Aggregate Enfleshments: Animation, Disassemblage, & the Death of the Body’s Grand Narrative
2023



In the media-saturated landscape of our postmodern time, it is hard to go but one day without encountering an animated body. From Disney films to corporate character logos, Vocaloid icons to hentai girls, the animatic representation of the human form has become entirely ubiquitous. As argued brilliantly by Terri Silvio in “Animation: The New Performance”, animation’s pervasiveness has allowed it to assume a function beyond itself, becoming a “mode of performative (real, social) world making” (434). Its hyperpresence has constructed animation as an embodiment and representation of life in post-industrial, technological, digital media-centric society. With this “world making” lens in mind, the proliferation of animated characters holds new weight for the postmodern subject. Confronted so regularly by this representation of humanness, one cannot help but wonder how the animated body animates the enfleshed human body. This essay explores this question by analyzing the productive and reproductive processes, technologies, and styles of animation as well as the database consumption and reception of animation by fans and consumers. Through this analysis, the process of fragmentation presents itself as a natural consequence of animation’s cultural dominance, creating a new relationship with the body in postmodernity. Hiroki Azuma’s paragonic and deeply exciting book, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, borrows from French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard the concept of modernity’s “grand narrative” (Azuma 28), asserting that postmodernity has disposed of this grand narrative in favour of an alternative, database-driven model. Applying these ideations to the human body, this essay will propose that animation’s production and database consumption encourage a fragmentation that has dissolved the postmodern subject’s grand narrative of the body.



Chronophotography & The Assembly Line - Fragmentational Precedent



As argued by Silvio, animation has become the “structuring trope” (422) through which to analyze our current media ecology and contemporary society. A strong emphasis is placed on how the rise of digital and creative industries and media has allowed animation to take on this larger role in the 21st-century landscape. The relationship between the human experience and technologies of representation (ie: photography, film, animation, plastic arts), however, has a much longer history than that which falls within Silvio’s contemporary animatic scope. In “Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor”, Sharon Corwin outlines the specific interconnection of chronophotography and industrial factory labour practices. Chronophotography, invented by Étienne-Jules Marey in 1882, is a technique that captures multiple still images of a moving subject at deliberate time intervals, typically rendering each of these shots into a single frame to depict multiple stages of movement simultaneously. It allows the holistic process of a movement to be fragmented into its constituent parts, capturing otherwise invisible moments within the particular movement practice. This capacity for visualization of the otherwise invisible made chronophotography an invaluable tool in the establishment of the Fordist factory line. This factorial model depends on the atomization of labour to maximize efficiency, requiring that each worker perform the same productive task repeatedly, collectively producing a product as a cumulative assemblage, rather than the traditional mode of start-to-finish single-person production. 

Frederick Taylor, an American mechanical engineer and founder of the Taylorist movement, played a foundational role in the advent of the assembly line. Motivated by President Theodore Roosevelt’s call for “national efficiency” (qtd in Corwin 139) as well as a general American culture of maximized productivity, Taylor published his 1911 text, Principles of Scientific Management. To do so, Taylor employed a team of engineers to closely watch and time various workers as they carried out their labour practices, documenting and publishing the movements and moments of productive inefficiency. Building from Taylor’s initial findings, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth sought to discover what they called “the One Best Way” (Corwin 139), or the most efficient means of production. To do so, they utilized chronophotographic technology to render visible the otherwise imperceptible processes of movement, attempting to “eliminate what they saw as unnecessary and wasteful movements” (Corwin 140). 

This relationship between the representative technology of photography and the embodied subject then fundamentally changed how the human body and society produce and labour. “Chronophotography was not merely a decisive step towards the animation of images. It was equally the basis for the animation of the Taylorist factory regime” (Franke 14). This, therefore, sets a general precedent for representative technologies’ impact on human experience and embodiment, establishing how media and technology mediate the body and the subject. 

