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TOYING WITH THE POSTMODERN
‘TO INFINITY AND BEYOND’
STEFAN HERBRECHTER
As part of the ongoing struggle with the peculiar logic of the ‘post-’ this essay aims to defend Lyotard’s philosophical and aesthetic notion of the postmodern against mainly sociological understandings of postmodernism and late or postmodernity. It argues that a psychoanalytic and deconstructive reading of major forms of contemporary cultural representations, as for example Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story (I and II), constitutes a more effective approach to understanding the postmodern, namely as a symptom of the repressed which prevents ‘traumatic’ modernity from coming into its ‘own’. The paradoxical logic of modernity’s ‘To Infinity and Beyond’ is constantly being undermined by an undialectisable and unrepresentable otherness which compels it to repeat itself in increasingly parodic forms. The Toy Story series can be read as symptomatic of this ongoing process that generates (‘Baudrillardian’) apocalyptic visions of ‘hyperreality’. The development from Toy Story I , which concentrates on the problem of subjectivity in typical Hollywood terms of moral self-realisation and freedom, to Toy Story II , which is more concerned with ‘posthumanist’ threats, posed by advanced techno-science and virtualization, also mirrors the development from ‘Theory’ to ‘Post-Theory’. The way in which ‘Post-theory’ is often characterized, however, is that it simply dismisses ‘earlier’ issues raised in relation to (anti-humanist) subjectivity, ideology and power and instead tries to move ‘beyond’ these problems seemingly too much entangled in textuality and representation. Instead it supposedly favours ‘posthumanist’ forms of ‘post-subjectivity’ that accelerate the breakdown of the remaining boundaries between human and machine, culture and technology, reality and virtuality. This essay thus proposes a ‘double’ reading – of filmic texts ‘through’ theory, and theory through films – with a particular focus on the question of childhood: the childhood in, of and as (post-)theory.
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The Discourse of Childhood
Let us call it infantia, that which is unsayable. Childhood not understood as a period in life and as something that passes. It haunts language [le discours], which never ceases to keep childhood at a distance; it is its separation. But through this separation language obstinately persists in constituting childhood as lost. Thus, unknowingly, it keeps accommodating it. Childhood is its remainder. If childhood remains in its place [demeure chez elle], it is not despite but because it lives within the adult [ elle loge chez l’adulte ]. (Lyotard: 1991a: 9; my translation)
Children are supposed to live in a world of their own, which is clearly confined and marked out as the space and time for play, and in which toys are the main objects and controlling devices of socialisation. This miniature world, at once infinitely remote and utterly inseparable from the ‘real’ and ‘serious’ world of adults, in which play is a mere pastime and toys are mere consumables, has always served as a kind of significant ‘other’ space and time which, through certain discursive practices, exists only to guarantee the precarious order of social organization as a whole. Childhood is a fairly recent invention, as Chris Jenks’s study points out (Jenks 1996; see also Ariès 1973). Given the double significance of the child as the guarantor of society’s future and the bearer of social projections of the past, the ubiquity of power relations within the social discourses that create ‘childhood’ as their object and propagate their knowledge about it through social institutions like the family, the school, the media (which all contribute to the fundamentally ‘educational’ condition of the child) is not surprising. Neither is the fact, that childhood, like those other discourses of containment, analysed by Foucault (madness, sexuality and surveillance), is an invention of the period we usually call ‘modernity’, with its double foundation in enlightenment and capitalism. Furthermore, a discourse always invents ways of mastering an otherwise uncontrollable ‘other’ which nevertheless, as the Archimedean point or the transcendental signified of this discourse – which is at once located inside and outside the discourse while policing its boundaries – continues to haunt every ‘system’ of signification constructed around it. Discourse, as defined by Derrida, is “a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences” (Derrida 1978: 280). It is this continual process of (re)capturing and transforming of a ‘strange’ other within a system of
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socially staked-out educational realm, and as a cultural and political target, ironically, has gained rather than lost in importance:
Late-modern society has re-adopted the child. The child in the setting of what are now conceptualized as post-modern cultural configurations, has become the site or the relocation of discourses concerning stability, integration and the social bond. The child is now envisioned as a form of ‘nostalgia’, a longing for times past, not as ‘futurity’. (Jenks 1996: 106-7)
This nostalgia, which is often taken to be one of the main ways of theoretically understanding the postmodern today, is a sign for the current attempt to resolve the inevitably conflictual creation of cultural meaning, self-representation and regeneration. Jenks’s far-reaching conclusion is that: “What is being so jealously preserved through the new, ‘nostalgic’ vision of the child is the meta-narrative of society itself” (109).^2
