Stanley 1

MA VCS Thesis Proposal

Title: But We, To Whom The World Is

Author: Bradshaw Stanley

Abstract. In this thesis I view the animated children’s show as a 21st century “surrogate,” in the sense developed by performance theorist Joseph Roach, for Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By viewing “surrogation,” reconstruction, and even re-enactment as occurring between two artworks rather than two artists, I outline a theory of desubstantialized “body-to-body transmission” that does not rely on “real” or substantial bodies for its support. I conclude by arguing that embodiment can be understood as a formal problem rather than one defined by organic function or phenomenological sensoria.

Research Areas. Embodiment, Affect Theory, Formalism, Animation Theory, Performance Studies, American Studies, Childhood Studies, Queer Theory, Film Studies, New Media, Visual Studies, Critical Theory

Agenda. Popularly acclaimed as “the trippiest show on television” (),

“groundbreaking…[and] ever more experimental” (AV Club), “sneakily sophisticated”

(New York Times), and “dark, gripping and almost nightmarish” (Indiewire), Adventure

Time may sound more like an HBO series than a animated children’s program. Because such accolades are typically reserved for adult (not to mention live- action, "underground" or foreign) productions, it is unsurprising that Adventure Time has been used to satirize conservative cultural anxieties, as in a ChristWire article that, perhaps picking up on the show’s “trippiness” and eagerness to experiment, asks whether it is “a gateway drug to LSD, homosexuality, and the rave lifestyle.” Such satire indicates a bleed between the formal qualities of a work and the embodied responses its viewers, in this case young children, may have: being exposed to trippy and experimental work, the thinking goes, may incline one to seek out trips and experimentation in other contexts. Stanley 2

Indeed, this is a bleed that the Cartoon Network brightly capitalizes on in its commercial breaks, where children are routinely shown buoyantly re-performing clips from the channel’s line-up. In this thesis, I will be following the neon-colored trail of those bleeds, the mimetic and non-mimetic circuits that link the non-/dis-embodied and immaterial to the embodied and material responses and performances that they enable; I will be asking how incorporeal performers, such as cartoon characters, transmit their unique behavioral, affective, and narrative orders to the regime of corporeality; and I will be examining how we, "to whom the world is our native country," as Dante wrote, establish and perform modes of sovereignty in a non-native world—a world where the four principle may not be fire, water, earth, and air, but fire, ice, slime, and candy.

Put at its most polemical, my thesis raises the following question: What if embodiment could be understood as a formal problem concerning line and color rather than organic function or phenomenological sensoria?

Although to begin unpacking this question I turn to Adventure Time and the burgeoning field of animation studies, which claims line and color as its formal provenance, it is important to note that my thesis is not a media history or study of children’s animated programming. Consequently, I will not be pronouncing on long- standing debates between film and animation, nor will I be focusing on the circum-

Pacific production routes that most Cartoon Network productions participate in, nor still will I be examining the sizable fan culture that has grown up around Adventure Time and other animated works. Such considerations, although important for a fuller view of the issues I will raise, are beyond the scope of this thesis and fall to other scholars. Stanley 3

What I primarily will be addressing, then, are the formal elements of Adventure

Time: its visual themes, narrative structures, rhetorical figures, and affective labors. Since

I will not be looking at the immediate production context of the show, or what Donald

Crafton has termed the “performance of animation,” I suggest instead another, perhaps unsuual context: the story that Ernest Hemingway described as the fountainhead of

American literature, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By placing these works together, I propose to focus on what Crafton calls the “performance in animation,” or the ways in which animation, by complicating our ideas of liveness and embodiment, can be said to perform (Crafton 15). In this case, that performance is a question of color and line—a question that the author Mark Twain, in the age of the color line, surely had in mind as he wrote Huck Finn, although the bleed to embodied performances was far darker.

