Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media 9781138227439, 9781315395746

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Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media

This book examines the manifestations of materiality across different gothic media to show the inhuman at the heart of literature, film and contemporary media, outlining a philosophy of horror that deals with the horror of the nonhuman, the machine and the nonorganic. The author explores how materiality lends itself ideally to discussions of gothic and horror and acts as a threat to attempts to control meaning which falls outside the realm of consciousness. It brings the two together by examining the manifestations of this materiality to focus on a form of horror that is concerned with the (in) human by reading blood as the conduit of an unnameable materiality that circulates through gothic media, seducing with its familiar mask of gothic aesthetics only to uncover the horror of a totally alienating and inhuman otherness. Film, media, popular culture, philosophy and nineteenth-century literature are brought together and juxtaposed to create a continuity of ideas, and highlighting differences. The book offers innovative readings of notions of blood inscription in different media, of the dark web, accelerationism and technoscience to account for the widespread haemophilia in contemporary culture. This title is an essential read for researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students in film studies, media studies, literature, philosophy, cultural theory and popular culture. Its interdisciplinary nature, clear exposition of thought and theoretical ideas will make it a key resource for both students and for general readers with an interest in contemporary horror, media and pop culture. Aspasia Stephanou is an independent scholar who has written extensively on the gothic, cultural theory and media. Her publications include Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood: Bloodlines (Palgrave 2014), Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary: Black Metal (2012) (with Steven Shakespeare, Ben Woodard and Eugene Thacker) and Transgression and Its Limits (co-edited, 2012).

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

Reclaiming Critical Remix Video The Role of Sampling in Transformative Works Owen Gallagher Ecologies of Internet Video Beyond YouTube John Hondros Panic, Transnational Cultural Studies, and the Affective Contours of Power Edited by Micol Seigel Ethnic Media in the Digital Age Edited by Sherry S. Yu and Matthew D. Matsaganis Narratives of Place in Literature and Film Edited by Steven Allen and Kirsten Møllegaard Unplugging Popular Culture Reconsidering Materiality, Analog Technology, and the Digital Native K. Shannon Howard Advertising in MENA Goes Digital Ilhem Allagui Gambling in Everyday Life Spaces, Moments and Products of Enjoyment Fiona Nicoll Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media Aspasia Stephanou For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media

Aspasia Stephanou

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Aspasia Stephanou to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-22743-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-39574-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To my husband, Andrew, for always believing in me.

Contents

Introduction: A Study in Scarlet

1

1

Typewriter Blood

21

2

Inhuman Inscriptions in Contemporary Horror: Stephen King’s The Shining and Kathe Koja’s Fiction

45

3

At the Heart of Darkness: Trauma and Women

68

4

The Real of Cyberia: Dark Web, Red Rooms and Internet Gothic

91

5

Inhuman Materiality in Edgar Allan Poe’s Stories

118

6

Gothic Inhumanism

140

Conclusion: De Man’s Red Room

160

Bibliography Index

167 175

Introduction A Study in Scarlet

Images of blood red viscous liquid seeping through the snowy and barren landscape in Guillermo del Toro’s gothic horror film, Crimson Peak (2015), do not go unnoticed. Some of the film’s negative reviews stress how “coherence is sacrificed to sensation”1 and that the film is a “Blood-Soaked Mess”2 “awash in the red stuff”; its “old-fashioned good intentions” “quickly get swallowed up by puddles of bright red goo.”3 Marketed as gothic romance, but utilising the “red stuff” of horror films and the lurid colours characteristic of such giallo thrillers as Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), Crimson Peak expresses the way the gothic and horror genres are understood and interpreted within contemporary culture. Cinematic screens overflowing with blood red become central in contemporary gothic and horror and criticisms, such as the above, are useful to the extent that they underline the movement witnessed in these texts from gothic plot to the horror of matter. Depth of meaning and metaphor recede to the mechanical repetition of flickering surfaces and bloody sensations. But such images, in turning away from meaning, draw attention to an inorganic materiality beyond bodies and familiar gothic tropes. Beyond the recognisable, albeit dehumanising, images of mutilated bodies and their too readable humanity, gothic and horror enable us to think life, matter and blood as other and inhuman. Such blood imagery vividly impresses and becomes imprinted in the memory, reminding us of the excess blood in the elevator scene from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), the upside down blood spattering scene of Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the famous lawnmower scene in Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (Braindead) (1992), which used five gallons of fake blood per second, and recently the fifty thousand gallons of fake blood in Evil Dead (2013).4 There are also the huge amounts of blood in Carrie (1976), Alien (1979), The Thing (1982), Cabin in the Woods (2011) and Martyrs (2008). While, Crimson Peak names the red liquid oozing through the earth as clay, its movement, visceral effect, viscosity and crimson colour are unmistakably qualities that horror audiences recognise as blood.5 The red clay is not seen as a metaphor for blood, it is blood.6 Crimson Peak is the name given to Allerdale Hall because of

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the clay’s colour. Crimson is also the colour of blood. Not named then, blood is everywhere in the film. Human footsteps sink into the snow and soon stain the whiteness in blood red. The decaying mansion is sinking in the red clay as its every surface drips with thick red liquid. The mansion’s underground vaults, filled with the red liquid, enclose the corpses of its previous inhabitants; all the ghosts of the murdered women in Allerdale Hall, unlike Edith’s mother’s ghost who appears in her American home dressed in black, materialise in red forms with torn flesh and dripping with blood. Whether the ghosts’ red colour is due to the red clay or their bloody murders, or whether Edith’s white nightdress after her fight with Lucille is stained with red blood or clay, one sees all these as the pure materiality of blood without any attempt to rationalise the fluid’s weird colour, its origin or its unfamiliar texture. It is blood the way horror viewers see it.7 In this respect, blood is not understood as symbol or metaphor, as part of an organic whole, but as machinic materiality flickering at the uncanny limits of figuration, both living and dead, organic and inorganic, material and immaterial. It is matter appearing not in the affirmation of bodies, but in their dissolution. The premise of the story is familiar: a heroine marries an aristocrat and moves into his ancestral home, a castle where strange things begin to happen. Edith Cushing, an author of ghost stories and the daughter of wealthy American Carter Cushing, meets and falls in love with an English baronet, Sir Thomas Sharpe, who travels to America with the hope of securing financial support for his mechanical invention. A toymaker and inventor, the baronet lives with his sister Lucille Sharpe in Cumberland’s Allerdale Hall, a decaying castle sitting atop Crimson Peak, named after its red clay which he has been struggling to mine. After the mysterious death of Carter Cushing, machinated by Lucille, Edith marries Thomas and travels with him to England. Within the walls of the dilapidated mansion, bloody apparitions as well as the disembodied voices of Thomas’ previous wives brought back to life by Edith’s discovery of cylinders played through a phonograph, unravel the truth. Edith, like Thomas’ other previously murdered wives, was chosen for her money and was slowly being poisoned by his sister Lucille with whom Thomas has been having an incestuous relationship. Like the body of the earth, Edith’s poisoned body spits out blood. She eventually discovers that the dead wives’ bodies are submerged within vaults filled with the red clay underground Allerdale Hall. In the end, Lucille kills Thomas because he is in love with Edith and dies after attempting to kill Edith. The end credits reveal that the story was the written account of Edith’s published novel Crimson Peak. Framed as a story within a story, Edith’s gothic text is an attempt to impose meaning and closure to the story since everything is explained. But the uncanny fluidity of red ghosts appearing increasingly bloodier and more corporeal, and the red clay’s enigmatic origin and unexplained use and purpose remain

Introduction

3

incomprehensible to the human. The narrative, like its flow of red liquid, cannot be contained or fully understood.8 Crimson Peak then is a duplicitous text that portrays the regressive movement from culture to the primitive, and the slow disintegration of metaphor into the madness of the Real and unintelligible horror that threatens to disarticulate meaning. Moving from the “progressive” America of hard-working men and female typists to the old England of decaying castles and lazy aristocrats, Crimson Peak utilises from the beginning all the known gothic tropes, having consumed and digested a series of gothic texts. There are echoes of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and its modern technologies, and of the heroines of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Charlotte Brontё’s Jane Eyre, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.” Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and The White (2002), which was adapted as a miniseries for BBC by playwright Lucinda Coxon, who was also involved in Crimson Peak’s screenplay, is also a possible influence evident in the resonance of the title and its subject matter revolving around a love triangle. The plot’s familiar gothic aesthetic is, however, dismembered and disarticulated by the sheer materiality of the blood red clay and its strange vitality. The fact that blood is formless and cloaks itself with another form tainting it with red, is an indication of its ability to escape structure, thus dissolving the aesthetic and figuration. At the same time, there is an uncanny sense of the invisible becoming visible as dark life draped with the blood-red liquid inscribes the whiteness of the snow. Edith’s typewriting on white paper is juxtaposed to Thomas’ machinic imprinting of the snow with the clay’s blood red, and Edith’s metaphorical ghost writing becomes, in Allerdale Hall, a real encounter with the darkness of a material world beyond. While the film repeatedly stresses that ghosts are just a metaphor, it sets out to de-metaphorise gothic assumptions, as metaphor turns into the real, and ghosts materialise into bloody and fleshy wraiths. But their horror, diminished by their recurrent appearances, soon dissipates into the familiar monstrosity of gothic apparitions. What remains, however, unintelligible and unfamiliar, is the red clay and the materiality of blood. There is always, of course, the desire of the critic to control meaning and read Crimson Peak’s blood as a metaphor for the siblings’ incestuous relationship or the tainted blood of their aristocratic line represented by the house and its bloody location. Such attempts, though, are unsettled by blood’s resistance to meaning and to human control. Allerdale Hall is engulfed by a negative liquidity eating away the earth and the mansion, and Thomas Sharpe’s efforts to harvest the red liquid seem to fail no matter how hard he tries. The opaque blood is matter with its own occult life—different than human life but nonetheless alive—flowing and pulsating with a strange vitality through the pores of the frozen earth. Although, as Thomas explains, nothing gentle ever grows in Allerdale

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Hall, the red fluid seems to be alive despite the adverse geographical conditions and extreme cold. But, like the decaying mansion and its uncanny vitality—the black moths that devour butterflies and “thrive on the dark and cold,” the ghosts that live within the mansion’s walls, as well as the siblings’ unnatural relationship—this kind of life is not fertile or bountiful, but decaying and disintegrating. It is inhuman to the extent that it does not recognise human aspirations or desires and points towards the life of nonhuman and inanimate things whose existence is indifferent to the human. The sight of blood flowing through the snow in Crimson Peak is as mysterious as Antarctica’s Blood Falls. The outflow of blood red, attributed to the iron oxides in the saltwater trapped below the Taylor Glacier, flows from the glacier’s tongue into the icy West Lake Bonney in the Taylor Valley in Victoria Land, East Antarctica. What is particularly important, here, is the survival of an ancient microbial population trapped 400 metres beneath the glacier’s thick ice in extreme conditions for over 1.5 million years. Blood Falls is the result of microscopic life surviving in the coldest and darkest environments and proving that life is possible even under inhospitable conditions that would be fatal for most life forms. This has implications for the ways we understand life beyond notions of generation, growth and production, as something imbued with negativity and which the gothic explores in its portrayal of corpses returning from the grave, in images of decay and of the decomposition of matter, and in the life of inanimate things and machines. In gothic texts, images of blood red flowing, whether it is real blood detached from one’s body or is simply an unknown matter, are instinctively seen as occult matter brimming with a negative vitality, and here, as in Crimson Peak, are indicative of a kind of life that thrives in the darkest and most unfavourable conditions, an inhuman life. Perhaps, as will be discussed in Chapter 2 and, in more detail, in Chapter 3, it is more appropriate to refer to death, rather than life; not as an end but as a dynamic and persistent force beyond the organic, a vampiric life, if you like. Crimson Peak’s movement from light to darkness, from the civilised America of progress to the decaying aristocracy of England is also a movement from an understanding of life as productive and generative to one of decay and disintegration. H. P. Lovecraft’s and D. H. Lawrence’s readings of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” are particularly interesting here, given the fact that Crimson Peak shares with Poe’s story more than the mere implications of incest and its gothic setting. Like much contemporary horror, del Toro’s and Poe’s narratives explore the limits of the human by delving into questions about the living and the non-living, unsettling the boundaries between the two. Allerdale mansion, dripping with the blood-red liquid flowing from below and above, is a tomb and a mediator between life and death, disturbing the living with the dead underneath. As a grand mansion, it is a temple

Introduction

5

of civilisation raised up to the skies, while below, the force of base matter swallows up human aspirations. For Lawrence and Lovecraft, in Poe’s story the organic and the inorganic—the Ushers and their house—are connected by something more than their mere name. As Lovecraft writes in Supernatural Horror in Literature, Usher, whose superiority in detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history—a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment.9 This obscure and impersonal life force flows through the organic and the inorganic and, not bounded by the form of a human body, it destroys organic closure. Horror here is not an affirmation of productive life but exposes one to the demonic and monstrous power of inorganic life which appears inactive and inert, machinic and deathlike. Like Lovecraft, Lawrence finds an “inorganic consciousness” which is expressed by Roderick Usher’s belief in the sentience of all vegetable things.10 Life is understood as a relation of forces that are beyond human control. Lawrence describes how all material things have a form of sentience, even the inorganic: surely they all exist in some subtle and complicated tension of vibration which makes them sensitive to external influence and causes them to have an influence on other external objects, irrespective of contact.11 It is in this way that Roderick Usher believed that his whole surroundings, the stones of the house, the fungi, the water in the tarn, the very reflected image of the whole, was woven into a physical oneness with the family, condensed, as it were, into one atmosphere—the special atmosphere in which alone the Ushers could live. And it was this atmosphere which had moulded the destinies of his family.12 Lawrence’s reading lays emphasis on this monstrous life and inhuman force that traverses animate and inanimate life as it destroys the life of the human, and it sheds light on Crimson Peak’s ghastly life that connects Allerdale Hall, the Sharpe siblings and the bloody clay which engulfs all their surroundings. For Lawrence, the Ushers’ utter merging and incestuous13 desire is an instance of this monstrous and vampiric life that is all consuming. The Ushers’ “absorbing love,” “a process of unison in nervevibration, resulting in more and more extreme exaltation and a sort of

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Introduction

consciousness, and a gradual break-down into death,”14 is the same as the Sharpes’ incestuous unison. As Lucille Sharpe reveals in the end to Edith, “the horror, the horror was for love,” “it is a monstrous love, and makes monsters of us all.” The consuming disease of love, part of the inorganic life that runs through Allerdale mansion, is a merging of the human and the nonhuman, a negative form of life that Crimson Peak materialises in its exaggerated use of crimson mud. It is also a machinic life in the sense that it is shown to have a mechanical quality, automatic, material and repetitive without passion. Lawrence finds in Poe’s writing a mechanical quality in his descriptions of characters as things rather than humans, and their dismemberment into their individual parts so as to analyse and know them wholly. In a similar manner del Toro’s film presents Thomas absorbed in his mechanical inventions, Lucille in her repetitive patterns of perversely loving her brother, poisoning his wives one after another, and carefully cataloguing their hair braids in drawers. Their existence is not impulsive but mechanical and lifeless. D. H. Lawrence’s philosophical idea of a blood consciousness as his own version of a bodily unconscious is linked here to the notion of blood as material and organic but also as the material basis of occulted and dark life that gothic texts bring to the fore. Lawrentian blood consciousness is very close to Poe’s synthesis of materialism and idealism in his fictions, a synthesis, however, that in Poe is always monstrous and not felicitous. Lawrence’s merging of blood and consciousness seeks to bring together the mystical and the bodily so as to express those unknown intuitive, instinctual, visceral, organic and sexual forces and a secret vitality that flows through living things and opposes the world of intellect and the conscious rational mind. Like Poe, who attacks the Boston transcendentalists, and his stories are examples of a contaminated idealism, Lawrence’s blood philosophy is clearly set against the mind. In gothic language he expresses how “The ideal mind, the brain, has become the vampire of modern life, sucking up the blood and the life. There is hardly an original thought or original utterance possible to us. All is sickly repetition of stale, stale ideas.”15 Unlike Poe’s demonic merging of the organic and the inorganic, Lawrence seeks their balanced union, since he recognises that there are limits, and once the human being opens up to this radical force it is utterly consumed and loses its individual self and difference. For Lawrence, Roderick Usher has become selfless, mechanical and a postmortem reality of a living being vibrating in the same machinic rhythm as the things around him.16 He has lost his individuality and humanity and is closer to the inhuman things around him. While disintegration can be positive and leads to renewal, in Poe it is negative. Lawrence sees this negative conception of life as an expression of the human spirit or will persisting in the after-life: the “pride of human conceit in Knowledge.”17 While for Lawrence, life should remain hidden and unknown, the mysterious blood experienced but never fully understood, in Poe’s stories all

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these are desired with a satanic will that turns life against itself. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” it is incestuous love, in “Ligeia” it is vampiric life as the manifestation of a demonic will beyond death. Lawrence’s blood consciousness, while partly associated with inhuman and impersonal forces, remains a positive force. In the end, both Poe and Lawrence are concerned with human limits and their transgression. For Lawrence, knowing what lies beyond the human is a “death-process”18 and “one can never know: and never—never understand”19 the inhuman because it cannot be just used with impunity by the human, anthropomorphised and exploited. But Poe’s stories give us instances where this inhuman beyond can be accessed and known through the gothic’s monstrous amalgamations of organic and inorganic life. Particularly, where Lawrence’s philosophy opposes blood consciousness to the mechanical, Poe’s stories deal with life and death as mechanical and artificial, something that will frame our discussion throughout the book. Lawrence’s philosophy attacks idealism as a disease and is an attempt to give expression to the bodily, flesh and blood, that, for him, is both the physical body but also its occult and mystical life. At the same time, his blood consciousness is a mysterious and impersonal force that circulates through both the human and the inhuman. Whether he associates negative disintegration to humans’ perverse desire for “beastly knowing”20 or on the other hand, he affirms a disintegration that goes beyond consciousness by letting in unknown forces,21 Lawrence sees life and death as part of the same force of change. It is, particularly, this notion of decay as a negative life that is of interest here. In his “Edgar Allan Poe,” published in the first version of Studies in Classic American Literature (1918–19), he talks about Poe’s concern with “creative death,”22 “living disintegration”23 and the mysterious decomposition of the body as “a life process of post-mortem activity.”24 In Women in Love, he writes about “destructive creation” and an inhuman and “mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as the beetles have, which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution.”25 Whether they are united or utterly merged, Lawrence sees life and death, the organic and the inorganic as entangled. Crimson Peak’s unique exploration of the living disintegration in the materiality of blood is indicative of this enigmatic and elemental life. In Poe, blood’s demonic vitality and materiality are felt at once in “Ligeia” in the moment of the disintegration of Rowena and the satanic return of Ligeia. The scene is punctuated by the unsettling implications of “three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby-colored fluid” which fall from an invisible spring within the wine goblet.26 Blood is here a conduit and a mediator between the world of the living and that of the dead enabling continuity and the free flow of forces from beyond. The inorganic and the organic unite in a monstrous merging whereby Ligeia’s satanic spirit gains material form and reanimates Rowena’s dead body. Life here is a negative and perverse machinic force that lives against life.27

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Lawrence’s notion of blood as an unintelligible and visceral force comes very close to Luce Irigaray’s notion of red blood/sang rouge as the maternal and material which is repressed in language and the symbolic and is opposed to the white blood/sang blanc of the masculine world of semblances and bloodless forms of representation. While both Irigaray and Lawrence were criticised for their essentialist and organic categories, their ideas on blood are attempts to inscribe the corporeal within language and express an opacity and darkness within language, something that is barely visible but material. In a similar manner, Poe’s stories bring to the fore a mechanical, inorganic life, even if, at the moment that such ghastly life materialises, appears distorted and demonic. In Crimson Peak, while the red clay is immediately recognised as blood, its materiality—both its colour and texture—is strange, inorganic and artificial, having no reference to anything real or familiar. It is unsettling because unfamiliar. This inhuman materiality which cannot be fully understood or put into words is what Paul de Man in the 1960s and 1970s will name the “material,” “materiality” or “inscription.” It is on this opaque concept of materiality, developed in his later writings, that recent reappraisals of Paul de Man’s work have drawn their attention. De Man’s “inhuman materiality” informs current discussions on matter, objects and life beyond the human by offering a sober account of a linguistic materiality manifested in those moments that meaning is dismembered, impossible or undecidable. As a threat to attempts to control meaning and as something outside of the realm of consciousness, materiality lends itself ideally to discussions of gothic and horror. This project attempts to bring for the first time the two together by examining the manifestations of this materiality across different gothic media in order to delineate a contemporary philosophy of horror that is concerned with the (in)human. It proposes to read blood as the conduit of an unnameable materiality that disarticulates gothic aesthetics by uncovering the horror of a totally alienating and inhuman otherness. The book seeks to offer innovative readings of notions of blood inscription in literature, of women and death, the dark web and internet horror stories, accelerationism and technoscience in order to account for the widespread haemophilia in contemporary culture. While Paul de Man is associated with the height of literary theory, revisiting his work today, particularly his latest writings on materiality, in the light of current ecological catastrophes, species extinction and the crisis of global capital is crucial. De Man’s assertion that language is an inhuman machine that creates a sense of familiarity and security while threatening reading with the radical senselessness of its materiality is key to understand the world for us but also the world beyond the human. Horror, by moving beyond the text and looking into the abyss, enables the darkness to creep in and corrupt established purities and definitions. Gothic enables this destructive materialism to creep in and destabilise

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recognisable certainties while pointing towards life and other things that exceed organic humanity. Always too much or not enough of something, materiality in horror is either apparent in the excess of monstrous meaning to the point of catachresis or when lacking, expressing the impossibility to perceive things and the nonhuman. This project, by focussing on de Manian key concepts of materiality, the inhuman and the machine, endeavours to offer fresh readings of texts opening thus and enriching the field of gothic and horror. At the same time, this project opens a dialogue with recent work on de Man, in particular Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller and Andrzej Warminski’s Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (2001) and Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller’s Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin (2012) in which de Man is shown to be the inhuman philosopher of the twenty-first century, whose work is particularly important in deciphering contemporary problems. In this respect, the project brings into the fore de Manian concepts while connecting them to current philosophies, writings on new media and cultural practices in order to offer original readings of de Man within the gothic and contemporary culture.

De Man and Inhuman Materiality De Man uses the word “materiality” on three different occasions to talk about something that is unknowable, that we are not able to make sense of or perceive. Firstly, materiality is linked to “material vision” as a certain way of seeing without the mediation of mind; secondly, it is associated with the prosaic materiality of the letter or the materiality of inscription that draws attention to the letters themselves as mere marks and meaningless, and finally, to the materiality of history. The latter does not refer to historical events as temporal acts but to momentary linguistic acts, non-mental performative speech acts, which cause something materially to occur and actually happen. In “Kant and Schiller” and “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” de Man refers to Kant’s Critique of Judgement as such a historical event, because Kant’s own rigorous analysis creates a break within his own discourse, generating a movement away from trope and towards a performative discourse. Relevant to the materiality of history, but more helpful to our discussion here, however, are de Man’s two other instances where materiality presents itself. In “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” and “Kant’s Materialism” de Man finds, in the idealist Kant, moments where materiality disrupts the aesthetic. For example, in his analysis of the dynamic sublime, Kant takes as examples the sky and the sea and explains that they must be regarded just as the eye sees them and not think of them as we usually do, “as implying all kinds of knowledge (that are not contained in immediate intuition).”28 This kind of seeing is detached from purpose and

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Introduction

does not involve the mind. This material vision “devoid of any reflexive or intellectual complication” and of “any semantic depth” has nothing to do with aesthetic experience.29 As de Man writes in “Kant’s Materialism” “the eye, left to itself, entirely ignores understanding; it only notices appearance (it is Augenschein) without any awareness of a dichotomy between illusion and reality.”30 This materiality is the loss of the symbolic because no “pathos, anxiety, or sympathy is conceivable; it is, indeed, the moment of a-pathos, or apathy.”31 Kant’s materialism then is without any reference to the real world and without any mediation of mind or emotion; it is simply a purely material vision previous to any desire to anthropomorphise it.32 The prosaic materiality of the letter is similar to material vision but refers here to the disarticulation and dismemberment of language. Meaning is butchered and tropes are replaced by fragmented sentences and fragmented words into syllables and letters.33 While material vision refers to a seeing that precedes figuration, the materiality of the letter refers to seeing letters as mere marks on a page, shifting attention from what is being said to the way of saying.34 This kind of materiality can be glimpsed when meaning disappears and words and letters are sheer materiality, mere unintelligible scribbling. This is also evident in the mechanical repetition of words that shifts attention away from meaning and towards meaningless sound such as in the use of rhymes, alliteration or assonance. In “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” de Man uses the example of memorisation which is different of that of recollection or imagination because it is not associated with images. Memorisation reveals materiality since when one learns by heart it is only by forgetting meaning and reading words as a “mere list of names.”35 The activity of learning by rote of names is, like their inscription in order not to forget them, “mechanical” and “machinelike.”36 In this sense, de Man notes that in Hegel the idea appears as the “material inscription of names” since thought depends on memory which is a mechanical faculty. The notion of mechanical repetition which, like “a stutter, or a broken record, it makes what it keeps repeating worthless and meaningless,”37 brings into focus this de Manian materiality, what can hardly be seen, totally stripped of its meaning, unintelligible random sound or mere prosaic signs and hieroglyphic inscriptions. Materiality then is the inorganic and the machinic, this impossible force outside of meaning, independent of any subjective desire that infects the text and mutilates meaning. For Judith Butler, such materiality is the body itself, not as an organic totality, but severed or dismembered in the act of writing it performs. As Butler shows, for de Man the body is also understood “as prior to figuration and cognition.”38 While the body makes writing possible, it is, at the same time, spectralised and dismembered within the language that seeks to deny it.39 As she writes, “There is no writing without the body, but no body fully appears along with the

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writing that it produces.”40 For Butler, the materiality of the body appears at the moment of its disappearance, separating from itself at the point at which it acts and produces language. Writing then becomes the process of the body’s spectralisation whereby the body is, at the same time, captured within discourse but also escapes it. Indeed, Butler points out, dismemberment, for de Man, “marks the very limits of figuration—its uncanny limits.”41 Butler’s gothic language here is indicative of how the gothic and horror genres present the material, glimpsed at those moments where figuration is resisted by an unnameable darkness, something monstrously unrecognisable, spectral or unknowable.

Gothic and the Materiality of Blood Materiality can be understood as this absolute otherness of the other that appears at the limit of thought: the inhuman, machinic and inorganic life of blood. Bodies and blood might be already culturally codified, but gothic and horror offer moments where aesthetics and representation are resisted by those openings where blood appears as a nameless and unknowable force, disrupting and inhibiting attempts to close off meaning. Horror lets the Outside in by dressing it with the mask of tropes, the aesthetic, only to reveal the real horror of the inhuman, the abstract disorder of artificial death, the undeadness of inorganic matter. Similar to what Mark Fisher terms “gothic materialism,” de Man’s materiality understood within the context of the gothic and horror is linked to this radical otherness—the world and relations of things as they are, void of meaning and existing without the human—that threatens metaphor and the symbolic. In order to make sense of this world of absolute otherness and lack of human feeling, of what de Man calls “a-pathy,”42 horror literature, it can be argued, masks materiality with the lure of meaning, trying to give it a human face, anthropomorphising it, at the same time as it seeks to describe a world operating without the human, to lift up the curtain and reveal it for what it is.43 This unnameable thing might take the form of a seductive Count, or the incomprehensible principle of life might become legible through the horror of blood.44 The gothic is unique in showing us that the world is not meaningful, generative and natural, but inhuman, unnatural and indifferent to us. The purpose here is to outline a philosophy of horror that conceptualises horror writing as a confrontation with the horror of the nonhuman, with this unnameable and ungraspable inhuman materiality. In particular, I want to argue that in gothic and contemporary horror this materiality, to a large extent, coagulates around the liquid of blood as a conduit of the Thing, of what is deemed Outside language and cognition. For gothic and horror stories, the expressive quality of blood and its strange aliveness and fluidity, its excessive loss in horrific events, the images of hideous figures dabbled in the scarlet fluid, or avatars threatening to

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infect with blood viruses, is a sign of a gothic materiality—of undeath and inorganic life—and of a life which according to human laws should not be living. Following de Manian analysis, I will argue that horror enables a movement away from knowledge through blood’s materiality. As something not open to the senses, perception and cognition, materiality is the Real, the Thing, a haunting, and quintessentially gothic. Gothic’s most prevalent ingredient that sustains but also gives the genre its disturbing flavour, blood conjures up the Thing, the horror of otherness, and constitutes a schism that tears through the veil of horror’s aesthetic and rhetoric in order to get a glimpse of the world beyond, of the inhuman. Metaphors of blood are imperilled by the horror of blood, by its sheer senselessness. In this sense, blood here should not be understood as a bodily fluid and a harmonious part of organic humanity, but as an inhuman, faceless and anonymous materiality operating mechanically and beyond human control. Neither spiritual nor material, this materiality is grasped in the demonic life writhing in the margins of Poe’s stories and in the disintegrating physiognomy of his characters or in the visceral images of contemporary cinema, creepypasta or the dark web. It is blood as a sign of a living death and a negative life. This book can be understood as an attempt to address blood’s materiality in light of the recent trend towards realism and materialism evident in the various philosophical movements from speculative realism/ materialism to Object Oriented Ontology, to agential realism, new materialisms, black metal theory, the great outdoors, as well as other philosophies that move away from the discursive field and language towards the realism of science or the “truth” of other disciplines. By using Paul de Man, however, I do not move away from language, but I turn towards his definition of language and the text as inhuman and machinic, and not as something that can be controlled by the human.45 Focussing on de Man’s last and more obscure essays in Aesthetic Ideology (1996), where he turns away from tropological systems (literary, figurative language) and towards an inscription and a materiality that precedes figuration, I want to examine this materiality through blood in order to formulate and expand on a theory of the gothic and horror that recognises that while blood is constructed through language, it also exceeds every effort to capture it linguistically. As a case in point, Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) is particularly important in the ways it presents blood as material and not as symbolic or meaningful. The story refers to Bloodstain Pattern Analysis which Sherlock Holmes develops in the laboratory for the microscopic examination of blood corpuscles. In Forensic Science, Bloodstain Pattern Analysis (BPA), by focussing on the size, shape and location of bloodstains at a crime scene helps determine the distance blood travelled, the kind of weapon that was used, or confirm witnesses’ accounts. In the story, the murderer writes with his blood on the wall the German word for revenge,

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“RACHE,”  in  order to distract investigators. He hopes that they will try to decipher the bloody writing by imposing some form of meaning and attaching the perpetrator to political refugees, revolutionists or secret societies. But the blood inscription is written at random and means nothing; its possible meanings function as figures and metaphors of blood that occlude its materiality. It is not what is written on the wall, but how it is written that provides clues to the identity of the murderer. While the blood writing does not mean anything, the way it was written, and its position reveal certain facts about the perpetrator’s appearance. The murderer’s forefinger with which the inscription was written scratched the plaster, indicating a man with long nails, while the place of the blood writing confirmed the man’s height. Conan Doyle’s story draws attention to the materiality of blood rather than its cultural meanings, and here, Inhuman Materiality in Gothic Media seeks to offer a similar study in scarlet that moves away from the field of metaphor and into the darkness of blood as something unknowable and un-aesthetic, the site of machinic life and animated death. As Poe writes about the monstrous plague that appears in the form of a masked stranger whose animated figure hides nothing underneath, “Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood.”46 Through a series of key gothic texts, as well as lesser known, but equally important texts and media, I will show that the dark materialism of the gothic and contemporary horror is what enables us today to grasp, conceptualise and examine some of the current themes on the inhuman and the inorganic circulating in the fields of philosophy, science, culture and society and to begin outlining and giving flesh to a contemporary theory of the gothic and horror that takes into account developments in those areas. Understanding after de Man that language, the gothic, a financial system, the planet, a human body or blood are all “interconnected machines” or “self-acting machinal programs”47 out of our human control that operate blindly, and will eventually self-destruct, may enable us to grapple with some of the current issues revolving around the inhuman and a future without promise. The project sets out to bring into contact disparate and related media and discourses, open a dialogue with each other, so as to trace the materiality of blood in its various manifestations. Mirroring de Man’s inhuman language and Foucault’s complex genealogies, the purpose here is to offer intricate and multiple analyses of interconnecting media and theories that do not seek to provide a general paradigm but to open up the texts to multiple readings. The examination of something that destroys the wholeness of the text can be linked to artistic attempts to go beyond veiled reality, open up the body and access some form of “truth.” Following de Man’s reading in “Excuses” where he demonstrates the ways the text as body is displaced by the text as machine, I want to argue that this contemporary

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Introduction

haemophilia—the proliferation of images of bodily mutilation and blood extremism—unmasks something more threatening than their visual horror: the realisation that beyond the symbolic and the fiction there is nothing but the arbitrary and mechanical repetition of bloody violence. This can be understood by the contemporary figure of the serial killer as the monster that gives out a death that is stripped of any meaning. Such a negative conception of the real is characterised by the persistence to destroy masks in order to uncover the real or some authentic identity that remains hidden. This obsession with transparency is enamoured with surfaces and horror presents us with images of mutilated and convulsed bodies, and violent sensations for experiencing the immediacy of suffering, extremity and anguish. Within this martyrology, blood is the signature of the real on the body, and the tortured body, always echoing that of Christ, is the body marked by this materiality. Films like Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008) show there is nothing beyond the surface of the flesh. But, beyond this cruelty that reduces the human to animality and pity,48 there are moments that horror and gothic texts open other possibilities by piercing the veil of reality without destroying it completely. These gaps and openings, the appearance and disappearance of monstrous forms, the flickering of images at the edge of the void or “this bit-of-the-real extorted by the fleeting passage of forms”49 is what de Man refers to as that materiality that disturbs the system. It is to this materiality that I want to turn, where the body and blood are inaccessible to our senses, and which enter our world through their very disarticulation and dismemberment. Films like Marina de Van’s In My Skin (2002) are attentive to the materiality of the body as inaccessible and unknown, where mutilation is an attempt to inscribe and give flesh to this unthinkable materiality. Indeed, while much of contemporary horror is in thrall to the paroxysms of the body in extreme ordeal and treats human suffering as something natural, there are other strands of horror that prompt us to think of a future without the human as an opening for new beginnings through the inhuman, the unnatural, the monstrous. And this is where the gothic’s power lies: by giving voice and precedence to the monster and inhuman materiality it questions human’s right over existence, while forcing us to begin thinking of what we might, or not, have in common with other forms of life. It is only by starting from the aberration and the inhuman that it is possible to think of what the human might be.50 And horror puts on display such an anonymous material force of inhumanism in the guise of unnatural manifestations, from Dracula and his incarnation into animals (wolves, rats, bats) or the inorganic (mist), vampire plagues, to the life of demonic things and the pulsating flow of blood. By merging biological and theological notions of life, gothic and horror are particularly concerned with blood as matter not accessible to human thought and as the material basis for an enigmatic malevolent vitality, a living death.

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Structure The book consists of six chapters and a Conclusion. Playing on and referencing Jacques Derrida’s essay “Typewriter Ribbon” which analyses de Man’s reading of Rousseau in “Excuses (Confessions),” Chapter 1, “Typewriter Blood,” will examine de Manian materiality and blood writing as a form of mediation and communication with a world beyond that of human perception. By looking at blood inscriptions in Matthew Lewis’ The Monk and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, writing is seen as an automatic and machinic process controlled by inhuman forces. Both novels play with the myth of Faustus, as blood and the body become the means of communication and the message itself. Through the vampire’s occult media and blood inscriptions, I argue that gothic media involve forms of communication that do not prescribe to our understanding of media as technological. Instead, through the organic, inorganic and supernatural, the monk and the vampire acquire knowledge, but, in the end, they are inscribed by the law and destroyed. In Chapter 2, “Inhuman Inscriptions in Contemporary Horror: Stephen King’s The Shining and Kathe Koja’s Fiction,” the notion of corporeal inscription is examined through philosophy, including Friedrich Nietzsche’s mnemotechnics, Foucault’s genealogy, and Grosz’s inscriptions, as well as through Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” the horror fiction of Stephen King’s The Shining and Kathe Koja’s novels. The repetitive nature of inscriptions destroys the wholeness of the body and introduces the Outside into the inside, haemorrhaging subjectivity and threatening any sense of selfhood. The body in horror becomes a surface to be written upon and to be broken by outside forces that are alien to the subject. The machines of history and culture inscribe and imprison bodies into their own very painful histories. The Shining deals with real, social and biological machines which inscribe bodies and instil repetitive behaviours. On the other hand, the chapter concludes with a set of transgressive novels by Kathe Koja, where bodily inscription is an expression of the human will to transgress, but the subject is caught up in the machinic forces of the inorganic and wallows in pure negativity. In Chapter 3, “At the Heart of Darkness: Trauma and Women,” I want to avoid the affirmative and celebratory vitalism of new materialisms, by looking at a series of films where death, violence and mutilation link Woman to the materiality of the body, the machinic and undeath. Whether one is talking about the Freudian demonic power of the death drive, Nick Land’s anti-vitalism, or de Man’s inhuman materiality and machinic repetition, gothic and horror capture this demonic, mindless repetition through imagery of blood. Paul Solet’s film Grace (2009), Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s Inside (L’ Interieur, 2007) and Fabrice du Welz’s Vinyan (2008) all deal with the maternal as a monstrous and violent chaotic force that traverses life beyond the limits of the organic

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and the familiarity of the human. The maternal is seen as an opening to the outside and life that embraces death as an experience and not an end. Claire Dennis’ Trouble Every Day (2002) and Marina De Van’s In My Skin (2002) focus on women’s vampirism and autocannibalism as realities which treat bodies in their pure materiality. By looking at physical and psychic trauma, corporeal wounds and bloody mutilation through de Manian materiality, it is possibly to see blood, the other and the body as totally inhuman, confronting the traumatic kernel of a world without us. Chapter 4, “The Real of Cyberia: Dark Web, Red Rooms and Internet Gothic,” examines de Man’s inhuman materiality in relation to the dark web, the myth of the red room and the phenomenon of creepypasta. Materiality is seen as the indefinable, unnameable and indifferent face of the internet which uncannily turns its inhuman gaze at us. The world of the internet is characterised by a postmodern permissiveness and a compulsion to witness everything, from internet memes involving cats to the most gruesome and cruel mutilations of bodies. As we hope to draw the veil and glimpse at something more real than our common reality, we fall prey to the repetition of content and the circulation of stories about horrors lurking in the shadows. From the myth of the red room to creepypasta— gothic and horror stories, videos and images—internet horror is linked to the gaze and the act of seeing and being seen, in order to give shape to the inaccessible. Unknown media, computer viruses, webcams watching us and monsters without faces are all figures of gothic mediation, reflecting an inhuman reality and the cold gaze of the internet. As Nick Land writes, just when you think the monster is dead amidst fake ketchup blood, it reanimates.51 Beyond the familiar aesthetic of gothic avatars and comforting monsters there is always something more sinister lurking underneath: the realisation that the Internet, like the computer, are independent machines, that operate beyond our control. Chapter 5, “Inhuman Materiality in Edgar Allan Poe’s Stories” examines Poe’s tales of the vampiric, mesmerism and death, to argue that his dark materialism enables us to look beyond mere semblances and right in the face of horror itself as the unscreened real, the impersonal and abstract force outside the limits of human experience. In his tales, death, matter and the inorganic are imbued with a dark vitalism, revealing Poe’s concern with death as a living force. Poe’s dark materialism is characterised by this monstrous merging of the organic and the inorganic, and his descriptions of a dark, mechanical and inhuman life resonate with de Man’s inhuman materiality. Poe’s persistence to uncover a life beyond the limits of the body, through his treatment of mesmerism or in his depictions of the demonic life of the vampire Ligeia, underline his preoccupations with a materialism that is inhuman, and of life as an impersonal force that is not limited to the organic boundaries of recognisable humanity. Chapter 6, entitled “Gothic Inhumanism,” focusses on the horror of life beyond the human. “Gothic Inhumanism” takes its cue from Paul de

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Man’s understanding of the inhuman as something impersonal, machinelike and completely other than man.52 By looking at nanotechnology’s transformation of living matter and machines the human is dethroned from its privileged position. Contemporary horror texts open up the possibilities of understanding life beyond the organism: beyond the human and the organic, there is the blood of other forms of life and the life of inhuman living systems. Twentieth- and twenty-first century cyberpunk horror and body horror demonstrate the inhuman life of machines and engineered life. The chapter seeks to avoid the idea of the posthuman as some peaceful integration of machine/human (Katherine Hayles, Andy Clark) or immortality as an enhanced version of the human (transhumanists), by examining the idea of an inhuman future that will revise the human altogether. Exploring the ambivalent gap between the organic and the inorganic, the chapter offers analyses of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and such cyberpunk texts as Michael Crichton’s Prey and Greg Bear’s Blood Music, in order to describe a negative conception of life as multiplicity and infection, where the human is superseded by machines and intelligent swarms. Against the idea of “life” as a positive and innovative force, gothic and horror texts give glimpses of inhuman matter or propose a totally desolate world without humans where life is supplanted by a machinic, dark fecundity. The book concludes by bringing the previous chapters’ concerns together in order to trace new meanings and expand the scope of the book, by creating connections to other ideas. Gothic and horror’s obsession with mutilation and dismemberment are connected to the mechanical repetitions of machinic processes which produce the illusion of the personal, the subject and our cosy sense of familiarity. The alterity of materiality is shown in those moments where the unthinkable is masked in the presence of senseless inscriptions, nameless monstrosities, the visceral spectacle of blood and the repetitions of machinic, incomprehensible and unseen forces. De Man’s concept of inhumanity is then linked to the gothic and horror’s preoccupations with negative, decaying life and nonorganic death. The inhuman is traced in the biological, socio-political and historical forces that have manufactured our very being, with its imprisoning passions and deathly compulsions. The obsession with seeing beyond mere semblances, the demand for transparency and appearance are read as part of a more general trend for making everything visible, a passion for the real, which ends in the derealisation of events, bodies and violence, by an endless circulation of fakes. More sober attempts at viewing the real materiality of the body, have tried to trace its truth in the cuts and blood of its surface. Finally, the contemporary persistence of images of trauma, like capitalism’s mechanical, unsympathetic nature, are nihilistic, as the suffering of human existence is put on display. But human violence, particularly the body’s fragile surface, when seen in comparison to the glistening

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electronics of our contemporary machines, reveals fears about our supersession by intelligent machines. De Man’s concepts of the inhuman, materiality and the machinic when read within the context of horror, are helpful to see our world as a cold universe without us, which we have no way to control or change. Horror depicts the demise of the human, but also warns of our total surrender to the inhuman, as the loss of difference and the total collapse of meaning.

Notes 1. A. O. Scott, “‘Crimson Peak’: A Guillermo del Toro Gothic Romance in High Bloody Style,” The New York Times, 15 October 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/ 10/16/movies/crimson-peak-a-guillermo-del-toro-gothic-romance-in-highbloody-style.html?_r=0. 2. Beejoli Shah, “Crimson Peak Is a Blood-Soaked Mess,” Maxim, 15 October 2015, www.maxim.com/ entertainment/crimson-peak-review-2015-10. 3. Michael O’ Sullivan, “‘Crimson Peak’ Is Awash in the Red Stuff,” Washington Post, 15 October 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/ movies/movie-review-crimson-peak-is-awash-in-the-red-stuff/2015/10/14/ d2c89d28-7272-11e5-8d93-0af317ed58c9_story.html 4. Dead Alive was considered one of the bloodiest movies ever made, using over one thousand gallons of blood in total. See “Five of the Bloodiest, Goriest Horror Movies of All Time,” www.verbicidemagazine.com/ 2012/10/16/fivebloodiest-horror-movies-all-time/; Dead Alive, “Trivia,” www.imdb.com/ title/tt0103873/trivia. See Evil Dead, “Trivia,” www.imdb.com/title/tt1288558/ trivia?ref_=tt_ql_2. 5. Even the word “red” derives from the Sanskrit word rudhirā, which means blood. 6. Deleuze’s reading of Godard’s formula “It’s not blood, it’s red,” stresses the sensual and active materiality of colour as producing material affect by absorbing all that it comes into contact with, and not as a mere metaphor of a particular thing, for example, blood. However, I am concerned with something different than the opposition between metaphor and representation. I am interested in how things are to the eye without the mediation of the mind, and thus not constantly changing meaning. Unlike Deleuze’s “symbolism of colours” (Cinema 1, 118) here I am interested in a materiality as “the complete loss of the symbolic” (Paul de Man, “Kant’s Materialism,” in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 127. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 118; and Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 1997), 182–3. 7. This is a paraphrase that references Paul de Man’s reading of Kant and of seeing “as poets do” in relation to materiality as a prefigural pre-seeing, seeing in a nonteleological manner without any mediation of mind or knowledge and without attaching any purpose or human benefit to what the eye sees. (See “Kant’s Materialism” and “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 126, 80). 8. The text here is seen as an inhuman thing that cannot be controlled or closed off. 9. In H. P. Lovecraft, H. P Lovecraft Omnibus 2: Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (London: Panther, Granada Publishing, 1985), 466.

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10. D. H. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” in Studies in Classic American Literature (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), 84. 11. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” 83–4. 12. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” 84. 13. The editor of The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II: Tales and Sketches (Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), Thomas Ollive Mabbott, in the introduction of “The Fall of the House of Usher” disagrees with Lawrence on the subject of the Ushers’ incestuous relationship, and clarifies that the use of this theme is “contrary to Poe’s general practice” (395). 14. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” 84. 15. D. H. Lawrence, “Fantasia,” in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York: Dover Publications, 2005), 106. 16. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” 83. 17. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” 81. 18. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” 76. 19. D. H. Lawrence, Letter, “3430. To Dr Trigant Burrow, 6 June 1925,” in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. 5 1924–27, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 262. 20. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” 79. 21. See Colin Clarke’s reading of Lawrence’s Women in Love in River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence and English Romanticism (1969). 22. D. H. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe, First Version (1918–19),” in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vassey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 230. 23. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe, First Version (1918–19),” 229. 24. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe, First Version (1918–19),” 229. 25. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 172, 253. 26. Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 325. 27. See Nicola Masciandaro’s commentary on “perverse negative vitality” and the horror of life and life as horror in Glossator 6: Black Metal, ed. Nicola Masciandaro and Reza Negarestani (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012), 119, 120. Also Eugene Thacker’s negative vitality in his “Horror of Philosophy” trilogy (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011–2015). 28. Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 80. 29. de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” 83. 30. de Man, “Kant’s Materialism,” 127. 31. de Man, “Kant’s Materialism,” 127. 32. de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” 82. 33. de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” 89. 34. de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” 89. 35. Paul de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 101. 36. de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” 102. 37. Paul de Man, “Hegel on the Sublime,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 116.

