctly male through the contrast with and pursuit of Minnie, but the very confusion indicates the tendency of animation towards hybridity. As Wells argues, “Animation has the capability of rendering the body in a way which blurs traditional notions of gender, species and indigenous identity.” 85 Most viewers probably assume Mickey is a heterosexual male, “But is Mickey a Mouse?” 86 E.M. Forester raises this perplexing question, quipping, “Certainly one would not recognize him

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in a trap.” 87 The earlier, flatter Mickey was more recognizably mouse, but still featured many human characteristics. 88 Other than the ears, Mickey appears human. He walks upright on two legs. He speaks English. He wears clothes. 89 He throws baseballs, fixes engines, flies planes, and steers boats. In Fantasia, we see him attempting to avoid work and using (magical) technology to lessen his load. In fact, Mickey’s evolution to a new, squash-and-stretch form is first debuted in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” After the design changes, he begins to look more like a child, with gigantic, signature mouse ears. 90 He wears more clothing, including shoes and gloves, and begins to rely more on facial expressions rather than physical gags for meaning. He gets Pluto for a pet, and whoever heard of a mouse with a pet dog? Yet the dual transfer of animistic mimesis indicates that Mickey nevertheless remains a mouse and a human, indivisibly so. His mouse-like body provides the surface for the transfer of movements, and his movements and voice then provide the metaphoric vehicle for the audience to see life. Thus this process is not simply animism in the sense of attributing human characteristics to animals. In Disney animation, audiences do not attribute human characteristics; the characters possess human characteristics. They move and sound like humans while looking like animals. From this similarity in movement and sound, the audience sees the blurring of self and other, human and animal. The human becomes mouse as much as the mouse becomes human. This is why animation tends towards animal characters and why animators continue to struggle with humans. When the movements of human characters never quite match up to the familiar gestures and expressions of actual humans, the artifice is laid too bare. Thus Disney struggled mightily with portraying Snow White, and even today animators have the most difficulty drawing humans. There is no magic in seeing a human character move like a human like there is in seeing a mouse mischievously disobey their master Sorcerer.

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Feature #4 Benjamin compares mimesis’ morphing hybridity to the world of dreams, claiming that the cinematic apparatus unveils the optical unconscious: “The ancient truth expressed by Heraclitus, that those who are awake have a world in common while each sleeper has a world of his own, has been invalidated by film—and less by depicting the dream world itself than by creating figures of the collective dream, such as the globe-encircling Mickey Mouse.” 91 The boundary crossing between self and other is indeed a dream-like process unbound to the strictures of everyday reality. The process is magical, magic being the fourth characteristic of animistic mimesis. The boundary crossing and blurring of subject and object takes place through magic. The emphasis on magic may remind the reader of Marx’s take on the “mysterious” and “mystical” character of the commodity, “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” 92 His description of a commodity table seems ripped straight from a Disney movie: But as soon as [a table] emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. 93 Schickel reminds us that the magic is a common trope used to describe Disney. 94 When Disney’s corporate marketing suggests that all one needs is magic to achieve their dreams, this is truly hucksterism par excellence. Yet inside the animated world, magic is not an assertion but a living presence. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” features a master magician and Mickey Mouse in training. Mickey dons his master’s magical hat and orders a broomstick to come to life and haul water to complete Mickey’s chores. In the hands of the apprentice, the magic backfires and almost floods them out of house and home. The master returns just in time to save the day and scold Mickey, assuring us that magic in the right hands is productive and beneficial. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was originally planned as a stand alone short, but the idea inspired

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Disney to pursue the full-length Fantasia. As the inspiration for Fantasia, the scene exemplifies the repeated connection between magic and the boundary-crossing of animistic mimesis. Indeed, magic flourishes in every scene. The narrator discuses the magic of Fantasia in the preface to each episode, particularly the introduction of Sound Wave. Likewise each scene seems internally animated by a magic of its own. In “The Rite of Spring,” it is the magic of the science. Marx might have sought to dispel the ghosts of magic with a solid economic science, yet for Disney science is more grist for the magic mill. Deems even claims that “science wrote the script” for this tale of Earth’s evolution. 95 “The Nutcracker Suite” represents the magic of nature, embodied in the flying fairies whose touch brings all of nature alive. “Toccata and Fugue” expresses the magic of music, “The Pastoral Symphony” the magic of Greek gods and legendary beasts. “Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Marie” portrays the black magic of demons and the white magic of saints. In all the scenes, magic is repeatedly represented by a sparkling effervescence which trickles out when magic touches the object. So, when the fairies contact the leaves or the flowers, sparks spring out and then the plants come to life. Even the package for the DVD repeats this technique, featuring Mickey the apprentice with hands outstretched and sparks surrounding him. Underneath the images and text on the box, subtle luminescent star-shaped holograms appear when turned to reflect the light. The drawing techniques further illustrate the connection to magic. The techniques of followthrough, anticipation, and exaggeration are similar to the gestures of magicians. Anticipation visually prefigures a coming movement, and follow-through culminates the ending of the movement. The animators hold the anticipatory and anterior movements for a few frames to ensure the audience reception of the gesture. Each technique exaggerates movements in order to make them highly expressive. The gestures become clear and distinct, making them easily

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imitable. This imitability is a necessary part of magical transfer; the audience repeats the ritual gestures performed by the magician to unleash the magical effects. By imitating the means, the audience hopes to complete the transfer of magical ends. Abram explains the importance of ritualized gesture for the magician: The magician, for instance, may make the magic palatable for the audience by following the invisible coin’s journey with the focus of his own eyes, and by imaginatively ‘feeling’ the coin depart from the one hand and arrive in the palm of the other; the audience’s senses, responding to subtle shifts in the magician’s body as well as to the coin, will then find the effect irresistible. In other words, it is when the magician lets himself be captured by the magic that his audience will be most willing to join them. 96 Once again, we see the dual process of transfer, from magician to gesture and audience to magician. This ritualized form of movement makes imitation possible. It is then up to the audience to play along. Viewers see the anticipation and follow-through (the semblances to real movements) and then interpret the emotion. The techniques are similar to what Brecht describes as the theatrical gestus, often translated into English as gest. The gest refers to both “gist” and “gesture” but gesture broadly conceived since Brecht includes music, language, facial expression, gesture, posture, and staging as possible means for showing the gestic. Brecht states, “‘Gest’ is not supposed to mean gesticulation: it is not a matter of explanatory or emphatic movements of the hands, but of overall attitudes. A language is gestic when it is grounded in a gest and conveys particular attitudes adopted by the speaker towards other men.” 97 In short, the gest is a series of performed actions that express the gist of an attitude. Brecht insists on the necessity for clearly expressing the gest, so that “the spectators’ interest is directed purely towards the characters’ attitudes.” 98 As a result, he prescribes a simplification of the gest through the aesthetically significant and typical performance. In other words, the gest is an attempt to make the gesture quotable, that is, iterable and therefore imitable as well. 99

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This description of gest readily compares to magic, ritual, and the animistic mimesis of Disney animation. Anticipation, follow-through, moving holds, and exaggeration make the gestures of the characters simple, typical, and significant. These techniques create movements clearly expressing the character’s attitudes and emotions. The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” scene portrays a clear narrative through such typical and simplified gestures. The scene begins with the sorcerer raising his arms upward as if lifting a heavy object; as he does, smokes rises up and transforms into a butterfly. Then, the sorcerer tickles the smoke downward like he is cramming it back into the skull from which it emerged. When the sorcerer leaves, Mickey pulls his arms to his chest (anticipation) and thrusts them forward rapidly, shaking his hands and alternating his fingers like he is stroking a piano (follow-through). As he does so, the broom comes alive. Then, Mickey mimes picking up two buckets and walking, and the broom follows by actually picking up the buckets and marching to the well. Satisfied, Mickey falls asleep and dreams that he climbs to the pinnacle of a mountain to exercise his magic. He turns his palms upward and swings his arms in an upper-cut motion, prompting the waves to rise up and crash against the mountain side, synchronized with the crash of the cymbal. Mickey awakes to find the lodge flooded due to the broom’s diligence. Unfortunately, he does not know the gesture to make the broom stop. Hands palms-out with arms extended as if to say halt does not work. He decides to chop up the broom with an ax, and after splintering it into numerous pieces, he leans against the door and exhales in relief. The splintering of the broom creates an army of brooms, however, and we see his face switch quickly from satisfaction to horror. Luckily, the sorcerer returns in time to save the day, gesturing to stop the brooms and then scolding his apprentice with a glare and a wag of the finger. Following the gestus, the audience sees Mickey move from curiousness to selfsatisfaction to fright to relief to horror and finally to embarrassment.

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Brecht would perhaps take issue with this comparison, since he is concerned with promoting an epic theater whose gest is primarily social. Indeed, the distinctly consumerist aims of Disney animation are anathema to Brecht, who desires to transform theater into a pedagogical agency for dialectical materialism. Thus Brecht distinguishes different kinds of gest, preferring the social gest which “is chiefly interested in attitudes which people adopt towards one another, wherever they are socio-historically significant.” 100 The aim of the social gest is to produce an alienationeffect in the audience, denying their empathetic identification with the characters by tearing down the fourth wall and revealing the characters’ and the play’s socio-historical construction. 101 Disney, in contrast, aims for this sort of empathic identification with Mickey that Brecht hopes to alienate. Yet the comparison remains apt nonetheless because Brecht admits that empathy is a necessary part of the social gest. His explanation further clarifies the mode of animistic mimesis, and its connection to the quotable or imitable gesture and readily compares with the description of Disney’s ability to portray the gist of another: The actor applying [the alienation effect] is bound not to try to bring about the empathy operation. Yet in his efforts to reproduce particular characters and show their behavior he need not renounce the means of empathy entirely. He uses these means just as any person with no particular acting talent would use them if he wanted to portray someone else, i.e. show how he behaves. This showing of other people’s behaviour happens time and time again in ordinary life (witnesses of an accident demonstrating to newcomers how the victim behaved, a facetious person imitating a friend’s walk, etc.), without those involved making the least effort to subject their spectators to an illusion. At the same time they do feel their way into their characters’ skins with a view to acquiring their characteristics. 102 Feature #5 Brecht also helps us isolate the fifth characteristic of animistic mimesis. He says about the socially gestic actor, “As a result everything put forward by him has a touch of the amazing. Everyday things are thereby raised above the level of the obvious and the automatic.” 103 Here again we see how the mode of animistic mimesis is aimed at an emotional touching, which for

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Brecht is ideally the discomfit affected by the alienation effect. The gest employs language, music, gesture, costume, and props (in short, a wide variety of visual and aural means) to achieve this emotional touching. But this is simply repeating what has already been established about animistic mimesis, that is, the use of synaesthetic experience to achieve an emotional transfer. In this quotation, Brecht’s emphasis on objects—those “everyday things” elevated above the level of the banal—is more important for delineating the fifth characteristic. Taussig also points to the importance of objects in mimesis ranging from voodoo dolls to hair to beloved trinkets. Objects are the necessary mediator for the magic of a boundary-crossing transfer. They provide the surface onto which the magic is transferred and from which the audience transfers their feelings. Objects provide the meeting ground for the magical blurring of self and other. Disney depicts the magical objects through some simple visual techniques. We might say that Disney draws the invisible aura of these magic objects. They do so by drawing tiny effervescent sparks emanating from the magical objects. So, the Sorcerer’s hat glows and sparkles when Mickey thinks about donning it. The fairies’ wands emit similar sparks that transfer the magic from figure to figure. Rocks and flowers and brooms and Sound Waves seem to shimmer and quake when touched by magic, as if awakening from a deep slumber. Greek gods throw lighting bolts, and Chernabog sprinkles dust to awaken his demon soldiers. 104 These objects are portrayed as critical mediums for the exercise of magic. Mickey, it seems, cannot make the broom spring to life without donning the hat. The Sorcerer’s skull from which the smoke emanates represents another such object, and smoke and other gasses, since they transfer between and even through figures, are another common way that Disney portrays the aura of magic. It is not only that Disney endows certain objects within the screen with a magical aura. Disney also conveys the idea that all of the objects on the screen are magical, whether or not they

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sparkle. This magic stems from the object’s ability to move and appear lifelike despite our knowledge that they are simple drawings. Mickey, centaurs, dancing hippos and mushrooms, demons, Greek gods, fairies, and dinosaurs are all magical characters as well as being objects. As Eisenstein says (ellipsis his): We know that they are … drawings and not living beings. We know that they are … projections of drawings on a screen. We know that they are … ‘miracles’ and tricks of technology, that such beings don’t really exist. But at the same time: We sense them as alive. We sense them as moving, as active. We sense them as existing and even thinking! 105 In other words, the very existence of animated images is magical, a magic that occurs through the medium of objects, namely photographs of drawings. Thus in an oft-repeated anecdote in animation studies, when Chuck Jones told a child that he created Bugs Bunny, the child insisted on the independent existence of the character, correcting him by saying “No, you draw pictures of Bugs Bunny.” In the child’s eyes, Jones was only responsible for the drawings not the auratic character itself. Jones might make the character move and speak, but Bugs had his own life, in the eyes of this child. This child correctly recognized that, although Jones might be responsible for the surface transfer, their own emotional transfer means that Bugs and Mickey have a life which goes well beyond the control of any animator or studio. Bugs lives in the child’s mind, not on the pages on which he is drawn.

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This final feature is tied to yet fundamentally different from Benjamin’s depiction of the aura of works of art. For Benjamin, works of art gain their aura through the cultic practices of ritual employing them. That is, by the continued use of these objects in cultural and religious ritual, the object is endowed with an aura, similar to the way the child gives life to Bugs. The auratic object “bears the mark of history to which the work has been subject.” 106 As Gyorgy Markus and Beller have noted, this description means that the aura does not reside in the object but is the product of the relation between the viewer and the object. 107 Beller contends that Benjamin’s aura results from the viewer imagining other viewers. “The painting in the museum becomes overlaid with the accretions of the gazes of others on its surface… That is, his or her perception of it includes his or her perception of the perceptual status of the object--the sense of the number and of the kind of looks that it has commanded.” 108 This clarifies what Benjamin means when he says that the aura is a “unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.” 109 The distance is the “strange tissue of space and time” that the viewer perceives in the object; the fascination not with the Mona Lisa’s eerie form, say, but with the knowledge that so many other eyes have looked upon this singular piece of art. 110 The distance is one of time, the accumulation of so much history through ritualistic repetition. The nearness is one of space; this distance in time persists no matter if we rub noses with Mona Lisa’s canvas. Benjamin contends that mechanical reproduction, and film in particular, betokens the decay of the aura. Without the trace of prior viewings, no object can have an aura. Since the products of mechanical reproduction lack this trace, they necessarily lack aura. This is the crucial difference between Disney’s portrayal of the aura and Benjamin’s concept. It makes no sense for the viewer to see accretions of other looks on the sorcerer’s hat. When I look at my copy of Fantasia, it is difficult if not impossible for me to believe that other people have seen that very same hat. My

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DVD is a copy, one without an original, singular history. Thus Benjamin would deny that the sorcerer’s hat (or more precisely, the dots of light that make an image of the sorcerer’s hat on my television screen) has any aura. Of course, some scholars challenge Benjamin’s argument that the auratic mode dissipates with mechanical reproduction, pointing to the cultic rituals formed around all sorts of mass produced commodities. 111 This is not my dispute. My point is to distinguish Benjamin’s auratic mode from the mode present in Disney. Whereas Benjamin’s aura comes from the viewer’s relation to the object, Disney inverses the priority. Disney’s aura literally emanates from the object, and the viewer only has to open their eyes to see it. The object’s aura does not require participation in or knowledge of the cultic history. Disney portrays these objects as inherently magical, needing only the viewer’s—nay, any viewer’s—participatory transfer and emotional investment. Disney wants to bring the viewer near, whereas Benjamin’s aura relies on a distance. Thus we can buy a Mickey doll but the Mona Lisa remains priceless. To summarize, Fantasia employs several formal features that specify the five characteristics of animistic mimesis. These features cue the audience to perceive Fantasia through the mimetic mode; the mode is like a key for interpreting the formal features. First, the status of Fantasia as an animated feature fusing music and image cues the viewer that they are not supposed to see mere imitation or rote copying. Fantasia is clearly designated as an imaginary world, one where viewers are encouraged to play. Second, Disney’s fusion of sight, sound, and color attempts to evoke an experience of emotional touching. The music, the images, the gestures, and the colors are all coded for an emotional response. Third, the use of shadows, hybrid human-animal characters, and morphing figures instruct the viewer that this emotional transfer depends on boundary-crossing, the blurring of self and other. Fourth, the repeated theme of magic, the

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portrayal of magical effects, and the drawing techniques of anticipation, follow-through, and exaggeration similar to Brecht’s gest indicate that this boundary-crossing is a magical process dependent on ritual. Finally, magic’s reliance on auratic objects tells the viewer that the boundary-crossing needs a mediator, a surface that can be shared by self and other in their blurring. This final characteristic reveals the distinctness of animistic mimesis from Benjamin’s auratic mode since in Disney the aura emanates from the object and draws the viewer near, rather than being interpreted by the viewer as an impassable distance. Animistic Mimesis and the Commodity Fetish While both live-action and animated cinema train audiences in a mode of perception similar to the daydream, how people daydream in these modes, and thus the cultural implications of the mode, are different. Cinema teaches a subject-focused daydreaming based on an economy of recording and editing. Animation teaches an object-focused daydreaming based on an economy of recognition and creation. In both, the audience sees like a camera, projecting and recording. But in cinema, viewers record moments of time; in animation, the viewer creates those moments. In live-action, people see existent life; in animation, they imagine life. Animation thus spreads a mode of perception in which the viewer constructs daydreams through objects. Animistic mimesis is a mode whereby audiences perceive objects as animated and animating; it is enabled by a transferability of semblance to the image and of emotion to semblance. Animistic mimesis draws on the pleasures of such daydreaming—namely, its perfectability. Looking and recording as a movie camera requires conscious editing and tedious waiting for the right moment containing the living movements that might trigger a daydream. The cinematic mode depends upon an external life. Animated perception requires only an object. The viewer can see semblances in objects and invest those semblances with life, if they simply give in to the