Beyond this, however, the specific practices of chronophotography as well as the assembly line crucially introduce the notion of fragmentation. Dissection and disassemblage is the precise goal of the chronophotographer. It is not one single moment within a movement nor the complete movement that this technique captures, but rather the splintering of a movement into its constituent parts. Here, movement is no longer a singular whole, but rather the cumulative sum of fixed, fragmentary pieces. The gesture is no longer a gesture, but an assemblage of micro gestures instead. This capacity for disassemblage is precisely what made chronophotography so compatible with Fordism and Taylorism, two ideologies that depend on the atomization of labour. As outlined above, the assembly line breaks production down into its constituent parts, dividing the disassembled labour between a factorial team. Therefore, chronophotography’s fragmentation of the human body and motion creates an industrial ideology of productive fragmentation, also played out on the human body. 

Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 classic film, Modern Times, parodies this precise style of labour. The protagonist, played by Chaplin, is assigned to an assembly station at which he must repeatedly perform a twisting motion with his hands to secure two bolts to a sheet of metal. The prolonged repetition of this particular movement then forces his hands to be stuck within this motile pattern, twisting even after putting down his work for the day. This scene, though comedic and hyperbolized, perfectly represents the embodied fragmentation of assembly line labour. More importantly, however, it depicts how the human relationship with the body is impacted by productive fragmentation. It is not just the production process that is atomized, but the producing body as well. In understanding how chronophotography’s capacity for fragmentation enabled the assembly line’s fragmentation as well as the fragmentation of the worker’s experience of their body, one can begin to understand how disassemblage, technologies of representation, and the experience of embodiment are profoundly interconnected. 





Animatic Technique - Productive Fragmentation


Having established this interconnection, let us now turn to the history of animation itself. Cel animation, also referred to as traditional animation or hand-drawn animation, refers to the practice of manually drawing objects and characters on clear celluloid sheets before placing them over painted backgrounds. This process was the dominant mode of animation through the 20th century, with computerized, digital, and 3-dimensional animation rising to popularity around the turn of the century. One technique commonly employed to maximize the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of cel animation is the slash system. Developed by Raoul Barré in the mid-1910s, the slash system is a means of reducing the number of full-body character drawings required to animate a sequence, thereby reducing productive time as well. In her book Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai’s chapter, “Animatedness” develops Kristin Thompson’s explorations of the slash system. They define this technique as the “breakdown of figures into discrete parts” (Ngai 109) allowing a character to be “cut apart and traced onto different cels”. This style of fragmented animation allows the disassemblage of both the animated bodies and the means of production, as discussed in Thompson’s “ICAT”:

Using the slash system, the background might be on paper at the lowest level, the characters’ trunks on one sheet of clear celluloid, and the moving mouths, arms, and other parts on a top cel. For speech and gestures, only the top cel need be redrawn, while the background and lower cel are simply re-photographed. This technique not only saves labour time for a single artist, but it also allows specialisation of labour. That is, one person may do the background, while another does certain main poses of the character, and yet another fills in the phases between these major poses. In fact, the animation industry has followed this pattern, with key animators (doing the major poses), “in-betweeners,” and “opaquers” (filling in the figures with opaque paint) in addition to those performing the specialised tasks of scripting and planning. (Thomspon 107-108)


Much like chronophotography and Fordist production, the slash system finds its particular mode of production and embodiment through the use of fragmentation. Importantly, it is both the animated representation of the body and the production of that animated body that are atomized. The characters’ bodies are splintered into their constituent parts, with limbs, torso, and face, for example, each on individual cels to maximize efficiency. Here, the body is understood not as a holistic unit, but rather as an assemblage of discrete parts. The body is no longer singular in slash animation but is instead a fragmentary aggregation. 

