Hugvísindasvið “I am an other and I always was…” On the Weird and Eerie in Contemporary and Digital Cultures Ritgerð til MA-prófs í menningafræði Bob Cluness May 2019 Háskóli Íslands Hugvísindad Menningarfræði “I am an other and I always was…” On the Weird and Eerie in Contemporary and Digital Cultures Ritgerð til MA-prófs í menningafræði Bob Cluness Kt.: 150676-2829 Tutor: Björn Þór Vilhjálmsson May 2019 Abstract Society today is undergoing a series of processes and changes that can be only be described as weird. From the apocalyptic resonance of climate change and the drive to implement increasing powerful technologies into everyday life, to the hyperreality of a political and media landscape beset by chaos, there is the uneasy feeling that society, culture, and even consensual reality is beginning to experience signs of disintegration. What was considered the insanity of the margins is now experienced in the mainstream, and there is a growing feeling of wrongness, that the previous presumptions of the self, other, reality and knowledge are becoming untenable. This thesis undertakes a detailed examination of the weird and eerie as both an aesthetic register and as a critical tool in analysing the relationship between individuals and an impersonal modern society, where agency and intention is not solely the preserve of the human and there is a feeling not so much of being to act, and being acted upon. Using the definitions and characteristics of the weird and eerie provided by Mark Fisher’s critical text, The Weird and the Eerie, I set the weird and eerie in a historical context specifically regarding both the gothic, weird fiction and with the uncanny, I then analyse the presence of the weird and the eerie present in two cultural phenomena, the online phenomenon of the Slender Man, and J.G. Ballard’s novels Crash (1973) and Concrete Island 1974). By exploring the presence of the weird and eerie in contemporary texts and online communities, I show that they are aesthetic modes that are prevalent in many levels of cultures in society. The weird and eerie I conclude provide the elements in making new conceptual tools for making sense of an increasingly chaotic and inhuman social world. 2 Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following people for their help, support, and advice in helping to make this thesis a possibility. To my wife Sigga, for her patience and love in during times of high stress and crisis. Also, to our feline son Stalin for existing and helping to keep things in perspective. To my friend Nikkita Hamar Patterson for her incredible help and fortitude in editing and proofreading this thesis. To my MA Thesis advisor Björn Þór Vilhjálmsson, for his supervision and helping to main some form of clarity and quality control on this essay. To Matt Colquhoun, aka Xenogothic, for the theoretical reading list, suggestions, and online discussions that began this conceptual journey. To Xavier Aldana Reyes for the reading list on contemporary gothic studies, as well as Simon Sellars and Damien Patrick Williams for their advice and suggestions on a variety of topics associated with the subject of this thesis. 3 Contents Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 Part 1: The Weird and the Eerie – Definitions and Concepts........................................................ 7 1.1: The Weird and the Eerie – The Gothic ............................................................................ 10 1.2: The Weird and the Eerie - The Uncanny .......................................................................... 17 Part 2: Slenderman and the Fictioning of the Real ...................................................................... 25 2.1: Of the Enlightenment and Romanticism – Of Objective “Reality” and Subjective “Fiction” .................................................................................................................................. 27 2.2: Spectral Realities and Ghosts in Modern Machines ......................................................... 29 2.3: More Real than the Real Itself: Baudrillard and the Image as Reality ............................. 30 2.4: Theory-Fictions, the Ccru, and Hyperstitions .................................................................. 33 2.5: On Slender Man and the Creation of the Internet’s First Folk Devil ............................... 38 2.5.1: Hyperstition Stage One - “An Element of Effective Culture that Makes Itself Real.” ............................................................................................................................................. 44 2.5.2: Hyperstition Stage 2 - “A Fictional Quantity Functioning as a Time-Traveling Device.” ............................................................................................................................... 47 2.5.3: Stage Three of Hyperstition - “The Entity as a Coincidence Intensifier.” ................ 48 2.5.4 - Hyperstition Stage Four - “Call to the Old Ones.” .................................................. 50 2.6: Accelerated fictions and the Collapse of the Social Real. ................................................ 53 Part 3: Driving Beyond Death - The Eerie Thanatos of Non-Place in J.G. Ballard’s Crash and Concrete Island ........................................................................................................................... 55 3.1: Modernism and the Uncanny ........................................................................................... 56 3.2 From Place to Non-Place, and the Seamless Landscapes of Global Capitalism ............... 59 3.3: Long Live the Autogeddon - J.G. Ballard and Crash ...................................................... 65 3.4: Set Adrift on Voided Bliss - Concrete Island .................................................................. 74 Conclusion................................................................................................................................... 81 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 86 Filmography ................................................................................................................................ 90 4 Introduction The current social climate of the times and conditions that we are living in can be described in various ways – scary, anxious, unreal, bizarre, absurd, etc. But one word that would best seem to describe our ongoing social situation is weird. Whether it is the acceleration of climate change, the hyperreality of our politics, the ever-inexorable advances in global capitalist systems, or the advances of bleeding edge digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and algorithmic machine learning, there is an increasingly pervasive view that society’s ability to generate grand narratives of consensual forms of social reality are starting to erode and fray at the edges. There is a distinct vulnerability in the air, one that is full of uncertainty, unpredictability, and instability. Nobody is sure of anything anymore. In order to make sense of the increasingly inexplicable phenomena happening around us, people are taking up various forms and avenues of knowledge and meaning. There is the increased interest in the paranormal, as well as neo-pagan traditions such as witchcraft and astrology. There has been the escalation in mainstream media and politics of various anti-governmental “conspiracy theories” as well as the rise of the “alt-right” movements in various online and material subcultures. Meanwhile in various fields of popular culture, such as TV, cinema, music, art and fiction, there has been more explicit explorations into these realms of the weird, and how they unsettle us. In this thesis, I will analyse how the weird and the eerie as aesthetic concepts have been defined and developed, in particular by the writer as Mark Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie (2016), and how they link with more historical and traditional nodes of the cultural weird, specifically through the historical concepts and motifs provided by the gothic and the uncanny as cultural and aesthetic forms. By analysing and exploring how the gothic, and therefore the weird and eerie, have been present in the cultural expression of historic periods of anxiety and uncertainty in society, I hope to show how the concept of the weird and eerie can provide a basis not only to understand and explain inherent anxieties that are prevalent in our digital cultures, but also how such notions of the weird and the eerie can help fuel the social imagination, an imagination that has been stymied and cut off in an era of neoliberal capitalist realism, to influence the invention of new ideas, concepts and fictions that allow society to imagine possible futures and worlds outside the one that we currently live in. 1 From this analysis I will lay out and define the concepts of their weird and eerie across two particular cultural texts and/or cultural phenomena to highlight how the weird and eerie are not only present in these texts and cultural mediums, but also how such aesthetics are bleeding into and multiplying within our everyday lives. I aim to show how each of these texts converge in the mind, creating interferences between different types of thinking, that materialize when science, philosophy, and art attempt to work on differing levels of