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illusion. And in these illusions, viewers play less the role of the recording camera or the screen and more the role of a god. For Eisenstein, this was precisely the source of Disney’s pleasure; that ability to treat all reality as composed of plastic materials ready for the viewer’s shaping. Indeed, numerous theorists have made the parallel. Wells describes it as animation’s ability to “absolutely resist notions of the real world.” 112 Neal Gabler states: Whether in his movies or in his theme parks, Disney always promised a fantasy in which one could exercise the privileges of childhood …. This will to power also explained why animation was his preferred medium. In animation one took the inanimate and brought it to life, or the illusion of life. In animation one could exercise the power of a god. 113 The utopian nature of such animated vision should be noted and not dismissed. It explains the source of desire motivating the continued viewing of animation and the ongoing translations of the mode of animistic mimesis. Animistic mimesis supplements the materialism of cinema, as in the Panofsky quotation above, with a desirable idealism. But there are some dystopian implications as well. Indeed animistic mimesis, the mode in which the viewer transfers life to objects, can be seen as the mode of Marx’s commodity fetish. Marx described the commodity fetish as the “mystical character of the commodity” whereby it comes to represent spiritual values and cultural meanings beyond its use-value. 114 Consumers fail to see the conditions of production, the labor and human relations that go into making the product, and fetishize the commodity. Consumers subjectify the commodity instead of valuing it for its objective qualities, what Marx calls its use-value. For instance, people do not value clothing for protection and warmth but instead see meaning in a pair of designer jeans. Marx’s example of a table with a wooden brain, standing on its head and dancing, seems to presage the coming of Disney animation. In fact, Marx makes the connection to a mode of communication as transfer explicit: Through this substitution, the products of labor become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social. In the same way, the impression made by a thing on the optic nerve is perceived not as a subjective excitation of the nerve

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but as the objective form of a thing outside the eye. In the act of seeing, of course, light is really transmitted from one thing, the external object, to another thing, the eye. It is a physical relation between physical things. As against this, the commodity-form and the value-relation … have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity…. It is nothing but … the fantastic form of a relation between things. 115 In a sense, Marx distinguishes between use-value and the commodity fetish based on a difference between the two forms of transfer. Use-value, like vision, is an objective relationship, an impression transferred from object to the surface of the eye. Marx states, “In order to become a commodity, the product must be transferred to the other person, for whom it serves as a usevalue, through the medium of exchange.” 116 The commodity fetish, on the other hand, is a subjective relationship, whereby the consumer transfers a fantasy onto the commodity. Marx describes the commodity fetish as an appearance, supra-sensuous, imaginary, the “fantastic form of a relation between things.” 117 The commodity fetish is a kind of emotional or spiritual transfer, the “conversion of things into persons.” 118 Thus he proposes that the most apt analogy comes from the realm of religion. “There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.” 119 In this description, the commodity fetish can be readily compared with animistic mimesis. Both involve a dual sense of transfer that endows objects with an imaginary or fantastical life. Yet animation and cinema raise some quarrels with Marx here because, as we have seen, animistic mimesis involves both types of transfer. Seeing a movie is partially a physical relationship between physical things; but it is also a supra-sensible experience in the imagination, an experience of emotional transfer. So, are movies a fetish or a real physical connection? The pleasure and emotion derived from movies are real, existent. The pleasure motivates continued daydreaming according to Campbell. Does this make movies’ use-value equivalent to their

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exchange value? If I paid eight dollars for a movie and it made me laugh hysterically, did I get my use-value and my money’s worth? What if I was bored to tears, but it helped me avoid interaction with the in-laws? Movies are fantastic forms but real experiences, often enjoyable, meaningful, and even potentially critical and, as Marx desired, world-changing. 120 Yet we can not deny that movies are also a fetish. Motion pictures actively edit out the production process and they hide the exploitation of labor evident from the numerous strikes in Hollywood during the 1930s and 40s, including a particularly nasty one at Disney. Moreover, movies are also commodities. Movies seem, on one hand, the prime example of a fetish. On the other, film and its industry are an undeniable and pervasive part of our contemporary cultural reality. Even if Mickey exists only in the imaginations and feelings of the audience, he continues to exist nevertheless and cannot be wished away. Such complexity requires an alteration in Marx’s take on the fetish. For Marx, exchange is the dominant medium; the simple fact of being a commodity makes the object into a fetish. 121 When a commodity is exchanged on the market, it becomes a fetish. “As soon as they are produced as commodities,” objects of labor obtain an exchange-value, which is the source of their fetish. 122 Obviously, we cannot fault Marx for somewhat simplifying the commodity during its early nascence, especially since all critical scholars since work in his shadow (and I thank Derrida for the reminder). 123 Exchange-value surely plays a role in commodity fetishism; exchange is a fundamental condition of fetishism and the commodity’s price and circulation add to the fetish. Yet commodity fetishism predates capitalist exchange markets. 124 Further, attributing the fetish to exchange does not provide a compelling reason for the proliferation and vast expansion of consumerism seen in the 20th century. How can we explain the voracious and encompassing

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nature of modern fetishism? Or, as Campbell asks, what accounts for the persistent, insatiable desire to consume that marks modern consumerism? The answer is obviously related to the spread of commodity fetishism. But fetishism requires a particular mode of perception. The commodity fetish is an appearance, a mode that enables a perspective, a shift from state to stance. 125 Marx is concerned with critiquing this perspective, one he finds widespread amongst his contemporary political economists. Yet Marx offers no explanation for the constitution of this perspective, other than to connect it to the fact of exchange. The only way to account for these changes in perspective, as well as leave open the possibility of future change, is by assuming that a culture has sources which teach, spread, and remind people of various modal possibilities. Marx’s comparison to religion drives home my conclusion. Religious fetishism does not spread simply due to the existence of religious institutions anymore than commodity fetishism can be said to spread simply because of the fact of exchange. Religion requires training in modes of perceiving, through ritual and other practices that serve as persistent reminders. For such insatiability, there has to be a desire to daydream through objects, a desire built up through established habits of communicating. Consumerism requires training and constant reminders. Consumerism needs sources that provide instruction, opportunity, and actualization of various modal possibilities. Animation provides one such source. Animation is both a constant reminder of the possibility of daydreaming through objects and training for the extension from one commodity (animated movies) to others (like daydreams experienced with all variety of Disney purses, watches, toys, and costumes). Thus, rather than describing commodity fetishism as the inevitable result of exchange, from my perspective commodity fetishism is better described as the mode of daydreaming through objects. In a culture attuned to display, aware of watching and being watched, people dream

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about projecting themselves and objects become a valuable aid. From fashion to automobiles to home furnishings to websites, all of these objects are part of a person’s possible image. They give them life and motion. Exchange makes available a much greater diversity and quantity of objects for daydreams, but it does not initiate the practice of daydreaming through objects nor can it account for the rapid and far-reaching dissemination of the commodity fetish in the 20th century. Instead, both these earlier and later practices are translations of a mode of daydreaming through objects. Seeing commodities as figures endowed with their own life is the mode of commodity fetishism, just as it is the mode of animistic mimesis. Animistic mimesis in Disney animation is simply a more recent iteration. The child who imagines a real mouse crawling in their backyard as Mickey and the one who plays in Disney’s commodified world of coloring books and silver screens are illustrating, through the translations, both the kinship and the difference in the modes. The differences matter greatly, however, and must not be forgotten since they help answer the dilemma of insatiable modern consumerism. The main difference is related again to the distinction between Benjamin’s aura and Disney’s portrayal of auratic objects. The distinction is important because, stripped of history and made to reside in an object, Disney’s aura encourages commodity fetishism. It is not simply that Disney portrays their objects as magical while hiding the vast industrial apparatus necessary to produce them. The consumer often knows that a gigantic industrial process lies behind the commodity but still acts as if they do not know, similar to Eisenstein’s point about knowing animation is not real and yet still sensing the characters as alive. Animistic mimesis encourages one to see the commodity as animated (full of life) rather than the mere product of industrial movements by providing a motivating desire to perceive through this mode. The mimetic mode generates a desire to participate in transfer through the

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mediation of Disney’s commodities. It trains audiences in the pleasure and magic of perceiving objects as animated and animating. Animistic mimesis reminds us of the pleasures of play, of transferring into fantastical worlds and blurring ourselves with the other. It may be a single tear, a hearty laugh, or shriek of terror but it is at those moments of emotional transfer that both the animated characters come to life and the desire to daydream through objects is bred. Corporations have seized on this desire for emotional transfer and run with it, often to the detriment of democracy, labor, and the environment. If consumers experience an emotional connection, through a synaesthetic experience, consider it to be a magical experience, and believe the objects are necessary to the experience then Disney has won. Disney controls and profits from the animated characters which are perceived to be the magical source of the aura. Thus animated figures represent the ultimate commodities because they are so ready for surface transfer. Mickey’s plastic nature allows him to rapidly cross national boundaries, carried along in the forms of movies, hats, shirts, watches, bags, costumes, toys, games, music, radio, television, and even tattoos. Animistic mimesis seems to be the ideal mode to spread the perceptions of an unbounded, plasmatic commodity fetishism. Wickstrom concurs that this mimetic mode is crucial to Disney’s success. She contends that Disney seizes on the proclivity of children to engage in this mimetic mode. When such a mode becomes part of consumer habits, the possibilities for commodity fetishism are endless. The commodity provides the object and the consumer, through mimesis, projects life into it. No wonder the strong love for Disney exhibited by children, or the strong connection between Disney and the commodity fetish in the eyes of many critics. It is also no surprise that corporations view children as valuable markets and seek to train them early in the habits of consumerism, one of which includes the mode of animistic mimesis and its penchant for

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daydreaming through objects. Animation spreads the mimetic mode necessary for the existence of contemporary commodity fetishism. Wickstrom summarizes: By creating environments and narratives through which spectators/consumers are interpellated into fictions produced by and marketed in both shows and stores, entertainment and retail based corporations allow bodies to inhabit commodities and so suggest that commodities, in turn, can be brought to life… In this scenario, it is not through the commodity, but as the commodity that experience apparently takes place. Animated when a consumer steps into the as yet unembodied costume, the commodity then appears to take on a life of its own. 126 Animistic mimesis, that mode whereby an audience envisions life in objects, is a materialized idealism, a collective dream of the perfectibility of our images. If cinema produces habits of contorting ourselves in front of cameras, animation teaches us that we can bring objects to those cameras to craft images. A more perfect “message” for consumerism, the corporations that peddle such dreams, and the defenders of the American dream can hardly be imagined. Viewed in this light, Benjamin’s more positive outlook on the decay of the aura seems suspect. Yet we must not dismiss Benjamin’s insights so quickly. The value for commodity fetishism is only one way of interpreting animation and the mode of animistic mimesis. Both also contain the seeds of a utopian desire, the belief in transferability, the possibility of bridging the inevitable gap between self and other, what Simonson calls communication hope and Peters the “dream of communication.” 127 In fact, as detailed in Chapter Seven, animistic mimesis results in some contradictory translations. In the cultural debates over Disney and consumerism, animistic mimesis provides the materials for the constitution of a constellation of metaphors. Seeing Disney animation through the mode of animistic mimesis readily articulates to a model of communication as transfer and its series of metaphors. Proponents defend Disney’s magic, its emotion, and its boundary crossing as the work of an Uncle genius, full of harmless play appropriate for children. Opponents fear, instead, a watering down of true artistic genius and the

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spread of childishness to the culture at large. Rhetors have struggled to translate the cultural landscape in ways to help comprehend what is happening to our children, our artists, and our dreams. As we shall see, transferability, and hence Disney, is heaven to some but hell to others.

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Endnotes for Chapter Six 1

Robert D. Feild, The Art of Walt Disney (New York,: The Macmillan Company, 1942), 16. One caveat is necessary. Just as there may be multiple modes of cinema, so too does animation include a diversity of potential modes. Not all animation will be received and produced according to the features of animistic mimesis outlined here. Some animation mingles with live-action cinema or pursues other experimental forms in ways that trouble my description. 3 Paul Watson, "True Lye's: (Re)Animating Film Studies," Art & Design Magazine, no. 53 (1997): 46. 4 Alan Cholodenko, "Introduction," in The Illusion of Life : Essays on Animation, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications in association with the Australian Film Commission, 1991). For a discussion of Emile Reynaud’s praxinoscope, see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999), 259-67. 5 Watson, "True Lye's: (Re)Animating Film Studies," 49. 6 Quoted in Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London ; New York: Routledge, 1998), 7. 7 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986). 8 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 20. 9 The reminder of death is not the only punctum Barthes illustrates, but it is the one which seems most proper to photography. The other details that prick vary much more depending on the viewer and the photo. 10 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet Books, 1964), 249. 11 Sergei M. Eisenstein, "Chapter Ii," in Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), 39. 12 Quoted in Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 1st ed. (New York: Disney Editions, 1981), 81. 13 This is a simplified and too top-down version of the process. In actuality, the transfers often moved in both directions. A particularly good drawing would shape the story, or a failure at the tracing stage would require a new drawing. I will return to this point later in the discussion. 14 Ibid. Kozlenko provides another example: ”What takes place before our eyes on the screen, takes place similarly in our dreams, and the pleasure we get from witnessing how easily Mickey Mouse, for instance, solves the most difficult problems in an almost haphazard and miraculous way, is a pleasure transferable to ourselves.” William Kozlenko, "The Animated Cartoon and Walt Disney," in The Emergence of Film Art; the Evolution and Development of the Motion Picture as an Art, from 1900 to the Present, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York,: Hopkinson and Blake, 1969), 247. 15 —“Conveying a certain feeling is the essence of communication in any art form. The response of the viewer is an emotional one, because art speaks to the heart. This gives animation an almost magical ability to reach inside any audience and communicate with all peoples everywhere, regardless of language barriers.” Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 15. Also see P. 19. 16 Thomas and Johnston say the consideration of “does it read” was a primary one. See Ibid, 23. 17 Reported by and quoted in Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 2006), 272. 18 Ibid., 172. 19 Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 19. 20 Animator Alexandre Alexeieff says, “Contrary to live-action cinema, Animation draws the elements of its future works from a raw material made exclusively of human ideas, those ideas that different animators have about things, living beings and their forms, movements and meanings. They represent these ideas through images they make with their own hands.” Quoted in Wells, Understanding Animation, 7. 21 McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 250. 22 Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, xv. 23 Karen Klugman, "Reality Revisited," in Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World, ed. Project on Disney (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 28. 24 Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 23. The “crude medium” statement can be found on p. 69. 25 Maurya Wickstrom, "The Lion King, Mimesis, and Disney's Magical Capitalism," in Rethinking Disney : Private Control, Public Dimensions, ed. Mike Budd and Max H. Kirsch (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 101. 2

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26

Ibid. Walter Benjamin, "A Child's View of Color," in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913 - 1926, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 51. Benjamin says the two poles of the mimetic mode are semblance and play. See ———, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Michael William Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002), 127. 28 Walter Benjamin, "Doctrine of the Similar," in Selected Writings: Volume 2, Part 2, 1931 - 1934, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 694. 29 ———, "A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books," in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913 - 1926, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 435. 30 ———, "Berlin Childhood around 1900," in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935 - 1938, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996). 31 Ibid, 366. 32 Benjamin, "Berlin Childhood around 1900," 393. 33 Walter Benjamin, "Old, Forgotten Children's Books," in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913 - 1926, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 411. 34 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics ([Northampton, MA]: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993). 35 Walter Benjamin, "Imagination," in Selected Writings; Volume 1, 1913 - 1926, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 180. 36 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 45. 37 Walt Disney, "Fantasia," (USA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2000 (1940)). 38 Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edward Jephcott and Howard Eiland (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002). 39 Taussig outlines the interpenetration of body and image. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 23. For the law of similarity and contact, very similar to Benjamin’s dialectic of semblance and play, see Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion, Third ed., vol. 1 (1911). 40 Evidence for this claim can be seen at www.rottentomatoes.com, which gathers movie reviews. Fantasia has an almost unheard of 98% approval rating and is consistently labeled a masterpiece. 41 Quoted in Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 118. 42 Ibid. 43 Quoted in the audio commentary. Disney, "Fantasia." 44 Susan Willis, "Walt Disney's Los Angeles Suite," Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 87. 45 See Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis, ed. John Drakakis, The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2006). Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953). 46 For the best discussions I know of the use of imitation or mimesis as a racist trope, see Kirt H. Wilson, "The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 2 (2003). Also, Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey : A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 47 See the criticism by Margaret Kennedy in 1942, quoted in Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2002), 192. 48 Disney, "Fantasia." 49 As reported in Walt Disney, "The Making of Fantasia," (USA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2000 (1940)). 50 The connection between animistic mimesis and an emotional touching further delineates this mode of communicating from the rote copy. Take the ballet dancing hippos in the “Dance of the Hours.” The viewers who find themselves moved by these graceful giants are not merely expressing a desire to mimic the hippos. They do not long to copy the dancers but to become them, to merge with them. The audience feels through the hippo and experiences a transforma-tion into myself–the-hippo. The hippos dance elegantly, leaping into the air, twirling on their hind legs, and prancing across the screen. The viewer knows that these hippos do not exist and do not, even can not, move in this manner. Yet from the perception of the similarity of movements (similarities with human ballet 27

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dancers) the viewer invests the objects with life and emotion. Once again, the play between the real and the illusion is the source of pleasure, the spark that may set off an emotional stirring. 51 McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 67. 52 Ibid, 105. 53 Merleau-Ponty argues that all sensory experience is synaesthetic and gets at this dual nature of sensuous transfer with his concept of the flesh. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Abram uses Merelau-Ponty to make a similar point. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996). 54 Ibid, 68. 55 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde, 252. 56 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Charles Lock Eastlake, Goethe's Theory of Colours, [1st ed., Cass Library of Science Classics (London,: Cass, 1967). This discussion is indebted to Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde. 57 Eisenstein discusses the importance of fire and liquid in Disney’s animistic mimesis. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986). 58 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde, 287. 59 Richard Neupert, "Painting a Plausible World: Disney's Color Prototypes," in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 112. 60 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde, 286. 61 J.P. Telotte, The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 50-51. 62 See Robert Edmond Jones, "The Problem of Color," in The Emergence of Film Art: The Evolution and Development of the Motion Picture as an Art, from 1900 to the Present, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1969). Neupert, "Painting a Plausible World: Disney's Color Prototypes." J. Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 89-90. Telotte, The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology. 63 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 81. 64 Jones, "The Problem of Color," 206. 65 Ibid. 66 Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, 89-90. 67 Ibid, 269. 68 Ibid, 208. 69 Neupert, "Painting a Plausible World: Disney's Color Prototypes," 116. 70 Walter Benjamin, "A Child's View of Color," in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Michael William Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996). 71 Quoted in Disney, "The Making of Fantasia." 72 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, 57-58. 73 Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages (in North-Western Melanesia) (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929), 449. 74 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), 184. 75 The cyborg is an example familiar to the utopian and dystopian implications of boundary-blurring. Cyborgs promise improved human health and function, but also frighten because they suggest the potentially unbounded and uncontrollable effects of technology. The movie Blade Runner expresses the ambivalent reverence and fear of cyborgs, as does the work of Donna Haraway. Donna Jeanne Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). Ridley Scott et al., "Blade Runner " (United States: Warner Bros. Embassy Home Entertainment, 1982). 76 Quoted in the audio commentary. Disney, "Fantasia." 77 Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde, 161. 78 Quoted in Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 53. 79 Ibid, 52. 80 Originally, I coined the term humanimistic to designate this dual transfer, but decided against the term due to its ugly bulkiness. Animistic, then, should not be read as simply the transferal of human characteristics to animals (the surface transfer) but also the transfer from animals to humans (the emotional transfer). 81 Ibid, 56. 82 Ibid, 54.