Postmodern Play
Thus, toying with the postmodern is serious. This statement implies taking the either widely acclaimed or condemned playfulness of theoretical postmodernism literally. In any theoretically and culturally informed analysis, therefore, the postmodern, in the Lyotardian sense, should be clearly differentiated from the theoretical discourse on postmodernism, on the one hand, and from the sociological discourse of postmodernity (or late-modernity), on the other. Instead, Lyotard, in his ‘didactic’ of the postmodern (explained to children) sees an essential connection between theory (philosophy, thought, etc.) and ‘returning to childhood’, in the form of a necessary “renewing ties with the season of childhood, the season of the mind’s possibilities” (Lyotard 1998: blurb). For Lyotard, and maybe for theory in general, the rather biblical concept of childhood as the state of possibility, as the absence of prejudice or preconception, idealism and faith, plays an important role in the ‘generation game’ of breaking out of a tradition and breaking away from modernity. Postmodernist thought historically situates itself after or in (temporal and logical) contradiction to certain presupposed
(^2) The resulting effect of “child panic”, according to Jo-Ann Wallace, mediates larger social anxieties (Wallace 1995: 288). One reason for the ‘aporia’ of childhood, as nostalgic ‘ideal’ and as irretrievably lost, excluded ‘other’, is of course that childhood necessarily takes place ‘outside’ or ‘prior to’ (adult) language (see Wallace: 296).
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modern(ist) positions. These positions themselves may be of pro-modern, anti-modern, ultra-modern, hyper-modern, etc., representation in relation to the modern and modernity (and various more or less critical twentieth-century modernisms). The differentiation between postmodernity and postmodernism is therefore judged according to the position one assumes in relation to all three: the modern, modernity and modernism. Postmodernism as historical manifestation cannot be (entirely) separated either from modernity or modernism. The postmodern as a tendency (equivalent to ‘modern’), on the other hand, refers to a transhistorical attitude (as defined against the modern which is also transhistorical); the postmodern in the sense of belonging to an epoch, or historical period called ‘postmodernity’ (used as a terminological variable for a ‘fourth age’ after Antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity), however, would imply an epokhè, a clear caesura that marks the end of modernity and a conscious beginning of something other than what the modern stands for (i.e. an Epochenbewusstsein ; see Welsch 1991: passim ). Modernity, however, is not just any epoch that may end at will, after its complete conceptualisation and full historical realisation. The project of modernity is, according to its own definition, interminable (or can only be ‘terminated’ at the cost of its apocalyptic (self-)eradication). Per definition, modernity is ad infinitum. The modern always appropriates and incorporates the new (to infinity, and beyond), because anything that is perceived as new is assimilated according to the category of the modern (even though it may want to call itself ‘postmodern’). Strictly speaking, the term ‘postmodern’ is thus an oxymoron: it is self-contradictory in that it cannot possibly hold what it promises. The premodifier ‘post-’ testifies to this circularity in the ways it qualifies modernism, modern and modernity by introducing nontinear and acausal temporal and spatial relations into the performance of the modern. In order to avoid being appropriated by the modern dialectic of the ‘same’ (i.e. the ‘new’ which can only be experienced after the event and therefore never as new in a radical sense), postmodernity, understood as the arrival of the radically ‘new’ or the ‘Event’ (i.e. that which would be even too modern to be appropriatable by and reducible to the modern) must remain an alterity or absence that exists only in the uncertainty of an uncanny implication. It is not surprising therefore that the ‘postmodern’ should be linked to the sentiment of living somehow after the end, after surviving the worst, in postapocalyptic limbo or survivance (see
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but to revolve itself into a sort of ultimate stability, such for example as is aimed at by the utopian project, but also by the straightforward political project implied in the grand narratives of emancipation. Modernity is constitutionally and ceaselessly pregnant with its postmodernity. (Lyotard 1991b: 25; my emphasis)
The relation between the modern and the postmodern is therefore not chronological, but it relies on a particular understanding of repetition as anamnesis (or an ‘initial’ forgetting, or trauma, that simply remains undialectisable). It is in this sense that postmodernism is a re-writing of modernity, neither a break nor a simple succession, but a working through (perlaboration, Durcharbeitung) that occurs at once forwards and backwards “without finality” (Lyotard 1991b: 24, 30). This movement of back and forth within the process of ‘mourning’ the initial forgetting of the un(re)presentable (modern) is what Lyotard refers to as a process in “ana-”:
[T]he ‘post-’ of ‘postmodern’ does not signify a movement of comeback, flashback or feedback, that is, not a movement of repetition but a procedure in ‘ana-’: a procedure of analysis, anamnesis, anagogy and anamorphosis which elaborates an ‘initial forgetting’. (Lyotard 1998: 93).
