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4.4 Becoming Horror

An ethics of becoming horror takes horror, not as good or evil, but as intensity which forces the self into movement, new intensities and modalities. Becoming horror will, eventually, be a jolt of the body, as prime site of signification and conceptual vessel of consciousness, toward flesh as undifferentiated from others or from consciousness but fully sensitive of the specificities of each moment, movement and juncture with any other intensity, movement or thing. Flesh is a composing moment (rather than a defined form) between body and BwO. Horror of the flesh is temporal synapse (horrified into becoming) rather than synarthrosis (frozen in terror). This moving, transforming self is, however, an ethical being/becoming. It is a moving entity, which, through intersectioning [27] with others in itself, will be sensitive to intersectioning with others traditionally posited as exterior to its own sealed body. Specific consideration of what Benhabib calls interaction and Deleuze calls mediation, is the only mandate action of the becoming (horror or anything else) self. In this concluding section, reading Deleuze and Guattari into Benhabib’s criteria for an ethical post-modernist subject will create an ethical becoming being - defined not through what it is but through what it can do. This will then become specifically a being becoming horror, where the ethics of traditional horror (non-ethics or bad ethics) will be the catalyst for a new becoming. Becoming horror involves the affect-ive jolts of horror, arrows aimed directly at the bulls-eye of integrated subjectivity, to set into motion or launch into a line of flight, a becoming something else for the self. Horror remains after the initial jolt, as it demands continued consideration of both the self as flesh (opposed to body) and the disruptive (for bodies, for culture) in representation. Where catharsis shocks and stabilizes, horror launches the self into momentum. The being becoming horror is both sensitive to specificity (of all others, its own and outside its flesh) and sensitive only because it has been thrust into a becoming through horror, traditional concepts of which claim it to be a priori unethical. As I have already stated, traditional concepts of horror appeal to a higher order such as God, language and the law of the father. Such an appeal creates a being unaccountable due to its continual appeal to another order, and a being unable to consider others without its own integrity being irrevocably harmed. The horror of becoming woman is comparative with the horror of gore due to the appeal to a higher law and the juxtaposition of becoming with the higher order valued (male, white, non-violated or wounded). My formulation of horror sees it only as disruptive affect. Initially, however, in its representation, horror is disruptive to a higher order in my reading as well. Horror exists in much cinematic theory as that which destroys the watcher by representing the destruction of an on-screen body which is supposed to mirror the viewer’s body, thus horror performs a vital action in a theorization towards ethical post-modern subjectivity. It destroys the valued body of representation that is the integrated subject, commonly white, commonly male but also, as theorists such as Clover has pointed out, female, commonly middle-class and in a large majority of academic texts on horror films, commonly American. Working with horror in a non-capitalist schema, this subject destroyed is both hopeful and an unsatisfactory investigation of the limits of what horror can do. Horror is so much more about the flesh of the viewer when horror film represents the flesh of the represented body on-screen. It forces the viewer into action, movement and becoming because it is not about the characters on-screen but about flesh.

Both traditional formulations of horror as a higher order evil, and my theories are explicitly about the body (becoming flesh) and its relationship with being. Traditional theories of horror as a thing take as their primary symbol, the law of the integrity of the solid, sealed body as vessel for consciousness (the hu-man phallus) and the destruction of the symbol made human. That symbol, the valued body, is commensurable with the valued subject and reminiscent of the valued phallus, (having a phallus but also being sealed and smooth like the phallus) the destruction of which is against the (Lacanian) Law. My retheorization of horror as affect values only transformation, presumably away from the configuration of the sealed body as vessel for consciousness. This is a Deleuzian/Guattarian project because it configures being only in terms of movement and the specificity of intensities. Horror is one (and many) of those intensities, which can create innumerable results when intersecting with other intensities, here most particularly our own when we sit in front of a screen.