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83

Interestingly, there were the same questions about Walt’s sexuality. He seemed to prefer the company of men, and almost begrudgingly was married to a woman. Sean Griffin, Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the inside Out (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 84 This discussion of Mickey and Minnie’s gender is supported by the comments of Disney animator Fred Moore. See Wells, Understanding Animation, 204. 85 Ibid, 188. 86 E.M. Forster, "Mickey and Minnie," in The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology, ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980), 239. 87 Ibid. 88 Robert Sklar, "The Making of Cultural Myths--Walt Disney," in The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology, ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980), 61. 89 Derrida suggests this may be one of the most significant differences between “animals,” a term he pluralizes and troubles, and humans. See Jacques Derrida, "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)," Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 373-74. 90 Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, 296-97. 91 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 118. 92 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols., vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1976). 93 Ibid. 94 Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York,: Simon and Schuster, 1968). 95 Disney, "Fantasia," 163-64. 96 Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 58. 97 Bertolt Brecht, "On Gestic Music," in Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1964), 104. 98 ———, "Criticism of the New York Production of Die Mutter," in Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1964), 83. 99 Walter Benjamin, "What Is the Epic Theater? (Ii)," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Wiritngs Volume 4 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2003), 305. 100 Bertolt Brecht, "On the Use of Music in an Epic Theater," in Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1964), 86. 101 ———, "A Short Organum for the Theatre," in Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1964). 102 ———, "Short Descirption of a New Technique of Acting Which Produces an Alienation Effect," in Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1964), 136-37. 103 ———, "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting," in Brecht on Theatre; the Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York,: Hill and Wang, 1964), 92. 104 Schickel calls this “Disneydust.” Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney, 206-07. 105 Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, 55. 106 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 103. 107 Gyorgy Markus, "Walter Benjamin or the Commodity as Phantasmagoria," New German Critique, no. 83 (2001). Jonathan Beller, "Cinema, Capital of the Twentieth Century," Postmodern culture 4, no. 3 (1994). 108 Ibid, Para. 19. 109 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 104-05. 110 Ibid, 104. 111 For one example, see Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 112 Paul Wells, Animation and America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 6. 113 Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, xvi. 114 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 164. 115 Ibid., 165. 116 Ibid., 131. 117 Ibid, 165. 118 Ibid., 209.

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119

Ibid., 165. Marx said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow,: Progress Publishers, 1969), 15. 121 Marx refers to exchange as a mediation in the quotation cited at 209. 122 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 165. 123 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 124 See, for instance, the essays in Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things : Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 125 This perspective, or shift from state to stance, can be seen when Marx says, “There is an antithesis, immanent in the commodity, between use-value and value… between the conversion of things into persons and the conversion of persons into things; ….” The status of things is perceived as personified. The status of people are perceived as things. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 209. 126 Maurya Wickstrom, "Commodities, Mimesis, and the Lion King: Retail Theatre for the 1990s," Theatre Journal 51, no. 3 (1999): 284, 91. 127 Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Peter Simonson, "Dreams of Democratic Togetherness; Communication Hope from Cooley to Katz," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13, no. 4 (1996). Of course for Peters and Simonson, this is an impossible and therefore potentially dangerous dream. I concur, but I want to partition this dystopian view to see the utopian desire animating the tensive economy of the mode as well. 120

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Chapter Seven Uncle Genius and the Kids (Are Alright?) The mode of animistic mimesis is greeted throughout the mid 20th century with many conflicting and even contradictory translations. In American cultural discourse, Disney is interpreted through metaphors of art and the child. These interpretations conceive an exigence related to art and the child caused by Disney. That is, the debates about Disney worry over what is happening to art and what is happening to the child. Not everyone agrees how to see Disney through these two frames; the answers vary widely and frequently clash. They differ on issues such as what is art, what art is appropriate for the family, and how Disney affects art, the family, culture, and the child. Nevertheless, the major debates about Disney revolve around this constellation of metaphors. Disney is repeatedly seen through the frame of art and the family. Through these frames, two major personas that are portrayed as involved in the communicative transfer, further illustrating the constitution of a model of communication as transfer. In short, the debates center on the idea that, with Disney, an artistic genius (or a huckster) transfers dreams to children, or the child-in-all-of-us. In this chapter, I outline these two major rhetorical personas linked to a model of communication as transfer. This model creates a particular stasis, leading to debates central to the understanding of consumerism in American culture. Proponents and opponents debate whether Disney is truly a genius, a term reserved for artists. They also debate whether Disney products transfer educational and democratic messages to children, or whether they instead make us all childish. Yet once again, seeing Disney through the frame of art and the family creates a metaphor that translates the very

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notions of art and family. The genius is translated from the solitary, detached visionary to the uncle who knows and feels the family’s desires. The child is translated from a person whose youth makes them a blank slate of innocence into the child-in-all-of-us, that wholesome, untainted emotional spot in everyone that gazes on the world with childlike wonder. I conclude by arguing that each side only takes a limited point-of-view—of either the uncle or the genius, the pure child or the hopelessly childish. A more thorough understanding of transfer and the animated medium questions the conclusions of both sides. Transferring Persona: Uncle Genius “When the outstanding violinist Isaac Stern was asked the difference between the great and truly great, he replied, ‘The ability to communicate.’ It is the key ingredient in every art form and certainly the great strength of Walt Disney’s genius.”—Thomas and Johnston 1 Walt Disney, along with the products of his corporation, have been tagged with the label “genius” so frequently that it may seem a trite and arbitrary connection, a “huckster word” par excellence. Business analysts like Capodagli and Jackson celebrate Walt as “the creative genius whose dream world would make him one of the most famous artists in history.” 2 The corporation’s marketing arm, the popular media, and fellow animators likewise assure us of Walt’s genius. For instance, a 1945 article in the Saturday Review attributes Disney’s “genius” to the appeal of “what is childish in adults and adult in children.” 3 At the release of Steamboat Willie in his Chinese Theater, Sid Grauman declared the picture a “creation of genius that marks a new milestone in cinematic development.” 4 When Disney attempted to mix live-action and animation, Popular Science wondered, “Will mystification outweigh story interest or will Disney’s genius make plausible the mingling of animated pictures with equally lively people?” 5 In 1959, Wisdom portrayed Walt as a genius pioneer: “By virtue of his unsurpassed imagination, native genius, determination, and resourcefulness, he has utilized all so effectively as to become

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a world renowned, self-made pioneer in creating highly entertaining, thoroughly delightful, colorful, and educative motion picture spectacles.” 6 Walt’s passing only magnified the adulation. The Los Angeles Times eulogized Disney as an “Aesop with a magic brush, [Hans Christian] Andersen with a color camera, Barrie, Carroll, Grahame, Prokofieff, Harris—with a genius touch that brought to life the creations that he invented.” 7 The label of genius did not come exclusively from the hucksters of the business and media world, however. In 1937, author and philosopher Mortimer Adler called Disney’s genius “a degree of perfection in it field which surpasses our best critical capacity to analyze….” 8 The novelists E.E. Cummings and E.M. Forester sang the praises of Mickey and Walt. 9 The famed conductor Stokowski joined with Disney to make Fantasia and proclaimed, “Disney is a genius who is going into new things.” 10 Calling Fantasia a “revolution,’ the film critic Paul Hollister titled his review, “Genius at Work: Walt Disney.” 11 All of these people might be hucksters, but they have no obvious and direct interest in browning Walt’s nose. Yet the sense remains that this is a huckster version of the story, an arbitrary designation spread by the corporation for the benefit of their bottom-line. As such, many scholars have interrogated this label and refused the “great man” version of Disney’s success. Janet Wasko details the critical assault: Most of the Disney histories claim that Walt Disney was a creative and financial genius, yet they often acknowledge that the company struggled for years to achieve financial success, even while attracting critical acclaim and praise. Recently, a number of researchers have done a decent job of debunking the ‘great man’ approach to the Disney mythology, pointing out that Walt was no real genius. 12 Douglas Gomery agrees, stating, “Walt was no genius, nor is Michael Eisner [the current CEO of Disney].We are fools if we ascribe all the actions and strategies of a company to one man or

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woman. The Disney company is simply another capitalist enterprise with a history best understood within the changing conditions of twentieth-century America.” 13 Undeniably Disney animation is a product of a vast industrial system, not the dreams and efforts of one man. The corporation seized on the changing conditions of American capitalism through fits and starts, not the utmost deftness that many depictions seem to imply. This dispute is not my issue. My question is: Why “genius”? The rhetoric exists, regardless of its “actual” truth. So, why label Walt and Disney a genius and not any other number of terms? Of course, other terms were used, even some with frequency, but why was genius so popular? It seems that the connection between animation and “genius” stretches further than Disney. The term genius is used in relation to other animators as well. Commentators frequently call the first great American animator, Windsor McCay, a genius. Stefan Kanfer, whose scholarly acumen leads him to limit the term “genius,” is still willing to bestow McCay with the honor. He says, “In a business where genius is applied to anyone whose picture is nominated for a Golden Globe Award, he is the exception: There has never been a filmmaker more deserving of the title.” 14 Nevertheless the title lives on in animation rhetoric, applied to J.R. Bray, Paul Terry, Max and Dave Fleischer, Otto Mesmer, Tex Avery, Walter Lance, and Chuck Jones, among others. Many Disney animators, including Fred Moore, Bill Tytla, and Ub Iwerks are likewise so honored. In fact, the critics who attempt to disprove Walt’s genius frequently point to these great animators, reminding the reader that Walt did not draw and could never draw as well as these real geniuses. So, what makes Disney a genius? The word “genius” has a much older history than the development of animated pictures. Geniuses have been said to exist since at least the time of ancient Rome, where the genius denoted the guardian spirit of a person, family, or state. This spirit was thought to be responsible for one’s outstanding achievements. Today, the connection

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to outstanding achievements remains, particularly of the intellectual or creative variety (spiritual, in a broad sense). So, have we run aground on the perennial problem of language—its elasticity, its slippage? If genius can be applied to anyone with remarkable intellectual or creative deeds, then it is no surprise Disney, much less other great animators, received the moniker. Language is slippery, but this dissertation is not an exhaustive history of the term “genius.” The more important question is: How does the animation medium, and its model of communication as transfer, translate the “genius”? How is the persona of the genius transformed? First and most simply, the genius becomes the one who transfers, communicating through their medium. They are geniuses when the transfer is most successful; that is, when the audience feels moved, when transfer in the second sense occurs. Of course, a cynical audience might deny that Disney, or any specific movie or director, is a genius. The denial does not eliminate the category; the rhetoric associating genius and those who make spiritual transfers still remains. The criteria are accepted, only the judgment differs. Those who transfer the audience successfully, who most move them emotionally, are “geniuses” in the mouths of the most critical and the most sympathetic audiences alike. Connecting genius to transfer only narrows the field. Both literature and theater result in a transfer of the audience into the fictional portrayals. Indeed, there is a long history of referring to authors of poetry, philosophy, and prose as geniuses. The Los Angeles Times eulogy quoted above compares Walt to a long line of literary geniuses. Further, painting, music, and sculpture involve transfer, producing numerous ‘geniuses” along the way. Who can deny this status to Michelangelo or Matisse, Bach or Beethoven? Indeed, Disney’s genius drew favorable comparisons with Picasso and da Vinci. 15 A 1937 Time cover story featured an extended analogy between Rembrandt and Disney, both portrayed as fiercely independent artists. 16

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Walt’s genius, however, was different and required further translation. Unlike a writer, he did not write his stories. Unlike a sculptor, he did not sculpt the final product. Unlike a painter, he did not paint. Unlike a comic book artist, he did not draw. Yet like all these artists, Walt’s genius was interpreted as that of a “visionary.” In the translations, his real talent was conceived to be his vision. In account after account, related to nearly every Disney endeavor, the association between Disney’s genius and “vision” is emphasized. Disney animator Wilfred Jackson said, “Walt already did have his fast eye and quick overall comprehension of whatever he put his attention on, so he would usually be first to detect what it was that made [a competitor’s cartoon] more effective than ours.” 17 For Jackson, Walt’s genius-vision is somehow tied to his talent for acting out characters. According to Jackson, “He visualized each thing with his whole body.” 18 Biographer Steven Watts envisions the “visionary genius” as a key element of Disney’s image. 19 Even Kanfer lets his reticence about the genius label slip when pondering Walt’s true talent. He says, “Other animators drew with greater skill, were funnier, produced more original work. The world was open to them, too. But only Walt had the genius to know genius when he saw it; only Walt created a public appetite and then gratified it.” 20 The visionary addendum to genius is obvious. Disney, after all, makes animated motion pictures. Journalist Bill Davidson expounds and exemplifies: As the late Jerry Wald once said, ‘Like Thomas Alva Edison, Disney has eyes that see what no other man sees.’ He can look at a bird’s awkward mating dance and choreoraph it into a comic ballet in one of his nature films; he can stare at a doorknob and, by adding a mouth here and there, can convert it into one of the most engaging characters in his cartoon feature, Alice in Wonderland. He is, in effect, a modern-day wizard, imparting human characteristics—which he alone sees—to mice, owls, otters, seals, crickets, to sugar bowls and a host of other inanimate objects, transmuting commonplace materials into artistic gold. 21 I usually see very little gold (more like cheese) in a Disney movie, but Davidson helps explain how the concept of genius is further translated in application to Disney and, by extension,

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animation. Disney’s genius-vision is not the vision of his physical eyes; people are not crediting him with an ability to see physical reality with any more precision than 20/20 vision. Disney’s genius comes from seeing what others can not see. We might say, following Plato’s designation spelled out by Martin Jay, that Walt’s superior vision is not the lux of the human eye but the lumen of the mind’s eye. 22 Walt is a visionary because he sees ideas more clearly than others. This explanation resounds in the numerous descriptions of Walt’s “fertile imagination.” 23 This explanation is a part, but it leaves the original dilemma. Artists in all mediums are visionaries of the imagination. Great writing, painting, directing, and sculpting are all said to be the product of the visionary. Such Platonic idealism is a common rhetorical trope when applied to the fine arts. Disney’s visionary nature, however, is different. It goes beyond the ability of the lumen. Again, the translation works through an economy between the real and the imaginary. Walt relies on the real vision of the lux to produce the fantastical vision of the lumen. As Davidson claims, Walt looks at doorknobs and birds, seals to sugar bowls, and transfers their characteristics to imaginary worlds. He has the visionary ability to notice similarities and then to play with them. In other words, Disney exhibits perspicacity in his ability to see the imaginary through the real. Gabler explains this visionary transfer from the real world to the imagination: Whether he is turning an auto into an airplane or a cow into a xylophone, Mickey, like Chaplin, and like Walt Disney himself, is always in the process of reimagining reality, and this is his primal, vicarious connection to the audience—the source of his power. He sees and hears things others don’t. He makes the world his. 24 The transfer moves both directions as well. Apparently Disney can see imaginary characters from the “real” world with his physical eyes, and he can transfer those characters to his body, acting out their parts, so that others could see them as well. Jackson claims that Walt could visualize characters with his whole body, and Thomas and Johnston report that this ability was a

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major assistance to the animator. Their description of Walt acting out a scene of Pluto for animator Norman Ferguson again articulates the dual transfer: And as Walt acted it out, it became funnier and funnier; encouraged by the response, Walt would know he was on to something that was good entertainment. He would imitate the expressions of the dog, and look from one side to the other, and raise first one brow and then the other as he tried to figure things out. Fergy was watching all this as well as laughing at the thought of the old dog …, an in his mind he was seeing the way it should look on the screen. He visualized drawings, attitudes, expressions, but they were not of Walt himself…. Somehow he had this ability to make you see what was funny about the character itself, and it was the character’s expressions that you saw and later tried to draw, but, still, that dog’s eyebrows could only have come from Walt. 25 Disney’s genius, a genius of transfer, does not end with his ability to transfer between the real and imaginary, the lux and the lumen. He is also reported to be a master of transfer in that he can see what will move an audience. Above, Jackson says that Walt was the “first to detect” what made a piece of animation superior. Thomas and Johnston credit Disney with a genius in communicating. Kanfer says that only Walt knew genius when he saw it; his true talent was creating and satisfying a public appetite. In other words, Walt was a genius because he could see like the audience; he could see what would spark an emotional transfer. This genius stems from a mimetic ability. Walt Disney could not only mimic the life of his characters but also imitate the response of his audience. He was a genius of transfer in both the surface and the audience sense. The composer Stokowski articulates the dual nature of Walt’s genius at transfer, “Walt had the imagination, insight, humor, and sense of design to enter into the feeling of life of any man, animal, tree, or stone and make us feel with him.” 26 Yet artists of all types may be seen as geniuses of transfer. They employ things they see in the real world to construct a fantasy world, and the successful artists draw the audience into this world. Is this really a translation of the “genius” affected by the animation medium? Or is it simply an extension of this term to a new kind of artist? Before we concur with the second