The initial forgetting is the unrecoverable, absent origin of the modern and the illusion (or delusion) on which modernism and its avant-gardes, however critical of modernity they may be, ground their ‘discourse of originality’ (see Krauss 1991: 73). Against the modern ideology of the (relatively) new, postmodernism sets its feeling of belatedness and parodic repetition (of the sequel [see Garber 1999], and the supplement) in order to achieve a ‘stalling’ of the continual process of anticipating and appropriating the new by the modern, or to reach a ‘beyond’ of the modern infinity but without dialectic. The postmodern thus inscribes itself within the un(re)presentable of the modern,^3 and through the opening of this unsayable and unexpressible ‘sublime’, invokes the radical otherness of the Event. The possibility of the Event in its radical futurity without any anticipation comes before any interpellation, any question and destination; it rather forms the possibility of the question itself:
The event happens as a question mark ‘before’ happening as a question. It happens is rather ‘in the first place’ is it happening, is this it, is it possible? Only ‘then’ is any mark determined by the questioning: is this or that
(^3) Cf. Lyotard 1998: 24: “The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself…”
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happening, is it this or something else, is it possible that this or that? (Lyotard 1991b: 90)
From a postmodern point of view, one can say that the ‘Ereignis character of Being’ remains unthought in the metaphysical tradition of modernity (see Vattimo 1991: 137). But the event is not to be confused with the process of commodification in modern innovation; the possibility of an event is open at any time – this is the meaning of the future as radical alterity. The postmodern seeks to suspend the modern pre-empting of events, which is a foreclosure of eventuality leading to the eternal pastness of the modern ‘present’. It represents this paradox in its use of the future perfect [ futur antérieur ] which:
expresses a past event that one somehow transposes into the future either to mark a supposition – or to attenuate – or else to underline the exceptional character of an accomplished event [ fait accompli ] seen from a future point where one posits oneself in imagination to increase one’s ability to judge the contours/depth [ relief ] this event may have. (Grevisse 1986: 1299; see also McKenna 1988)
Coming at once too late and too soon – the phrase ‘this will have been new’ reflects the temporal contradiction within the postmodern as a process of anamnesis: the future as already contained in the past and vice versa. It is only in the performativity of (re-)writing (which invents its own rules as it progresses) that an opening towards the future event can be created (cf. Wood 1990: 1ff):
The [postmodern] artist and the writer therefore work without rules, and in order to establish the rules for what will have been made. This is why the work and the text can take on the properties of an event; it is also why they would arrive too late for their author or, in what amounts to the same thing, why their creation would always begin too soon. Postmodern would be understanding according to the paradox of the future ( post ) anterior ( modo ). (Lyotard 1998: 24)
Although the future perfect “translates the present in its difference ” (McKenna 1988: 232), it is not so much concerned with the futurity (in its prophetic anticipation) as such but in conjunction with a (psycho)analytic understanding of the cure with the undoing, ‘unwriting’ or erasing of a predetermined) future (see Forrester 1990: 104). What is beyond the edge of the postmodern future perfect
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Toying
But if this playfulness is so ‘serious’ why insist on using the word ‘toying’ in combination with the postmodern? Nothing is more representative of the playful than the idea of a ‘toy’. Toys are those ‘things’ that represent everything culturally associated at once with the gratuitous and the necessary, at once the guarantee of a future that resembles the past, of growing up to become a ‘useful’ and responsible adult member of society, and the reassurance of absolute difference, the unrepresentable present of mere playfulness, of being a child. In 1957 – i.e. in what may be called the ‘early childhood’ days of what would later grow up and be translated as ‘theory’ – Roland Barthes complained about the lack of imaginative space within the world of toys: “All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size” (Barthes 1993: 53). In their representational mimeticism toys always ‘mean’ something. As such they are therefore a fundamental way of teaching and learning the social process of ‘mythologisation’. The toy may be the myth or secondary signification par excellence – hiding its ideological construction in a process of naturalisation – that ensures the survival of modern capitalism:^6
Faced with this world of faithful and complicated objects, the child can only identify himself as owner, never as creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it: there are, prepared for him, actions without adventure, without wonder, without joy. (54)
Barthes regrets the functionality of representational toys and attacks the increasing use of artificial materials (and the “gradual disappearance of wood”) and the ‘consumability’ (the short life span) of modern toys. His nostalgia leads him to a quite unexpected outburst of romantic idealism, similar, in fact, to Lyotard’s idealized notion childhood:
The merest set of blocks, provided it is not too refined, implies a very different learning of the world: then, the child does not in any way create meaningful objects, it matters little to him whether they have an adult name;
(^6) See Dan Fleming (1996: 8): “toys are a wonderful place to look at the complex interactions between the desiring individual and the massified demand.”
