<<TRANSMATHOME

0.1 Horror...

This book is an exploratory work. It posits a human body in front of a television screen exhibiting images of extreme horror in order to theorize a new mode of experiencing one’s own flesh and eventually one’s self.  This book is about film, yet it is adamantly not a film book. It is about subjectivity, yet it is against the idea of affirming or inventing new forms of subjectivity. And it is feminist, yet it includes medical texts and other discourses historically problematic for feminism. It is, then, a book of contradictions. But the aim of this book makes these contradictions clear. This book (somewhat ambitiously) sets out to theorize the beginning, or the first steps, of a different mode of existing in the world. Its most important aim is to theorize subjectivity as both immanently embodied and transformative, a body becoming without ever being.

This book is set, however, in a banal, domestic sphere - in front of the television. Demarcated from traditional film theory which is emphatically cinematic theory, the video, DVD audience is the most important here, though not exclusively or anti-cinematically, because in the past twenty-five years the private viewing realm both allows greater access to films, a certain wider volition in film choice and their screenings, and also reduced observation of what is being watched, so that what we choose to watch can be as private as we desire. Hence although most of the theories I will present will be easily transcribable to the cinema experience, their inception and many of the nuances of their situated suggestions are explicitly related to the private and easily accessible world of the home cinema. The ‘televisual’ realm takes the viewing experience away from a notion of ‘cinema’ as an ontological practice and object of analysis toward a more proliferative idea of visual enjoyment. Television-based viewing is different to cinematically located viewing. From the pragmatics of finding certain films on at a cinema to the public/private dichotomy of the viewing experience the two and their various deflections (public video, web trawling, solitary cinema viewing) cinema and television are analyzed in the following text through their commonalties rather than their specificities.  The link is the act of watching film. And the key to this book is possibility, projective propulsion of the self. This is not television phenomenology or sociological viewing theory that differentiates television viewing from cinematic, because this book is about the desire for images, in any environment, that affect the viewer and launch them on a trajectory of becoming-otherwise. I do actively encourage the reader, however, to rent and view and think their own pleasures, perversions and integrated subjective death as a result of viewing the strange, the gory, even the banal, the boring, but always precluded by the desire to watch.

Televisual representations are considered by traditional definitions of aesthetics to be the lowest level of visual ‘art’ - European gore films. I intend to utilize the relatively under-theorized genre of Italian gore film to posit a tangible space and moment whereby we, as viewing subjects, may set into motion our becoming, representing unbound flesh instead of integrated bodies. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are the most important theorists in my analysis of this material. Their theory of becoming will serve as the model of thinking experiential existence toward which my viewing body shall aspire. Italian gore films exist at the intersecting point of thinking being and becoming because they demand a change in the viewer as a result of the affect of horror. In feminist terms, any devaluing of the traditional body of ‘humanity’, that being the white male healthy body, represents a point of potential rupture for the culture which reiterates such a body in every discursive system, be it science or film theory. In the ‘molecular’ theories of Deleuze and Guattari, the integrated, singular, spatially ‘molar’ subject - dominantly represented in traditional philosophy as the white, imminently omniscient male - is repudiated for molecular configurations of being temporally. The feminist [1] and Deleuzian/Guattarian readings of subjectivity both take the non-dominant – the minoritarian – as the first step towards different modes of being in the world, but the two philosophies are not necessarily complementary. My reading of films takes a viewer as the first minoritarian to represent the dismantling of traditional subjectivity, and feminism and Deleuze and Guattari will mediate this viewer toward thinking a new molecular form of being, yet neither philosophy will be more or less important in this project than the other. I am not looking for narrative becomings but for potentials toward becoming and therefore the importance of feminism and Deleuze and Guattari, in this work, are their mediation rather than their (impossible) conflation.

