Abstract

From film and television to architecture and even to the global market economy, we evolve and dissolve in a computer generated culture which is increasingly possessed by the omnipotent spirit of "animation." With this dissertation, I want to locate the modern origins of animation as a collective fantasy by inquiring into discourses of simulated life and movement--- Lebendigkeit, Beweglichkeit---which evolved from the equally anxious and analogously "animated" psychological landscape of the preceding fin-de-siecle. ;Originated in the "enslaved" columns of Vitruvius, incorporated in Renaissance doctrines of proportion, echoed in classical theories of physiognomy and caractere and scientifically researched in the formulations of empathy theory in nineteenth-century German aesthetics, discussions of pneumatism, spiritism or animism of forms have proved to be implicitly central in the foundational discourses of art and architectural theory. However, starting with the physiological conception of the sublime in the eighteenth-century, the "body metaphor" mutated from a harmonious exterior morphology into an organic inner pathology affecting the organisms of statues, buildings and modern metropolises. Within this shifting ground, in fin-de-siecle Europe, the artistic drive, Alois Riegl's Kunstwollen, presents an inflection, marking the shift from empathy theory to what Wilhelm Worringer calls "the uncanny pathos for the animation of the inorganic." My main argument, is that empathy, the ability for identification with the external world, was fundamentally repressed by modern egos, thus, it had to return metamorphically projected and reified into the inorganic form of the animistic artifacts of twentieth-century modernism. ;The dissertation has two sections. The first deals with animation in turn of the century historiography and the second presents the practice of animation in early twentieth-century avant-garde movements in Germany and France. Moving from mythology to history and from psychoanalysis to social anthropology and natural history, I rehearse the effort of modern discourse to invent new totemic orders between crystals, trees, snakes, houses and human bodies. Bringing together Warburg's nymphs and Leger's nudes, Ovid's Daphne and Mies's skyscrapers, this project ultimately attempts to replicate a Mnemosyne atlas of the inorganic fragments and reanimated fossils of modernism's "living" archaeology