#animatedness

Like animatedness, irritation, envy, anxiety, stuplimity, and paranoia – nonstrategic affects characterized by weak intentionality and characteristic of the situation of scriveners – disgust does not so much solve the dilemma of social powerlessness as diagnose it powerfully. But while all of the negative affects we have discussed call attention to this problem, the poetics of disgust seems to have drawn us closer to the domain of political theory, perhaps even of political commitment, than these others. In its intense and unambivalent negativity, disgust thus seems to represent the outer limit or threshold of what I have called ugly feelings, preparing us for more instrumental or political efficacious emotions. It therefore brings us to the edge of this project on the aesthetics of minor affects, marking the furthest it can go.

On one hand, animatedness points to restrictions placed on spontaneous movement and activity […] On the other hand, the affect can also be read as highlighting the elasticity of the body being animated […] the affect manages to fuse signs of the body’s subjection to power with sighs of its ostensive freedom.

...to be ‘animated’ in American culture is to be racialized in some way, even if animation’s affective connotations of vivacity or zealousness do not cover ever racial or ethnic stereotype […] animation remains central to the production of the racially marked subject [...] it is the cultural representation of the African-American that most visibly harnesses the affective qualities of liveliness, effusiveness, spontaneity, and zeal to a disturbing racial epistemology, and makes these variants of ‘animatedness’ function as bodily (hence self-evident) signs of the raced subjects' naturalness or authenticity