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question, we must recall that granting Disney the status of art was very much under dispute historically. Many critics felt that animation was an entertainment product, created as an industrial craft for popular consumption. Its production by industry, its lower-class audience, and its entertainment value all denied its status as real art. Even those who felt that animation could be an art, such as the first great animator McCay, lamented the industrialization of animation and denied the status of art to Disney. He exclaimed, exasperated, “you fellows” have made animation not an art but “a trade,” concluding this was an unfortunate piece of “bad luck.” 27 Many, such as Schickel and Marc Eliot, felt compelled to defend art and the genius label by correcting the popular perception and, instead, painting Walt as a huckster or Hollywood’s Dark Prince. 28 The dispute over Disney’s artistic status was so heated that Harvard professor Robert Feild felt compelled to write a tome defending The Art of Walt Disney. 29 Feild worries that the exclusion of Disney from art criticism and the concomitant obsession with the traditional criteria of fine art and leaves us with “no standards by which to judge the art of today.’ 30 In response, Field translates the conception of genius and along with it art. Disney’s work produced dilemmas for the traditional standards of art criticism. It was not intended to evoke or uncover deeper meanings of the culture or the soul. It was simply meant to entertain, making it a crass form of consumer materialism rather than a heightened form of idealism. It was not produced by a single great artist, but by a Studio of up to one-thousand contributing members. Few could distinguish which parts of the work were done by which animator. Even more, the art seemed to not require any specific talents. Walt, as a genius, could not draw, did not write, and was a failure as a director. Further, many of the effects stemmed from mechanical contrivances, such as photographing, inking, and painting. To some, then,

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calling Walt a genius and Disney animation a form of art was the highest form of blasphemy, an unconscionable affront to all the great art and great geniuses who came before. Indeed to some, Disney is the exact opposite of the genius. He pillages stories from other sources, in turn watering them down and stripping them of their true beauty and deeper meaning in order to get some silly laughs and sentimental emotions. The preeminent scholar of the fairy tale, Bruno Bettleheim, accused Disney’s Snow White of destroying the valuable lesson by making the dwarves into cute individuals rather than pre-pubescent foils to the adolescent Snow White. 31 Worse yet, Walt was not an artist because he was a sell-out, peddling easily consumable fare in simplified form to the masses. There was nothing original or unique in Disney portrayals. Disney appropriates popular tales and conforms them to the crass desires of the masses in order to make a buck. The older, particularly Romantic, notion of the genius varies in nearly every respect. The Romantic genius was an individual with unique and original ideas. 32 This individual’s genius was supposed to stem from their difference from the masses and the corrupt, denuding world of civilization. These geniuses sought the solitude of the Walden cabin so they could free their mind of the misleading shackles of common perception. They were loners, out-of-touch with society so they can be in-touch with the deeper truths of the soul. At the very least, they were geniuses because their spirit was composed of stuff different from the common mass; they knew what the mass did not, saw what the mass could not. Disney, on the other hand, was anything but out-of-touch, at least in the popular rhetoric and in the box office. Walt was portrayed as a typical American, an icon of that universally-held American dream. He spoke to the latent desires and beliefs of the masses. Many credit Disney’s popularity with speaking the message that the public wanted to hear. For instance, Disney’s 1933

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version of Three Little Pigs became a major public hit during the height of the Great Depression. The movie was widely interpreted as an allegory, with the wolf representing the economic crisis that might destroy your house and devour your body. The song “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?” won an Oscar and became the theme song of the Depression. The message of the song and the movie is that there is nothing to fear, that the little pigs who work hard to build their houses on solid foundations will survive. Such a message was surely naïve and over-simplified, but it provided a source of reassurance in dark times. Kozlenko goes so far as to claim that the fact that Three Little Pigs was animated explained why audiences rallied around the message. Other live-action films had the same message but failed. And why? “Obviously because on the plane of reality audiences would have refused to accept the conclusion that they weren’t afraid of ‘the big, bad wolf.’” 33 There is much to dispute in Kozlenko’s interpretation, but this is not my argument. For our purposes, the Three Little Pigs presents a microcosm of the debates over the status of art and the value of animation. Critics worried that such simplistic, even propagandistic (after all, Franklin Delanor Roosevelt claimed Three Little Pigs was his favorite movie) messages were the perfect evidence of the spiritual harms of consumerism. 34 People sought escape from the real world rather than seeking the changes necessary to improve their lot. When the failure to show Three Little Pigs sparked a riot at Dallas’ Majestic Theater, the critics were armed with more ammunition. 35 A writer for the Philadelphia Record argued that such passion demonstrated the movie had intoxicated the American people. Three Little Pigs was “the great national menace” created by the “public enemy” Walt Disney. 36 The fears did not subside with the last run of Three Little Pigs. The popularity of numerous Disney features was attributed to similar desires for escapism. Snow White and Fantasia, for

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instance, were both celebrated and critiqued for providing a fantastical world into which audiences might escape. Fantasia’s mixture of high-cultural symphony music and low-cultural animation drew the most ire. Critic Dorothy Thompson’s comparison of Fantasia to Nazism is only one such instance. 37 Many critics responded negatively because Fantasia’s mixture of art forms directly threatened the status of art and the boundaries of its demarcation. In other words, Fantasia represented one nodal point around which the debates over art and its accompanying notions of genius revolved. Geniuses were supposed to escape the world, not provide the world with easily-accessible forms of escape. Eisenstein, a fan of Disney but not the Fordist system that nurtured him, believes this escapism is Disney’s most profound gift: Disney is a marvelous lullaby for the suffering and unfortunate, the oppressed and deprived. For those who are shackled by hours of work and regulated moments of rest, by a mathematical precision of time, whose lives are graphed by the cent and dollar… This is how Americans … will recall with warmth and gratitude the man who cheered them up with ‘golden dreams’ during their period of oppression. Who, for an instant, allowed them to forget, to not feel the chilling horror before the grey wolf who, while you were at the movies, pitilessly turned off your gas and water for non-payment.” 38 Thus to many Disney was anything but a genius, more like a huckster. Disney provides escape from the world while speaking to and for the masses. Unlike the Romantic genius, Disney’s power came from understanding and communicating the public perception, rather than breaking free of its shackles. Walt, as such, is continuously portrayed as an average American, a typical person whose genius (or lack thereof) stems from his normality. He could see what others saw, dream what others dreamed. For Feild, Walt was indelibly stamped with his time and his place. 39 This was the source of his genius: “That Disney came from the heart of the people is no idle phrase. His ability to feel the public’s pulse … has enabled him to know exactly how much of the new and unexpected it can take without resistance and, moreover, with understanding.” 40 This is, once again, a genius of transfer. Yet this transfer did not seek to rip the viewer or reader

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from their real space and its flawed perceptions, to transport them to a higher, truer, or more spiritual realm. The Romantic genius wanted to shake the viewer free of their stultified cultural roots. Disney simply wanted to touch and tickle the audience in the places they knew so well. Once again, the interpretations of Disney’s genius relied on an economy between the real and the imaginary, between illusion and life, between surface and emotion. The Romantics view these pairs as oppositions not economies, and perform the typical metaphysical move of elevating one over the other. Thus, Romantic geniuses pursued the life of imagination and emotion against the illusion of the surface and the real. They valued transfer in the second sense, but feared the bleeding, the metamorphosizing, the blurring, the contamination that came from appealing to an audience or mingling with the masses. Thus for the Romantics, the best forms of surface transfer were those that produced new spaces—unique and original ways of seeing. Elite art critics repeatedly judged Disney inadequate when held to these standards. Disney, the conglomerate and the person, are not unique or original in the Romantic sense. They are common, ordinary, downright average, quintessentially American. Disney is a family member, who knows your dreams and your realities. When Walt Disney is labeled a genius, then, it is a new translation of genius. He is “Uncle Genius.” The persona of Walt as uncle is well-known. Reportedly, the workers at the Disney Studio were in the habit of referring to Walt as “Uncle.” The corporation’s marketing arm fed the association. Per Nicholas Sammond, “Disney was represented as a benevolent patriarch, often referred to as ‘Uncle Walt,’ who tirelessly and selflessly oversaw the entire operation.” 41 When Walt hosted the popular television show Disneyland, he was called “Uncle Walt” as well. For Sean Griffin, television transformed Walt into “a member of the family.” 42 Apparently, this association goes much further back in audience perception than Walt’s first appearances before the camera. Capodagli and Jackson claim that

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most Americans “were originally drawn to Walt Disney and the company he founded as one is drawn to a favorite uncle. Like nearly everyone else alive today, we, the authors, grew up being almost as familiar with the Disney name as we were with our own.” 43 Some analysts treat the uncle label as sheer historical quirk or mere biographical coincidence. Walt liked and encouraged the label Uncle because he had a particularly influential one as a child, or it was simply the co-workers projecting their perceptions of Walt’s personality. These elements certainly play a role, but when putting the label Uncle in context with the genius, when seeing “Uncle Genius,” the constitution of this persona gains more explanation. Uncle Genius is not the typical genius; your uncle is too common and too familiar to be genius. He knows too much about the family and is thus caught up in their flawed perceptions. The uncle is too ordinary to be a Romantic genius. It seems unlikely that Thoreau, stranded on Walden farm, created such warm feelings as to be treated as and labeled a family member. Thoreau was revered for his greatness, his distinctness from the mass family. Thoreau might have been technically an uncle, but Walt was not technically these interpreters’s uncle. He is the family friend who has become so familiar that people call him uncle. For Disney, being an uncle is not an accident of biography separate from his other accomplishments. Thoreau is called a genius because he knows something most do not. Walt is a called a genius because he knows us as well as we know ourselves. Thus being the uncle is crucial to the translation of Walt’s genius. Only by knowing us like a family, seeing both what we see in the real world and what we dream in the imagination, can the uncle successfully move us. In order to mix the real viewer space-time and imaginary space-time, he must be familiar with everyday actualities and provide the audience what they desire in their imaginary ones. To transfer the audience to the imaginary world and the imaginary world to the audience, the artist

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needs to be connected to them, in frequent and intimate contact. For both transfers, Disney had to know the kids. In short, he needs to be family, an Uncle Genius. And as a family, Americans would sometimes fret and fight over what the Uncle Genius might transfer to the children. Transferring to a Second Persona: The Child (In All of Us?) You know, an honest person, to me, is someone that can really sit down and not be afraid to show a little emotional reaction to something, or not be afraid to go back to his childhood. These are the honest people. I don’t care what the critics say. Critics sometimes lose contact with the public. –Walt Disney 44 Who is interpreted as the audience in the communicative transfer? The short answer is children; the long answer is the “child in all of us.” Obviously, the connection between Disney, animation, and childhood is firmly cemented in popular rhetoric. The connection is also the source of a contentious debate, as Walt here acknowledges. Proponents praise the wholesome, educational, and family-oriented content of Disney features. Opponents suspect that Disney brainwashes our children with ideological poisons and bewail the childishness Disney transfers to the entire culture, adults and children alike. Yet both proponents and opponents presume a specific notion of the child and childhood, one translated from animated cinema. This child is a surface, a blank-slate ready for the ink of culture, an innocent susceptible to transfer and thus either in need of the simplified and reassuring Disney fare or extremely vulnerable to its misleading and insidious messages. The danger in broaching the subject of Disney and childhood results from the confusion between the “actual” audience and the second persona, the “real” person and the mask. Earlier, I argued that this distinction is troubled by a materialist rhetorical approach because the two are related and often indistinguishable. Treating the second persona as simply a creation of the rhetor leaves us without any ability to explain the constitutive process and thus understand how personas emerge. In the case of the Disney child, the distinction is a tempting one, however.

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Children are, in fact, the primary audience and the main consumers of Disney animation. Anyone who tries to argue that children are constituted via Disney’s rhetoric seems to be in a difficult position. Children are created by human reproduction, not magic wands, animated movies, secret spells, or flying storks. Disney aims at a pre-constituted market of children; they do not make children and do not control what they desire. Indeed, I argued previously that Disney animation borrows the mimetic mode of seeing familiar to children, so suggesting Disney also constituted those children seems to present a paradox. Actually, this paradox is a dilemma for the traditional notion of the second persona, where the actual and discursive audience is distinctly separated. In my position, Disney both constitutes and is constituted by children. Children are always a discursive and material production. They pre-exist Disney, but, through the medium of cinematic animation, their perceived elements are translated in new and unique ways. “Children” become metaphors for the translation and interpretation of Disney animation. Thus I agree with Sammond who portrays the child as a “discursive operation,” and I draw heavily on his genealogy of this discourse as it transformed around Disney throughout the 20th century. 45 Yet I seek to answer the question just under the surface throughout Sammond’s insightful work: why did these discursive shifts take place? Although Sammond illustrates that the notion of the child changes, how can we explain these changes? For Sammond, it is not that Disney produced this notion of the child, for either selfish profit or altruistic pedagogy. Instead, the shifting notion of the child is the result of “a complex set of historically specific relations.” 46 This complexity is undeniable, and I do not wish to reduce the production of the child to any one rhetor or deny agency to involved parties. However, I see all of the agents and agencies involved in this complex set of relations as involved in the same practice. That is, they all seek to translate the child through an analysis of the cultural modes. The complex set coalesces around the

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(discursive and material) child because all of these rhetors are seeking to describe some significant cultural changes affected through Disney animation. The complex set involves numerous rhetors, rarely in agreement and often at odds, but each addressing a similar perceived exigence: how communication as transfer affects children and childishness. In other words, the model of communication as transfer creates a stasis point centered on the persona of children. So, how is the child translated through the animation medium? Before the child can be translated, they must first be seen as a distinct cultural category. Most historians trace this development to the sixteenth century. 47 Prior to the sixteenth century, children worked, fought, played, dressed, and acted as adults. Western culture did not distinguish children as anything more than “little adults”; there was little discourse proper to the child. 48 Beginning in the sixteenth century, children became described as “a weak and innocent being in need of special care, love, discipline, and protection from evil.” 49 With this changing conception came new etiquette books, the emergence of a children’s literature, and a subculture of “fairy tales, toys, birthday celebrations, and nursery rhymes.” 50 According to Meyrowitz and Elizabeth Eisenstein, the new notion of childhood proceeds from the spread of literacy due to the printing press. 51 The printing press creates segregated markets, allowing authors to craft literature specifically designed for children. Because children must learn to read at progressively higher levels, they are excluded from the world of adult knowledge to a degree previously unknown. Adults can draw boundaries between the books and knowledge appropriate for adults and books and knowledge appropriate for children. In Meyrowitz’s words:

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In the primary oral society of the Middle Ages, children may have been seen as less distinct from adults because, by the age of seven or eight, children generally master the basics of speech… The medium of print removed the child from the adult world in a manner and degree inconceivable in an oral culture. To learn what adults knew, to be able to join adult interactions in print, now required many years of schooling and training. Printing allowed for all-adult interactions in which parents and teachers could ‘privately’ discuss how to treat children, what to teach them, and what to keep from them. 52 The spread of literacy, not coincidentally, also introduces communication as transfer in the second sense. Children could be transferred to imaginary worlds outside the purview of their adult parents, necessitating more careful editing and control. It was assumed that there are worlds in books that children are not ready to handle. The sin and debauchery of adult worlds are seen as dangerous when transferred to children who lack the moral equipment to process the transfer. Children need protection due to their innocence, due to the fact that they have not yet been imprinted with the knowledge necessary to understand evil. Children, as such, are largely considered to be blank slates, ready surfaces for the transfer of culture. Sammond considers Rousseau’s Emile to be the most famous example. He concludes that the idea of the child as “plastic” is a commonplace of post-Enlightenment rhetoric (which we can read as post-printing press thinking). 53 The child becomes seen, then, as a “transhistorical object,” linking raw human nature to future cultural possibilities. 54 Likewise, Gary Cross depicts a similar discourse, emerging in the Seventeenth Century, of the child as a blank slate in need of protection that he traces to Locke and Rousseau and labels “sheltered innocence.” 55 In a very real sense, children are our future. Yet the idea that children are innocent, plastic surfaces ready for the imprint or transfer is not inevitable or natural. Prior interpretations viewed children as either imprinted by a god or marked by their biology, each pre-destined at their birth. The newer interpretation of children as innocent, blank slates is the dominant one in cultural discourse at the birth of cinema. Cinema, in fact, provides this view with further sustenance

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because viewers acted like surfaces. The viewer must identify with the camera and record the sequence of images, encouraging a notion of people as surface. Walt confirms the interpretation: “I think of a child’s mind as a blank book. During the first years of his life, much will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly.” 56 With the spread of cinema, the child, the most innocent and least imprinted of surfaces, became the focal point of a moral crisis. Part of the reason for this moral crisis was the mixing of previously distinct spaces for adults and children. In early movie theaters, children and adults watched the same films just as did the upper and lower classes. Critics worried about both conditions. They feared the influence of the lower classes on their children and were wary about the violent and sexual materials portrayed on the screen. Richard deCordova states, “During the late 1920s and early 1930s the cinema’s address to children was contested ground and a matter of frenzied concern. Reformers denounced the movies’ influence on children and mounted wellorganized efforts across the country to regulate and control this aspect of children’s leisure.” 57 The moral crisis led to a number of studies on the effects of cinema on children, including the well-known Payne Fund studies of the 1930s. Results were inconclusive. Although this may sound strange to our contemporary ears, Disney was not immune from the criticism. The early Mickey shorts were full of raunch and outhouse humor, including many “butt” jokes, Mickey’s erotic desire for Minnie, and the repeated molestation of animal bodies. 58 To the critics, the plasmatic nature of the characters’ bodies signaled salaciousness, with some even claiming that the secret of Mickey’s appeal was sexual, either reminiscent of the phallus or the circles of women’s breasts. 59 E.M. Forster, for instance, praised Mickey’s “scandalous element.” 60 The portrayal of udders on Disney’s cow characters really raised the cultural ire. “The gargantuan organ whose antics of late have shocked some and convulsed other of Mickey

