Pleasure, Perversion and Death 1.4 Technophiliatic Pleasure in Viewing

In the realm of a body watching television and other technomorphic bodies, pleasure’s disparate definition may be explored. The drive to watch, especially to watch as a drive, before the subject matter being watched is considered, means that the pleasure of watching poses both a risk and unpredictable results. [68] Primarily the subject positions itself in front of the technic apparatus, usually in a linear manner which insinuates a mirroring between apparatus and subject, a movement towards becoming unified with, or to be aligned with, the object of desire. The television is off. Whatever erupts onto the screen when the television is on is, therefore, by default, also a part of the object of desire. A program, a chosen film, is a risk for the subject’s pleasure if it has not been viewed before, whether or not the subject wants to watch. There are two categories of pleasure which come from subject-matter watched after the primary pleasure of watching (which, like the pleasure Ryle cited earlier of digging) occurs concurrent with and indivisible from the actual event of watching or knowing one is about to watch. These are 1) Pleasure in surprise, in event unfamiliar, or, importantly, lack of pleasure due to the subject matter, which may range, similar to the example of sexual pleasure used earlier, from the horrific to the boring. 2) Pleasure in repetition, viewing that which is familiar and receiving gratification from the image which both recalls the memory of earlier pleasure from the image as well as the current pleasure the image affords. For the most part, and especially in the example of the computer, where net surfing is about uncovering the new, discovering image by chance, the viewer is not familiar with the subject matter. Familiarity, however, is a slippery world of its own. To choose a video, to attend a film is to presume oneself to be familiar with what type of film it is; genre, topos (Hollywood, Art house), intellectual demand (trashy, ‘arty’). In actuality the knowledge of the film before the film is an untrustworthy perception of packaging rather than a familiarity with text-to-be. Frequently, especially in the restraints of a cinema, where darkness and public spectacle make the viewer more self aware, the only pleasure experienced is the perception of the film’s cessation.

At home the VCR can be turned off, the perceived world exorcised from the room. The subject can watch in fragments, the images can be muted, the film distorted into non-narrative, fast-forward, and stop. The body watching becomes invisible; it is not a potential object to be watched while watching as it is at the cinema. If the subject is familiar with the viewed text from repetitive viewing there is still little guarantee that the pleasure may be predicted in its affect. Lacan states: “... the regulation of form... is governed, not only by the subject’s eye, but by his expectations, his movement, his grip, his muscular and visceral emotion - in short, his constitutive presence, directed in what is called his total intentionality.” [69] All these features would effect not only the premier viewing of the screened text but repeated viewing also, the possible difference in its repetition. To believe that familiarity between the eye and the image assures a familiar pleasure (or unpleasure) fails to take into account basic and rudimentary differences in the ‘muscular and visceral emotion’ of the subject, the fallibility of eye and brain in conforming to one another. It also fails to account for the subject’s psychical expectation and suspicious ability in accurately remembering pleasure. Such beliefs indicate the scientific reception of watching as assured repetition rather than an unpredictable change in the subject from one time to the next.

Neurophysiology’s insistence that all pleasure runs along the same tributaries as it did the time before, be they full corporeal indications or seratonic tributaries seems suspicious. The definition of repetition alludes to dilution or change in experience. The expectation of repetitious pleasure is the trust of the self with the reason of the brain. Deleuze states that two features constitute repetition “It is the constitution in time of the past, the present... (i.e. before and during).” [70] Future, although that which allows the subject to look forward to the next moment of pleasure, is redundant in this equation. Deleuze’s connecting of time and anticipation to masochistic repetition in particular points to the necessary pain of waiting for pleasure as well as waiting for pleasure itself being a form of potential pain. The reason for this potential pain is that our trust in the logic that suggests we will always experience the same reaction to the same situation, is flawed. The ‘during’ must be, each time, different to the ‘before’, which is the anticipation or drive of pleasure. The before, contracted to an immanent because no before is truly accessible after the fact, is shakily remembered at best. It is assumed the pleasure will trickle through the established tributaries upon seeing the same images, that each time the image is awaited it will fulfil an exact repetitious function. But the body, and its role towards pleasure, is seen as baser than the pleasure of reason. Yet the body both alters and experiences the pleasure in its tensions, its movements and its visceral emotion. At the most basic level a bad mood means a bad movie in spite of the movie itself and the drive toward it the subject may exhibit. Turning back to the physiological equation sensation + perception = affect, what Lacan states as the pre-existing condition itself is an important and noticeably absent term. Its absence is a representation of the absence of the flesh in the psychical equation. Before sensation exists this tension, this grip, as well as this corporeal expectation, of the film, of affect, of the desire to watch at all. So pleasure arrives, if ever, after what could tentatively be suggested as a readiness for pleasure, rather than as event which disrupts a blank canvas of emotion upon the body of the subject.

