Amanda Beech
Postmodernism undertaken as a philosophical, political, and cultural practice has definitively underscored its limits. For culture at large, the illustration of a world that is stretched, fragmented, and de-ontologized, where exteriority is thread-ed through the experience as immanence, is mirrorthread-ed in our political incapacity to think a future equality. These two facets demonstrate the requirement to accomplish a thinking of the unknown (the future) and the genuine possibility of a project (equality) where both call for certain de-mythologizations of the uniqueness of selfhood. Horror, as a cultural phenomenon, speaks to this issue of human limitations, equality, and our ca-pacity to take negativity seriously. It does this sometimes di-rectly and sometimes naïvely, acting as evidence of the problem that we have described. In light of these limits and potentialities, can horror accommodate a non-pessimistic view of language and maintain a project of realism? Can we assert that the lan-guage that expresses a mind-independent reality can explicate the conditions of horror vacui, without undermining language as having an essential equality or inequality with the real? Fur-thermore, does horror expressed in ordinary language provide access to meaningful, conceptual expression that is extensional rather than solipsistic? We will explore these questions by first advancing the limits of horror as a representational expression
of nothingness as a means to ask how a new understanding of the relation between representation and the thought of nothing can rescue the operations of language after postmodernity.
Capitalist Horror
It’s difficult to make a good horror film these days, and we know it. The genre has situated itself in retrospective feedback loops of the sequel, the prequel, the remake, and the ironic, tragic replay of itself as farce, where horror makes its own antirealist wink at the blood-spattered lens and knows the condition of its own constraint to horror as genre.1 In this sense what we expect from horror, its concept, and what we often get or experience are very different. Horror promises the experience of the un-grounding of certain norms, vis-à-vis its transgressive character wherein spaces, characters, and objects traverse the worlds of the percep-tible and the imperceppercep-tible but also threaten to reach the limits of our conceptual capacities. In this, horror’s aim is to produce an experience of alterity that maintains its alien quality; we will never be at home with the monster, a guiding principle that offers a lived experience of the outside and holds the nowhere within the lens of human perception. Unfortunately, this attempt to hold open the space for alterity without qualities leads to dis-appointment, since horror recuperates the “beyond” as the re-production of already existing norms, habits, and styles that get reinstated ironically, knowingly, as a claim to the meta-genre of new transgressions within the genre. In this postmodern for-mat, we can see that horror fails. It loses its capacity for the out-side. This is for two reasons: First, representations are always already seen to be inadequate to the real, underpinning horror by a kind of semantic pessimism; second, postmodern plural-ism conditions a genealogy of the image’s failure over time as an
1 Franchises such as Keenan Ivory Wayans, dir., Scary Movie (Los Angeles:
Dimension Films, 2000), HD exemplify this genre of meta-horror, where the tropes of various horror films and their allegorical contents, such as the “easy” girl gets it first, are culled from the history of the genre and replayed or re-enacted as another self-conscious representational form.
indeterminate process of the real. Here, the concept of horror resides within a contradiction of the real as process and an irre-ducible alienation in the given. This transcendental knowledge of the real has no traction upon the given; it is either sublated to the given as one of many other competing claims within it, or this knowledge is privatized to the realm of the psychological fictions of private minds. Time is in motion, but the future is closed.
Films like Hostel (2005, directed by Eli Roth) extrapolate this dance of horror as meta-genre — where horror narrates hor-ror in the stage within the formalization of drama. Hostel fore-grounds the connections between knowledge and money/power, entangling these discourses in the central narrative framework.
Here, the constraints of the horror genre are made equivalent to the administration of neo-liberal economies, where the film features various modes of torture as artistic spectacle paid for in full by rich masochists. The victims of such terror are vic-tims only because they are naïvely unaware of the traditional allegories of the horror genre: don’t trust anyone, don’t go back-packing in Eastern Europe, don’t go out alone at night, don’t be a slut, etc. Horror, in the film Hostel, is understood as a knowl-edge-based and fiscal-centered economy. For the victims, this is marked as lack and operates as a tradition of dramatic irony for the audience. The latter meets death precisely because they have not watched enough horror movies. For the masochistic rich, this technē of horror becomes a form of power exercised through money. Knowledge of horror does not enter the picture for the victims, nor for the actors; it is for us and the masochistic authors of the structure of horror in which others partake.
Hostel narrates the limits of the horror genre as something that is regulated as and through capital, and it self-consciously remakes itself within this paradigm through this picturing of its own constraint as capitalistic experience. For the globally mo-bile and endemically bored, perverse rich who pay to see and experience horror first-hand as art, another irony is palatable:
we too pay to encounter a version of this artifice. But the com-plaint we have, that which bites us, is that unlike the punters
in Hostel, the horror that we encounter is that a thought of the real is only capable of reiterating itself as a mode of illustrative, simulated, or representational experience, and that culture, if it thinks, has met the limits of its imagination. These limits are defined through the bind of money on the one hand and knowl-edge as the status quo on the other hand. Together, they extol problematic folklores of the representational image and sub-jectivity. Such traditions identify the horror genre as a form of Burke’s sublime: an antirealist expression of the contradiction of how the impossibility of knowing the structure that subtends reality can be manifest in images which somehow access our non-relation to the real, conflating the narration of our relation to the real with a form of the pseudo-experience of it.