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Mouse's patrons,” wrote Time in 1931, spawned so many complaints that it was banned by the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America. 61 Over time, Disney believed that the censors destroyed Mickey. As Walt concluded, “Mickey was on a pedestal—I would get letters if he did something wrong.” 62 Disney developed Donald Duck in response to Mickey’s straightjacketing. Donald was freer to engage in raunch; his foul attitude was his modus operandi. Animation faced stronger pressures for censorship than live-action because it was viewed as primarily for children. A 1939 Look magazine made precisely this claim: “In fact, these cartoons have censorship problems more complex than those of feature pictures.” 63 In the article, Warner Brothers executive Leon Schlesinger acknowledges that the reason for more stringent standards is their primary audience—children and their “impressionable minds.” Even kissing is apparently too much sexuality for the impressionable, surface-like children. “Robert Taylor may kiss Garbo in a feature picture, but it isn’t considered nice for Porky Pig to kiss Petunia Pig in an animated cartoon. Censors prefer romance of the hand-holding type.” 64 Smoodin contends that the pressure for censorship led Disney to move into more innocent portrayals, dropping the raunch and outhouse for the world of fairytales. 65 The wholesome, family-oriented Disney most people think they know today evolved in this direction due to economic pressures. Disney marketers promoted their wholesome image and exploited the rage of censors to attract a market. Soon, Disney was widely esteemed as a model for child-appropriate cinema. By the 1940s, the perception of Disney as family entertainment was firmly cemented. However, this image did not emerge naturally; it was developed through fits and starts and challenged by the cultural critics. The criticism of Disney’s fitness for children was widespread. David Kunzle states a representative example, “The child in the Disney comic is really a mask for adult anxieties; he is an adult self-image. Most critics are agreed that Disney shows little or

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no understanding of the ‘real child,’ or real childhood psychology and problems.” 66 At first, Disney also resisted this image. Walt lamented the straight-jacketing of his alter ego Mickey. Further, Snow White and Fantasia caused a rather large uproar because the wicked Queen and Chernabog were seen as too scary for children. Walt seemed satisfied with the result, unlike a corporate president who knew his target market. He said, “Before seven or eight, a child shouldn’t be in a theater at all. But I didn’t make the picture for children. I made it for adults— for the child that exists in all adults.” 67 Walt’s conceptualization of audience as something other than children was a running theme throughout his life. He wondered, “Aren’t we getting too prudish” when some suggested they cut the scene of a birth of a buffalo-calf in one cartoon. 68 He insisted, instead, “You do a child no favor by trying to shield it from reality.” 69 When the Story Department rejected a story because it would not appeal to children, he exclaimed, “Dammit, I’m making pictures for the family, not just children. If I made pictures only for children, I’d lose my shirt.” 70 Instead of actual children, Disney envisioned his work as for families, or what he called at other times the “child in all of us” or the “Mickey audience.” 71 In a quotation frequently recited, Walt elucidates: Everybody in the world was once a child. We grow up. Our personalities change, but in every one of us something remains of our childhood…. It’s where all of us are simple and naïve without prejudice and bias. We’re friendly and trusting and it just seems that if your picture hits that spot in one person, it’s going to hit that same spot in almost everybody. So, in planning a new picture, we don’t think of grownups and we don’t think of children, but just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us that maybe the world has made us forget and that maybe our picture can help recall. 72 Why would Walt reject his largest audience? When the child is viewed as pure surface, they seemingly represent the perfect group for animation’s form of transfer. We cannot dismiss economic motivations; Disney wanted a broader audience. Yet the populace continued to assume Disney was children’s fare and still turned out in mass. Plus, with the child becoming a new

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consumer market and with Disney’s penchant for merchandizing, Disney’s economic success did not depend upon Walt’s explanations of the audience. Instead, we see in Walt’s quotation the attempted translation of the child as an audience persona. Other live-action motion pictures might include child-friendly content, but animation was particularly adept at speaking to the child-in-all-of-us. Walt was not so much rejecting the association with children but attempting to interpret the second persona of his audience. This translation of the child marked an important discursive shift in the middle 20th Century. Cross details this shift in the discourse of the child from the blank slate of sheltered innocence to a conceptualization of the child as wondrous innocence, a shift he ties to Disney as a primary example and proponent. Wondrous innocence is the child in all of us to which Disney refers. The child in all of us is not the innocent, blank surface of the “child” proper. This child might be an adult, but one that could still see the world through the wondrous and magical eyes of the child. This child-eyed person could ignore all of their other impressions, cast out of frame the realities which might make us cynical to the mysterious, the new, the innocent, and the emotional. The child-eyed can experience transfer (in the second sense) from the animated pictures. In Walt’s words, the picture “hits that spot in one person.” They are moved emotionally, transferred anew. Disney attempted to portray this as a universal feeling by claiming everyone will be hit in the same spot. But as Feild noticed, such transfer is not the purview of some audiences. Their previous transfers have left them too jaded, too de-pressed by the world, unable to see with youthful eyes. He states, “Although to enter the world of the imagination under Walt Disney’s guidance is no difficult task, it conveys with it one responsibility: we must be prepared to recover a quality of youthfulness that many of us have been forced to surrender.” 73

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To Feild, Disney, and others, animation is the proper medium for the youthfulness of the child-in-all of us. Animation’s transfer relies upon a mode of seeing familiar to children, the mimetic mode. Viewers must envision a living world where there is none, see objects anew as brimming with life and mystery. In the mimetic mode, viewers must be able to see the life of a chair, feel for the spoon, laugh with a mouse, cry with a deer. Animation is the world of children, animistic and egocentric. Everything gains life through their presence; everything becomes real with their first glance. Walt says that “something remains” from childhood in all of us. That something is perhaps a memory of seeing as a child, of engaging in a mimetic mode. Against the rough and rugged impressions of the real world, animation serves as a constant reminder that there is another mode of seeing. Those who are willing to employ it, who open their eyes to the surface transfer, can experience the emotional transfer as well. Field explains his connection between childhood and the mimetic mode of animation, “The child is by nature an actor. But he learns not only by imitating others; he also learns by experimenting with the unknown. His curiosity is such that if left to his own devices he must always be burning his fingers, splashing still waters, or wondering what will happen if he adds one more brick to his castle.” 74 What is occurring is the translation of the child. As the ‘real’ child becomes the child in all of us, the adult and child start to mix and blur. Some critics appreciate this mimetic mode of seeing and are terrified nevertheless. They fear the translation, the mixing of adult and child. In the transfer, they see culture becoming more childish, given into simple diversions and escapist pleasures, ignoring the realities of the adult world. 75 Childishness is a big part of Theodore Adorno’s critique of Disney, the entertainment industry, and Walter Benjamin alike. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” is reportedly a polemic against Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay. 76 In it, Adorno argues that mass music is the perfect example

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of Marx’s fetish. The exchange of music is disguised as the value, rather than its musical use. Music becomes a source of pure diversion, completely manipulated for the market. Music transforms into vulgarized and over-played pieces designed for memorability and sensual immediacy. This is not the complex, contemplative (literate) mode of the adult. Such music produces and adapts to the consciousness of the masses, which become childish: The counterpart to the fetishism of music is a regression of listening … (I)t is a contemporary listening which has regressed to the infantile stage. Not only do listening subjects lose, along with the freedom of choice and responsibility, which was from time immemorial confined to a narrow group, but they stubbornly reject the possibility of such perception. They fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition … They are not child-like…. But they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded. 77 Adorno’s comparison to the child extends throughout the essay. He contends regressive listeners behave like children in their stubborn rejection of anything unfamiliar. 78 As such, musical form transforms, presenting listeners with only the most familiar, most comfortable, most predictable, and most fluent compositions, similar to the ways children are attracted to bright and shiny colors against the subtleties of form or content. For Adorno, this childishness is a characteristic of all mass media, particularly film. “Together with sport and film, mass music and the new listening help to make escape from the whole infantile milieu impossible.” 79 It is in the application of his argument to film that Adorno’s response to Benjamin is most direct. Adorno compares regressive listening to Benjamin’s notion of film’s reception in distraction. He describes the mode as the perceptual activity of deconcentration whereby the listener or viewer only pays attention to what is immediately spotlighted. By deconcentrating on the form of the whole, the audience becomes able to shift between forgetting and “sudden recognition,” making the formulaic, standardized, and repetitive music bearable by disabling any kind of sustained concentration. Such regressive listening derails any potential liberatory or progressive potential

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from the decline of aura because the illusion of aura is maintained through the fetishizing of music as a commodity. This fetishizing transforms audiences into the childish: The infantile play has scarcely more than the name in common with the productivity of children… It is only play as repetition of prescribed models, and the playful release from responsibility which is thereby achieved does not reduce at all the time devoted to duty except by transferring the responsibility to the models, the following of which one makes into a duty for himself. 80 Here, we can see how Adorno’s analysis relies on a particular translation of the child persona as well as a model of communication as transfer. And in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno make the application to animation. Cartoons “accustom the senses to the new tempo.” 81 Worse yet, the themes of the movies “hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction … is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.” 82 In this quotation, the link with a model of communication as transfer is apparent in the word “hammer.” Only if the mass is surface and the culture industry a tool can they conclude that “culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.” 83 Or again that, “The culture industry as a whole has molded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product.” 84 Or finally, again from the regressive listening essay, “The total social grasp confirms its power and mastery by the stamp which is impressed on anything that falls within its machinery.” 85 Communication as Transfer: A Model Rhetorical Situation To summarize, two debates emerge from the model of communication as transfer and the perception of the child (in all of us) as the surface. In the first debate, people argue over the appropriateness of Disney and animation for children. Some see Disney as wholesome and others see a simplified and naturalized ideological propaganda, promoting consumerism, racism, heterosexism, colonialism and sexism alike. For these critics, children are threatened by Disney

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and must be taught to resist the ideological messages. 86 As a solution, Pushpa Naidu Parekh calls for the immediate training of children to be critical thinkers. They must become visually literate in order to connect what they see, what they think, and what they feel to how these sights, thoughts, and feelings are molded by public culture. They must be empowered to define the construction of their imaginary landscape instead of becoming passive spectators of the Disney imaginary. 87 Undoubtedly, Adorno would agree, but his concern is less for the actual children than the child in all of us. The spread of childishness produces a second debate, one concerned over the escapist diversion of film in general and Disney in particular, what Debord labels “the society of the spectacle.” Debord argues, “The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep.” 88 Debord contends that in the society of the spectacle, adults no longer exist and youthfulness is now the property of the economic system. 89 His reliance on a model of communication as transfer, and its connection to magic, mimesis, and childishness, is evident when he says, “One who passively accepts his alien daily fate is thus pushed toward a madness that reacts in an illusory way to this fate by resorting to magical techniques… The need to imitate which is felt by the consumer is precisely this infantile need….” 90 American critic Daniel Boorstin makes a similar argument, although Debord faults him for misrecognizing the true cause—the commodification of all culture. Boorstin connects the spread of The Image and its accompanying “pseudo-events” to media such as television and cinema. 91 He explicitly references Disney in the chapter entitled “From Shapes to Shadows: Dissolving Forms.” 92 His primary fear is that Disney and other movies make audiences lose their grip on and sense of reality; they become like children. 93 “The shadow has become the substance.” 94 This argument is answered by popular and corporate voices in a similar manner. Most responses read like Walt’s:

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These sort of lost souls, sophisticates, who are so bored and turn their nose up at everything, they say it’s childish. Well, what the hell’s wrong with something being childish, you know? You can’t have everything profound… It’s the equivalent of not getting so stuffy that you can’t laugh. 95 Anyone who has read Adorno’s critique of jazz, or of the astrological column of the Los Angeles Times might be tempted to agree at least somewhat from Walt. 96 Each exhibits an inability to let down the critical guard, to enjoy a laugh, a wink, a nudge, or an imaginary world. Even the grumpiest critic wants to turn off their rational mind and act like a child from time to time. Fundamentally, however, the proponents insist that people can change modes, can shift from being childish to more serious, without losing their grip on reality. They esteem the wondrous innocence of childhood, and see value in the ability of adults to access that wonder. In these two debates, each side subscribes to a model of communication as transfer. Adorno and the ideological critics see the transfer and equate the audiences with surfaces. The child metaphor, then, makes the most sense. Disney and their defenders see nothing wrong with children or adults enjoying the emotional transfer. Eric Sevarid turned Walt’s eulogy into a similar defense on “CBS Evening News: By the conventional wisdom, mighty mice, flying elephants, Snow White, and Happy, Grumpy, Sneezy and Dopey—all these were fantasy, escapism from reality. It’s a question of whether they are any the less real, any more fantastic than intercontinental missiles, poisoned air, defoliated forests, and scraps from the moon. This is the age of fantasy, however you look at it, but Disney’s fantasy wasn’t lethal.” 97 The translation process inevitably distorts and deforms. The metaphors allow one to see a new perspective only by obscuring another. Hence, the interpretations of Disney conflict and clash to the most extreme. Yet these translations share a model of communication and an economy of metaphors. The debates historically constitute the series of differences and deferrals responsible for this model. That is, the shifting-sides of the debates represent the play within the model of communication, the differences and deferrals that allow it to become. The translations share a

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kinship, revealed through the translations and manifested as a shared model of communication. This kinship is revealed through tracing the various translations from mode to model. The implications of these modes and translations are further developed in the following chapter.

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Endnotes for Chapter Seven 1

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 1st ed. (New York: Disney Editions, 1981), 25. 2 Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson, The Disney Way : Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company (New York: McGraw Hill, 1999), 6. 3 Quoted in Eric Loren Smoodin, Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era, Communications, Media, and Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 101. 4 Quoted in Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 2006), 178. 5 Quoted in Smoodin, Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era, 134. 6 Quoted in Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (Cambridge, UK: Polity; Blackwell, 2001), 6. 7 Quoted in Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, 632. 8 Quoted in Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney (New York,: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 223. The quotation comes from Adler’s 1937 book, Art and Prudence. Mortimer Jerome Adler, Art and Prudence, a Study in Practical Philosophy (N.Y., Toronto,: 1937). 9 E.M. Forster, "Mickey and Minnie," in The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology, ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980). E.E. Cummings, "Miracles and Dreams," in The American Animated Cartoon : A Critical Anthology, ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980). 10 Quoted in Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, 307. 11 Paul Hollister, "Genius at Work: Walt Disney," in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Loren Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994). 12 Quoted in Janet Wasko, "Is It a Small World, after All?," in Dazzled by Disney?: The Global Disney Audiences Project, ed. Janet Wasko, Mark Phillips, and Eileen R. Meehan (London ; New York: Leicester University Press, 2001), 16. 13 Douglas Gomery, "Disney's Business History: A Reinterpretation," in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Loren Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 86. 14 Stefan Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story, 18. 15 For Picasso reference, see an Art Digest article cited by Watts. Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 131. For Rembrandt and da Vinci, see Gregory A. Waller, "Mickey, Walt, and Film Criticism from Steamboat to Bambi," in The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology, ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980), 49-50. 16 "Mouse and Man," Time, December 27 1937. 17 Quoted in J. Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 80. 18 Ibid. 19 Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, 144. 20 Stefan Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story, 52. 21 Bill Davidson, "The Fantastic Walt Disney," in Walt Disney : Conversations, ed. Kathy Merlock Jackson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 127. 22 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 29. 23 Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 509. 24 Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, 155. 25 Thomas and Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, 100. 26 Ibid, 473. 27 Quoted in John Canemaker, "Winsor Mccay," in The American Animated Cartoon : A Critical Anthology, ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980), 23. 28 Marc Eliot, Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince (New York: HarperPaperbacks, 1994). 29 Robert D. Feild, The Art of Walt Disney (New York,: The Macmillan Company, 1942). 30 Ibid, xiii.

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31

Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf : distributed by Random House, 1976), 199-200. 32 I draw this notion of Romantic genius from the work of Walter Ong, who treats their notions of rhetorical invention and memory. The Romantics valorized uniqueness in invention and condemned memory as well as the practice of invention by drawing from common topoi or topics. See Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971). 33 William Kozlenko, "The Animated Cartoon and Walt Disney," in The Emergence of Film Art; the Evolution and Development of the Motion Picture as an Art, from 1900 to the Present, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York,: Hopkinson and Blake, 1969), 248. 34 For the FDR reference, see Stefan Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story (New York: Scribner, 1997), 83. 35 Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, 78. 36 Quoted in Ibid, 79. 37 Quoted in Ibid, 118. 38 Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), 3, 5. 39 Field, The Art of Walt Disney, 23. 40 Ibid, 33. 41 Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 29. 42 Sean Griffin, Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the inside Out (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 45. 43 Capodagli and Jackson, The Disney Way : Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company, 2. 44 Paul Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), 84. 45 Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960, 4. 46 Ibid., 16. 47 See Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). Also, Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977). 48 Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 258. 49 Ibid, 259. 50 Ibid, 261. 51 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge [Eng.] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 52 Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, 264. 53 Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960, 10. 54 Ibid, 11. 55 Gary S. Cross, The Cute and the Cool : Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 56 Quoted in Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, Culture and Education Series (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 17. 57 Richard deCordova, "The Mickey in Macy's Window: Childhood, Consumerism, and Disney Animation," in Disney Discourse : Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Loren Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 204. 58 Robert Sklar, "The Making of Cultural Myths--Walt Disney," in The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology, ed. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1980), 61-62. 59 Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story, 65. 60 Forster, "Mickey and Minnie," 239. 61 "Regulated Rodent," Time (February 16, 1931), http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,741079,00.html. Retrieved July 17, 2008. 62 Griffin, Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the inside Out, 21. 63 All quotations from the Look article are as they are presented in Smoodin, Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era, 11-12. 64 Ibid. 65 Smoodin, Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era, 7-43.