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38. Judith Butler, “How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?,” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 258. 39. Butler, “How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?,” 258. 40. Butler, “How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?,” 263. 41. Butler, “How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?,” 268. 42. See de Man’s, “Kant’s Materialism.” 43. See de Man’s, “The Concept of Irony.” 44. For de Man, the confusion of the thing itself with its linguistic equivalent is exactly the action of aesthetic ideology. 45. See also Claire Colebrook’s assertion that “As the end of humanity come [sic] to be more and more apparent, and as the prospect of a future without humans promises to be literally the case, we would be better served to think of processes of textual complexity that could not be returned or contained by what we mean, must have meant or can imagine. Radical rhetorical abandonment, or a sense that sense is itself a material event of inhuman complexity, may awaken us from our political slumbers; our refusal to think of multiplicities beyond the world of man” (“Matter without Bodies,” Derrida Today 4, no. 1 [2011]: 1–20), 19. 46. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978). 47. Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller, Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 87–8. 48. See the notion of “pitiless art” in Paul Virilio’s, Art and Fear (London and New York: Continuum, 2004); and the “metaphysics of pity” in Alain Badiou’s The Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 176. 49. Badiou, The Century, 137. 50. In this sense, there is a strand of thought that connects Michel Foucault and Reza Negarestani’s inhumanism to that of Paul de Man. 51. Nick Land, “CyberGothic,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987– 2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012), 349. 52. See Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller, Theory and the Disappearing Future: On De Man, On Benjamin (London: Routledge, 2012).

1

Typewriter Blood

The American medium Charles H. Foster (1838–88) from Salem, Massachusetts, is associated with the strange phenomenon of blood writing on skin, which appeared in an automatic and involuntary fashion, displaying the communicating spirit’s name. While this might appear ludicrous to a modern reader, spiritualism was very popular during the 1850s, particularly, through the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg and Anton Mesmer’s experiments with “animal magnetism.” In 1861, when Foster was visiting England, he performed séances attended by Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Chambers and William Howitt. Arthur Conan Doyle, who was interested in spiritualism and the communication with the world beyond, compared the “gift of blood-red letters upon Foster’s skin” to stigmata.1 In the Salem Seer: Reminiscences of Charles H. Foster, Foster’s biographer, George C. Bartlett, described how during a séance in Philadelphia in 1873, “names [were] written in plain, distinct characters, in letters formed of the living blood at that moment coursing through the hand of Foster.”2 While The Spiritual Magazine received evidence in 1863 that Foster had faked some of the phenomena, including the blood-red skin writing that was consistent with his own handwriting, Foster’s real or fake communication with the world beyond the human through the medium of blood draws attention to writing as something automatic and machinic controlled by inhuman forces. The blood inscription on the surface of the body, guided by some unknown force, brings into view many of the preoccupations of contemporary horror, particularly, its fascination with the world outside our perception. Gothic and horror texts open a universe where one can glimpse moments of this (im)possibility of communication with a world beyond the human, but one which comes at a cost. In such moments, horror nullifies the interiority of the subject, drawing attention to the surface of the body as mere parchment, only to be written upon or marked by the inhuman. In this sense, while the Victorian mediums’ form of communication might seem outdated to us today, it nonetheless draws attention to the ways human bodies in gothic and horror become inscription surfaces by inhuman forces, media or machines. At other times, the inscription

22 Typewriter Blood of bodies by machines does not wholly destroy subjectivity but facilitates a new form of knowledge radically different to phenomenal experience. In Clive Barker’s “The Book of Blood,” for example, the body of Simon McNeal becomes an inscription surface where the dead use his skin as the “vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood.”3 Blood in this context is a mediator between the human and the inhuman, the red ink that mediates between machinic intelligence and the world of the human. It functions as an occult or uncanny relic of an earlier time bridging our world to the world beyond us. It runs compulsively, repetitively, in a demonic manner that exhibits its own inhuman agency. Gothic and horror texts have always been preoccupied with conjuring this inhuman world through the use of blood as a medium. Just as the devil requires John Faustus’ “deed of gift” written in legal jargon and with his own blood, so God inscribes Faustus’ own flesh with the warning “Homo fuge.” Blood and the body become the means of communication and the message itself. The title of this chapter brings together two traditionally incompatible things: the machinic typewriter and the organic, blood. It is perhaps a monstrous marriage of what is inhuman, inorganic and senseless with what is an essential part of the human and life. Moreover, blood is usually associated with a series of symbolic meanings: race, sexuality, gender, kinship and class. However, I want to undermine the neat association of blood with any meaning by pursuing how such knowledge is disrupted or annihilated by coupling blood with the machinic, its meaningless repetitive and automatic qualities. Machinic blood writing is then about the impersonal and dangerous compulsion to repeat evident in the mechanical and systematic qualities of blood inscriptions. This will draw attention to de Man’s materiality as an openness towards what is beyond human perception and experience. In this chapter, de Man’s concepts of materiality and the text as machine will be discussed in relation to forms of gothic mediation. At the same time, I will begin to delineate a genealogy of gothic and horror by focussing on the changing understanding of the inhuman from something that is shown to be transcendental and supernatural, to something that is immanent; the impersonal force of the cosmos that is indifferent to human passions.4 On the one hand, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gothic fiction is mostly preoccupied with inscriptions associated with an inhuman world understood to be the province of a theistic force embodied by the figure of a loving or hating God, and populated with benevolent or malevolent spirits, angels and demons, vampires and ghouls. On the other hand, contemporary horror deals with an atheistic universe and understands horror and inhuman materiality to emanate from a desolated cosmos devoid of human subjective emotions and anthropomorphised entities that act for or against our emotions. For example, as will be discussed here, Matthew Lewis’ The Monk and Bram

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Stoker’s Dracula enable us to see an inhuman universe, but one which remains linked to the supernatural, classical conceptions of the Christian God and Lucifer, and, thus, outside of nature and our material experience. On the contrary, contemporary horror, as will be shown in the following chapters, focusses on inhuman materiality as an expression of our own reality and cosmos, which is natural rather than supernatural, but which, nonetheless, confounds and challenges our limited human understanding and common experience. In both cases, inscription offers access to inhuman knowledge, but whereas Dracula’s vampiric mutilations are connected to occult knowledge, contemporary horror is concerned with inscription and blood as expressions of an other knowledge and truth, which are part of the very fabric of our reality, but which lie beyond our comprehension.

Paul de Man’s Machinal Text In this section, I will examine the connections of writing to the machine, by first looking at the idea behind the choice of the “typewriter,” as a machine of inscription, in the title of this chapter, and secondly by discussing de Man’s reading of the text as machinal. This chapter’s title is a reference to Jacques Derrida “Typewriter Ribbon” which analyses de Man’s reading of Rousseau in “Excuses (Confessions),” but also, more specifically, to Friedrich Kittler’s reading of the typewriter in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999).5 Derrida’s essay is “peculiar,” as Andrzej Warminski explains, because it exhibits “a certain carping, needling, nitpicking, almost petty quality to the many apparently small reservations he expresses about, and the many minor complications he notes in de Man’s reading of Rousseau.”6 Warminski notices that, while Derrida originally wrote the text for a conference on de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology with the scope of analysing and examining de Man’s notion of materiality, he delegates “materiality” to the last ten pages of his around one hundred page text.7 The problematic of this reading is that Derrida seeks to reappropriate his term of deconstruction, while ignoring, or, even, misreading de Man’s materiality. He says that de Man’s materiality “becomes a very useful generic name for all that resists appropriation”8 and, later, materiality is called a “machine-like deconstruction.”9 Derrida’s use of the typewriter as a machine (inorganic, inanimate, automatic and repetitive) is considered antinomic to living organicity, and the two concepts—the organic and inorganic, or, the event and the machine—cannot be thought together because they are indissociable.10 Derrida points out that if one day it is possible to think these two concepts together, then one would have produced a new logic, a new figure that would resemble a monster.11 As Tom Cohen writes, Derrida deletes de Man and materiality, and he does so partly by positing this binary between himself and his “de Man,” “a strategic binary, staged in ‘The Typewriter Ribbon’ [in the form of]

24 Typewriter Blood (the machinal vs. the inventive, the dead vs. the living).”12 For Derrida, de Man’s concept is this “machinistic materiality without materialism and even perhaps without matter.”13 Cohen disagrees with Derrida’s formulation of a “materiality without matter,” which seeks to rename and deface what “resists,” and points out that de Man’s term is rather a kind of “matter without ‘materiality,’” “preletteral,” “an outside without interiority.”14 But while Derrida obsesses over the survival of deconstruction, the de Man that he seeks to efface, is one that is concerned with a “radical materiality” beyond any attachment to the human and living systems.15 De Man’s materiality, like Kittler’s typewriter, is a form of an inhuman mnemotechnics, the utter exteriority to any form of meaning or human control. In this respect, Kittler’s analysis of the typewriter in conjunction with his reading of Dracula and its technologies, a novel whose narrative is partly given through Mina’s typewriting, is closer to de Man’s material inscription and the purposes of this chapter. Kittler describes how the discourse network16 of the 1900s is defined by a separation of interiority from writing through the use of the typewriter, which mechanises inscription and liberates technology and writing from the metaphysics of origin and the domination of consciousness. While I will return to Kittler later, it will suffice to note here that the typewriter brings together the idea of a machine and writing, stressing the mechanical and automatic nature of the inscription of surfaces and the materiality of the letter amputated from meaning and perception. The typewriter is connected to vampiric biting, as will be discussed further below, because Peter Mitterhofer’s Model 2 typewriter from 1866 was a literal inscription machine: it did not have types and a ribbon, but perforated the paper with needle pins.17 Like the “vampiric” typewriter which is an “inhuman media engineer”18 that overwrites human agency, de Man’s text exhibits similar inhuman qualities: it is mechanical and repetitive as de Man shows in his reading of Rousseau in “Excuses (Confessions),” and it is to this text I turn now. De Man’s own reading of Rousseau focusses on the repetition of a confession regarding the episode of Marion and the ribbon which appears initially in Rousseau’s first three books of the Confessions and later in the Fourth Rêverie. Rousseau confesses that he had stolen a pink and white ribbon and when he is discovered he accuses Marion for giving it to him, as an attempt to seduce him. So, Rousseau sets out to apologise for harming the innocent Marion’s reputation, feeling shame and trying to excuse himself. While by the end of Book II he pleads not to mention the episode ever again, de Man notices the repetition of the excuse when Rousseau returns to it in the Fourth Rêverie where he tells the story all over again. On one level, the text can be read as a desire for possession where the ribbon is a metaphor for his desire for Marion, or the free circulation of the desire between them. The riddle then is easily solved: Rousseau’s intentions can be understood and forgiven, because,

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as de Man writes, “He did it all out of love for her.”19 But the text also functions in another way, since the “delight with which the desire to hide is being revealed” points to Rousseau’s desire for exposure, and where Marion’s destruction provides him with a stage where Rousseau can “parade his disgrace.”20 This structure is also “self-perpetuating” where exposure is the desire to expose and each stage reveals a deeper shame.21 But de Man continues by listing more possibilities. This knowing and not knowing, concealing and revealing, means that his crime of lying cannot be excused, closure is impossible, and the Fourth Rêverie has to be written. As soon as, however, this is understood as part of human desire and shame, still the excuse fails. De Man’s reading proceeds then by turning to a disjunction in Rousseau’s text: the random pronunciation of the name of Marion, who up to this point has not been mentioned before by Rousseau. She has been haunting Rousseau’s mind, but the name’s entry into discourse is totally arbitrary. There’s no significance to the sound “Marion” since it is meaningless. This lack of understanding and conclusiveness takes de Man to the Fourth Rêverie, where the text becomes “delirious,” intercepted by episodes supposedly intended to paint a favourable portrait of Rousseau, but instead are random stories of physical assault. From “bloody mutilation” to “crushed fingers” the stories are told in such a way “that one remembers the pain and the cruelty much better than the virtue they are supposed to illustrate.”22 They add an “uncanny obliqueness,”23 and like the name “Marion,” mean nothing at all. Because the choice of the name is unmotivated as is Rousseau’s own taking of the ribbon, de Man explains that the blame falls to the misguided reading of the incident as theft or slander. There was no deeper meaning behind Rousseau’s actions to take the ribbon or to use the name Marion, yet misreading the incident is possible because fiction is fiction and language “is entirely free with regard to referential meaning and can posit whatever its grammar allows it to say.”24 Rousseau himself recognises this when in another instant in the text of the Rêverie, he lies again out of shame and writes: “It is uncertain that neither my judgement, nor my will dictated my reply, but that it was the automatic result [l’effet machinal] of my embarrassment.”25 De Man notices that this machinic quality of the text adds a “delirious element to the situation.”26 A fiction then is also a machine, something that shows a detachment from any referential meaning but also something that is an “implacable repetition of a preordained pattern.”27 De Man compares the machine-like quality of the text to Heinrich von Kleist’s graceful marionettes which lack human consciousness.28 Kleist’s marionettes have the advantage of being immune to gravity and thus able to perform any movement perfectly: “they know nothing of the inertia of matter” because “the force that lifts them into the air is greater than the one that binds them to the earth.”29 But the second advantage is that

26 Typewriter Blood they are never affected, since the puppeteer controls the wire and therefore “all the other limbs are what they should be—dead, pure pendulums following the simple law of gravity.”30 Similarly, the machine-text is “both ‘anti-grav,’ the anamorphosis of a form detached from meaning and capable of taking on any structure whatever, yet entirely ruthless in its inability to modify its own structural design for nonstructural reasons.”31 In this sense, the text as machine is pirouetting and improvising gratuitously, yet it has a “ruthless” preordained pattern, its own laws and programme, that cannot be changed by any authorial control. The grammar, when separated from the figural dimension of the text, is also machinic, and it is the formal element that makes any text possible. De Man clarifies that there can be no use of language which is not mechanical even if this is obscured by aesthetic or formalistic delusions.32 It is the mechanicity of the “gratuitous and irresponsible text” that threatens the “radical annihilation of the metaphor of selfhood and of the will,”33 and thus the loss of control. The machinic text of Rousseau’s excuses poses a “threat of textual mutilation” to the “organic and totalizing synechdocal language” questioning “textual mastery and authority.”34 This “dispossession” can only be experienced by the subject as “a dismemberment, a beheading or a castration.”35 The metaphor of the text as an organic whole, a body, is threatened by a machinic language that severs the head of the author and does violence to the body, meaning and language. The use of those narratives of mutilation and beheading which, as mentioned earlier, create a delirious effect in the text, are not present for their shock value but as evocations of the machine that caused them.36 The text itself uses the theme of the machine as its own allegory, where the metaphor of the text as body is displaced by the text as machine. What causes the mutilations in the narratives is a machine: Rousseau describes the “metal rolls” and the “polished surface of the cylinder.”37 The earlier mention of fiction as machinic and the image of the machine here, reveal the threat of language as “machinal.”38 The text is not a metaphorical body but a machine that mutilates the integrity of the text. De Man finds that the tropological system of metaphors and substitutions in Rousseau’s text is displaced by the text as machine which puts into question the organic wholeness of the text. There is a shift from interpretation based on psychological terms to an interpretation that lays emphasis on mechanical repetition. There is an excess of language and a proliferation of meaning beyond any authorial intention or control which are the effect of language’s mechanical quality. Language is no longer seen as an instrument in the service of a psychic expression like guilt but “the entire construction of drives, substitutions, repressions, and representations is the aberrant, metaphorical correlative of the absolute randomness of language, prior to any figuration or meaning.”39 Language is then

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a machine which performs anyway and the text as machine has the infinite power to excuse.40 “Entirely arbitrary and entirely repeatable”41 the machine can interrupt the figural chain and systematically undo understanding, without closing off the tropological system but instead enforcing “the repetition of its aberration.”42 The subject is equally threatened, and this loss, is not of some original authority that the author once possessed, but a “radical estrangement” of what was intentionally meant and what language itself has performed. There are no hidden meanings, no originary guilt in the case of Rousseau’s text, no personal responsibility or originary subjectivity,43 but the inhuman process of an arbitrary production and reproduction of meaning. The result of any text is then that of a machinic language independent of any human intention, control or interpretation. This idea of a machinic writing that mutilates bodily integrity and meaning is what gothic and horror texts bring to the fore. Bodily mutilations and blood inscriptions are the performance of inhuman forces that have their own agency and laws beyond any human control. Similarly, blood itself, despite our desire to impose some symbolic meaning whenever it flows freely in horror narratives, is possessed by automatism: it is entirely arbitrary and meaningless but also with its own repeatable pattern. Nothing flows so remarkably and so abundantly in horror narratives as the red and deadly compulsions of blood. And like de Man’s machinic text that commits the most ruthless and bloodiest mutilations to the delusions of meaning and the integrity of the text, so with horror narratives blood inscriptions mutilate human bodies and disrupt the safety of a mundane human world couched in the certainty of its own privileged status.

Kittler and the Typewriter The shift that Kittler marks with the typewriter in the nineteenth century, coincides with the change of the humans’ position from being the agents of writing to becoming surfaces of inscription. Like in de Man, where language’s inhuman machine dismembers the authorial subject, in Kittler, “so-called man” is reduced to a mere accessory, where media substitute or extend human capabilities and eventually could replace the human altogether. They both argue, respectively, that the human is an effect of language and media. Here, by examining Kittler’s reading of the typewriter, I want to draw attention to the materiality of writing and inscription and the similarities with de Man’s notion of the inhuman and machinic.44 Kittler uses the word discourse network to refer to the ways physical, technological, discursive and social systems connect to each other enabling us to elucidate a specific culture’s administration of knowledge and power. For example, the discourse networks of 1800s/1900s/2000s—the

28 Typewriter Blood connection of power, bodies and technologies in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries—is the network of technologies and institutions in nineteenth-century romanticism, early twentieth-century modernism and twenty-first century that select, store and produce relevant data. In the 1800s there is the domination of print and universal alphabetisation, in the 1900s there is the technological storage of data, from typewriters to the gramophone and film, while in 2000s we have the digital discourse network of telecommunications assemblages and the computer.45 Kittler sees literature in the 1800s, the typewriter in the 1900s and the computer in the 2000s as structurally similar: they are all forms of data processing that receive, store, process and transmit information. Writing itself and the typewriter are then equally machinic. Kittler connects the development of the typewriter with that of brain physiology which turns to the vocabulary of machines to describe neurological disorders like agraphia or aphasia. As he writes, “from the point of view of brain physiology, language works as a feedback loop of mechanical relays.”46 Kittler takes its cue from Adolph Kussmaul,47 who in 1881 would describe language in its early developmental stage as a machine that has nothing to do with the subject, intentionality or thought: “pantomime, the spoken word, and the written word are nothing but the products of internal, self-regulating mechanisms that are channelled and coordinated through emotions and conceptions, just as one can operate a sewing, typing, or speaking machine without knowing its mechanism.”48 In the same year, 1881, the Remington II typewriter’s sales would grow exponentially, changing forever the materiality of writing and its medium, mechanising writing and denying authorial narcissism. Nietzsche’s “scandalous surmise that ‘humans are perhaps only thinking, writing, and speaking machines,’”49 does not sound so scandalous when understood within the framework of the typewriter. As Nandita Biswas Mellamphy writes, “in his use of the typewriter, Nietzsche envisioned the human itself as a kind of type-writing, a kind of formative, informational, or better yet, telegraphic technology (or ‘teletechnic’) beyond human determination.”50 No wonder that the word typewriter would refer to the machine itself but also to the female typist who would increasingly come to replace the quill, the symbol of male intellectual creativity.51 The idea of the machine then should not conjure up glistening electronics, but rather the ways humans and automata, the organic and the inorganic are systems that receive and use information in a feedback loop. Nietzsche’s observation that the human was an informational machine would also anticipate Norbert Wiener’s definition of cybernetics in 1948, which refers to the study of the control and communication in the animal and the machine.52 For Wiener, “The problem of interpreting the nature and varieties of memory in the animal has its parallel in the problem of constructing artificial memories for the machine.”53 According to

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Wiener, human behaviour and machines operated according to similar principles, and he highlighted the analogy between the computer and the human nervous system. From learning machines, like computers, to self-organising living machines like animals and humans, Wiener studied the ways machines learn through feedback by continually improving their performance through previous experience, failures and successes. What is interesting, is that Wiener’s cybernetics, by perceiving the human as an autonomic nervous system, a cybernetic, goal-directed and selforganising system of autonomous and automatic responses that help to regulate human behaviour, denied the self the privileged position of having control over the body. This echoes de Man’s notion of the human and language as machinic, inhuman and impersonal systems that cannot be fully controlled or steered by his majesty the Ego. In a similar fashion, the typewriter excludes the human from its internal operations, relegating it to the automatic repetition of mechanical text reproduction. Chapter 6, for example, examines the possibilities regarding the supersession of the human by machines or inhuman figures. Not only did the typewriter destroy the traditional notion of masculine creativity, but it also changed authors’ thinking and writing itself. In Nietzsche’s earliest typewritten text in existence, a letter to Peter Gast,54 dated 17 February 1882, he refers to the ways the new technology of writing was changing the way subjects think. Nietzsche would write: “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.”55 Developed from the sewing machine and the result of the American Civil War (1861–64), the typewriter’s fast strikes and triggers, like “rapid fire-weapons”56 mechanised writing and the subject and effected a more laconic style. As Kittler writes, E. Remington & Sons (1816–96) transferred weapon parts to those of writing instruments and began producing models of Sholes’ typewriter in 1874, giving birth to a “discursive machine gun.”57 Nietzsche’s writing would be transformed from “arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”58 Like Nietzsche’s mnemotechnics or Kafka’s torture machine discussed in the next chapter, the typewriter was an inscription weapon that perforated surfaces in an automatic and precise manner that mutilated florid and effusive writing. In a similar manner, the medium of the computer, together with new forms of language shaped by message boards, have radically changed gothic fiction and created new-fangled ways of mediation, as it can be seen in Chapter 4’s short horror texts, memes and images shared by online users. No wonder that typewriters built before 1897 would also call forth another “inhuman media engineer,” Dracula, and “a type of writing” that “blindly dismembers body parts and perforates human skin” by striking on the neck with its two fangs.59 Kittler explains that a certain typewriter from 1886 pierced paper with needle pins in the same way the vampire inscribed bodies. The fact also that the typewriter made everything

30 Typewriter Blood visible, apart from the inscription of the sign, is also consistent with Stoker’s vampire and Nietzsche’s mnemotechnics where the victims cannot see or read what the mutilations do to their bodies. Like the typewriter, Dracula’s act of inscription is invisible and passes undetected.60 Humans then are no longer the agents of writing but become a surface to be inscribed by new technologies, like the typewriter, which changes them, shaping their thoughts and writing. As Kittler shows, the mechanisation of writing and its detachment from subjectivity that the typewriter inaugurates, is dramatised in Stoker’s Dracula where the “hand-written diary, as soon as it is hooked up to phonographs and typewriters, autopsies and newspaper reports, will kill the Lord of the East and the Night.”61 The typewriter then is responsible for the emancipation of women, but also, through “the mechanical processing of anonymous discourses,” it revolutionises European bureaucracy and democracy.62 Typewriters, mostly used by women, are “neutral apparata” that reproduce meaningless prose, and in Dracula, Mina Harker’s typewriter does exactly this: it “copies indifferent paper instead: handwriting and printed matter, declarations of love and land registry entries.”63 If the vampire leaves two bites on the neck, “always in the same place like the strikes of a precisely aligned typewriter,”64 then Mina Harker’s typewriter “does not copy the bites of a despotic signifier”65 but indifferent words mechanically reproduced. Dracula’s project is the discourse of the master which is shattered by the technology of democracy, Mina Harker’s typewriter. And since vampirism is a “chain reaction,” it can only be “fought with the techniques of mechanical text reproduction.”66 It is through bureaucratic procedures, by gathering all information and storing it safely through Mina’s typewriting, that the vampire is eventually captured and killed. As Kittler writes, “Stoker’s Dracula is no vampire novel, but rather the written account of our bureaucratization. Anyone is free to call this a horror novel as well.”67 It is not accidental that Kittler would turn to the gothic and the text of Dracula to exemplify how the inhuman, whether a typewriter or a vampire, mark surfaces and shape humans’ thoughts and their understanding of reality.

Gothic and Inscription Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick also turns to the gothic to discuss one of its characteristic areas, that of surfaces. In “The Character of the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic,” she argues that critics have ignored surfaces by stressing “a psychology of depth” and the “thematics of depth.”68 She focusses on veils and the marking of flesh and veils with blood that serve to draw attention to blood writing and inscription as neither referential nor symbolic but as unintelligible writing that anchors “the Gothic conception of fictional character and lends it its most riveting and influential traits.”69 For Kosofsky, writing in blood and writing in flesh

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represent a special access of the authoritative, inalienable, and immediate; the writing of blood and flesh never lies. . . . The marks traced out in earth, flesh and paper, architecture, and landscape are often not part of any language, but, rather, circles, blots, a cross, a person’s image, furrows, and folds.70 They point to their materiality rather to a specific meaning, and even when its real words these “lack something in discursiveness.”71 As she writes, such “imperfect” writing is what gives the “Gothic conception of fictional character and lends it its most riveting and influential traits.”72 Most importantly, like with the other philosophical views discussed above that are concerned with the human subject imprinted by outside forces, so here with Sedgwick’s reading, the character is “impressed” on the self from the outside and inscription “comes from the outside, not the inside, it is not psychological, meaningful, emotional.”73 For Sedgwick, gothic characters are what they are because of the use of images of veils, writing in blood and inscription on flesh. Characteristic example of this is Matthew Lewis’ The Monk where Lucifer unveils the true nature of Matilda who is neither a maid nor a monk, but an evil spirit: the man, that reveals he is a woman “is really something else more glamorous, more sinister, more potent, and even blanker.”74 Behind surfaces, veils, skin and metaphor, there is nothing but death, absence and the horror of the Real. In particular, as Sedgwick points out, in The Monk, the writing in blood is used in magic and rituals to summon the devil. Sedgwick’s reading comes close to my argument that writing in blood and inscription of skin in horror are voided of meaning and interiority and always come from the Outside, the place of death and the demonic. As a media theorist, Kittler’s perspective is different than that of Sedgwick’s, but, nonetheless, they both turn to the gothic and inhuman inscriptions in order to move away from the privileged psychological world of the subject, laying emphasis on the machinic or what lies outside the human. By looking at gothic texts, I want to explore these inhuman inscriptions and blood writing as forms of communication with the outside or as meaningless signs outside of human experience. Sedgwick’s analysis focusses on gothic texts such as Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, as examples of the gothic’s elusion of depths and its characteristic use of surfaces. I want to expand on this and read blood writing and inscription as inhuman and automatic language that communicates and connects with a world beyond human experience, the inorganic and death, not as passive, but as having their own agency. My analysis wants to emphasise, not only that blood writing comes from the outside, but also that this outside is not dead and inert, but the impersonal force that flows through both the organic and the inorganic. While she uses Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho where Emily follows the “written

32 Typewriter Blood traces”75 of blood to discover a horrible corpse beyond a dark curtain,76 I am more interested in gothic texts where the outside is not passive, but a totally inhuman world permeated by dark and obscene life. Radcliffe’s novel is preoccupied with explaining the supernatural and by imposing human meaning and rationality on what was supposedly a supernatural phenomenon. H. P. Lovecraft makes the distinction between Radcliffe’s novel and Lewis’ The Monk, when he writes that The Monk deals with horror as supernatural and does not attempt to rationalise it like Radcliffe does. As he wrote: “One great thing may be said of the author; that he never ruined his ghostly visions with a natural explanation. He succeeded in breaking up the Radcliffian tradition and expanding the field of the Gothic novel.”77

Occult Media: Inhuman Materiality in The Monk and Dracula Within the context of the supernatural, both The Monk and Dracula use blood, the occult and bodily inscription to access a world beyond the human, and thus inhuman knowledge, while playing with the myth of Faustus. The Monk and Dracula are examples of transgression, where both the monk and the vampire seek through blood the expansion of their knowledge and power. Through his pact with the devil written in blood, the monk seeks more knowledge and a satisfaction of his human passions, while Dracula embodies the ubermensch who seeks an expansion of his power beyond appropriate limits, by inscribing bodies. But their pursuit of knowledge through inscription comes at a cost, since, in the end, both the monk and the vampire become inscription surfaces by the Law. The Monk uses the image of blood writing as a medium to communicate with the inhuman, to call forth spirits and Lucifer itself. As Sedgwick discusses, writing in blood appears as the “token of magic” in The Monk and other gothic novels.78 But, it’s more than that. It signifies the moment when the occulted world appears to the human eye, and communication with the world beyond the human is established. And this is where my analysis diverts from that of Sedgwick. For me, blood writing facilitates an irruption of the Outside into our world, and thus is a form of communication. The Monk exhibits three instances in which blood enables this contact, with the third being a version of the pact with Mephistopheles. The first time when blood acts as a medium between our world and that beyond our senses, is when Alphonso attempts to free himself from the spectre of the Bleeding Nun, and the Wandering Jew, the “Great Mogul,” performs a ceremony to exorcise her. Using blood from a goblet, he sprinkled the floor; and then dipping in it one end of the crucifix, he described a circle in the middle of the room. . . . Holding the

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crucifix in one hand, the bible in the other, he seemed to read with profound attention. The clock struck one!79 It is not only that blood connects with the world beyond, but that the ceremony in which blood is used is closely linked to time and the mechanical repetition of the appearance of the spectre. The myth of the Bleeding Nun highlights the logical and repetitive nature of her appearance: every fifth year, on the fifth of May and as soon as the clock strikes one, the ghostly nun appears with her lamp and dagger.80 Something similar occurs when Antonia’s dead mother, Elvira, appears to her daughter at three o’clock, pointing to the hour, before the clock strikes and saying that in three days they will meet again.81 However, while blood facilitates communication with the supernatural, this is grounded within the familiar because both the Bleeding Nun and Elvira are recognisable. The apparition of the nun and its mythology is known to the characters, and after the exorcism, she is identified as Beatrice de las Cisternas. Elvira is Antonia’s mother, and both her and the Bleeding Nun are not horrifying. The second instance where blood is used to communicate with the inhuman, is when Matilda performs mysterious rites to make Antonia Ambrosio’s lover: “[t]aking a small phial from the basket, poured a few drops upon the ground,” and, seized with a delirium, she plunged a poniard into the monk’s left arm and “blood gushed out plentifully.”82 From the ensanguined earth, Lucifer appeared through dark clouds in the form of a seraph. Defying Ambrosio’s expectations, Lucifer’s real nature is masked by the dazzling light of the beautiful and perfect apparition and the familiar Christian iconography of celestial and angelic beings which renders the dark and horrific figure of the daemon less threatening to the eyes of the monk. In the final occurrence, Ambrosio calls Lucifer by reciting backwards words written in an unknown language from a book Matilda gave him, but his appearance this time is terrifying. Holding a roll of parchment on the one hand, and on the other, an iron pen, Lucifer struck his pen into a vein in the monk’s left arm, and asked Ambrosio to sign his name and offer himself body and soul. After his “fatal contract,”83 Ambrosio is eaten by myriads of insects and birds which inflicted on him “tortures most exquisite and insupportable.”84 The ceremonies begin with meaningless language, an inscription in blood and on skin, and in the end, are sealed with more writing on the flesh, as the monk’s body is annihilated by insects. In the last example, what stands out is also that, while in the case of the Bleeding Nun, who insists on appearing again and again, her familiar apparition is not so much horrific as it is bothersome, Lucifer’s presence is an eruption of something old, but which terrifies with its presence. Communication comes at a cost, and once the monk faces the Real of the monstrous creature and the reality of his crimes, what remains is the shattering horror of his own demise.

34 Typewriter Blood What also begins as a communication with a supernatural being through blood, turns out to be a way to uncover the natural order of things which is far stranger than the appearance of Lucifer himself. The monster does not so much come from the Outside, and Lucifer brings another kind of enlightenment than the one pursued by the monk. In the final scene, he reveals to Ambrosio that he had killed his mother Elvira and raped and killed his sister Antonia. True evil resides inside the monk, and the demon, in a moralistic turn of events, brings justice by punishing him. If, in the beginning of the novel, the monk was celebrated as a unique example of what is good, by the end, he is just a monster. What initially appears as the face of true virtue, is in the end, and after the machinations of the devil, masking true evil. It can be said that Ambrosio’s real self and desires were a mystery to himself and only through the lure of the devil these emerge in their most violent form. Lucifer, as his name attests, brings knowledge written in blood. This is the blood with which Ambrosio signs his contract with the devil and the same blood that runs through his mother and sister, and which is finally violently spilled in his murderous crimes. Blood opens and seals communication, and knowledge, or lack thereof, determines the fates of the characters. But this realisation of ultimate evil hiding in the deepest recesses of Ambrosio’s mind and which surfaces to throttle his humanity, reveals that evil resides within, and no one is secure, even the most pious monk. The novel might be read as a critique of Catholicism, but also as a warning. Evil and monstrosity are within, and sometimes, looking outside beyond the human, helps to see the real beast lurking within the human. The pursuit of knowledge and access to a world beyond is also a significant part of Stoker’s Dracula, since the circulation of information through the inhuman blood practices of Dracula and modernity’s media capture the other’s point of view. On the one hand, vampiric inscription and knowledge through blood are Dracula’s tools with which he achieves communion with the world of the human. On the other hand, the typewriter inscribes surfaces of paper, so that invaluable information is made accessible to the vampire hunters to understand the inhuman creature and capture it. As it was discussed earlier, Kittler’s reading of Dracula touched upon the mechanical inscription of surfaces by focussing on the new technology of the typewriter, but my reading here will focus on the vampire’s occult media and the use of blood as a medium to access knowledge through the inscription of bodies. In both Kittler and my reading, the inhuman is what shapes reality, and the mutilations it performs draw attention to the material act of inscription. In many ways, The Monk and Dracula draw inspiration from the myth of Faustus and his pact with the devil in exchange for knowledge and power. Henry Irving’s 1885–86 production of Faust, in which he also played the role of Mephistopheles, at the Lyceum theatre in London, was influential on Dracula. Catherine Wynne draws many connections

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between Irving’s stage adaptation of Faust and Stoker’s Dracula.85 In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires, Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, point out that Stoker, who was the manager of the Lyceum, went to America in 1887 to plan a tour of Faust and is said that Irving’s role was an inspiration to the construction of the character of Dracula. I believe that Stoker’s familiarity with the text of Doctor Faustus is mostly felt in the maniacal obsession of the vampire to consume more knowledge. The fear that undulates beneath the surface, and beyond the apparent monstrosity of the vampire, is that relating to overcoming the limits of human knowledge. The vampire achieves this through violent means, whereas the humans extend their power through the new technology of the typewriter. From Dracula’s perspective, there is a need to accumulate information, and his desire to move to London is an example of his consuming thirst for access to more knowledge and a dangerous expansion of his power that is seen by the humans as dangerous. From the humans’ perspective, as Kittler points out, the novel is an account of our bureaucratisation. Secretaries, doctors and lawyers write, record and transcribe all possible information. But from Dracula’s point of view, from the Outside looking in, humans are just mere vessels of information. If the typewriter reproduces all information in an indifferent manner that removes all personal experience and affect, then Dracula is similarly seeking to absorb all knowledge through the indifferent and mechanical inscription of matter. Dracula is a Faustian novel in the sense that both the vampire and humans are striving to access knowledge beyond their limits through a process that is inhuman. The inhuman typewriter and new technologies might eventually defeat the atavistic Dracula, but his occult knowledge remains inaccessible to humans. For example, when Dracula was a human, he gained access to forbidden knowledge through his dealings with the devil, like Mephistopheles. As Van Helsing points out, Dracula was in life a most wonderful man. Soldier, statesman, and alchemist— which latter was the highest development of the science-knowledge of his time. He had a mighty brain, a learning beyond compare. . . . He dared even to attend the Scholomance and there was no branch of knowledge of his time that he did not essay.86 The Draculas were also “a great and noble race” who had “dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance.”87 Harker discovers in the Count’s library English books, magazines and newspapers.88 Dracula consumes information on all aspects of English life, mechanically, in the same way he consumes the blood of his English victims. Through these different acts of mediation he grasps materiality, surfaces, inscription. As he says, “I know the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them.”89 The mechanical inscription of

36 Typewriter Blood information through Mina’s typewriter follows the same pattern as the Count’s mechanical memorisation of knowledge and his inscription of bodies. These material acts of mediation reveal that the Count like the machine, repeats information and replicates himself through vampirism indifferently and in a cold rationalist manner. The vampiric automatism of the vampire is most clearly captured by Van Helsing’s comment of Lycy’s mutilations: “whatever animal inflicts them has a system or method of its own.”90 Like de Man’s machinic text, so the vampire’s inscriptions are systematic and mechanical. Here I want to expand on the notion of media beyond that of the typewriter and technological apparatus, by including forms of mediation that do not prescribe to traditional understandings of media. Dracula poses various forms of mediation that include the organic, the nonorganic and the supernatural, where communication with the world beyond the living and towards that of the inaccessible and the incommunicable is possible. From the flickering, blue flames and their “ghostly figure”91 that reveal where treasure is hidden, to the little specks of dust “floating in the rays of the moonlight” and whose phantom shapes materialise into the “ghostly women,”92 the mist that surrounds the Russian schooner, Demeter, as it arrives at Whitby, and the vampire’s different disguises as a bat, wolf and “myriad little specks,”93 all these unnatural or supernatural phenomena mediate a world beyond that of the human. Dracula uses necromancy, the divination of the dead, with whom he can communicate, and he can direct the elements: “the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat—the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and become unknown.”94 Dracula communicates with the dead but also with the living, through his corporeal form or metamorphosing into elemental dust or mist, inhabiting the organic and the inorganic and communicating with different realities, human or inhuman. To the humans, the vampire is ungraspable and elusive because he can mediate with both the occult and modern world. He doesn’t remain isolated in his castle, a relic of the past, but he uses reason to assess his strengths and powers and inculcate himself. Van Helsing is aware that Dracula “study new tongues. He learn new social life; new environment of old ways, the politic, the law, the finance, the science, the habit of a new land and a new people who have come to be since he was.”95 Dracula has managed to return from the past, “from a ruin tomb in a forgotten land” and the threat he poses is captured by Van Helsing’s warning: “What more may he not do when the greater world of thought is open to him.”96 The horror of the vampire is not his supernatural status, but his ability to become familiar and infiltrate the human world, while being the master of arcane and modern scientific knowledge. This, together with Harker’s fear that he might “create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless,”97 make Dracula a dangerous predator that threatens the survival of the human.

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There is a correlation between writing and inscribing surfaces, replicating information and a desire to access a knowledge beyond the human through blood. Renfield eats flies and keeps a notebook with meaningless or unreadable figures which the psychiatrist cannot decipher. Mina and Jonathan have journals and Dr Seward and Lucy have a diary. There is also the recurrent theme of imprisonment so that access to more knowledge or of communicating with the totally Other is inhibited. Lucy is locked in a room, so she doesn’t sleepwalk or consume the blood of innocent infants, Renfield is kept in the asylum and Jonathan is locked in the castle by the Count so he has limited contact with the world of the vampire. Particularly, after Lucy is turned into a vampire, her letters, memoranda and her new diary are to be protected from strangers’ eyes. Her whole existence, her inheritance, her mother’s house and her writings, are “signed off” to Arthur, her future husband. Access to the horror of the Thing is indirect, prohibited or impossible. Even when Dracula performs his terrible mutilations, these are never totally accounted for and are only remembered through sensations or in fragmented images described by Jonathan Harker during his delirium. Mina is the only one that comes the closest in communicating with the vampire after her baptism of blood, during which she gains the ability to see through the eyes of Dracula. In this case, Dracula inflicts an incision on his chest and invites Mina to drink his blood, as he has drunk from her previously, and thus gain access to knowledge beyond the limits of the human. Dracula’s blood enables her to connect with him, and she acts as a medium between the human and the inhuman. Similarly, having drunk from Mina’s blood, Dracula is able to learn through Mina where the men are and what they are planning. As Van Helsing says, Mina acts as a medium for both the human and the inhuman: If it be that she can, by our hypnotic trance, tell what the Count see and hear, is it not more true that he who have hypnotize her first, and who have drink of her very blood and make her drink of his, should, if he will, compel her mind to disclose to him that which she know?98 But Dracula’s inscription on her body is punished with Van Helsing’s inscription on her forehead. After placing a “Wafer on Mina’s forehead, it had seared it—had burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal.”99 The “red scar, the sign of God’s knowledge of what has been,”100 comes to mark her body a second time, as women in Dracula are turned into surfaces of inscription and, in turn, mechanically reproduce surfaces of inscription as typewriters. Dracula shares many similarities with the character of Poe’s “Ligeia” in their mutual obsession with breaching the limits of human knowledge and communicating with a world beyond phenomenal reality. Like Dracula, Ligeia has “immense” and “gigantic” knowledge.101 The existence of an

38 Typewriter Blood octagonal and a pentagonal room in Dracula and “Ligeia,” respectively, indicates real magic. In Stoker’s Dracula, Jonathan Harker is greeted by the Count who carries his bags through “a small octagonal room lit by a single lamp, and seemingly without a window of any sort.”102 In “Ligeia,” the narrator describes the bridal chamber of the abbey as “pentagonal in shape.”103 Both the characters of Dracula and Ligeia are considered to be magicians or alchemists who hold forbidden knowledge and they both use blood or, in “Ligeia,” what could be seen as the alchemical elixir vitae, to prolong their corporeal existence and mediate between the known and unknown worlds. Blood in Dracula communicates a world beyond the human and opens a space to contemplate a mechanical universe where matter, the organic and the human are navigated by forces that are out of human reach. From dust specks, mist, animals, to Mina’s control by the inhuman Dracula and the vampire’s ungraspable materiality, these are examples where the whole of nature exhibits its unnatural character and where the cosmos reveals itself as an impersonal mechanism without the need of a human self at its centre. The three vampire women materialise from “floating motes of dust”104 and Dracula appears outside Lucy’s window in the form of a bat and a wolf, and enters through the window in a “myriad of little specks.”105 When he arrives at Mina’s house, he is again indiscernible, travelling as “a thin streak of white mist, that crept with almost imperceptible slowness across the grass towards the house” and which “seemed to have a sentience and a vitality of its own.”106 This is not some vitalistic principle that animates the whole of nature, an example of panpsychism, but rather animated death and vampiric life. The communion with the vampire occurs at the limits of thought, where the human experiences “vague terror,” the “sense of some presence,”107 and is “paralysed.”108 The problematic of attempting to grasp the unintelligible is further elaborated in a passage where Dr Seward struggles with the meaning of the vampire and tries to navigate through Van Helsing’s cryptic descriptions: Tell me the thesis, so that I may apply your knowledge as you go on. At present I am going in my mind from point to point as a mad man, and not a sane one, follows an idea. I feel like a novice blundering through a bog in a mist, jumping from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort to move without knowing where I am going.109 Human thought here is unable to make sense and the impossibility of meaning and seeing clearly is captured by the image of the impenetrability of the mist and blindness. In another instance, where the men attempt to exhume the body of the vampiric Lucy, Dr Seward considers the passage of time by using aesthetic language to describe images of decay:

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the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discoloured stone, and dustencrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silverplating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life—animal life—was not the only thing which could pass away.110 For Dr Seward, the use of metaphor seeks to control and define a natural world where all things, living and non-living, come to pass away, wither and die. But soon, this secure and meaningful universe crumbles once the grave is opened and the coffin is found to be empty. The vampire remains ungraspable and defies human understanding. The gothic scene of Dr Seward’s musings, despite all its familiarity, is dispelled by the vampire’s elusive nature. Death and the vampire cannot be captured or understood through recognisable clichés, and he is faced with the shock of an ungraspable materiality, nothing. The vampire’s elusive nature is linked to this inhuman engineer’s ability to undermine human free will by controlling its victims through hypnosis. Lucy and Mina’s contact with the inhuman through blood makes them susceptible to the power of the vampire and Dracula can read Mina’s mind or she can go to him in spirit, by his own volition. As Van Helsing explains, when she is under Dracula’s controlling force, Mina is either subdued, restrained or incited to action without her will. Mina and Lucy’s inability to consciously chose, and the way they are hypnotised and used as instruments by Dracula’s inhuman force, reveals this automatic, machine-like force that can be likened to de Man’s mechanical materiality. No longer themselves, Mina and Lucy’s bodies are piloted by this inhuman, abstract vampiric force that, at times, is seen to pervade the mist, animals, dust or the human, and which is completely indifferent to human emotions. The vampire defies the idea of human free will and autonomy since he “can come out from anything or into anything.”111 In this sense, blood in Dracula, is shed in a systematic and rational way, and marks bodies in a dispassionate manner, subordinating their identity to the vampire’s mechanical cause. Dracula is then this de Manian materiality that is unintelligible, but without which there can be no writing or meaning. Mina’s indifferent typing and copies of papers would not have existed without the inhuman materiality of Dracula. He is the machine that performs the mutilations, and such violence and systematic writing in blood brings to the fore the mechanical repetition of language itself to proliferate text. The vampire’s accreted mutilations draw attention to their methodical and repetitive nature, which is then juxtaposed to the humans’ mechanical transcription

40 Typewriter Blood of information into typewritten copies. As Jonathan writes in his diary, “We were stuck with the fact, that in all the mass of material which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting.”112 What made all this writing possible, the horror of Dracula, is now a mass of typewritten paper, as “Every trace of all that had been was blotted out.”113 There is no originary sin, authorial voice or reason for writing and replicating information, but the mere logic of a compulsion to repeat and record. Both kinds of writing, vampiric inscription in Dracula and typewritten notes and journals, are indifferent and mechanical processes that are governed by their own internal forces and have nothing to do with the “majesty” of the human mind. The mechanical nature of language and the text of Dracula itself have triggered numerous other adaptations, films, novels and video games created out of, and expanding, Dracula’s universe. The haemorrhage of vampiric biting and countless writing has given voice to the text itself, as the inscriptions of surfaces have taken away Stoker’s authorial privilege through the interpretation and expansion of Dracula’s fictional world by authors and readers alike. As will be examined later in Chapter 4, internet horror stories written anonymously by users are similarly proliferating text made up of bits and pieces of videos, images and text to give figure to the darkness beyond. Dracula, patched together by a web of multiple voices and various media, from handwritten diaries to newspaper clippings and typewritten notes, was already a composite of parts questioning Stoker’s authority and control. The bloody mutilations and the perforations of human parchments were always there to remind us that writing and biting are machinic operations, threatening textual mastery and authority. In the end, both the vampire and the human are superseded by masses of typewritten text. To return to The Monk, both Dracula and Lewis’ novel focus on inscription and blood as a way to communicate and access knowledge beyond limits. Within this theistic universe, both the monk and the vampire are punished for their transgressions and for disturbing the order of things. Tortured and mutilated, they are punished by divine and human law, respectively. Like Prometheus, the monk’s body becomes food to eagles which tear his flesh and dig out his eye balls with their beaks. Dracula’s body is inscribed by Jonathan and Morris’ knives, which stab the Count at the throat and heart. From the magical and occult inscriptions in the texts of The Monk and Dracula, we move to the inscriptions of cultural machines. While gothic novels are steeped in supernatural lore, they are nonetheless concerned with the question of what lies beyond and thus with the inhuman materiality of a world that is incomprehensible and defies human thought. The repetition of blood rituals and vampiric biting, like Foster’s blood writing on skin, are examples of gothic media that enable access to knowledge outside that of the human. In the following

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chapter, I move on to contemporary fiction and Stephen King’s The Shining, which offers a glimpse of another kind of inscription, that of history itself, experienced as deadly repetition.