In this way, horror has witnessed and narrated its own ex-haustion. It has authored its failure to be horror and has done so in order to transcend the parameters of its own paradigmatic framework. More than other genres — like the action movie, the spy thriller, or the rom-com, which have all to some extent de-livered pastiche, parodic, and ironic self-referential treatments, and all have in their grasp some narrative of the real, be this the real of power or true love — horror seems to fail precisely because it specifies a precise and unique claim to the real in a set of images that are negatively charged with themes of violence, death, sadism, evil, and so on. There is a political claim, via a discourse on transgression and heterogeneity, where horror transcends the norms and regulations that govern the function-al aspects of human society by connecting private, psychologi-cal experiences with larger philosophipsychologi-cal and societal issues that include the question of what it means to be human and what a society is or might be. This format of horror apes a structure of existing power and its image. In framing and protecting an unreal fictional space that insures us against the fear that the horror pictured in the film is real, such fiction also asks us to see that this horror is a hyperbolic metaphor for forms of power that undergird and mobilize contemporary life. In this struc-ture, the political claim of horror remains private.
These political and philosophical claims compel us to ex-plore the horror genre as a form of phenomenological experi-ence, and to ask what and how epistemology structures horror.
If our labelling of our experiences as “horror” denotes the limit attitudes of human life and knowledge, could horror, as an ex-perimental space for the production of new forms, pictures, and stories extend the definitions of what the horizons of these limits might be? In what ways can horror explore the real and articulate the expanded territory of our thinking of it? In these questions we see the need to construct a distinction between a post-structuralism that concentrates on the totality of infinite possibilities for thought, where the horror we ultimately find lies in what the genre fails to do, spelling out a new existential crisis of the unavailability of horizons, and a horror philosophy that must navigate the relation between the aesthetic experience of horror and the definition of thought itself.
Neo-Con Horror and the Post-Human
A neo-conservative horror is exemplified not only in the con-servation of genre but in what stands out as the core content of the horror genre. Here, dominant themes are threats to the known at the level of perception and conception (e.g., altered worlds and times, the theme of the double, or parallel realities à la Poltergeist (1982)), the fear that there are other forces beyond our ken that produce “life as we know it” (e.g., stories of pos-session), and ultimately, the threat to annihilate human exist-ence at local (e.g., the axe murderer scenario), processional (e.g., the vampiric assimilates the human over time), and universal (e.g., the global disease from The Last Man on Earth (1964) to World War Z (2013)) scales.2 The allegorical content of horror across these subgenres emphasizes a defense of the known as its core value but does little to contemplate the “nothing” or the
2 These themes are also available in conspiracy movies, science fiction, and psychological thrillers, but they are also key to sustaining the genre of hor-ror.
“non-being” of human life as a serious enterprise — that is, to consider the relation between genre, and the generic space of horror. A model of horror that exists within the circle of genre cannot entertain the conception that humans are self-causing entities. Nor can it comprehend the horror vacui that defines the truth of non-knowledge as the condition for knowing extrapo-lated within a Godless, purposeless universe, since this atempo-rality of being-nothing-nowhere is supplanted by conjurings of irrational and in-substantive representations that duly take on both a theological tone of dread and a politicized fear of other people, bodies, and identities.3 This latter form has had popular success as a narrative structure that privileges themes of sur-vival and protection. Stories of global bio-apocalypse and alien invasion show the horror genre’s semantic flexibility rather than demonstrating any radical shift in redefining the standards with which horror goes to work. From William Castle’s The House on Haunted Hill (1959), where parlor games that host the dark side of human nature are eclipsed by the real of these psychologi-cal forces, to Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death (1964), which tells tales of the dark arrangements between aristocratic decadence and the barbaric powers of both earthly and tran-scendental natures; from the films that took center stage in the late 1970s and early 1980s; the master-horror moments in films such as John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), to the relatively more recent foray into hor-ror as social realism with films like Paranormal Activity (2009).
Horror, as the aesthetic experience that would in avant-gardist fashion lead to antagonism with and the circumvention — of our own beliefs, our institutions, and our ground — seems to have written itself out through its own institutionalization. The
3 For a discussion on the issue of the conflation of the identity of the inef-fable and non-knowledge as a problem for knowledge, Bataille’s work also leads to the material expression of the limits of knowledge as non-dis-cursive conditions in the processes of powerlessness and desire. Georges Bataille, “Non-Knowledge,” in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, ed.