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66

David Kunzle, "Introduction to the English Edition," in How to Read Donald Duck : Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, ed. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (New York: International General, 1975), 20. 67 Quoted in Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney, 131. 68 Quoted in Kathy Merlock Jackson, "Introduction," in Walt Disney: Conversations, ed. Kathy Merlock Jackson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), xv. 69 Ibid. 70 Bob Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Original (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 202. 71 The “Mickey audience” quotation comes from Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art, and Commerce of Walt Disney, 158. 72 Quoted in Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, 160. 73 Feild, The Art of Walt Disney, 53. 74 Ibid., 24. 75 Ayres and Hines claim childishness is the major concern of their edited collection: “The ethos of oversimplification and subjectivity, this force of Disneyfication, is a major concern shared by the authors of this collection. A child’s experience of the world is oversimplified and subjective, and to some degree, that is the pure, idyllic beauty of childhood egoism. But it is egoism nonetheless: a regard only for the self—the Other can be acknowledged but only in relation to the self.” Brenda Ayres, "Introduction: (H)Egemony Cricket! Why in the World Are We Still Watching Disney?," in The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom (New York: P. Lang, 2003), 10. 76 The report comes from J. M. Bernstein, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London ; New York: Routledge, 2001), 4. Theodor W. Adorno, "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," in The Culture Industry : Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London ; New York: Routledge, 2001). 77 Adorno, "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," 46-47. 78 Ibid., 51. 79 Ibid., 47. 80 Ibid., 57. 81 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), 138. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid, 120. 84 Ibid, 127. 85 Adorno, "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," 47. 86 This is a major theme of Henry Giroux’s work, who argues against transforming the child into a consumer, a move perpetuated by Disney. See Henry A. Giroux, Stealing Innocence : Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture, 1st ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000). 87 Pushpa Naidu Parekh, "Pocahontas: The Disney Imaginary," in The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom, ed. Brenda Ayres (New York: P. Lang, 2003). This entire edited collection contains multiple examples of such ideological critiques. Parekh’s diagnosis of the problem and proposed solution are very close to Henry Giroux’s. Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. 88 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 2005 (1967)), 21. 89 Ibid, 62. 90 Ibid, 219. 91 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image : A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1987). 92 Ibid, 103, 145-46. 93 Ibid, 148. 94 Ibid, 133. 95 Quoted in Watts, The Magic Kingdom : Walt Disney and the American Way of Life, 401. 96 Theodor W. Adorno, "The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column," in Adorno: The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. Stephen Cook (London: Routledge, 1994). 97 Quoted in Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story, 193.

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Chapter Eight: Walt, Walter, Wall-E, and Modern Consumerism In the early to mid twentieth century, animation and cinema sparked changes in cultural perception through the introduction of the cinematic and mimetic modes. People sought to understand these modes, and translated them into a model of communication in which Uncle Geniuses transfer animated images to the child in all of us. Such translations spur an ongoing debate over Disney revolving around this model and its constellation of metaphors. The first side views Disney as childish, simplistic, a passive spectacle replete with negative ideological content. The second side portrays Disney as wholesome, pleasurable, innocent, harmless entertainment, a necessary moment of respite in a difficult world. Some defenders of Disney even argue that Disney movies encourage cultural resistance by encouraging values of individualism, youthfulness, rebellion, and freedom. For instance, Douglas Brode’s From Walt to Woodstock goes to great lengths to illustrate how Disney galvanized the 1960s counterculture. His content analysis of hundreds of Disney movies goes against the critical grain. He exhaustively illustrates the persistence of themes such as anti-conformity, pro-rebellion, proenvironment, and anti-religion throughout the Disney corpus. Such Romanticism leads Brode to conclude that Disney “may now be considered and viewed as something of a radical.” 1 Brode’s cultural studies approach exemplifies a theoretical turn away from structuralism towards an appreciation of the active, resistive practices of viewing and interpreting engaged in by audiences. Scholars such as Fiske and de Certeau contend that consumption can be an arena of personal resistance and even potentially radical challenge to the status quo. Such resistance is

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simply an illusion for Debord, Boorstin, Eco and Adorno, who see Disney as the perfect example of the escapist and childish spectacles of consumer culture. 2 Each approach offers an explanation for the emergence of modern consumerism, locating the prime force in the consumer as does Brode, or in the cultural industries such as Disney and their ideologies such as the American dream, as does Adorno. In this chapter, I contend each side focuses on one side of the transfer process to the detriment of an analysis of a dual transfer grounded in a theoretical conception of modes. Brode and others ignore the effects and affects of media and modes, whereas Adorno and others overstate the impact of one medium, the commodity, downplaying the mutual affection of media. Modes deny both a determining structure and a resistive human agency, instead directing the critical focus to the specific articulations of their relationship. Although modes require human beings for their uptake and completion, individuals are not the origin of modes. As such, an analysis of modes provides an explanation for the shape of modern consumerism without locating the origin in either audiences or speakers. In other words, neither the child or the hucksters nor the genius or the childish are responsible for causing modern consumerism. Instead, modern consumerism emerges from modes that produce stances from which these audiences and speakers are constituted. This conclusion demands a more ambivalent response to the modes of animation and cinema than either Brode or Adorno will allow. Adorno, recall, denies any progressive potential from consumer media due to the dominant influence of the commodity and the spread of commodity fetishism. As such, the modes of cinema and animation can do nothing but spread childishness and the “hidden messages” of capitalist ideology like the American dream:

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The customary reference to ‘dream factory,’ nowadays employed by the representatives of the movie industry themselves, contains only a half truth – it pertains only to the overt ‘dream content.’ The message of the dream, however, the ‘latent dream idea’ as promoted by motion pictures and television reverses that of actual dreams. It is an appeal to agencies of psychological control rather than an attempt to unfetter the unconscious. The idea of the successful, conforming, well-adjusted ‘average’ citizen lurks even behind the fanciest technicolor fairy tale. 3 Daily, the culture industries broadcast abundant evidence for Adorno’s claim; tales spun in American dream yarn permeate the airwaves, and millions of televisions flash images oozing childishness. Yet Adorno’s conclusions seem overstated due to a limited understanding of consumer modes through a singular notion of transfer. Although Adorno appears to engage in an analysis of media, the limitations stem from an incomplete account of a cultural environment replete with proliferating, competing, and interacting communication media and modes. Indeed, Adorno can group film, sport, music, television, and radio together under the moniker of the culture industries because for him only one media matters—the commodity. As he states, “For all contemporary musical life is dominated by the commodity form.” 4 The impact does not end with music. Commodification turns all works of art into simplistic and repeatable formulas fitting for a childish audience. The commodity’s translation of film or music ensures, for Adorno, a single, static, and regressive mode common to all media. The fact that cultural products have become commodities, that they are made for and shaped by the market, is the deciding and determining factor above and beyond all others. The commodity form dominates communication media, just as the commodity is the dominant presence in Adorno’s notion of communication as transfer. Thus the “messages” Adorno consistently garners from the analysis of media are related to the alienated status of the consumer in modern capitalism. The message is always the American dream, as we see in the quotation above.

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Although Adorno appears to be engaged in media theory, his approach assumes a distinction between message and media. What matters about consumer media for Adorno is their content, the hidden message that impresses the same ideological stamp on everyone who engages it. 5 The content is shaped fundamentally by the commodity. The commodity dominates all other media, so the hidden message is always culling its favor. In short, Adorno’s criticism can only envision a one-way transfer process, controlled and determined by the culture industry beholden to the commodity. Commodities encourage the transfer of the consumer’s perceived value from use to exchange, spawning the commodity fetish. Likewise, commodification imprints itself on the surface of other media, turning their offerings into standardized, simplistic, and formulaic fare. Finally, this commodification impresses itself on the audience by stamping the culture with a general, fetishized and childish mode. As I have argued, the message of consumer media is undoubtedly related to the commodity, the spread of modern consumerism, and the mode of fetishism. For Adorno and similar to Marx, however, the fetish is essentially related to exchange value. The commodity fetish occurs through a transfer between use value and exchange value. Consumers misrecognize the exchange value as use value and hence fetishize the exchange of the product rather than its useful contents. According to Adorno, the act of going to the movie or the concert becomes valued rather than the content of the art. “The consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket to the Toscanini concert… The woman who has money with which to buy is intoxicated by the act of buying.” 6 In fetishizing exchange, the consumer imagines that the commodities exist in their own world, in a social relationship existing between objects rather than between people. What cement holds the perception of this world of commodities together? For Adorno, the cement comes from the persistence of the commodity fetish, a persistence

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enabled by the transfer of value onto the exchange process itself. “The answer is that this transfer of the use value of consumption goods to their exchange value contributes to a general order in which … exchange value in commodities has taken on a specific cohesive function.” 7 This explanation for the spread of modern consumerism seems as inadequate as Marx’s account of the commodity fetish resulting from the simple fact of exchange. Part of the fun of going to the movies or a concert is certainly the going part. Part of the pleasure of watching Disney animation is, perhaps, in the sharing of the experience through conversations, references, and yes sometimes buying other commodities, too. People value the exchange and circulation of the commodity by becoming a collector, expert, or fan, all practices belittled as representative examples of fetishism by Adorno. Yet, as my analysis shows, there can be real pleasure – an emotional transfer – in Disney animation experienced in excess of any pleasure gained by buying the ticket. Adorno is thus forced to distinguish between real pleasure and pseudo-pleasure, a tenuous line made even moreso by media like cinema and animation. “Their ecstasy is without content. That it happens, that the music is listened to, this replaces the content itself.” 8 The line between real pleasure and pseudo-pleasure is drawn between the real content (use value) and the illusory process (exchange value). For Adorno, this line only goes one-way. The commodity imprints on media and hence consumers, but not vice versa. Transfers can occur from use-value to exchange value, but not the reverse. When consumers get pleasure from exchange rather than use or “content,” this is dismissed as pseudo-pleasure. Yet if the process can become pleasurable, can become a use such as for conversation or fitting in with a group of fans, and can thereby become a commodity, how can Adorno’s line move only one direction? Similar to Marx on vision and fetishism, Adorno seems to imply that the “content itself” is the real, physiological process of listening, opposed to

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the illusory process of going or experiencing. Does this mean that Fantasia, since it includes an orchestral performance of some of Adorno’s more revered – adult – musical selections, is an unlikely counterforce to the dominant trend of regressive listening? Of course the answer is not that simple, but once again animation makes the entire assumption of a real use and an illusory or pseudo exchange circumspect. What is Disney’s commodity? The images on the screen? The home DVD? The soundtrack? The Mickey doll or watch or all of the above? What, then, is their “real” use value? How would one value them for their content since, as McLuhan notes, their content is simply another medium? A more complete explanation, based in my analysis, recognizes the dual transfer of animistic mimesis and the crucial role of the participation of audiences in modes. Sure, the surface transfers and their hidden ideological messages occur. Adorno has adeptly analyzed the production side of consumer media and the effects commodification has on texts. But these transfers alone cannot explain the insatiable persistence and particular shape of modern consumerism. In fact, contrary to Adorno’s insistence that all consumer media are standardized and thereby promote the same modes and infuse the same hidden messages, the major lesson of post 1950s American capitalism seems to be that counter and resistant messages sell, too. 9 In more recent history, hate for the American dream makes more dough than the old mold. Anticonsumerism, green consumerism, and ethical consumerism are all new commodity fads. The hidden messages Adorno points to have been recognized and resisted, met with contempt and boredom alike, and capitalists have learned that diversity and rebellion can also grease the wheels. Consumer desires for commodities as well as the practices of fetishism have changed, in turn sparking adaptations by the culture industry as well. What Adorno’s analysis cannot decipher is why these changes take place. What forces motivate these changes? The commodity

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has existed for centuries, so why in the 20th century does the commodity and the practice of fetishism take a particular shape? If the commodity is the dominant medium whose effects are tragically predictable, why then has the form of the commodity and the practice of commodity fetishism altered over time? Adorno is right to point to the process as an explanation for the spread of modern consumerism. Only if the process itself is desirable will consumers return to a particular media or mode again and again. Yet where Adorno’s analysis fails is in the dismissal of process as a pseudo-pleasure and the tenuous distinction between “real” use value and illusory exchange value. A more appropriately constitutive theory sees the process as always what is valued since no one can ever attain the “content itself.” When it comes to communication media at least, use is always an exchange, a dual transfer. The very idea and perception of value is iterable, as Derrida demonstrates in Spectres of Marx. 10 If a commodity is useful to one person, then it necessarily implies a value in exchange for others. Adorno admits that use value can transfer into exchange value, and that consumers can transfer exchange value into use value. Yet he wants to see the transfer as only singular. Use value is polluted by its transfer to exchange value, but he denies that exchange value can transfer to use value. When this transfer takes place, it is not a real use but a fetishized one, not a real pleasure but a pseudo-one. My analysis challenges Adorno’s distinction and the assumption that the transfer can only go one way. There is a dual transfer between exchange and use value. Exchanges can become use and uses can become exchange. Value is always a cultural construct, not a transcendent universal like Adorno’s “true” pleasure. While his insistence that the consumer celebrates purchasing the ticket more than the listening or watching seems silly and at least overstated, the point is not simply that there is a real use value in watching animation that Adorno ignores. The point is that the commodity,

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translated through media such as animation and cinema, makes such distinctions themselves untenable. Animation, in particular, troubles the notions of real and illusory and use and exchange on which this distinction depends. What results from Adorno’s distinctions between exchange and use, fetish and content, and real and pseudo pleasure is an unsustainable, hierarchical opposition masking a moralistic judgment. As Derrida illustrates throughout the body of his work, such hierarchical oppositions are advanced in order to violently exclude one side of the hierarchy despite their mutual interdependence. Rejecting exchange value as a false fetish is the violent attempt to shore up the ever-shifting boundaries between use and exchange. Such an argumentative gesture ends with a case of bad rhetoric. Adorno’s rhetoric frequently evinces a moralistic belittling that is, at best, off-putting and, at worst, infuriating to any reader who has enjoyed a bit of mass cultural entertainment. His language faults audiences of the culture industry for stupidity, ignorance, childishness, primitivism, and retardation. He dismisses people’s experiences as a false pleasure. Perhaps Adorno is often wrongly read as arguing that consumers are dupes, but his rhetoric nevertheless is dismissive of anyone who finds enjoyment in commodity culture and thus more than likely debilitating for his cause. It is not, of course, Adorno’s obligation to flatter the audience, especially since he bears some seriously bad news. Yet the tone and the framing of his arguments remain violent and overbearing, evidencing a refusal to listen to or care why consumers might find pleasure in and through a commodity. The problem is not exclusively tone, however. Adorno’s exclusionary gestures preclude him from adequately answering how and why modern consumerism emerged and spread. Adorno can not explain the various enjoyments and attachments that people have to the process other than dismissing them as false pleasure. He cannot, therefore, account for the persistence of fetishism

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or why certain forms of it arise and become popular. He remains baffled by it, frustrated by a culture seemingly seeking to leap headlong into immaturity and fascism, and perhaps this is why anger, resentment, and elitism seep through his prose. Adorno can describe the surface transfers, often childish and formulaic, but that can only tell part of the story. Producers are not the only players in the cultural arena. Modes, in contrast, point to the importance of relationships and the role of the liminal space between producer and consumer, text and audience. An analysis of modes allows that cinema and animation, translated through the commodity, often favor ideological messages similar to the American dream as Adorno contends. Producers can transfer biased, hidden cues to the surface. Yet modes, like enthymemes, depend on a participation and engagement by the audience. Modes illustrate that the process has become the commodity, that consumers achieve pleasure from the act of responding to cues and completing texts. Mickey’s “real” use value is indecipherable, yet his image is used, exchanged, and lives in the minds and homes of consumers nonetheless. Understanding the desire for engaging modes requires going beyond an artificial and exclusionary distinction between real and pseudo pleasure, between actual use and illusionary fetish. A better understanding of audiences and their situations will most likely sow the seeds for more effective, resistant rhetoric as well. In other words, the insistence on a dual transfer means we must grant a role for media and consumers in shaping the commodity and fetishism as well. Undeniably, the commodity alters the shape of media and modes, yet the modes of animation and cinema have changed the shape of the commodity and the practice of consumerism as well. That is, modes point to the mutual affection of media, rather than a singular, one-way and determining influence. Let us take animation to illustrate. Animation made the commodity into a plasmatic, transferable form. If

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Beller is right that cinema began the dematerialization of the commodity, then animation represents the pinnacle of this dematerialization. 11 Whereas (pre-digital) cinema requires the filming of material reality, animation means no material object is necessary other than an image to make a commodity. The dematerialized, image-based, and transferable commodity of animation results in some new corporate practices. It is no surprise that Disney is one of the first corporations to emphasize brand marketing – the selling of an image rather than a product – and to pursue vertical integration, each staples of the contemporary culture industry. 12 Since Mickey is only an image, his image easily transfers to all sorts of media and cultural surfaces, making Disney a player in various consumer media. In fact, this translation of commodity consumerism to imagistic brand marketing is so complete, and so tied to Disney, that Bryman labels it The Disneyization of Society. 13 Even companies with tangible products like automobiles, structured on decidedly Foridst models, have been compelled to enter into the game of image manufacture. As I argued in the cinema chapter, this emphasis on image plays a major role in explaining the rise and spread of an insatiable modern consumerism. Most importantly, animation and cinema translate the commodity by emphasizing the pleasure of engaging modes. Animation and cinema show that modes require the participation of audiences and that the participation can be a great source of pleasure. Rather than a desirable product, corporations, especially in the cultural realm, increasingly shift to providing an enjoyable process. Getting audiences to enjoy and participate in the process, getting them to complete the transfer, helps ensure they return again and again to the mode. Animistic mimesis trains consumers in the pleasure of imagining life in objects, of experiencing an emotional transfer into worlds of play. They learn a particular way of fetishizing the commodity, a way of investing an object with life and emotion. The pleasure of participating in the mode, of

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communicating with an object, becomes easily transferred to other cultural arenas. Thus corporations in the later 20th century have fervently sought to develop and commodify modes in order to control the in-between space, moving modes increasingly from the didactic to the mechanical, structuring the forms and ways of audience participation. If the mode is the message of media, corporations have received the memo and have attempted to own and control those messages for themselves. Youtube, the internet, iPods, and the contemporary “user generation” obviously illustrate that in capitalism today selling modes is the name of the game. This conclusion does not stray far from the overall gist of Adorno’s analysis. Yet unlike Adorno’s decidedly negative and definitive conclusion, my analysis calls for a more ambivalent response. Rather than denouncing consumer modes as pseudo-pleasures, and thereby precluding an understanding of the forces motivating continued consumerism, a more in-depth analysis recognizes the power of modes. Modes enable pleasurable experiences such as an emotional transfer, and those experiences can provide a source of inspiration and motivation that can perhaps be directed for different ends. Perhaps the infantile nature of consumer modes, the insistence on the same, formulaic “baby food,” is simply an early articulation of modes, a predictable response of a young culture communicating anew for the first time. 14 What forms might modes take as the culture matures and as the number of media and modes continue to diversify and proliferate? The answer may be difficult to ponder, but the task is made impossible by a criticism that judges and dismisses the specificities and singular pleasures of modes. If the commodity so dominates other media, then the answer is already known in advance and change is foreclosed. At the very least, the historical unfolding of postmodern capitalism denies such rigid stability for the commodity-medium as well as for the media through which it is translated and the modes through which they are experienced.

