Puppet Theory: The Mechanical Infrastructure of Personhood

This dissertation begins from a rather simple observation: puppets, with varying degrees of success, replicate people. As a predominantly anthropomorphic project, American puppetry in the 20th and 21st centuries borrows from various conceptions of what a person is in order to convincingly reproduce or renegotiate these dynamics through artificial, mechanized means. I offer a study of the materialist backstories of four puppetry traditions—ventriloquism, marionetting, protest puppetry and Muppetry—in order to bring into view their submerged histories and to attend to the ways these histories re-emerge when these mechanized objects and the techniques for animating them are engaged in performance. Personhood, within these puppetry traditions, is rendered distinctly mechanical: it entails a set of operations that produce a figure with a recognizable set of expressive repertoires—a repertoire that is necessarily limited. The puppet's mechanics not only teach us the minimum requirements to believably seem like a person, but also those aspects of personhood we could just as well do without. I argue that puppetry allows us to see the mechanical infrastructure of personhood as well as the often violent and oppressive means by which this infrastructure is mechanically sutured to bodies. I offer puppet theory as a method for tracking the ways that puppets materialize the logic of what makes a person a person and thus make available new kinds of thought for how personhood could be imagined differently.