Planetary unseen in animation

Taking up Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of plasmaticness or plasmaticity (Russian “plasmatichnost”), this paper tries to extend the polyformic and polymorphic capability of animation/drawing into the way we develop new vocabularies for a yet-unrefined subjectivity – its enunciations. As our living conditions with their forms-of-life have transformed in relation to the shifting sociopolitical realms under domineering capitalist systems (David Harvey, 2006), so have new narratives emerged to account for the lack of understanding, and attempt to understand, these all-encompassing shifts on a ‘planetary’ level. Planetary recognizes the unavoidable mutual relation between and affect of capitalist realities on living systems, including bodies, subjectivities, and materials in between organic and non-organic. Material agency is as such considered a condition for thinking a certain ‘naturalness of images,’ particularly when they appear to be ‘alive,’ that is when they appear to be in motion through time. Simply put, the ‘complete naturalness of animation’ aims to understand which images of living processes can emerge from animation practices that help us apprehend the complexity of vitality. Animation here becomes a composition of forces, a coded and homogenized translation of time, space and life, into an image that is essentially and ontologically vital.

Given the particular status of Japanese animation (its images and affects), arguably its very visibility or omnipresence in our living realities, can we perhaps propose an intrinsic link between its modalities and our senses of ‘the living:’ and more importantly, find a remedial quality inherent to its forms of new evocations of ecosophy’s boundaries? How does this animation/animism appropriate Félix Guattari’s (Machinic Eros, Writings on Japan, 2015) notes about images that throw us “into a universe without foreseeable ends, without the delimitations of identity” where “scenes of heterogeneous enunciation are determined by singular matters, of which no structural paradigm can deliver the key.”

The presentation is informed by Erich Hörl’s Thousand Ecologies, previous explorations of fûkeiron and the collective character of a landscaping of film, independent Japanese animation, Guattari’s minor cinema – futuristic, non-representational, common places of discourse (Paolo Virno) and quests for experimental analytical models – a future form of text.