Benhabib takes as the primary requirement for an ethics towards a feminist post-modernism the concept of interaction, as opposed to legislation. Deleuze, in his interview ‘Mediators’ suggests a similar approach to any new ideas, which necessarily come from an old episteme, from philosophy to science, literature and sport. He calls such an approach mediating. Mediation is an interesting strategy for feminism and for ethics because it does not ‘come from nowhere’ and address nothing that exists now. Feminism and ethics potentially figure as new world orders which could come from out of nowhere and simply implement themselves on a culture wiped clean in order to ‘fix’ it or change it. Deleuze however suggests that only in the tightest places, the least giving areas, can new ideas, in fact must new ideas, be thought, because of their very forced mediation with unsatisfactory and cloying ideological situations. Deleuze sees value in an idea only if it is true in terms of its necessity and its relevance. He states

That’s why arguments are such a strain, why there’s never any point arguing. You can’t just tell someone what they are saying is pointless. So you tell them its wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid and irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. [28]

Within this logic, feminism and an ethical interlocution on anything can only be successful according to its relevance and necessity. It is because feminism is so relevant and urgently needed at this moment in cultural history that it can be at all. Feminism, like all ideas for Deleuze, is nothing unto itself except in the ways it mediates with what falsifies it, what makes it necessary and what demands its urgency. It exists as qualities of the contexts it is placed in, and in our time in this Western culture its context is absolute in its necessity. Similarly, horror stands traditionally as that which is ‘wrong’ according to Deleuze. Higher order law states simply that horror is wrong and that horror films are pointless (except that this statement of pointlessness masks an urgent panic of there perhaps being a point or effect). For marginalized persons horror has been the point for some time, the being of a marginalized body is the sanctioned horrific body of culture - beginning with woman and travelling through many marginalities to the current AIDS body. The rupturing of the valuation of an isomorphic dominant body is particularly relevant at this time, especially because of the relationship feminism and post-modernism have with ‘horrific’ bodies. In this way, both horror and feminist ethics demand mediation with culture, in spite of and because of the impossible space there is for such creativity. Deleuze says, “A creator who is not grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator.” [29] Feminism finds simultaneously in culture the impossibility of marginalized bodies being valued, and the impossibility of the necessity for only one kind of body to exist. Impossibilities are the cause, the action and the aim of feminism. For this book becoming horror is mediation with a mundane activity, watching television, in order to create the interstitial within the impossible.

An important feature of Deleuzian mediation is its lack of origin and lack of completion. Although Benhabib does not specifically voice this anxiety she does point to the ways in which origins and completions have hitherto fuelled phallologocentric culture across all epistemes from history to science. Most commonly this desire resulted in ‘truthful’ accounts of what exists, what has happened and what will happen in the world to the exclusion of women and all other others. According to Deleuze’s mediation, in order to interact or mediate, a “putting-into-orbit” [30] of the self is required. Putting-into-orbit stands against the enlightenment desire to reach pure truth, the philosophical desire for eternal re-action and return, but also against the scientific desire to find absolute genesis (all of which cross-pollinate their respective discourses so that science also desires absolute truth and philosophy a recognizable genesis). Deleuze sees both beginning and end as detrimental to the concept of mediation. Mediation is something akin to movement in that it is a refusal to know without being caught up in the motion of knowledge, without acknowledging that motion is already a process which we can only be caught up in at a moment and not at the start or towards the end. We are in essence, according to Deleuze, existing always at the in-between. Deleuze’s most emphatic question then becomes “What happens ‘in-between’?” [31] Benhabib continually points to the detrimental effect of a philosophy that fails to take history into account because history inevitably refers to his-story and hence to unified phantasies of the hu-man. She states “Until very recently neither did women have their own history, their own narrative with different categories of periodization and with different structural regularities.” [32] In her section on the death of metaphysics, Benhabib quotes Jane Flax on post-modernism,

For post-modernism this quest for the Real conceals most Western philosophers’ desire, which is to master the world once and for all by enclosing it within an illusory but absolute system they believe represents or corresponds to a unitary Being beyond history, particularity and change. [33]

What Benhabib sees as two of the most urgent elements of a feminist ethics are the acknowledgement of history and the repudiation of a desire to see truth, which is the same as seeing the end of a system or structure of knowledge. This directly correlates with Deleuze’s putting-the-self-into-orbit of movement. The matter or meaning of specific ethics is not the most important point of consideration in order to formulate an ethical theory; it is the movement of the ethics within the world that must be considered. Deleuze states, “But if we’re so oppressed, it’s because our movement’s being restricted, not because our eternal values are violated.” [34] To move or mediate or interact within a time frame, caught up simultaneously in past and future, works sideways also. Deleuze points out that “you’re always working in a group even when you are on your own.” [35] Mediators are not only mediating with their past, their future, but with themselves and everything around them, “real or imaginary, animate or inanimate”. [36] Deleuze here sets up a situation in conformity with his and Guattari’s theories towards both a schizoanalysis and becoming. If we are forced, in constant movement hence presumably in constant change, to mediate with everything in our past, future and laterality, we are forced to mediate with our own parts, flesh and deterritorialized selves. The potential to formulate others in ourselves demands a deterritorialization of subjectivity, but also through horror images demands a deterritorialization of our own bodies, whether they are integrated bodies or on the way to becoming bodies without organs. This demand is only a demand for action, or for movement through affect. It does not predict a result, or close off potential due to the traditional configuration of horror as ‘bad’ and hence any affect will not automatically be correspondingly detrimental. 