If Adventure Time has merely been satirized as a gateway drug for children to moral failure, Huckleberry Finn was outright banned upon its release at libraries throughout the United States for being “trashy and vicious” (Springfield Republican),

“flippant [and] worthless” (San Francisco Chronicle), and “not altogether desirable” for

“parents who want a good future of promise for their young folks” (San Francisco

Evening Bulletin). It is worth remembering, however, that Twain described the novel not as a book for boys, but as a book for men who remember being boys. Likewise, when

Adventure Time creator says that he makes the show according to “what

I would have liked when I was a kid,” he refers not to what he did like but to what he would have liked, participating in the subjunctive mood that characterizes performance.

In short, Adventure Time and Huckleberry Finn are primarily designed to restore parts to Stanley 4 our (boyish) selves that are past. More than both works simply being stories for men who remember being boys, however, Adventure Time and Huck Finn also play across the mythic chronotope of “adventure-time,” which Mikhail Bahktin describes as “an extratemporal hiatus between two moments of biographical time,” in which events can be reconfigured and rearranged without damaging the narrative arc (Bahktin 90).

(In performance, this “adventure-time” is perhaps better known as rehearsal.)

Both Adventure Time and Huck Finn crucially and oddly structure their diegetic universes around a temporal tripping: whereas Huck Finn achieves this by omission, since it was written after the policies of Reconstruction had been enacted but takes place in a time that is either before or to the side of the US Civil War, thereby “tripping” the past and present, Adventure Time signals its “tripping” of past and present through the anachronistic insertion of Abraham Lincoln into its animated, post-apocalyptic world.

Adventure Time's pilot, a 7-minute short originally produced for NickToons in 2007, introduces Pen, a 12-year old, human boy whose name suggests that of his creator, who is accompanied by his magical, shape-shifting, “28-year old” dog, Jake. As the two try to cheer up a sobbing Lady Rainicorn (a flying half-unicorn, half-rainbow creature who does not speak English), they stumble into the frozen biome of the nefarious , where they must fight to save . When the Ice King momentarily gains the upper-hand in battle, Pen's body is frozen and his mind is "transported back in time and to Mars" where Abraham Lincoln tells a disoriented Pen to believe in himself. This temporal marker positions the show in an American mythos—and especially its mythos of mis-/dis-remembered wars and national, international, and even interplanetary material conquest. Stanley 5

This is particularized several years later when the Cartoon Network picks up

Adventure Time as a full series. There, Pen is re-introduced as an orphan named Finn the

Human, a kind of distorted orthographic inversion of Huckleberry Finn, and Jake returns as , now also playing the role of Finn’s “older brother.” As we know from

Sianne Ngai’s essay, “On Animatedness,” the cartoon animal is often a stand-in for the raced other: Finn is to Jake as Huck is to Jim. This should remind us, if reminding need be, that what counts as human, for us as well as for Huck Finn in his own time and place, is always an open question.

By focusing on how Adventure Time re-performs, re-imagines, re-enacts, and even re-constructs (with all that term's historical weight) Huck Finn along formal dimensions, my thesis hopes to hold open the gaps of Adventure Time’s playful (re-

)performances in order to glimpse and map some of the contours of that (re-)performing body that is irreducible to the human body, that body of forms, that body that is form, a body that, like a cartoon figure, is "not human" and "not not human,” thereby revealing the performative (rather than phenomenological) dimensions of human embodiment.

Methodology. Because I envision this thesis as a work of performative scholarship, I want to include a final remark on how I will be putting this material together. Performative scholarship, as Della Pollock has argued, is a mode of criticism that dispenses with the ontological interrogative “What is…?” Thus, my thesis generally declines the conventional art historical labor of evaluation and judgment; instead, I am keen to approach Adventure Time by working to understand its internal logic and the expression of that logic as it is revealed through form. As the performance artist Matthew Goulish says, the labor of understanding is one that happens from “any direction whatever,” and it Stanley 6 is precisely from “any direction whatever” that I approach Adventure Time. Parafictional narratives and memories of paratheatrical events from my own childhood snake their way through the meta-critical commentary and close viewings that comprise the thesis. I deploy these “personal” details as sites for readers to re-perform the text before them, and

I exploit the pleasures and difficulties of lacing disparate verbal registers together in order to enhance the performative dimensions of the work.