Notes 1. Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1926), 32. 2. George C. Bartlett, Salem Seer: Reminiscences of Charles H. Foster (New York: Lovell, Gestefeld & Company, 1891), 11. 3. Clive Barker, “The Book of Blood,” in Books of Blood, Vol. 1–3 (London: Sphere Books, 1988), 1–11. 4. Mark Fisher, “Indifferentism and Freedom,” K-punk Blog, 30 December 2004, http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004647.html. This cold, indifferent, impersonal and mechanical force that exists in nature is like Spinoza’s God, and has nothing to do with individual emotions and passions but operates according to its own nature. As Mark Fisher so eloquently writes, Spinoza’s God is different than the personal, transcendent God of classical theism. He is the “desolated unlife of cosmos,” the “anorganic flatline which manufactures the vital as part of its indifferent process of endless production without final cause;” in other words, it is Sigmund Freud’s Thanatos in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 5. Friedrich Kittler, “Typewriter,” in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 183–263. 6. Andrzej Warminski, “Machinal Effects: Derrida with and without de Man,” MLN 124, no. 5 (December 2009): 1076. 7. Warminski, “Machinal Effects,” 1075. 8. Jacques Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (within Such Limits),” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 353. 9. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” 354. 10. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” 277–8. 11. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” 278. 12. Tom Cohen, “Toxic Assets: De Man’s Remains and the Ecocatastrophic Imaginary (An American Fable),” in Theory and the Disappearing Future, authored by Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2012), 93–4. 13. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” 281. 14. Cohen, “Toxic Assets,” 120. 15. Claire Colebrook, “Matter without Bodies,” Derrida Today 4, no. 1 (2011): 18. 16. According to Kittler, a discourse network refers to “the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data.” In Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 369. 17. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 210–11. 18. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 210. 19. Paul de Man, “Excuses (Confessions),” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 284.

42 Typewriter Blood 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

de Man, “Excuses,” 286. de Man, “Excuses,” 286. de Man, “Excuses,” 290. de Man, “Excuses,” 290–1. de Man, “Excuses,” 293. Quoted in de Man, “Excuses,” 294. de Man, “Excuses,” 294. de Man, “Excuses,” 294. In the story-essay “On the Marionette Theatre” (1810), Kleist argues that the beauty and grace of marionettes lies in the fact that they lack human consciousness. They are free of affectation and the strictures of the self. Kleist also imagines a future where humans will transcend their awkward self-consciousness and attain a higher level of sublime consciousness exhibited by the marionettes’ pure mechanicity. Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” The Drama Review: TDR 16, no. 3, The “Puppet” Issue (September 1972): 24. von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” 24. de Man, “Excuses,” 294. de Man, “Excuses,” 294. de Man, “Excuses,” 296. de Man, “Excuses,” 296. de Man, “Excuses,” 296. de Man, “Excuses,” 298. de Man, “Excuses,” 298. de Man, “Excuses,” 298. de Man, “Excuses,” 299. de Man, “Excuses,” 299. de Man, “Excuses,” 300. de Man, “Excuses,” 301. The problem with de Man and Derridean deconstruction more generally, is this lack of responsibility and the undecidability of meaning. Kittler’s archaeology of media is useful in addressing the temporal transformations in writing, from nineteenth-century typewriting to computer processing and the Internet, particularly, in the ways gothic and horror narratives have been written and circulated. John Johnston, “Introduction: Friedrich Kittler: Media Theory after Poststructuralism,” in Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays (Amsterdam: OPA, 1997), 6. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 189. German physician (1822–1902) who studied in Heidelberg and was the first to describe dyslexia. He wrote Disturbances of Speech, in Cyclopaedia of the Practice of Medicine, ed. H. von Ziemssen, Vol. 14 (New York: William Wood, 1877), 581–875. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 188. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 188. Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, “Nietzsche and the Engine of Politics,” in Nietzsche and Political Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 148. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 183, 186. Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) was a mathematician and computer pioneer who is considered the father of cybernetics. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948, 2nd edition 1961), 14.

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54. A pseudonym used by Heinrich Köselitz and given to him by his friend Friedrich Nietzsche. Köselitz was a German author and composer, and the editor of Nietzsche’s writings and letters. 55. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 200. 56. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 192. 57. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 190–1. 58. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 203. 59. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 210. 60. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 211. 61. Friedrich Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 56. 62. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” 63, 64. 63. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” 71. 64. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” 66. 65. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” 71. 66. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” 71–2. 67. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” 73. 68. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA 96, no. 2 (1981): 255. 69. Sedgwick, “The Character of the Veil,” 261. 70. Sedgwick, “The Character of the Veil,” 261. 71. Sedgwick, “The Character of the Veil,” 261. 72. Sedgwick, “The Character of the Veil,” 261. 73. Sedgwick, “The Character of the Veil,” 261. 74. Sedgwick, “The Character of the Veil,” 261. 75. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 324. 76. Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 348. 77. H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in The H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 2: Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (London: Panther Books, 1985), 440. 78. Sedgwick, “The Character of the Veil,” 259. 79. Matthew Lewis, The Monk (London: Penguin, 1998), 149. 80. Lewis, The Monk, 124. 81. Lewis, The Monk, 275. 82. Lewis, The Monk, 236. 83. Lewis, The Monk, 372. 84. Lewis, The Monk, 376. 85. Catherine Wynne, Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (Basingstoke and Hampshire: Palgrave, 2013). 86. Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Penguin, 2006), 322. 87. Stoker, Dracula, 256. 88. Stoker, Dracula, 26. 89. Stoker, Dracula, 27. 90. Stoker, Dracula, 189. 91. Stoker, Dracula, 19. 92. Stoker, Dracula, 53. 93. Stoker, Dracula, 154. 94. Stoker, Dracula, 252. 95. Stoker, Dracula, 341. 96. Stoker, Dracula, 341. 97. Stoker, Dracula, 60. 98. Stoker, Dracula, 344. 99. Stoker, Dracula, 316.

44 Typewriter Blood 100. Stoker, Dracula, 316. 101. Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknam Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 315. 102. Stoker, Dracula, 23. 103. Poe, “Ligeia,” 321. 104. Stoker, Dracula, 53. 105. Stoker, Dracula, 154. 106. Stoker, Dracula, 274. 107. Stoker, Dracula, 305. 108. Stoker, Dracula, 306. 109. Stoker, Dracula, 205–6. 110. Stoker, Dracula, 210. 111. Stoker, Dracula, 255. 112. Stoker, Dracula, 402. 113. Stoker, Dracula, 402.

2

Inhuman Inscriptions in Contemporary Horror Stephen King’s The Shining and Kathe Koja’s Fiction

I want to continue the previous chapter’s attempt to define a genealogy of gothic and horror, by moving away from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ focus on the supernatural to focus on contemporary horror’s understanding of the inhuman as something immanent. Contemporary horror is like a pendulum which oscillates between the known and the unknown, between the inhuman powers of culture and the inhuman forces of nature. There is then an understanding of horror as the violent inscription of the body by culture, biology and family, on the one hand, and as the violent inscription of nature’s cold and apathetic impersonal force, on the other hand. Cultural inscriptions imprison the subject, whereas inscriptions driven by forces outside human perception disorganise rigid hierarchies, allowing for the possibility of an escape from identity. This chapter addresses a significant shift from gothic fiction populated with supernatural creatures—vampires and werewolves to horror as a genre grounded in the real world of everyday life which is disrupted by the unknown forces of the Outside—what lies beyond human perception and experience. As gothic monsters populate contemporary culture, gothic fiction has mutated into a pallid and toothless form of cosy and warm familiarity. Vampires and zombies are no longer horrific because they are too recognisable. As Nick Land writes, Long gone are the virile, predatory vampires that once populated horror stories. . . . Instead, shambling worm-eaten wrecks mill about aimlessly, whilst augmenting their numbers in obscure cannibalistic circuits. . . . Fiends have degenerated into ghouls, who do not hunt and feed to strengthen themselves, but only to carry on, prolonging their putrescent decrepitude.1 In a culture where once unfamiliar and monstrous forms are now reproduced and proliferated, where masculine Draculian metaphors are degraded into impotent reproductions of vampiric romance and candygothic,2 horror is increasingly concerned with what lies beyond mere

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semblances. It turns away from the supernatural and faces the real horror of human passions, and our inscription by social, cultural and biological machines that entrap us into repetitive behaviours, seeking thus to address the machinic and repetitive deathliness of our habitual prisons and subjective experiences. And when horror offers a way out of the deathliness of our repetitions, this is an exit into that indifferent universe which constitutes an escape from the prison house of subjective passions.3 Through key theoretical texts that connect blood and wounding to corporeal inscriptions, such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s mnemotechnics, Foucault’s genealogy and Grosz’s inscriptions, as well as horror fiction such as Stephen King’s The Shining and Kathe Koja’s novels, I want to highlight horror texts’ obsession with blood and inhuman inscriptions. This draws attention to the machinic, automatic and repetitive nature of inscriptions that destroy the wholeness of the body and introduce the Outside into the inside, haemorrhaging subjectivity and threatening any sense of selfhood.4 No longer an envelope, the body in horror becomes a surface to be written upon and to be broken by outside forces that are alien to the subject. By tracing blood inscriptions in horror texts, the purpose is to exhume what lies beneath the camouflage, that which comes from the outside interrupting the closed system which it transforms. Avoiding both idealism and materialism, it is this materiality, matterin-itself, raw matter that enables the horror of the Outside to creep in through the vocabulary of bodily mutilation and inscription.5

Bodies as Inscription Surfaces If bloody mutilations are performed by a senseless and automatic process, then horror narratives conceptualise this by emphasising the cruelty done to the surface of the body. Before moving on to discuss the horror novels, I want to look at the work of philosophers, critical theorists and writers who stress the surface of the body which is imprinted and mutilated to discipline it, ingrain memory, culture and language. The drama of domination, destruction and creation that takes place on corporeal surfaces is the practice that enables meaning and cultural values to emerge through the subjection of bodies. There is a genealogy of writing that is preoccupied with the body as an inscription surface. Diverse voices, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Michel Foucault, Elizabeth Grosz and Franz Kafka, have stressed the surface of the body which is marked by the social seal, albeit in a different way. Particularly, Nietzsche, Foucault, Alphonso Lingis and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have developed theories that stress the body as a surface that enters culture through a terrible mnemotechnics that instils memory and knowledge into the human subject. The idea of mnemotechnics is first used by Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morality (1887). Nietzsche asks: “How do you give a memory to the animal, man? How do you impress something upon this partly dull,

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partly idiotic, inattentive mind, this personification of forgetfulness, so that it will stick?”6 The answer is of course through practices of blood, pain and torture. This is what Nietzsche calls a “technique of mnemonics.”7 As he writes, “When man decided he had to make a memory for himself, it never happened without blood, torments and sacrifices”: “the most horrifying sacrifices,” “the most disgusting mutilations” and “the cruellest rituals” are the most powerful tools that shape memory and all the other “splendours man has” like reason and “mastering of emotions.” At the basis of all these “good things” lies “blood and horror.”8 Foucault develops this idea through Nietzsche in his “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” where he describes a body “imprinted by history,” a body that is “the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration.”9 The body is a medium shaped by disciplines and discourses and history appears as a machinic and relentless writing instrument which inscribes the body. De Man’s inhuman language is echoed here in Foucault’s conceptualisation of the inhuman forces of history which are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms but respond to haphazard conflicts. They do not manifest the successive forms of a primordial intention and their attraction is not that of a conclusion, for they always appear through the singular randomness of events.10 The body then, as a pliable and blank slate, is the page on which discursive power regimes attempt to inscribe their meaning at different points of history, and in the process of doing so they destroy the body, causing suffering and pain.11 In a similar fashion, Deleuze and Guattari talk about primitive societies where the body was inscribed, tattooed, scarified and mutilated to become part of culture and of a collectivity. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari also consider systematic cruelty a form of organisation that creates culture and memory where an individual becomes encultured through initiation rituals and inscriptions. The individual body is appropriated by culture: “Cruelty has nothing to do with some ill-defined or natural violence that might be commissioned to explain the history of mankind; cruelty is the movement of culture that is realized in bodies and inscribed on them, belaboring them.”12 Cruelty is then a “terrible alphabet” that inscribes individual bodies initiating them into the cultural and linguistic system.13 But they also stress the surface of the body by dismantling the relation between an inside and an outside, mind and body, proposing instead a subject as a “recording surface”14 of energies, flows, feeling and movement that can escape the known world of organisation (family, culture, biology) and open up to the inorganic distribution of affect, the unknown

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outside, death drive. In Anti-Oedipus, they refer to the schizophrenic “body without organs” as a surface inscribed by figures of differential speeds and intensities. The body without organs is the model of death, because it has ceased to be a unified and organised whole and instead is sensed as an ecstatic impersonal intensity, a state of death that cannot be really experienced, perhaps, only in moments of becoming other, of getting rid of structures and codes, or as a catatonic and paralysing state of zero intensity. Mark Fisher rightly points out that “any real rejection of civilisation” always entails “a move into schizophrenia—a shift into an outside that cannot be commensurate with dominant forms of subjectivity, thinking, sensation.”15 The body without organs inhabits this schizophrenic zone beyond the Symbolic; it is the unattainable limit, pure unmediated reality or the Lacanian Real, where the human body has no interests or goals and identity is dissolved. It is what is left when you have thrown everything away; it is wherever you are not. This can also be linked to de Man’s materialism, in particular, when he discusses “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” where he attacks the idea of the organic totality of the body as the unity of its limbs and parts, and instead, considers limbs, hands and toes in themselves, severed from organic unity. He celebrates and calls for the disarticulation and mutilation of the body to emphasise seeing objects, nature and the body itself as pure materiality and thus, as having “no purpose or use,”16 and, consequently, no human-assigned meaning. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, online users are faced with this death drive in the cold indifferent body of the other whose returned gaze unsettles, or, experience this materiality in images where the body is disarticulated. The idea of corporeal inscription is also taken up in Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (1994), where she rejects the idea of the body as an expression of an interior consciousness, instead relying on the notion of the body as a surface to be written upon. By displacing the centrality of the mind, she turns towards inscriptions of the subject’s corporeal surface which can explain the effects of depth and interiority.17 For, her, subjectivity cannot be thought in terms of interiority, but of corporeal surface.18 The body then becomes the very “stuff” of subjectivity.19 Like Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, Grosz undermines the guiding role of consciousness and emphasises a productive body and the ways in which social inscriptions of corporeal surface generate the effects of psychical interiority.20 Unlike these male theorists, Grosz proposes a sexed corporeality that is socially constructed, trying to develop a theory that is specific to women’s bodily experience. In her discussion of body writing in Nietzsche, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, she turns towards Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony,” where she concludes that the story shows us that Nietzschean corporeal inscription “need not be regarded simply as a metaphorical description of processes that occur psychologically” but that “processes

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of bodily inscription must be understood as literal and constitutive.”21 I also take bodily inscription literally and want to turn to this particular story by Kafka, also discussed by Judith Butler in relation to Foucault’s reference of the body as a surface of inscription, to examine how meaning and consciousness are the effects of corporeal inscriptions. “In the Penal Colony” is the quintessential story about bodily inscription (judicial, medical, punitive, disciplinary) and blood writing executed by a torture machine that destroys the body by inscribing it with a sentence, and thus meaning. Kafka’s story takes place in a penal colony where those condemned are executed by an apparatus with a harrow that engraves on the body the commandment the condemned man has transgressed. The condemned man does not know he has been sentenced, neither the sentence itself, until this is inscribed on his body. As the officer in the story explains, “He’ll come to know it on his body.”22 The inhuman punishment is a “performance” that needs to be seen and the harrow is made of glass so the viewers can witness the sentence being inscribed on the body. As the harrow begins to write, the body is also turned so that the surface is extended for more writing, and the process is repeated for twelve hours with more and deeper writing on the body. On the sixth hour, the man starts to interpret the writing which he deciphers “with his wounds,” a process that takes him another six hours, before he is finally dead.23 The machine is like a typewriter whose needles pierce the surface of the skin, and blood is the ink that delivers the message. Here, notions of an inhuman machine and language that writes the human body, come together with an understanding of corporeal inscription as a producer of knowledge. The human body remains a passive instrument and recipient of a machinic writing. But beyond readings that see the body as a blank page to be inscribed by the law, which becomes literally incarnated, it is also pertinent to our discussion to focus on machinic inscription as an automatic and repetitive process that cannot be controlled or made sense of. In her reading of Kafka’s story, Grosz explains that the punishment machine is not a creative, but more like a printing technique in which the machine blindly executes a sentence by inscribing it on the body of the prisoner and a system of textualization, a system which brings “enlightenment,” meaning, a statement of the crime, to the prisoner’s consciousness.24 But this is how language operates, according to de Man. Any text, fictional or non-fictional, as long as it is “grammatical, it is a logical code or a machine. And there can be no agrammatical texts.”25 And like the mechanical text of de Man, so the harrow blindly inscribes the body, beyond any authorial control. Language, de Man writes, is a blind and ruthless machine, indifferent to the human, that “performs anyway”26

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and the harrow needs to perform, inscribe again and again in order to give a particular meaning to the body, to inscribe the law on the body and to justify the penal colony’s existence and power. The machinic writing on bodies in the penal colony, is not the result of some psychical interiority of a subject, but the “absolute randomness of language”27 and of Kafka’s apparatus. Any meaning produced is exactly the result, and depends on, material inscription, and the condemned man’s corporeal inscriptions are what make any meaning possible. Kafka’s alternative and unsatisfying endings for the story also point towards language’s mechanical nature, beyond any authorial control that remains illusory. In a letter to Karl Wolff on 4 September 1917, Kafka wrote that he was not “wholehearted” in asking for the publication of the story, whose final pages he considered “botched.” So, the story itself, like the machine that inscribes bodies, has to perform anyway, produce more and Kafka realises the impossibility to fix meaning and give closure to the text; an ending is impossible because language is mechanical and beyond his authorial control. In his reading of Hegel, de Man also finds that memory, the learning of names by rote and their material inscription, their writing down on paper, is a mechanical activity, because, in order to remember, meaning has to be forgotten. Thought then depends on this mechanical memorisation and inscription of words as mere signs, “hieroglyphic, silent inscriptions.”28 The cruel mutilations of Nietzsche’s bloody mnemotechnic come to memory through de Man’s description of this material inscription of names and which, in his story, Kafka brings to the fore in its most literal sense. Kafka’s machine inscribes bodies so they remember the law, and they get to know it on their very flesh. For any meaning then to arise, for the condemned man to be able to make any sense of his punishment, he first needs to trace the lines and curves of the hieroglyphics and meaningless signs on his body. And when he finally makes sense of this, it is not with his mind, but through touching. For any meaning to arise, the sign must first manifest itself materially, and in Kafka’s case also deciphering it happens through the body before the mind finally interprets it. The idea of de Man’s material inscription can be witnessed in Kafka’s story when the officer shows the traveller the former commandant’s drawings which are used to programme the machine to deliver the prescribed sentence. The first drawing revealed “a labyrinth of crisscrossed lines that covered the paper so thickly that it was difficult to discern the blank spaces between them.”29 It was impossible to be read by the traveller, because this was a drawing of signs detached from any meaning. It was a logical code, like de Man’s grammar that is machinic “prior to any figuration or meaning.”30 Like the grammar of a text that is systematic in its performance and ruthless in its inability to change its own design for any other exterior reason or subjective whim, so Kafka’s machine is set to perform for twelve hours in a calculated manner, inscribing the body

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with lettering and ornamental signs. But it is also arbitrary in its principle and capable of taking whatever structure possible, in the same manner that Kafka’s machinic writing surrounds the text of the punishment with flourishes and ornamentation. In Kafka’s apparatus, the whole performance of the cruel punishment does not focus on the message itself, but the process of writing. In the case of the condemned man, the sentence that would be written on his body is “Honor thy superiors!”31 According to the judicial system, the condemned man does not know he will be sentenced or the result of the sentence, and he is never questioned about his alleged offences, since the officer believes that “Guilt is unquestionable.”32 He trusts the captain’s report that the soldier was asleep instead of guarding him, and this is enough for the officer to decide that the soldier committed a fatal transgression. The mechanical inscription then commences without any admitted or accepted misdeed, but with the captain’s confession, his own side of the story that is written down as a statement.33 It can be argued that the whole machinery of writing begins with a “fictional” statement and not with an initial confessed guilt, demonstrating that we have always been in the realm of writing. The whole existence of the penal colony and the judicial institution is based on this cruel inscription of bodies, but any judgement is always performed through texts and inscriptions that offer the illusion of authority or justice. The captain’s fictional statement performs more writing, as this time the accusation is literally carried out on the body of the prisoner. Misreading, as de Man shows, is what makes any text possible, because language is “free with regard to referential meaning”34 and this is what leads the captain’s “doubtful” statement into injustice and an inhuman sentence. The fictional statement then functions as an excuse for the mutilation of the prisoner and for injustice to be misread as justice. The machinic system of language, along with all its associated parts, the captain’s statement and the writing instrument, have to perform and carry out inscriptions, that, despite the individual sentence’s meaning, are ruthless in their mechanical and repetitive patterns. And this is what is threatening about Kafka’s story. It is not only the thought of the mutilation of bodies and their destruction, but also the way the machine and the inscription go on writing beyond any human control or authority. It is the realisation that the prisoner is at the mercy of a machinic inscription that is utterly arbitrary and random. This is why Kafka’s writing machine and all its mechanical and intricate details so obsessively and enthusiastically described by the officer, need to be seen. For example, the progress of the sentencing can be seen through the glass harrow. The harrow has needles attached to it in a similar way as the teeth of a harrow, so that it resembles a hand that writes. This invisible hand of the harrow made out of glass draws attention to the materiality of the letter as it is written and appears in its bloody marking of the flesh. In this Kafkaesque juridical drama, the agent or actor is

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no longer the body but writing itself. The suffering body and its pain become the locus to understand the effective and systematic character of the writing machine. This comes close to de Man’s machinic inscription detached from the hand and intentions of authorial subjectivity, stressing the autonomy of a system that is exterior to any human control. Kafka’s disciplinary machine, like the cultural and historical machines discussed in Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault, shape, delineate and delimit the subject’s own history, from which escape is shown to be impossible. In The Shining by Stephen King, as discussed in the next section of this chapter, blood is linked to the repetitive and automatic nature of history and the past’s re-inscriptions, which, like the cruel markings of Kafka’s writing machine, remorselessly imprint a body whose pain and suffering is unimportant and meaningless.

Body as an Inscription Surface by History In Stephen King’s The Shining, inhuman materiality is felt in the movement from modernity to postmodernity, and thus, in the repetition of history and the nostalgia for modernity. In a sense, horror texts record these glitches of time and history, when one era supersedes another. In the first chapter, it was shown that Dracula’s occult technologies are juxtaposed with modernity’s typewriters, and old media coexist with new technologies, as different modes of gothic propagation. But whereas Dracula’s text celebrates the revolution of the typewriter, The Shining, in its use of the typewriter, marks a stasis and a deadly repetition of the past, that looks backwards rather than forwards. As I mentioned earlier, Foucault sees history as an inhuman machine that inscribes the surfaces of bodies and, in this process, causes their destruction. For him, the body is constructed through its inscription by external forces, marked by cultural meanings and thus subjected to social and cultural signification. In Stephen King’s novel, this drama of the body’s inscription by history’s relentless writing machine is witnessed within the Overlook hotel’s walls, as the protagonist Jack Torrance is caught in the horrific repetition of the past, powerless to escape his subjection to the patterns of history, power and culture. The notion of humans being caught in a cycle of machinic repetition where blood and murder are shown to be the result of an automatic compulsion to repeat, mere pawns of an aeons old history machinically and impersonally navigating human life is the focus of King’s The Shining (1977) and its adaptation by Stanley Kubrick (1980). In both texts, humans appear like Kleist’s marionettes dancing and pirouetting to an age-old tune without choice, without personal agency. There are no authors here or emotional intent, but the mechanical materiality of an inhuman language and history that produces and reproduces miserable humans doomed to repeat the horror of their passions. In “Historicism

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of The Shining,” Fredric Jameson, situates Kubrick’s “depthless” characters within the triviality of daily life in postmodernity’s consumer societies where they appear “standardized and without interest, their rhythmic smiles as habituated as the recurrence of a radio-announcer’s drawn breath.”35 In such a contemporary individualistic society that has abandoned “ancestor worship” and the “objective memory of the clan or extended family,” the family of Jack Torrance is haunted by history itself and “the return of the repressed of the middle class mind” through the “sequence of such ‘dying generations’” and the “successive seasons” of the grand hotel.36 In contrast to the boring privatised lives and bureaucratic structures of the present, the film and novel nostalgically return to the past. Longing for community and the rigid certainty of a traditional class system, this nostalgia takes “the peculiar form of an obsession with the last period in which class consciousness is out in the open: even the motif of the manservant or valet expresses the desire for a vanished social hierarchy.”37 Jack is possessed by a “thralldom to the past” which results in his imprisonment in the monuments of high culture. Jameson notes that Kubrick’s Jack is not a writer but embodies the fantasy of the writer, and by extension dramatises the impossibility of the new and of cultural production today. Trapped in and enthralled by the past, Jack is unable to produce anything new, but gets caught in the compulsion to repeat the past. Mark Fisher’s reading of the film focusses on exactly this “mechanical deathliness of the human world,”38 but one seen from the outside and an indifferent universe. The late Fisher, who sought to record this impersonal force in his own writing, offers one of the most clear and succinct analyses of The Shining. For Fisher, both the novel and the film of The Shining shift the focus away from the “subjective experiencing of emotions to the (social/cultural/biotic/. . .) machines which produce those emotions.”39 We can no longer identify with the characters, but we are invited to see them from the point of view of the outside so that we, too, appear as mannequins trapped within the hideous, remorseless machines that produce and feed upon our subjective intimacies. We are all in the Overlook—locked into the treadmill repetition of someone else’s past mistakes, the viral time of abuse-begetting-abuse—yet escape is possible: but such escape is precisely out into the impersonal, the emotionless, the cold of the Overlook snow rather than the heat of Jack’s passion.40 The only way to escape the “prisonhouse of the human” and everything that traps us into repetitive, emotionally charged behaviours that disable true happiness, is through the total abandonment of this cosy submission to warm enjoyment and emotional gratification and towards

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the cold embrace of a universe alien to human emotions. In this respect, Fisher moves away from the interiority of the subject and towards the machinic as the producer of subjectivity, which agrees with both Kittler’s and De Man’s focus on the inhuman as the impersonal force that guides and shapes human experience. With both Jameson and Fisher’s readings in mind, I want to focus on this machinic repetition of the past which is punctuated by the rhythm and inscription of time through machines. Jack’s typewriter, the clock in the novel, and blood itself flowing in waves out of the elevator and reappearing as the film’s refrain, are the agents of machinic repetition from which the humans are unable to escape. In the film, Jack is possessed by this automatic and impersonal force of the Overlook hotel which is partly manifested in his inability to write meaningful prose. Instead, to her horror, his wife Wendy discovers that he has been typing endless papers of meaningless words which are the mere repetition of the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”41 Here, as Jameson points out, we’re dealing with the impossibility of writing and of producing anything new. Within the nostalgic space of the Overlook where repetition reins and the past re-circulates endlessly, the production of the new out of the old is impossible. Jack is not an author, but someone possessed by this impersonal force, and what he types is meaningless prose which draws attention to the materiality of language. What he writes are mere letters evacuated from any meaning. In this respect, the realisation of this materiality of writing and of mere inscription, without an authorial voice, is horrific. Jack Torrance’s meaningless typewritten notes question the subject of writing and draw attention to inhuman language. At the same time, Jack Torrance is not an engineer or producer of texts. Controlled by the past’s alien forces, he becomes a mere recording system that is doomed to repeat compulsively mechanical patterns. Instead of breaking the pattern and tampering with the pre-recorded message, he is completely swallowed up by death and repetition. He becomes possessed. It is no accident that one of Stephen King’s novel’s epigrams is a long passage from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), describing a gigantic clock and the impossibility of humans to escape death and the passing of time. In the course of the novel, as memories of the past come to life through the animation of the dead, references to the masked ball and phrases from Poe’s story are repeatedly used to draw attention to the masks worn by the dead of the Overlook, to repetition and death.42 In the most revealing passage, the Overlook and the time within which it is trapped, is compared to a clock, where emphasis is laid on repetition and death as an undying time, living in perpetuity: Because here in the Overlook things just went on and on. Here in the Overlook all times were one. . . . In the Overlook all things had a sort

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of life. It was as if the whole lace had been wound up with a silver key. The clock was running.43 And when Danny observed the clockface he saw it disappear and in “its place was a round black hole. It led down into forever. It began to swell. The clock was gone. The room behind it. Danny tottered and then felled into the darkness that had been hiding behind the clockface all along.”44 In this no-time and no-place where the dead are alive, Danny is tortured by ghostly figures in the hotel’s labyrinthine corridors. As the clock materialises in front of him, its glass dome reflects the word REDRUM, which is murder spelled backwards. With the black hole swelling in its place, Danny reappears in the ballroom where references to Poe’s Red Death and the theme of masks returns. Beyond the machinic face of the clock there is the darkness of the Real, death and repetition. And “behind each glittering, lovely mask, the as-yet unseen face of the shape that chased him down these dark alleyways, its red eyes widening, blank and homicidal.”45 Like the masked figure of Death which appears in Poe’s story, and which is eventually unmasked and revealed to have no face, so the Overlook’s revellers wear their own masks, veiling the fact that what is hidden underneath is the faceless horror of what lies beyond life, a death that is not passive, but seething and undulating. The Overlook is then one gigantic clock that mechanically repeats the time in a never-ending cycle, within which the lives of the dead and their memories are replayed and repeated within its walls. It is a mechanical clock and a recording device within which the dead relive the past and Jack Torrance is caught and devoured by its mechanical rhythms. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, and one which does not exist in the novel, the red elevator doors, which appear to mark the threshold between the world of phenomenal reality and that beyond, like the red curtains in a David Lynch film, are leaking with red blood which increasingly rushes out in big waves flooding the hotel’s corridors. The excessive quantity of red blood flowing through the doors does not necessarily stand for something else but epitomises horror films’ most favoured liquid as an occult presence that creates horror and dread. The blood-red liquid scene, which systematically paints the horror of the Overlook’s inhuman past, was used as the film’s original trailer. In the 1980 trailer, the blood bursts from the elevator in waves which eventually cover the camera itself, turning everything into darkness, before we can see again through the blood-covered lens. Kubrick’s trailer condenses the horror of the film in one bloody image, capturing at the same time the essence of horror itself. The thick blood-red liquid violently flows in waves that cover the walls and the camera’s lens, momentarily obstructing our vision, as if this blood, which comes from the doors of the elevator, is totally an alien force and inhuman matter that covers everything in blackness. When we are able to see through the blood-red lens again,

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Kubrick places us in the perspective of blood itself. As will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4, the gaze objectifies, and here we are turned into objects gazing through the eyes of an inhuman materiality both living and dead, permeating the space of the Overlook itself. What is important is that blood is not connected to the human and does not come out from a living body, but it bursts out of what is a mere machine, an elevator. With its association with the elevator and the camera, blood is machinic. We become the viewers of an automatism, whose only mediation is the cool indifference of the camera. The centrality of the clock in the novel, and Jack Torrance’s typewriter and blood in the film of The Shining, enable us to witness the horror of a repetitive and machinic cyclical history, so much a part of American mythology itself, and the submission of the human to the ruthless inscriptions of the past. This nightmarish vision of history where the human is trapped and subjected to powers beyond its control, can also be likened to capital’s undead and vampiric life which dominates the human. Torrance’s entrapment into replaying the Overlook’s past and living through the lives of the dead, most of whom, as the novel points out, are capitalists, mafia and the high society of 1920s America, exemplifies his total abandonment to undead capital and its impersonal mechanical deathliness. As the previous manager and employee of the Overlook, Delbert Grady, says to Jack, his successor, “‘You’re the caretaker’ .  .  . ‘You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been here. The same manager hired us both, at the same time.’”46 Both Grady and Jack’s fate is inscribed and inescapably written, and they accept their assigned roles and positions, as passive slaves to the very system that produced them and caused their suffering. Jack is trapped by its socio-biotic history to repeat the role of his father, a tyrant and an alcoholic, and, like Grady, a perfect prospect for murdering his family, too. The whole of the Overlook and its class of capitalists can be seen as the embodiment of corporate recruitment agencies which, as the saying goes, have an appetite for new blood and flesh. In the novel, Torrance is even made to compete with his son, Danny, as the perfect candidate for the role of the caretaker, as Grady points out that his son “has a very great talent, one that the manager could use to even further improve the Overlook, to further . . . enrich it, shall we say?”47 The problem, however, is that Jack’s son, unlike him, is “willful” and can use his talent against the rotten managerial class. Jack then is the ideal candidate, because he accepts his role without questioning it, mesmerised by the sleek façade of dead wealth, whose corpse remains alive through the hard labour of people like Jack. The myth of the Overlook’s bygone leisure class seduces Jack and instructs him to enjoy his own submission to the undead rhythms of work, so that the powerful continue to enjoy their privileges. But “beneath the glitter and paint and masks”48 of the Overlook’s residents, lies the violence of history’s inscription which is glimpsed in the

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blood writing on the wall, the materiality of blood spatters, which can only be seen by Danny. When they first arrive at the Overlook, Jack Torrance’s family is given a tour of the hotel by the manager, Stuart Ullman, and in the Presidential suite, while everyone admires the “picture-postcard view,” Danny instead notices that Great splashes of dried blood, flecked with tiny bits of grayish-white tissue, clotted the wallpaper. . . . It was like a crazy picture drawn in blood, a surrealistic etching of a man’s face drawn back in terror and pain, the mouth yawning and half the head pulverized.49 Retrospectively, what Danny witnesses is the scene of Vittorio Gienneli and two of his companions’ murder that took place in the 1960s.50 Whereas Jack is enthralled by symbols and polished masks, Danny is able to see beneath such masks, the pure materiality of the Overlook’s reality etched on the walls. The scene contrasts the aesthetic and beauty as it is enjoyed by Jack and his wife looking outside the window of the hotel to the horror of unmediated reality, as if one was looking from the outside, inside. This is emphasised by the description of aesthetic beauty seen through the eyes of Jack, Ullman and his wife Wendy: The window ran nearly the length of the sitting room, and beyond it the sun was poised directly between two sawtoothed peaks, casting golden light across the rock faces and the sugared snow on the high tips. The clouds around and behind this picture-postcard view were also tinted gold, and a sunbeam glinted duskily down into the darkly pooled firs below the timberline.51 Like the aesthetic language used in Dracula when Dr Seward describes the passage of time over the tomb of Lucy and soon is questioned by the absence of her body, here the aesthetic and the inability of humans to see reality as it really is, without attaching to it some meaning, is juxtaposed to Danny’s ability to “shine” and see the materiality of things as they really are. The materiality of blood as is seen by the rivers of blood flowing out of the Overlook’s elevator, despite our compulsion to ascribe some meaning to it, defies any logical explanation. It is neither imagined, nor part of our everyday common reality, but nonetheless, like the blood spatters that Danny sees, it is there and real. The cinematic equivalent of The Shining’s red fluid is Del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015), where an unknown bloodred fluid flows underneath and within the mansion. In this respect, the presence of blood is as unnatural as that of the Overlook hotel, which is built over an Indian burial ground and that of the Crimson Peak mansion, which is the place of the burial of Sir Thomas Sharpe’s previous wives. In both films, blood flows from the inside to the outside, mediating

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between the horrific world of human passions and the pure passionless and desolated world that exists outside the walls of these human edifices. Crimson Peak and The Shining juxtapose the murderous and hedonic proclivities of humans to the desolated and snowy emptiness of Nature. And it is to this outside that the humans escape in both The Shining and Crimson Peak, leaving behind them the crumbling walls of history, repetition and suffering.

Transgressing the Self: Writing on the Body in Kathe Koja’s Novels As it has been shown, human bodies are inscribed by machinic processes and blood reveals this machinic repetition. On the one hand, The Shining focusses on the inhuman forces of history which determine one’s subjectivity. On the other hand, the inhuman is what lies beyond the limits of one’s perception and which presents the human with transformative potential. In The Shining, history’s inhuman machine inscribes the body of Jack Torrance, condemning him to the dreadful repetition of acting out the dramas of other people’s suffering. In Kathe Koja’s novels, The Cipher (1991), Bad Brains (1992) and Skin (1993), we move to another relation between the body and inscription, where inscriptions on the body open holes into the fabric of being, destroying personhood and agency. However, such experiments are doomed to failure, as the seduction of transgression and of writing on the body to access some unnameable truth, result in the destruction of the human altogether. All three novels revolve around the marginalised lives of writers and artists who willingly or by chance transgress the limits to experience some truth and something more real than the dreariness of their everyday existence. Imprinted by the inhuman discourses of the institutions that imprison them and striving with their art to escape them through their own inscriptions in writing, painting and body art, these visionaries go all the way and are totally swallowed up by the unknown and the horror of the real, since after piercing the veil of ordinary reality, they become obsessed with death. While opening one’s body to trauma to move beyond suffocating structures will be further analysed in the following chapter, here bodies are totally mesmerised and overtaken by the mechanical forces of the death drive. The notion of negativity, absence and failed “transcursion”—“a passage beyond limits”—52 is at the centre of Koja’s The Cipher,53 where the appearance of a black hole in Nicholas’ apartment building changes the marginalised lives of those which encounter and are enthralled by it. An English graduate who writes poems and works at a video store, Nicholas, destitute, lives in a decrepit apartment and is in a loveless and exploitative relationship with Nakota. As Steven Shaviro writes about the characters in The Cipher, these are the “individuals” of the neoliberal era, and the

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novel moves “in a fatal short-circuit, between individual wounded interiority and all-embracing ontological nullity.”54 And this is how Nicholas describes himself: as “living like a cockroach for so long,”55 “derelict,”56 “[s]kid and adrift, lived my life, foolish, hopeless, irredeemable,”57 and as “tired of hating myself,” “flotsam” and “nothing.”58 And when he and Nakota discover the hole, which she names the Funhole, he explains, bitterly, that he was responsible for letting it out: “I let it into my body, . . . I let it run my life because somebody has to, right? somebody has to take the goddamned brunt even if it’s a void. Even if it’s chosen me.”59 The Funhole was a “living black . . . the sense of something not living but alive, not even something but some process,”60 which causes things to change, from bugs to objects and Nicholas himself, whose hand is inscribed with a hole itself. In their search for meaning, Nakota and Nicholas become obsessed with the “gaping blackness”61 of this “underworld,”62 as if they could master some form of meaning and purpose out of the “emptiness” and “negativity” of the hole,63 only to find the pure materiality of inscription, meaningless darkness and lack at the heart of their very being. As Nicholas, sarcastically, comments, humans are the enemies of themselves, attracted to what is bad for them, and creating their own little hells: “Ah God, the happy hells I can create, you too, all of us. Even Nakota. We are all our worst best friends.”64 The Funhole inscribes the bodies of insects and humans indifferently, enabling Nicholas to perceive a world beyond human perception, as he is slowly swallowed up by the hole’s negativity. When Nakota tries to find out what there is inside the hole, she pushes a pickled jar with bugs close to the lip of the hole, and they watch the bugs change: “an extra pair of wings, a spare head, two spare heads, colors beyond the real,”65 before there were all dead, but inscribed with runes. As they open the jar, they notice that the wings had a “crazed patterning . . . etched and slanted glyphs in a language I could never hope to master.”66 The runes and unknown inscriptions transform Nicholas’ perception who, saw, in this new state, deeper, encountered signs I had never before known: the slick sound of a Visa sliding across the counter, the feel of the counter itself . . . all of it told me things, showed me things, and gifted somehow by the Funhole—was that the source?—I saw, if not the meaning of patterns then patterns of meaning, and for me that was enough.67 And when they send a camcorder down the hole, the video records “a figure carving itself, re-created in a harsh new form from what seemed to be its own hot guts, becoming no figure at all but the absence of one.”68 As Nicholas explains, the video was like Faces of Death: “Same principle: you know, everybody knows about death, but to actually see it, wow.”69 Koja’s novel links the obsession with seeing the real face of

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death to contemporary artists’ obsession to pierce the veil of reality, since Nakota and her artist friends become enthralled by the video which they watch repeatedly with the pornographic precision of a voyeur. Perhaps, this kind of voyeurism and obsession with seeing is best captured in the creepypasta examined in Chapter 4, where online users are fascinated by witnessing the face of death. But the hole is particularly connected to Nicholas, and is only active, changing things, when he is present. This is why he is the one who is inscribed by the hole, as his right palm, going accidentally inside the Funhole, comes out with a hole, “a bite from the devil,”70 “stigmata.”71 The wound does not heal, but grows to the point that there was “[n] othing but hole,”72 as his body, in a process of “dissolution,”73 becomes the material manifestation of his own emptiness. As death writes on his body, literally erasing part of him, Nicholas becomes aware of his lack of agency: “I stared at my hand, my hole hand, haha, and flexed my fingers but where are the strings, hmm?”74 Nicholas’ wound becomes a gaping hole from which “the living leakage crawling up my fingers, painlessly chewing the flesh as it went. Eating me alive .  .  . Skin and bone dissolving. Matter over mind.”75 The “transparent reddish coating” was not “devouring but dissolving the flesh beneath to form something—new.”76 For him, the idea of freedom of choice was as artificial as a “beer commercial,”77 and he gave himself totally to this blackness eating him from within, becoming a process, “the consumption itself.”78 The writing on the wings of the insects is replicated on his rotting hand, as if the runes, according to Nakota, said that Nicholas was the key to open or close this gap of possibility. But Nicholas suspects that the truth was much darker than him being some kind of key, that the Funhole was the manifestation of his “own sick heart, the void made manifest and disguised as hellhole,” and that he was entering the hole of his “own emptiness forever.”79 The realisation that there is no transcursion and no transformation, but the unending experience of the void and negativity, is what the Funhole represents and where the true horror lies. Nicholas’ body is inscribed and opened, exhibiting the horrors that lie within: the negativity at the heart of being and the absence of any transformative will. The human dissolves, wallowing in its own negativity, shown to be weak, without agency and without any control over processes beyond its comprehension. The inhuman has always been there, part of the human, and Nicholas realises how helpless he is to change this fact. During their violent but passionless sex near the Funhole, Nicholas is able to see himself and Nakota, as if he is outside of himself, a witness to their “slow decaying gyration above the Funhole,” where he “looked and saw as if in a mirror that Nakota’s eyes had rolled back in her head and there was blood in my mouth, all over her face, and the look on my face scared me so badly that I felt us fall, as if belief was all that held us.”80 In this moment, Nicholas sees from the outside inside, able to experience the

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horror of the human’s decaying and deathly circle of life, the negativity of their machinic and empty existence, as if the Funhole was a black mirror reflecting back the darkness at the heart of the human. This negativity is carried on in Bad Brains, a novel concerned with seeing beyond perception and of giving expression to de Manian materiality through painting. This is what the novel names as duende—and which the poet Federico García Lorca has described in “Theory and Play of the Duende”81 as the heightened response to art, as irrationality, affect, and as proximity to death that eradicates momentarily any sense of selfhood. As he writes in his essay, duende is a “mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained .  .  . . is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought.” It is the opposite of intellect and divine illumination, because it is a physical force “roused from the furthest habitations of the blood,” and with which the poet and artist struggles “on the edge of the pit,” to produce their art, and move their audience with duende— which approximates “religious enthusiasm.” It offers “real poetic escape from this world,” and enables “communication with God.” The duende “loves the edge, the wound, and draws close to places where forms fuse in a yearning beyond visible expression.” While de Manian materiality is without affect and emotion, it has many similarities with duende, particularly, the way it is described in Bad Brains, through the appearance of silver, as that which exists after the “veil was stripped,”82 the possibility of death, and which “cannot be adequately named.”83 It is the place beyond the border, “no man’s land at all,” “where every color is burning black,”84 and “where every real creator wants to be.”85 Koja’s duende approximates de Man’s conception of materiality as a passionless seeing of a universe emptied out of the human. It is the horror of seeing the world from a different position than that of human emotion and intellect; it is completely inhuman, and, as such, the site of death. In the novel, after portrait artist Austen’s brain injury, he begins experiencing dissociation and loss of language, and his vision is transformed, able to see, as de Man writes in “Kant’s Materialism,” “as poets do, [and] as the eye seems to perceive it.”86 When he is unable to find a cure for his seizures and visions, and medical science is presented as obsolete, Austen is determined to find other methods that would enable “another way to see; a new vision.”87 This “profound dissociation” came to him “as if he had become a person sitting cross-legged inside his own chest, watching. With the calm unblinking eyes of the practiced observer; voyeur’s eyes; artist’s eyes.”88 In this state, and during his seizures, “borderline between pained prosaic consciousness and the ether-state of scales and smells and fear,”89 he begins seeing the “silver thing,” an “inhuman” bloodlike, “dustdevil of fluid, liquid, mucus; silver;”90 the “silver monster.”91 This mystical fluid is described as having the qualities of blood and as a living, real material thing that appears to Austen in images of “Spatters and clots,”92 “clotted,”93 as a “silver gash”94 and “bleeding livid,”95

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and “running like blood.”96 And when his paintings become saleable and unique, this is when their textures begin to change and silver appears: “in everything one constant: the relentless drip of a color so pale it was nameless, but if he had to, . . . he would call it silver.”97 The blood-like silver colour is the appearance of duende, and it is what gives Austen’s paintings their uniqueness. The novel connects Austen’s unique vision with other limit experiences and attempts to escape what Nick Land has called the Human Security System—“the net result of this crushing cosmic legacy of ‘stratification,’ normalizing and limiting what thought can do.”98 When he visits the shaman, he witnesses on a tape a series of human exercises and inscriptions on the body to communicate with the inhuman: a woman, a girl, the surface of her skin no skin at all but a million mouths: rips, gouges, pulling farther back to show that the damage was in no way random, was a pattern: like distorted arms, like the twisting arms of a hungry god.99 Austen saw people levitating, claiming to be God, the devil or avatars of both, “people who hung themselves from rubber straps for hours at a time, people who scarred and tore their own bodies, attempting enlightenment, punishment, brute forgetfulness, it went on and on.”100 Like Foucault’s experiments in the “desexualization” of pleasure in the San Francisco bathhouses, where “you cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past, in your own identity,”101 Koja’s novel focusses on bodily inscription as a carefully orchestrated method of erasing identity and accessing knowledge beyond those limits that imprison the human to normalisation and subjection. However, as Austen exhaustively focusses on his painting with his new transformed vision through silver, he becomes violent and obsessed, eventually murdering his ex-wife, before crossing the border to death. He, momentarily, succeeds in making his body into a depersonalised machine, not limited to the organic, as he experiences everything as abstract vision, but he, finally, dies. The concept of crossing the limits of the body through inscription is also further investigated in Koja’s The Skin. Like the other two novels, Koja’s horror lies at the site of the body, and in the latter, the body is inscribed by the self to be used as a tool and a gate to transcend the material. The novel juxtaposes the attempts of two artists, Tess Bajac, a metal sculptor, and Bibi Bloss, a dancer, to create from their art the perfect mingling of the organic and inorganic, through the materiality of steel and skin. Tess is obsessed with “the rhythm inherent in metal,” with Machines that were not robots, moving sculpture that did not mimic the organic but played, somehow, both with and off that distanceless

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dichotomy, the insolvable equation of steel screws and aching flesh, that wanted people not only as operators but as co-conspirators.102 But, Bibi wants to go further, and seeing the limitations of dancing, she becomes obsessed with performance art where her body is cut, inscribed and bled. The question of the two women’s relationship revolves around the different paths they take: “Metal versus flesh, the engineered versus the organic.”103 Their “competing obsessions” are captured in the image of Bibi as a rag doll, voodoo doll sprouting needles and everywhere sewed black and red scars, and Tess’s made all of metal, metal teeth, dull metal eyes and toolbox hands, each finger a screwdriver, a drill bit, a grinding wheel, all in constant empty motion.104 For Tess, Bibi’s obsession with piercings and cuttings was for nothing, and even the concept of the “hectoring of limits,” “liberating” on the one hand, but, on the other hand, “a deader end”: “Do you modify to improve, or empower, or simply to feed the greedy black scorn of the human boundaries that succor flesh to blood to the pulse and contraction of the emperor mind within?”105 Bibi’s desire to be steeped in the “bright blooded ecstasy of pain; in the service of the most capricious god of all, Change,” is connected to transgression and Bataille, whom “Bibi was forever intoning: ‘Human life is an experience to be carried as far as possible.’”106 From bindings, piercings and tortures, Bibi sought her own answers in her body and through the body, as if the skin was a gate and cutting would enable her to get somewhere,107 to “use the body to transcend the body.”108 For Bibi, the repetitive and consistent inscription in blood is not used as a form of pleasure but as a necessity “because there’s a place we need to get to and nothing else can take us there, not fucking or drugs or learning, not even the people we love can take us there. We have to go alone. ‘On a carpet of blood.’”109 But Bibi’s extreme performances end in death, as her friend Matty is cut too deep, and she is taken to prison. Like Koja’s Cipher, Skin ends with negativity and the impossibility of transgression. Contemporary horror deals with the reality of human bodies and links the horror of the inhuman to those machines which produce and wound up bodies. In The Shining, bodies are inscribed by the inhuman power of history, rather than that of the supernatural (the devil or the vampire), as the human is doomed to replay the passions and histories of others, in a deadly repetition. In Koja’s fiction, inscriptions on the body are linked to acts of transgression ending in failure. In all these novels, inscriptions on the body seek to dominate, destroy or transform the body and self, demonstrating that horror is concerned with the materiality and surface of

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the body, rather than interiority, as the site where knowledge is inscribed in a Kafkaesque manner. Horror, which takes the surface of the body as its focus, shows in all its bloody splendour, that the machinic, the materiality of inscription and the inhuman can be accessed and glimpsed through the bodily inscriptions of such characters as Nicholas and Austen. At the same time, these horror novels end in meaningless transformation, death and negativity. From Stephen King’s Jack Torrance to Kathe Koja’s Bibi, the human is inscribed by socio-cultural and biotic institutions and machines—the causation of the human’s mechanical deathliness and misery—and any attempt to escape these is impossible. In the next chapter, this mechanistic quality will be examined in films where women’s traumas expose the ambivalent boundary between the organic and the inorganic, or the gaping hole between mind and body.