Lacan’s ‘visceral’ reaction espouses an important and interesting means by which to begin to theorize the subject watching film as non-platonic or didactic. Rather than the film having a direct intervention on the ‘mind’ of the viewer, why cannot (and surely why would not) the film, especially a horror film which itself is concerned with viscera and viscerality, affect changes in the flesh of the viewer. Is not the term ‘gut reaction’ more than just a metaphor? I am not suggesting there is currently evidence or any empirical theory of the reactivity of the viscera in respect to watching horror film, nor am I suggesting this would validate my suggestion. I am instead advocating a making meaningful and perhaps even visual, of the internal activity of the body, the carnality of the viewing subject. Because I am not a medical theorist, I do not claim to know what affect occurs within and through (but not necessarily as posited opposite or polar to without) the subject who watches images of gore, horror and carnality. But the focus of film theory on the mind of the viewer, and the platonic relationship between viewer and film and the affect on the viewer’s cerebral reaction to pleasure, indicates bias towards the self of the subject instead of aspiring (which is probably all theory can do at this stage in cultural discourse) to a theory(ies) that attempts to encompass a carnal and psychical viewer without splitting the two into a hierarchical order, or indeed at all. It seems as if the body on screen in horror film entirely replaces the body off screen, the ob-scene body who watches.

Barbara Creed, in The Monstrous Feminine devotes a whole book to the image of the abject body, the viscerally reactive body and specifically the female/maternal body, but only on-screen. Her claim is that much of modern horror is aimed at further perpetuating the psychoanalytic fear of the abject, voraciously consuming, sexually terrifying, and specifically embodied feminine/mother. In her discussion of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (US, 1973), read through Kristeva’s theory of the abject, Creed states:

Creed’s reading of the utterly abject body of the possessed young girl is accurate in its focus (though Creed never explicitly uses this word) on the appeal of the indulgence of the image of the writhing, spewing, shitting, devil-child. Woman’s body is made available for visual analysis in ways that it differs from, repulses in its difference, and haunts the phallologocentric isomorphically sexed body. It is frustrating to her reader however that Creed is able to point to this appeal in the speculated/spectacular body without ever taking its why or wherefore any further. Why is indulging in images, even with a wince, of the unpaternalized body, the yet-to-become symbolic body, an appalling/appealing one? Does Creed, in her reading of the abject pleasure of horror film only refer to it being horrific if it continues to represent the pre-symbolic period of a subject’s existence? Creed states