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Benjamin makes a similar argument, and it is this argument that stands at the heart of his dispute with Adorno. 15 Although the two agree on many issues related to consumer media and the importance of modes, they differ on the prospects for their reappropriation. Whereas Adorno insists that commodification subverts any progressive potential from the decline of an auratic mode, Benjamin maintains a more ambivalent conclusion. 16 The ambivalence is evident in the responses to Benjamin. Some maintain that Benjamin warns against the decline of the aura often point to the passage where he argues that capital uses film’s revolutionary potential for counterrevolutionary purposes. 17 They also remind readers of the concluding section warning against fascism’s aestheticization of politics. Fascism capitalizes on the decline of the aura as well as mechanical reproduction like film to value art-for-art’s sake, even the art of war. Others insist that Benjamin valorizes the decline of the aura when he claims that film “exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of a split-second,” that film’s training of apperception is a “process of immeasurable importance,” that “the expropriation of film capital is an urgent demand for the proletariat,” and that his concepts are “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.” 18 According to Markus, Benjamin bases his entire theoretical frame on such ambivalence, most clearly elaborated in the concept of the aura. Benjamin’s writings rely upon a “dialectics of ambiguity” where the critic seeks out the progressive in the regressive, the positive potential in the negative reality. 19 The dialectical image hopes to produce, in the flash of the now, both a critical recognition of the hell of the present while tapping into its illusory dreams for a source of utopian motivation and desire. I agree with Markus that holding onto this ambiguity is productive. On the one hand, the decline of the auratic mode frees art from ritual and enables it to become political. But film can also be (and very much have been) appropriated by state

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fascism and corporate imperialism alike. When we think through Disney’s appropriation of the auratic through the mimetic mode, this ambiguity is a necessary cautionary note. Critics continue to rail against Disney, and perhaps find some displeasure with Benjamin when he says, “Collective laughter is one such preemptive and healing outbreak of mass psychosis… American slapstick comedies and Disney films trigger a therapeutic release of unconscious energies.” 20 But we must remember as well that laughter, “figures of collective dream such as the globeencircling Mickey Mouse,” and the practice of mimesis are not necessarily negative. These are modes of communication which produce emotional effects such as laughter. Emotional response can be motivating, even crucial; it sometimes can innervate impulses which encourage new ways of perceiving and thus communicating. This communication encourages a blurring and blending of self and other that necessarily includes an empathic and utopic gesture. In light of this ambivalence, both interpretations in the debate over Disney seem to fall short. The defense of Disney and consumerism as a resistive practice focuses exclusively on the content, not the modes of communicating or the “messages” in the McLuhan sense. Such an approach locates too much influence in the consumer audience rather than in the speakers, the media, and their relationship articulated in modes. In addition, as the previous chapters illustrate, the relationship in animated motion pictures between ‘real” space-time and imaginary space-time is more complex than Adorno, Debord, or Boorstin’s dualism between reality and illusion. In cinematic animation, the two mingle and mix; they are interdependent rather than distinct. The shadow does not become the substance but is a substance in its own right, one mediating the transfer between self and other. Disney animation shows that the division between fake and real is blurry, depends upon the viewer’s perspective, and can be played with and altered. It

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illustrates to us that the various modes of communicating are responsible for constituting the very notions of real and imaginary. Both perspectives emphasize only one side of communication as transfer at the expense of the other. One tends to take the viewpoint of the Uncle genius; the other sees the child. The supporters view the audience as a projector, creatively constructing their own texts and meanings from the cultural fragments. The opponents see the audience as a recorder, an impressionable surface duped into confusing the real and the illusory. Neither tells the complete story; neither sees the dual transfer I have outlined. In the animated medium, there are two forms of transfer, two types of space-time, and a mode of perceiving based on a dual economy. Focusing on only one fails to grasp the entire process. There is a transfer from the imaginary world to the viewer but also from the viewer to the imaginary world. The viewer of animated movies is located as the camera, required to both project and record. They must use their viewer space as part of the surface, but they must also contribute their own dreams and visions to construct the imaginary world. In the mimetic mode, the animation shows the viewer semblances but also invites them to play, to make the mode of seeing and the objects their own. The viewer is both active and passive, creative and receptive, genius and child. Dismissing Disney animation as passive and childish ignores the pleasures derived from the active, creative viewing process and the potential benefits of the mimetic mode (particularly its utopian core), just as excusing Disney as innocent entertainment ignores the impressions made by employing the audience as a surface. Indeed, there is still a significant need to resist Disney. Their reliance on a transferable medium presents them with a problem. Once the transfer takes place, once the audience becomes a surface and makes the images their own, Disney loses control. Anyone can sketch the original Mickey Mouse who was traced from coins, and the very plasmatic-nature of their characters

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allows for their easy reproducibility, often times in locations or manners that Disney does not approve (such as the drawing by Wally Wood entitled the “Disneyland Memorial Orgy”). 21 Animation might make us feel like a god, but other people get in the way nonetheless. The Corporation recognizes that transfer is the name of their game, and thus they work hard to ensure they get a massive head start. Disney responds by stamping all of their products with the Disney name and vigorously pursuing copyright and trademark protection. “Disney has always,” according to Kunzle, “employed what his daughter termed a ‘regular corps of attorneys’ whose business it is to pursue and punish any person or organization, however small, which dares to borrow a character, a technique, an idea patented by Disney.” 22 Reports indicate that Disney has threatened to sue the University of Oregon over their duck mascot, the town of White River, Ontario for their town mascot Winnipeg the Bear who looks similar to Winnie the Pooh, and a daycare who dared to paint Mickey and friends on their walls. 23 Disney refused to be on the U.S. postage stamp, forced a French AIDS nonprofit to drop a campaign featuring provocative Snow White imitations, sued the Academy Awards for using presenters dressed as Snow White, and forced a poison prevention campaign to pay cash to use Jiminy Cricket’s likeness. 24 These are not isolated examples, as John Lewis makes clear: To put Disney’s litigious bent in perspective, consider the following. In 1987, Disney filed seventeen major lawsuits, naming some seven hundred defendants in the United States and another seventy-eight overseas. The following year, one suit alone named four hundred defendants, claiming copyright infringement, and then, after Dick Tracy hit the theaters, the studio filed another suit against fifteen hundred vendors selling ‘fake’ Dick Tracey paraphernalia. 25 Disney’s penchant for lawsuits persists despite the fact, Lawrence Lessig reminds us, that Disney frequently borrows stories such as old fairy tales already in the public domain. 26 More recently, Disney has been accused of stealing the Lion King without acknowledging or financially rewarding the source. 27 Disney led the campaign for the Copyright Extension Act of

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1998, also called the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” because its original characters like Mickey and Minnie were about to enter the public domain. 28 Walt’s obsession with control over the company, including his refusal to credit other Disney animators, is noted with frequency in the biographies. He feared diluting the Disney image with other names and worried that outside control would muddle the clarity of the brand. As Walt said, “What we’re selling here is the name of Walt Disney.” 29 The official name is the copyright stamp; it is the only thing distinguishing the genuine Disney products from the imitators, flattering or offensive alike. Animation’s plastic images necessitate such a strong legal stance. This stance is a result of transfer as a form of communication. The transfer depends on audience participation; they make themselves surfaces and complete the imaginary worlds. But Disney wants to guarantee that the audience’s creative input ends there. Transfer drives Disney to become a multi-national media conglomerate with control over a vertically-integrated entertainment empire. In fact, transfer has a third definition taken from the legal sphere which reads “to make over the possession or control of.” 30 This third form of transfer is a form of legal magic, seeking to protect semblances of Disney’s images from the play of cultural appropriation. Thus Disney reigns in the utopic possibilities of emotional transfer by subjecting the surfaces to legal sanction enforced through copyright and trademark law and armies of lawyers. If Disney controls all the surfaces, then they can control the transfers. Ownership of the television and radio waves, the video rentals and movie theaters, the comic books and children’s stories, the toys and the clothes, we might say the paper and the plastic screens, leaves the public with few spaces for their own creative and resistive appropriations of the common stock of images. We can project our image but only through Disney and only for a price. Unfortunately, the price is too high for most. As Allen Scott argues, the oligopolistic control of distribution creates a major

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impediment to competition in the movie industry. 31 Worse yet, given the spatial and temporal dominance of these media empires, they dominate public discourse. Giroux concludes: Far from being a model of moral leadership and social responsibility, Disney monopolizes media power, limits the free flow of information, and undermines substantive public debate. Disney poses a serious threat to democracy by corporatizing public space and by limiting the avenues of public expression and choice. 32 This is not a call to eliminate Disney. Neither a boycott nor even a revolution could make Disney and its products disappear. Any assumption otherwise is pure fantasy, even further removed from reality than a child’s daydream. Further, animation should exist. Seeing as a child is not necessarily bad; it also contains a utopian impulse. Laughter is not always “barbaric,” emotion is not always sentimentalizing. 33 Human beings, as surfaces and projectors, are much more complex. But democracy depends upon communication, and I have argued that communication depends upon media. Only by materializing perceptions through media can we have material to communicate and points-of-view to convey. Politically and critically, the focus should not be directed at content of those positions, or even the (radical? reactionary?) themes in Disney movies. As I illustrated, the mimetic mode creates messages perfect for commodity fetish. The two seem so intrinsically connected that even a few anti-consumerist animated movies are unlikely to change it. Indeed, Disney recently packaged and sold a quite compelling and entirely critical account of consumerism in their 2008 blockbuster Wall-E. Yet Giroux’s solution seems limited as well. Teaching children critical media literacy tries to battle one media with another. It hopes to encourage more reading and less animation. I would love to see more reading and I encourage the effort, but the mode of literate seeing is not immune from criticism. If we attribute rational, linear thought to writing, then it is even arguable that such criticism has been the focal point of 20th century philosophy. Different modes of seeing and different media are as valuable as a diversity of population, location, or identity. They are

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democratic virtues. Each has its own spaces and times, each can be necessary and valuable. The better question is: how can we establish new sources of pleasure; how can we direct cinematic and mimetic modes of seeing into critical resistance producing social change? Or better yet, how can we see, through cinematic and mimetic modes, the monopolization of public discourse via the monopolization of communication media? If I knew the answer to that question, I should probably be getting to work on the solution rather than writing this lengthy dissertation. But I had to write first in order to understand the “message” of the medium and the mode of communication. It seems a lot to ask that we use the cinematic and mimetic modes to encourage popular audiences to see similar conclusions. And I apologize, but I am not here to answer this question. Nor do I have the power, in print, with my small but kind reading audience, to alter the materialized perceptions of the entire American populace. Fantasy again. Let me try to daydream instead. This daydream is a revolt, inspired by Wall-E and Walter. It requires my looking as a camera, and my investing the objects I see with a life of their own. In it, I look at the things I usually leave out of focus. I turn my eyes away from the bright neon-billboards, the polished monuments and buildings, the manicured lawns, and the shiny cars. They become the backdrop, the contrast. Instead, I focus in on the trash and refuse. I see a sputtering black smoke emitted from a muffler. I see empty beer cans littering a field. I see cigarette butts pocking the concrete and perhaps the poor janitor sweeping them up. I open up a dumpster and peer in for the imaginary treasures I might find—plastic toothpaste tubes, rotting, wasted beef, and armies of paper towels. A squirrel half-smashed by a car might become a main character, an old factory the perfect setting. The image of earth surrounded by space garbage in Wall-E serves as my inspiration.

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Armed with objects, the object is to daydream. So, I see my squirrel and my toothpaste tube running into each other in the old factory. The squirrel has been growing fat off the sugary-sweet remains dumped behind the toothpaste factory, and the plastic toothpaste tube has been discarded due to a production mistake. As the squirrel eats from the tube, the tube starts to bemoan his miserable life. “I am a freak of nature,” he says. (Flashback scene). (In voiceover) “I began life as a human creation, produced from crude oil, natural gas, ethane and propane.” We see the liquids which would become the tube “cracked” in a high temperature furnace. We then see the cracked liquid combined with another substance in a reactor, resulting in “fluff” a powdered polymer resembling laundry detergent. The fluff is shoveled into a giant blender, combined with more sparkling additives. The polymer then runs on a conveyor belt to an extruder, where it is melted. The melted plastic is whisked away to a freezer, where it cools rapidly (if the reader would please picture our tube now shivering). After a quick cut to show time passage, our plastic sheet is rolled out and placed onto a board so a giant machine can cut it into our tube’s current shape. Unfortunately, our little tube was on the corner of the sheet, and part of his body gashed open when the toothpaste is pumped into his body. He is then taken by a large, burly man in a bag full of other rejects out to the dumpster, where he is now being eaten by the squirrel. (Flash to present). “My life has been quite a torture,” says the tube to the squirrel. “What’s worse is my life doesn’t end here.” We then follow our toothpaste tube from the dumpster to the truck, and from the truck to a giant landfill stretching out over the horizon. Here, we see our tube meet some of our other characters. Rotting beef becomes his best friend, but he dies much quicker, consumed by maggots, and leaves tube sad and lonely. A beer can full of his buddies, cigarette butts, comes along and relieves the pain for a while. We see a series of gags and beer-butt jokes here. Tube

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even starts calling him ‘beer-butt.’ But the butts die, too, and the despondent beer can becomes silent. We see tube pass on his final days at the bottom of the ever-growing landfill landscape, slowly leaking his cancerous green chemicals (marked through Disney’s trademarked “sparkle”) into the water supply. Fade out as tube says, “Of course my miserable life can do nothing but spread pain, even in death.” Credits roll: Directed, acted, and animated by Eric Jenkins. Would my daydream move you? Could I use it to sell stuffed animals of road-kill squirrels and abandoned toothpaste tubes? Perhaps, but it seems apparent that it could inspire other actions as well. What is different between my daydream and Disney’s is a reversal of perspective. With Disney, the mimetic mode is used to sanitize and beautify the actions and the characters. They take fantastical objects and create daydreams with fantastical plots. In contrast, my daydream takes real objects, with dirt and scars, and real plots (the course of the tube’s life is based on the actual life of a toothpaste tube). From this point of view, we have our head in the air and our feet on the ground. We are allowed to dream, to mimetically envision the life of objects. Our head can peer upwards, and we can enjoy the pleasure that such seeing as a god can bring. But we draw the objects and their narratives from the real cultural milieu, particularly focused on the usually hidden process of production and disposal. Our feet are on the ground; we keep our head in the air only if it serves the purpose of our actual movement. Disney, on the other hand, has both its feet and head in the air. They are not concerned with the real lives of objects; they rip them from the ground and place them in the air. When Disney portrays a spoon, or even a trash compactor as in Wall-E, they do not follow their real life but put them into fantastical scenarios and adventures. Nor is Disney concerned with where the cultural movement is headed. Standing still—the status quo—is just fine with them. They are winning.

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It is most of us that are losing. Disney’s monopolization of communication as transfer excludes so many daydreams. People are denied the means and the control over their daydreams. Any one who seeks to use Disney images, or even similar ones, are excluded by way of threatening lawsuits and herds of lawyers, including this dissertation. I will never have permission to use Disney images, despite the educational gain. Sans images, what I hope the gain is from my work is a better understanding of animation and communication as transfer. Transfer teaches us that such communication depends upon using the audience as a surface. This means that when Disney monopolizes the surfaces, they also monopolize us—our bodies and minds. This is an unacceptable condition for a free and democratic country. Freedom and democracy depend on access to the means of communication. Translating mimetic and cinematic modes of seeing so that we can see how the access to the means of communication, and thus the prospects for social change, have become subverted is crucial to any truly democratic movement. People must learn to see the American dream as responsible for our present nightmare. Otherwise, observers will continue to be locked in the same stale debates, only seeing either the child or the genius.

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Endnotes for Chapter Eight 1

Douglas Brode, From Walt to Woodstock : How Disney Created the Counterculture, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 233. 2 Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality : Essays. 1st ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, "The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column," in Adorno: The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. Stephen Cook (London: Routledge, 1994), 59. For more on the hidden messages, see ———, "How to Look at Television," in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London ; New York: Routledge, 2001). And. ———, "Transparencies on Film," in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London ; New York: Routledge, 2001). 4 Theodor W. Adorno, "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," in The Culture Industry : Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London ; New York: Routledge, 2001), 37. 5 Again, Adorno is insistent on the singular message of media, this time in relation to film. “But the secret doctrine which is communicated here is the message of capital. It must be secret because total domination likes to keep itself invisible: ‘No shepherd and a herd’. Nonetheless, it is directed at everyone.” ———, "The Schema of Mass Culture," in The Culture Industry : Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London ; New York: Routledge, 2001), 93. 6 Adorno, "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," 38-39. 7 Ibid., 39. 8 Ibid., 53. 9 This argument has been made by many. See, in particular, Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 10 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 11 Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2006). 12 For a discussion of brand marketing and vertical integration, with some detail on Disney, see Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000). 13 Alan Bryman, The Disneyization of Society (London Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publishers, 2004). 14 Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture," 67. 15 For more of a taste of the disputes between Benjamin and Adorno, see Walter Benjamin, "Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on the Essay "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century"," in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 19351938, ed. Michael William Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002). ———, "Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on the Essay "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"," in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Michael William Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003). ———, "Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on 'the Flâneur' Section Of "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"," in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Michael William Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003). 16 The most extended discussion of aura comes from Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Michael William Jennings and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002). 17 Ibid, 113. 18 Ibid, 117, 105, 102. 19 Gyorgy Markus, "Walter Benjamin or the Commodity as Phantasmagoria," New German Critique, no. 83 (2001). 20 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," 118. 21 See the image at http://illegal-art.org/print/popups/orgy.html Retrieved July 18, 2008. 22 David Kunzle, "Introduction," in How to Read Donald Duck : Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, ed. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (New York: International General, 1975), 18. 23 For the threat on the University of Oregon, see Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (Cambridge, UK: Polity; Blackwell, 2001), 88. For the White River and day care examples, see John Lewis, "Disney after Disney: Family Business and the Business of Family," in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Loren Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 92.