Notes 1. Nick Land, Suspended Animation (Shanghai: Urbanatomy Electronic, 2013). 2. Fred Botting, Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions (London and New York: Routledge, 2008) and “Candygothic,” in The Gothic, ed. Fred Botting (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001). 3. My reading here is indebted to Mark Fisher’s writings in general, and particularly, his analysis of The Shining in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Hants: Zero Books, 2014). 4. Writing is a form of communication with the other in the same manner that blood in Christianity is a communion with the body of Christ and creates a community. At the same time, beyond this symbolic meaning, blood in its inscrutable materiality remains foreign and Other to the subject. See JeanLuc Nancy’s Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 5. de Man uses “dismemberment,” “defacement,” and “decapitation” to demonstrate the dismantling of abstract linguistic models. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 38. 7. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 38. 8. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 39. 9. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 148. 10. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 154–5. 11. Judith Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” (The Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 11 (November 1989): 601–607), criticises Foucault for his paradoxical presentation of, one the one hand, a body that is discursively constructed, and on the other hand, a pre-discursive body; a body that pre-exists culture (603). She disagrees with Foucault’s view of a body as a passive recipient of culture that needs to be destroyed and changed for culture to emerge. 12. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 145. 13. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 145. 14. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 10. 15. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), 100.

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16. Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 88. 17. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), vii. 18. Of course, the body is socially branded and marked through corporeal inscriptions but is also “a body shell capable of being overtaken by the other’s messages (for example, in shamanism or epilepsy)” (Grosz 119). 19. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, ix. 20. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, xiii, 115. 21. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 137. 22. Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” in The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Donna Freed (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003), 99. 23. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 104. 24. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 135. 25. Paul de Man, “Promises (Social Contract),” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 268. 26. Paul de Man, “Excuses (Confessions),” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 299. 27. de Man, “Excuses (Confessions),” 299. 28. Paul de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 102. 29. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 103. 30. de Man, “Excuses (Confessions),” 299. 31. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 99. 32. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 100. 33. Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 100. 34. de Man, “Excuses,” 293. 35. Fredric Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” www.visual-memory.co.uk/ amk/doc/0098.html. 36. Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” n.pag. 37. Jameson, “Historicism in The Shining,” n.pag. 38. Mark Fisher, “Kubrick as Cold Rationalist,” K-punk, 2 January 2005, http:// k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004666.html. 39. Fisher, “Kubrick as Cold Rationalist.” 40. Fisher, “Kubrick as Cold Rationalist.” 41. Stanley Kubrick, The Shining (Hawk Films, 1980). 42. See Stephen King, The Shining (London: Hodder, 2007), 170, 175, 307, 333, 334–6, 391–2, 482. 43. King, The Shining, 334–5. 44. King, The Shining, 335. 45. King, The Shining, 338. 46. King, The Shining, 387. 47. King, The Shining, 388. 48. King, The Shining, 391. 49. King, The Shining, 101. 50. King, The Shining, 180. 51. King, The Shining, 101. 52. Kathe Koja, The Cipher (New York: Dell, 1991), Kindle, Location, 2973. 53. See also Michael A. Arnzen, “‘Behold the Funhole’: Post-Structuralist Theory and Kathe Koja’s The Cipher,” Paradoxa 1, no. 3 (1995): 342–51.

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54. Steven Shaviro, “Into the Funhole: Kathe Koja’s The Cipher,” Genre 49, no. 2 (2016): 216. 55. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 160. 56. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 1531. 57. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 383. 58. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 1280. 59. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 1280. 60. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 88. 61. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 295. 62. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 250. 63. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 1448. 64. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 381. 65. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 226. 66. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 252. 67. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 532. 68. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 621–9. 69. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 652. 70. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 792. 71. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 954. 72. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 3021. 73. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 1940. 74. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 3029. 75. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 3197. 76. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 3206. 77. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 3214. 78. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 3288. 79. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 3637. 80. Koja, The Cipher, Loc. 2110. 81. All references to “Theory and Play of the Duende” are taken from Poetry in Translation (n.pag), www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/Lorca Duende.php. 82. Kathe Koja, Bad Brains (New York: Dell Publishing, 1992), 335. 83. Koja, Bad Brains, 335. 84. Koja, Bad Brains, 330. 85. Koja, Bad Brains, 331. 86. Paul de Man, “Kant’s Materialism,” in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 126. 87. Koja, Bad Brains, 115. 88. Koja, Bad Brains, 9. 89. Koja, Bad Brains, 66. 90. Koja, Bad Brains, 9. 91. Koja, Bad Brains, 26. 92. Koja, Bad Brains, 86. 93. Koja, Bad Brains, 110. 94. Koja, Bad Brains, 129. 95. Koja, Bad Brains, 129. 96. Koja, Bad Brains, 128. 97. Koja, Bad Brains, 289. 98. Robin Mackay, “Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism,” Divus, http:// divus.cc/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus. 99. Koja, Bad Brains, 310. 100. Koja, Bad Brains, 312. 101. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 264.

Inhuman Inscriptions 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

Kathe Koja, Skin (New York: Dell Publishing, 1993), 42. Koja, Skin, 92. Koja, Skin, 207. Koja, Skin, 197. Koja, Skin, 204. Koja, Skin, 352. Koja, Skin, 377. Koja, Skin, 378.

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At the Heart of Darkness Trauma and Women

In this chapter, I continue the explorations of materiality as meaningless repetition and of blood as flowing beyond the organic limits of life, by looking at a series of horror films focussing on women, bodily and psychic trauma. The purpose here is to move away from the associations of blood with Woman as the site of positive vitalism and fertility that celebrate affirmative becomings and to challenge such clean categorisations and attempts to departmentalise Woman by looking at blood as abstract matter and as de Manian materiality. Against the vitalist tradition which privileges productivity, organisation and creativity, human, heterosexual living bodies or matter’s agential power, I want to turn to what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “passive vitalism” and life as a pre-individual plane of forces that acts through chance encounters. This inhuman radical force is not grounded in the organism but in the autonomous percepts and affects: expressive matter beyond the human point of view. While vitalists imagine life as purposive and organic, the following films posit a monstrous and inhuman force that can be felt beyond the dissolution of one’s bounded living body. Like Foucault and de Man’s notion of language, so Deleuze’s life can be thought as an impersonal and an independent force. Here de Man’s notion of the inhuman and of the machinic can be connected to Deleuze’s understanding of life as technological and as an inorganic web of forces beyond any organic control. But, as Mark Fisher instructs, we should also go beyond and abandon conceptions grounded around the idea of life, and instead follow Freud’s lesson in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which demonstrates how vitalism is in the service of death. Following Fisher, the chapter turns towards that which Schopenhauer, Freud and Lacan based their work upon: the perception of an anorganic flatline which manufactures the so-called vital as part of its indifferent process of endless production without final cause. Kant called this pursposiveness without purpose, Schopenhauer blind will, Freud, Thanatos.1

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From Fabrice du Welz’s Vinyan (2008), Paul Solet’s Grace (2009) to Julien Maury and Alexandre Bastillo’s Inside (2007), Claire Dennis’ Trouble Every Day (2002), and Marina De Van’s In My Skin (2002), women’s trauma and wounding opens a space where the inside is inhabited by the outside, while human passions and feelings are seen from the outside from an inhuman point of view. As will be examined in Chapter 4, here the idea of looking from the side of the inhuman, of a bodiless eye, captures the point of view of de Man’s inhuman “eye” in “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant.”2 Looking at women’s bodies and at themselves looking at their own bodies is like laying one’s eyes on the body and blood as materialities, evacuated of the kind of sentimentality and flippant, pop feminism which forswears a sober and consistent analysis of matter. With new materialisms imbuing everything with life to challenge subject/object distinctions, but only ending up reproducing human subjectivity across the material world, de Man’s materialism comes to offer an alternative. Seen from the point of view of the totally Other, matter is not equated with life and agency but with death as an active force. We are no longer dealing with what Slavoj Žižek has critically described as the new materialisms’ “panpsychism,” or “terrestrial animism,” the result of a “benign anthropomorphism”3 which seeks to “understand” natural reality by giving it purpose and interiority. Instead, de Manian materiality is encountered in the inhuman Otherness of woman’s blood and corporeality, and the traumatic confrontation of a world without and unlike us. In this sense, the female characters encountered in these films do not subscribe to an idea of a healthy and happy subjectivity, trapped within their individual feelings and imaginations, but go beyond the limits of their selves and bodies, towards an affectless, unemotional and detached state where blood and the body are no longer the arbiters of vitalism, but of death as a mechanical force. This is why, in their refusal to embrace any affirmation, these films are not on the side of “life” but of death. They lay bare the workings of death as a dynamic and impersonal force. They are not clad in naïf sentimentalism and biological essentialism, but edit out life, not in the pursuit of some kind of conventional self-destructiveness, but in their attempt to offer a rationalist vision of an inhuman world.

Freud, Lacan, Spinoza and Schopenhauer: “Thanatos Runs the Organic Show”4 The ultimate horror that these films and these philosophers focus on, is that of an impersonal, implacable and persistent drive that refuses to satiate itself but continues to go on and on remorselessly, in an endless repetition. This inhuman force is experienced as a dark vitalism beyond the bounds of biological life. At the same time, the human appears to be at the mercy of such a compulsive force, winded biologically and emotionally to

70 At the Heart of Darkness perform a set of predetermined behaviours that condemn it to its organic and biological prison house. As was seen in the previous chapter, Jack Torrance exemplified this. At the heart of this drudgery of existence is what Schopenhauer has so well described with his concept of the Will: a mindless and non-rational impulse, “unconscious and blind,”5 a “restless striving”6 and “compulsory activity”7 whose main goal is the maintenance of the species. Within this logic, the human has no other value than that of reproducing the race, and its ceaseless striving towards existence is seen by Schopenhauer with horror since no human has any control over it. This persistence in life is “not something freely chosen” but that “every individual bears the stamp of a forced condition; and every one, in that, inwardly weary, he longs for rest, but yet must press forward.”8 As he writes, the human race is “a play of puppets who are pulled after the ordinary manner by threads outside them; but from this point of view, as puppets which are set in motion by internal clockwork.”9 At an other point, he compares this “blind will”10 to “a rope which is stretched above the puppet show of the world of men, and on which the puppets hang by invisible threads.”11 This is the will to live which manifests itself as “an untiring machine, an irrational tendency, which has not its sufficient reason in the external world. It holds the individuals firmly upon the scene, and is the primum mobile of their movements.”12 Being as such the nature of man, the striving for life becomes the sole purpose of the human, whom is condemned to repeat, despite all its misery, anxiety and suffering.13 This repetition comes in the form of an endless and dissatisfied desire since the objects of a man’s desires continually delude, waver, and fall, and accordingly bring more misery than joy, till at last the whole foundation upon which they all stand gives way, in that his life itself is destroyed and so he receives the last proof that all his striving and wishing was a perversity, a false path.14 Man is then, according to Schopenhauer, at the mercy of this monstrous will which inhabits and propels him to push forward, while, at the same time being unable to satiate it. Schopenhauer’s will to live is an undead drive which keeps returning without end. In the film Inside, the maternal instinct and reproduction are seen as an uncontrollable and violent drive to give life, devoid of the cosy warmth of the family home and refusing affirmation and hippydrippy celebrations of life. Instead, amidst copious amounts of blood, the two mothers will fight to death and with an unparalleled conviction and remorseless force that will unsettle the clear binary between, and conventional understandings of, both vitalism and destructive Thanatos. Similarly, in Grace, the will to life, lacking any positivity, will push a mother to persist in carrying her dead child and giving birth to a bloodthirsty

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baby vampire. Confusing the boundary between life and death, the film highlights the insistence of a vampire drive which goes beyond the limits of human life. The humans in both these films appear as mere Schopenhauerian puppets, acting in the service of an inhuman impulse propelling them to not give up. But if life is painted with such dark colours, it is useful to turn to Freud’s conception of the death drive which captures exactly this animated impulse that has nothing to do with nature and the organic, and everything to do with the artificial, inorganic and machinic. The vital is then only part of this death drive as endless production. I want to move away from any persistence in life or Freud’s later binary between two opposing drives, that of Eros and Thanatos, and return to his earlier formulation of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It is to this earlier Freudian concept of the death drive as undead life that Lacan himself returns when he writes: “To the bow (Βiός) is given the name of life (Bíos) and its work is death.”15 We are not dealing here with a drive for self-annihilation, destruction and death, but a death drive which is indifferent to death. Lacan uses the symbol of the lamella to talk about the blind insistence of a life that does not require a human body, but is pure uncontrollable life force: “pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life.”16 For Lacan, every drive is linked to death, and, as he writes, both sides of the drive are united.17 This excessive energy and vitality of the death drive is a mode of unnatural and inhuman animation, which finds its monstrous incarnation in Lacan’s myth of the lamella. And as Žižek insists, the death drive has nothing to do with the return to the inorganic: it is the “very opposite of dying, it is a name for the ‘undead’ eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain.”18 Death drive is life in excess of life: eternal and undead life. For Žižek, the death drive is personified by horror’s living dead, “of something that remains alive even after it is dead. And it’s, in a way, immortal in its deadness itself. It goes on, insists. You cannot destroy it.”19 At the same time, for Lacan and Žižek, the death drive is not just this undead vitality beyond the biological body, but also the repetition automatism experienced in relation to the Symbolic and language. In this sense, the death drive defines the human condition, since it subordinates the human to the “blind automatism of repetition beyond pleasure-seeking, self-preservation.”20 The death drive is not a natural fact but the void in the Symbolic, something in-between, the “ultimate ‘vanishing mediator’” between nature and culture.21 The question then is no longer between an opposition of Life and Death, but a split within both life and death itself. As Žižek clarifies, this double split results in two modes of the death drive; between a dead and “parasitic symbolic machine (language as a dead entity which ‘behaves as if it possesses a life of its own’) and its counterpoint, the ‘living dead’ (the monstrous

72 At the Heart of Darkness life substance which persists in the Real outside the Symbolic).”22 The horror of the death drive is then manifested in two instances where we deal with the “ghost in the machine” and the “machine in the ghost”: what we initially thought was alive is actually dead and vice versa, what we thought it was dead is actually alive.23 On the one hand, we have the body colonised by the symbolic order and thus the instance of a human being as dead while alive, and, on the other hand, the undead life that escapes the Symbolic and animating what should be dead. The idea of death is inextricably entwined with what we perceive as life, the persistence of a tedious infinity that we can never escape from; the image of the human as a biological being trapped in the “pleasure-death ferris wheel” of undead existence.24 As Lacan concludes, there is only one drive, that of death, “since when we get to the root of this life, behind the drama of the passage into existence, we find nothing besides life conjoined to death. That is where the Freudian dialectic leads us.”25 Lacan’s death drive, to the extent that it is an undead impulse, “life conjoined to death,” fits with Spinoza’s conatus—the human organism’s tendency to strive for selfpreservation—in the sense that it is understood as a single drive, where the concept of life and death are indistinguishable. While conatus lacks the death drive’s repetition, it is, nonetheless, an impersonal force that does not recognise the life-death division. Both Schopenhauer’s and Lacan’s impersonal and inhuman drives are visible in contemporary horror’s images of vampiric life which coagulate around the materiality of blood as endless repetition. Schopenhauer’s concept of the Will is an insatiable, implacable and blind drive propelling us to move forward, while remaining dissatisfied with any of the objects it pursues. Similarly, Lacanian death drive is a monstrous machine: an automated process of endless repetition without end. As discussed in chapters 1 and 2, contemporary horror marks a shift away from the supernatural undead and towards the real of the body and blood. The meaningless and mechanical flow of blood in horror films makes visible a de Manian materiality, and is the manifestation of a death drive that, according to Lacan, is impossible to experience, unthinkable: The death-drive is the real in so far as it can only be thought of as impossible—that is to say, that every time it peeps round the corner it is unthinkable. We cannot hope to approach that impossibility, because it is unthinkable; it is death, of which the foundation of the real is that it cannot be thought.26 Thought embroiders and flourishes around the real, but, for Lacan, it remains inaccessible. However, as we move to analyse the following films, it is evident that what is unthinkable becomes tangible as the horror of the inhuman appears within the limits of human experience and reality.

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Beyond Biology, Mothers of Death Paul Solet’s film Grace (2009), Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s Inside (L’ Interieur, 2007) and Fabrice du Welz’s Vinyan (2008) all deal with the maternal as an abstract force that traverses life beyond the limits of the organic and the familiarity of the human. Women and the maternal are seen as an opening to the outside and a life that embraces death as an experience and not an end. Both Grace and Inside begin with car accidents and the death of the respective pregnant protagonists’ husbands. Their deaths set in motion a series of events, where the women will persist in giving birth despite having to overcome the horrors that befall them. In Grace, after the accident which causes Madeline’s husband and her unborn child’s death, the pregnant mother will continue carrying the baby to term and giving birth to her. Eventually, the baby will miraculously return to life and be given the name of Grace, but she will be unable to digest breast milk. Instead, Grace starts drinking blood from her mother’s breast. Grace’s undead life is a living death, since she exudes a putrescent smell which attracts flies, while bathing causes bleeding to her skin. When later Grace begins teething, the baby will literally eat part of her mother’s breast. Despite the various readings of the horror film focussing on the relationship between the mother and child, vampirism, or evil children in horror, the analysis here pursues less of a thematic direction and rather concentrates on the juxtaposition of life and death, and the film’s own commentary on the inhuman side of life. The idea of Madeline carrying a dead child inside her, touches upon the coexistence of both life and death, while it highlights the pitiless insistence of the death drive which propels us forward despite whatever societal boundaries us humans have sought to impose. As Freud wrote in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the self-preservative instincts are part of, and, at the service of, the death drive and express the fact that “the organism shall follow its own path to death.”27 This means that the death drive strives for self-preservation and the organism will not die out of external causes but only from an immanent cause in the organism itself. The death drive is then beyond any opposition between the self-preservative and death instincts and is a kind of self-preservative drive itself. Madeline does everything she can to keep the newborn vampire infant alive, and this includes initially trying to feed it the blood from animal meat, which the baby rejects. It is not accidental that the movie begins by emphasising Madeline’s vegan lifestyle, her organised view of life and that of those surrounding her, only to move towards the violence of blood drinking and flesh eating that Grace’s birth initiates. There is indeed a simplistic view of the world through the eyes of Madeline and those around her, who despite their conflicting views, have manufactured an artificially clinical lifestyle to suit their comfortable lives. Madeline’s preparation of her body to be a receptacle of new life

74 At the Heart of Darkness through her veganism and her belief in holistic practices, or her motherin-law’s opposition to that, and her support of traditional medicine are two different but nonetheless clear-cut and regimented choices. These, however, are immediately muddled and overthrown by the survival of the living dead Grace. Veganism is juxtaposed to images of the slaughtering of animals with the caption of “Overmilking causes anemia,” played on Madeline’s tv in the kitchen, while she prepares meals for her family. In a manner that is almost perverse, Madeline half-watches this in the same way that one would watch an indifferent tv drama. Blood pouring out of a slaughtered cow is contrasted to soy milk poured in a bowl for Madeline’s cat, while the cat itself brings a dead mouse at the porch. Madeline is watching the bloody slaughtering of animals in a cold, uninterested manner, but when she unwraps a beef liver for her husband’s dinner, she immediately feels disgust. In a series of images that serve to show the contradictions of modern living, the movie succeeds in touching upon the passive and compliant nature of modern alternative lifestyles where consumers mechanically accept the sacrifices of others for the enhancement of their own wellbeing. Ironically, the consumption of soy milk does not necessarily exclude the exploitation of animals under capitalism, but rather harmoniously coexists with it. Not only this, but Madeline’s alternative lifestyle, with its demand for new products, renovates capitalism and guarantees its future shelf life. For example, when Madeline’s husband consumes his cooked liver, he swallows his bite with a glass of soy milk, called “soymoo.” Beef and soy milk are consumed indifferently. In a sense, both Madeline and her mother-in-law participate in a cultural system, each one supporting causes and beliefs in things they consider meaningful, but, at the same time, they both remain consumers within the same system that recognises and promotes both of their choices. But Grace’s undead existence, her putrefying smell, the flies in the house and her hunger for her mother’s blood will radically change Madeline, who will absolutely do anything for her daughter, including buying multiple packages of beef, “organic,” nonetheless, to extract its blood and bottle-feed Grace. However, despite her efforts to find a substitute for her daughter, the only thing that Grace can drink and digest, is her mother’s blood, which she voraciously consumes, resulting in Madeline’s anaemia. Like the overmilked anaemic cows Madeline watches on tv, she ends up becoming food for her baby, the film here highlighting the fact that there are no ethical solutions but the raw, insatiable drive to survive, no matter what. When Madeline realises that the only solution to Grace remaining alive is human blood, she feeds the baby the blood of the family doctor she just killed. We have moved to another reality here, not a supernatural field, but a horror reality where death is not an end, but an active force beyond normal biological humanity. This shift is also marked by Madeline’s new role, from a passive observer of videos

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on animal cruelty and consumer of organic products to a mother as a violent force. It is perhaps pertinent to comment on the importance of the current cultural trend of the consuming monster. Beyond being strong cultural metaphors of our times, such images express our current reality. Their horror is not fictional but real. The widespread images of zombies, vampires and other hordes of insatiable undead, do not just embody capitalism’s hunger to subsume everything under its control, but also the real and everyday experience of millions of people who are hungry for food. Images of monstrous feeding simply reflect the sad reality of humanity’s suffering coagulating around images of consumption. There is no other visceral substance than blood to visually convey the pure naked reality of our present material condition, our physical and cultural starvation but also our hereditary damnation to constantly strive to survive, even if that means such a survival is at the expense of someone else. While Grace deals with the persistence of putrefying life by highlighting the vampiric life of Grace, in Inside, the compulsion to push forward is experienced as a violent struggle for survival between two mothers. Like Grace, and all the other films discussed here, the absence of the supernatural confirms that the events in these texts are far more horrific because they are real and are happening within our human world. The horror of the outside and of something inhuman, beyond our comprehension, enters familiar reality and changes our conception of what constitutes “life.” Inside is based on the simple premise of two women fighting over the life of an unborn baby. Only retrospectively is it established that the fateful car accident with which the film starts, is the cause of changing the course of the lives of two pregnant women, after one of them loses her unborn baby and the other her husband. Sarah, who is still pregnant and expecting to give birth on Christmas day, is then visited by the childless mother called La Femme, who invades Sarah’s house to claim the baby as her own and take back the life she herself has been denied. What takes place on Christmas Eve is not the celebration of life, but a bloody theatre of undead life: an unwavering and uncompromising will to life. La Femme, despite her gothic attire and witch-like presence, is shown to be a human character who, like Sarah, is also driven by an uncanny force to take and protect the baby as her own. Her anachronistic appearance and gothic corset serve to clothe human violence with a mysterious and unsettling quality, while perhaps pointing to how the compulsion to repeat is a thing of the past, mechanically repeated in the present. The violence that takes place between the two women and inside the private space of the family house, is juxtaposed to the backdrop violence that occurs in the public and social domain. In the film, but also in real life, the burning of cars during riots and protests in France is a real phenomenon repeated yearly since the 1970s and is connected to suburban

76 At the Heart of Darkness youth burning cars to attract the attention of the media, society and politicians. Most recently, the act has become a protest against alienation, discrimination and indifference by the wealthier of French society.28 In the film, the photojournalist Sarah explains that the rioters are “bored youth” who are “having fun” by burning cars, as she indifferently takes pictures of a happy couple in the park. But Sarah’s indifference towards her life and society more general, as she repeatedly wants to retreat to the comfort of her own suburban house, is disturbed by La Femme’s violence which changes Sarah and turns her into a relentless woman fighting for her life and that of her own child. Like Madeline, she is no longer a viewer but is violently jolted out of her own passivity to take action. In a way, the outside enters the inside, and the violence it performs unsettles the comfort and safety of Sarah’s home. The film depends on images of viscous blood, and, right from the beginning, the inside of the body is presented through surfaces of blood interchanging with the form of an unborn baby. The film juxtaposes the concept of life and death, as the image of the unborn child is immediately cut by the sight of a car accident. Like in the case of many horror films, blood runs copiously in the film, and, it is seen coagulating on the faces of the couple inside the car, dripping in thick streams on their faces, before the credits run with the background of blood moving in waves, as its colours change from deep red to black. When later La Femme enters the house, the interior is painted red, as if one has entered the mouth of hell instead of familial safety. Here the interior of the maternal body captured through images of blood is associated with the interior of the house which soon becomes the slaughterhouse of maternal fury. All interiority is turned inside out, as the house becomes a gaping wound. Nonsensical violence and the murdering of innocent victims punctuates every scene with the uncanny compulsion of a dark power, which is finally captured by the discomforting maternal image of a mutilated La Femme lulling to sleep Sarah’s newborn baby. The fact that the viewer does not know the reasons behind La Femme’s violence until the very end, heightens the meaninglessness and inhuman aspect of her horrific acts, which tumble out of control, sweeping in their way all vestiges of human logic and unleashing a series of further unfortunate occurrences. Sarah kills her mother as she mistakes her for the intruder, putting into motion an inhuman chain of violent repetition, as in turn, La Femme kills the paternal figure of Sarah’s employer. As a photojournalist, Sarah takes pictures through which she tries to make sense of the world, and, this is why, when confronted with the darkness of the unknown and the horror of La Femme’s presence, she uses her camera flash to take pictures and see where La Femme is. The reality of being confronted with the pure surface of bodily inscription and violence, mediated through her camera lens, and manifested momentarily through the camera’s flashes, draws attention to the material medium with which one always perceives the world, screening out the horror of the real. But, peeling off another layer of meaning, Sarah’s use of the camera to record

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reality mechanically, rather than view it subjectively, highlights another problematic arising in the film and relating to the wave of New French Extremity. As part of a group of twenty-first-century French films focussing on the realism of bodies in suffering, the film deals with extreme bodily horror, but, as already mentioned, its main character Sarah suffers from a lack of human emotion and affect, despite the horrors that surround her. Her malady is part of a world characterised by a generalised sense of anhedonia, depressive passivity and complete desensitisation, where anything can become the subject of the next click of a camera. In Inside, there is a certain normalisation of violence seen through the burning of cars for “fun” or Sarah’s employer who demands the protests to feature as a sensationalist headline story. On the one hand, as if to comment on the current inundation with images of violence and our resultant lack of affect, the film points to the failure of media to move us. On the other hand, by focussing on the medium of the photographic image and the camera itself, the film makes a case for the medium being the message itself, as it renders a different reality. Sarah’s camera makes things appear and her photo of a happy couple in the park, viewed carefully, reveals the dark figure of La Femme lingering at the back. The use of the camera then serves to bring into focus different layers of mediation, moving away from meaning and towards the materiality of bodies, surfaces and media. This is also why for La Femme, whose name is also an abstraction, the biological history and family of the unborn baby do not matter, but rather only its life. There are no texts, codes or the personal, but the impersonal process of endless production. La Femme’s violence can be read as nothing else but an inhuman response, a glitch in the human system that confounds human understanding but is as real as the bloodspattered walls of the human security system.29 In the end, La Femme and Sarah are mere puppets caught in a repetitive cycle, where what matters is the ruthless persistence of death-life. If the notion of life in these films is rewritten and presented through the materiality of images of death and blood, then Fabrice du Welz’s Vinyan (2008) places woman beyond the symbolic structures and into the heart of darkness. At the same time, the idea of the impersonal, seen through La Femme and her drive to have Sarah’s unborn baby, is dramatised in Vinyan’s descent into the heart of the Burmese jungle, where mother and children embody the materiality of another reality. Beyond civilisation’s recognisable socio-biotic and emotional human responses to trauma, there is an other space which manifests itself as the mother of all traumas, the generator of dark life.

At the Heart of Darkness: Trauma in Fabrice du Welz’s Vinyan In Fabrice du Welz’s Vinyan, the traumatic event of the loss of their child drives Jeanne and Paul Bellmer towards the heart of darkness, deep in the

78 At the Heart of Darkness jungles of Burma where life opens up to the realm of death. In this zone, at the heart of trauma itself, the feminine is embraced by undeath: Jeanne, being closer to death, becomes the mother of a group of feral boys who kill her husband and consume his entrails. Trauma is not cured through (failed) psychoanalytic method as in Lars von Trier’s arthouse Antichrist (2009). Instead, using infernal imagery, blood and entrails, Vinyan moves away from hyper-aestheticised landscapes and into the pure surface of mindless materiality and the Real. While the logical and controlled Paul is unable to open toward horror and inevitably dies, his wife is radically altered and transformed by horror. She embodies the maternal as a possibility and an opening, deepening and widening her trauma. Against scenarios of mourning for the dead subject, the film hauntingly imagines the kernel of trauma as “the inhabiting of the organic by the inorganic,”30 and locates the potential to subvert phallologic culture in the transformative possibilities of the traumatised feminine body. Vinyan is a visceral reflection on death, on the traumatic as the location of a new possibility. Avoiding a pathological or therapeutic understanding of trauma, and Freud’s later model of splitting, I turn towards Sándor Ferenczi’s ururtrauma/pre-primal-trauma/mother-child scar and Reza Negarestani’s analysis of “trauma as perforation” and “transplantation of exteriority within interiority.”31 Vinyan is not merely a journey towards the heart of trauma itself, but a reflection on the nature and importance of trauma as the “traumatic consequence of primary traumatisms”32 and, thus, of the interconnected character of traumas. As Sándor Ferenczi writes in his Clinical Diary: [T]he question arises whether the primal trauma is not always to be sought in the primal relationship with the mother, and whether the traumata of a somewhat later epoch, already complicated by the appearance of the father, could have had such an effect without the existence of such a pre-primal-trauma mother-child scar.33 Ferenczi argues for the centrality of the primal trauma that he relates to an early troubled relation to the mother and which he considers as the origin of later disturbances. In “Globe of Revolution: An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism,” Reza Negarestani expands on Ferenczi’s understanding of trauma or cut. For him, No matter how originary and precursory a trauma is, there is still another trauma to which it can be deepened, another trauma by which the infinite interconnected traumas can be widened—it is the one that makes sure the narcissistic wound keeps bleeding.34 Negarestani connects this to the political task of contemporary subjects “to reconnect isolated traumas” instead of avoiding and refusing them,

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and thus contributing to capitalist and fundamentalist strategies that seek to isolate traumas in order to monopolise and control them within different regional worlds.35 The obligation of today’s revolutionary subject is, according to Negarestani, “to absorb and interiorize traumas so as to expose ‘isolated traumas’ (this or that regional world), interconnect them to its regional horizon and widen them across the geocosmic continuum and deep into the open universal continuum.”36 Avoiding taking the place of the victim or the master of one’s traumas, Negarestani’s contemporary subject becomes “a vector of synthesis between ‘regional traumas.’”37 As much as Vinyan subscribes to the clichés of horror in order to portray the isolated and private trauma of a family that is mourning the loss of its child, it is also, equally, an opening towards the interconnectedness of traumas and the intricate nature of wounds folding and refolding. The film goes beyond the isolated trauma of a wealthy Western family and towards the perforation of the horizon with wounds that bleed and talk about larger socio-political traumas. It is not about seeing within, identifying with the subject’s emotional trauma, but it is about being forced to look outside, and encounter the Other in its bare reality. The wound of the 2004 South Asian tsunami which resulted in the loss of thousands of lives bleeds into Thailand’s and Burma’s traumas. The film unveils through its spectral and atmospheric cinematography the bleeding wounds of countries devastated by the effects of the tsunami, poverty and child trafficking. Hidden from the eyes of Western tourists are the unbearable traumas of Thailand’s illegal trafficking of children from Burma for prostitution or, as the film points out, for adoption by wealthy parents. As Jeanne and Paul travel in master Sonchai’s boat with the help of the trafficker Thaksin Gao to find their son, who is believed to be held by child traffickers, they are offered a kidnapped child. While the father explains that the boy is not their child, one of the traffickers exclaims “What’s the difference?” For Thaksin Gao, “There are other white children; it won’t cost much, we will find him.” Western attitudes consist of an economical model and a calculated logic where money and charity fundraising will heal wounds and make problems disappear. The hypocritical humanitarian intervention of western charity fundraisers and their desire to help orphans and eradicate illegal trafficking is, in retrospect, uncannily connected to those same human trafficking networks. The real traffickers and exploiters hiding behind the mask of charity and humanitarianism are none others than the western benefactors, and consequently, Jeanne and Paul themselves, whose money is drenched in blood, are equally responsible and complicit in the trauma of trafficking. Behind the terrifying, feral and violent faces of the boys that the couple encounters deep in the Burmese jungle, lies the criminal face of trafficking, the innocence of children bought and sold, as well as the powerful maternal connection between mother and child. Like David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), the film materialises the traumatised and disturbed fantasies of the mother. But, the boys are not just

80 At the Heart of Darkness ghostly manifestations of the parents’ trauma or the traumas caused by the tsunami and trafficking. They are also real and, like Colonel Kurtz, have created their own mad kingdom beyond meaning. Jeanne becomes the maternal force who is pregnant with the possibility of connecting these different fields of traumas as the film moves beyond isolated trauma and towards interconnected traumas. Accordingly, Ferenczi stresses the significance of the maternal and the mother’s relationship with the child. Like Kohut, Balint and Winnicott, Ferenczi lays emphasis on the mother, and not the Freudian authority of the father, as the central figure of trauma. In Vinyan the relationship between the mother and son is emphasised through the figure of Jeanne Bellmer and her insistence that her son is still alive. While the father is logical and believes in his son’s death, the mother does not choose to heal her trauma but deepen it, by travelling at the heart of darkness. She is associated with the archaic mother, the maternal, chaotic and uncontrolled forces of Nature. The maternal loss of the child drives the couple deep in the bowels of the Burmese jungle where the trauma will be re-enacted and the mother reunited with the tortured souls of children in an intermediate zone of undeath. Conjuring up Elias Merhige’s film Begotten (1989), where “Mother Earth” is born out of the entrails of “God killing Himself” and gives birth to the “Son of Earth,” Vinyan places Jeanne at the centre of trauma and undeath. Resembling a scene of sacrificial rituals and primitive myths, the father is disembowelled by the feral children who proceed to embrace Jeanne as their mother. The death of the father gives birth to Jeanne as the sacred mother, both terrifying and loving whose maternal instincts transform her into a dark goddess at the opening of life to the Outside. Trauma is located at this blurry and contagious threshold of lifeinfecting-death, where the feral boys are not alive or dead, but vinyan. As Ruth-Inge Heinze explains, With the arrival of Buddhism, the Thais began to use the word vinyan (from the Pali word vinnana) to denote a more abstract soul that incorporates the concepts of thought, perception, and consciousness. It is believed that the vinyan is that which transmigrates and, in rebirth, enters a mother’s womb to give rise to name and form.38 The “bearer of life” or “regenerative force,” vinnana, as C.A.F. Rhys Davids writes, was understood, at the infancy of Buddhism, to mean “the man as surviving death of the body.”39 This very “special meaning” of vinnana (ibid. 34) is significant here because it throws light on the idea of trauma as something that is at once dead and alive: “Trauma is a perennial boring or a vermicular inhabiting of the organic by the inorganic.”40 This recalls Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of life as liberated from the restrictions of the organism. As Deleuze and Guattari write,

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If everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organized but, on the contrary, because the organism is a diversion of life. In short, the life in question is inorganic, germinal, and intensive, a powerful life without organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs.41 What Deleuze calls a life is “life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal or external life.”42 Negarestani moves beyond this to emphasise a life that infects death, a germinal death that coils and writhes in its perverse entanglement with life. This is why Ferenczi is here significant in his belief that there are “germs of life” in dead/ inorganic matter.43 Ferenczi argues that “we should conceive the whole inorganic and organic world as a perpetual oscillating between the will to live and the will to die in which an absolute hegemony on the part either of life or of death is never attained.”44 For Ferenczi, and this is what the film forces us to experience in its ending, is that death can be imagined as a birth and a return to the maternal womb. Death, according to Ferenczi, exhibits utero-regressive trends similar to those of sleep and coitus. It is not mere chance that many primitive peoples inter their dead in a squatting or foetal position, and the fact that in dreams and myths we find the same symbols for both death and birth cannot be a mere coincidence.45 Indeed, the film does seek to uncover this zone where life and death cannot be separated. For Fabrice du Welz, there are differences between western and eastern conceptions of death, and the film itself is a contrast between two worlds: the East and the West, comparing in particular the idea of death in our world, where it is a real taboo, to that in the East where it is seen as part of life.46 While Paul and Jeanne cannot accept the death of their son, the trafficker Thaksin Gao and Sonchai reveal to Paul that they have lost their wives and children in the tsunami. The problem with western attitudes towards death is their inability to accept death and embrace a necrophilic horizon and a satanic plateau where life is feasting on death and where death is laid open.47 While the East is open to such spaces of “becomings and heterogeneities giving rise to the new things,”48 and strategically develops modes of life out of the collapse of necrocratic regimes, the West remains anchored to a tactical model of oedipalised life, that fails to comprehend the mutual contamination of life and death: That is why we speak of an Oedipal-narcissistic machine, at the end of which the ego encounters its own death, as the zero term of a pure

82 At the Heart of Darkness abolition that has haunted oedipalized desire from the start, and that is identified now, at the end, as Thanatos. 4, 3, 2, 1, 0—Oedipus is a race for death.49 The journey from West to East, from isolated trauma to interconnected traumas, from civilisation to wilderness and the heart of trauma revolves around this understanding of death as infected with life, as undulating with the seeds of a life. In his discussion of trauma in “The Problem of Acceptance of Unpleasure” (1926), Ferenczi argues that self-destruction is “the cause of being” given that “partial destruction of the ego” can be tolerated so that the ego will become stronger.50 Trauma then is an “unassimilated psychic wound”51 which the life instincts convert into growth. As he writes, I have no hesitation in regarding even memory traces as scars, so to speak, of traumatic impressions, i.e. as products of destruction, which, however, the tireless Eros nevertheless understands how to employ for its own ends, i.e. for the preservation of life. Out of these it shapes a new psychical system, which enables the ego to orientate itself more correctly in its environment.52 In this respect, in his analysis of trauma, Negarestani elaborates and expands on these early formulations by Ferenczi. The idea of the persistence of traumas as traces within the organism is echoed in Negarestani’s own concept “of traumatic agents no longer understood as foreign bodies that assault the protective membrane of the organic individual, nor even as . . . repressed fragments of a greater exuberance; but as xeno-chemical insiders, Old Ones waiting to be awakened.”53 Following Ferenczi, Negarestani understands trauma “asymmetrically and modally unbound,”54 where exteriority “is immanent more to the inside of the system (or the interiorized horizon) than to its outside. Accordingly, the traumatic cut nests cosmic interiorities within bounded horizons as inassimilable (hence unilateralizing) yet convolutedly interiorized insiders.”55 According to Negarestani, it is significant that such a topology of trauma marks a shift from Freud’s notion of trauma as an incision to Ferenczi’s trauma as perforation and “piercing from multiple points of view.”56 Trauma is then a form of “alien transplantation,” an interiorisation of the originary wound that does not use up or consume the energy of the system, as in Freud’s energetic model.57 Instead, trauma is a positive wave of radical exteriority that on its own cuts a problematically convoluted and nested horizon of interiorities. And this by means of turning the externalizing function of the splitting cut (Freud’s trauma) into the temporarily formative function of the “internalizing

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cut” which creates intricate topologies of nestedness (continuous internal fissions) rather than externalizing incisions.58 For Negarestani, trauma is an affirmative strategy where the alienating presence of inassimilable insiders, of foreign intruders that cannot be expelled or integrated within the interiorised horizon, act as a “twisted mobilizing principle.”59 At the heart of the Burmese jungle, and at the centre of Jeanne and Paul’s trauma, the presence of the feral boys expresses this inassimilable and alien trace of radical exteriority. Trauma then is this undulating deathly zone, where Jeanne and the feral boys coexist. Jeanne, like the mothers in Inside and Grace is a relentless force, whose belief in her child still being alive is linked to the idea of death being an active pulsating force and not an end. Glimpses of this material schism in reality where this unintelligible life is manifested are first evident when Jeanne notices in a video the figure of a boy she believes is her lost son. The scene is reminiscent of Don’t Look Now, as the boy is wearing a red top, in the same manner that the drowned daughter and the serial killer in Nicolas Roeg’s 1970s classic horror are wearing a red trench coat. This material inscription of the colour red also marks the creepypasta “Satellite Images,” in Chapter 4. In many ways, Vinyan is about the ability to see things beyond our common reality. Vinyan’s Burma melds into Don’t Look Now’s Venice, as the oceanic feeling of something primordial and dark is throbbing just under the surface, and the image of water as a fluid boundary between life and death, past and present is highly poignant. In both films, Don’t Look Now and Vinyan, trauma and mourning are shown to be journeys through water and towards the darkness within. In particular, Jeanne and Paul’s belief in their own personal drama and loss is violently smashed by the slow realisation that their own trauma is nothing compared to the trauma of the local people who have also lost their children to the tsunami. What they understand as benevolent nature and positive vitalism, are soon experienced as cold and bleak, indifferent to their own individual grief. As they move away from the symbolic, they face the fluidity of boundaries and finally the bear core of reality itself, washed off of all meaning. As Jeanne gives away all their money, knowing that there is no return to the past, her husband remains attached to symbols and a logic that has no currency once they have passed the threshold. In a scene, where fire lamps are released into the night sky to help the vinyan, the spirits of the children trapped on earth, to head to the house of the dead, Jeanne is invited to partake in the ritual, and thus enlarge her own personal mourning and connect it to collective loss. This is why, when they are finally offered an unknown boy as a substitute for their lost son, one of the many children, kidnapped or traded for money, she begins slowly to see beyond one’s personal and emotional attachment to trauma. Like in her scrapbook, photographs of her son Joshua are soon followed by a faceless image of a boy, marking her transformation and

84 At the Heart of Darkness openness to undeath as an abstract force. Despite her husband’s insistence that Joshua is dead, she remains like Inside’s La Femme loyal to her cause. Jeanne believes her son is alive, but what she now means, as we also begin to change our own understanding, is that for her these orphaned children are her children, their loss as painfully felt as her own. Her psychic trauma becomes a visceral wound and is experienced as the multiplied traumas of all the lost children. Trauma here is not an isolated, internalised wound but a violent material reality. Blood then—like its presence and the use of red colour in Don’t Look Now—has no symbolic value, but its sheer visceral power introduces death as wounded life, as a bleeding of death into life. In the final scene, Vinyan invokes the founding myth of civilisation in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) and Moses and Monotheism, where the murder of the primal or forbidding father by his sons and their ensuing guilt, is what guarantees the prohibition of incest and establishes community. In Vinyan, the father’s disembowelment, followed by the mother’s entry into the community of the feral children, offers a different thesis than that of Freud’s patriarchy. While in Freud’s myth, the murdered Father survives through the children’s introjection of his voice, realising that his death does not promise their total enjoyment, in Fabrice du Welz’s version, the father is silenced by the feral boys who are now the writers of their own history. From Inside to Grace and Vinyan, the maternal becomes the embodiment of a violent persistence towards death, as the women journey to the end of the river, at the heart of the wound and the kernel of trauma. Organised life dies with the last screams of the Father, while the mother opens up to the machinic forces of undeath.

