<<TRANSMATHOME

0.3 Abjection, Aesthetics and the Primacy of Materiality

Kristeva uses aesthetics as an example of sublimated abjection. Any concept that sees abjection incorporated at all, even in a sublimated form, is a different and un-traditional form of existing. Also, the focus in her argument on male authors leads to the question; do only those who have something to lose if they fall sublimate abjection? Elizabeth Grosz has pointed this out in her discussion of Kristeva’s use of literature,

These men, if they are to avoid complete psychical/signifying disintegration, remain anchored by some threads of identity to the symbolic… They are able to maintain their imperiled hold on the symbolic only by naming the abject… [16] .

Using art to encompass and know abjection reduces the author to something akin to the scientist. The object, or in this case, the abject, is analyzed in order that it may be put to ‘use’ without threatening the scientist/author with the irreducible effect such a concept may have on his subjectivity.  For female subjects and any subject who is or wishes to exist at the margins of integrated subjectivity and the symbolic, however, they are already abject. They may insinuate a fall but it may also be an exploration of the fall that has already been the lot of such a subject. The most important signifier of whom may already be abject-ed, and who is not, is the body. When the body is male, white and of a certain age, sexual preference and other dominant binary index, it is rendered almost invisible or at least under the control of the psyche who inhabits it. When the body is female or racially other, it is already located within the abject because such a body does not have a monopoly on and hence a fixed safe place within the symbolic. Kristeva locates all origins of abjection in maternity, but at a more basic level, all women are aligned with such abjection. Only the white male child can compare his successful integration into the symbolic with the horror of being produced by and undifferentiated from his mother. For those bodies not valued as part of the symbolic system within which Kristeva explicitly sets her discussion, the abject is a constant companion by virtue of castration and color.  The horror of coming from the mother is matched daily by the horror of one’s own body. If the male body does not exist as abjection but simply at the frontier of its potential, this may explain why Kristeva only uses male authors to explore ways in which abjection is sublimated and hence controlled in literature. For a woman author to come face to face with and identify the abject is something dominant culture emphasizes continually as already within (and even as) her body. She does not need to locate the abject; conceptually it is already in her. The horror of abjection is the horror of being for women, however, this horror may only be negative or repugnant if it is analyzed through the rigid psychoanalytic structure within which Kristeva works. This book discusses in depth the nature of negative feelings and their affect - not necessarily negative, nor even clear as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ - on the subject who feels. Pleasure is achievable through disgust, perversion transforms us into monsters we name ourselves, and death becomes a tactic for valuing all forms of non-fixed selves over valued subjects. For women the horror of being abject-ed from the psyche of culture can not be the same as the feeling of confronting the abject that the male valued author fears and sublimates into aesthetics.

