Outer Worlds: Mediated Aesthetics and Alethic Truth

Premised on its construction and fabrication, much of the debate around animated non-fiction has focused on its capacity to engage with the ‘fantastical’, ‘illusory’ and ‘internal’. However, many films adopt an approach that dynamically hybridizes the photographic and drawn, occupying an intermediate ontological state. This suggests non-fictional animation can’t only be defined according to the assumed exclusion of indexical materials, or it’s more explicitly subjective, ‘interior’ tendencies.
Supported by the philosophical position of critical realism, the paper will examine the capacity of the hybridisation of the real and mediated to address the non-empirical levels of the external world. Critical realism argues for the independence of a complex, layered, reality; whilst recognising the contingency and fallibility of knowledge. This resists the dualism of the positivist belief in an observable and measurable reality, and approaches that foreground the subjectivism of language and discourse. In this context, hybrid animation is seen to balance the empirical and the theoretical, and facts and values, offering a model of reality that is located in the relationship between the indexical and the iconic. In a challenge to unitary notions of what it means to be objective or subjective, this points to the recognition of hybrid approaches as a philosophical principle with a particular position in respect of realism and politics. In relation to the strategy of defamiliarization, the paper argues that the dialectical juxtapositions of a hybrid aesthetic can function as a mode of inference towards the real, but empirically undetectable structures generating actual events. I will suggest that this can provide access to what critical realists have called alethic truth, a truth that is arrived at through an active, imaginative and intersubjective apprehension of the stratified and social world.