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the actions he performs are not those of a user but those of a demiurge. (Barthes 1993: 54)
Thus in the beginning of theory’s history, before it entered the institutionalized adult world, one could say, “a child was being killed” Leclaire 1975). But maybe it is precisely this myth of the freedom of imagination (the loss of which Barthes deplores), lost through modern socialization processes, which has become ‘incredible’ in late modernity and thus has become ‘post-theory’s’ main concern (i.e. theory in its current state of ‘adulthood’, of lost innocence, of institutionalization and professionalisation). The crisis of representation and representability in pre-1968 France, had obviously not yet rendered absurd the dream of a ‘demiurgic’ (i.e. transformative) capacity of the subject, nor the idealist faith in the object for that matter. For Barthes, the child using non-mimetic toys may create “forms which walk, which roll, he creates life, not property: objects now act by themselves, they are no longer inert and complicated material in the palm of his hand” (Barthes 1993: 54). In Baudrillard this object world has gained absolute autonomy. It could be shown quite easily, however, that it is the nostalgic idealism of childhood innocence and (primitive) imagination itself that today provides a convenient marketing strategy for a whole range of toys which, thus, at the same time, guarantee the survival of modern capitalist society and the nuclear family Barthes so forcefully sought to ‘defamiliarize’. If, instead, postmodern (or late-modern) society is as ‘hyperreal’ as Jean Baudrillard (and his postmodern and ‘post-theoretical’ followers) would have it; if images have become more real than the real, if the sign can no longer refer, Barthes’s notion of myth has also lost its critical foothold. Ideological critique in the age of ‘pure simulacrum’ seems deluded precisely because “illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible” (Baudrillard 1993: 197). This is of course a major problem especially for the film industry (and Hollywood and Disney in particular) for whom the commodification of ‘illusion’ is crucial. When simulation replaces representation as the main symbolic structure, ideology is at once omnipresent but always merely another ‘simulation’. It is, therefore, no wonder, that postmodernism is compared to the psychotic condition of facing “the threat of vanishing in the play of signs” (Baudrillard 1993: 199). But one should not forget, however, that the idea of reference in signification became problematic long before Saussure; the sign lost its mythical ‘transparency’ a long time ago.