Bodily Discomfort Moving towards bodily trauma, the following films, Marina De Van’s In My Skin (2002) and Claire Dennis’ Trouble Every Day (2001), deal with women’s consumption of human flesh or bodily mutilation, as a form of disconnection between body and mind. The materiality of wounds reveals the endless surface of the body as a strange and unfamiliar envelope that remains alien to the subject. Like the film’s screen, so flesh itself is a boundary that is pierced and transgressed, drawing attention to the medium of the body and film. Equated to the screen, the skin becomes an object, inorganic and unnatural, seen as a thing without any body. In Trouble Every Day, during a bioprospection in New Guinea, where Dr Léo Semenau’s botanical samples and analyses hold the promise of expanding pharmacological research into nervous and mental diseases, as well as problems of libido, Dr Shane Brown manages to steal his work by infecting himself and Semenau’s wife, Córe. The effects of their infection resemble that of vampirism, as both experience libido as an uncontrollable urge to devour the other. Shane initially controls his violent instinct,

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but Córe descends into a mad circle of devouring and killing her sexual partners, whom her husband devoutly buries every time. Bodies mingling in sex are left writhing in blood, mutilated matter of the workings of the libido which is equated to death and the inorganic. Vampirism is not a supernatural phenomenon but a disease which manifests itself in the spasms of sexual contact and the devouring of human flesh. Libido is not a vitalistic drive, but a death drive, experienced in the marriage of sex and cannibalism, which leaves humans unable to control it. The film moves beyond the masks of representation, in its attempt to show the unrepresentable, the pure materiality of the screen and the body, discarding the depth of meaning. Libido is presented as the violence that breaks the limits of the body through torn flesh and blood, turning everything into surface. The medium of the body and that of the film itself are broken, representation itself fails and the invisible flickers at the edge of sanity. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes, body and screen become interchangeable, as the Real takes form: The image becomes an image of a torn image: no longer an image, or a figure, but an icon of access to the invisible. The invisible, that is sanguis, the blood nourishing the body, life itself, pulsating beneath the skin. Once the skin has been bitten to draw blood . . . the blood becomes cruor, spilled blood . . . . of sacrificial cruelty, the revelation of a raw life which serves not to live but to grant access to that which is more than life in a splash of blood, of meaning, of presence. Spilled blood, spurting blood, blossoming into the icon, gives us to see that which should only be seen through the transparency of the skin over the vessels. It is the most unbearable of sights.60 Trouble Every Day uses vampirism to unearth biological instincts and humanity’s violent urges, which in the film are marginalised in mainstream medicine as nonsensical. What is beyond representation, meaning and logic is Shane Brown and Coré’s vampiric instincts which dominate their lives and reduce them to mere animals unable to overcome their compulsions. Vampirism is then trouble every day, since as a compulsion to repeat and a disease that dictates how to live their lives, has turned both of them into the butchers and meat puppets of a slaughterhouse. What lies beyond the limits of humanity, what cannot be explained, the unintelligible, is not a romanticised ideal, but horror that destroys unfeelingly the boundaries of the organism. Libido does not respect the organic but turns everything into reassembling surfaces, indifferent to the caterwauling of humanity. Vampirism as an unnatural human behaviour is also explored in another French extremity film. But the disconnection between body and mind, as the materiality of the wounded body takes centre stage, is perhaps more

86 At the Heart of Darkness unsettling in Marina De Van’s In My Skin. An accident that leaves a deep cut in Esther’s leg, marks the beginning of her compulsion to selfmutilate. Esther pokes at the healing wound and cuts around it, with a clinical precision devoid of any sentiment. This lack of affect is firstly noticed when her doctor and boyfriend are baffled by her deferred visit to the hospital, as she explains that she “felt nothing” when she got the cut. Later, when her boyfriend is worried about her self-mutilation, she describes that what has driven her to pinch her wound, insert sharp objects and cut around it, was just a “mindless urge.” But this mindless compulsion to repeat which materialises on the surface of her body and in blood, has no meaning and cannot be explained, despite Esther’s friends trying to make sense of her cutting. As Tim Palmer writes, de Van focusses on the body in and of itself as unintelligible materiality: “Represented through de Van’s camera, the body becomes matter abstracted from mind, the source of peculiarly remote sensation, or else, complete disassociation and passive disconnect.”61 The eerie distance from her own body and humanity, is perhaps a commentary on our own disconnection from screens and our apathy when dealing with images of mutilated bodies. But, at the same time, the indifferent inscription of her own body, breaks the limits of representation, dissecting the screen itself and confronting the viewer with the raw and visceral surface of the body devoid of interiority. Esther destroys the illusion of the body’s organic unity while remaining unflinching and distant, something which is closely linked to her corporate lifestyle. Unlike Trouble Every Day which presents vampirism as an aggressive coupling, In My Skin associates Esther’s mutilation with her increasing withdrawal from any social connection, and her growing involvement in corporate life and success. As she becomes more and more detached from, and violent towards her body, she becomes more active in her job, pursuing a promotion and a better salary. In a similar way, in Trouble Every Day, Shane contracts the disease due to his greed for money and the promise of a successful career in the pharmaceutical industry. There is a link then between corporeal horror and corporate reality, self-mutilation and capitalism. In Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), Žižek makes this point about women’s compulsion to cut themselves, a phenomenon that demonstrates a passion for the Real and their “desperate strategy to return to the Real of the body,”62 peel back all symbols and uncover the bear thing-in-itself. They want to ground themselves in bodily reality, and despite the phenomenon being pathological, it is nonetheless a form of grasping normality and “avoiding a psychotic breakdown.”63 However, in the case of Esther this is not pertinent since her self-mutilation has nothing to do with affirming a sense of reality written in flesh and blood. On the contrary, her problem is that she fits perfectly into everyday reality, to the point that she is conscious of something else beyond her private and work life, something that cannot be felt, experienced or quantified.

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Instead, we are dealing with the recognition that the body itself has its own reality and that any attempt to feel this or comprehend it will always end in blood and violence. The body is then this inaccessible materiality that does not yield to our mind, the real itself which cannot be accessed but is always embroidered in thought, in the same manner that Esther’s mutilations inscribe her flesh, each line tracing a pattern, but always remaining foreign, occulted. Her mutilations are attempts to breach this gap between mind and body. If capitalism wants to subsume all energies, affect and creativity under its power, then there is something here that escapes it: this is the unintelligible materiality of the body, the inorganic indifference of matter and the inability of the mind to describe this hidden reality. As Esther complains to her partner, “You always look for meanings.” During a corporate dinner with clients, Esther is shown to be absent and disengaged from her clients’ trite discussion on the tropes of marketing, especially when they refer to the misreading of a hand gesture by an Asian audience in an advertising campaign. At first, she muffles the noise of their speech with drinking more wine, but soon her hand starts to move impulsively as if to pierce her other hand with a fork or to grab the food from her plate. As another female across the table details her career choices, Esther becomes more indifferent, while she tries to control her left hand which is then shown to be detached from her body and lying on the table as an object. She pokes at the hand in a desperate attempt to feel something, but the foreign object that looks like her own hand remains dead. The image of an artificial doll-like amputated hand, at the same time appearing as a “phantom limb” and totally other to her, punctuates this distance from her own body. Here there is a significant disconnection between the materiality of the body and the workings of the mind, something that also highlights the faulty relations under capital and the widening gap between Esther’s relation to her own body and the normalised tedious symbolic reality. In order to inscribe herself within reality, Esther begins stabbing her “dead arm” with a knife under the table and pinching the cuts with her other hand. As her clients discuss life in Rome and how their friends “feel bored and cut off,” Esther pushes a fork in her wounds, while later retreats to the cellar where she attempts to bite her wounds. The next sequence finds her in the room of a hotel mauling her own hand and cutting her leg to drink the blood, knowing that her forbidden urges should remain hidden. From self-mutilation to auto-cannibalism, Esther’s violent compulsion is nothing but the last resort of a person who feels nothing. And here the body appears as is, in its pure materiality, as inorganic materiality, torn up flesh, fragmented body parts, blood and chewed up skin. The materiality of the body and its clinical treatment by Esther is meant to emphasise a different imperceptible reality, the life of the body detached from mind. Like many of the other horror movies here that

88 At the Heart of Darkness deal with the body, In My Skin also makes use of the camera, treating it as a medium to capture objective reality, the body as an object, as something that exists as separate from the human mind. In a similar way, the creepypasta examined in Chapter 4 are fascinated by videos and recordings of a world without the human and inaccessible to the senses. This is what Marina de Van explains as being the sole focus of her film. In an interview, she points out that In My Skin is not about the phenomenon of self-mutilation common among girls—as she jokingly says, she is not a psychiatrist or a sociologist. Instead, the film poses the question of “does this body belong to me?” and what is my relation to this body. In a series of scenes, she is seen to carry pieces of her skin in her wallet, preserve a piece of it and carry it close to her chest, as well as take pictures of her mutilated skin. These are different ways by which she is attempting to relate to this occult matter which is at once her and not her. Handled as a relic, preserved and photographed, the skin is treated as a mystery whose nature remains hidden from us. In the following chapter, this concept of a hidden materiality is explored in stories of blood, monstrous and spectral entities, haunting the dark side of the internet.

Notes 1. Mark Fisher, “Indifferentism and Freedom,” K-punk, 30 December 2004, https://k-punk.org/indifferentism-and-freedom/. 2. Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 80. 3. Slavoj Žižek, “Materialism, Old and New,” Strike 8 (November–December 2014): 12–3. 4. Fisher, “Indifferentism and Freedom.” 5. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, trans. R. B. Haldane, M.A. and J. Kemp, M.A. (London: Kegan Paul, 1909), 247. 6. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, 108. 7. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, 114. 8. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, 117. 9. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, 115. 10. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, 116. 11. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, 117. 12. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, 116. 13. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, 386, 388, 391. 14. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. III, 374. 15. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (SXI), ed. Jacques Allain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 177. 16. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 198. 17. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 199. 18. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 292. 19. Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, dir. Sophie Fiennes (2006). 20. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 4–5. 21. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 207.

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22. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press, 2006), 121. 23. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 2008), 111–12. 24. Mark Fisher, “Staying Alive,” K-punk, 11 October 2004, http://k-punk. abstractdynamics.org/archives/004254.html. 25. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, ed. Jacque-Allain Miller (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 232. 26. Jacques Lacan, “Le Sinthome” (16 March 1976), Seminar XXIII, 1975– 6, trans. from the texte établi by Luke Thurston, ed. J.A. Miller, Journal Ornicar? 11–6 (1976–7), n.pag, www.lacanonline.com/index/wp-content/ uploads/2014/11/Seminar-XXIII-The-Sinthome-Jacques-Lacan-Thurstontranslation.pdf. 27. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961), 33. 28. Bruce Crumley, “France’s New Year’s Tradition: Car-Burning,” Time, Friday, 2 January 2009, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,186 9392,00.html. 29. Nick Land refers to the Human Security System as the normalisation of thought and its imprisonment within social, institutionalised, personal and philosophical forms. In other words, it is any social, political, religious or control system that manipulates and entraps human consciousness. 30. Robin Mackay, “Brief History of Geotrauma,” in Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012), 33. 31. Reza Negarestani, “Globe of Revolution: An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism,” Identities 17 (2011): “Heretical Realisms,” 31, https://issuu. com/janoszanik/docs/globe_of_revolution. 32. Thierry Bokanowski, On Freud’s “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence”, ed. Thierry Bokanowski and Sergio Lewkowicz (London: Karnac Books, 2009), 108. 33. Sándor Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Judith Dupont (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 83. 34. Negarestani, “Globe of Revolution,” 29. 35. Negarestani, “Globe of Revolution,” 50. 36. Negarestani, “Globe of Revolution,” 50. 37. Negarestani, “Globe of Revolution,” 51. 38. Ruth-Inge Heinze, Tham Khwan: How to Contain the Essence of Life: A Socio-Psychological Comparison of A Thai Custom (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1982), 18. 39. C. A. F. Rhys Davids, qtd. in Edwina Pio, Buddhist Psychology: A Modern Perspective (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1988), 34. 40. Davids, qtd. in Pio, Buddhist Psychology, 33. 41. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (New York: Continuum, 1987), 550. 42. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (London: Verso, 1998), 133. 43. Sándor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (London: Karnac, 1989), 94. 44. Ferenczi, Thalassa, 95. 45. Ferenczi, Thalassa, 95. 46. Anne Feuillère, “Fabrice du Welz meets Asian ghosts,” 7 July 2006, www. cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/65401. 47. Reza Negarestani, “Death as a Perversion: Openness and Germinal Death,” CTheory, 15 October 2003, n.pag, http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/death-as-aperversion-openness-and-germinal-death/. 48. Negarestani, “Death as a Perversion.”

90 At the Heart of Darkness 49. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004), 393. 50. Sándor Ferenczi, “The Problem of Acceptance of Unpleasure,” in Selected Writings (London: Basics Books, 1926), 242. 51. Sándor Ferenczi, Selected Writings, ed. Julia Borossa (London: Penguin, 1999), xxvi. 52. Ferenczi, “The Problem of Acceptance of Unpleasure,” 243. 53. Mackay, “Brief History of Geotrauma,” 33–4. 54. Negarestani, “Trauma and the Outside: 1000 Forms of Cut,” Urbanomic, 17 May 2010, https://www.urbanomic.com/trauma-and-the-outside-1000forms-of-cut/, n.pag. 55. Negarestani, “Trauma and the Outside,” n.pag. 56. Negarestani, “Globe,” 30. 57. Negarestani, “Trauma and the Outside,” n.pag. 58. Negarestani, “Trauma and the Outside,” n.pag. 59. Negarestani, “Trauma and the Outside,” n.pag. 60. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Icon of Fury: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day,” FilmPhilosophy 12, no. 1 (April 2008): 6. 61. Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown, CT: Wesleyean University Press, 2011), 82. 62. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 10. 63. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, 10.

4

The Real of Cyberia Dark Web, Red Rooms and Internet Gothic

What has been seen cannot be unseen.1

De Man’s materiality has helped us see the world without us at the centre, rendering it meaningful and comforting. On the contrary, inhuman materiality manifests itself as that which resides beyond the limits of thought, an unfamiliar cold and rational indifference. While materiality is totally devoid of human emotion, the confrontation with this kind of pulsating darkness is met with an attempt to decipher it and drape it with what is familiar, as the horror of nothingness paralyses emotion. In many ways, like the Freudian death drive, we are compelled towards it without logic or consciousness as if we are automated machines, and like the Lacanian Real, this materiality remains nonsensical and meaningless. In this chapter, I will trace this mechanical force online through the stories we tell ourselves about the things that lurk in the darkest pleats of the internet. From real and imagined facts about the nature of the dark web to horror text and internet legends shared on message boards, their content is always concerned with a pervasive atmosphere of ominous horror, the anonymous coldness of a digital space indifferent to human will. Stories about the dark web focus on this machinic materiality enveloped in an eerie, uncanny and mysterious aura as it challenges human perception. This occult, unknowable inhumanity indefinable and shrouded in darkness is textually materialised as that which transgresses or confronts the inevitability of limits. The play between light and dark, corporeal limits and their infringement, particularly in stories about gothic media where blood flows outside the body, but also in the absolute realisation of those limits in the inability to see or know, these are all fears about a world we know and one that is beyond our perception. Limited senses and a recurring concern about the lack of faces are all connected with online fears about what lies outside our familiar world. Horror stories, images and video games imagine the internet as a place where horror has to do with the impalpable, the unseen, unknowable and the limits of the human. As

92 The Real of Cyberia one delves deeper into the jungle of the web, so the engulfing unknowable darkness is weaved into anonymous horror or unfamiliar monsters as users craft myths, legends and stories to describe the automatism of machines, their systematic and, at the same time, inhuman and unpredictable nature. Written in the language and form of online message boards, emails and blog posts, horror stories about online media are mediated as if they were the “speaking face”2 of the internet itself. Accompanied by amateur, unrefined videos and images, these shareable stories seek to convey the idea that they are recordings, first-eye camera views of a material world as it appears in its authenticity. This de Manian radical material vision describes the world in its untranslated, raw and pure state, without the mediation of thought that would render it moral, beautiful or sensual. Severed from a purpose or a unifying whole, the things, bodies and media that appear in the stories are disarticulated, mutilated and broken.3 There is no purpose or use to them, but a depthless presentation of their materiality. Video game glitches, mutilated faces, dismemberment, indiscernible bodies drowning in blood and an abbreviated cut-up language that is purely practical, all these elements work to present an online world that is not meaningful or purposeful, but material, mechanical and cold. This indifferent world of the internet which alienates us and makes us feel unwelcome, horrifies because it has absolutely no interest in what we think, feel or value. For example, part of the evergrowing canon of short horror texts is a pc game which is always introduced with commentary that stresses its disturbing nature and renders it realistic in the tradition of found footage. “Sad Satan” is a deep web horror video game claimed to have been discovered by YouTuber Obscure Horror Corner who downloaded it from a Tor hidden service.4 No one knows the creator of the game or its purpose, as the player simply navigates dark hallways while distorted or reversed audio, recordings of interviews with murderers, Hitler speeches and growls can be heard. There is also the appearance of images relating to child abuse and murder without any further meaning or connection. The game is basically monochromatic and consists of the player walking down dark corridors and towards what appears to be an open passage with light coming through. The experience is repetitive and meaningless. However, it is this raw and mechanical character of the game that gives it an unsettling tone, together with the inability to provide some totalising meaningful explanation of the random and disconnected pieces of audio and image. The player appears to have no control and is immersed into a darkness with the sole constant sound of his/her own footsteps. While there is speculation that the video game was created by the Obscure Horror Corner channel as a means of self-promotion, the game has become popular due to the mystery surrounding its creation, as well as the use of incomprehensible imagery. Some decoded texts suggest that the user can even be tracked down due to malware in the exe file.

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The inability to define here the purpose of the game, the anonymity of the creator and the inexplicable nature of its content, coupled with the existence of sinister malware and viruses that can detect one’s home location, are some of the characteristics of a more general trend of horror media called “creepypasta” that circulate on the internet. Searching for familiar gothic tropes on the internet from the comfort of our own home, we end up getting more than we bargained for, as we realise that our ip address can be traced, or our webcam was hacked all along. The question of who is watching whom fills us with dread. In an attempt to fill the gaps of what lies beyond communication networks and unable to reach the heart of what is allegedly the dark side of the internet, we become enthralled by looking for things. But when the object itself returns the gaze and we become the objects, this in turn becomes disorientating and horrifying. Again and again, internet horror stories dramatise the materiality of looking and the disruption of the comforting act of being online, watching images or videos by the realisation that these are independent of the meaning we have ascribed to them. In a vast and opaque online space, we are unable to know and control who is watching and how we are being seen. Internet horror stories link this traumatic gaze with media, as unknown others watch us through webcams, recording our every action, or computers begin to function in ways that we cannot control. Conveying no meaningful message, horror videos, images and short texts act as mirrors, reflecting back to us the indifferent gaze of the internet. Seeing and being seen is doubled and redoubled, as online horror media multiply: edited, reviewed, watched and replayed they go viral as they vampirically feed on fears. New media just circulates, writes Jody Dean.5 Banal, obscene and horror texts proliferate online without any ultimate goal, but their sheer circulation which then feeds communicative capitalism itself. A repetitive loop within which we are caught, ensnared, objectified. In an online space where anything goes, copies of text, horrifying videos and mutilated bodies become meaningless text consumed. The popularity of creepypasta is grounded on these kinds of horrors of the night where the internet and digital devices open new avenues for exchange and communication and help to monetise content while engendering more of it regardless of ethics and responsibility. In creepypasta, the immateriality and incorporeal nature of online communication systems is juxtaposed to the visceral and material bodily experience of the subject who is confronted with the cold indifference of an inhuman network communications architecture. Beginning from the dark web and the internet myth about the existence of red rooms where arguably torture is streamed live on webcam, and moving on to discuss a series of creepypasta, I will try to elucidate the dark nature of online media through the concept of materiality. The internet is a festering ground of horror stories seeking to fill in the holes of what is lurking beyond our

94 The Real of Cyberia vision and perception. Materiality is this unadorned black hole at the heart of online media.

Dark Web From the familiar, traditional bright surface of social media and everyday common search engines there exists the deeper, darker and unfamiliar space of the deep web, and beneath it the dark web of hackers, pornographers, killers and extreme subcultural practices.6 What operates here is the dominant binary structure of media always imagined in terms of familiarity or strangeness: surface and depth, the familiar and unfamiliar, light and darkness, the known and the unknown that is used to separate the traditional “surface” web from the dark web. While the surface of the web is one based on control, organisation and structure, the dark web’s inner life is characterised by chaos, chance and freedom of information; an unbounded desire that interrupts the supposed calculated logic of the network, moving toward the Real and materiality, action and horror. In this hidden world beyond the known symbolic reality, there seem to be no limits. There is an anxiety here about the nature of media and their need to communicate some message, and the fact that there exists a hidden world that cannot be put into words or which negates such communication. The inability to know and the inaccessibility of the dark web itself has resulted in the proliferation of gothic narratives about unspeakable practices. In the absence of discourse and the possibility of uncovering a truth there is the machinic reproduction of endless horror narratives and new Things. Because there is no access to real blood, murder and torture, myths, internet urban legends and horror Avatars are spawned from the bowels of Cyberia that testify to what is otherwise arguably hidden from the majority of internet users. In this sense, there is a movement away from the luminous world of information communicated between human users and towards the communication with the outside, the materiality of blood and horror. Like the revellers in Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” who, after removing the Red Death’s masque, discover that there is no “tangible form” underneath, so the gothic narratives circulating on the internet hide the horror of the Real which is impossible to access. My reading here is prompted by Paul de Man’s reading of Rousseau’s red ribbon which, instead of finding some hidden symbolic meaning— for example, Rousseau’s supposed hidden desire for Marion—instead, it uncovers the impersonal and meaningless mechanical repetition of text. For de Man, every text presents a trope which it proceeds to deconstruct, opening the text into a series of readings; one misreading engendering another one ad infinitum. By substituting the red ribbon with blood, one can argue that those fascinated with the deep web and its shadowy side, the dark web, are tracing narratives and links on the internet related

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to blood and horror, moving from one fiction to another in order to exhume a hidden truth, but only engendering more readings and misreadings without achieving closure. Enthralled by the promise of conspiracies and hidden messages, readers and online users are caught in an endless repetition, recycling myths and narratives. The dark web is fundamentally characterised by a permissiveness towards all information, as anonymity allows for sharing more intimate or violent content and exchanging illegal products or services. To a certain extent this is also what has given 4chan its notoriety as the underbelly of the surface internet. The anonymous internet message board which hosts ephemeral content has been home to famous memes such as the LOLcats but also to the hacktivist group Anonymous, creepypasta and crime scene images posted by a murderer anonymously. From simulations to real and photoshopped images, irony, brutal humour and raw realism are hard to disentangle. What brings all this disparate content together and allows for its circulation is the anonymity of the users. The possibility of its appearance coincides with the disappearance of the perpetrator, author or creator’s identity. This freedom which creates a new way of sharing or crowdsourcing content, comes also at a cost as everything is permitted without responsibility. By cancelling out authorial control and absolving one’s responsibility, any user at any moment is free to share any content. The myth of the red room which is rumoured to exist on the dark web and where anonymous users can pay thousands to access real torture and murder online is exemplary of the dark side of the internet. The association of the concept of the red room with murder is first found in the word “redrum,” an anagram of murder which makes its appearance in Stephen King’s novel The Shining (1977), which was discussed in Chapter 2. Danny Torrance utters it repeatedly and is spelled in red letters on the door that appear mysteriously. But it is in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), a film that anticipates many of the current concerns with media, that the concept of the red room takes form. Cronenberg’s technosurrealist film juxtaposes machines and humans, television and media to the human mind, and deals with both as recording devices that are machinic, programmable and controllable. In a world where reality, simulation and hallucinations are indistinguishable, liquid boundaries meld into flesh as the body is invaded by media. Cable-station president Max Wren discovers a satellite television show called Videodrome, a snuff-like broadcast of live torture and murder of anonymous victims within a red room. Enthralled by its violence but also interested in it as a business opportunity, he embarks on a quest to determine whether the programme is real, only to uncover that beneath the raw brutality of the show lies its true function: that of controlling and dominating the population. Developed by a firm specialising in military applications and defence contracts, Spectacular Optical, Videodrome emits a signal which causes a non-lethal tumour to its viewer as a means of control. Like the internet’s pervasive

96 The Real of Cyberia anonymity and, at the same time, obsession with witnessing real murder, so Videodrome opposes digital signals’ invisibility and visceral gore to materialise the invasion of the body by that which is inorganic, the image. A modern replay of Plato’s cave, Videodrome stresses the subject’s inability to separate image from reality, a recurring motif in many creepypasta. Screen and flesh are no longer solid boundaries, as Wren makes contact with a pulsating TV screen, while later his body opens up to host a videocassette programme, literally being turned into a videotape recorder. Like a virus that invades the body, Videodrome causes the body to produce tumours which will then produce images to invade the body. As tumours create hallucinations, these are recorded, revised and played back to the viewer. Humans become mechanical recorders, objectified and turned inside out, emptied out of any interiority and flattened into surfaces. Hooked on the internet and continuously feeding it with images, videos and stories, online users are both the producers and consumers of content, entangled in a never-ending circle within which they occupy multiple positions at once: senders, recipients and even the objects. The search for red rooms, for the most horrifying spectacle, finds its predecessor in the live streamed suicides of online users on Justin.tv, video-streaming app Periscope and Facebook.7 From jihadists’ videos of beheadings to social media streaming murder, and rumours of hitman services in the dark web, the possibility of viewing death lurks in every corner of the internet. Here the absolute horror is that of the lack of authority, of permissiveness and of the inhumanity of an abstract online monstrosity which feeds on humanity’s compulsion to witness what lies beyond the veil. Many argue that the myth of the red room has been created as a scam by anonymous users to steal cryptocurrencies, but such claims are rumours circulating online. As vampiric capital perpetuates its undeath existence through many guises, it expands and nurtures itself online under the latest fad of blockchain technology and anonymous cryptocurrency payment systems. This new crypto-infrastructure facilitates the circulation of digital coins among online users many of whom want to obscure their illegal or promiscuous financial exchanges. In this respect, horror is linked to the fear of anonymous decentralised networks, where there are no governments or regulators to interfere. Red rooms and online horror legends are the dark side of an absolute online freedom gone rampant. These myths and stories of dark and gothic media are extreme speculative stories about what happens when libertarianism and cypherpunk ideology take a horrific turn. Based on security, privacy and anonymity in communications, cypherpunk, now recognisable due to its notable advocates Julian Assange and anonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto (pseudonym), supports anonymity between parties who chose when to reveal their identity.8 But this freedom has not only helped users to conduct online anonymous cryptocurrency or other transactions, but has also fuelled cybercrime such as hacking, and encouraged the existence of

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illicit market places selling anything, from narcotics to arms. For example, while the black-market Silk Road which operated between 2011 and 2013, when the FBI shut it down, was a darknet market place selling mostly illegal drugs, other more sinister darknet market places included child pornography, weapons, stolen credit cards and an “assassination market.”9 As cryptocurrencies and, particularly, Bitcoin, became the favourite currency of the dark web, they have made possible different anonymous services including an anonymous crowdfunded assassination market. The idea of anonymous funded murder combines the anonymity of an untraceable digital currency with that of encrypted sites and tools that were celebrated by the cypherpunk movement in the mid-1990s. In the 1992 “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto”10 Tim May argues that anonymous computer technology will allow for a computerised market for trading national secrets, illicit and stolen material and “will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion.” In his 1997 essay “Assassination Politics,”11 Jim Bell presented his so-called “revolutionary” idea of a system of awarding digital cash to anonymous users who correctly predict the death of any government official from a list of “violators of rights.” From Bell’s references to the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), which claims that any form of aggression against an individual’s life or property rights is wrong, one can see that we are dealing with a libertarian logic which rationalises crime on the grounds that is an act of retaliation. Government officials or employees are an ideal target whose assassination is not considered a crime since they violate the NAP by receiving payments from taxes. Bell’s idea is concerned with translating this new-found internet freedom—encryption and digital cash—into ordinary life and protecting it from any governmental attempts to bar it. Indeed, this online freedom is based on anonymity, encryption and cryptocurrency transactions which enable users to communicate, transfer and exchange data and funds. The fact that the sites on the dark web are encrypted through such systems as the Onion Router, which can only be accessed through the specific software securing thus anonymous communication, is interesting in relation to de Man’s machinic text. The metaphor of the onion, with its many layers, is indicative here of how the receiver, sender and the message itself are hidden through a multi-layered encryption method whereby the message is repeatedly encrypted and sent through nodes called onion routers which decrypt each layer of the message, thus unpeeling the onion and revealing the next router address and final set of data. This artificial and mechanical nature of encryption and decryption draws attention to the materiality of inscription and of the letter, to the knowledge that the computer is a machine of inscription that communicates through unintelligible numbers and algorithms. At the same time, this other (Is he real or a programme?), whose real and algorithmic12 identity is always hidden, remains totally other to me. What is terrifying is the gaze of this unknown other, the fear of being watched

98 The Real of Cyberia through one’s own webcam or being visible to this foreign and undesired gaze. The fear of this other in the place of the subject is nothing else but the empty Thing, an alien Other that drives the machinic process. There is a tension here between those that seek the deep and dark web for their personal privacy and the internet’s impersonal anonymity; a rift between what Nick Land refers to as “a disintegrating personal egoism and a deluge of post-human schizophrenia.”13 Whether one is confronted with the real horrors of Cyberia or its masks in the form of replicating gothic narratives, one’s being and humanity is actually being hacked by the inorganic, impersonal and disinterested automatism of vampiric financial replication that disorganises the social field. The dark web’s spectacles for consumption, from torture to extreme porn, snuff films and red rooms, might be digitally synthesised pleasures, but when Eros drops its mask, what lies underneath is Thanatos and the traumatic face of capital as the inhuman Thing. Real or simulated, images of mutilated and tortured bodies attest to technocapital’s total disregard of human morals and pity. Like de Man’s elaboration of the materiality of language as the radical indifference and unnerving impersonality at the heart of language, so with the alien order of cyberspace that consumes all humanity, its human values, dignity and agency and reassembling them according to technocapitalism’s addictive strategies and imperatives of online consumerism. De Man’s radical materiality associated with death, automatism and the inhuman, like Nick Land’s sinister technocapitalism, cannot offer any hope or possibility for ethics or aesthetics. This also resonates with Kittler’s radical antihumanism, for whom the human in the contemporary world of digital technologies will eventually have nothing to do with the production of knowledge. The translation of any medium into any other through the digitisation of all information not only will erase the notion of a medium but will result in the circulation of digital information in an endless loop decoupled from any correlation with the human body and perception.14 No longer able to sustain the illusion of being in control of his technologies, man is now written and coded by technology. In this view, the human can be reprogrammed, and images altered in such a way that they no longer correspond to empirical reality. In the darkest corner of the web, the subject is confronted with the emptiness of the Real in the form of an excess of horror images and data in an endless circulation and devoid of human morality and sense.

Creepypasta: Gothic Media and the Face of the Internet This excess horror is manifested in creepypasta: short stories, videos and images usually accompanied by short text or microfiction. They constitute examples of crowdsourced internet horror written in the most efficient manner, and with the single purpose of eliciting dread and horror in the reader. As user generated, copy-and-pasted texts of urban legends,

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creepypasta are considered a subgenre of “copypasta”: viral copy and pasted texts which arose out of the online 4chan community around 2006. They are the digital version of campfire ghost stories edited, changed and expanded by online users who mostly remain anonymous and whose own creepypasta versions strengthen the belief in the legend and add rich dimension to the original story or image. Rumoured to have been heard or seen by someone else, they become “FOAFlore” (friend-ofa-friend-lore). With their original creator usually obscured and forgotten, creepypasta are haunted by the enigma of their own production, as if they have been created ex nihilo in the dead of night. As the authors’ identity recedes to the background, fears about our contemporary lives are foregrounded. Creepypasta, narrated in the language of everyday online users and shared anonymously in bulletin boards, give the impression that they are written and narrated by the inhuman world of computers, the internet and online communication systems. First appearing on message boards and email chains, such as 4chan and Reddit, and gaining popularity in 2010 after a New York Times story,15 creepypasta have acquired the quality of legends, manufacturing their own authenticity by juxtaposing photographs or newspaper clippings with written text, or composed as a witness’ account, infecting reality with fiction and bleeding one into each other, with believable effect. The notion here of inbetweeness or the denaturalisation of the world through the collage of two conflicting realities that creepypasta brings into focus is similar to the effect of the Weird which both Graham Harman and Mark Fisher have analysed. In his 2012 Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Graham Harman argues that the way Lovecraft uses language resembles that of cubist painting, since he slices an object into vast crosssections, creating multiple realities.16 His descriptions of objects create a gap within our world, as their horror consists of monstrous features that cannot be unified into one reality and an “unsettling range of traits” that overwhelm the imagination, even if they are not completely “unvisualizable.”17 Harman explains that Lovecraft’s style involves the paradoxical combination of detailed descriptions of indescribable realities in the manner of “a cubist painting, with numerous jostling planes jammed together along a single surface—all of them completely visible, yet never quite fitting together as a whole.”18 In a similar fashion, creepypasta, by creating new objects out of the fusion of disparate realities existing in uneasy relationship, force us to question our own everyday reality, or consider the possibility of other realities otherwise inaccessible to our senses. Mark Fisher, elaborating on the Weird, both in his blog and his final book The Weird and the Eerie (2016), argues that the Weird tale presents an Ontological montage in which a world— usually “our” world, the world captured by naturalistic description and governed by commonsense—is ruptured or interrupted by what

100 The Real of Cyberia does not belong to it: that which is “out of space,” and/ or “out of time.” Lovecraft’s major breakthrough was perhaps his setting of his stories in a familiar New England setting (his earliest stories had taken place in a heightened Dunsanian OtherWorld).19 Expanding on Harman’s argument about Lovecraftian similarities to cubism, Fisher connects the Weird with collage, as it “does not airbrush or photoshop incommensurable elements into a seamless CGI simulation; rather it insists upon, and consists in, the very incommensurability.”20 Whether photoshopping images or juxtaposing different realities within written text, creepypasta unsettle reality and create a disturbing view of a chaotic world. The most popular creepypasta can be found on 4chan’s paranormal board, but also on creepypasta.com and Creepypasta Wiki. Some examples include the creepypasta internet meme “Slender Man”—whose popularity has given birth not only to other creepypasta, but also a movie and a video game series—“Jeff the Killer,” “Candle Cove” (on which Syfy based the first season of their creepypasta TV series Channel Zero), “The Russian Sleep Experiment,” “Robert the Doll” (which is a real doll at the Fort East Martello Museum) and “BEN Drowned.”21 “Slender Man,” “Jeff the Killer,” “The Expressionless” and “The Rake” involve creepypasta characters with white faces lacking features or monstrously disfigured, associating horror with what lacks a human face and thus is inhuman and unrecognisable. The idea of the inhuman, and of glimpsing at moments where life is unveiled in its mechanical deadly repetition, and the human is a lifeless puppet subject to the whim of forces beyond any of his control is at the heart of this online bits of horror. “Candle Cove,”22 “Annora Petrova,” “Psychosis,” “BEN Drowned” and “Lavender Town Syndrome” are some of the creepypasta that deal with the relationship between technology and the human body, as many of the characters are haunted by spectral entities channelled through screens or whose lives are inextricably connected to or inscribed by media. Many of these concerns express current anxieties surrounding the nature of media and their role in sculpting our own private and social histories. “Annora Petrova” is a case in point, as the creepypasta, delivered in the form of an email written by the eponymous character to a friend, explains how the aforementioned figure skater discovers a Wikipedia page about herself and how the page can predict her wins every time she visits it. When she decides to create an account to change her own page, the page itself begins to retaliate by leaving hostile comments which insinuate her death. When she finally reinvents herself and recovers from her misfortunes, linked to the occulted powers of the page, she makes the mistake of returning to check her Wikipedia entry, and is then that she reads about her death, predicted to occur on a specific date. The

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story ends with Annora refreshing the page repeatedly, so she finds out what will happen to her. Included in her email is the screenshot of her Wikipedia page. The last section of the page entitled “Further Information” is written in the first person, as the inhuman voice of the unknown power behind the tragic events of Annora’s life, warns the reader to take a lesson from the figure skater and avoid delving too deep. The story is a good example of the inhuman character of media and the association of the internet with negativity and death. We are not the writers of our own fate and cannot change it, but mere helpless puppets. But is also an interesting example to anyone who has ever tried to modify a Wikipedia entry, and got a glimpse of the cold face of a bureaucracy of rules and the trite demand for the endless citation of sources, an exhaustive experience which can deter everyone from editing anything ever again. The story also echoes some of the concerns of the first chapter about the nature of writing as communication with a world beyond our perceived reality. It is also punctuated by the weird, as the presence of something other which should not be writing back to us. “Annora Petrova” equates the horror of the inaccessible with the materiality of writing and the manifestation of the words on the page. What is pertinent to our discussion here is the connection of both “Annora Petrova” and the following story, the video creepypasta “Username: 666,” with the idea of repetition, the inhuman and online media. Both creepypasta examine fears linked to online media, specifically Wikipedia and YouTube as popular platforms where anonymous users can edit, create and upload anything at any time. YouTube is also home to myriads of videos regarding the hidden nature of the dark web, perpetuating myths and creating new ones. Particularly, the darkest myth of the dark and deep web, but also one which is connected to “Username: 666,” is that of the red room. Here is interesting to see how the idea of a red room, of witnessing and even participating online in real murder through access to a hidden website, has been a recurring urban legend. While it might be impossible to stream live videos over encrypted networks such as Tor, and violent content might rather exist on the surface web on highly encrypted password protected sites, the concept of gaining access to that which lies beyond conventional reality, the inaccessible, ties in with seeing the world in its bear, unmediated state. This is not the presence of comforting and familiar images of aesthetic experience, gothic or sublime affect, but of confronting death as a meaningless spectacle. In “Username: 666” we are witnesses of what happens when one searches for the YouTube username 666 and then refreshes the channel repeatedly. In the story, but also in real life, since both realities haemorrhage into each other, a video uploaded by the YouTuber nana825763, creates controversy for its nightmarish videos seen through red viscous screens. The weird video, which has become a viral phenomenon, is believed to be the creation of Japanese experimental artist Piropito.

102 The Real of Cyberia According to online rumours,23 which have helped cement this pasta in the realm of fact, the original YouTube account contained a virus that infiltrated the user’s browser and operating system, changing all text to sixes. The fact that the same thing happens within the story, only serves to blur the lines of myth and reality further. In the creepypasta, the narrator explains how he heard of a YouTube user who had caused controversy over the nature of gory and blood fetish videos, and whose account was later suspended. The rumour was then confirmed by a person on YouTube who posted their experience with the specific channel. Through the technique of FOAF (friend of a friend), the urban legend is created and from then on it is difficult to extricate fact from fiction. A second layer of realism is rendered through the narrative voice of a YouTube employee, whose first-hand experience is given by copying and pasting their blog post as it appeared online. Creepypasta are stories for the YouTube generation, and this particular one is close at home. The YouTube employee explains how a YouTube account was suspended and that he was not allowed to find out more. Warned not to speak of the matter ever again, he is given a paper by a moderator with the link “www.youtube. com/666” which directs him to a suspended account. The inaccessibility of media or their use to access the inaccessible is connected here with a new media platform and concerns about its anonymous use. The lack of transparency, visibility and identity facilitated by YouTube, opens up new avenues of communication beyond meaning, as repetition moves towards senselessness. By repeatedly refreshing the page, things begin to change, including video tags turning into the number “666” and every single text on the screen showing “666.” As the narrator admits, “I thought someone was hacking my computer, but I denied it and then refreshed it.” The mechanical repetition creates an ominous effect, since in both “Annora Petrova” and “Username 666” the action is pointless and serves no purpose other than that of hoping to experience or access what is unknown. Nonetheless, the characters’ lives are shown to be inscribed by media: edited, modified or deleted. In the video of “Username 666” the constant clicking to refresh as well as the repeating images are further given an unsettling effect through repetitive sound effects. The repetition of discordant music, as if played in reverse, becomes increasingly faster and noisier as it merges with the endless clicking sound and culminating in the system being infected with the accursed virus. The human is no longer the controller of media but is played by media itself. Repetition is the key to entering the inaccessible with the “666” channel finally on view, containing videos of random surreal content, including a video of four babies twisting their head and another one with swirled graphics. After clicking a blank pop up, the narrator is then taken to another video, this time more realistic and unbearable than before, showing “women drowning in a blood pool.” The internet is imagined here as nineteenth-century nature, an unknowable and undiscoverable

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landscape which the male subject seeks to penetrate and unveil. Through different layers of videos, the male user finally uncovers the horror of something more unfamiliar and visceral: the real materiality of blood. Here the pure viscerality of blood is linked to the automatic and inhuman nature of the machine which no longer functions as it should be. The YouTube user realises that is impossible to pause the video, close Internet Explorer or shut down. The video “kept going on and on. . . . The girl in the video kept staring at me, looking at me,” as her hand “popped out of the video and crashed my Internet Explorer.” The similarities with the influential Japanese horror film The Ring (1998) are evident in the accursed medium, the materiality of the body crossing the border of the screen and the notion of the image carrying some form of curse and having an impact on one’s life. In The Ring after seeing the videotape the viewer is cursed to die within seven days, while the image of Sadako Yamamura climbing out of the television set has become one of the most characteristic scenes of horror cinema in the recent years. In the creepypasta, immediately after the user encounters the horrible video, he is unable to sleep and loses his job. By wondering whether the video was made by the devil or as a joke to scare YouTubers, the mystery behind the maker of the videos is linked to anonymity, lack of authorial identity and thus to the inability to determine whether it is factual or not. Not only here, but through most of these creepypasta, postmodern permissiveness is coupled with the desire to witness, due to the lack of authority, some kind of supernatural proof that would dispel contemporary disenchantment. This attempt to find some meaning is never met with a hospitable or beneficent other, but with an indifferent inhuman entity or reality that does not share the same values as us. As will be discussed later in this chapter, creepypasta videos and images shock us with the realisation that they are independent of us and our subjective experience, as our mesmerised looking is reversed and media turn to look at us. From corrupted computers to haunted software, spectral hacking and malevolent interactivity, machines are the ones programming subjectivity, destroying the illusion of human control and the notion of the internet as a hospitable place. Stories and videos begin with the assumption that us humans can determine, define and write our own histories, but this kind of narcissism is soon shattered by the productivity of media and the weird, oozing of visceral images autogenerating and virally disseminating on screens. Similar themes are explored in the “Unbranded Laptop,”24 which deals with streaming live mutilation, hacking, as well as issues of trust, anonymity and privacy. In this particular pasta, it is not the message whose unknown origin is questioned, but the medium itself, as the computer device literally appears from nowhere, is unbranded and completely lacks any sign of inscription. Like the absence of authorial control in most of the creepypasta, so their subject matter deals with the inexistence of origins. It is the horror and weird manifestation of a materiality that is

104 The Real of Cyberia unknowable and which undermines the human’s self-conception as an agent capable of intentionally changing and rearranging one’s reality. Instead, one’s reality is here constructed and played back by unknown agents. The laptop in this case is mysteriously charged, has a black wallpaper, no start menu button, and only three icons of videos and games folders, and a DOS command prompt programme. In one of the folders, the narrator finds pictures of a five-year-old girl in a tattered white dress and others of a room with a bed. In the videos folder, he recognises the same girl playing a dress up game which she must have accidentally recorded with the webcam. But every two minutes, the screen cuts to black for a fraction of a second and then resumes to the video of the same girl dressed differently, as if every time the girl was playing the game, she was being recorded without her knowing. Like with “Username:666,” the computer does not respond to any command and the narrator cannot shut it down. In a similar way, there is a repetitive movement of clicking icons, images and videos to eventually reach the heart of darkness. After going through several layers of content, the protagonist comes face-toface with what is out of place. His safe role of being the viewer behind the comfort of the screen is quickly questioned as soon as the girl from the video stares blankly into the camera, with an “expressionless look on her face.” Curiosity turns to uneasiness and soon to horror as he witnesses the girl mutilating herself in front of the camera. Showing the hand saw to the camera, she proceeds to execute cuts by slicing different parts of her face, before she finally cuts through her head. First in an emotionless state and then in extreme pain, the girl performs the theatre of self-mutilation in an indifferent manner. She automatically inscribes her body as interiority is spilled out and references to blood multiply: from drizzling to streaming and leaking, blood flows on the surfaces of a body turned inside out. Body and screen become interchangeable. The cut body is juxtaposed to the different cuts in the video, which reassemble reality and change perspectives. The spectator-narrator ultimately becomes the actor, as the final cut is a shot of his own face. There are no authors, no choices to be made or actions to be taken, but rather the automatism of machines which is reflected back on us, on the other side of the screen where the human is played by the thing. The question of who is the one pulling the girl’s strings will remain hidden. Whether that is inhuman capital and she is playing a game for online subscribers, an alien other or her own unconscious and machinic drives that have written and sealed her fate in death, the pasta is concerned with the anonymous presence behind the webcam, highlighting that the human is no longer the one who controls the machine. Here surveillance reaches its ultimate limit in the inside of the body, flattening all surfaces and destroying interiority. The unbranded laptop becomes a window into the abyss of human degradation and exploitation, as the last shreds of human dignity are squashed and extracted into the replication of bodily fragments and

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visceral screens which disassemble the body into a heap of meat. With the last gesture of cutting the face off, what is ultimately the seat and symbol of knowledge, recognition, identity and language, the human is reduced to an unrecognisable, inaccessible materiality.