Both Deleuze and Benhabib are suspicious of reflection through the direct influence of, and on others, be it a philosophical influence (re-active philosophy) or a real-life corporeal influence (bodies outside ourselves mediated only in terms of what we are anterior to everything else, the ‘anything-outside-me’). Deleuze states “You’ll get nowhere by latching onto some parallel movement, you have to make a move yourself. If nobody makes a move, nobody gets anywhere. Nor is interplay an exchange: it all turns on giving and taking.” [37] By becoming a parallel version of something, be it a real-life ethical situation or a philosophical discussion, there is a danger that the other is either simply assimilated and hence may be spoken for (the other becomes an ‘idea’, whether it was an idea to begin with or a body), or else the self and the Other will become involved in an economic exchange, the ‘give and take’ of Deleuze, which works within a rigid backwards-forwards space that is limited and limiting. This second potential hurls the other into a factual space ‘outside me’, where the only truth is that of what is ‘I’ and what is not. Latching on to another’s movement is what Benhabib sees as the repudiation of a concrete or generalized other, produced by simply ingesting and expelling ideas, considerations, situations and experience while retaining the truth of everything outside me. When the ‘me’ of this concept divides itself in its movements, when conversations and mediations begin within a self in order to conceive of mediations with self(ves), then anything outside me becomes a defunct concept. That holiest of divisions in Lacanian psychoanalysis between me, either corporeal or psychical and everything else (which can only be known through the holy me) begins to splinter within the ‘me’ itself. The divide between consciousness and flesh historically has continually referred to a split in the self in all epistemes, from science to philosophy. However, this divide has neither resulted in a consideration or interaction between potential multiples of being, nor a corporeal configuration of subjectivity, where flesh and consciousness, although divided, fold in on each other to produce specific qualities at each intersectioning. This chasmic split has resulted instead in a traditional hierarchical configuration of, not mediation but a binary. One term is taken as irrevocably other and subjugated: this ‘other’ term is inevitably the body. It may be repressed, as in psychoanalysis, it may be repudiated as in philosophy, or it may be taken as an example of an absolute given and hence completely knowable entity, as in biology. A formulation of an embodied subject, which addresses constant change within any phantasmatic cultural border of what is ‘I, would renegotiate the sanctity of the body which is at once subjugated and significant as the border of ‘me’.  Any consideration of ‘the body’ as an entity unto itself has the potential to subjugate, repress or biologically fix it. An embodied becoming subject does not extricate any concept of ‘body’ from being. ‘The body’, in relation to and as opposed to, ‘the other’ is a defunct concept when movement and quality or specificity replace the Cartesian dualism of being. This is not, however, a new Cartesianism conflating body and self/psyche/consciousness where movement and specificity replace any thinking of a body or of flesh. Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook point this out in their article ‘The Haunted Flesh: Corporeal Feminism and the Poetics of (dis)Embodiment’. In a discussion of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition they state that

The body is no longer a vehicle for consciousness, nor is it a privileged site of meaning of primary materiality. On the contrary, Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’ (143) posits a univocity whereby bodies, consciousness, actions, events, signs and entities are specific intensities. [38]

Bray and Colebrook emphasize two ways in which cultural configurations of the body have been detrimental for feminism. As a vehicle for consciousness, where consciousness is a traditionally masculine realm, the body for women has been a vehicle affirming the realms she is relegated to, that of the reproductive vessel. When the body becomes a vehicle for something it is only a vehicle for a valued thing based on the very image of such a vehicle. Only when the vehicle carries no undesirable signification can it refer to such a transcendental concept of ‘consciousness’. When the vehicle is harder to transcend, through its hyper-signification of sexual or racial difference, then a covert operation of valuation occurs. When feminism could not (and did not want to) extract women from their bodily signification a new valuation of materiality was theorized. As Bray and Colebrook claim, valuation of any concept of the body makes or affirms the body as “locus of meaning and identity”. [39] The body is still extricated from any formulation towards transformative selfhood. According to Bray and Colebrook, for Deleuze the body is another intensity, specific and transforming at every intersectioning with any other intensity. I take this further by highlighting the specific intensities of flesh, as differentiated from the body or a body. Bray and Colebrook exhibit similar anxieties about the body, singular. They state “To think a ‘body without organs’ is to refuse any single signifier, such as the phallus, that would enable an organization or interpretation of the body”. [40] The term flesh insinuates non-signification. It at once refers to living body part, both interior and exterior, as well as ruptured or dis-organized body part. Part here does not mean recognizable organ or piece but simply a part of the body, either minute or vast, temporal and spatial.

