Introduction
TEXT IS FOR PLACEMENT ONLY The sound animated cartoon in the 1920s and 30s can be read as a space of transduction for a media‑saturated collective imagination. It’s one that is socially and psychically charged with the impact of early 20th century industrialization. In terms of desire, the scopophilia, escapism, cathartic violence, and humor direct a reinvention of production, labor and individuation in a world transformed by an accelerated market economy, and the beginning of a bourgeois academic love affair with psychoanalysis.
FPOts of Frankfurt school critics Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, analysis of the animated cartoon plays an instrumental role in a critical dialogue examining the mass culture industry as an extension of capitalism’s potential to alienate workers and exploit their labor. However, conversely, those same cartoons as publicly-viewed spectacles, raise the issue of collectivity in mass entertainment, and its potential to create political solidarity as an intervention in this alienation process.