One of the attractions of Italian gore films is that they escape a mandatory reading through film theory. They defy narrative cohesion, either by presenting surreal, nonsensical narrative, as in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (Italy, 1977) or by offering no narrative at all, quintessentially seen in such horror films as Lucio Fulci’s …E Tu Vivrai Nel Terrore! L’Aldila. (‘The Beyond’, Italy, 1981). The majority of traditional film theory and less recent feminist film theory posits identification and the ability to read the symbols of film within the narrative structure as the prime mode of interpreting film. Horror films especially have been theorized within feminist film criticism as representing an oscillation between male identification with the slasher and a female viewer’s identification either with the male (Mulvey, although not specifically for horror film) or with the monster (Williams). Ideas which perpetuate masculinist identificatory readings of horror film, such as catharsis (Creed) or becoming masculine to survive (Clover), [2] exhibit a desire for feminists to look at horror films in new, less derogatory ways, however these readings remain within the traditional scope of film theory. Even such hardcore films as those analyzed within this book have been given academic attention, such as Mikita Brottman’s Offensive Films: Towards an Anthropology of Cinema Vomitif [3] . This book takes neither the screen nor audience identification with the screen characters as object of analysis. It explores instead the viscerality of viewing. [4] Viscerality is not simply a reduction to viscera; hence it is not just viewing films that make us sick to the stomach. The viscera here stands for all parts of the body, both repressed (such as internal organs) and expressed (such as eyes and mouth), and the ways in which the body is affected by images, not narrative. Affect is a prime term in this text. It describes the irreversible and qualitative full corporeal change in subjectivity indivisible from a body’s environment, actions and psychical embodiment. It is a means by which we can think the temporality of the flesh, existence in time rather than subjectivity immobilized in space. Where effect insinuates an exterior and hermeneutic agency influencing or causing a describable result in a level zero concept of the subject, affect encompasses the essential ambiguity and multi-directional forces of both the interior of a subject and its environment – an assemblage of flesh, self and surround. Effect also suggests the capacity to return to the previous feeling or state after the effect has subsided. Affect expresses all experience, feeling and intensity as having been and not able to be forgotten or reversed but forming and informing a subject’s future, albeit neither transcribably nor predictably.  Visual culture stands both as constantly forming and formed by subjects in the world and also as dominant mode of desire, pleasure and knowledge. Its role in the affectuation of everyday life is both consciously and unconsciously pervasive. At best, however, the affect of extreme visual images in this book will be a motivational force toward a volatile becoming-otherwise of the multi-forced assemblage that exists in and as an individual subject.

Presumably in gore films images horrify, but within an affect of horror there lies pleasure. Pleasure is an important factor in this book because, despite the fact it is utilized by culture in reference to an identifiably positive effect, the pleasures of horror create a sensational affect, a psychically corporeal (where mind and body are not spliced) altering moment. Where phenomenology leaves the viewing body, at the site of analysis, is where the socially active and hence ethical body begins. The viewing body in this book extends beyond the site of analysis to concern ways we can think the future of an active body and subjectivity. The body affected is altered irrevocably and is something different at each moment of affect. The horror of Italian gore film in this book, thus, not only affects the flesh but hurls the embodied self ‘into orbit’, [5] or upon a ‘line of flight’, [6] both of which are explicit Deleuzian/Guattarian modes of becoming.