Lateral putting-into-orbit of the self refers also to Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of consistency. Like the mediators putting-into-orbit, the plane of consistency is not reactive and not self-reflective. Becomings and multiplicities, which create the plane of consistency, exist at the moment of movement. Deleuze and Guattari state

Although there is no preformed logical order to becomings and multiplicities, there are criteria, and the important thing is that they not be used after the fact, that they be applied in the course of events, that they be sufficient to guide us through the dangers. [41]

As with being put into orbit, becoming involves a movement of now, not a reflection of then or a paralleling of another’s becoming. It is the quality of right-now that becoming describes by virtue of what becoming aims towards, which is an irrefutable alteration at every moment. Becoming cannot be retrospective or after the fact. Every moment produces a new, specific quality and desire, haeccity. In the introduction to this book I discussed the importance of dividuation between epistemes. These are larger scale versions of haeccity, where intent and the specific reader-ly context of certain images (the forensic and the filmic of the death chapter, for example) are related to their particular quality within their episteme. Epistemic division predicts and produces the readings of such images, rather than encouraging the particularity of an image to be felt. We as reading subjects, however, must become multiple in order to cope with such demands. The particular quality of an image is regulated by its contextual intent based on its episteme, but we, who are phantasmatically always the same, become certain qualities when we oscillate from episteme to episteme. Unfortunately, the epistemic intent protects us rather than encouraging us to transform. Horror films we know are ‘just films’, the ultra-gore of forensic texts are not revolting because they are ‘seriously scientific’. If the epistemic divide is broken down, we no longer oscillate between various epistemes, but images force an internal oscillation, engaging with the multiple qualities of any picture at any time in mediation with ourselves. Moments and qualities are no longer legislated by epistemic intent, but become a broader haeccity that is unpredictable for any given moment. We also become quality(ies) and specific intensity(ies) at each moment. Mediation with our own multiplicities, and with that which we wish to become similarly involves an haeccity of the mediation we take with the moment and the movement we are involved with. The plane of consistency describes the situation we find ourselves in as multiple and in becoming. The plane of consistency describes a plane of time, and laterally of space as well as of movement. Every intersection on the plane creates a new, specific combination. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that “the plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete forms”. [42] Concrete forms need not refer to, nor exclude, whole bodies or selves. But they do include the concept of undifferentiated flesh, because the quality of any whole or thing is available at many intersections or points along the plane of consistency. Hence any whole is also simultaneously sections, pieces or qualities of the whole and a whole may be a piece or pieces of a greater.

Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook use the anorexic as an example of a body “being otherwise”. [43]   Bray and Colebrook point out that the reading of anorexic bodies has primarily been about the body as representative of something, as a result of something being read within a phallologocentric order, albeit as a protest against that order. The anorexic body becomes an object of pathology, a representation of a desire for non-being, and a symbol of the detrimental effect phallologocentric law has on women’s bodies. Even if this is seen as an attempt to subvert the supremacy of the phallologocentric, Bray and Colebrook emphasis the disastrous effect of reading a body before its production, hence all bodies, whatever their particular intensity, become aligned with something eventually. These representations stand as the means of recognizing such a body, and hence recognizing its protests, its actions and its functions as fulfilling already established criteria of pathology. For feminism, even a body which resists phallologocentric incorporation through anorexia is detrimental to a refiguring of bodies as intersectionally different, that is different at each active encountering intersection with anything else. A body that resists specifically the Law of the Father still appeals to such a law. Bray and Colebrook state: “As a site of representation the subject is perceived in terms of its relation, negation, recognition or encounter with an outside world”. [44] A theory that involves interaction with horror will always be a ‘bad’ theory while the body remains readable in terms of the ways in which it interacts with monolithic structures outside of it, for instance, represented as a textual object conforming with a theory of material existence that precedes it, and which it will be forced to fulfill. The body comes into being only when it is recognizable, as fulfilling a theory of what a body is - anorexic or any other type or kind of body. Like the anorexic, the body in horror is read before it arrives as traumatic and as able to subsist based only on those representational capacities, which exist before it in order to encompass it. When I use Bray and Colebrook’s idea of ‘being otherwise’ applied to becoming horror as a result of watching traumatizing images, the body can be refigured as not suffering under the monolithic and detrimental effect of something bad, but as a bundle of movement affected towards being something other than what it was the moment before. On-screen horror itself must be figured as a plane or plateau, not a concept, or monolithic effect. For Deleuze and Guattari plateaus are a “continuous region of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, any more than they allow themselves to build towards a climax.”. [45] Representation of a concept is potentially an example of what Deleuze and Guattari name an external termination. Representing the body as traumatized, or horror as evil or bad for the self, not only ceases the flow of intensities and the potential intersections to come, but it pre-creates whatever body or horror it seeks to represent in order to fit into some schema elucidated by the adjective which precedes the term. No prediction of what the body in horror may be can be included in this book because the creation of such a schema would close off the becoming body. My theories of the body in horror have been vague, suggestive and deliberately evasive because the only certainty for such a theory is simply the affect, or action, or movement. Such a body in horror resists being ‘good’ as much as my theory is opposed to the traditional being ‘bad’ of horror, because for an ethics towards becoming horror, what matters most is the specific consideration of every intersection and intensity of the body in horror. Bray and Colebrook elucidate this point. They state:

The question that organizes many feminist ethical debates - Is a practice repressive or liberatory? - relies upon the possibility of a free consciousness that could precede, and be revealed beneath, its representations. If, however, signs and actions are seen as positive, then the ethical value of an act is determined by evaluating its force within a network of other acts and practices, and not in reference to a putative origin. [46]

The similarities between this statement and Benhabib’s formulation of a context-specific ethics encourages an application of Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of becoming and its focus on specificity, intensity and unique intersections, within an ethical and ‘real-life’, social context. Watching television may be a microcosmic, minute version of ‘real-life’ where the term real becomes more contentious than in other circumstances due to the conflation of television and bodies within this situation. However my aim for this book was to apply the very complex theory of being differently in the world - becoming, launching into a line of flight, mediating or putting the self into orbit - to a situation which did not necessarily need a hitherto pathologized body, a terminally differenced body, (although those who watch horror have been othered terminally on a quieter scale) but a body every person with a television finds themselves as on a daily level. I actively wish to conflate the body who watches horror with the body who claims not to. By including concepts of unpleasure as pleasure, everyday perversions and death, which is the horror of all living things but which presses down on culture in every textual form, I have driven out the aberrant terms and structured everyone who watches as a potential becoming being.

Moira Gatens states “This is one way in which the social body can absolve itself of responsibility for the acts committed, since between ‘the criminal’ and ‘us’ a distance and a difference has been created.” [47] Any pathological body creates a site for the representation of culture as a group of bodies whose actions carry with them specific meanings, rather than figuring culture as a body. The anorexic and the criminal are more specific pathologies but essentially within the same realm as the woman, and the racially other. If bodies are differenced in time, for a moment, and in space for an action - the now watching body - the signification of corporeally dermic differences are made redundant. The aim towards movement and differentiation from the moment before makes not only pathological bodies redundant but also all signified bodies. All that matters here for an ethics of a body in horror is that a body in horror must be a body forced into movement, into differentiation from itself from the moment before, into mediation with something in order that it be propelled into orbit, into a line of flight. Why would horror do this? Perhaps because the person who watches horror is blamed in order that the structures of culture that promote and provoke certain forms of ‘real-life’ horror are passed over for the aberration, be it horror film or horror film watcher. For an ethics which demands transforming corporeal subjects, horror is both specifically aimed at the horror of challenging the single model of the desirable white male middle class middle aged subject, and at acknowledging that for a lot of subjects (women, racially other) there is a concrete feeling of such a horror in everyday existence. Such a theory of becoming horror is applied to everyone, whether they are marginalized and made horror in everyday existence or not. However becoming horror is also specific and different for everyone in order that the oppression of the other is not colonized. Such colonization is reminiscent of the male-hysteric, and the appropriation of the suffering of the other in order to be ‘post-moderned’ from traditional culture. This horror is not radically destructive, indeed such feelings that accompany images of the destruction of the sanctity of the hu-man could be seen as a comforting enactment of the being of woman or black or poor. This line of theory, however, takes horror into a prescriptive realm and I adamantly do not want to formulate what horror could always mean or always be. When addressing the use of the term horror we should ask the question ‘horror for whom?’  Moira Gatens states