Simultaneously, the mode of production inherent to the slash system is also that of splintering. Rather than a singular auteur creating a total work, or even a single artist creating a single body, the slash system requires the animation of the body to be striated between many animators. One animator may focus entirely on gestural limbs while another draws only facial expressions, for example. Unlike theatre and even film, the human body is neither conceived of as an organic whole nor is it produced by a singular being. There is no Barthesian “illusion of totality” (qtd in Silvio, 428) in the animatic sphere, and there is also no singular productive totality. This mutually fragmenting animation style functions similarly to that of chronophotography and the assembly line. In both cases, the body is fractured into discrete parts just as labour is fractured into discrete parts, each disassemblage enabling the other. 

A similar framework can be applied to other, more contemporary animation methods. Claymation, for example, depends on the minute fragmentation of movement on a limb-by-limb basis by any number of animators. Motion capture (mocap) animation is also structured on fragmentation, with each mocap sensor corresponding to a specific body part. Movement, therefore, is not captured holistically, but as an aggregation of various gestural points or body parts. A mocap sensor on the wrist captures and renders the motion of the wrist, and a sensor on the neck captures the motion of the neck. There is no comprehensive, total sensor to capture and animate the complete human form, but rather an assemblage of sensors. Though the animation may appear as a total body, it is in fact the conglomerate of discrete body parts. The mocap is achieved by fragmenting the moving body through individual sensors before reassembling the body into a cohesive grouping. 

Even the dominant computer animation techniques of the 21st century depend on a form of fragmentation, namely keyframing. Keyframing is a popular technique of digital animation wherein the animator defines a frame as the beginning or final point of a motion, action, or change. Having set these keyframes, the user can then isolate individual elements of the gestalt and animate them as such, never having to redraw the frame or impact the original keyframe. In a computer animation of the human form, a keyframe of a sitting body, for example, can then isolate an individual limb or body part to animate movement. Here too the body is animatically disassembled. The animation of one piece of the body can occur independently of the rest of the form, disassembling the body in doing so. Here too there is no semblance of organic wholeness or the “illusion of totality”. Instead, there is an animated body that is consistently and constantly conceived of and represented as an assemblage of independent fragments. 

In contemporary animation production, splintering and division of labour is another constant. Unlike live-action cinema, where auteur theory holds strong and directorial cults run rampant, animation is rarely thought of as the product of one directorial mind. Instead, given the striation inherent to animatic production, animation is a multiply-produced medium. The sheer number of animators, let alone sound engineers, specialists, actors, etc., means that “animation is a relationship of many-to-one” (Manning & Gershon 109). Just as there is a cumulative body world instead of a singular animated body, so too is there a cumulative production process instead of a singular production or producer. In both production and representation, fragmentation is a constant of animation.


Database Consumption - Receptive Fragmentation


Hiroki Azuma’s brilliant and inventive text, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals first hit Japanese markets in 2001, being translated into English 8 years later by Jonathan Abel and Shion Kono. Azuma uses this book to develop an ingenious theory of postmodernity. While he focuses on Japanese culture primarily, Azuma is clear in asserting that these ideations apply to the postmodern world at large and makes particular arguments concerning American culture. The title’s use of the word “otaku” is defined by Azuma as a “general term referring to those who indulge in forms of subculture strongly linked to anime, video games, computers, science fiction, special-effects films, anime figurines, and so on” (3). Azuma’s specific formulation of the otaku positions them as a sort of model organism for the postmodern human, embodying directly how the subject experiences and relates to our contemporary culture.