Slender Man: The Face of the Inhuman The theme of cutting off the face, of an acephalous, anonymous entity is present under a different guise but one that has become recognisable among online users and storytellers, that of the Slender Man. “The Blank Face” or the “Tall, Thin, and Faceless” are a couple of creepypasta involving one of the most famous figures of internet horror, that of the Slender Man. Having featured in various media, from creepypasta, movies and TV series to music videos and video games, the Slender Man originally appeared in the form of a creepypasta internet meme in 2009, created by Eric Knudsen (pseudonym Victor Surge) as part of an online photoshop contest on the Something Awful forums. Users were invited to submit paranormal images and Knudsen’s contribution consisted of two real black-and-white images of children with the lingering figure of a faceless man photoshopped in the background. Both pictures were accompanied by two captions respectively, identifying the spectral figure as the Slender Man and claiming to have been taken by witnesses who had mysteriously disappeared or died. The first text read: “We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time . . .— 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.”25 The second image was followed by another text equally suggestive of the horrors that had befallen the children: One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as “The Slender Man.” Deformities cited as film defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.—1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.26 Knudsen fictionalised the figure of the Slender Man by giving him a history and a purpose. The images were effective by themselves having given the Slender Man a form through its realistic representation in a photographic medium, akin to William Hope’s spirit photography and Victorian photographs of ghosts and mediums. But the addition of a text, placing the figure within a particular time and associating his presence with the disappearance of children added another dimension to the story. The fake image and its short description would function as a witness’ account attesting to the existence of a gothic figure, and soon Slender Man was to feature in various stories, expanding the mythos and adding

106 The Real of Cyberia more detail to the story. The fact the online users are aware that this is a “fake,” yet they choose to believe in the myth touches upon the double nature of media to be either scrutinised with scientific precision or wholeheartedly accepted with religious belief.27 In 2014, cyberlore would pass over into the realm of real life, when two twelve-year-old girls in Wisconsin would brutally stab their teenage friend nineteen times to allegedly please Slender Man, who would then grant them access to his mansion where they would live with him in the woods. While one of the girls was diagnosed with schizophrenia and the other one with a shared psychotic disorder, many have chosen to see the socio-cultural and psychological motives behind the attempt to murder. Particularly, internet stories and the nature of the web have been demonised for the brutal attack, with some reports describing creepypasta as an “internet horror-cult that almost caused a killing.”28 For CNN reporters, children were now incapable of differentiating between fiction and reality, and fictional memes could create monstrous acts in real life.29 Others have read Slender Man as a predatory male figure,30 due to his black suit and lengthy figure suggestive of the towering and looming figure of a man. While all of these are true, the gothic figure’s featureless face evokes the horror of something more. In Excommunication, Eugene Thacker’s discussion on the limits of media and his proposition of the term “dark media” is useful here to unravel a few more threads regarding contemporary media, gothic and horror. As Thacker writes, the uses of new media devices in nineteenthcentury Europe, from spirit photography to phantasmagoria shows can be likened to the similar uses of digital media today, such as handheld cameras to prove the existence of ghosts, digital audio to record the voices of the dead or Photoshop to capture an individual’s aura.31 Thinking about media then as the paradoxical mediation of the inaccessible, what Thacker calls dark media, will help shed more light on digital horror images and videos. The Slender Man can be seen as a manifestation of concerns about technology and the mediation of something beyond human perception. The fact that he lacks a face and cannot be recognised becomes an apt image of the inaccessibility of communication itself. His face obscures any possible meaning and feeling, something that also relates to the idea of prosopagnosia, as the inability to recognise one’s face and thus their identity. The Slender Man embodies the fear of the unknown but, following Thacker we can also argue that, since he carries the children to his own realm in the woods where they disappear, crossing the threshold, he is the medium between two worlds. As Thacker writes, “the first lesson of the horror genre is that the body itself—as living, dead, or possessed— is the medium of all media.”32 The Slender Man mediates between the human and the inhuman worlds, as his featureless face and tendrils, that are usually described waving as branch-like extensions of his upper torso, fade out into his surroundings. His spectral and witch-like presence is

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further accentuated as he is always located, in both image and text, within the woods, surrounded by trees and branches, which blend with his long tentacles. A figure that appears and disappears at will, the Slender Man is at the limits of communication, a montage of what is natural and unnatural, the juxtaposition of a trusted figure in a black suit and the occulted presence of a tentacled humanoid. Despite his white face being a mark of pure negativity, the Slender Man repulses and compels, acting as the screen between this world and another one beyond lived experience. In the stories and the eponymous film, the children are terrified by the unknown, but, at the same time, feel a maddening pull towards it. He represents the impossibility of communication and the communication with the impossible. He embodies, at the same time, the juxtaposition of two different realities, the presence of something beyond our lived experience and the absence of a face and of identity. And this brings us to the quest for, or interest in making something that is absent present, which is at the heart of spirit photography and contemporary horror media. The material intervention in the fabric of the image itself by manipulating it with Photoshop, draws attention to the medium of the photograph as an unreliable mediator of reality, but also as a medium for rearranging that reality. The photoshopping of the natural and unnatural into a weird, new reality, opens up our perception of the world, while destroying our notion of a cosy rationalism and well-ordered familiarity. The foreignness of tentacles attached to the organic body of the Slender Man, the unfamiliarity of his white face blending into the surroundings of the playground, create an unsettling effect which is also replicated in the various stories he appears. The human mind is unable to grasp the existence of something other than what is recognised as natural or human. The unnaturalness of the new inserted object into everyday reality lends the image a weird and horrific effect, because of the complete incommensurability of the two conflicting realities. In the two images submitted by Knudsen, the familiarity of the children in the playground is unsettled by the unfamiliar spectral form of the Slender Man as the inhuman watcher in the background. The horror of the Slender Man’s figure is not only the horror of what Thacker describes as the presence of absence, but also of the weird, what Mark Fisher designates as that which is out of place, and which causes a sense of fascination that draws one towards their own dissolution or disappearance. The Slender Man with its lack of expression and face, its total indifference and foreignness, embodies this de Manian materiality, of seeing the world without any meaning or purpose. What both fascinates and repels is the desire to perceive the new and look into the void, in order to see what lies beyond. The Slender Man fascinates and terrifies because his expressionless face is the unknowable itself that humans desire to touch but are unable to put into words. As a figure which attracts and appals compulsively, the Slender Man is the personification of the death drive: a repetitive compulsion beyond

108 The Real of Cyberia any pleasure and beyond one’s control. As the caption for one of the photoshopped Slender Man images states: “We didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time.” The children are so fascinated by the figure of the Slender Man that they follow him without any will, as if they were puppets without any control over their feelings. The fatal pull of the Slender Man is nothing else but the pull of the death drive, the nameless dread which emanates from contact with the inhuman but also the irresistible pulsion towards this negativity. The idea of having a face, and thus a mouth, a voice, is also linked to the notion of being able to speak, to tell one’s story. Language is a way to create a mask, a figure of one’s self, even if that is just a mere illusion. On the contrary, the Slender Man signifies the inaccessibility of meaning, figuration and the very inhumanity of language and communication. If the Slender Man stands in for the inaccessibility of what lies beyond, the following creepypasta give us a glimpse into the darkness, as they explore the doubleness of seeing and being seen. Gothic media are reflexive as they communicate a sense of dread through images of blurred faces, seeing and being watched, drawing attention to our very own compulsive and mechanical tendencies to repeatedly watch and consume meaningless and never-ending spectacles.

Human Objectified: The Horror of the Gaze Creepypasta are fascinated with invisibility, and usually imagine spectral others watching us online. As we indulge in an overconsumption of images, this looking is also disrupted by its dark side which creates the dread of being watched. As Slavoj Žižek writes, “insofar as I cannot see the point in the other from which I’m gazed at, the only thing that remains for me to do is to make myself visible to that point” which “retains its traumatic heterogeneity and nontransparency, it remains an object in a strict Lacanian sense, not a symbolic feature.”33 Expanding on Lacan’s idea of the gaze, Žižek explains that the gaze of the object is itself an object, and that the subject can never see himself from the angle of the gaze, or gaze at the object from its position, as “I can never see the picture at the point from which it is gazing at me.”34 Not only are we unable to know who is watching, but also what we are able to see is always incomplete. The realisation that the gaze functions as a “stain,” that I am able to “see only from one point; but in my existence I am looked at from all sides,”35 is unsettling. Creepypasta dramatise this objective seeing from the angle of the gaze, negating thus the comforting or familiar sentimentality of the subject’s position, and instead they posit a foreign otherness which disturbs our seeing, pushing us to see too much or the world from another point of view strange to us. The Lacanian phrase, “You never look at me from the place from which I see you,”36 starts to ring true

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when creepypasta reveal that this indefinable feeling of being gazed at by an object manifests itself in the presence of foreign others, or of the image itself looking back at us. We are forced to see more than we have asked for, or we are made to see ourselves from a foreign point of view, gazing at our own selves as objects or mere things that have no power at all to control their image. In the following creepypasta, seeing and sensing as gateways to human reality are blocked or questioned. “Psychosis” and “Satellite Images” deal with the unsettling feeling of this excess of the gaze, but, particularly, the latter pasta is exemplary of the movement from the activity of seeing to that of being seen, as the human perspective changes to the one of the inhuman. This comes closer to the objective and inhuman materiality of seeing the world without purpose and meaning that de Man describes in the essay “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant.” Rather than observe the world through ideas, de Man moves towards the gaze of the poet as a passive ocular vision or a pure seeing, dealing with “what the eye reveals.”37 On the one hand, the gaze of the thing that turns to look at us is utterly devoid of meaning, it is indifferent to us. The thing that gazes at the subject online lacks emotion. This inhuman materiality marks the moment when there is no anxiety or horror or sympathy because it is devoid of the symbolic and the human; it is the place without a subject or a body that would render it meaningful. On the other hand, when the subject gazes at the sheer exteriority of the internet and its unknown viewers, this is horrific because it is totally alien. The subject approaches this foreign other from the position of the master and seeing that this exteriority is totally alien, unsettles and horrifies him. Creepypasta play with these two modes of seeing and being seen, as the subject is looked at by the cold materiality of a world beyond his perception which unsettles his belief as a controller of media. “Psychosis,” like Plato’s Cave, deals with the indissoluble melding of reality and simulation, as the protagonist’s inability to separate truth from fiction arises from his own isolation to his basement apartment and his lengthy hours of working as a computer programmer. As he writes, “hours of sitting and staring at a monitor can make anyone feel strange.”38 There is a recurring reference to seeing and being seen, while being unable to trust one’s eyes or what one sees through media screens. From the eye’s retina to the screen of the webcam, there is a distrust of the human eye and a desire to see the world without the mediation of an “embodied eye” but through the “eye as a machine.”39 Oscillating between different media and ways of seeing, the subject is incapable of feeling at home with a chaotic world increasingly mediated through machines and experienced as empty of humans. In “Psychosis,” there is absence of communication and presence of an ominous mediation beyond familiarity. A generalised disaffection, pervasive discomfort with the world and an experience of fragmentation

110 The Real of Cyberia and disorganisation have isolated the protagonist from the world. Emails sent go unanswered, and friends are never met. Isolated, the narrator craves human communication, while, at the same time, being unable to leave his apartment as an eeriness begins to creep in. Even his attempts to go outside fail and he is forced to return to the security of his flat. On one occasion, he is almost ready to open a window so that he might see the familiarity of a human face, but he hesitates again: “I had the strangest feeling that if I opened that window, I would see something absolutely horrifying on the other side.”40 The inability to see another human and feeling entrapped inside his apartment turns into a fear of seeing something horrifying or even being watched: Perhaps from having seen too many scary movies, I had the sudden inexplicable idea that something could look in the door’s window and see me, some sort of horrible entity that hovered at the edge of aloneness, just waiting to creep up on unsuspecting people that strayed too far from other human beings. I knew the fear was irrational, but nobody else was around.41 There is a movement from the human eye and human perspective to that of media screens as a form of seeing without the body. But as all human communication is gradually substituted by emails, telephone and webcam calls, he is increasingly questioning what is real and the authenticity of his friends’ responses. When an email from a friend consists of the enigmatic and unfinished sentence, “seen with your own eyes don’t trust them they,” then he begins to wonder where everyone has disappeared or whether what he sees through his webcam is his real friend, as if “there was some unknown force at work trying to trick me.”42 From hungering to see a human face, he reaches a state where he feels everyone has vanished and that a “phantom entity” is trying to make him go outside. When, finally, his friend arrives with a psychiatrist and policemen to get him out, he remains distrustful of them, as if their “voices could be faked electronically.” Migrating from a digital world inundated by affect, disembodied voices and phantom entities end up populating a world bereft of humans. When all forms of seeing appear to be forms of unreliable mediation, artificial simulations of a universe where overstimulation and affective hypertrophy have produced a subject unable to discern the organic from the inorganic, then the human is doomed to wallow in its own inanity. The narrator contemplates: “I might be one of the last people left alive on an empty world, hiding in my secure basement room, spiting some unthinkable deceptive entity just by refusing to be captured.” Unknown monsters and unthinkable entities lurking in the dark are merely figures occupying the space of what we cannot see. But they are also the figures of a spectral digital world in which we have overstayed our welcome,

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following us into our own corporeal reality, confusing what were once stable boundaries. But “Psychosis” is also symptomatic of our digitised lives, where everything needs to be visible, excavated, uncovered, seen and shared. The horror here is not so much about what is seen as that which cannot be seen and thus not trusted. The subject, unable to unplug themselves, have turned into mechanical devices recording, viewing, flattening every untranslatable depth into a bright surface so it is visible, uncomplicated and accessible. Faced with online and offline worlds that remain concealed and sheltered, and do not dovetail with one’s obsession to order them into clear organised categories, they confuse body and image, dissolve real and representation: How can I know what’s real and what’s deception? All of these damn things with their wires and their signals that originate from some unseen origin! They’re not real, I can’t be sure! Signals through a camera, faked video, deceptive phone calls, emails! Even the television, lying broken on the floor—how can I possibly know it’s real? Camera and eyes become problematic, so both are destroyed. Delusional, the blind man believes that he is the last human in a world where things masquerade as humans and are trying to deceive him. Neither media nor human eyes are satisfactory tools to offer an omniscient perspective on the world. In “Psychosis,” the impossibility of seeing or having access to the world as it is, as well as believing that one is being watched by malevolent entities is also pursued in “Satellite Images.” But, where “Psychosis” recognises the inaccessibility of the world and experience beyond human perception, “Satellite Images” gives glimpses of something sinister that makes its appearance through media. The creepypasta is interesting in its use of the colour red to highlight repetition and the presence of what appears to be out of place. In both pasta, the fear of being seen and the disturbing feeling of being watched are connected with this Lacanian gaze and being trapped in the field of the visible. But, with “Satellite Images,” both the narrator and us witness the coldness of this looking, as if the eye of the internet is suddenly staring at us right in the face. This inhuman seeing is no longer between an all-powerful subject navigating the safe space of the internet and a passive thing. The subject becomes the object of a gaze that views the world not as beneficent or a threat, but simply as it is without idealising it or making it look purposeful. It is this cold gaze that freezes the subject online. In “Satellite Images,” the narrator, like the one in “Psychosis,” is isolated within the interior of the house, and media is the only eye for seeing the external world. The protagonist of the pasta is unable to go outside due to an accident and he is wheelchair bound. This reminds of Jeff in

112 The Real of Cyberia Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) who recuperates after a broken leg and indulges in voyeurism through windows and cameras watching people’s lives unfold as if in a movie. Rear Window shares many of the concerns of creepypasta, namely the obsession with looking and being looked at, as well as the morbid fascination with seeing something awful. By using Google maps, the narrator in “Satellite Images” is able to see places and people: It gave me a real eye on the world. I could go to almost any major city, and I did. I’d seen streets in China, Japan, Germany, England . . . so many places. I’d even gone to tourist attractions like the Great Barrier Reef and Dracula’s castle.43 Gothic attractions, familiar places zoomed in and out, are visited and seen the way one plays video games online, as the repetition of gleaming images flickering without meaning: “The faces of the people were always blurred to protect their privacy, but it was still enjoyable to see them out there, enjoying their life, walking like it was no big deal.”44 Faceless, anonymous and meaningless entertainment soon turns into a nightmare, when the unknown and occluded face of the internet manifests itself in the passive image, now imbued with a strange life of its own. The figure of a woman wearing the same clothes and a red pair of sneakers appears in all the street views of all the countries the narrator randomly checks. From Tokyo to Paris and Berlin, the figure travels the world with the character. But when he revisits the same streets in Tokyo and Paris, the woman no longer appears to be standing in the same positions. When he sees her in Brussels, he is shocked as her “head tilted in the direction of the camera, almost like she was coyly looking toward me.”45 Repeatedly, the woman appears in every country he looks, and in “each picture, she came closer and closer to looking directly at me with her blurred out face.”46 Eventually, checking his own town and a random street, he sees her looking directly at the camera and at him, until she appears outside his house, seen through his house camera, “her face still a complete blur,” knocking on the door.47 The presence of the girl embodies this materiality of the inhuman as her body is prefigural, lacking a face and a speech, it merely appears as a flat surface devoid of an indication of depth. Reminiscent of such horror films as Don’t Look Now (1973), where the dead daughter appears to the father as a small figure in the same red coat she was wearing when she drowned, the woman’s red shoes punctuate mechanically every image, disrupting the safety of the online space. If the subject is looking with horror and anxiety at this empty hole, filled with monsters or at the anonymous faces on the other side of screen, these things embody the complete opposite of emotion, harmony or beauty: they are the cold face of the inorganic, the materiality of the image itself, flat, referential, but not present for us or for any

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other body. These unsettling presences of absence, the different faces of anonymous negativity that make their appearance through various media in these creepypasta are just the messengers of darkness, the figuration and masks of a world without us.

“The Expressionless,” “Gateway of the Mind” and H. G. Wells’ “Red Room” The face of a world without bodies and humanity, the absolute blankness of inhuman materiality can be witnessed in “The Expressionless,” a creepypasta that is concerned with the horrifying appearance of a woman in a white, blood-covered gown at Cedar Senai hospital in 1972. Like de Man’s reference to Heinrich von Kleist’s marionettes and their mechanised movement, the woman “wasn’t exactly human,” she “resembled something close to a mannequin,” and had a “flawless as a mannequin’s” face.48 Despite her “emotionless eyes” and “blank expression,” her mouth had sharp spikes instead of teeth, which she uses to kill one of the staff. Here, her inhumanity is linked to a theological materiality as she utters, “I . . . am . . . God.” The creepypasta encapsulates the recipe of online horror stories, as the occulted face of the internet and the fear of the totally indifferent other are coupled with the promise of blood and gore, and the mystery of the inhuman, draped here in the mystical and an immanent god indifferent to human will. The concept of faceless horror is linked to the fascination with what lies outside human perception and here it is manifested in the presence of god. After examining the multiple faces of anonymous horror, through faceless figures, blurred faces and expressionless mannequins, we arrive at the erasure of all human senses in the “Gateway of the Mind.” The creepypasta outlines the results of a human experiment to determine whether “a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God.”49 The old man who volunteers undergoes surgery and is purged of all his senses with no way to communicate with the outside world. Trapped within his body, he becomes a medium, channelling messages from the dead. Eventually, before he dies, he reports that he has spoken with god and he has abandoned us. The pasta plays with the illusion of surface and depth, as if the elimination of senses would give access to depth, thought and god, only to deliver the melancholy of aloneness and nothingness. These couple of creepypasta, while not focussed on online media, associate, nonetheless, communication with what lies beyond human perception. A female without a human face and a man without any senses are figures of that which is inaccessible in media and communication. Gothic media are concerned with accessing that which is out of our reach, making things appear where they should not exist, or focussing on the absence of things, the inaccessibility of media.

114 The Real of Cyberia Perhaps, it is appropriate to conclude with a short nineteenth-century story by H. G. Wells, which manages to capture this darkness of meaning so persistent in creepypasta and the recurrent myths about horrors lurking online. In the story, coincidentally but very aptly titled “The Red Room” (1894), the protagonist chooses to spend the night in the haunted red room of Lorraine Castle, in order to disprove the existence of ghosts because, as he says, “it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me.”50 Gothic figuration cloaks the castle’s surroundings with an atmosphere of eeriness fitting to the tradition of a gothic story: I must confess that the oddness of these three old pensioners in whose charge her ladyship had left the castle, and the deep-toned, old-fashioned furniture of the housekeeper’s room, in which they foregathered, had affected me curiously in spite of my effort to keep myself at a matter-of-fact phase.51 The story materialises the ghosts of a different time in the recollection of an older age “when omens and witches were credible, and ghosts beyond denying.” The old pensioners’ existence, thought I, is spectral; the cut of their clothing, fashions born in dead brains; the ornaments and conveniences in the room about them even are ghostly—the thoughts of vanished men, which still haunt rather than participate in the world of to-day. But the story moves beyond the supernatural, ghosts, hauntings and familiar gothic tropes to define the fear of something else. The play of light and dark, visible and invisible, accessibility and inaccessibility of knowledge, have been recurrent themes in the discussion of internet horror stories and myths. “The Red Room” condenses all these themes in the single theme of darkness as the inability to see what is lurking in the shadows: The shadow in the alcove at the end of the room began to display that undefinable quality of a presence, that odd suggestion of a lurking living thing that comes so easily in silence and solitude. And to reassure myself, I walked with a candle into it and satisfied myself that there was nothing tangible there. No matter how many candles are lighted, these are extinguished, and darkness begins to form, “as one might start and see the unexpected presence of a stranger. The black shadow had sprung back to its place.” Fighting with a relentless darkness and relighting the candles, the narrator is finally engulfed by blackness and flees the room. Using images of the eye shutting and sealed vision, the narrator dispels the myths of ghosts, by explaining that the impalpable source of horror was intolerable black

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fear and the power of darkness. It is this indefinable blackness that nurtures the myths and stories and surrounds the red room with superstition. As the narrator admits, “one could well understand the legends that had sprouted in its black corners, its germinating darknesses.” One might as well admit, that the darkness and opacity of the dark web, together with our fears of what might be lurking in the dark pleats of the internet, will continue to feed our digital fantasies, as we strive to give tangible form to an inexpressible materiality. In Chapter 5, this inhuman materiality snakes through inanimate matter, as we move on to explore Edgar Allan Poe’s dark materialism and life beyond the organic limits of humanity.

Notes 1. Internet axiom. 2. Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 82. 3. de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” 70–90. 4. Patricia Hernandez, “A Horror Game That May Be Hidden in the Darkest Corners of the Internet,” https://kotaku.com/a-horror-game-hidden-in-thedarkest-corners-of-the-inte-1714980337. 5. Jody Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010). 6. See Jamie Bartlett, The Dark Net (London: Windmill Books, 2015). 7. Liz Gannes, “19-Year-Old Commits Suicide on Justin.tv,” Gigaom, 20 November 2008, https://gigaom.com/2008/11/20/19-year-old-commits-suicideon-justintv/. Lucy Williamson, “French Periscope Death Stirs Social Media Safety Fears,” BBC News, 13 May 2016, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36274051. Samuel Gibbs, “Facebook and Twitter Users Complain over Virginia Shooting Videos Autoplay,” The Guardian, 27 August 2015, www.theguar dian.com/technology/2015/aug/27/facebook-twitter-users-complain-virginiashooting-videos-autoplay. 8. Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto,” 9 March 1993, www.activism. net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html. 9. Andy Greenberg, “Meet the ‘Assassination Market’ Creator Who’s Crowdfunding Murder with Bitcoins,” Forbes, 18 November 2013, www.forbes. com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassination-market-cre ator-whos-crowdfunding-murder-with-bitcoins/#68b89d3e3d9b. 10. Tim May, “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” 22 November 1992, www. activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html. 11. Jim Bell, “Assassination Politics,” 3 April 1997, http://cryptome.org/ap.htm. 12. The “new algorithmic identity” is what John Cheney-Lippold refers to as the digital identity formed through mathematical algorithms. One’s identity is determined by information amassed by web analytics firms based on one’s internet browsing history. “A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 6 (2011): 164–81. 13. Nick Land, “Machinic Desire,” Textual Practice 7, no. 3 (1993): 471–82, 481. 14. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures, 1999 (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010).

116 The Real of Cyberia 15. Austin Considine, “Bored at Work? Try Creepypasta, or Web Scares,” New York Times, 12 November 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/fashion/ 14noticed.html?_r=0. 16. Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Hants: Zero Books, 2012), 3. 17. Harman, Weird Realism, 35, 111–112. 18. Harman, Weird Realism, 162–3. 19. Mark Fisher, “I Put My Finger on the Weird .  .  .,” Kpunk, 29 November 2007, http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/009906.html. 20. Fisher, “I Put My Finger on the Weird . . .” 21. “BEN Drowned” is given in the form of posts and a diary, as well as footage of video gameplay under the YouTube channel of Alex Hall (Jadusable). The footage includes a warped soundtrack, glitches and a statue of the ghost of BEN, who follows the player in the game. http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/ BEN_Drowned. 22. “Candle Cove” is a creepypasta about a haunted TV show in which a group of adults discusses a 1970s children’s TV show on a web forum and reminisce about its disturbing details. While parents would only see static on the TV, the children would witness the show’s puppets screaming and flailing, and even see a skeleton pirate called Skin-Taker in children’s skin. The story is presented in the form of message board posts as they appeared on the fictional NetNostalgia forum Kris Straub, “Candle Cove,” http://ichorfalls. chainsawsuit.com/. 23. “Username: 666,” http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Username:_666; www. the13thfloor.tv/2016/08/18/creepypasta-is-username666-the-most-danger ous-video-on-the-web/. 24. “Unbranded Laptop,” http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Unbranded_Laptop. 25. “The Slender Man,” https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/slender-man#trender. 26. “The Slender Man,” https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/slender-man#trender. 27. Eugene Thacker, “Dark Media,” in Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker and Mckenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 87. 28. Lindsay Beyerstein, “Slender Man Is a Convenient Target for Our Fears: Misogyny and Racism Aren’t,” The Guardian, 5 June 2014, www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2014/jun/05/slender-man-wisconsin-stabbing-misogynyracism. 29. Beyerstein, “Slender Man Is a Convenient Target for Our Fears.” 30. Nicky Woolf, “Slender Man: The Shadowy Online Figure Blamed in Grisly Wisconsin Stabbing,” The Guardian, 4 June 2014, www.theguardian.com/ world/2014/jun/04/slender-man-online-character-wisconsin-stabbings. 31. Thacker, “Dark Media,” 90. 32. Thacker, “Dark Media,” 92. 33. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 197. 34. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 125. 35. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York and London: Penguin Group, 1977), 71. 36. Žižek, Looking Awry, 126. 37. Paul de Man, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 80. 38. “Psychosis,” www.creepypasta.com/psychosis/.

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39. Claire Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 22, 15. 40. “Psychosis.” 41. “Psychosis.” 42. “Psychosis.” 43. “Satellite Images,” http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Satellite_Images. 44. “Satellite Images.” 45. “Satellite Images.” 46. “Satellite Images.” 47. “Satellite Images.” 48. “The Expressionless,”http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Expressionless. 49. “Gateway of the Mind,” www.creepypasta.com/gateway-of-the-mind/. 50. H. G. Wells, “The Red Room,” The Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ files/23218/23218-h/23218-h.htm. 51. H. G. Wells, “The Red Room.”

5

Inhuman Materiality in Edgar Allan Poe’s Stories

Edgar Allan Poe’s monstrous merging of organic and inorganic matter, the concept of living death and gothic vitalism, as well as his treatment of mesmerism, form part of his materialist philosophy, and one that shares similar concerns with what it has been termed in the course of the book as inhuman materiality. It is not only in his attempts to show matter’s vitalism or inorganic life as mechanical and undulating, but also in his persistence to uncover a life beyond the limited organicity of the body, that Poe’s inhumanism and materialism are most clear. His dark materialism is evident in those stories where life appears as creative destruction and decaying, as in the plague which is masked in the cerements of the grave in “The Masque of the Red Death” or vampirically feeds on life as in “Ligeia.” Poe’s unique blend of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s absolute identity highlights exactly his interest in a materialism that has nothing to do with interiority, identity, subjectivity or the organic, but as that which is inhuman and impersonal and which disarticulates human certainties. Such materialism sees matter as disorganised life, a vitalistic mechanism or deathly automatism, and which Poe’s stories foreground in the animation of the inorganic or in the terrifying words of one who is no longer alive. As Poe himself put it so well in a letter to Chivers in 1844, There is no such thing as spirituality. God is material. All things are material; yet the matter of God has all the qualities which we attribute to the Spirit; thus the difference is scarcely more than words. There is a matter without particles—of no atomic composition: this is God. It permeates and impels all things, and thus is all things in itself. Its agitation is the thought of God, and creates. Man and other beings (inhabitants of the stars) are portions of this unparticied matter, individualized by being incorporated in the ordinary or particled matter. Thus they exist rudimentally. Death is the painful metamorphosis.1 It is to those stories where Poe is mostly concerned with life after death and materialism, particularly his stories on mesmeric phenomena or

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vampirism that I will turn, as the most succinct examples of his dark materialism and exploration of a world beyond the human.

Mesmerism Poe’s interest in death as the continuation of inhuman life, or as “nonorganic discontinuum of raw matter,”2 is expressed in three stories where mesmerism is a central concern. The first one is “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” which appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book in April 1844, and is concerned with the idea of metempsychosis and animal magnetism. The next story where mesmerism is a central idea recounting in detail the experience, is “Mesmeric Revelation,”3 which was published in August 1844 in Columbian Magazine. The most sensational story of mesmerism is “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,”4 which was published in the American Whig Review in December 1845. Mesmerism, or animal magnetism, is the pseudo-scientific belief in a natural and invisible force permeating all living things, which was named after the eighteenth-century German doctor Frans Anton Mesmer. A forerunner of what is now named as hypnosis, mesmerism was the transference of an ethereal fluid between the mesmerist and the client which induced a trance like state to heal him/her of bodily disease, or any other physical or emotional pain. It is not clear for what reason Poe became interested in mesmerism in the 1840s, but we can take as an indication of his interest his praise of Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend’s 1841 Facts in Mesmerism, or Animal Magnetism. Mesmerism was the fad of his time, mainly in England and Scotland, and as Caroll Dee Laverty explains, he possibly decided to work it in his stories, especially those of 1844 and 1845, due to the growing interest in his own country. Laverty writes: But mesmerism made other appeals to him. In the mesmeric state, he fancied, a person could learn more of the conditions of death than anywhere else. Mesmerism appealed to his persistent interest in mental phenomena phrenology, insanity, psychology, the operations of the “soul.” Mesmerism was in the romantic tradition: it was strange and mysterious; it temporarily released the soul from its carnal bonds; it transcended space and time; it involved an exertion of the will—a subject often interesting to him. For these reasons, probably, he used mesmerism in his short stories.5 It is because of the interest in the “conditions of death,” that Poe’s stories on mesmerism are most fascinating and, particularly, because they are so closely connected to that unspeakable region beyond human experience of which he is such a master. For Laverty, it is not clear to which extent Poe believed in mesmerism either. His statements are often contradictory, but he

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does point out that most of his own published statements suggest that he considered mesmerism “more as a metaphysical fad than as a true science.”6 Nonetheless, Poe’s treatment of mesmerism foregrounds his ideas and interest in life after death, or living death, especially in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and “Mesmeric Revelation.” In these stories, there is a sense of death cheating life or life cheating death, as the literature of mesmerism itself attests. In his Somnulism and Psycheism (1851), Joseph W. Haddock cites a case of mesmerism as extracted from the work of French mesmerist, M. Chardel, in which a mesmerised daughter correctly diagnoses her mother’s disease before her death. But, what is also interesting is the fact that she admits that mesmerism is what has kept her mother’s body alive: “My mother has been very weak for some days; she has only lived by the magnetism, which has artificially sustained her; life is failing.”7 It is this state of artificial death and strange vitalism that Poe’s stories set out to examine. “Mesmeric Revelation” is Poe’s pamphlet of materialism where his idea of spirit being a rarefied kind of matter is presented through, what was believed to be among many of Poe’s contemporaries, a true account of a mesmeric experiment. This, drove Poe to clarify in “Marginal Notes” in Godey’s, in August 1845: The Swedenborgians inform me that they have discovered all that I said in a magazine article entitled “Mesmeric Revelation,” to be absolutely true, although at first they were very strongly inclined to doubt my veracity—a thing which, in this particular instance, I never dreamed of not doing myself. The story is a pure fiction front beginning to end.8 “Mesmeric Revelation” is then a fictional account of a mesmeric experiment, where the subject is in a state of which the “phenomena resemble very closely those of death” and “yet perceives, with keenly refined perception, and through channels supposed unknown, matters beyond the scope of the physical organs.”9 Poe then proceeds to detail the conversation that takes place between the narrator and mesmerist and the “sleepwaker” Vankirk, who is dying of consumption.10 Vankirk explains that the mesmerist has not been called to alleviate his bodily pain, but to help him deal with the source of his anxiety, his scepticism about the soul’s immortality. The colloquy then centres on Vankirk’s idea that mesmerism has facilitated a certain rationale and this “profound self-cognizance evinced by the sleep-waker—the extensive knowledge he displays upon all points relating to the mesmeric condition itself,” can only be proved and experienced once he is mesmerised again.11 Under this condition, Vankirk begins to set out a materialist philosophy, whereby matter and not spirit permeates everything. As he elaborates, “That which is not matter, is not at all” and that:

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there are gradations of matter of which man knows nothing; the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser. The atmosphere, for example, impels the electric principle, while the electric principle permeates the atmosphere. These gradations of matter increase in rarity or fineness, until we arrive at a matter unparticled— without particles—indivisible—one; and here the law of impulsion and permeation is modified. The ultimate, or unparticled matter, not only permeates all things but impels all things—and thus is all things within itself. This matter is God. What men attempt to embody in the word “thought,” is this matter in motion.12 Thinking, then, is “unparticled matter, set in motion by a law, or quality, existing within itself.”13 Spirit is also explained as unparticled matter, due to its atomic constitution, even if different matters can “escape the senses in gradation.” Vankirk notes that, for example, when we try to conceive of “the luminiferous ether,” “we feel an almost irresistible inclination to class it with spirit,” but what restrains us is our conception of its atomic constitution; and here, even, we have to seek aid from our notion of an atom, as something possessing in infinite minuteness, solidity, palpability, weight. Destroy the idea of the atomic constitution and we should no longer be able to regard the ether as an entity, or at least as matter.14 Through his discussion of matter, Vankirk arrives to the human, which he explains as materiality and that it can never be bodiless. Materiality is connected to death, but death understood not as an end. Against idealism, matter is not inertia or death in a conventional sense, but a dark organicity. He says: There are two bodies—the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call “death,” is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.15 According to Vankirk, ultimate life is death, but death resembling the mesmeric state. This is what he terms unorganised life, abstract and inhuman materiality in the de Manian sense of disarticulation. Vankirk recognises that the vitality permeating and causing the body to vibrate, is not limited to that body. Mesmerism resembles death and ultimate life because “when I am entranced the senses of my rudimental life are in abeyance, and I perceive external things directly, without organs, through a medium which I shall employ in the ultimate, unorganized life.” The organic body is a mere “contrivance” which facilitates relations with other forms of

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matter, while excluding others. In this sense, the human, organic body is a limited and “rudimental condition” and the ultimate condition is that of “being unorganized.”16 Thus, the concept of matter and life transgress the limits of the human, the organic and individuality to embrace abstract life and living death: But in the ultimate, unorganized life, the external world reaches the whole body, (which is of a substance having affinity to brain, as I have said,) with no other intervention than that of an infinitely rarer ether than even the luminiferous; and to this ether—in unison with it—the whole body vibrates, setting in motion the unparticled matter which permeates it. It is to the absence of idiosyncratic organs, therefore, that we must attribute the nearly unlimited perception of the ultimate life. To rudimental beings, organs are the cages necessary to confine them until fledged.17 It is not unbefitting then to conclude his story, with the realisation that Vankirk had already expired, and that his last words were possibly dictated from beyond the grave. As the narrator wonders: “Had the sleepwaker, indeed, during the latter portion of his discourse, been addressing me from out the region of the shadows?”18 Death in Poe is not the end, but painful metamorphosis, a passage towards ultimate life, the inhuman and the impersonal that flow through the whole of nature. Mesmerism and death are further explored in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” where mesmerism is shown to sustain a state of vitality even after death has come to the body. Again, like with “Mesmeric Revelation,” the story was believed to be true, with many readers writing to Poe to confirm the veracity of the facts. This made a writer in the New-York Daily Tribune of 10 December 1845 to comment that the story was “a pretty good specimen of Poe’s style of giving an air of reality to fictions . . . but whoever thought it a veracious recital must have the bump of Faith large, very large indeed.” To which, Poe replied with playful irony, writing in the Broadway Journal of 13 December 1845: For our parts we find it difficult to understand how any dispassionate transcendentalist can doubt the facts as we state them: they are by no means so incredible as the marvels which are hourly narrated, and believed on the topic of Mesmerism. Why cannot a man talk after he is dead? Why?—why? that is the question; and as soon as the Tribune has answered it to our satisfaction we will talk to it farther.19 The voice of a man talking even after he is dead is indeed terrifying. The story is about the effects of mesmerism on the body at the moment of death. The narrator is interested in experimenting with mesmerism to

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define whether the magnetic influence could be increased or impaired by death, or whether he could postpone death altogether. But when the mesmerised Valdemar is pronounced dead, the narrator and the doctors are horrified by the realisation that Valdemar continues to speak. The narrator immediately notices that “there issued from the distended and motionless jaws a voice—such as it would be madness in me to attempt describing.”20 The “hideous” and “indescribable” sounds which have never “jarred upon the ear of humanity” were “unearthly” as if the voice came “from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth.”21 The “unutterable shuddering horror” of Valdemar’s reply that “I am dead,”22 finds its ultimate conclusion in the attempts to awaken him from a trance-like state that had lasted nearly seven months. In those final moments, with the words “dead” “bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer,” Valdemar’s body immediately rotted away in a mass of “detestable putridity.”23 The story, like “Mesmeric Revelation,” is an attempt to give literally voice to a world beyond human experience and thought. As with the novels and texts examined throughout this book, horror disorganises life and human securities, in order to push thought beyond its limits and make contact with the shuddering horror of a world that is utterly inhuman and abstract. But Poe’s interest in the dark materiality of life is not only limited to his interest in mesmerism. In the following stories, matter and vitalism are amalgamated into a demonic marriage, as life is experienced in its mechanical quality.

Edgar Allan Poe and Life as Inhuman and Mechanical Materiality Here, I am interested in those stories that enact an interruption in the course of the narrative, by tracing the strange materiality of life, the flickering light of demonic life through the colours and effects of expressive matter. In Poe’s tales, blood and other inanimate things appear disturbing and unsettling to the narrator by exhibiting the signs of a strange life and thus questioning his concrete ideals about life and the human. Poe’s stories, where blood is central, such as “The Masque of the Red Death,” but also those that are concerned with the transmigration of souls or the life in inorganic things, are particularly useful in shedding light on blood and life as a mechanical and inhuman force. Whether blood communicates with a world beyond as in “Ligeia,” or is itself the horror of the plague as in “The Masque of the Red Death,” it is an inhuman matter whose terrifying power lies in the fact that it unveils the horror of a malevolent and negative life; a life also found in the disintegration of the body itself. The notion of materiality as this force imbued with gothic life, whether it is blood, inorganic things or monstrous forms that disrupt the life of the human, is something that Poe clearly associates with the impossibility

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of knowing and unintelligibility. This materiality appears at the limits of thought and thus it cannot be put into words. D. H. Lawrence touches upon this idea when he finds in Poe’s stories a concern with knowing and analysing which he associates with consumption, death and the female characters’ physical disintegration. As he writes, what Poe “wants to do with Ligeia is to analyse her, till he knows all her component parts, till he has got her all in his consciousness. [. . .] But she won’t be quite analysed out. There is something he can’t get.”24 For Lawrence, it is horrible to try and master the secret of life that should remain unknown. Thus, to “know a living thing is to kill it”25 because, “like the analysis of protoplasm,” you “can only analyse dead protoplasm, and know its constituents. It is a death-process.”26 Indeed, this is why in those passages where the narrator desperately attempts to know and describe life itself, he comes close to the limits of thought, and the boundaries of life and death. Like de Manian materiality that is something unknowable or unintelligible, so here this inhuman materiality appears at the limits of knowledge, as the impossibility of human thought to grasp life itself. De Man also associates materiality with memorisation by rote which is automatic, mindless and mechanical. In his readings of Hegel, the aesthetic is akin to an emotionless, non-sentimental memorisation: “Like a stutter, or a broken record, it makes what it keeps repeating worthless and meaningless”; “it offers nothing to please anyone.”27 In “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” he refers to a materiality when we learn by heart and all meaning is forgotten “and words read as if they were a mere list of names.”28 Learning by rote or the “material inscription of names”—writing down words in order to remember them—is “a mental faculty that is mechanical through and through, as remote as can be from the sounds and the images of the imagination or from the dark mine of recollection, which lies beyond the reach of words and of thought.”29 In “Hegel on the Sublime,” de Man captures this inhuman materiality of language without intent or purpose in the image of a ventriloquist dummy. For de Man, there is no self that speaks, but inhuman language that speaks through us.30 De Man’s gothic figure of a ventriloquist, that speaks like a medium or someone possessed, resonates with Poe’s figure of a mesmerised Vankirk, but also with his descriptions of Egaeus’ mental illness in “Berenice.” There is something unknowable that trembles at the limits of memory, not as meaningful recollection, but as a mechanical materiality that is sensed rather than thought. The narrator connects this to the theme of reincarnation and remembering previous lives. As he says, there is a remembrance of aerial forms—of spiritual and meaning eyes—of sounds, musical yet sad; a remembrance which will not be excluded; a memory like a shadow—vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.31

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Further, after Berenice’s consuming disease, the narrator Egaeus’ own disease rapidly grows. His “monomania” and “intensity of interest”32 make him susceptible to intuiting this vague and unknown materiality that de Man connects to mechanical repetition. As the narrator contemplates: To muse for long unwearied hours, with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin or in the typography of a book; to become absorbed, for the better part of a summer’s day, in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry or upon the floor; to lose myself, for an entire night, in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat, monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical existence, by means of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in: such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation.33 Egaeus here is absorbed in the materiality of life itself as something that language cannot express. The inability of the mind to grasp this materiality is felt as “horror more horrible for being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity.”34 He focuses on typographical and ornamental signs on the pages of books, but also on expressive matter and the life of inanimate things: the shadows on tapestries and walls, the flames of lamps, the perfume of flowers. Language is siphoned off meaning, and he becomes obsessed with material inscriptions and meaningless signs. More particularly, Egaeus’ monotonous repetition of “some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind” could not be more accurate and succinct definition of what de Man calls the materiality of inscription. While Egaeus is obsessed with meaningless repetition, the nameless narrator in “Ligeia” desires to analyse and know but is unable to grasp the meaning in Ligeia’s eyes even after their “intense scrutiny.”35 The sentiment which her “large and luminous orbs”36 arouse is associated with the forces of life. As he says, despite the difficulty to define or analyse the strange sentiment, he, nonetheless, recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidlygrowing vine—in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean; in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And there are one or two stars in heaven—(one especially, a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near

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Inhuman Materiality in Poe’s Stories the large star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books.37

The narrator’s scrutiny of life and growth in organic and inorganic things, but also of the strange life in “unusually aged people,” is tinged with unsettling undertones. This is a life that is exceeding its limits, growing too much or abnormally, witnessed in the life of the smallest, most delicate insects but also in that of the vast surfaces of the earth.38 The persistence of life is further described in a quote that may have been made up by Poe and is attributed to Joseph Glanvill:39 And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.40 This vigorous force of the will to life that is stronger than death, resonates with Schopenhauer’s will to life, as discussed in Chapter 3. Here, associated with the divine and the mystical, it permeates all animate and inanimate things and enables man to conquer death. “Ligeia” is concerned with life after death as an inhuman force that runs through the living and the dead and transcends the boundaries of those material things it animates. Indeed, in Poe’s stories that deal with the theme of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, such as “Morella,” but more particularly “Ligeia,” the inhuman is visible as the glowing embers of a dark life beyond the human. The theme of metempsychosis, if understood within the context of American transcendentalism and the Emersonian myth of Adamic freedom, individualism and self-creation reveals preoccupations about the perfection and development of the human. Such concerns become central in current discussions on inhumanism and the posthuman which will be later analysed in the final chapter. Poe’s stories, however, offer a unique and different view of metempsychosis than that of his contemporaries. For American transcendentalists, the notion of a complete individual where both the physical and spiritual meet in a single and solid unifying system expressed the myth of the Adamic American. The American Adam of nineteenth-century American literature is a figure of heroic virtue and gigantic potential at the beginning of a new history. German idealism’s conception of developmental and progressive historical change was a major influence in nineteenth-century American literature. The Adamic literature of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman figured

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this forward-looking optimism and individualism where the corpse of the past was abandoned in order to move forward toward the direction of the New Man, the American. This movement from the past to a new state is described by Ralph Waldo Emerson through the metaphor of metempsychosis which depicts human consciousness and the soul’s journey through history as a process of self-knowledge.41 Although influenced by his contemporaries and German idealism’s notion of consciousness and the transformation of one’s self through spiritual knowledge, his system unsettles any definite closure and correspondence between the material and the spiritual. As Corrigan argues, Emerson’s “metempsychotic perception” is an open process and an “ongoing and unsettled dilemma” of self-constitution whereby the individual seeks to become a more conscious whole.42 Applied to a national level, Emerson’s project imagined the future poet questioning the past and living through and uniting various identities so as to found a new American nation, realise a fitter individuation and to help others accomplish theirs. While for Emerson the transmigration of souls is seen in relation to evolution, since the self develops as it passes through “successive transmigratory perceptions,”43 for Poe, the journey of the spirit through matter is characterised by disintegration and putrefaction, giving rise to a satanic will beyond human control. Poe’s transmigration of souls is not harmonious or a perfect transformation but a demonic resurrection and a malevolent materialism that strangles idealist aspirations. If the Adamic figure embodies the ethos of individualistic liberalism characterised by ambition, intrepid spirit, self-affirmation, unrestrained opportunity and a quest to exceed limits, it seems that Poe’s Ligeia, with her gigantic volition and fervent Will, is a satanic Eve that unveils the dark side of such idealist ambitions. In a similar way, Poe’s interest in the “appalling spectacles of inanimate matter,”44 the strange vitality of blood and inhuman life where the merging of the organic and inorganic unveils the signs of a dark vitalism needs to be understood in conjunction to his interest in, and deviation from, transcendental idealism. In his stories, there is an urge for metaphysical union which is disrupted by the horror of evil spirit. The horror of Poe’s stories arises from this tension between metaphysics and inhuman materiality, between the desire to synthesise dualisms into an absolute identity and their disruption by the fleshy materiality of monstrous bodies and their dangerous persistence to transcend God’s will. This tension between idealism and materiality has been historically analysed by critics. In “Gothic Romanticism and Rational Empiricism in Poe’s Berenice” (1973), David E. E. Sloane examines the tensions between poetic intuition and scientific rationalism, in order to conclude that “the merging of systems in ‘Berenice’ is a dramatic rejection of empirical science as it is seized upon by the inflamed mind of Egaeus, the egomaniac” who abhors the earthly while attempting to tackle with the materiality of Berenice.45