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between imaginary and real. This doubling – which is entirely in tune with a popular understanding of the ‘American dream’ as the transformation of a sordid reality into a fairy tale – with its synchronic proliferation prevents the development of a historical identity.^7 Instead the ‘disneyfied’ depthless subject is placed within a (cryogenised) “space on flat earth” (Wakefield 1990: 98ff). Since, according to Wakefield, Disney is “the model of a postmodern culture in which you have to be buried alive in order to survive” (114), and which is thus truly ghostly, it seems that performing a critical reading of one of its simulations has to show, not how the real is being virtualised, but rather how the unsimulatable is being excluded. Or, in terms of a ‘posthumanist’ reading, the question would be how a simulation process as in Toy Story deals with its desire and anxiety for ever more (or ‘truer’) simulation. How does it envisage the production of an environment in which its interests may be preserved, reproduced, expanded, consolidated, etc.? Simulation – the creation of truly ‘postmodern’ toys so to speak – has been fully implemented in Toy Story (1995). Toy Story was Disney’s first fully computer animated film produced by the graphics company Pixar. Each and every image, character, action in this film is a digital simulation. There is nothing ‘real’ about this film. However, visiting the various official and unofficial Toy Story websites the interested viewer could learn a great many technical details about the production of the film and the scrupulousness with which the 110 people involved in its production managed to achieve the incredibly ‘realistic’ simulation effects. The technical structure used 366 objects (including 76 characters), 25,000 storyboard drawings and 500,000 basic arithmetic operations per pixel. Apparently there are 12,384 hairs on Andy’s and 15,977 on Sid’s head (the two boys who function as the toys’ respective good and evil owners in the film) and 10,000 leaves on a typical tree in Andy’s neighbourhood. The biggest portion of realism was applied to the incredibly complex shaders that represent “human skin with as many as ten separate texture maps applied to each patch of skin to control such detail as freckles, blushing, facial hair, oil and wrinkles” (see sys.uea.ac.uk/~ah/toystory/...). What one is most compelled to admire,
(^7) This is something of which John Lasseter, director of Toy Story, is only too conscious: “If you make sure that the audience knows the world you’re creating doesn’t exist, then you can use this photorealistic technology and make it seem as believable as possible. The magic is that the audience can sit there and say: ‘I know this doesn’t exist, but… it sure looks real!’” (2001).
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therefore, is the level of realism the simulated images and their animation attained for both toys (objects) and children (toy-owners, or subjects).^8 To briefly summarize the plot: the cowboy puppet Woody, Andy’s favourite toy and leader of Andy’s toy community who, every time they are left on their own i.e. not seen by ‘humans’, come to life, is replaced, on Andy’s birthday, by a new toy, the spaceman action figure Buzz Lightyear. Buzz, greatly admired for his ‘modern’ gadgets and rational organisational skills, soon becomes the new leader. In their competing for Andy’s attention, Woody’s jealous plotting leads to both his and Buzz’s ‘fall’: Buzz is pushed out of the window and Woody is expelled from the toy community. They both have to team up to overcome their respective ‘delusions’. Woody needs to shake off his jealous self-centredness and Buzz needs to realise his ‘true identity’ as a toy-object-commodity (he, in fact, thinks that he is on a ‘real’ mission to save the planet). Both are captured by the evil kid next door, Sid, a cruel toy torturer, who owns a savage pitbull terrier, called Scud. Just when Sid is about to blow Buzz up with a rocket, Woody – whose only hope of reinstatement, reintegration and redemption lies in his rescuing Buzz – teaches the evil child a lesson in how to treat one’s possessions. He does so with the help of Sid’s disfigured toy victims (monstrous ‘hybrids’ of reassembled toy parts). He violates the most fundamental rule namely, keeping reality and fiction apart and addresses himself directly to Sid, who, ‘haunted’ by his toy crimes, runs off and is henceforth scared of toys. Buzz and Woody, now close friends, have to use all their wits, however, to be reunited with their rightful owner, because Andy is moving home. The happy ending shows them both reinstated as Andy’s favourite toys and joint leaders, who are anxiously awaiting the unpacking of Andy’s Christmas presents. The final twist is that, although no toy is being replaced this time, ‘playful’ uncertainty is anticipated when Andy receives a puppy (opening up another parallel and possible contrast between the ‘good’ child as toy and dog owner and the ‘evil’ Sid). It also prepares the public for ‘sequalisation’.
(^8) The technical realism is even greater in Toy Story 2 (1999) as John Lasseter (2000) explains: “More than 250 artists, animators and technicians including 90 technical directors and 60 animators helped create 1,200 models and 18 sets including a ten-square-block downtown area and an airport. Twice as complex to make as A Bug’s Life and ten times more advanced than Toy Story , the movie was generated on 1, computer processors with 122,699 frames used which took between ten minutes and three days to perfect.”
