<<TRANSMATHOME

0.6 Toward an Ethics of Horror

Horror is traditionally seen as culturally detrimental. Depictions of horror are depictions of evil, of what not to do and what not to look for or see. Horror is defined as a negative of life, signifying not only death but also the most abject of material terrain. Horror is a feeling; a sensation of the self continually represented as capable of being an outside independent image. Something is pure horror, such as film, or garish news stories of disaster, or murder. This essentialization of what horror is, instead of what horror may do, appeals to a higher sense of truth, determining subjects in space as fixed. Horror can be seen, rather, as potential process, which forms and transforms subjects in time. Horror, traditionally then, is used to describe a type of subject, which denies its effect (and for my theories a more extreme affect) of all subjects. Horror is affect for any subject who appeals to the self rather than to an external sense of order. For those who are most valued in symbolic culture such an appeal to God or language or transcendental knowledge is predictable. Yet, this book aims to return the subject into itself by using the imagination Kristeva points out is necessary for any configuration to refuse traditional psychoanalytic binaries. Where abjection becomes the third term that messes up the binary of object and subject, imagination must become the third term that messes up the binary of ‘I’ and higher order. The higher order exists only to affirm the position of such an ‘I’ and for post-structuralism the breaking down of such higher orders is imminent and essential. For the processual transforming subject, there is no appeal to a higher order but only a change in the self. This does not ignore others, though it does repudiate the Other. Imagination allows, for want of better words, assimilation and ingestion of horror - the ‘becoming horror’ of chapter two ‘Perversion’  - so that the self exists as such a feeling. At the most rudimentary level this causes a form of empathy, however, what I am really attempting to theorize is a self, capable of transforming through watching, rather than reading what is watched. By pushing the self into innumerable feelings, qualities or positions, a value of self is no longer based on surfaces of bodies which are seen to represent or at least conform to a quality of psyche (be they surfaces of sex and color or internal surfaces formulated by science, such as genetic surfaces, whereby surfaces insinuate above all else an immutable substance able to be read and known). Traditional valuation of bodies can no longer exist if fixed bodies no longer exist, specifically within an ordered hierarchical system. Within this different formation of bodies, consideration of the other does not occur by representation, but is broadened by qualitative affect set off in this particular project through horror films.

An appeal to order, whether it is that of language or psyche, which would regulate horror as necessarily evil, is an appeal to the destruction of both imagination and a real lived other in favor of value judgement and a conceptual irrefutably outside-me Other. I am not suggesting there is a real which psyche and psychoanalysis destroys by making everything a value-laden concept. But by situating all things within a stratified system where their qualities are easily recognizable as good, or evil, outside me or inside and hence applicable to me, the quality of every ‘thing’, be it representation or another body, is fixed. This means that ethical consideration of any ‘thing’ is bypassed for identification. Contextually sensitive consideration of all ‘things’, and interactive rather than legislative thinking, are two of the elements Benhabib points out as essential for a post-structural ethical mode of being. [36] The context of represented horror in film and the context of real suffering bodies are conflated within legislative thinking, which appeals to a higher order. The act of looking and real being are similarly conflated, and film is continually read as both inspiring and being inspired by ‘real life’ events. Those who enjoy horror, be it in film or written narrative (though apparently less so in literature, which is ‘high’) are aligned with those who perpetrate it, where horror is not affect but action. In my figuring, however, the film viewer is active only in her/his own transformation, which is action enough. In legislative thinking the self must exist with another, recognizable other, which is why the activity of watching representation is always connected with further action between persons. I do not wish to suggest there is no element of interaction entirely un-effected by watching. In fact, I am stating the exact opposite, that through watching our entire being transforms, but the ordering of terms and concepts is not always equivalent. Represented horror certainly changes us, but not necessarily in a way that does not differentiate between representation and real lived action. Horror is qualities, not a quality that remains constant from the television to the scene of the crime. Horror affect is not the same as horror perpetrated. And similarly self is affect, rather than perpetrating or psychotic subject. Such a self is able to differentiate the specific qualities of everything and hence cannot act identically in any two situations, as it interacts with each moment uniquely. Horror as affect is an extreme interactive situation, yet still maintains the individual quality of situation. The most generalized claim we can make of horror is that it demands high interaction and causes an often harsh affect of self. The differentiation of every situation of horror, most specifically from screen to ‘real life’, is, however, always the most primary element of affective transforming subjectivity.

This book is broken into very large chapters with many smaller sections within them. The large chapters refer on a most basic level to ideas that may potentially change us - when we feel pleasure, when we are perverse or perverted, when we think death. Gore films are equated with these three terms. They give us pleasure, they must or we would not watch them. They are the perverse genre of film, and those who watch have been clinically and morally judged as such. They refer primarily to the viscerality of death, which may be called ‘real’ death, because such gore is matched only by forensic pathology.

The two themes that I have discussed through Kristeva and Foucault, horror and epistemic textuality, are themes that underpin the entire body of this book. The use of horror towards transformation, which is represented in films but which occurs as a symptom of becoming other, is manifest in many incarnations. Reading epistemically divided texts, such as film and medicine, purely as texts multiplies these incarnations while forming synthesis and connections between them, and potentially creating different and yet to be formed incarnations. Not only is on-screen horror that which may transform us, but the horror found in such simple terms as pleasure, perversion and death, in every genre of discourse, is studied in order to posit moments and tactics of transformation everywhere. Each of the three key terms and their affect, for an embodied subject leads me to new theories of viewing, theories which can only progress, take off, toward an ethics of becoming.