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For Sloane, the end of the story questions American science, while, at the same time, parodying the traditions of the European Gothic novel.46 Louis A. Renza, in “Poe’s Secret Autobiography” (1985), explains that like “Ligeia,” “Eureka propagates the notion of an entropic material spiritualism precisely in contradistinction to the ‘natural supernaturalism’ or intimations of immortality that permeate the writings of Poe’s English and especially American Romantic peers.”47 Maurice Lee, for example, has read the horror of Poe’s stories in terms of the tension between metaphysics and racism. As he writes in “Absolute Poe: His System of Transcendental Racism” (2003), “Poe struggles to assimilate his politics and metaphysics, an antinomy evident in ‘Metzengerstein,’ if only in nascent form.”48 According to Lee, Poe’s anomalous position within antebellum literature is due to this uncomfortable amalgamation of romantic idealism and the issue of slavery and race. Joan Dayan in Fables of Mind (1987) finds that Poe’s expression “engages one in a fierce seesaw motion between apparent opposites”;49 between idealism and materialism, uniting transcendental and empirical theories. Poe’s stories about taint, corruption and disability are not merely about slavery, but also about the “mysteries of identity, the riddle of bodies and minds that lived during a generation that proclaimed perfectibility . . . but that he knew was steeped in disaffection.”50 In “Amorous Bondage” she reads Poe’s work in terms of “radical dehumanization” by arguing that both “etherealization” and “brutalization,” the de-materialisation of black men and the idealisation of angelic women, are processes of sublimation.51 Humanity is displaced through operations that resist Enlightenment dualisms. As she explains, for most nineteenth-century theologians and anthropologists, animality is inherent in those beings that are both human and beast: women, black men and children.52 To embroider upon this statement, it can be said that Poe’s stories where the dualism of matter and spirit is present in gothic and monstrous forms reveal the inhuman in the human, not in order to dehumanise, but to resist any comfortable and joyful idealisation of life and uncover the negative forces of a vitalistic principle contaminated by the putrefaction of the grave. Poe undermines the dualism of body and spirit. His views resonate with the German idealism of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling.53 While Poe parodies Kant, Coleridge and the American transcendentalists, the “Frogpondians,” in his satires, “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” at the same time, his writing is influenced by transcendentalism’s absolute oneness. Poe’s reception of Schelling and German philosophy was perhaps second hand through Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), the transcendentalism of Carlyle, Cousin, de Quincey and de Staël, as well as Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Vivian Grey (1826).54 As Lee points out, during the emergence of transcendentalism in the 1830s, Schelling was more widely read and better understood than other philosophers such as Hegel.55

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In “Morella” (1835), “Loss of Breath” (1831) and “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” Poe mentions the “absurd metaphysicianism”56 of Schelling and his view on identity. In “Morella,” Schelling’s doctrine of identity is the focus of the narrator and the eponymous heroine’s discussions. The idea of personal identity, “which at death is or is not lost forever,”57 forms the central thesis of Schelling’s The Philosophy of Art (1802–1803; 1804–1805). Poe is interested in Schelling’s definition of the imagination as the power of mutual unity, where the ideal is simultaneously real and the body and mind merge into one. This is what Poe, after the ancient philosophers, calls “principium individuationis,” and which describes the moment that something diverse forms into a unity. This principle of singularity is the metamorphosis of an individual into a singularity, understood as the absolute of singularity and totality. This absolute of life itself, beyond the dualisms of life and death, is understood negatively by Poe as the horrific contemplation of inhuman life. According to Schelling, nature is permeated by a universal substance, the absolute, which is living force coursing through organic life and inorganic matter, spirit and nature, ideal and real. Schelling refused to distinguish between living and dead mechanical movement and sought to understand everything as an expression of the living principle of life. In this respect, the positive principle of spirit or life penetrates and unifies harmoniously both the organic and inorganic, mind and body in a creative interaction that does not subordinate one to the other. On the one hand, this is the expression of the Good where Spirit circulates through, and illuminates, nature. Human freedom consists in the striving of one’s will for self-knowledge and the unity of opposites. On the other hand, Evil is the false unification of opposites by the self-willing of the individual. In diverting from the path of the good, man’s selfish will is elevated to that of universal will; an irrational persistence of the Will that exemplifies true diabolical Evil. Evil is then a passionate spiritualism, “a perversion of the true spirituality” which “despises sensuality and is bent on violently dominating and exploiting it.”58 What is evil then is Spirit that materialises as a monstrous inversion of nature: this is the life that writhes and undulates under the pale and bloodless face of Ligeia. Indeed, the good is associated with a harmonious life and will, while evil with a perverse will. Ligeia is characterised by her passion and will for life, but when that becomes irrational and wants to rise above everything else, the “convulsive writhings of her fierce spirit” and “the intensity of her wild desire for life,—for life—but for life”59 become a “pitiable spectacle”60 that challenges God’s will. This is supported by Joseph Glanvill’s aphorism about the strength and vitality of the will, quoted previously. For Schelling, an energetic selfhood is good and not evil as long as human will remains subordinated to the light and includes love, “for, where there is no struggle, there is no life.”61 Indeed, to a certain degree, her passion for life is positive and praised by the narrator. But Ligeia’s

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will tears itself away from the good and becomes evil in and for itself, “a hunger of selfishness which, to the degree that it renounces the whole and unity, becomes ever more desolate, poorer, but precisely for that reason greedier, hungrier, and more venomous,”62 pursuing a life beyond limits and against god. Ligeia’s consumptive disease can be read as the result of her misuse of freedom and the persistence of her perverse will. Consumption, disintegration and decay are here the negative forces of an inhuman life. For Schelling, Evil is similar to disease. Given the fact that Ligeia’s self-will is elevated, and persists even after death then, a life emerges which, though individual, is, however, false, a life of mendacity, a growth of restlessness and decay. The most fitting comparison here is offered by disease which, as the disorder having arisen in nature through the misuse of freedom, is the true counter-part of evil or sin.63 Ligeia’s wasting disease is related to her energetic will, and more particularly her gigantic knowledge and fascination with “wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!”64 As the narrator admits, her “readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed.”65 This passage can be further illuminated by another short story, “Never Bet the Devil your Head” (1841), in which Poe parodies moralistic literature and transcendentalism. In the story the narrator tells us that the character of Toby Dammit is “affected with the transcendentals” which he diagnoses as a “disease.”66 Like with Ligeia, there was something in the “manner” of Dammit that the narrator finds “queer” but “Mr. Coleridge would have called mystical, Mr. Kant pantheistical, Mr. Carlisle [[Carlyle]] twistical, and Mr. Emerson hyperfizzitistical. I began not to like it at all. Mr. Dammit’s soul was in a perilous state.”67 Here Poe attacks transcendentalism’s belief in the power of the individual, inner spirituality, knowledge and truth. With its focus on the human mind and inspiration, transcendentalism elevates the spiritual while rejecting matter and sensual experience. In this respect, in “Ligeia,” this persistence of spirit over matter is understood as evil, false and the cause of disease. Ligeia’s life is also exemplary of a negative life that should not be living but which grows through decay and consumption. Ligeia’s inhuman existence as a monstrous amalgamation of the ideal and the real is foregrounded in the horror and the disharmony between matter and spirit in the descriptions of objects permeated with vitality. Ligeia’s longing and will as characteristics of life itself are foreshadowed in the animation of matter. Like Schelling, Poe is interested in dead and living movement as different expressions of the principle of life. Poe exhumes here a dark vitalism and an unnatural monstrous life: “It writhes!—it writhes!”68 In the abbey the narrator describes “a huge

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censer . . . with many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of parti-colored fires.”69 Like the horrific vitality of the snake-like tongues of fire writhing in and out of the censer, the arabesque figures on the tapestry material, when regarded from a certain angle, seemed hideously animated. This phantasmagoric effect gave the figures “the appearance of simple monstrosities; but upon a farther advance, this appearance gradually departed; and step by step, as the visiter moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms.”70 This perverse life is the same life that animates the vampire body of Ligeia, an uncanny and diabolical inversion of human life. Like Schelling, Poe smudged the line between vitalism and materialism by bringing to the fore the unnatural materiality of spirit. This materiality of undead matter and of inhuman life is present in the blood itself. As the editor notes, the drops are “rather a primary corporeal form attained by Ligeia’s spirit; and in themselves the elixir of life.”71 “Ligeia” unveils the horror of the reanimating corpse and life beyond the boundaries of death. Death does not announce the end of Ligeia’s life but her revivification in an undead horrifying state. Through Rowena’s dead body, the fanatical spirit of Ligeia materialises. Her spirit and living force enter Rowena’s bodily form through the materiality of blood: “Three or four large drops of a brilliant ruby colored fluid.”72 Following the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century belief in vitalism, and particularly John Hunter’s vitalistic ideas, blood contained the principle of life itself, a material agent that he called materia vitae diffusa.73 In addition, the idea of a red liquid points towards the elixir vitae whose colour mystical writers believed to be that of a ruby. In alchemical writings, blood functioned as an image of mercury, the Arcanum of transformation and was considered to be the material of the elixir of life. The English scholar and alchemist Roger Bacon sought the elixir of life in human blood which was believed to contain a prima materia or first matter, the fundamental stuff found everywhere in nature.74 The alchemist then began with human blood in which the four humours, phlegm, blood, black and yellow bile, were separated and purified and then recombined in a “secret proportion, mixed with purified mercury, the calx of a base metal, and the calx of a noble metal. The resulting elixir can then be used as a means of transmuting base metals” but also for “prolonging human life.”75 Ligeia then desiring fervently another life beyond the grave is indulging in studies of “forbidden wisdom”76 and alchemy in order to defeat the “Conqueror Worm” and transcend the limitations of human life and the tragedy of “Man.”77 Blood is here the alchemical substance that unlocks the convulsions of inhuman life. Blood is also central in “The Masque of the Red Death,” where its horror is associated with uncanny vitality, the life of the plague and decay. The plague of the Red Death in the story is imaginary and is the

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equivalent of the Black Death. The source for the story is, however, historical, and Poe must have been familiar with the epidemic of cholera in 1832, in Paris, and descriptions of masque balls aimed at entertaining people who were aware of their imminent death. A description of a masque ball at the Théatre des Varietés, from the sixteenth letter of “Pencillings, by the Way” of N. P. Willis, referring to a man dressed as Cholera itself, “with skeleton armor, bloodshot eyes, and other horrible appurtenances of a walking pestilence,” was well known in Poe’s time.78 In Poe’s story, Prince Prospero retires with a thousand guests to the confined space of his abbey to immunise themselves against the danger of the plague.79 In the fifth or sixth month, during a masque ball, a horrific figure “shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave,”80 and personifying the Red Death, appears. When the revellers remove his corpselike mask, they discover nothing underneath. The horror of Death and the beyond, impossible to express in words, appears as the personification of Death and spreads decay. Poe’s story is unique in the way blood and its scarlet colour are the horror of the plague and disintegration: “blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood.”81 Blood does not stand for something else, but is itself horrific; both its colour and presence, the “scarlet stains” and “profuse bleeding” are the horrible materiality of disease.82 Death is dressed in the familiar cerements of death and the plague, but underneath there lies the unspeakable and intangible form of the beyond. Indeed, if the inhuman is intangible and indescribable, the closest the story gets to grasping this materiality is in the uncanny life of blood and things dabbled in blood red. Like in “Ligeia,” where the arabesque figures are imbued with mechanical vitality, here, life and blood are described in mechanical terms, while inanimate things are rendered expressive and animated. Blood is not shown to be organic but mechanical because, as the descriptions of the seventh apartment with black velvet tapestries reveal, “the redness and the horror of blood” are transferred onto light and matter giving an air of ghastly animation in the chamber. Like the writhing fires of the censer and the “monstrosities” of the tapestry in “Ligeia,” in Prospero’s black chamber, due to the deep blood coloured window panes, the light appeared monstrous: “the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered.”83 Poe’s descriptions materialise invisible light by drawing attention to its blood colour as it alters the visages of those who enter the room rendering them inhuman and monstrous. The horrific and inhuman effect of blood-red light passing through glass is mechanical given that it resembles the phantasmagoric effects of magic lanterns. Phantasmagoria was a theatrical form of entertainment using a magic lantern to project gothic images on walls, screens and smoke. Friedrich Kittler has drawn the connection between the phantasmagorias of French inventor

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Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, new forms of reading and gothic texts, particularly E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Devil’s Elixirs (1815).84 Here the gothic magic lantern as a mechanical device is used to make visible the hideous animation of life. Marina Warner has noted that “phantasmagorias gave an impression of vitality” because their projected images “swelled and shrunk, as well as shifting with tricks of the light, and so created an illusion that they possessed that quality of conscious life: animation.”85 The idea of undead life as a machine is also emphasised by the centrality of a gigantic ebony clock situated in Prospero’s ghastly chamber, in the same manner that in The Shining the clock marks the machinic repetition of the death drive. Life as the passage of time is experienced by the clock’s chiming that causes “disconcert and tremulousness and meditation.”86 There is a negative conception of life associated with the passing of time understood in terms of decay and not growth that cannot be controlled by humans. Organic and inorganic at the same time, this monstrous conception of life is captured in “The Premature Burial” (1844) as a machinic force that runs through the living and the dead described in terms of pinions, cords and wheels: The boundaries which divide Life and Death, are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called. They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. A certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not ever loosed nor the gold bowl irreparably broken.87 Poe’s mechanical and inhuman life force brings to the fore de Manian materiality as an automatic and indifferent force beyond human desires. The notion of life as a machinic assemblage and a multiplicity will also be examined in the following chapter through such novels as Michael Crichton’s Prey (2002) and Bear’s Blood Music (1985). In particular, Poe’s obsession with mechanical movement, “artificial death,”88 and his depictions of putrefying bodies resemble the 1990s cyberculture and Nick Land’s affirmations of physical annihilation and merging with the immanence of machines, discussed in the final chapter of this book. Disturbing and ghastly, this life that persists in inorganic things and beyond death is, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” beheld in the horror of Madeline Usher’s “suspiciously lingering smile” and “the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face.”89 More particularly, this spirit that permeates matter and connects bodies and things in perverse unison is witnessed in Roderick Usher’s interest in books of doubles, demonic possession and his belief in the “sentience of all vegetable

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things.”90 Madeline’s “vampiric” return is associated with this “inorganic consciousness”;91 a phantasmatic life that circulates through the stones of the house, the fungi, the decayed trees and the silent waters of the tarn.92 Madeline, her twin brother and their family house and bloodline are “all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment.”93 In “Berenice” (1835) the narrator Egaeus recounts how the fatal disease distorts the identity of the eponymous heroine. Berenice’s emaciation “was excessive, and not one vestige of the former being lurked in any single line of the contour.”94 It is at this moment, when her presence showed signs of death that “her personal identity, has become more real to him . . . . for the destruction of her being means that he can possess her as ‘a thing to admire’ and ‘an object of love.’”95 Egaeus marries Berenice, not because she is beautiful in death, but because the presence of death made him see her as a real, material being, not an abstract ideal. This change of view is also associated with his own disease and alteration from being the Romantic hero and idealist, to the man of scientific reason and materialism. In this respect, both Egaeus’ former idealism and his view of Berenice’s pure and ideal beauty are contaminated by reason and realism. The disease of their human spirit has corrupted their physical body.96 The presence of death is captured in the disintegrating physiognomy: The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets, now of a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly. . . . The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupilless, and I shrank, involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenicë disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!97 Idealism is contaminated by the horrifying effects of putrefying matter. In particular, the descriptions of “the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth”98 reveal this perverse union of matter and spirit; a spectral materiality that is at once horrific and evil. Egaeus desires the teeth, “one body part not subject to decay,”99 because “they alone were present to the mental eye.”100 Egaeus imagination assigns to the teeth “a sensitive and sentient power, and, even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression.”101 For him, the teeth are ideas, matter permeated by spirit. “Berenice” culminates in “the phantasma of the teeth” floating about with the “most vivid and hideous distinctness.”102 The contemplation of this hideous synthesis of matter and spirit lays emphasis on inhuman life. “Morella” brings into focus this hideous marriage of materiality and idealism through the disintegration of the body. Morella’s consumption is

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related to her profound intellect. Her “powers of mind were gigantic”103 and were consumed in the study of speculative writings such as the transcendental philosophies of Fichte and Schelling. In particular, Morella was interested in Schelling’s doctrine of the absolute identity of subject (mind) and object (matter). This principle of absolute and homogeneous unity of subject and object is, however, imagined as horrific. As Morella begins to pine away, the narrator is sickened by her tubercular body with the crimson cheeks and prominent “blue veins upon the pale forehead.”104 Gazing into her melancholy eyes, the husband becomes “giddy with the giddiness of one who gazes downwards into some dreary and fathomless abyss.”105 While her frame is consumed, her “fragile spirit clung to its tenement of clay for many days—for many weeks and irksome months.”106 It is this uncomfortable synthesis of opposites that is dramatised through Morella’s persistence to live: “I am dying—yet shall I live.”107 And, indeed, after her death, Morella’s spirit lives through the body of her daughter. It is this perfect identity and sameness of mind and matter that is finally horrific. In the uncanny repetition of the dead Morella’s phrases on the lips of the living one, the narrator “shuddered at its too perfect identity.”108 The horror of this absolutism lies in the evil spirit of Morella. As is evident in an earlier version of the story, Morella’s invocation of the Blessed Virgin is linked to her sinful and forbidden knowledge. Poe undermined the dualism of body and spirit. His tales question idealism and metaphor. Matter penetrates the world of the ideal and reveals the inevitability of death, disintegration and putrefaction. In this respect, Poe went against the dominant discourses of American transcendentalism that sought to elevate spirituality and idealise materiality, thus reducing life to mysticism. In true gothic fashion, he sought to unveil the dark life writhing behind the mask of spiritualism and theological mysticism, in order to show mortality’s evil aspirations to divine will. Poe attacked the “Humanity clique’s”109 transcendental style of “mysticism for mysticism’s sake,”110 and questioned their “Carlylisms,” “Euphuisms,” “Merry Andrewisms” and “metaphor-run mad” style.111 In this respect, he remained outside the clique of American transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henri David Thoreau, for whom human suffering or sin were insignificant and thus external possibilities. Against their optimistic imagination, Poe was more comfortable among Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne with whom he shared a darker view of human life.112 Harry Levin has pointed out that in Poe, Melville’s and Hawthorne’s writings we find the darker side of transcendentalism.113 But while Hawthorne and Melville mock transcendentalism, Poe remains faithful to his strand of idealism returning to his unique but “troubling prospects of transcendental unity.”114 Poe’s treatment of Schelling’s absolute identity, precedes that of the Boston transcendentalists, and thus, is characterised by its unique flavour.115 Poe’s gothic materialism, evident in the horrific contemplation of consuming and decaying bodies and the evil

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manifestation of Spirit, offers an understanding of life in negative terms. The decaying and disintegrating body, along with the strange stirrings of inorganic life, point towards life beyond the human. Blood and life appear inorganic and mechanical, drawing attention to a materiality that is monstrous because inhuman and unrecognisable. In the next chapter, the inhuman is examined within the contemporary context of nanotechnology, posthumanism and accelerationism.

Notes 1. Edgar Allan Poe, Letter to Chivers (10 July 1844), in “The Poe-Chivers Papers,” ed. George E. Woodberry, The Century Magazine 65 (January 1903): 441. 2. Mark Fisher, “Gothic Materialism,” Pli 12 (2001): 238. 3. Edgar Allan Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. III: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 1024–42. 4. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. III: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 1228–44. 5. Carroll Dee Laverty, “Mesmerism,” in Science and Pseudo-Science in the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (Thesis, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1951), 303. 6. Laverty, “Mesmerism,” 303. 7. Joseph W. Haddock, Somnulism and Psysheism (London: James S. Hodson, 1851), 54. 8. Edgar Allan Poe, “Marginal Notes”: No. 130, in Godey’s Lady’s Book (Philadelphia, PA: Louis Antoine Godey, August 1845) 50. This is the first piece that Charles Baudelaire translated in French as “Révélation magnétique” in La Liberté de Penser for 15 July 1848. 9. Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” 1030. 10. Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” 1030. 11. Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” 1032. 12. Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” 1033. 13. Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” 1034. 14. Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” 1034. 15. Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” 1037. 16. Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” 1037. 17. Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” 1038. 18. Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” 1040. 19. Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” 1230. 20. Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” 1240. 21. Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” 1240. 22. Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” 1240. 23. Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” 1243. 24. D. H. Lawrence, “‘Edgar Allan Poe’, First Version (1918–19),” in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vassey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 75. 25. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” 75.

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26. Lawrence, “Edgar Allan Poe,” 76. 27. Paul de Man, “Hegel on the Sublime,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 116. 28. Paul de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 101. 29. de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” 102. 30. de Man, “Hegel on the Sublime,” 112. 31. Edgar Allan Poe, “Berenice,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 209–10. 32. Poe, “Berenice,” 211. 33. Poe, “Berenice,” 211–2. (My italics). 34. Poe, “Berenice,” 217. 35. Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 314. 36. Poe, “Ligeia,” 314. 37. Poe, “Ligeia,” 314. 38. The idea of a life growing too fast and beyond its appropriate limits will appear in Chapter 6 in the discussion of bioart, particularly, of the issues arising in relation to the “Victimless Leather Jacket,” the bioart project of artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, co-founders of the Tissue Culture and art Project. 39. Thomas Ollive Mabbott’s notes for “Ligeia.” 40. Poe, “Ligeia,” 310, 314. 41. John Michael Corrigan, American Metempsychosis: Emerson, Whitman, and the New Poetry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 2, 4, 8. 42. Corrigan, American Metempsychosis, 31, 168. 43. Corrigan, American Metempsychosis, 170. 44. Poe, “Metzengerstein,” in The Collected Works of E. A. Poe, Vol. II: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 29. 45. David E. E. Sloane, “Gothic Romanticism and Rational Empiricism in Poe’s Berenice,” American Transcendental Quarterly 19 (1973): 24. 46. Sloane, “Gothic Romanticism and Rational Empiricism in Poe’s Berenice,” 24. 47. Louis A. Renza, “Poe’s Secret Autobiography,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 78. 48. Maurice S. Lee, “Absolute Poe: His System of Transcendental Racism,” American Literature 75, no. 4 (2003): 757. 49. Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 171. 50. Joan Dayan, “Poe, Persons, and Property,” in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 120–1. 51. Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies and Slaves,” American Literature 66, no. 2 (1994): 243–4. 52. Dayan, “Amorous Bondage,” 244. 53. For Poe’s literary references to Schelling see Hansen and Pollin, The German Face of Edgar Allan Poe, 80. 54. See Lee, “Absolute Poe,” 759. 55. Lee, “Absolute Poe,” 763.

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56. Poe’s footnote, “Loss of Breath,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 78. 57. Edgar Allan Poe, “Morella,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 226. 58. Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (New York: Verso, 1996), 69. 59. Poe, “Ligeia,” 317. 60. Poe, “Ligeia,” 317. 61. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (SW 399–400) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 63. 62. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (SW 390–391), 55. 63. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (OA 440–443), 34. 64. Poe, “Ligeia,” 316. 65. Poe, “Ligeia,” 316. 66. Edgar Allan Poe, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” Graham’s Magazine 19 (1841): 126. 67. Poe, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” 125. 68. Poe, “Ligeia,” 319. 69. Poe, “Ligeia,” 321. 70. Poe, “Ligeia,” 322. 71. Mabbott’s note 31, “Ligeia,” 334. 72. Poe, “Ligeia,” 325. 73. John Hunter, A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation and Gun-Shot Wounds (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1828), 113. 74. Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry and the Scientific Revolution (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2005), 22–3. 75. William R. Newman, “An Overview of Roger Bacon’s Alchemy,” in Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1997), 317–36, 331. 76. Poe, “Ligeia,” 316. 77. Poe, “Ligeia,” 318. 78. See editor’s introductory comments in Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 668. 79. Prospero is also the Duke of Milan in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest who uses sorcery to control spirits and humans and raise the dead. 80. Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death,” 675. 81. Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death,” 670. 82. Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death,” 670. 83. Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death,” 672. 84. See David J. Jones, Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-Cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture, 1670–1910 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011). 85. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 148. 86. Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death,” 673. 87. Poe, “The Premature Burial,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. III: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 955.

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88. Fisher, “Gothic Materialism,” 238. 89. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 410. 90. Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 408. 91. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 80. 92. Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 408. 93. H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in Dagon, and Other Macabre Tales (London: Panther, 1985), 466. 94. Poe, “Berenice,” 215. 95. Arthur A. Brown, “Literature and the Impossibility of Death: Poe’s ‘Berenice’,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50, no. 4 (1996): 458. 96. Sloane, “Gothic Romanticism and Rational Empiricism in Poe’s Berenice,” 24. 97. Poe, “Berenice,” 215. The description here is of a skull. 98. Poe, “Berenice,” 215. 99. Joan Dayan, “The Identity of Berenice,” Studies in Romanticism 23, no. 4 (1984): 501. 100. Poe, “Berenice,” 215. 101. Poe, “Berenice,” 216. 102. Poe, “Berenice,” 216. 103. Poe, “Morella,” 225. 104. Poe, “Morella,” 227. 105. Poe, “Morella,” 227. 106. Poe, “Morella,” 227. 107. Poe, “Morella,” 228. 108. Poe, “Morella,” 234. 109. Burton R. Pollin, “The Living Writers of America: A Manuscript by Edgar Allan Poe,” in Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 165. 110. Kent P. Ljungquist, “The Poet as Critic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15. 111. Ljungquist, “The Poet as Critic,” 15. 112. Later, as Ljungquist points out, in 1848, Poe will caustically describe Hawthorne as a “Puritan Tieck” (15). 113. See Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York: Knopf, 1958). 114. Lee, “Absolute Poe,” 773. 115. Lee, “Absolute Poe,” 773.

6

Gothic Inhumanism

This chapter continues the examination of inhuman machinic and nonorganic death discussed in the previous chapter, through an understanding of blood as matter and not metaphor. In this respect, blood is not controlled by the human but is an inhuman force of unbounded dark fecundity. The title “Gothic Inhumanism” takes its cue from Foucault’s notion of a history without the human and, particularly, Paul de Man’s understanding of the inhuman as something impersonal, machinelike and completely other than man.1 By looking at the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and nanotechnology’s transformation of living matter and machines, this chapter will show that life and blood exist beyond the organic boundaries of privileged humanity. Greg Bear’s scientific views on the materiality of blood and life, uncover a notion of life that is not positive, but negative, characterised by disintegration and decay. In Greg Bear’s Blood Music the multiplying and growing living blood-sludge is described in terms of disintegration and annihilation of humanity and its constructed securities. This negative life, while it is against the human and its future, opens up the possibility of new life forms. Greg Bear’s pulsing, viscous blood is literally an inhuman materiality that exemplifies future transformations beyond the bounded organism of the human; its plasticity points towards the malleability of death as it unfurls in all its negative and malevolent force. Blood Music contemplates gothic blood as an unnatural and frighteningly unbounded force that exists against human life. The novel’s technological manipulation of blood is not practiced in order to guarantee human immortality or superiority, rather is an exercise in Prometheanism in order to go beyond with, or without, the human. Greg Bear’s biotechnological views of life are about transcending the limits of the human by touching upon a notion of living death that is autonomous, cold and indifferent to any human control. While this force is totally apathetic to the human, from the perspective of humanity is imagined as hostile, evil and monstrous in order to better grasp its elusive and incomprehensible materiality.

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Inhumanism The idea of inhumanism is a central concern of this book, and of this chapter, in particular. Since for the analysis here I am concerned with language and history as inhuman forces in the work of Michel Foucault and Paul de Man, I do not seek to delve into the historical meanings of the term. But I need to acknowledge the centrality of the term as it has been featured in the thought of the poet Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers’ philosophy of life, his “inhumanism,” presents “a shifting of emphasis from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.”2 In this sense, he shares with the texts discussed in this chapter a sense of the impermanence and insignificance of human beings who are imagined as “a tide/ That swells and in time will ebb, and all/ Their works dissolve” and the need to “uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhumanise our views a little.”3 Like with cyberpunk horror, human life is imagined in terms of its disintegration and decadence,4 while the principle of “life” is seen under the cold rationalism of de Man as the Freudian death drive mentioned in Chapter 3 and a nonorganic death that “includes all life and all things,”5 and of which the human is but a temporary manifestation. It is important to note here that it is this understanding of living death, not as a naïve vitalist creationism but as inhuman flow and as a machine made up of organic and inorganic parts that permeates my discussion throughout this chapter and resonates with de Man’s inhuman materiality.6 Indeed, Jeffers’ poetry points towards the beauty and life beyond the human, while emphasising the destructive consequences of man’s actions and narcissistic image. Like Foucault’s image of humanity as something transient drawn on the sand, so with Jeffers “man will be blotted out.”7 Foucault’s 1966 declaration of the death of man in The Order of Things is particularly important in its rejection of the humanist tradition and for the ensuing implications of such an inhumanism in the examination of what constitutes humanity. Humanism privileges human beings ruled by reason over nonhuman and nonorganic life and promotes a progressive view of history governed by the actions of human beings as autonomous and powerful agents. In The Order of Things, he writes: As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises—were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.8

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Foucault denies the primacy of man as the foundation of all knowledge and as something natural. Instead, such an idea of man is historically created and, thus, open to change. History is inhuman in the sense that is governed by forces beyond human control, and notions of individual autonomy and free will are mere illusions. After Nietzsche’s death of God and Foucault’s disappearance of man, there is, for the latter, the possibility for an opening and a thought without the figure of man: “to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking.”9 In this respect, man is only an impermanent possibility, whose end opens up new possibilities that might take the form of inhuman figures. Like Foucault’s attempt to construct a history without the sentimental illusions of the human, Paul de Man was similarly engaged in describing an “inhuman” language. For him both language and history are inhuman. History, as he shows in his reading of Benjamin, is inhuman and unnatural because it pertains to the order of language.10 In “Kant and Schiller,” he clarifies: To say that the human is a principle of closure, and that the ultimate word, the last word, belongs to man, to the human, is to assume continuity between language and man, is to assume a control of man over language, which in all kinds of ways is exceedingly problematic  .  .  . . the principle of closure is not the human—because language can always undo that principle of closure—and is not language either, because language is not a firm concept.11 De Man clearly notes that the human and language are not stable, concrete or unchangeable and that man has no control over a language that is nonhuman. De Man and Foucault agree that the human as a linguistic construct is something inhuman and machinic independent of any intent or wish that we as humans might have. As de Man writes, there is in a very radical sense no such thing as the human since, “If one speaks of the inhuman, the fundamental non-human character of language, one also speaks of the fundamental non-definition of the human as such, since the word human doesn’t correspond to anything like that.”12 It is important to note that I do not seek to deny that the human in a very specific and concrete way exists or did exist in the bloody revolutions, genocides, exterminations and wars on which it has interminably inscribed its name. Rather, one cannot assume that the human as a referential exists, particularly with concern to the human other and nonhuman animal. One cannot presume that they are empathic to the human because they supposedly subscribe to an existent idea of the human, confirming thus the lie of human exceptionalism.13 It is by recognising the inhumanity at the heart of the human that it might be possible to imagine, and tackle with, the future possibility of our extinction or posthuman/inhuman transformations. As will be examined later

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through accelerationist thought, particularly Reza Negarestani’s “The Labor of the Inhuman,” it is by first dealing with the question of what it means to be human that it might be possible to revise the human and accelerate towards an inhuman future that will prove to have always been what the in/human is. Returning to de Man, the inhumanity of language is examined in depth in the essay on “Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” where de Man discusses the impossibility of translation by pointing out that Benjamin’s translators have misunderstood his text and translated the opposite of what Benjamin was saying. The failure of translation lies, as de Man points out, in the fact that “The text about translation is itself a translation, and the untranslatability which it mentions about itself inhabits its own texture and will inhabit anybody who in his turn will try to translate it, as I am now trying, and failing, to do.”14 Translation reveals something destructive in language itself. Despite that we “think we are at ease in our own language, we feel a coziness, a familiarity, a shelter in the language we call our own, in which we think that we are not alienated,” translation shows that “this alienation is at its strongest in our relation to our own original language.”15 As de Man following Benjamin argues, due to the lack of control over language it is not possible to conciliate the conflict that arises between what one means and the way that meaning is expressed. Language is uncontrollable and mechanical because meaning will always contradict any human intention and attempt to control it. The incompatibility between the materiality of the letter and meaning is then due to the inhumanity of language. Language is an inhuman machine and thus not an organic and harmonious whole within human control. The inhuman is not something mysterious or messianic but the very linguistic structures and possibilities which are inherent in language itself.16 This nonhuman aspect of language is something inescapable, “because language does things which are so radically out of our control that they cannot be assimilated to the human at all, against which one fights constantly.”17 The idea of an inhuman language devoid of meaning and function, without pathos or imagery and drama, a language as pure signifier and indifferent to human desire and intent is exactly this de Manian materiality and unintelligible darkness that gothic and horror confronts us with. It is gothic and horrific not because it is a familiar gothic figure, but because it presents us with this blank and indifferent existence of unnameable things whose horror lies in their cold and unrecognisable nature, leaving one speechless and questioning one’s privileged existence. Blood then should not be understood as an organic part of a body and as something meaningful, but as something that disarticulates the notion of organic wholeness: an inhuman machine that is demonic and out of control. Greg Bear’s novel offers a unique example of blood as an automatic and machinic system that operates according to its own inherent programme beyond the human.

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Posthumanism, Inhumanism and Accelerationist Gothic Twentieth- and twenty-first century cyberpunk horror and body horror demonstrate the inhuman life of machines and engineered life. Here the purpose is to underline an understanding of life as machinic and of exhibiting inhuman qualities. Contemporary narratives show machines, engineered viruses and artificial life imbued with dark vitality, movement and the capacity to think. Narratives about nanotechnology, by presenting us with the monstrous synthesis of the organic and the inorganic, lay emphasis on life and blood as machinic forces and not the privileged domain of organic bodies, while making us think about the life of other things beyond the human. In this respect, blood and metal as instances of machinic and inhuman life become interchangeable. Within this context, the body is treated as meat and as something alien, disconnected from flesh and blood humanity. More particularly, I want to avoid the idea of the posthuman as some peaceful integration of machine/human (Katherine Hayles, Andy Clark) or immortality as an enhanced version of the human (transhumanists), by committing to the idea of an inhuman future that will revise the human altogether. Through recourse to a series of accelerationist writings as well as recent scholarship on the posthuman, I will argue that in order to move forward there is a need to abandon any phobic resistance to traditional discourses that oppose technology to the human in order to embrace a progressive politics that opens up the human to its future synthetic possibilities. This chapter looks at such novels as Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) and Michael Crichton’s Prey, as well as the Japanese horror films Meatball Machine (2006) and Tokyo Gore Police (2008), as examples of gothic inhumanism that present us with narratives of engineered viruses that penetrate human bodies only to change them into something inhuman. These texts explore the fluid and permeable boundaries between organic nature and inorganic technology, considering ideas about nature’s artificiality and technology’s organicity. They express anxieties about the use of nanotechnology as well as the fusion of technology and the human and help us navigate through the current issues surrounding the posthuman/inhuman. These texts fictionalise the meeting space of the machinic, inorganic and nonhuman with the organic and the human, speculating on a posthuman future that might be radically different from the human present due to technological interventions, or warning of humanity’s extinction by merciless, self-organised and indestructible machines. Within this context, blood is reengineered, dissociated from the materiality of the body and altered into a machinic assemblage navigated by its own internal system. On the one hand, machinic processes are shown to be at the heart of the human, revealing it as a mere “hermeneutic artifice.”18 As mentioned, man is an effect of

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an  inhuman  language.  This  machinic system, the materiality of inscription, can be traced in chemical processes and dna coding. As Cohen writes, “all are generated from inscriptions,”19 and bios “emerges with and from mnemo-semiotic process and formalizations.”20 On the other hand, cyberpunk texts and much accelerationist thinking stress the liberation from the drag of the human through the immanence of machinic processes that promise transcendence. Accelerationist philosophers believe that the only realistic and progressive way to respond today to capitalism’s inhuman speed is to go even further by accelerating its alienating tendencies. The earlier accelerationism of the 1990s, as it has been elaborated in the work of Nick Land, identifies with the alienating and destructive forces of capitalism. Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Hamilton Grant and other thinkers, associated with the collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University, espoused the integration of the human with cyberspace and sought to accelerate an emancipation from the prison of the human. Such a dark vision is expressed by Nick Land’s virulent inhumanism and has been criticised as Deleuzian Thatcherism.21 In “Cybergothic,” Nick Land argues that gothic avatars, with their familiar monstrosity, mask the alien face of something inhuman and machinic: “A moment of relief. You had thought the goreflick effectively over, the monster finished amongst anatomically precise ketchup-calamity scenes, when—suddenly—it reanimates; still locked on to your death. If you are going to scream, now is the time.”22 But accelerationism’s “desperate joy” as the only way to move forward in a permanent state of revolution and “creative festivity” is also the prevalent mood of neoliberal capitalism’s consumer culture.23 Recently, there have been attempts for conceptualising a left accelerationism that embraces rationalism and Prometheanism. According to left accelerationists Williams and Srnicek, it is not possible to know what a technoscientific body would look like or what technology, liberated from its capitalist bonds, can do.24 Similarly, and according to David Roden, any account of posthuman ethics or politics that is not fooling itself should be aware that it is not possible to know what it would be like to encounter or be posthuman.25 However, this chapter will explore the idea of an inhuman future that will, as Reza Negarestani argues, complete the Enlightenment’s project of self-mastery by revising the human altogether. The chapter concludes with another understanding of inhumanism that does not naively celebrate a trendy antihumanism or seeks to relinquish the human at the hands of an abstract, indifferent monstrous capitalist machine. Against the neoliberal dictum of no alternative to capitalism, Reza Negarestani proposes an inhumanism that is only possible through the space of human reason, of an ongoing rational revision and construction of the human which will eventually result in the end of the human. For him, committing to what it means to be human is a process of becoming inhuman.

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Accelerationist gothic enables us to think about the implications of nbic (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science) technologies and their future effects on biological humanity. The gothic mode and its avatars give form to the monstrous accelerationist forces of capitalism and its technologies as they butcher the last vestiges of human civilisation. While gothic’s engagement with such questions is often tainted by exaggeration and negativity, the ideas expressed rather than the actual events, particularly the confrontation with the inhuman and the limit of the human, make it uniquely apt for philosophical discussion.26 Whether humans choose to experiment in these narratives with new technological modes so that they bring about the posthuman, or are radically altered by an inhuman technology, these are possibilities that the gothic explores and questions. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) can be considered here the gothic father of the aforementioned posthuman/ inhuman and accelerationist gothic narratives. The monster is a composite of fleshy remains brought to life by the new technology of electricity. A living pile of decomposed matter, Frankenstein’s monster is living death and a perverse synthesis of the organic and the inorganic. This inhuman life is perhaps the first literary example of what can be named gothic inhumanism. The novel clearly expresses fears and anxieties of the human’s supersession by a race of devils nurtured by the monster and his future bride and “propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.”27 Frankenstein considers his promise of creating a female companion to the monster and how its fulfilment will be a curse on the “existence of the whole human race.”28 It can be argued that Frankenstein’s desire to experiment and create something inhuman, pushing technology beyond its accepted uses, anticipates several issues relating to the posthuman and much accelerationist thought and is diametrically the opposite of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If these two novels are widely recognised as established gothic texts, then they also embody two basic, but opposing tendencies, characteristic of the gothic. On the one hand, Dracula’s love of life and persistence to live forever is quintessentially archaic and regressive. It insists on the organic and its future guarantee, and, in many ways, can be likened to the search for immortality witnessed in contemporary transhumanist thought. On the other hand, Frankenstein looks to the future and beyond organicity and the past. Its Prometheanism— going beyond “appropriate” human limits, desire for change and technological experimentation—is also the kind of Prometheanism that Ray Brassier advocates. His, however, has shed any theological belief in some ready-made world that we should accept the way it is. As he writes, the world was not made: it is simply there, uncreated, without reason or purpose. And it is precisely this realization that invites us not

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to simply accept to participate in the creation of the world without having to defer a divine blueprint. It follows from the realization that the disequilibrium we introduce into the world through our desire to know is no more or less objectionable than the disequilibrium that is already there in the world.29 Frankenstein, with its exploration of new corporeal surfaces resulting in inhuman life, shares many of the concerns of cyberpunk literature and film where the body is invaded by new technologies. Through their use of prosthesis of parts, implants, or brain-computer assemblages, cyberpunk texts are interested in tearing down the worldly and demolishing any nostalgia for the past’s authenticity by disturbing the boundaries between the human and machine to produce machinic intelligence and alternative inhuman realities. Breaking with creative vitalistic traditions of positive entities, cyberpunk texts visualise inhuman landscapes of living death, where sterile hardware coexist with visceral monstrous parts. The body horrors of such Japanese cyberpunk films as Yūdai Yamaguchi’s Meatball Machine (2005) and Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Tokyo Gore Police (2008) originate from, and are influenced by, Shinya Tsukamoto’s cult cyberpunk horror film Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989). The film welds a posthumanist future of metal architectonics where meat melds into metal in unrecognisable formations. Resonating with the transgressive attempts of artists in Kathe Koja’s Skin in Chapter 2, it focuses on a metal fetishist’s efforts to integrate metal with his flesh by inserting a metal rod in a wound in his body. After being hit by a car, driven by a businessman, he takes revenge by forcing the driver’s body to mutate into a living pile of metal. Metal-infected bodies and humans mutating into inhuman livingmetal forms become the reality, and the metal fetishist, and the businessman, now transformed into the so-called Iron Man merge together in order to change the world into metal. Followed by Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992), where body limbs turn into weapons, and Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009), the series speculates on the consequences of merging the human with inhuman metal, as the human is transcended through the messy materialisations of meat and the machinic. Meatball Machine’s biomechanical NecroBorgs controlled by an alien homunculus inhabiting their bodies, and Tokyo Gore Police’s monstrous parasites called Engineers, whose wounds birth weapons, are machinic assemblages, which, like the Tetsuo biomechanical creatures, subordinate the human and biological processes to the machinic and inhuman. It can be said that technology is fetishised, as seen by Tokyo Gore Police’s depiction of a perverse underworld, where pleasure is found in the surgically altered female body. The female body’s plasticity and malleability, its remoulding into unrecognisable human-animal forms, reminding one of medieval chimeras, is not merely the product of masculine desire, but of, perhaps, a new form of posthuman pleasure, uncoupled from normative

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sexuality and recognisable female corporeality. Instead, what is eroticised is the site of monstrosity itself, of a desire to move beyond the human itself. Dethroned from its previously privileged position, the human is revised or totally destroyed, as machinic-fecund things disseminate. The films enable us to understand the inhuman in terms of materiality as an assemblage of machines in the manner of Levi R. Bryant’s conception of being as a collective of machines in his Onto-Cartography.30 In this sense, avoiding the elevation of the mind or consciousness over the base materiality of flesh or the machine, gothic inhumanism mutates the two into monstrous syntheses that cannot recuperate past idealist values.

Nanotechnology in Michael Crichton’s Prey and Greg Bear’s Blood Music While the previously discussed texts playfully fetishise body modification through the fusion of flesh and metal, the following two texts are concerned with the convergence of nbic technologies and biological life, as they move away from the familiarity of the human body altogether. Poe’s Ligeia, for example, using alchemy and forbidden knowledge achieves life beyond the human through her elixir of life. Here, the mystical and magic are supplanted by the technological manipulation of biological matter in order to transcend the human. Michael Crichton’s Prey and Greg Bear’s Blood Music are both novels that describe a future threatened by the inhuman as they elaborate on the Grey Goo scenario involving nanotechnology and self-replicating nanomachines or microorganisms that transform the human and the world around them.31 In many ways, the nanoswarms in Prey and the biomolecular consciousness of the noocytes in Blood Music shift attention away from the centrality of human dna by opening up the concept of biological life to include other living forms traditionally associated with base materiality. Beyond this expansion of the concept of life in terms of an impersonal, machinic multiplicity, Blood Music’s use of an intelligent plague challenges conceptions of disease and infection as merely negative, problematises embodied subjectivity and proposes the idea of a radical animated consciousness. The novel is especially unique in showing the human transforming into a miniaturised part of an intelligent assemblage of cellular matter functioning in cooperation with the collective consciousness of previous and potential humans. In Crichton’s Prey, nanotechnology, genetic engineering and computer programming converge in the making of the nanoswarm, predprey. A distributed system based on biological models, the mechanical swarm was developed as a military technology to replace drones in future warfare. However, released in the desert by accident, and acting autonomously, the micro-robotic machines could no longer be controlled by humans. Due to their goal-seeking programming based on a model of predator-prey relationships, the microbots behaved like predators with

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a common goal: hunting. Independent of humans and engineered to eat anything, the swarm adapted to the environment and was able to survive and reproduce. The swarm consisted of nanoparticles which formed a cloud and were endowed with intelligence, interacting with each other to wheel in the air as a flock. The swarm, which could divide into three independent swarms with perfectly coordinated behaviour, was “a swirling cloud of dark particles.”32 The image of the swirling black swarms, ominously clouding the sky and speedily moving in coordination attacking their human prey resonates with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), which was based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 story The Birds. The aerial assault on humans by birds, echoing the threat of communist attack in du Maurier’s story, and the nanoswarm’s predatory behaviour resembling contemporary drone attacks, is equally frightening. Hitchcock’s black birds and the “black stream”33 of the nanoswarm curving high in the air are horrifying because they are unpredictable and unnatural. The swarms of birds and machinic intelligence preying on humans attest to the liquidation of symmetry and a breach in the natural order of things, through the revolt of nature or the uncontrollable forces of programmable matter. Fear is associated with the domination of the human by the inhuman, and the desire to return things to the way they were before, rings true with a certain kind of moral and theological thinking that prohibits transgression of those limits divinely allocated. The swarm’s collective intelligence and ability to reproduce, sustain itself, learn through experience and innovate to respond to problems meant simply that, “It’s alive.”34 Consisting of bacteria, which provided the components for the reproduction of particles, and particles themselves, the swarm, was a monstrous synergy of organic and inorganic parts existing in symbiosis. Here, the swarms evolve through their interaction with other forms, and this evolutionary change does not merely upset the equilibrium of life as we know it, but also intelligence as a human privilege: “It was difficult to believe that extremely stupid creatures with brains smaller than pinheads were capable of construction projects more complicated than any human project. But in fact, they were.”35 The swarms not only demonstrate life as multiplicity, but they resist any human attempt to calculate their number or to understand their “psychology.” Their “abstract, nonhuman number,”36 as well as the ability of the swarm to appear singular but also to divide into unpredictably more than one self-organising swarm, liquidate any notion of number characterised by calculation and consistency. Similarly, despite the attempts at human psychology and maternal nurturing by child psychologist and vice president of Xymos corporation, Julia Forman, it becomes evident that the fabricated micro-robots are unaffected, autonomous and evolving on their own. Without any “central control” and acting as “a defined purposeful organism,”37 the swarm appears demonic and inhuman.