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kind of ‘super-subject’ who is (apparently) not a real actor in the play (Andy, who rarely shows his face, and if so, only in a passive and melancholic context; or of course the implied viewer) but rather the ‘addressee’ or destination of the toy action. This god-like position of seeing without being seen is, of course, the ideological position of power par excellence. But in the end, after having overcome or refined human nature, toys must become objects again. Ironically the uncertainty that renews the desire and guarantees the continuation of social order, at the end of the story – the always necessarily incomplete moment of closure – is produced by the non-human that escapes both the categories of object and subject, but which, at the same time, allows for the existence of humanism in the first place: the animal, the puppy, which (or who?) is neither completely toy (object) nor human (subject). The appropriation and insertion of the animal, or the non-human other, into the cosmology ensures the continuation or repetition of the drama, and announces another round in the generation game: will it be a good dog (like Slinky, Woody’s ‘well-sprung’ friend, who, like him and Buzz have been commercialized in ‘real life’, as ‘real’ toys for ‘real’ kids, by Mattel) or a bad dog (like Sid’s pitbull Scud)? Will the (hi)story repeat the Fall or enact progress towards moral elevation? As demonstrated by the story itself: it always does both. Its desired end cannot accomplish itself because it cannot imagine anything else than its own repetition. This is the point where the ‘logic’ of the story rejoins the ‘postmodern’, outlined above. Toy Story ’s ironic motto of “to infinity and beyond”, is a reflection of the (postmodern) critique of modernity, in the words of Peter Sloterdijk:
On the one hand, modernity can perceive only the worst after itself; on the other hand, the worst lies precisely on its own course, which it prevents itself from leaving, because it holds no alternative to itself as thinkable. (Sloterdijk 1989: 292; my translation)
But how exactly is recognition and thus the distinction between reality and fiction, between true and false identity, between good and bad – in short, the fundamental principles of ‘modern’ liberal humanism – achieved? The answer can be found in the central sequence of Toy Story, which also constitutes the turning point and prepares the dénouement of the ‘play’, i.e. when the viewer is released from fiction and returned to ‘serious’ reality. It is the most important ‘pedagogic’ moment of the story and the one in which (mediated, disneyfied) ‘society’ reinscribes and relegitimates itself.
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Rowan Woods, giving his “private view” on Toy Story in Sight and Sound (1999), admires the “reality” and well-roundedness of the toy characters, as opposed to “action toys which can do anything, perform any function”, and declares Buzz’s recognition scene as his favourite moment of the film:
There are many great scenes, but one I particularly enjoy is where Buzz has just realised that he really is a toy (having seen a commercial for himself on television). He’s in a state of terrible despair and then he is grabbed by Sid’s sister, who dresses him up and plays with him in a tea party situation. She leaves and Woody arrives to find Buzz sitting at the party completely drunk on tea. Woody starts to try to persuade Buzz that there really is hope. It’s a beautiful scene. (Woods 1999: 62-63)
What is striking here is the serious passion of the description. Just like Buzz’s dialectical process of recognition that leads to a level of higher consciousness and ‘new hope’, Woods’s reading of the story does precisely the same thing for him, it confirms the sublime moment of losing and finding oneself in fictional reality, in this moment of transition that constitutes the separation between fiction or simulation and reality. How else would one be able to differentiate between the playful and the serious? Why else should Woods state that he loves the idea that “the toy community is a complex hierarchy of groups and sub-groups?” Toy Story functions only because it toys with the very idea of the story and story-telling. It is at once a story of toys (a story about and acted out, determined by toys) and a narrative that toys with the idea of the story as such; it is merely a ‘toy’ (i.e. simulated) story, and therefore has a very complex relation to the ‘real’ indeed. It is a story that plays with the fictionality of stories – a metafictional story. Instead of effacing the boundaries between reality and fiction through simulation, metafiction rather tries to confirm or renew both by redrawing or re-imagining these or other boundaries which have never been absolute but mere constructions or fictions, in the first place. The recognition theme in Toy Story I (and equally in Toy Story II ) is a very good example of this. There are in fact three instances of recognition in Toy Story I and two in Toy Story II , which serve as models that allow the viewing subject to construct privileged forms of identity: Woody has to learn that only (male) friendship leads to the brotherhood of man and that a leader or true hero of humanity needs to be the most human of all and act as a moral example (a ‘fiction’ that is being repeated almost every day in ‘adult’ politics); Buzz has to learn that technology without idealism leads to the dehumanisation of the world, in other words, he needs to learn the