Significantly, Azuma emphasizes the database consumption habits of the otaku, outlining the notion of “moe-elements” (42) and clarifying the vital role fansites such as TINAMI play in both fan reception of animation and its production process. Moe-elements is a term used to describe the specific attributes, features, or traits of a given anime character. Ranging from cat ears to “incurable diseases” (78), blue hair to chubby cheeks, these elements are atomized traits that evoke moe, or affection, adoration, and attraction towards the animated character. Importantly, it is not the character as a holistic being that evokes this sense of moe, but rather the discrete moe-elements that generate the otaku’s sense of affection. Hatsune Miku, a Japanese Vocaloid superstar and corporate character logo of Crypton Future Media can serve as a useful example to comprehend the idea of a moe-element. From her iconic long, blue pigtails, to her schoolgirl attire and knee socks, Miku is visibly and obviously an accumulation of moe-elements. To the otaku who are fans or fetishists of Miku, it is typically her moe-elements, and not her embodied being, that they are drawn to. It is her blue hair, for example, to which they are attracted, rather than to her total unified self. In other words, it is the fragment and the assemblage of fragments to which the otaku is drawn, and not the singular unity of an entire self and body. This same concept applies far beyond just Miku, resonating with all animated characters and their fans.

Azuma also asserts how the moe-element functions through and in relation to the database fansite. Due to the proliferation of otaku and fandom cultures in a time of social and digital media, fan reception has largely moved to digital spaces, allowing new modes of consumption to emerge. TINAMI, standing for “The Information Navigator of Manga Artists on the Internet”, and other sites like it serve as an exemplary model of how database consumption has emerged in animation reception. TINAMI functions as a user-driven, crowd-sourced database of anime and manga characters that allows fans to browse canonical and derivative works across countless characters, projects, and styles. Importantly, users can search for particular moe-elements, and are encouraged to tag their own uploads with whatever moe-element is featured. A user uploading their drawing of Hatsune Miku, to continue our previous example, could file her under the tags of “blue hair”, “schoolgirl”, “pigtails”, etc. Another user might stumble upon this particular work, appreciate the moe evoked by her blue hair, and select that particular tag. They would then be taken to a new page of the database, wherein any image under the tag “blue hair” would appear. Alternatively, a user who knows they are drawn to the blue hair moe-element could simply search the database directly for images residing under that tag. In either case, the otaku or fan will be exposed to new characters and animes based on the particular moe-element they are drawn to. The otaku attracted to Miku’s blue hair, to continue the example, having searched TINAMI for images under that tag, discovers other blue-haired characters, such as Nymph from Heaven’s Lost Property or Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Because it is the moe-element, a fragment of personhood, and not Miku herself that evokes this moe, the otaku will experience a parallel moe in looking at Nymph or Rei Ayanami. These shows will then potentially gain a new viewer or fan by virtue of having a character possess a shared moe-element with the already adored character. 

Animation studios are certainly aware of this phenomenon, a fact that has fundamentally altered the character design and world-building processes of animation. Understanding that fan reception and commercial success are vital to any anime program or feature, moe-elements became a free ride to gaining a mass fanbase. Character animation therefore centres less on an individual who operates well within the narrative, or who embodies certain traits which propel plot. Instead, the character is designed as an assemblage of the fragments that are moe-elements. Azuma’s primary example is Di Gi Charat’s titular character, who seems to almost parody the moe-element in her being so visibly designed by assembling these points of fan enjoyment, but this practice is now quite commonplace across animation studios. 

As chronophotography and the assembly line fragment each other and as animatic production and the animated representation of the body disassemble one another, so too do the moe-element and the database fansite engage in a mutual splintering. As these characters are received and gain fans as aggregated atoms instead of holistic persons, so too is this fragmentation reflected in the productive character design process. “As soon as the characters are created, they are broken up into elements, categorized, and registered to a database.” (47) In turn, the productive emphasis on moe-elements only exacerbates the sense of fragmentation innate to these characters. Their existence as assemblages is intentional and obvious, encouraging fans to understand them as such. In turn, the fan fetishizes the extractable traits of the character in a way that becomes profitable for the studio, who then makes even more obviously moe-assembled characters, creating a mutual perpetuation of disassemblage and atomization. 