There is a similar theory of certain images or spectacles of horror that precedes Creed’s suggestion by almost twenty-six centuries. It is Aristotle’s discussion of Poetics, and specifically, that of catharsis. “Tragedy…achieves, through the representation of pitiable and fearful incidents, the catharsis of such pitiable and fearful incidents.” [73] Tragedy is notoriously concerned with the body in various states of rupture, and the body of Glauke melting under the acid coat of Medea in Euripides’ Medea cannot be that far from the body of Regan in The Exorcist whatever were their differing characters or motives. Aristotle’s catharsis, of course, carries with it an immeasurable number of problems concerned specifically with the Hellenistic context of tragedy that I do not have the luxury to go into here. [74] My reason for using it as a comparison to Creed’s argument however, is that both claim images which conflict with the self’s ideal symbolic integrity and affect the body by allowing it to expel the imagery of anxiety of a pre-symbolic world it witnesses. This theory has two main problems I wish to address. The first idea of ingesting images of horror only in order to expel them insinuates a return to the desire for the phantasy of equilibrium in the body that the texts I have previously discussed also aspire toward, Deleuze and Guattari’s reterritorialization. There seems little discussion of desiring motivation in Creed’s work - why a viewer would want to ingest these images simply to expel them and, in the meantime, cause trauma to the self? She does suggest these images affirm psychical anxiety about the female body, which are present in the symbolic male psyche after infancy. [75] This brings me to the most important problem in Creed’s theory. For a body to enjoy and take pleasure in a horror film it must presumably be a) male and b) fixed rigidly within a symbolic system and find no space for subversion in horror images, only for repetition of oedipal scenarios. The viewer must be male because having the phantasy of being a symbolically whole, non-abject subject is a male position. As both Creed and Kristeva point out, the female body is always and already abject. My hope is that, instead of horror films being repetitive cementing of established experiences which affirm the subject in the symbolic, they may be taken out of a purely psychoanalytic context and placed back into an embodied subject, potentially a female body, potentially a post-psychoanalytic Deleuzio-Guattarian body. (This configuration is opposed to a divided mind/body, where the body is arbitrary or indeed abject.) I intend to make horrific pleasure transformative rather than regressive through this reading/body. Creed’s limitation of any reading of horror to anything except pre-oedipal, returning-maternal and other scenarios of psychoanalytic trauma is about return rather than possibility. Massumi points out the fissure in seemingly similar language between Deleuze and Guattari and traditional Lacan. He states: “the body without organs is not the ‘fragmented body’ of psychoanalysis. A frequent critique of Deleuze and Guattari casts them as toddler visionaries in men’s clothes preaching a return to the maternal body.” [76] Such a reading of a non-integrated body retains the maternal as abject even if it is supposedly subversively so. Abjection as subversion is only progressive within the retained and rigid systems of the psychoanalytic and necessarily phallologocentric - that which it subverts. Abjection, as I have already argued, is about the sealed integrated body because the abject refers to that particular body traversing its borders of symbolization. Exploring abjection may be a necessary step in the transformation of the body towards a body without organs or a body in process, speed and intensity. But the abject is not sufficient in order to locate a body with any potential to subvert or problematize phallologic culture. After the problematization there must be a potential at least for a different configuration of the body – a future. An abject body is still a female body, and by reading any monstrous body in film as a female body, the female is returned to the realm it is relegated to in phallologic culture. My most pressing question is ‘where to from here?’ The Deleuzio-Guattarian body thought through speed and intensity encompasses both those abject bodies on screen, our bodies as we watch and marginalized or minoritarian bodies in general without limiting any bodies into fixed being. Perhaps, since Creed does not specify how images of perversity are thrown up and out of our watching bodies, we could arrest their ingestion and analyze the body at the precise moment of “confronting sickening, horrific images/being filled with terror/desire for the undifferentiated”. [77] What Creed dismisses to parenthesis is exactly the moment in film theory that I wish to theorize - the moment before pleasure is finished, before the subject is restored (though I do not necessarily believe the subject is always or ever restored). Creed admits in these brackets that watching horror film changes the subject - I want to find out in what ways. For the moment, I want to focus on the subject in this state of terror and desire. Such a subject seems subverted, not only in the psyche and its established rules of integrated being ruptured momentarily by horror film, [78] but also in the whole embodied self of the subject watching for pleasure.

Watching horror is a moment when the subject is made explicitly aware of its body, as Creed points out (made me sick/scared shitless), but what pleasure lies there? Because I cannot say what pleasure is inside the body I have to be content for now simply to say there is pleasure happening in the (un-Cartesian) body which, to psychoanalysis, to medicine, to psychiatry may not be an altogether ‘good’ rational vehicle through which the body may experience pleasure. Jacqueline Rose writes that “For the subject to enter into the possibilities of language and judgement, something has to be discarded, something falls away”. She continues, in discussing the theories of aggression found in Melanie Klein, “Knowledge, as much as - inseparably from? - aggression, breaks up the unity of the world.” [79] That which falls away is considered by Creed, in her reading of Kristeva, abject. But Rose in her reading of Klein claims that the world was less decomposed in infancy, and that knowledge, through and because of language, compartmentalizes experience. What falls away may be abject but only through the condition of the subject who names it abject being firmly embedded in the symbolic. What falls away can never be known due to its existence before language. Negation, if ever it is vividly present in the subject, could be most so in the cinematic world. Rose states “Negation, for Lacan, is death in the structure, or what he also calls the ‘real’, which, for symbolization to be possible, has to subsist outside its domain.” [80] The aggression that is theorized as a result of watching images of horror could be (and this is pure speculation, not a further compartmentalization of the viewing experience) an anxious result of returning to a linguistically compartmentalized world after experiencing the pleasure of an (if horror is the world of the pre-symbolic as Creed suggests) ‘irrational’ landscape in film. So, to turn Creed’s theory upside down, perhaps it is the return to a pre-linguistic or an entrance into a post-linguistic world that is the pleasure of horror. The illness experienced may be travel sickness of a pleasurable kind? This suggestion is posited in order to extend the limits of reading pleasure and I would advocate this theory only along with many other potential versions of visceral enjoyment rather than to suggest there is any other way to explain the enjoyment of horror. Re-reading horror for its disruptive effect, and its antagonism towards the perpetuation of the sealed phallologocentric subject, is an important experiment that explains the pleasure of horror and, consequently the pleasure of not being the most prevalent and dominant model of subjectivity.