So long as the law continues to treat the criminal as an ‘aberrant individual’ or a ‘monster’ and as the sole locus of responsibility, our civil body will continue to structure human relations in ways which systematically encourage violence… The ‘spectacular’ cruelty of such crimes only serves to mask the underlying banality of a largely unchallenged violence which structures our social relations. [48]

Images of horror can be no more implicitly good or bad as images of women or racially other bodies. Only representation that fixes meaning and does not mediate can dictate such a reading. In order to formulate an ethics of becoming horror, outside of such fixed meanings of what horror and the watcher are, the mediators of Deleuze, and the interactive of Benhabib should be applied directly to a body becoming.

When we compare the involvement of becoming with mediation we find that Deleuze’s formulation of movement fulfills all three criteria of what Benhabib describes as mandatory for a feminist, post-modern ethics. Benhabib demands: 1) interaction not legislation; 2) cognition of gender difference (and hence all difference) not gender blindness; 3) contextual sensitivity not situation indifference. [49] Becoming describes 1) not only the interaction of the self with others but also of the self with its own others; 2) it is about the specificities of the self at each moment, but includes what it was in order to aim toward something else that it may be. Even if we ignore Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming-woman’ for the moment, being put into orbit, or heading off on a line of flight in order to become, never eradicates the places from whence the self has come. Indeed in order to be something different that which the self was before must be acknowledged. We can only be something different based on a comparison with what we were before and the residuals which adhere from that former self as we become; 3) within the plane of consistency the specificities of each moment, their haeccity, is the most important element of the places we inhabit from one moment to the next on the plane. Mediation is a constant consideration of concrete specificities as they intersect, not economically but in terms of quality and movement. Situated indifference is a problem Deleuze recognizes when he points out that mediated writing should become liquid or gaseous, “Not becoming unearthly. But becoming all the more earthly by inventing laws of liquids and gases on which the earth depends.” [50] Benhabib’s legislation, Lacan’s law and Bray and Colebrook’s putative origin are all unearthly because they refer to a higher order. Through this statement, Deleuze points to the application of theories of becoming and mediation as directly affective of real bodies and real situations in movement, not philosophical or reflective conceptual versions of becoming. Here he points again to becoming as a real, embodied, cellular alteration, which takes into consideration effects upon real cellular bodies of others (real though not necessarily unified, singular or integrated). And it is here, rather than in his and Guattari’s theory on becoming-woman, that Deleuze begins to formulate a feminist theory of becoming. He begins to encompass what I quoted Braidotti earlier as stating “Here the focus is more on the experience and the potential becoming of real women in all of their diverse ways of understanding and inhabiting the position ‘woman’.” [51]

Deleuze and Guattari theorize an absolutely radical new way of being in the world. Often it seems too radical; it is a theory of existence that is still in shadow. Although it exists within and is only available through our immediate culture, the question we ask is how? How do we think it, how can we fly from, how can we put ourselves into orbit? Indeed, how do we become a body without organs? This microcosmic world of watching offensive films on television that I posit as a transgressive site is, for me, an ideal place, a one space, to suggest for lines of flights. This space conflates the space(s) of phantasy in our bodies, and the phantasies of representation. Many plateaus overlap and fold in on each other in this humble space. A lot happens already in this space, despite the seeming banality of such a practice. My suggestion for the space for going into orbit is deliberately meek, inspired by my own pleasure at these films and the situation of watching them, and by a suspicion in any search for the ultimate or grand space and time for becoming to happen. Becoming is as tiny and as banal as it is radical and enormous. It is, after all, molecular. Each tiny point that becomes is as valuable as a large, visible and obvious plane of becoming. I do not know, and I cannot predict, what process becoming horror will take in each instance. But the availability of the television/video/horror rental scenario for many persons, [52] and society’s absolute anxiety about horror films combine to make transforming embodied subjects a tangible potential. Horror exists not only through what it stands for but for what it stands against. All that it represents as detrimental for culture’s valued subjects is everything I want it to stand for as positive for the transformation of bodies and selves.

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