In order to claim this book as a feminist Deleuzian/Guattarian text, issues of real bodies, real suffering and real women must be included in the consideration of the validity of becoming. For who is becoming most dangerous? For whom is it a tactic for liberation? And from where is becoming a departure? These questions place becoming through televisual affect as a process, which must consider the particularities of each body watching, their history and what they have to gain or lose by putting themselves into orbit. For this reason the book is not simply an exploration of the cinematic body but a striving towards an ethics of such a body and its future potential. Where other Deleuzio-Guattarian film theorists such as Steven Shaviro can see post-modernist theory as already at work in culture I do not. Shaviro states “Precisely because postmodernism dissolves any notion of fixed or personal identity or of an integral and self-contained subject, fragments and traces of subjectivity (or better of ‘personality’) are strewn more or less everywhere in the postmodern landscape.” [7] For women, as for racially-othered, sexuality-othered or other forms of othered bodies, this phantasmatic personality or subjectivity is yet to be achieved in culture. Shaviro’s astute summary of the abandon arising from postmodernism is precisely not only my own dissatisfaction with it, but also Deleuze and Guattari’s attack on the theoretical movement. Postmodernism is, however, often where film theorists turn for ‘new’ readings and interpretations of signification in film. And indeed for ‘new’ ways of understanding signification itself - a mode of reading film where any interpretation goes, as the signifier loses its fixed meaning and exists as multiple meanings for individuals that compete but which are no more or less true than each other, (this may seem a more positive way of understanding film). Certainly for feminism the lack of solidarity in film theory has transformed the singular focus of censorship feminism in the sixties into the more liberal analysis of misogynistic film texts as signifying more than one thing to different readers. Postmodernism as a tactical form of reading which demands a mandate for neither truth nor conformity, but simply for multiplicity, has its place in film analysis. In his comparison of postmodernism and the thought of Deleuze and Guattari Philip Goodchild locates the major difference between the two in this catalogue of multiplicities. In a comparison of Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari Goodchild points to the emptiness of postmodernism due to its inability to connect with its own multiplicities. He states:

By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari are less interested in overlap and contradictions between territories than the ways in which such different territories can interact, affect and deterritorialize each other. The difference between Lyotard, on the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other, is therefore a matter of strategic emphasis: difference as against synthesis. [8]

The multiplicities of postmodernism exist as Shaviro suggests they do, as fragments and traces upon the postmodern landscape. Although this may elucidate a tautology in postmodern thinking, these fragments exist as wholes, as unified and hermeneutic entities, because they do not belong in any one rational narrative, even though they remain fragmentary within a larger whole, such as society or culture. Two problems arise in this system of thinking for both feminism and for Deleuze and Guattari. The first is the dissolving of any notion of communitarianism, or connectivity or solidarity. Especially for oppressed groups, the fragmentary existence of knowledges and subjects which postmodernism creates can, at its worst, simply refer to an extreme form of egocentrism which may reaffirm the success of the traditional white male subject, even if he is now a white male post-modern subject. There is evidence of this already occurring when we look towards precisely who is formulating postmodernism itself - Lyotard, Baudrillard and many other Western, white male philosophers. Contrary to postmodernism’s construction of multiplicity, difference does not need to exist in order to enhance the space between people, as feminism has proven. Goodchild cites the “brief but vehement attack which Guattari made on ‘postmodernism’ in the form of the thought of Lyotard and Baudrillard: Guattari attacked the ‘social abandonism’ that makes collective political action impossible by multiplying differences.” [9] Guattari’s anxiety is an important and urgent one, not only in reference to political solidarity, but also in reference to what the meaning of difference might be. Difference does not always have to mean dividuated. Multiplying difference in space does not always address temporal differentiation, the becoming of the subject rather than difference between subjects. Postmodernism makes difference socially democratic, in that it refers to the differences within everyone, and this is Guattari’s problem with difference. Such a postmodern version of difference is not necessarily destructive, but it is a theory which, implemented now, may run the risk of wiping over certain subjects’ specific history. An ‘anything goes’ version of difference oscillates a hyper-specific account of difference and differing with a soupy homogenization of difference itself as unremarkable due to its proliferation. Difference as a philosophical term must exist simultaneously as a political tactic where multiplicity considers the relation between multiple forces rather than multiplicities considered ontologically independent of their relation with each other.