Database World Model & Grand Narrativity


Azuma’s investigation of the database does not end with a simple acknowledgement of its existence and its relationship with both otaku and animators. Instead, Azuma engages with the database as a new world model through which to understand and experience postmodernity. Drawing from Ōtsuka Eiji’s Theory of Narrative Consumption, Azuma suggests that the arboreal, “tree model” of modernity is composed of “the surface outer layer of the world that is reflected in our consciousness… [and] the deep inner layer” wherein meaning or narrative truly reside. He further asserts that in modernity, the purpose of intellectualism and scholarship was to reveal the “structure of the hidden layer” (31) beneath. For Azuma and Ōtsuka, this arboreal model is also deeply interconnected with the “grand narrative” (28) first proposed by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard:

From the end of eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century in modern countries, various systems were consolidated for the purpose of organizing members of society into a unified whole; this movement was a precondition for the management of society. These systems became expressed, for instance, intellectually as the ideas of humanity and reason, politically as the nation-state and revolutionary ideologies, and economically as the primacy of production. Grand narrative is a general term for these systems. (Azuma 28)


For Azuma, the grand narrative is precisely the arboreal model’s “deep inner layer” that regulates the “surface outer layer”. It is the product of societal unification and the presence of a total whole structured into a narrative of the modern world. In the postmodern world, however, the tree model no longer functions or accurately represents contemporary society. Further rejecting the frequently theorized rhizome model, Azuma instead proposes a “database model” (31). This model, as its name suggests, adopts the structure of the database to embody the structure of postmodernity. The most significant shift between the tree and database models is in the database’s “double-layer structure” (31). Through a comparison to the Internet, Azuma explains that there is the “accumulation of encoded information” (31) as well as the Web pages on which users “read up” (38). On the Internet and in the database world model, “the agency that determines the appearance that emerges on the surface outer layer resides on the surface itself rather than in the deep inner layer; i.e., it belongs on the side of the user who is doing the ‘reading up,’ rather than with the hidden information itself” (32). In other words, while the tree model has a hidden layer that determines the meaning which is projected onto the surface layer, the database model’s meaning resides in the user’s engagement with the surface layer itself. 

Without the deeper, hidden layer where meaning resides, the grand narrative too dissolves in postmodernity. Grand narratives are now dysfunctional and disjointed. We no longer understand ourselves to be part of a cohesive social whole, but are rather atomized as individual operators independently “reading up” and making meaning without narrativity. The database’s capacity to “dissemble, analyze, and reassemble” (94) allows for meaning-making to occur not on the level of larger unity or grand narrativity, but rather “around the combination of elements extracted from the database” (92). In other words, it is through fragmentation and assemblage that the postmodern subject creates meaning. They no longer have use for the larger, hidden meaning behind totality or unification in modernity. 




The Body Database


Having already established the relationship between animation, fragmentation, and the human body, Azuma’s database model and lack of grand narrative can be a useful and interesting lens through which to examine the aforementioned intersection. The postmodern subject’s relationship with the world is now that of the database, and this essay would argue that the same concept applies to the human body. The particular way in which animation’s production and reception mutually fragment and disassemble one another has made it highly compatible with both the literal database fansite, as well as the larger database model of experience. The constant representation of our fragmentation through the ubiquity of animated bodies has fundamentally altered our experience of enfleshment, embodiment, and personhood. Animation’s role as a “structuring trope” of contemporary society allows its impact to be felt far outside the traditional confines of the medium. The postmodern subject therefore considers themself not to be a cohesive, singular, organic whole or total unit, but rather the assemblage of discrete fragments. The meaning of personhood no longer resides in a deeper, hidden layer that is projected onto the body and self. Instead, the meaning of personhood is constructed in the “combination of elements” (92) that make up the human body.





Enfleshing Aggregation - Pornography & Pornhub


This process can be most easily understood through pornography, an industry that shares an array of traits with that of animation.Both industries focus on representations of the human body, sexual or otherwise. There is, of course, a particular overlap between the two industries in the genre of hentai, or the category of porn which uses animation to represent sex and sexuality. Hentai, however, is only the most readily apparent overlap between the two media. It is, in fact, the database and its capacity for bodily fragmentation that unites the two industries.