Stuart Kendall, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 197–200.
recent re-make of Suspiria (2018) further advances this point by interweaving the allegory of remembering past forms of fascis-tic violence with a story of witchery and culfascis-tic paganism. The horror in Suspiria is therefore not given in a question of the unknowable but in the forgetting of what is known, and in the violence that this forgetting produces.
These comprehensions of horror establish the genre as a form of institutional critique that is similar to the artistic kind,4 which reminds us moreover that horror has an institution, and leads us to ask about what is being defended rather than pros-ecuted in these stories. Whilst horror advocates the presence of aleatory forces in our lives and thus appeals to a transgressive dynamic, horror as an allegory of its own content often perfects and reinforces conservative values of political power. Increas-ingly, what “postmodern” movies tell us is that horror is capable of direct and explicit conservativism and is repressive in many senses, and its impoverished (kitsch) call upon exteriority sus-tains this. But even when horror knows this limit and turns in-ward to engage in a critique of the social, it refuses to engage in thinking the way in which horror can be a tool to offer the possibility of thinking another structure for the world.5 Thus a
4 I am referring to the standard modalities of institutional critique in the mid-twentieth century, where conceptual artists strategized various cri-tiques of power by identifying ideological power as materially located in the walls and structures of the institutions of the art world. The emergence of post-institutional critique recognized the way in which these practices were part of and absorbed within the institution of art and therefore developed art that would bear witness to the entrapment of art within the institutions of its own critique. Such behaviors moved across the tragic recognitions of the failure of critique, tongue-in-cheek ironies that fiction-alized difference or practices that expressed a tragic form of surrender to the status quo.
5 Key to this is the way in which philosophy of horror is often satisfied with the idea that a movie can illustrate some ideas contained in a philosophy of horror adequately, rather than propose its own philosophical notions.
For example, “Space Horror” is defined in Gavin F. Hurley, “Nonknowl-edge and Inner Experience,” in Horror in Space, Critical Essays on a Film Subgenre, ed. Michele Brittany (Jefferson: MacFarland and Company Inc., Publishers, 2017), 81–96. He claims that movies can communicate the
horror that gives up on exteriority as a serious endeavor loses its grip on both the non-causal aleatory and the causal future.
The limits of horror tell us that we should not lay the blame purely at the level of horror’s language, stylization, or scripts but also at the level of the invariant structure of horror itself. We can see this deeper structural problem in the way that horror has a predilection for the case of the human. Despite its claim to occupy thoughts, things, and experiences beyond us, it is often done in our image and our name. Horror therefore exposes its immanent humanism. Despite the claim that the task of horror is to think beyond the means and ends of human psychology, self, and scale, it nevertheless clings to the theme of the irre-ducibility of human consciousness to the explanatory realm of the understanding; the mystery of the self persists. In this way, horror tends to privilege an existential crisis of knowing the self as the establishment of horror, for the question of “self” might appear to be a project of knowledge, but in this case it is the definitive bulwark against knowledge as well as freedom. The incomplete task of knowing is the mobilizing force of horror but also its aesthetic. This image of horror is secured in the mutual effacement and preservation of the human, where horror takes the human as figure and sets it against a background of the world of appearance. This figure takes on abstract qualities, receding and appearing into the world picture in a hydraulics of a vertigi-nous depth of field. The structure of horror offers a disorient-ing experience. Horror’s architecture in this picture of human/
world, then, produces a symmetry between the erasure and the construction of difference, where one cannot be discerned from the other. Horror is therefore realized in a landscape of time as
limits of the postmodern comprehension of reality, “in a way that science, language and logic can never grasp” (93), but in placing such movies in a space of literature which is apparently discourse-free, and therefore has special access to horror, promises only the thought of the never know-able — infinite horror as telos. As such, narrative horror when read via philosophy as a space beyond the discursive fully reinforces the trivial nature of culture’s capacity to apply horror as a generic to the particularity of genre expressions.
its own atemporality, and here, its images are special-effect il-lusions. They are illusions because horror does not possess or seek any possibility of transforming the categories/images/tech-niques that it takes on, nor does it show an interest in excavat-ing its own structure in a critical fashion. This horror would be better termed “post-human” because its aim to think after the primacy of humancentrism becomes an act of bearing witness to this passage towards becoming post-human. Therefore, the facticity of alienation is not taken as a fact but as a turn in the story of human life. In short, the post-human project becomes the act of constructing a passage to its own end — to realize the post-human as a process of “unbecoming” in the face of exterior forces that may be constructed by humans or not. Therefore, a post-human horror seeks to destroy the human as image but at the same time naïvely holds onto a concept of the human as the means and end of this project.
Totalizing Contradiction
If horror stakes its claim in nihilism, then we must be vigilant regarding the claims that language can manifest “the nowhere”.
In the structure of horror, we identify a paradox undergirded by an inability to think across two conceptions of time. This is
In the structure of horror, we identify a paradox undergirded by an inability to think across two conceptions of time. This is