Within traditional cultural discourse woman fulfils all the criteria of the abject: she has no object of desire, but she may exhibit unbound desire; she leaks, grows and changes her body; she is ambiguous, she is more-than-one; she is defined by her flesh rather than in spite of it. Her flesh stops signifying and becomes a glaring visual object of the abject. While male subjects have their bodies only in order to signify with them - the eyes of knowledge, the head of reason, the hands of practice - woman is horror because of her failure to signify anything but her flesh. Horror films exhibit other, perhaps extreme, versions of abject flesh. All that is needed for abjection, however, is this exhibition. The woman’s body needs no signification, nor do the other abject objects of horror. “No, as in true theatre” Kristeva says of the corpse, “without make-up or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.” [17] The horror of horror film is lack of signification; the horror of woman’s body for the valued white male subject is lack of signification. A desire to place signification on images of horror, and the feelings of horror that accompany them, asks: ‘what do these things mean?’ The inability to answer is one step towards being affected, irreversibly altered by the confrontation. Within a scientific system in order to know the nature of any object at all one must know all objects, and so any image or thing that defies signification and ontological formulation must aversely effect the integrity of the object (us). The literary figures analyzed by Kristeva are not un-scientific men; they too are after the ontology of abjection in order to reassure themselves of their own integrity. Kristeva’s authors analyze and encircle the abject with theory; they phantasize controlling and ejecting it from their psyches. It becomes exterior and hence knowable. Concepts of abjection are objectively fixed, legislative rather than interactive, which Seyla Benhabib sees as detrimental to an ethics of feminism [18] . Abjection now is, it exists not in the modes by which we are affected, but as an exterior predictable entity, who, when effecting subjectivity, produces a repetitive predictable result. This probability and normativity is entirely contradictory to Kristeva’s definition of abjection, something that confuses borders, or which defies being known as an object. Authors of both science and literature give abjection signification through ad nauseum analysis. However abject ‘things’ continue to refuse such analysis by continually confounding and causing horror to the viewer. They may be given signification but their continual changeability and shifting borders make such signification defunct. Gore in film, and real women’s bodies refuse practices of fixed signification because they continue to alter and show the formerly invisible or non-signifiable. They show, without masks (of signification) or make up (of ontology). To use Kristeva’s example, they are the corpse to the author’s flat encephalograph. Where there is only image without language there can be no control, catharsis or purging. The image without signification propels the subject, rather than expelling the abject. This is why questions so often accompany visceral horror films - why? Who? And most specifically what? (What part of a body is that… what has happened to that body?) - Not the satisfaction of a narrative resolution. Horror does not appeal to language but image. Images of gory horror are not symbols, they are ruptures, they are unfamiliar (not uncanny, but completely foreign - Kristeva points out the abject is “Essentially different from ‘uncanniness’, more violent too, abjection is a failure to recognize its kin.” [19] ), confusing, garish and ambiguous. Gore images are abject not only in their representation but in what they do to the viewer. They defy being read, because they defy signification. They defy signification because they do not follow the narrative chain of signification from image to mind, bypassing the viscera and indeed the flesh. Traditional readers of film perform this bypass; leaving unexplored the differential impact image may have on the flesh or embodied self.

Flesh (and its relative productions) is the prime site of, and for, abjection. We are abject-ed through the flesh and because of the flesh. Abjection describes conditions of the flesh beyond the tolerance of our psyches toward that who we are. For example we are not faeces, saliva or vomit, we expel them in order to affirm our borders, which are nothing but the phantasmatic borders of our body made elastic in order to spring back into place to match our psyches, our ‘who ‘I’ am’. But our bodies themselves are abject, not simply that which we expel from our bodies (which is a strange division anyway, the faeces and saliva we expel is the faeces and saliva that was moments before part of our incorporated bodies which we had no problem with until the refuse becomes potentially visible). The abject nature of all flesh and all bodies is re-invested in the disdainful, expelled products it produces to make such an expulsion tangible and easier. But the wound returns our abject bodies to ourselves, wounds we cannot expel. And beneath the wound is the most abject of all things, the viscera. If the ultimate symbol of integrated subjectivity is the integrity of the skin, which insinuates that nothing lies beneath it but a solid ‘me’, then the wound making visible such a terrain is extreme abjection because it points to the secret inner terrain(s) of ‘me’, suggesting ‘I’ am more than I know of me, the kin I cannot recognize. Viscera points to my very potential to not be integrated, to ‘open up’, and hence for my body to be in complete rebellion of the phantasmatic structure which conforms to my psyche. The abject, on the other hand, emphasizes the Cartesian nature of psychoanalysis, fixing the mind in order to fix the body as in the case of hysteria, or fixing the mind in order to protect other bodies as in psychosis. Such science only affirms the vast chasm between the mind’s attempt to contort and make the body conform and the body’s explicit inability to ‘listen’ to the mind. The abject is a version of embodied subjectivity because the mind does not tell the body what to do and be and the body does not ignore such commands. Abjection that thrusts a subject towards the borders of madness is an example of the subject not willing to be a body. Such a body is the socially stratified body that stands in opposition to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘body without organs’. In this book, horror escapes madness by thrusting selfhood into being a body, non-stratified and joyously so.