Stanley 7

Structure.

Introduction / The personal is the critical (5-7pp)

Introduces this thesis’ methodology of performative scholarship through a manifesto for criticism

Act 1 / What time is it? (12-18pp)

Introduces AT and contextualizes it as a surrogate for Huck Finn; Bahktin and the post-apocalyptic; textuality vs visuality in animation; Eisenstein; performing the non-/dis-embodied

Intermission / Lines that turn (5-7pp)

Meditates on the figure of the timeline; Deleuze and issues of recurrence, return, the (non-)original; the fold; nonlinear ontology; poetics

Rehearsal / Drawing (it) out (12-18pp)

Close viewings of AT episodes touching on: erotic confusion and homophobia; salt vs sugar; cuteness and trauma; cartoon ethics and quantum mechanics; fart jokes and death

Interval / Surface affects (5-7pp)

Explores the affective limn between animation and realism; mimetic vs non- mimetic narrative; sex and writing

Act 0 / Beyond the animation principle (12-18pp)

Elaborates the threat of de-animation as figured by ’s storyline in AT; formal horror, formal bodies; nonlinear optics; Bersani and de-narrativized time; queer cosmology

Telemission / What time is it (not)? (5-7pp)

Concludes with meditation on desubstantial/incorporeal materialism; queer grief and screen erotics (Mark Doty: “Kiss me, please, the dead are watching”); reading for bodies

Stanley 8

Bibliography.

0. Adventure Time episodes

Produced by NickToons (2007) Pilot

Produced by Cartoon Network (2010-Present) Season 1. Episode 1: Slumber Party Panic Episode 5: The Enchiridion! Episode 10: Memories of Boom Boom Mountain Episode 12: Evicted! Episode 16: Ocean of Fear Episode 25: His Hero

Season 2. Episode 5: Storytelling Episode 16: Guardians of Sunshine Episode 17: Death in Bloom Episode 24: Mortal Recoil Episode 25: Mortal Folly

Season 3. Episode 1: Conquest of Cuteness Episode 9: Fiona and Cake Episode 12: The Creeps Episode 15: No One Can Hear You Episode 19: Holly Jolly Secrets (Part 1) Episode 20: Holly Jolly Secrets (Part 2)

Season 4. Episode 1: Episode 7: Episode 8: Hug Wolf Episode 18: Episode 25: I Remember You Episode 26: The Lich

Season 5. Episode 1: Episode 2: Jake the Dog Episode 14: Simon and Marcy Episode 34: The Vault Stanley 9

Episode 44: Apple Wedding Episode 45: Blade of Grass Episode 48: Episode 52: Billy's Bucket List

Season 6. Episode 1: Wake Up Episode 2: Escape from the Citadel Episode 12: Ocarina Episode 16: Joshua and Margaret Investigations Episode 19: Is That You? Episode 24: Evergreen Episode 25: Astral Plane Episode 26: Gold Stars

1. Animation Studies Beckman, Karen “Mixing Memory and Desire: Animation, Documentary, and the Sexual Event,” in Animating the Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality, and Animation, ed. Jayne Pilling (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Kindle edition. Buchan, Suzanne, “Animation, in Theory,” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Kindle edition. Bukatman, Scott, The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). ------, “Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics; or, the Cartoon Cat in the Machine,” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Kindle edition. Cholodenko, Alan, “’First Principles’ of Animation,” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Kindle edition. Crafton, Donald, Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making in Animation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Eisenstein, Sergie, Disney, trans. Dustin Condren, eds. Oksana Bulgakowa and Dietmar Hochmuth (Berlin: PotemkinPress, 2011). Halberstam, Judith (Jack), The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Hawkins, Alys, “Whose Body Is It?” in Animating the Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality, and Animation, ed. Jayne Pilling (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Kindle edition. Hayes, Ruth, “The Animated Body and Its Material Nature,” in Animating the Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality, and Animation, ed. Jayne Pilling (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Kindle edition. Johnson, Barbara, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986). 28-47. Koch, Gertrud, “Film as Experiment in Animation: Are Films Experiments on Human Beings?” trans. by Daniel Hendrickson, in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Kindle edition. Stanley 10