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his claim that he can ‘really’ fly, his technologically-founded belief in progress ‘towards infinity and beyond’, as well as the realisation of his truly being imaginary, pushes him towards ‘testing’ that reality: for the first time he ‘deliberately’ tries to fly through the open window, back to Andy. He crashes, breaks, loses an arm, and the fact that he cannot actually fly shatters his imaginary identity. This time it is Woody’s turn to instill a new sense of ‘reality’ transformed (through idealism, to be precise) in Buzz until he regains a purified, more realistic and more ‘refined’ sense of self. Only after realising that he is not real is he enough of a realist to be imaginative. In the end, through his belief in the common cause of serving as a good toy, he can, by a sheer act of will, fly, after all. Just when he and Woody are about to lose their owner Andy for good, Buzz ‘takes off’ and safely lands both of them in Andy’s car. Thus imagination (idealism or the refusal of ‘mere’ materialism) is confirmed as being more realistic than reality. Imagination is the necessary process of arriving at an identitarian and communal form of reality. It is nevertheless a process that relies on the transformation of (material) reality, i.e. it must have material effects. What ensures that this process can really take place is the objectiveness of the object, or the peculiar ontology of the toy. This objectiveness is of course guaranteed by nothing other than signification, signifying practices, and language in particular. Playing, in Toy Story I and II, is playing with signification. It is certainly no coincidence that the first thing Buzz ‘learns’ after his disillusionment is to pun (when Woody says he needs a hand, Buzz throws his broken arm to him). For the other toys, on the other hand, playing with language has been part and parcel of their imaginary community from the very beginning (see the use of names; the competition between Woody and Mr Draw in the opening scene of Toy Story I ; Mr Potatohead’s sense of humour throughout, etc.). The playful usage of language which is often (erroneously) attributed to the child exclusively and hence seen as ‘childish’, as opposed to factual and transparent, ‘serious’, use of language in the adult world, is here allegorically employed as a necessary rite of passage, or a mirror of recognition. It is by provisionally accepting the play of language as constitutive of identity that one becomes a ‘real’ toy, and by implication, it is by forgetting or ignoring this playfulness that one becomes a serious adult. It might be argued that the modern(ist) ‘residue’ in Toy Story I lies in the fact that it depends too much on its viewer and his or her competent reading to function. Its appeal to an external, ultimately
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unsimulatable or unscreenable (one might say unframable) reality is much more urgent than in a film relying less on techniques of ‘simulation’. But there is of course the main ‘postmodern(ist)’ moment of the sublime, the undecidable ‘otherness’ in the process of doubling or rather the switch from one side of the screen to the other, as exemplified in Buzz’s recognition scene. The hyper-real simulation implies that the ‘real’ necessarily ex-sists in the unrepresentability of the switching – or, one could say, reality seems to zap. What exactly takes place between channels, what is it that resists simulation? In this respect, the animated ‘thingness’ of the living toys could be read as sign of a deep anxiety about a loss of control (over reality, over childhood) caused by Disney’s animation revolution which now threatens to devour its children. And this is also the point at which a closer look at Toy Story II can help to explain the ‘crisis’ of postmodernism and the question of ‘post-theory’.
Toy Story II – Mourning the Postmodern and Post-Theoretical Melancholy
Toy Story I could be said to be toying with the idea that “in postindustrial society things are no longer primary” (Brown 1998: 960). The autonomy of things displayed or rather unleashed in Toy Story I can only be recaptured/controlled at the price of moralising and thus contradicting the ‘liberal humanist’ message of ‘believe in yourself and you can fly’, because ultimately the film seems to say:
‘Take good care of your toys’. In other words, the film instructs its viewers against misuse – against irregular exchange – as though the toy industry should have the final say on the shape of the world and of the world to come. (Brown 1998: 964)^10
What separates Toy Story I from Toy Story II is mostly a change in tone. While in the first part of the sequel Disney/Pixar seem to exude confidence through their self-referentiality expressed in the simulatory nature and ‘photo-realism’ of the film, Toy Story II displays anxiety. The main theme is that of toys growing obsolete, of being discarded by their owners. There is ample nostalgia or unease in the much darker closure of the second part. The reaffirmation of Buzz’s and Woody’s friendship despite Andy’s inevitable growing up leaves the viewer
(^10) This problematic seems to be thematised more directly in Small Soldiers (1999) in which the toy industry is clearly part of the industrial-military complex.