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The human is further humiliated when the swarms appear to imitate human behaviour and appearance: “It was creepy to see this human replica, suddenly floating over the desert.”38 Later, when Julia’s body is eaten by the swarm, the nanoparticles give her an image of herself as beautiful and healthy: “The skin of her swollen face and body blew away from her in streams of particles, like sand blown off a sand dune.  .  . . And when it was finished, what was left behind . . . was a pale and cadaverous form.”39 The semblance of human life and the transformation of the human into a robot-like puppet, possessed by nonhuman life, is evocative of the gothic’s spectral forms or E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Olimpia in his story The Sandman (1816). In particular, the story becomes the focus of Freud’s analysis of the uncanny effect which results from the lifelike appearance of the doll Olimpia and the human confusion and uncertainty caused by what appears to be both familiar and unfamiliar, animate and inanimate. It is this uncanny feeling that is experienced when in Prey human bodies appear to be merely an ethereal mass of nanoparticles after they have been consumed or infected. Julia’s disintegrating human form here, visually captured by the blowing sand, resounds with Foucault’s erasure of man like a face drawn in the sand. And like Poe’s etherealised corpses, Julia’s semblance attests to a form of life beyond the organic and the familiarity of the human body. While in Prey the human is completely abandoned and mortified by the swarm’s evolution, in Blood Music the human is integrated with the machinic as human consciousness is absorbed in the sphere of the noocytes. If in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” blood is the plague and the horror of death itself, here blood is an intelligent plague and a form of artificial life that assimilates human life resulting in the disintegration of man-made creations. The novel disrupts the binary of the feminised, soft, liquid body and the masculine hardness of the machine by merging the two through the viscous fluidity of the organic and inorganic. Vergil Ulam, a researcher at Genetron genetic engineering firm, is dismissed after his secret project is deemed unethical due to its use of mammalian cells. Vergil, who was working on a side branch of biochips called biologics (“autonomous organic computers”) 40 decides to save his “white blood cell cultures—his special lymphocytes” by injecting them into his body in order to recover them later and resume his experiments. The lymphocytes, however, technologically augmented, and able to think, were rebuilding him from the inside “finding things, changing them.”41 Vergil named his intelligent cells noocytes from the Greek word for mind (noos). Like Frankenstein, he “gave birth” to the lymphocytes, which were “his children, drawn from his own blood, carefully nurtured, operated upon; he had personally injected the biologic material into at least a thousand of them. And now they were busily transforming all their companions.”42 But the noocytes ability to infect others through “every vector known to epidemiologists”43 and the spread of an “intelligent plague” not only

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redesign the human, but also the environment itself. The infection of the whole of North America within eight weeks saw large cities vanish and change into “a wonderful landscape of an entirely new form of life”44 and the transformation of their citizens within forty-eight hours.45 In the end, the noocytes decide to save humans for something later because they are unable to survive and function in the macro-scale world. However, their rapid disappearance transforms the earth as climatic conditions become extreme. The novel imagines a future where the human is consumed by a new form of intelligent machinic life that is characterised by cooperation, adaptation and the ability to alter the environment. The body is transcended as the human is liquidated and turned into a part of the collective of blood cells. On the other hand, the few survivors in North America, become, like Matheson’s last human in I Am Legend, “the uncomprehending, the limited, the transient and fragile.”46 Individuals are “duplicated hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of times . . . . like being Xeroxed. . . . So like, if I die here, now, there’s hundreds of others tuned in to me, ready to become me, and I don’t die at all. I just lose this particular me.”47 As the human passes the Rubicon, individual identity is reproduced efficiently so that perpetual functionality is guaranteed in the noocyte factory. The autonomous cells are “efficient”48 and can learn with “incredible speed.”49 Reproduction is not understood organically but mechanically since “after all, [it was] but a computerized biological process of enormous complexity and reliability.”50 The work ethic of the cells and the theme of reproduction, growth and selfreplication inject the noocytes with the ideology of neoliberalism. Life imitates the machinic rhythms of capital. Indeed, integration into the machine disables human agency and the ability to control one’s future or rights. However, following de Man, one can argue that these are all very human thoughts, and one has no power over the kind of machinic intelligence the future will realise. Nonetheless, the question arises about whether they were “all truly equal, duplicated a million times, or did the noocytes exercise a little judgement?”51 And further, “Did they really respect and love humans as masters and creators, or did they simply suck them in, chew them up, digest the information needed and send the rest into entropy, forgotten, disorganized, dead?”52 As Dr Bernard considers this, the horror of difference and radical change is manifested in the simple question about the future of the human, the loss of control, human consciousness and reason. The transformation of the human, the landscape changing into a “nightmare land,” the appearance of airborne life forms and gigantic animals unknown to biologists are all described in terms of awe and terror as everything is revitalised, injected with life, flowing as a viscous green fluid. As the human is digested, assimilated or spat out, no more special than any other organism in the noosphere, then one considers the repercussions of being superseded by our intelligent

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organic/machines. If indeed Vergil’s acceleration of technology and his Prometheanism are to be encouraged, then such experimentation needs to be calculated, to benefit the common and not something driven by selfish pursuits. Katherine Hayles’ reading of Blood Music focuses on the novel’s positive conception of the posthuman because it preserves human agency and stands for “an improbably idealized combination of identity, individuality, perfect community, flawless communication and immortality.”53 However, this is not the case since in the novel Vergil attempts to control the noocytes because he does not want them to find out about his brain and take over54 and Bernard questions how autonomous the human really is in the noocyte sphere. Furthermore, for Hayles, the novel shares the notion of leaving the body behind and the cells becoming “weightless information.”55 On the one hand, certainly, the novel expresses the thrill and threat of separating consciousness from its material support which lies at the heart of neoliberalism.56 This is the accelerationist inhumanism of liberation from the meat and immersion into immanent flux as human and machine are technologically synthesised.57 The migration from one material embodiment to another, and the immortality of the noocytes, suggests a desire for undeadness and the eternal return of the same.58 On the other hand, the notion of bodiless information reiterates the traditional dualism of material body and immaterial information; the latter acting as the privileged term. Information though needs to be purged from idealism and understood as material. Blood Music demonstrates that information is not an abstract but a material process and the result of cell clusters performing different tasks.59 The “posthuman” might even not have a recognisable human body, leaving open the possibility of different material entities and weird becomings.60 Hayles’ positive view fails to see that the future of the (in)human would be indifferent to conceptions such as human agency and identity. Prey and Blood Music also help us understand biological processes under a different light, as machine-like operations, working like computers. One can think of here the notion of blood flow as information,61 or the analogy between the brain and the computer.62 As Greg Bear explains, “Blood Music followed hard on the dawning of my realization that dna is a self-organizing cybernetic system—a kind of neural network . . . It’s a parable . . . of what happens when biological systems acquire supreme control over their environment.”63 The swarm in Prey, for example, is not merely the opposite of the human. Instead, the novel seeks to invert such assumptions by demonstrating that a human being is actually a giant swarm. Or more precisely, it’s a swarm of swarms, because each organ—blood, liver, kidneys—is a separate swarm. What we refer to as a “body” is really the combination of all these organ swarms.64

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In this sense, the human body is understood as a multiplicity of swarms, and, like the nanoswarm, human beings are ruled by “swarm intelligence,” since “a lot of processing occurs at the level of the organs.”65 In Prey, the human concept of consciousness and our sense of “self-control and purposefulness, is a user illusion. We don’t have conscious control over ourselves at all.”66 Like the nanoswarms, humans are understood as organic machines. This is echoed by novelist and cultural critic Scott Bakker in his Blind Brain Theory in which he conceives the brain as “just another natural processing system, one able to arrest and amend its routines via some recursively integrative subsystem.”67 For Bakker, the brain is almost blind to itself, while the notion of personal identity is possibly an illusion. According to him, humans need to admit the horrifying truth of how small and inconsequential they are. As he writes, I sometimes fear that what we call “consciousness” does not exist at all, that we “just are” an integrative informatic process of a certain kind, possessing none of the characteristics we intuitively attribute to ourselves. Imagine all of your life amounting to nothing more than a series of distortions and illusions attending a recursive twist in some organism’s brain.68 Prey’s machinic swarms, selfless and displaying a kind of “communist subjectivity,” seem to be closer to a more realistic understanding of the posthuman, than the utopian and positive vitalism á la Deleuze and Guattari evident in Rosi Braidotti’s elaborations of her posthuman nomadic subjectivity. And like, Blood Music, the world might as well end in a grey goo scenario where everything is reduced to an undifferentiated slimy green viscosity. For David Roden, our “wide” technological descendants might possibly be so alien that the transhumanist and bioconservatives’ ethical frameworks will be inefficient to evaluate them. In “Hacking Humans,” he postulates that a posthuman is “the result of a technically mediated process,” a “whd [Wide Human Descendant] that goes feral; becomes capable of life outside the planetary substance comprised of narrow biological humans, their cultures and technologies.”69

Accelerationism, Reza Negarestani and the Inhuman Unlike the optimism and utopianism of 1990s cybercultural acceleration, current accelerationist strands are more abstemious, due to the financial crisis and the need to account for a left politics of the common.70 Accelerationist thinking, from Mark Fisher and Reza Negarestani to Ray Brassier and Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, celebrates the emancipatory possibilities promised by modernity through the reconfiguration of the relation between freedom and reason so that collective intelligence and freedom are no longer, as in the case of Nick Land, anchored to

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monstrous Capital.71 Unlike earlier accelerationism’s identification with machinic, inhuman intelligence, left accelerationism purports “the active design of new systems of collective intelligence.”72 Moving away from Land’s machinic intelligence, current left accelerationists propose the realisation of “the construction of a genuine collective political agency.”73 Although it is impossible to know “what a modern technosocial body can do,”74 left accelerationists affirm Prometheanism as a project of re-engineering the human and the world, and a technological acceleration that capitalism and neoliberalism are unable to generate. The possibility of retaining collective self-mastery as we accelerate towards the future is possible, as Reza Negarestani tells us, by returning to the project of the Enlightenment and reason, despite its apparent regressive connotations. It is only by understanding the human and our world that we may be able to control our lives. By defining the human, understood as a “constructible hypothesis, a space of navigation and intervention,”75 is an inhuman labour. It is this capacity for reason—our ability “to engage in discursive practices”76 and shape processes of “genuine collectivity” and freedom77—that makes us human and not mere biological things. Being committed to humanity then involves the active construction and revision of the human through the autonomous power of reason. But reason’s objective to maintain and enhance itself is radically revisionary in regards to the human.78 Eventually, by committing to reason’s autonomy and its revisionary programme, the human is erased: As soon as you commit to the human, you effectively start erasing its canonical portrait back from the future. It is as Foucault suggests, the unyielding wager on the fact that the self-portrait of man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.79 Inhumanism is this labour of rational agency on the human, of being “impersonally piloted”80 by reason’s revisionary programme. In this respect, as Ray Brassier puts it, the ways in which we understand and change the world based on our reasoning are continually re-established in a dynamic process in which our impulse to predict and control is not incompatible to the catastrophic consequences of our technological inventiveness.81

In Conclusion If capitalism exhibits a retrograde approach to technology, then the above horror texts imagine a posthuman future where humanity is threatened, mutated or reengineered beyond recognition, as “Our human camouflage is coming away, skin ripping off easily, revealing the glistening electronics.”82 However, in order to avoid becoming slaves to monstrous capital, machinic intelligence or any other future tyrannical order, a progressive

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politics needs to be aligned with an understanding of ourselves as humans, and by committing to being human, which is characterised, as Negarestani affirms, by constructing and revising humanity.83 The gothic’s scenarios of human extinction and control by bioengineered machines are, on the one hand, nihilistic and pessimistic because they lament the future of the human. Their horror is located in the perseverance and ensuing impossibility of retaining the human and its future. On the other hand, they quickly affirm and celebrate the demise of the human. They vaporise the human by imagining the future as monstrous and antihuman. Eventually, they reaffirm the degradation of the human by some powerful Thing. However, the true inhuman task, as Negarestani and left accelerationists instruct us, is to understand the human and its ability of sapience/ reason in order to re-engineer ourselves and the world through a left Promethean politics that stresses the transformative potential of technology.84 By avoiding the impasse of underestimating or celebrating “subjectivity,”85 it is significant to commit to the (in)human task of autonomous reason’s revising and constructing the human as we move towards a synthetic future. In this respect, any discussion of posthumanism or the inhuman steeped in giddy celebrations of trendy newness and liberation from the drag of the human should be supplanted by the continuous labour of what we think of ourselves and what is becoming of us.86 The question here is not whether we preserve our self-image, but whether we cede control to collective agency and social participation, and not simply to the compulsions of vampiric capital. Perhaps Negarestani’s vision comes closer to the assimilation of human life by the noocytes in Blood Music or the collective hive mentality of the cybernetically enhanced Borgs, who were once like humans but developed into a more perfect synthetic life and against whom any resistance is futile. But the lack of retaining some form of control or choice over technology or the possibility of liberating it from its capitalist bonds or expansionist politics in these texts remains problematic. The nihilistic outlook of many gothic narratives or their radical inhumanism are, nonetheless, like posthumanist or inhuman philosophies, speculative in nature. What might be, or what we would like it to be, are equally events beyond our control, and can be altered and irrevocably changed, like figures drawn on the sand. More particularly, gothic inhumanism shows that life has always been a machinic and automatic process, and that blood is the stuff of material inscriptions and computer codes. Gothic inhumanism makes us think of a world without the human and of life and blood as totally independent and inhuman. Perhaps accelerationism and narratives of nanotechnology are too human, in the sense that they focus on thinking the posthuman and what will become of the human. Rather than thinking negatively of the future of the human and of its transcendence, perhaps we can look soberly to a world without us and to an inhuman life that

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does not refer to any body or any one specifically.87 Gothic inhumanism forces us to imagine a world that is not for the human, without bodies, a world to come. Turning backwards, in order to look into the future, Poe’s inhumanist outlook is pertinent here. The inhuman does not necessarily involve a futuristic apocalypse of glistening machines but can be seen in the “contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water,”88 in the serpentine vitality of gothic censers and tapestries, but most disturbingly in Poe’s “Silence (Siope): A Fable” (1838). In the story, true silence, cessation of the human and thought, terrifies even the bravest of men who would gladly cling on the dreariest and most horrible realities. In a world of absolute silence, without man, language and thought, the river, and the lilies, and the wind, and the forest, and the heaven, and the thunder, and the sighs of the water-lilies .  .  . . became accursed and were still. And the moon ceased to totter in its pathway up the heaven—and the thunder died away—and the lightning did not flash—and the clouds hung motionless—and the waters sunk to their level and remained—and the trees ceased to rock—and the water-lilies sighed no more—and the murmur was heard no longer from among them, nor any shadow of sound throughout the vast illimitable desert.89 There, life is imagined from the point of view of any body90 as de Manian materiality: without passion, without emotion and without the human.

Notes 1. See Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller, Theory and the Disappearing Future: On De Man, On Benjamin (London: Routledge, 2012). 2. Robinson Jeffers, “The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948),” in The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Volume Four: 1903–1920, Prose and Unpublished Writings, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 428. Here transhuman refers not to the current transhumanist interest in technological enhancement of the human, but to life beyond the human altogether. 3. Robinson Jeffers, “Carmel Point,” in The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Volume Three: 1938–1962, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 399. 4. See Robinson Jeffers, “Shine, Perishing Republic,” in The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Volume 1: 1920–1928, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 15. 5. Robinson Jeffers, “Foreword,” in The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Volume Four: 1903–1920, Prose and Unpublished Writings, ed. Tim Hunt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 411. 6. Deleuze considers life beyond the narrow boundaries of biology and in a non-anthropocentric way as inhuman flow, a multiplicity and a network of vital forces; a “machinic phylum” whose constant variation of machinic

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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components—of humans, organic and nonorganic life—produces different forms and combinations of life: microbes, epidemics, parasitism, packs, a-life. Life is matter in flux and a technological lineage of natural or/and artificial materiality. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). Also see Eugene Thacker, “Biophilosophy,” “The Shadows of Atheology: Epidemics, Power and Life after Foucault,” Theory Culture Society 26, no.6 (2009): 134–52, and “Darklife: Negation, Nothingness, and the Will-to-Life in Schopenhauer,” Parrhesia 12)2011): 12–27. Robinson Jeffers, “To the Stone-Cutters,” Selected Poems, ed. Colin Falck (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987), 17. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 422. Foucault, The Order of Things, 373. Paul de Man, “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘the Task of the Translator’,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 92. Paul de Man, “Kant and Schiller,” in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 151–2. de Man, “Conclusions,” 96. As Johanna Zylinska argues, the mistake of many “animal studies” today lies at the false attribution of subjectivities to animals from humans who may not have them either, resulting in a soft humanism or anthropism. As Zylinska asks, what happens when the animal is not a domesticated dog or cat, but a parasite or bacteria? Johanna Zylinska, “Bioethics Otherwise, or, How to Live with Machines, Humans, and Other Animals,” Telemorphosis: Theory in an Era of Climate Change 1 (2011), https://quod.lib. umich.edu/o/ohp/10539563.0001.001/1:11/-telemorphosis-theory-in-theera-of-climate-change-vol-1?rgn=div1;view=fulltext. de Man, “Conclusions,” 86. de Man, “Conclusions,” 84. de Man, “Conclusions,” 96. de Man, “Conclusions,” 101. Tom Cohen, “Toxic Assets: De Man’s Remains and the Ecocatastrophic Imaginary,” in Theory and the Disappearing Future, ed. Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 109. Cohen, “Toxic Assets,” note 29, 158. Cohen, “Toxic Assets,” 110. Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2015), xi. Nick Land, “CyberGothic,” in Fanged Noumena, Collected Writings 1987– 2007, ed. Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay (Truro: Urbanomic, 2011), 349. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, “Introduction,” in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Truro: Urbanomic, 2014), 18. Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Truro: Urbanomic, 2014). David Roden, Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (New York: Routledge, 2014). See Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015), 11. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (London: Penguin, 2003), 170–1. Shelley, Frankenstein, 171.

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29. See Ray Brassier, “Prometheanism and Its Critics,” in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Truro: Urbanomic, 2014), 485. 30. Levi R. Bryant, Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 38. 31. See Eric Drexler’s, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (New York: Anchor,1986) and Robert A. Freitas, “Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations,” 2000, www.foresight.org/nano/Ecophagy.html. 32. Michael Crichton, Prey (London: Harper, 2006), 202. 33. Crichton, Prey, 324. 34. Crichton, Prey, 252. 35. Crichton, Prey, 395. 36. Eugene Thacker, “Pulse Demons,” Culture Machine 9 (2007). 37. Crichton, Prey, 373. 38. Crichton, Prey, 407. 39. Crichton, Prey, 487. 40. Greg Bear, Blood Music (London: Gollancz, 2007), 8. 41. Bear, Blood, 59. 42. Bear, Blood, 16–7. 43. Bear, Blood, 118. 44. Bear, Blood, 163. 45. Bear, Blood, 120. 46. Bear, Blood, 124. 47. Bear, Blood, 193. 48. Bear, Blood, 68. 49. Bear, Blood, 16. 50. Bear, Blood, 14. 51. Bear, Blood, 213. 52. Bear, Blood, 214. 53. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 256. 54. Bear, Blood, 60. 55. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 255. 56. Noys, Malign Velocities, 51–2. 57. See Slavoj Žižek’s, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 152; Noys, Malign Velocities, 58. 58. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 193–4. 59. Bear, Blood, 160. 60. Roden, Posthuman Life. 61. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness (New York and London: Routledge, 1997); Sarah Kember, Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998); Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 62. For eliminative materialists Paul and Patricia Churchland, the mind and consciousness (as well as mental states like thoughts, beliefs and desires) are not real entities, but folk psychology phrases that need to be eliminated and substituted by more accurate accounts of neuronal processes. 63. Greg Bear, “Tech Flesh: An Interview with Greg Bear,” Eugene Thacker, CTheory 13, 2001. 64. Crichton, Prey, 374. 65. Crichton, Prey, 374. 66. Crichton, Prey, 375.

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67. Scott Bakker, “The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness,” 1–35, (32), accessed June 16, 2015, www.academia. edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind_Brain_Theory_of_the_ Appearance_of_Consciousness. 68. Bakker, “The Last Magic Show,” 31. 69. See David Roden’s, Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human and ‘Hacking Humans’, 2012, accessed June 13, 2015, http://enemyindustry. net/blog/?p=2870). 70. Mackay and Avanessian, “Introduction,” 43. 71. Mackay and Avanessian, “Introduction,” 45. 72. Mackay and Avanessian, “Introduction,” 45. 73. Mackay and Avanessian, “Introduction,” 45. 74. Williams and Srnicek, “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” 355–6. 75. Reza Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman,” in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Truro: Urbanomic, 2014), 427. 76. Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman,” 434. 77. Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman,” 434. 78. Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman,” 437. 79. Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman,” 446. 80. Mackay and Avanessian, “Introduction,” 31. 81. Ray Brassier, “Prometheanism and Its Critics,” in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Truro: Urbanomic, 2014), 486. 82. Nick Land, “Circuitries,” Pli, Warwick Journal of Philosophy 4, no. 1–2 (1992): 219. 83. Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman,” 438. 84. Brassier, “Prometheanism,” 487. 85. Negarestani’s second note on Michael Ferrer in “The Labor of the Inhuman,” 427. Also see Ray Brassier’s notion of “autonomy without voluntarism” in “Prometheanism and Its Critics,” 471. 86. See Negarestani, “The Labor of the Inhuman,” 448, 464. 87. See Claire Colebrook, “Introduction: Framing the End of the Species: Images without Bodies,” in Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (Michigan: Open Humanities Press, Michigan University Press, 2014). n. pag. 88. Poe, “Ligeia,” 314. 89. Edgar Allan Poe, “Silence (Siope): A Fable,” The Baltimore Book (1838): 84. Here one can return to Robinson Jeffers who in his poem “The Eye” describes the inhuman eye of the earth which watches a world without us. 90. This refers to de Man’s use of the figure of the eye as its own agent, as pure vison or ocularity. See “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 83.

Conclusion De Man’s Red Room

Speaking from beyond the grave, Poe’s Vankirk in “Mesmeric Revelation,” explains that death is only “painful metamorphosis,” and seeking to separate life and death is impossible.1 It is fitting to say that death is not the end. This conclusion is not an end; it is an attempt to synthesise the different themes analysed in the previous chapters in order to trace new ideas and possible explorations. Having weaved different media together, I sought to raise and answer questions, knowing that these would only be fragmentary and incomplete. Like the subject of this book, it is not possible to control language completely, as there is always an excess or lack of meaning. Horror is exemplary of an inhuman writing where the text liquefies into multiple bleedings and possible interpretations threatening despotic solidity and the possibility of a final resolution, while the material and inorganic disarticulate proper meaning and eviscerate the imagined organic wholeness of the text. By bringing de Man’s concepts of the machine, materiality and the inhuman into an analysis of gothic and contemporary horror across different media, the purpose was not only to offer fresh readings of gothic and horror texts and practices, but also to show how current and useful de Man’s thought is today to understanding contemporary realities. In particular, his concept of an inhuman materiality questions naïve humanist projects and hopeful attempts at recovering some ideal past, as well as prevalent vitalist tendencies that celebrate an engendering and productive matter, reducing materialism to panpsychism and elevating it to the point of idealism. Like horror and the terrifying monsters lurking in the shadows, de Man’s thought is not reassuring or hopeful; instead, he cracks open thought to the outside and the inevitable annihilation that awaits all things. Gothic and horror writing’s obsession with mutilation, blood, vampiric biting and dismemberment conceals the real wound at its heart: the notion of writing as a technology that affects and forms subjectivity. No longer an envelope, the body in horror becomes a surface to be written upon and to be broken in order to reveal its bloody secrets. Screens and pages dripping with blood offer access to this invisible red fluid that

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should remain sealed by the surface of the skin. In this respect, horror writing, more than any other form of writing, is essentially material and depends on the materiality of inscription, dismantling and disorganising the body in order to communicate with a world beyond phenomenal reality. Materiality as this otherness in language, death and the impossibility of meaning find their manifestation in gothic and horror texts where the unthinkable is masked in the presence of senseless inscriptions, nameless bodies, the raw matter of blood, visceral spectacles, unintelligible markings, the repetitions and compulsions of machinic forces. De Man’s concept of inhumanity is ideal to examine the gothic and horror’s negative understanding of life as decaying, machinic, indeterminate, nonorganic rather than as growing, productive, affirmative and natural. Materiality’s affectless, unemotional and cold deathliness is the opposite of neoliberalism’s celebration of an energetic, emotional, upbeat identity and politics. Especially when, in postmodernity, the eye is captivated by the passion and affect of the other,2 de Man’s inhuman indifference is a refusal to this vitalistic and relentlessly positive horizon, at the same time, forcing us to go further. As Colebrook writes, Now that sense of indifference—which has nothing to do with feeling or affect—brings me to the second reason. Too much has been said about affect, about how—from Hume onwards—it is only affect that will prompt me to act. Indifference is sublime: what if one could imagine the world or anything as if “we” did not exist? That is de Man’s “material sublime.”3 Not only to imagine a world without us, but to explore the possibilities and legitimacy of our unemotional or impassive conditions, the very inhumanity of our own selves and our inability to feel. We should not measure our so-called “defects,” against the colourful Instagram cheerleaders or bubble-gum Starbucks consumers. Mark Fisher, writing about Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and the narrator’s lack of affect, urges us to “mobilise” this lack “rather than treat it as a pathology that requires a cure. . . . How, in other words, is it possible to keep faith with, rather than remedy, the narrator’s affective dyslexia?”4 Kathy Acker’s description of bodybuilding, for example, is an exploration of this loss of meaning through the journey into the foreignness of the body, the site of change, chance and death.5 From bodily to digital inscriptions, from a writing in blood to blood as genetic code and information, we move away from the illusion of man’s authority as an inventor of media to man as an effect of technology;6 the human body is understood as code and inscription through digitisation by technoscience. At the heart of blood and the organic then there is mechanical and inhuman writing. Instead of interpreting blood and

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life as orderly information, reducing everything to metaphor as it often happens in biomedicine and biosemiotics, we should consider the organic emerging from signs and inscriptions as inhuman language.7 Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric writes the text as technology, where words like vampire and blood become mere data in a series of circulating information that resists interpretation: an inhuman and automated form of writing on the screen of white paper.8 De Man’s lesson is that everything we have dressed in a warm and fuzzy individualism and humanism, are in fact the products of impersonal machinic processes of cause and effect. Typewriters, cameras, computers and webcams inscribe, record, capture and broadcast, their machinic operations disturbing our view, introducing the repetitions of mechanical processes which form and produce us. Inorganic and inhuman, controlled by otherworldly forces or imbued with a strange pulsating force, machines delete interiority and rather portray a flat and depthless inorganic fecundity. But machines are not just the mere objects of technological engineering, but the biological, sociopolitical and historical forces that shape us and the world around us. De Man has made this clear: not only language is inhuman, but history, which is “nonorganic process.”9 The inhuman forces of history hold The Shining’s Overlook hotel in their grasp, while inhuman capital haunts illegal markets, where users pay in cryptocurrencies to access violent content, allegedly to witness the murder of others through red rooms or crowdfund death through dark web assassination markets. From bodily mutilation to machinic reproduction, blood images slide into countless copies and fakes, resulting in the widespread passion for the Real that Alain Badiou has defined as the major trait of the twentieth century in his Century (2007).10 Peeling off the deceptive layers of reality to uncover what lies beyond mere semblances, we become obsessed with appearance. Seeing that there is nothing beyond screens, we are mesmerised by the repetition of violence, the convulses of open bodies or become obsessed with witnessing the most horrific acts. Kathe Koja’s female artists in Skin manipulate the surface of the skin, tear and inscribe it, in order to return to the real of the body itself, so that they can feel rooted in some kind of reality, only to disappointingly realise there is nothing behind semblances. Marina de Van’s In My Skin moves beyond transgression, and rather indulges in tracing the body as an unknowable entity, turning cinema into a lament or intimate portraiture of the body as occulted thing. Photographing her mutilated body, or preserving skin tissues cut from her body, are attempts at seeing and touching the materiality of the skin. Skin becomes the actor, and it is pierced in the same way that the screen is bled to uncover the pure materiality of the body and blood. Not only us as viewers are mesmerised and horrified by bloody screens, cameras and webcams, but, the machines themselves return the gaze, to watch, record and even edit and delete us. Creepypasta, written and

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shared among anonymous users, are enamoured and appalled by the hole of the Real and the nothingness of the void, and give form to monstrous unnameable entities watching us in the dark. The horror of blood is here rewired and reconfigured in the endless circulation of viral horror narratives that fill in the gaps left by the sheer materiality of digital inscription. Videos and images of blood throbbing in viral videos that threaten to infect one’s computer if downloaded or played, body parts that reach through screens to touch users, or curses and texts that promise murder, are the figuration of a materiality that is rendered accessible through contemporary internet horror texts. But the icy gaze of our contemporary machines reveals more horrors closer to home. Media, like the Videodrome tv show, reveal our own mechanical patterns, ridiculous passions and monstrous appetites played back to us, coming back to haunt us.11 In their formulaic repetition of horror imagery influenced from popular culture, particularly gothic and horror films and novels, creepypasta resemble the nineteenth-century’s penny dreadfuls or “penny bloods.”12 These short, illustrated sensationalist stories of crime, gothic and evil aristocrats, withered hags and murderers were aimed at entertaining the working class. The Victorian “bloods,” like creepypasta, were dependent on both the text and the illustration to offer easy and quick entertainment. But their gory and lurid subject matter also revealed Victorians’ increasing interest in the communication with the dead, mesmerism and spiritualism, and they perceived such stories not as simply flights of fancy but as facts.13 Creepypasta might not be considered facts, but their sometimes interactive nature and the blurring of reality and simulation give the impression of realism. Their concerns, however, about a world where the subject is vulnerable to the gaze of the other who remains unknown, are quite valid, especially with the growing threat of global surveillance and hackers. As computer analyst and whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaked documents revealed, the US National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting extensive internet and phone records of millions of Americans and had tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms, including Facebook, Google and Microsoft to track online communications. Creepypasta blur the boundaries between reality and fiction. But when fiction is snuffed out by the real, then we have moved to the “monstration” of a “blatant presentation of horror.”14 Given the concerns with materiality, life and death and the inhuman pursued here, it is impossible not to ask about the status of life created by artists today. For example, in 2011, SymbioticA’s and Science Gallery’s exhibition Visceral: The Living Art Experiment put into display such bioart works as bioengineered dolls entitled The Semi-Living Worry Dolls, the living foetal calf cells utilised in Afterlife: The Immortalisation of Kira and Rama, and the Cryobook Archives, books made of human or pig tissue. In 1939, the aesthetic aspirations of Ilse Koch, “the blonde romantic,” or most fittingly, “the Bitch Dog of Buchenwald,” would drive her to demand that concentration

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camp detainees with tattoos be skinned so that she could turn their skins “into various objects of art brut, as well as lampshades.”15 As Virilio has put it, “Ashtrays, lampshades, quotidian objects and prostheses of a life where the banality of evil, its ordinariness, is far more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”16 Bioart, in its desire to explore the intersections of biology and art, is a nihilistic commentary on the general cultural climate where immediacy, terroristic presence and transparency have turned us into cold-blooded spectators. With the technological capacity to realise metaphor, nature is devoured by artificiality. From the gothic origins of Frankenstein and the vivisection experiments in The Island of Dr. Moreau to contemporary biotechnology and bioart, ethical questions arise about the use of biological material beyond the organism’s life and about what is natural or artificial. Gothic is concerned with the fragile boundary between life and death and animates ambiguous figures such as the living dead (zombies) and animated corpses (vampires) to challenge the stability of established boundaries and voice anxieties about life itself. Contemporary biotechnology and, particularly bioart—art produced by the manipulation of biological materials and the creation of new life—are also inextricably linked to the question of life and its manipulation. On the one hand, the unbounded freedom of aesthetic expression and the creation of monstrous entities recalls, as Paul Virilio himself points out, the eugenic experimentations of the Nazi concentration camps and the absolute horror of inhuman science. The presentation and realism of contemporary art along with its creation of lives genetically programmed to suffer abnormally are extremities that ought to remind us of the atrocities of the past. On the other hand, arguably, bioart raises concerns about the kind of life that animates bioengineered entities and radically asks questions about what counts as human life and what is life. Indeed, life is out of our human control, as was demonstrated by the bioart exhibit entitled “Victimless Leather Jacket”—a “living jacket” made out of stem cells from human and mouse dna and fed nutrients through a tube—at the New York MoMA exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” (2008). The coat was growing too fast and, in danger of bursting out of its container, it was eventually “killed.” These unfamiliar teratologies occupy the liminal space of undeath, nonhuman entities that are living but, at the same time, nonautonomous. More importantly, there are valid questions regarding bioart’s exploitation of living forms to generate profit and fame for bioartists, who very often act as business representatives for biotech companies. Neoliberalism’s obsession with enhancement and perfectibility of the body goes hand in hand with the biological transformation and manipulation of genes, cells or proteins. To what extent bioart participates in, or interrupts, the dogmatism of liberal eugenics, private property, patent laws and commodification, remains to be seen. Nonetheless, the manipulation of life at various scales to make visible the vulnerable and fragile life of

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bioengineered figures, should always be critically seen, within the more general context of Virilio’s pitiless art and Badiou’s century of terroristic nihilism, of pure surface and transparency. The extreme visual presence of blood in contemporary horror’s cinematic embodiments attests to the movement from reading, navigating through tropes and deciphering imagery, to the mesmeric martyrology of screens where the eye is invited to participate in the jouissance of pain and suffering. The gaze is directed on the screen itself as the embodiment of visceral effects, where the inside biological life, what should remain hidden, blood itself, is exposed and put on display. Blood is filmed as expressive materiality through its movement, colour and light, caught as pure naked intensities, an intense experience of misery and glory that is unbearable. But, at the same time, the glorification of the visual sensations of blood and flesh at the expense of meaning, are traced with the clinical gaze of the camera, reducing the body to a carnival of pity and despair, while inviting the isolated individual to momentarily be entertained by the passions and martyrdom of the other, who remains an abject body open to consumption. In this respect, within this inhuman outlook, it is possible to read the contemporary compulsion to repeat and the persistence of images of trauma and abjection in literature, film and other media in terms of capitalism’s mechanical, unsympathetic and uncaring nature. The everyday, routine, mundane reproduction of images of blood testifies to contemporary capital’s cold indifference and the impossibility of meaningful connection. Such imagery reflects the violation, pain and nihilism that surrounds much of human existence now. On the one hand, such practices participate in a generalised supermarket suffering that accepts that man is a mere body whose only saleable quality is the spectacle of its own suffering. On the other hand, there is a necrorealism at work today that, like that of the Russians’ in the twentieth century, seeks to represent the Real through images of the undead and the in-between that resist biopolitical categorisation. Neither dead nor alive, necrorealist figures protest against decaying and corrupted realities, affirming a sense of an in-between/(vampire) identity. In particular, horror’s depiction of human violence and imagery of blood remains attached to the organic and humanity, masking the fear of the inorganic and the machinic. What horror teaches us today is that humans have no control over a world that is indifferent to them and absolutely inhuman. More importantly, horror stages the destruction of the human by inhuman forces, questioning humans’ right to existence, by presenting them as rapacious, dominant and narcissistic whose own survival depends on the subordination and appropriation of their environment. In other words, horror affirms and celebrates the demise of the human, destroying the illusion of being unique. At the same time, the total surrender to the inhuman immanence of machinic forces means the end of horror itself, the Thing, blood and the

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Real. As de Man tells us, language, consciousness and all those other things that render the human possible are also the same things that render identity undecidable. In other words, the heterogeneous materiality of language, on which the whole system of meaning and representation depends on, not only makes meaning possible but also impossible. In this respect, when heterogeneity dissipates, and everything becomes a thing, what is ultimately threatened is the Thing itself and the nature of horror.

Notes 1. Edgar Allan Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation,” in The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. III: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 1038. 2. Claire Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 18. 3. Claire Colebrook, “In Conversation: Claire Colebrook with Jessica Caroline,” The Brooklyn Rail, 1 September 2016, https://brooklynrail.org/2016/09/ art_books/claire-colebrook-with-jessica-caroline. 4. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 101. 5. Kathy Acker, “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body,” in The Last Sex: Feminism and Outlaw Bodies, ed. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 27. 6. See Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 7. See Tom Cohen, “Toxic Assets,” in Theory and the Disappearing Future (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2012) 110; and Cohen, “Introduction,” Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 24–5. 8. See Reza Negarestani, “Technodrome,” www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/ 2005/oct/technodrome.shtml. 9. Paul de Man, “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 83. 10. Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). See also, Benjamin Noys, “‘Monumental Construction’: Badiou and the Politics of Aesthetics,” Third Text 23, no. 4 (2009): 383–92; Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 11. See Mark Downham, “Videodrome Programming Phenomena: The Thing in Room 101,” Tom Vague, 1987, http://vague.mjretro.co.uk/vague-18-19/. 12. The comparison here between old and new media is also a nod to “media archaeology” as a way to explore new media through past ones and get insights of thinking past and present media in parallel lines. See, Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012), 2–3. 13. Denis Denisoff, “Introduction,” in The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories, ed. Denis Denisoff (Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2004), 21. 14. Paul Virilio, Art and Fear (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 50. 15. Virilio, Art and Fear, 41–2. 16. Virilio, Art and Fear, 64.

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Index

accelerationism 8, 136, 145, 153, 154, 155 agential realism 12 Alien (1979) 1 anonymity 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 104, 112, 113, 163 Anonymous (hacktivist group) 95 Argento, Dario, and Suspiria (1977) 1 Assange, Julian 96 Austen, Jane, and Northanger Abbey 3 Badiou, Alain: and passion for the Real 162, 165 Bakker, Scott, and Blind Brain Theory 153 Barker, Clive, and “The Book of Blood” 22 Bear, Greg, and Blood Music 17, 140, 143, 144, 148, 150–2 bioart 164 bitcoin 96, 97 black metal theory 12 blood: blood spatters 12, 57; in Bloodstain Pattern Analysis (BPA) 12; in contemporary cinema 1, 2, 4, 14, 165; and D. H. Lawrence’s “blood consciousness” 6–7; as elixir of life 131; and haemophilia 8, 14; as inhuman materiality 11, 12, 140, 143; and Luce Irigaray’s red blood/sang rouge 8; as mechanical 13, 22, 39, 132, 136, 143, 144; in Poe’s tales 7, 123, 127, 131; as red colour 1, 2, 84, 132; as sanguis and cruor 85; in The Shining (1980) 1, 54, 55, 57; and stigmata 21, 60; as symbol 1, 2, 3, 22, 64n4, 94; and women 68, 69, 76; and writing 13, 15, 21, 22, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 40, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 161

body: and cannibalism 16, 84, 85, 87; detached from mind 87; inaccessible 87; and inscription 15, 32, 49, 62, 64, 76; and mutilation 14, 15, 16, 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 30, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 84, 86, 87, 88, 103, 104, 160, 162; and screen 86; and vampirism 16, 73, 84, 85 Botting, Fred, and candygothic 45 Braidotti, Rosi 153 Brassier, Ray 153, 154 Brontё, Charlotte, and Jane Eyre 3 Butler, Judith 10–11, 49 Cabin in the Woods (2011) 1 Candle Cove 100 Carrie (1976) 1 Carter, Angela, and “The Bloody Chamber” 3 Conan Doyle, Arthur 12, 13, 21 creepypasta 12, 16, 60, 83, 88, 93, 95, 96, 98–113, 162, 163 Crichton, Michael, Prey 17, 133, 144, 148–50 Crimson Peak (2015) 1–8, 57–8 Cronenberg, David: and The Brood 79; and Videodrome 95 cryptocurrencies 96, 97, 162 Cybernetic Culture Research Unit 145 cyberpunk 17, 141, 144, 147 cypherpunk 96, 97 dark web 8, 12, 16, 91, 93, 94–8, 101, 115, 162 del Toro, Guillermo 1, 4, 6, 57 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 46, 47, 48, 52, 68, 80–1, 153; and body without organs 48, 81; and life playing with death 81

176

Index

De Man, Paul: and Aesthetic Ideology 12, 23; and apathy 10, 11, 86; and “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘the Task of the Translator’”143; and “Excuses (Confessions)” 23, 24; and “Hegel on the Sublime” 124; as inhuman philosopher 9; and “Kant and Schiller” 9, 142; and “Kant’s Materialism” 9, 10, 61; and machinic text 27, 36, 97; and material vision 9, 10, 92; and new materialisms 69; and “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” 9, 48, 69, 109; and prosaic materiality of the letter 9, 10; and “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics” 10, 124 de Van, Marina, and In My Skin 14, 16, 69, 84, 86, 88, 162 Dennis, Claire, Trouble Every Day 16, 69, 84–6 Derrida, Jacques 15, 23–4 du Maurier, Daphne: and The Birds 149; and Rebecca 3 du Welz, Fabrice, Vinyan 15, 69, 73, 77–84 Evil Dead (2013) 1 Faber, Michel, and The Crimson Petal and the White 3 Faustus 15, 22, 32, 34–5 Ferenczi, Sándor 78, 80, 81, 82 Fisher, Mark 11, 48, 53–4, 68, 99, 100, 107, 153, 161; and gothic materialism 11; and The Weird and the Eerie 99–100 Foucault, Michel 13, 15, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 62, 68, 140, 141, 142, 150, 154; and desexualisation 62; and history 142; and The Order of Things 141 Freud, Sigmund: and Beyond the Pleasure Principle 68, 71, 73; and death drive 15, 48, 58, 68, 69, 71–2, 73, 85, 91, 107, 108, 133, 141; and Moses and Monotheism 84; and Totem and Taboo 84; and the uncanny 150 gaze 16, 48, 56, 93, 97, 98, 108–9, 111, 162, 163, 165; and bodiless eye 69; and eye as a machine 109; and passionless seeing 61, 109 grey goo scenario 148, 153 Grosz, Elizabeth 15, 46, 48–9

Harman, Graham 99, 100 Hayles, Katherine 17, 144, 152 history: as inhuman 51, 52; as machinic 15, 41, 56; as writing instrument 47, 52 Hitchcock, Alfred: and The Birds (1963) 149; and Rear Window (1954) 112 idealism 6, 7, 121, 126, 127, 128, 134, 135, 152, 160 internet horror 8, 16, 40, 91, 93, 98, 105, 106, 163 Jackson, Peter, and Dead Alive (1992) 1 Jameson, Fredric 53–4 Jeffers, Robinson, and inhumanism 141 Kafka, Franz, and “In the Penal Colony” 15, 29, 46, 48–52 Kant, Immanuel 9, 68, 130; and Critique of Judgement 9 King, Stephen, and The Shining 15, 46, 52, 54, 64, 95 Kittler, Friedrich 27–30, 31, 34, 35 Koja, Kathe 15, 46, 58–64, 147, 162; and Bad Brains 61–2; and The Cipher 58–61; and The Skin 62–3 Kubrick Stanley, and The Shining (1980) 1, 52, 53, 56, 57 Lacan, Jacques 48, 68, 69, 71–2, 91, 108; and the gaze 108, 111; and the lamella 71 Land, Nick 16, 45, 62, 98, 133, 145, 153–4; and anti-vitalism 15; and inhumanism 145 Lawrence, D. H. 4–8, 124 Lewis, Matthew, and The Monk 15, 22, 31–4 libertarianism 96 Lorca, Federico García, and “Theory and Play of the Duende” 61 Lovecraft, H. P. 4–5, 32, 99, 100 Martyrs (2008) 1, 14 materialism 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 24, 46, 48, 69, 115, 118, 119, 120, 127, 128, 131, 134, 135, 160 Maury, Julien and Alexander Bustillo, Inside 15, 69, 70, 73, 75–7, 83, 84 Meatball Machine 144, 147 medium: and blood 22, 32, 34; and body 104, 106; and camera 76, 77, 88, 107; and corrupted computers

Index 103; and de Man’s ventriloquist dummy 124; and film 84, 85; and online media 91–113; and phantasmagoria 106, 132–3; and spirit photography 105, 106, 107; and spiritualism 1; and video games 91, 92, 105, 112 memorisation by rote 10, 50, 124 Merhige, Elias, and Begotten 79 Nakamoto, Satoshi 96 nanotechnology 17, 140, 144, 146, 148, 155 necrorealism 165 Negarestani, Reza 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 154, 155 new materialisms 12, 15, 69, 160 Nietzsche, Friedrich 15, 28, 29, 142; and mnemotechnics 15, 30, 46–7, 48, 50 Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) 1 Object Oriented Ontology 12 occult media 15, 34 Poe, Edgar Allan 4–8, 12, 13, 16, 115, 118–36, 148, 150, 156, 160; and artificial death 120; and “The Fall of the House of Usher” 4; and “The Masque of the Red Death” 54, 55, 94, 118, 123, 131, 150; and mesmerism 118, 119–23 posthuman 17, 126, 136, 142, 144–6, 147, 152, 153, 154, 155 prometheanism 140, 145, 146, 152, 154 Radcliffe, Ann 31, 32; and The Mysteries of Udolpho 3, 31 red room 16, 93, 95, 96, 98, 101, 113, 114 Roeg, Nicolas, and Don’t Look Now 83, 84, 112

177

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 118, 128–31, 135 Schopenhauer, Arthur 68, 70–1, 72, 126 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 30–2 Shaviro, Steven 58 Shelley, Mary, and Frankenstein 1, 146 Siratori, Kenji, and Blood Electric 162 slender man 100, 105–8; and face 105–8 Solet, Paul, and Grace 15, 69, 70, 73–5, 83, 84 speculative realism/materialism 12 Spinoza, Baruch: and conatus 72 Stoker, Bram, and Dracula 3, 14, 15, 23, 24, 29, 30, 32, 34–40, 52, 57, 146 Tetsuo 147 Thacker, Eugene, and dark media 106 Thing, The (1982) 1 Tokyo Gore Police 144, 147 transgression 7, 32, 40, 51, 58, 63, 149, 162; and Georges Bataille 63; and limit experience 62 transhumanists 17, 144 Virilio, Paul: and pitiless art 164, 165 von Kleist, Heinrich 25 Walpole, Horace, and The Castle of Otranto 3 Wells, H. G. “The Red Room” 114–15 Wiener, Robert, and cybernetics 28 writing: and the machine 23–30, 49, 50, 51; and the typewriter 15, 22, 23–4, 27–30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 49, 52, 54, 56, 162 Žižek, Slavoj 69, 71, 86, 108; and death drive 69, 71; and ghost in the machine 72; and new materialisms 69; and self-mutilation 86