Pornhub is an online, user-driven platform that allows the uploading and viewing of pornographic content. Like TINAMI, Pornhub uses database functions to assist its users in finding the audience or content they are most drawn to. Instead of moe-elements such as blue hair or knee socks, however, these categories tend to be more explicitly sexual (eg: feet, teen, large breasts). Using a similar uploader tag system to TINAMI, viewers can search via category just as they would via moe-element. This encourages porn producers and actors to then emphasize and dramatize the particular traits the user seems drawn to. Porn seems far removed from sex at this point and seems much more like a combination of fetishized points designed to maximize profits for the production team. Much like moe-elements and the database, the fetishized body part and Pornhub also engage in practices of bodily fragmentation. The presence of categorization and database consumption allows viewers to conceive of the body as a conglomerate of discrete parts. They are not experiencing the porn performer as a holistic person, but rather as the above-mentioned set of feet, young age, or large breasts. Here, the human body is disassembled into its constituent parts. The database then allows users to explore whatever fragment they so desire, encouraging producers to further emphasize those parts, which in turn encourages the viewer’s fetishization of the fragment, creating a mutual fragmentation between producer and consumer. In hentai, this is made all the more visible, given the relationship hentai has with anime and therefore with moe-elements, and also given the level of control the producer has over an animated image, allowing more extreme fragmentations and fetishizations to occur.

As outlined by Silvio and elaborated upon already in this text, animation is not just a contemporary artform or industry, but also a real “structuring trope” (Silvio 422) and mode of “world making” (434). This essay would argue, therefore, that animation’s fragmenting impact on our perceptions of our body is precisely what has enabled the pornographic fragmentation we are now witnessing. The postmodern subject’s relationship with bodies and embodiment has shifted so fundamentally that aggregating has replaced enfleshing, the database body has replaced the grand narrative of the body. Pornography, an industry unafraid of taboo and uninterested in subtlety, simply serves as the canary in the proverbial coalmine of this phenomenon. Our experience of embodied fragmentation will render itself increasingly visible as the animatic regime continues to assert its cultural dominance. 

Pornography, as outlined above, is the most immediate example of this fragmented database model of the body. It is animation’s fragmentation and database structure that underlie and encourage the embodied person’s fragmentation and database compatibility. Here, the meaning of the body as well as its erotic potentialities lie not in its total wholeness, but in its constituent parts. It is the foot, the teen, and the large breasts which each individually create pornographic meaning, not the entire embodiment or person. This is precisely a product of the death of the body’s grand narrative, a death enabled by animation’s productive and receptive fragmentation.





Enfleshing Aggregation - Beyond Pornography


This dissolution of the body’s grand narrative, originating in animation but now embodied in the organic human being, extends far beyond the pornography industry. Another key example can be understood by examining the social media platform TikTok. This user-generated content platform encourages users to upload videos to pre-existing audios or sounds, ranging from songs to movie audio clips, individual conversations to combinations of outlandish sound effects. Immediately, one can note a fragmentation that is inherent to the platform and the content it generates. Speech is splintered from the body, separating the voice of the individual from their physical form. Beyond this, the hashtagging system of TikTok as well as its aggressive algorithm also encourages a fragmented structure. Much like TINAMI and Pornhub, TikTok encourages users to tag their content to attract consumers who are interested in that specific content form. Frequently, this manifests as a tagging of bodily elements, such as #blueeyes or #brunette, or tagging of aesthetic components, such as #coquette or #cottagecore. This culture of categorization has fascinating capitalist and consumer cultural implications that fall outside the scope of this investigation but also relate directly to the moe-elements previously discussed. The activity of hashtagging encourages dissection and dissassemblage of constituent parts. The content and the creator are both, therefore, fragmented in TikTok and through hashtagging. Importantly, however, and unlike moe-elements, this is a self-fragmentation. The individual who is uploading content of themselves is dissecting their own embodiment and personhood, implying that the TikTok content creator, and the postmodern subject at large, no longer see themselves as a holistic unit, but rather as a set of fragmentations grouped into an assemblage. This speaks directly to the death of the body’s grand narrative and the rise of a database model for experiences of embodiment and personhood. The postmodern subject is simply combining elements of their bodily database and is no longer expecting a grand narrative of themselves, nor any deeper meaning to their personhood or embodiment.