Earlier I quoted Kristeva as stating “pleasure as having become pure and true... has nothing to do with the pleasure of scratching.” [81] Perhaps the corporeally abject nature of pleasure, despite its beneficial affect, is what aesthetic discourse wishes to repress, or transform into something noble. Its evidence in childhood as the primary and most obvious drive, its evidence in animals, [82] creates a feeling of guilt in human discourse that what feels good is shared with other species. Pleasure is that scratching. It is the ridding of a niggling unpleasure and it is perceived sensation that causes a positive affect, whether the scratch is to rub the nose or to read a richly eloquent novel. These pleasures are not the same, but they are not different because of their facilitation through art versus ‘primitive’ body function. Because pleasure is not limited to the cortical tributaries of the brain, but felt also in the flesh, [83] this suggests it also reside there. The primacy of physical pleasure (and physical pain) over perplexion and understanding as an example of mental pain and pleasure indicates its seat in the body is not singular or even split into many localized sites, but is, in its fluidic state, all over the body. [84] Physical pleasure is non-definable as a singular product, and also non-locatable. So when watching film, physiology and psychology posit the sensation perceived through a sense, in this case, the eyes [85] - travelling directly towards the brain to an affect result - but forgo the visceral input of the image. Pleasure in horror films, the pleasure of being repulsed, obviously has receptors in the abdomen, the digestive viscera. These may not be the standard receptors unique to the nervous system (although these traverse the viscera) but the receptors which, sensed and perceived, cause the stomach to produce acid, to clench in nausea or to relax the bowel in fear. Pleasure maybe, pain maybe, but certainly affect that, whether or not the perception travels from the brain to the viscera makes itself apparent in the lower, traditionally ‘less rational’ area of the body.

Primacy for a singular organ, or what Szasz calls ‘organism’, [86] limits not only the site of perception (brain) but the ability to perceive pleasure anywhere but through the primary site which then ‘sends’ it to the corresponding cortical reception pathway. He writes,

This neither explains the ingestion of light by the skin, the pleasure found in the sun upon the dermis, nor does it account for such sensations as the desire to weep at the experience of particularly good music. [88] Perhaps physiology would argue these are all secondary affects, which occur subsequent to the primary line of ingestion. There is a feeling in the air of music; sound waves are tangible, not visibly, but by making the atmosphere heavier to the flesh, being able to touch sound through vibrations on surfaces. The light rays which affect the retina also affect the viscera, extreme light, or images formed through light, cause nausea and abdominal discomfort, psychical anxiety, [89] not secondary affect but perhaps only secondary effect, if experienced sensation must be read as narrative. Effect is a singular event upon the body, affect the multiplicitous emotional, visceral, cortical result which is apparent upon the entire self. Effect is a dent in the molar self, affect a new process of the molecular being. Deleuze and Guattari ask

This idea is not aspiration as current possible theorization. To watch subject matter that demands desire for the repulsive [91] is to demand the organism re-think which senses perform which function (the vision of gore, the sound of gore). But the many other organs, which see and hear the film also, become increasingly agitated by the sound/image. The watching, listening muscles, the viscera, stir at the sight/sound of gore and are stirring at the sight/sound of itself. Eyes are offended by images of eyes on film being traumatized, so then are viscera traumatized by seeing what they never see or by seeing what is inside, mediating with and becoming visible outside? Surely there is pleasure to be found in being made visible away from a purely medical context, according to the silent subjectivity of viscera, organs which are repressed by the eye. So is the stirring of viscera at the sight of viscera a feeling of unease, or an uneasy feeling of pleasure at seeing the unseen?

