Towards unbearable lightness, or topsy-turvy technology in the new Pooh

Abstract

This essay critiques the physics-based aesthetics that have come to dominate digital blockbusters and Triple-A video games, while unearthing an unlikely alternative to their ‘Newtonian’ phenomenology in Walt Disney Company's 2-D animated feature Winnie the Pooh (2011). Here, I argue that, despite belonging to disparate genres and market niches, digital productions from Toy Story to Grand Theft Auto deny their abstract technosocial premises by rooting the sensorium in violent acrobatics and proximal physical interactions. In doing so, I suggest, such media both foreclose encounters with the abstract processes that condition contemporary life and proffer falsely tangible grounds for a publically divested network culture in which material rootedness ceases to afford the leverage that socially meaningful action requires. Winnie the Pooh, by contrast, sidesteps the reigning digital Newtonianism and, however unwittingly, envisions a more imaginative and just relationship to technology. As I show, Pooh not only flaunts animation1s abstract tools to toy with matter and meaning across diegetic and nondiegetic registers; it also challenges neoliberal privation by imagining such play as a topsy-turvy form of collective care.