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24

For the stamp, AIDS, and Academy Awards examples, see Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy, 84-85. For the poison control example, Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer, Disney: The Mouse Betrayed: Greed, Corruption, and Children at Risk (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1998), 6, 181-87. 25 Lewis, "Disney after Disney: Family Business and the Business of Family," 93. 26 Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 20-30. 27 Schweizer and Schweizer, Disney: The Mouse Betrayed: Greed, Corruption, and Children at Risk, 164-79. 28 Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy,.85-86. 29 Quoted in Leonard Mosley, Disney's World: A Biography (New York: Stein and Day, 1985), 189. 30 See dictionary.com 31 Allen John Scott, On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). 32 Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence, Culture and Education Series (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 156. 33 Adorno claims that the laughter of the masses “is actually an invading, barbaric life.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1972), 141.

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Chapter Nine Conclusion To begin this dissertation, a seemingly simple question was posed: how was the Disney version of the American dream constituted? How did the American dream emerge as a metaphor, and why did it shift from the days of Ford to the days of Disney? Why, in particular, was the Disney version articulated to a constellation of metaphors such as dream, fantasy, wonder, innocence, magic, art, genius, and the child, the very same terms through which many of the debates over modern consumerism revolve? Based in a fully constitutive theory of discourse, the American dream was not assumed to be merely an ideological message perpetuated by corporate interests. Instead, the Disney version constitutes the terms through which modern American consumerism is understood. The Disney version includes a constellation of metaphors – magic, dream, fantasy, imagination, wonder, innocence, the child, art, creative genius – around which the debates over consumerism and Disney take shape. Answering how these terms emerged, how these debates arose, promised some insights into both the features and understandings of contemporary American consumerism. To answer this question, a specific interpretation of McLuhan’s famous axiom “the medium is the message” was proposed. This interpretation maintains that the translation of modes constitutes messages such as the Disney version of the American dream. Modes represent the origin, in the sense of the original, “message” that is subsequently translated into cultural discourse. Modes are, like metaphors, a perceiving as, ways of perceiving one thing through the frame of another. Since modes are defined relationally, through the economy or dialectic

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between the terms, seeing them as the origin denies a substantive notion which locates origin in exigencies, speakers, or texts. Modes constitute discourse through the play or movement of difference and deferral between the poles of an economy. This play of difference and deferral means that the various translations will necessarily conflict and contradict but that a certain stable constellation emerges, a range of thinkable metaphors make sense and therefore persist in the cultural discourse. Thus the terms child, genius, art, dream, and magic are consistently evoked to explain Disney and consumerism because those metaphors articulate to – make sense through – the economy of the modes of cinema and animisitic mimesis. The cinematic mode is a way of perceiving fragments of material reality as an imaginary narrative. The structure of the cinematic mode is composed through an economy of projection and recording that constitutes the perception of discontinuous images as a continuous whole. The mode works through the techniques of shooting and editing that enable a reproducibility of image similar to photography, a legibility of narrative similar to literature, a watchability of performance similar to theater, and a transposability of points-of-view unique to the cinema apparatus. By transposing points-of-view, the cinematic mode relates the diegetic space of the narrative to the viewer space, a relationship designated by Benjamin’s phrase the optical unconscious. The optical unconscious describes the unique spatial relationship of the cinematic mode. Viewers see (the optical) material reality as part of an imaginary narrative (the unconscious). Temporally, the optical unconscious is perceived through a reception in distraction. By controlling viewer time and attention, the cinematic mode interrupts reception with the continual progression of flowing images. Viewers are distracted, shocked by the ceaseless flow of images, but nevertheless piece together the discontinuous images as a continuous, coherent reception.

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Disney animation borrows many precepts from the cinematic mode, including the transposability of points-of-view and the reception in distraction. Yet the mode of animistic mimesis differs from the cinematic mode since what viewers see are not fragments of material reality, are not moments in time. Instead, animistic mimesis enables a way of perceiving objects as full of life. Animistic mimesis entails perceiving semblances of actual reality as the expression of living emotion. Rather than recording moments in time, the viewer creates living moments by perceiving and interpreting their semblances. The economy of animistic mimesis oscillates between these semblances and play in an imaginary world. The images must simultaneously express actual life, without moving too close to its simple reproduction, and fantasy, without becoming wholly imaginary. For Mickey to live, he must be both mouse and human, both real and imaginary. Mickey becomes alive through the transferability of animation. Transferability indicates a dual transfer. The animators transfer the semblances of movement and sound to the screen. The viewer transfers the feelings of life and emotion to those drawings. This dual transfer, as Barthes indicates, is animation; the images animate (move) the viewer and the viewer in turn animate (gives life to) the image. The characteristics of animistic mimesis were outlined through a discussion of the movie Fantasia. In Fantasia, we see that animistic mimesis is a synaesthetic or total-sensory experience that blurs self and other through a magical process mediated by auratic objects. Animistic mimesis aims at a synaesthetic experience in order to more fully convey the semblances of life, to more fully immerse the audience in a fully-sensory experience similar to touch. This emotional touching blurs self and other because the viewer transfers feelings to the characters, thereby making them alive. Nothing can explain this blurring other than magic, a magic not available through any ordinary, everyday object but only accessible through special, auratic

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objects. Techniques such as emotional color coding, the drawing of ritualistic gestures through such techniques as anticipation and follow-through, the heavy use of shadows, and the frequent portrayal of morphing and hybrid characters all cue the viewers to the mode of animistic mimesis. What, then, are the “messages” of these modes for modern American consumerism? How are the modes, as the original texts, translated into the Disney version of the American dream and its associated constellation of metaphors? Recall that the “messages” of the modes are the ways these modes structure perceptions and the cultural sensorium. The “message,” if reduced to a paraphrase, would simply be “this mode is possible.” What, then, is learned from the possibility of animistic mimesis and the cinematic mode? First, with the cinematic mode what is learned is a way of perceiving actual reality as part of an imaginary narrative. That is, people learn to take fragments of their existing experience and craft pleasurable stories. People learn to daydream through external reality, the term daydream again indicating an economy of reality and fantasy. As a counterpart to this lesson, consumers learn that they are also the potential subjects of a daydream, that they also project images for the recording of other camera-subjects. Viewers learn to both project and record, to contort themselves as and contort themselves to the camera. These lessons of the cinematic mode hold important implications for both the practices of consumerism and the ways that people talk about and understand consumerism, as in the Disney version of the American dream. The cinematic mode, by encouraging daydreaming, explains the persistent and insatiable desire to consume unique to modern consumerism. Daydreams create a pleasurable experience of crafting imaginary narratives, but the daydreams continually fall short in their actualization, sparking a perpetual desire to daydream anew. Further, a cultural habitus full of camera-subjects creates an environment where people seek to manage their images, to

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either fit in or stand out. Fitting in and standing out, or keeping up with the Joneses and distinction, are the two primary explanations for the impetus of modern consumerism. Consumers either try to ensure their image fits in with their peers, or they try to make sure their image is unique and distinct. Both desires are not competing explanations for insatiable modern consumerism but equally logical outcomes of a cultural habitus full of camera-subjects. The “message” of the cinematic mode for modern consumerism is the possibility of daydreaming, a possibility that requires the continual refinement and management of one’s image. This emphasis on the continual refinement of one’s image encourages a consistent and perpetual desire to consume, sparking a constant cycle of fashions that repeatedly redefine fitting in and standing out. As we project ourselves for the camera’s record, an obsession with image fuels a consumerism bent on selling and packaging them. The “message” of the cinematic mode is also easily translated into the Disney version of the American dream. Since everyone projects an image and those images are material for daydreams, then the idea that all one needs is a dream can make sense. With nothing but a dream, one can mold and shape their image to make those dreams come true. We can make fantastical images of ourselves come true in reality. This version of the American dream is the dream of celebrity, the dream that anyone who learns best how to contort themselves to the camera might achieve the greatest fame and fortune. The existence of the cinematic mode seems to make this dream a real possibility. Similarly, animistic mimesis entails important “messages” for the practices of modern consumerism and the Disney version of the American dream. Animistic mimesis teaches viewers to daydream through objects, to construct living fantasies through inanimate materials. This “fantastic form of a relation between things” is precisely the definition of commodity fetishism

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advanced by Marx. 1 Objects, like in a Disney film, seem to take on a life of their own, standing on their heads and doing a dance like Marx’s table. Yet the study of animistic mimesis reveals a limitation in Marx’s take. The simple fact of being exchanged does not, as Marx maintains, necessarily result in commodity fetishism. People can exchange goods, indeed have for millennia, for the use-value without imagining that the objects contain a magical, fetishized value as well. Imagining a fantastical life of objects requires a particular mode of perception, a mode emulated in and spread by animistic mimesis. Commodity fetishism is thus better envisioned as daydreaming through objects, a practice instructed with every showing of a Disney movie. Animistic mimesis instructs viewers to transfer life and emotion to objects, to see commodities as part of themselves, as elements of their own image. Animation is both a constant reminder of the possibility of daydreaming through objects and training for the extension from one commodity (animated movies) to others (like daydreams experienced with all variety of Disney purses, watches, toys, and costumes). In a culture attuned to display, aware of watching and being watched, people dream about projecting themselves and objects become a valuable aid. From fashion to automobiles to home furnishings to websites, all of these objects are part of our image. We give them life and motion. Commodity fetishism stems from a belief that by perfecting our choices of objects we can project the ideal image. Animistic mimesis also articulates to the Disney version of the American dream, particularly the constellation of metaphors included in a model of communication as transfer. Once again, all one needs is a dream because dreams, idea-images, are the content of animation’s transfers. Through a metaphoric comparison, the “message” of animistic mimesis is consistently translated into debates over the genius and art, as well as the child and the intellectual state of consumers. In this model of communication, the uncle genius or the huckster transfers images to children or

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the child in all of us, resulting in some conflicting debates over animation, Disney, and consumerism. Some see Disney undermining art and deny him the status of genius whereas others insist his avuncular commonness makes him a new kind of artistic genius. Some fear Disney’s influence on children while others celebrate Disney for its wholesome and innocent fare. Some worry over the spread of childishness against the proponents who celebrate the ability to act like a child again, to have a laugh, to be moved emotionally, to not take themselves too seriously. The metaphors of child, art, genius, innocence, wonder, and imagination make sense when translated from the mode of animistic mimesis. They form a model of communication through which much of Disney and animation’s cultural effects are talked about and understood. A fully constitutive theory must accord this discourse an important role in the shape of modern consumer culture. These metaphors guide understandings of consumerism, cinema, and animation, and thus influence the practices associated with them. Yet, these translations are not necessarily logical or accurate; they are not a simple mirror reflection of real economic conditions. Instead, the model of communication produces some very contradictory conclusions. The model provides positions for a variety of perspectives, provides a locus from which each of these conclusions may make sense. Yet each, therefore, necessarily remains limited. Each wants to emphasize one perspective at the expense of the others, to foreground one notion of art, the child, or transfer. Each, then, misses the ambivalent implications of the spread of these modes by ignoring the movement or play enabled by their possibilities. Neither the dystopian criticism nor the unmitigated heraldry of Disney and consumerism adequately grasps the implications of the spread of these modes. I would like to end not by issuing a final judgment but by insisting on the productive ambivalence of this conclusion. Animistic mimesis and the cinematic mode contain both

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dystopian and utopian implications whose possibilities stand out in sharp relief. The spread of these modes has enabled their capitalization and monopolization by gigantic media empires such as Disney with the help of a little legal magic (the third sense of transfer) in the form of stringent copyright and trademark protections. Yet at the same time, these modes and the American dream express a potentially productive utopian desire. They embody the desire to make dreams, the artist’s and the child’s desire to inhabit and enjoy the realms of the imagination. They express a desire for play, for laughter, for emotional touching, and for the blurring of self and other. These desires are not only perversions that mask dominant ideologies and their oppressive interests. They are also human feelings, emotions that move us and make life worth living. They are one potential source of motivation to act for the purpose of changing the world, as Marx directed. Too often criticism dismisses these human desires as childish and the people that have them as dupes, willingly swallowing their own oppression. Instead, critics should direct their judgments against the control and monopolization of these modes rather than their practice. It is precisely the great size and wealth of the Disney Corporation that has turned the American dream into a nightmare. If Walt Disney dreamed of making animation into a new art form, his dream is now inaccessible to most individuals due to the dominance of such enormous corporate players as Disney. As Disney pursues control over every possible surface, the ability for other artists or dreamers to transfer becomes more and more difficult. Disney’s corporatization and monopolization of the modes of communication has been the monopolization of the means of social change, the commodification of our dreams and desires. The rampant monopolization and consolidation of the media, the tireless and punishing pursuit of copyright lawsuits, the exclusion and ostracization of artists with different dreams, the squelching of free speech in favor of corporate interest, and the widespread feelings of

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alienation, loneliness, emptiness and boredom of consumerism are the result. The history of cinema, animation, and American consumerism reveals a series of catastrophes in stark contrast to the beautiful picture painted in the Disney version of the American dream. As the post-Fordist consumer economy faces an extreme economic crisis, as the promise of possibility in the American dream seems to fall apart, perhaps the utopian desires these modes contain can be reanimated for the purpose of progressive social change. Indeed, while history is catastrophe, the future always holds the possibility for change. The prospect and reality of change offers a final concluding note, this time with a more theoretical focus. The theory of rhetorical constitution illustrated here contains an advantage over other perspectives in that it can account for social change. It can explain how new texts, speakers, audiences, and perceived exigencies emerge rather than locating them as the origin of constitution. It can show how models like the Ford version of the American dream can shift as new modes of communication spread and are translated. Indeed, the conceptualization of origin and translation advanced here is a dynamic one. Translation is an ongoing process repeatedly shifting the locus of the original and the translation. The Disney version of the American dream, once a translation from the Ford version, becomes the original for a future version. The cinematic mode, once a translation from literature, photography, and theater, becomes an original translated into painting, literature, video, and other media. The mode of animistic mimesis is translated into new media, transferred onto new surfaces. There is no telos, no essence, no root, no origin in the metaphysical sense, only a perpetual renewal and unfolding of ur-phenomena, only a cycle of translation that is fundamentally historical and thus subject to change. By the time of this dissertation, in fact, the translation of Disney’s mode has already proceeded. Disney sought to translate their mode into new media, to capitalize on new surfaces,

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developing perhaps most famously the theme parks Disneyland and Disneyworld. Disneyland and Disneyworld represent the attempt to translate animistic mimesis into the medium of a theme park, through architecture, characters in costume, and animatronics, a form of robotic animation. Such a translation entails totally-planned environment, where everything from the stores to the streets, the rides to the restrooms convey the sense of magic, wonder, and imagination aimed at in animistic mimesis. Yet, like all translation, the theme parks are not only faithful to the original mode but also represent a transformation necessitated by the differences in media and the different economies and –abilities thereby made possible. Detailing this new mode is beyond the scope of this dissertation, yet suffice it to say that whereas animistic mimesis asks the viewer to transfer into the screen, Disneyland and Disneyworld transfer the fantasy to the time and spaces of everyday reality. Disney’s success with these theme parks beckoned other translations, with store owners emulating their principles of consumer architecture through what Douglass Rushkoff calls atmospherics. Atmospherics is the designing of consumer locations to “communicate something,” a kind of “fetishizing of space.” 2 Disney’s success with Disneyland led many retailers, shopping malls, and store fronts to emulate the practice. They developed display cases, music, architecture, and other sensory attractions to convey the atmosphere of an imaginary world. Each practice aimed at creating “an architecturally rendered dream.” 3 Interestingly, marketers develop these practices of atmospherics with the aim of creating the “Gruen Transfer,” the moment when consumers go from purchasing a specific product to transferring into the dream world of the store, becoming undirected, wandering browsers. 4 Bryman calls atmospherics “theming,” saying it is “probably the most obvious dimension of Disneyization.” 5 Theming, like animistic mimesis, aims at a type of commodity fetishism, revealing the kinship of

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these translations. “Theming provides a veneer of meaning and symbolism to the objects to which it is applied.” 6 Although Disney is not the progenitor of such theming, their success revitalized the struggling American theme park and encouraged further translations into restaurants, hotels, malls, zoos, museums, casinos, cruise ships, health clubs, universities, and even whole towns. 7 With the spread of such translations, the translation of the American dream proceeds further as well. The saturation of planned fantasy environments throughout the cultural landscape has led some to indict the American dream as the ideology of simulation and illusion. Rather than relating the real and the fantastical as in the cinematic mode, the spread of consumer phantasmagoria seems to leave nothing left of the real. Thus Baudrillard has argued that the real has been exterminated by the hyperreal. We see in his argument a further translation of Disney and the American dream. For Baudrillard, Disneyworld is the perfect emblem of the hyperreal, and America represents the culture of the hyperreal, the culture now living completely in their dreams: America is neither dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. It is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved. Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet it is the stuff of dreams, too… The Americans, for their part, have no sense of simulation. They are themselves simulation in its most developed state, but they have no language in which to describe it, since they themselves are the model. As a result, they are the ideal material for an analysis of all the possible variants of the modern world. 8 In short, the life of the American dream metaphor continues through translation, even if the actual possibility of social change has become more of a nightmare. What is certain is that the proliferation of modes of communicating through the spread of consumer media has fundamentally altered the conceptualization of our rhetorical situation. The old oppositions between the real and the fantasy, fact and fiction, true pleasure and pseudo-pleasure, use value

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and exchange value, and waking life and the dream no longer hold. Only a theoretical perspective such as the one demonstrated here that pays careful attention to modes and their various translations can account for the fundamental, widespread, and crucially important changes in the spaces, times, and –abilities that shape modern consumer culture.

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Endnotes for Chapter Nine 1

Karl Marx, Capital Volume I (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 165. Douglas Rushkoff, Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 68. 3 Ibid., 71. 4 Ibid., 76. 5 Alan Bryman, The Disneyization of Society (London Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publishers, 2004), 15. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Jean Baudrillard, America (London ; New York: Verso, 1988), 28-29. Also see, ———, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 12-14. 2

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