[68] In terms of censorship censors posit themselves, as scientists, before the pleasure of the job and hence perpetuate the myth of the ‘objective’ viewer able to predict truth. Because the censors watch for ‘scientific’ reasons, their subjective reactions are invisible at the very moment that they predict the visibility of the subjective reactions of every one else who watches the same thing.

[69] Lacan, J. explicates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘La Phenomenologie de la Perception.’ In Lacan (1973) The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, section 2: ‘Of the Gaze as objet petite a’. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin. 1994, p. 71. As an interesting side-note, one of the questioners of Lacan in this chapter is an M. Safouan, whom I suspect may be the same Safouan cited earlier as author of Pleasure and Being. See Lacan, 1994, pp. 103-4.

[70] Deleuze, Gilles (1967). Coldness and Cruelty. Trans. Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books. 1989, p. 115.

[73] Aristotle’s Poetics, VI, ll.9-11. Trans. Leon Golden. Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. 1968, p. 11.

[74] The most obvious being the suspect historical theory that women were neither allowed to sit in the audience nor appear on stage in tragedy, although this would conform more rather than less with Creed’s ideas of female spectacle and horrific catharsis.

[75] Creed states, “In the struggle to break away the mother becomes an ‘abject’, thus in this context, where the child struggles to become a separate subject, abjection becomes a ‘pre-condition of narcissism’ [Kristeva, 1982, p. 14]. Once again we can see abjection at work where the child struggles to break away from the mother.” 1993, p. 11 and 12. The narcissistic self-valuing adult then may re-live the fear of the primal breakaway and once again successfully ‘escape’ by escaping the abject in horror film.

[76] Massumi, Brian. (1992) A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge Mass: The MIT Press. 1996, pp. 84-5.

[78] And of course, unfortunately this is exactly what a lot of horror films do. Which is one of the reasons for my focus on Italian horror films. More often than not they do not aim for the resolved happy ending that many US films inevitably aim for.

[79] Rose, Jacqueline. Why War? - Psychoanalysis, politics and the return to Melanie Klein. Oxford: Blackwell. 1993, p. 155.

[82] A feature that Foucault points out was a contributing factor to the regulation of pleasure amongst Greeks, 1992, pp. 48-49.

[83] One example of the mirroring of the cortical effect of pleasure with the corporeal effect is the pleasure of intravenous drug use. The feeling of a pleasure drug injected, say, into the vessels of the arm, the subsequent perceived sensation of the ‘pleasure’ travelling up the vascular system towards receptors, is an incarnate tangible version of both pleasure as fluid, spreading through tributaries in the body, and the affiliation between the vascular tributaries (torso) and the cortical tributaries (head).

[84] Elaine Scarry writes; “Physical pain is able to obliterate psychological pain because it obliterates all psychological content, painful, pleasurable and neutral. Our recognition of its power to end madness is one of the ways which, knowingly or unknowingly, we acknowledge its power to end all aspects of self and world.” In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. 1985, p. 34.

[85] Szasz writes “A represents some aspect of the environment (e.g. the stimulus) and B stands for the organism acted upon... we shall then speak of a sensation. Vision, hearing, taste and smell are typical examples.” 1957, pp. 35-36. Note Szasz insistence upon an individual, singular site of sensed perception.

[86] Ibid., p. 36, this term is what Deleuze and Guattari are explicitly against in A Thousand Plateaus, 1987, p. 158.

[88] Or for a phenomenon called the ‘Stendhal Syndrome’. This refers to a medical condition whereby a person hallucinates, drools and loses consciousness at the experience of remarkable art.

[89] Interrogation light is used to affect the subject’s will, not only the subject’s eyes, it is more like the panopticon that the optometrist’s telescope.

[90] Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 150-151.

[91] On the most basic level, masochistic desire, filmicly Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (UK, 1987) and Tony Randel’s Hellbound: Hellraiser II (UK, 1988) construct a tantalization towards pain that is at once deliciously beautiful and frighteningly disgusting, ironically through a representation of the human form, signifying beauty, but a human form skinned, signifying internality.