Culturally, difference has more often than not referred to a negative form of being, which historically is an oppressed form of being. Difference is not yet the democratic term that postmodernism claims it to be. Difference from the dominant paradigm is often enough a political alliance, which does not destroy differences operating within such an alliance. However this form of political solidarity is as marginalizing as it is solidifying and therefore excludes any dominant subject from ever needing to form a politically transformative alliance. Feminists of difference have theorized solidarity as that which celebrates difference, specificity and the potential for transformation of the subject within a politically marginal group. Recognition of cultural difference within feminism, disagreement and in-fighting has been productive rather than dismantling. [10] Difference in feminism creates connections and new syntheses, in to use Deleuzio-Guattarian terminology, rather than the maintenance of the integrity of difference as multiple and hermeneutic. There is no need to see difference as terminally dividuated, because to do so refuses any possibility of a social ethic. The fragments of postmodernism exist as a totalizing effect in space, where new ideas overlap others without necessarily transforming them. On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari’s connections and feminism’s version of difference within solidarity both exist upon the temporal plane where transformation is the key element of success. This creates an ethical space because it de-totalizes knowledges by connecting them uniquely with other knowledges in order to transform all knowledge, and to move the politic through time as a becoming rather than leave it in space as an ideology.

The second problem of postmodernism’s creation of fragmentary knowledges and subjects is that such hermeneutic fragments have no history, hence no accountability and no acknowledgement of oppression, suffering or domination, as expressed by Jane Flax among many others. Postmodernism dissolves validated subjectivity before women had any claim to it. Oppressive constructions which posit a certain kind of body as the body of reason, knowledge and hence subjectivity, prevent women from, essentially, having any form of modernity to ‘post’. Women’s selfhood, like their bodies, was already epistemologically strewn everywhere in the landscape before postmodernism arrived. Postmodernism represents for feminism an ambivalent set of theories. On one level, the idea that no integrated subjectivity encompassed in a particular kind of body is valid allows women to feel less othered, even theoretically fashionably progressive. However, the idea that male philosophers can colonize the othered-ness of women - as a form of philosophical transcendence of traditional modes of being - both refutes real bodies and their histories of pain and oppression, and claims that women stand at the frontier of all ‘othered’ bodies, all of whom can be easily appropriated. The female appropriation of male subjectivity that brings with it equality consideration, freedom from violence and sexual predation and the freedom to be ontologically known on our own terms is not so simple. The particularities of the viewing bodies in this book are considered at every turn, not simply because they may refer to women’s bodies, but they refer to what these bodies, in their lines of flight, are flying from. One of the most interesting aspects of the lines of flight Deleuze and Guattari posit in their thinking existence as temporal multi-connective trajectory is that these lines can only ever fly from that point where they began, so a line of flight is not escaping from something entirely but a connection between the has-been and the becoming. In this way the histories of bodies and oppression are not simply forgotten or repudiated, but are the very nexus for the flight, which, nonetheless, leaves such an oppressive system behind.

As a project that utilizes film, this book refers to the creation of a space towards a different mode of being, no matter how minute. The films under discussion occur only in order to alter their viewer, not simply as texts which refer to and reflect society. Traditional analysis of the signification of meaning within postmodern film theory more often refers to what Goodchild states as Lyotard’s project of ‘differing’; “Differing regimes of representation conflict and contradict over a space which they construct in different ways.” [11] Each theorist posits her or his theory as a new, correct analysis of, not simply the film that they analyze but the space in which that film exists as a cultural and textual entity. My use of film is as a line of flight, not as a reflection of that from which the subject flies. For this reason my analysis of film does not refer to a new way of reading film that can be catalogued within the multiple other ways of reading film as a different option. This use of film is towards becoming; it is primarily towards the change of the viewing subject and for this reason is not a reading of film at all, but rather, a suggestion towards becoming something different for the viewer, essentially thinking the viewer differently. Because visual culture creates most of us as viewing subjects constantly inundated with images for all purposes from entertainment to epistemological comprehension, thinking the viewing body differently need not simple refer to a body watching film, but can extend to apply to sighted social subjectivity within visual culture. Film becomes secondary in so much as it is the ignition or the agitation towards making new connections, productions and plateaus of immanence - a specifically Deleuzian and Guattarian use of film. In my schema, the line of flight is made concrete, simple and domestic. It is the smallest beginning for Deleuze and Guattari’s massive and radical project.