The Animation of Contemporary Subjectivity in Tino Sehgal’s Ann Lee

Abstract

In Tino Sehgal’s Ann Lee, the title character, a twelve-year-old girl, entered the white, cube-like space in which I waited with a dozen more people. She explained she was part of a tradition of Ann Lee characters that/who were animated through different media and asked us two questions: ‘What’s the difference between a sign and melancholia?’ and ‘Would you rather be too busy or not busy enough?’. Her utterances and demeanour were entirely strange.

In this article, I suggest that the two questions are the crux of the work and reveal Ann Lee as the subject par excellence of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. I begin by looking at the history of the work and drawing out the connections between animism, animation, and capitalism. Following a close examination of the questions, I propose they point to the melancholy of our times: the first reveals a subject that suffers emotionally because it no longer knows how to ‘do the social’ and does not ‘feel at home’, but instead feels constantly displaced, audited and measured, while the second, as a supplement to the first, expresses its suffering that arises from the imposition of precarity and unmanageable workloads.

I argue that the questions and the work as a whole point to the manner in which the contemporary subject is animated and to the pathologies of our time, results of capitalism’s acceleration, overproduction of signs, precarity, and appropriation of animism as a resource for the economization of social relations. Following a consideration of proposed pharmaca – in the curative sense of the word – for this predicament, I question the potential pharmacological role of animism and suggest that Sehgal’s Ann Lee has the capacity to animate us by setting in motion the ‘soul’, again, by allowing us to imagine, dream, and desire a world beyond the present.

Notes

1 The following are from my fieldnotes and recollection of the work.

2 In the context of neoliberal capitalism, the term ‘economization’ refers to the casting of all activities and areas of life in an ‘exclusively economic frame’ (Brown 2015: 62), thereby marketizing them and treating human beings as ‘market actors’ (31).

3 Pharmakon as that which, depending on its dosage, can be a remedy or a poison (Derrida 1981).

4 From the Greek adjective noētikos.

5 That is, the control and modulation of consciousness, as opposed to biopower, which refers to the discipline of bodies or regulation of life processes.