TikTok and pornography are but two examples of this death of bodily grand narrativity, particularly useful given their own cultural significance, weight, and impact. This database body, however, extends far beyond these two examples. The insecure adolescent, for example, does not hyper-fixate on her entire self as narratively flawed but rather sees the size of her arm, the shape of her nose, or the sound of her voice as flawed elements of her database. The home office, Zoom labourer does not represent nor conceive of their total self as entering a workplace, but rather as an upper body and head interacting with other fragmented bodies. The bodybuilder does not seek to engage with his whole body in each workout but rather fragments his body and his practice into arm day, leg day, and core day. The extent of this fragmentation and database modelling is limitless.





Conclusion


In the 21st century media-centric, laborious, and experiential landscape, animation has become a “mode of performative (real, social) world making” (Silvio, 434). Its productive processes such as the slash system, keyframing, and mocap technology all engage with illustrative fragmentation, as well as the division and specialization of labour between the “many-to-one” (Manning & Gershon 109) animating teams and studios. The fruits of this fragmented production are then received in the database, a platform that relies on the dissection and tagging of various components, points, and moe-elements of the animated form. The mutually perpetuated cycle of fragmentation between producers and consumers of animated works has created an industry that not only engages with disassemblage but depends on it. 

Furthermore, Azuma’s brilliantly articulated database model illustrates how the structure of the database not only functions unto itself but operates as a world model for our postmodern times. The database model’s lack of a grand narrative or deeper, hidden meaning, allows for the postmodern subject to find meaning in the surface level of the database, by reading up and combining various extractable data points. Applying Azuma’s ideations to the enfleshed person allows one to visualize the death of the body’s grand narrative, and with it, any sense of organic cohesion or wholeness. Instead, the postmodern subject understands their body and self as an assemblage of discrete units or data points. As argued above, it is the specific structural components of animation’s production and reception that enable this sense of fragmentation and non-narrativity. The daily embodiment of this lack of bodily grand narrative, through TikTok, pornography, and regular human experience all arise from animation’s function as a “structuring trope” of contemporary society. Ultimately, it is animation that encourages and inspires the disassembling and databasing of embodiment and personhood. The very nature of animatic production and reception dissolves the grand narrative of the body, forcing each postmodern subject to understand themselves not as an organic whole, but as a collection of fragmented parts. 





Works Cited

Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku Japan’s Database Animals. Translated by Jonathan Abel and Shion Kono, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Chaplin, Charlie, director. Modern Times, 1936, Accessed 2023. 

Corwin, Sharon. “Picturing efficiency: Precisionism, scientific management, and the effacement of Labor.” Representations, vol. 84, no. 1, 2003, pp. 139–165, https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2003.84.1.139.

Franke, Anselm. “Animism: Notes on an Exhibition.” Journal #36, e-flux.com, July 2012, www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61258/animism-notes-on-an-exhibition/.

Manning, Paul, and Ilana Gershon. “Animating interaction.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol. 3, no. 3, 2013, pp. 107–137, https://doi.org/10.14318/hau3.3.006.

Ngai, Sianne. “Animatedness.” Ugly Feelings, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007, pp. 89–125.

Silvio, Teri. “Animation: The new performance?” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol. 20, no. 2, 2010, pp. 422–438, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1395.2010.01078.x. 
Thompson, Kristin. “Implications of the CEL animation technique.” The Cinematic Apparatus, 1980, pp. 106–120, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16401-1_9.