Lamarre, Thomas, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). ------, “Cartoon Film Theory: Imamura Taihei on Animation, Documentary, and Photography,” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Kindle edition. Leslie, Esther, “Animation and History,” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Kindle edition. Ngai, Sianne, “On Animatedness,” Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Kindle edition. Steinberg, Marc, “Realism in the Animation Media Environment: Animation Theory from Japan,” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Kindle edition. Wells, Paul, Understanding Animation (New York: Routledge, 2006).

2. Childhood Studies Kincaid, James, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child-Molesting (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). Mavor, Carol, Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Latigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Stockton, Kathryn Bond, The Queer Child: or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Winnicott, D. W., The Piggle: An Account of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Little Girl (Madison: International Universities Press, 1977).

3. Cinema Studies Bazin, André, What Is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Brinkema, Eugenie, The Forms of the Affects (Duke: Durham University Press, 2014). ------, “e.g., Dogtooth,” World Picture 7 (Autumn 2012): http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_7/Brinkema.html. Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). Conley, Tom, Film Hieroglyphs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Metz, Christian, Film Language: On the Semiotics of Film, trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Rancière, Jacques Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006). del Rio, Elena, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Kindle edition. Rodowick, D.N., Elegy for Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). ------, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

4. Performance Studies Stanley 11

Blocker, Jane, What the Body Cost: Desire, History, Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Brody, Jennifer, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Cervenak, Sarah Jane, Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Doyle, Jennifer, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Fleetwood, Nicole, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Heathfield, Adrian, ed., Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (New York: Intellect Ltd., 2012). Hill, Leslie and Helen Paris, Performing Proximity: Curious Intimacies (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014). Jakovljevich, Branislav, Daniil Kharms: Writing and Event (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009). Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York: Routledge, 1996). Phelan, Peggy and Jill Lane, eds., The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1997). Roach, Joseph, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Schechner, Richard, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). Schneider, Rebecca, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Re- enactment (New York: Routledge, 2012).

5. Theory & Philosophy Agamben, Giorgio, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003) Bahktin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986). Butler, Jeremy, Television: Critical Methods and Applications, 3rd ed. (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2007). Butt, Gavin and Irit Rogoff, Visual Cultures as Seriousness (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014). Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Danto, Arthur, The Body/Body Problem Deleuze, Gilles, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). ------, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). ------, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). ------, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia Stanley 12

University Press, 1990). Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Fiedler, Leslie, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, eds. Gerald Graff and James Phelan (Boston: Bedford, 2004). Fineman, Martha Albertson, “The Vulnerable Subejct and the Responsive State,” Emory Law Journal, Vol. 60; Emory Public Law Research Paper No. 10-130. Harraway, Donna, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Heller-Roazen, Daniel, The Inner Touch: Archeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007). Jones, Amelia, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification in the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2012) Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Khalip, Jacques and Robert Mitchell, eds., Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011). Lippit, Akira, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Merlea-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012). Morton, Timothy, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Ngai, Sianne, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012) O’Donnell, Victoria, Television Criticism (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2007). Phelan, James, Peter Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts & Critical Debates (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012). Quirk, Tom, “The Realism of Adventures of Huck Finn,” The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, ed., Donald Pizer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 138-153. Silverman, Kaja, Flesh of My Flesh (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009). Smith, Daniel W., Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press, 2012).

6. Queer Theory Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). Bersani, Leo, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1976). ------, Thoughts and Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Stanley 13

Copjec, Joan, “The Strut of Vision: Seeing’s Corporeal Support,” Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). 178-196. de Lauretis, Teresa, Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) Dean, Tim, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Edelman, Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Love, Heather, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Ricco, John Paul, The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Roof, Judith, Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) Vincent, John Emil, Queer Lyrics (Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).