The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture

4: Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?: Performance, Philosophy, Tradition

135 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb 4 Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? Performance, Philosophy, Tradition Phenomenological Performance In a tour-de-force examination of the role of the animal in philosophic enquiry, Akira Muzuta Lippit moves seamlessly from Descartes’s view of animals as unthinking machines to Leibniz’s conception of animal as a composition of immortal, soul-like protean parts to Schopenhauer’s view of consciousness being embedded across the whole animal world and thus shared by both humankind and beasts. He addresses Rousseau ’s notion of animals as sensually intelligent machines lacking in self-awareness, looking also to Kant’s, Burke’s, and Hegel’s configuration of animals within language and through their articulation in a cry or sound, taking in Lyotard’s notion that there is a sense of separateness in the “pure body” of the animal that accords with the human unconscious. He focuses on the Heideggerian denial of the ability for an animal to know the process or presence of its own death and the poverty of its existence in the human-formed world, but, equally, he details Nietzsche’s joyful embrace of the ephemeral present in animal “becoming.” Ultimately, Lippit suggests that “by tracking the animal across the philosophical spectrum, one discovers the systemic manner in which the figure of the animal comes to portray a serial logic: the animal is incapable of language; that lack prevents the animal from experiencing death; this in turn suspends the animal in a virtual, perpetual existence. The figure of the animal determines a radically 136 T HE A NIM AT ED BEST I A RY antithetical counterpoint to human mortality, to the edifice of humanism ” (Lippit 2000, 73). So, what then for the more literal-minded of us? How does this model of dense nuanced inquiry and intellectual engagement help to facilitate this particular discussion? I have already established that the concepts of bestial ambivalence and the naturalcultural speak to a range of open and dynamic discourses that are especially revealed by the working practices in, and execution of, the particular and unique language of expression available in animation. Consequently, I have also sought to illustrate that animation can accommodate the density of these discourses within its own models of a critical and pragmatic anthropomorphism, and its facility to invoke the particular terms of visualization that reveal the material and cultural presence of the animal. I want to further suggest, perhaps provocatively, that the facility for animation to work as form which privileges phenomenological imagery—not quite human, not quite animal, not quite real, yet embedded in humanity, animality, and reality—enables it to stake a claim by which it can be seen to actually express, illustrate, and perform the terms and conditions of philosophical agendas. The following chapter will therefore explore the idea of animals within the frame of phenomenological performance and philosophical inquiry. John Halas of the British Halas & Batchelor studio insisted that animation was always a more complex medium than any common understanding of the American animated cartoon in some of its idioms might allow. He thus championed the animated film as a serious art form, arguing that it could support the expression of modern art through its ability to embrace any aesthetic application, but, more important, that it was an intrinsically metaphysical form (see Halas and Wells 2006). I have argued that the ways in which animation invokes and plays out the multiplicity of its discourses can work at a number of levels, but its particular ability to interrogate what I have elsewhere defined as a “primal” state (see Wells 2002a; Wells 2007) is particularly significant in the revelation of philosophical principles because it is predicated on the view that animation can readily depict interior psychological and emotional states—dream, memory, solipsistic preoccupation, fantasy, heightened consciousness, feeling, and PER FOR M A NCE, PHILOSOPH Y, T R A DI T ION 137 so on. This point of access not only reveals the conditions of sensibility and sentience but also has accord with the deep-rooted, archaic knowledge of animality. Crucially, within the animated space there is a high degree of performance that facilitates the particular impact of these spaces, self-consciously invoking the presence of acts of thought, conceptual preoccupation, and philosophic inquiry. As Claude LéviStrauss has suggested, “Animals are good to think” (see Lévi-Strauss 2007, 251–261), and provides a model by which ideas can be...