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Home , Armen Avanessian, Beware the Slenderman, Bob (Twin Peaks), Concrete Island, Eerie, In the Mouth of Madness

Hugvísindasvið

“I am an and I always was…”

On the Weird and Eerie in Contemporary and Digital

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 into everyday life, to the hyperreality of a political and media landscape beset by chaos, there is the uneasy feeling that society, , 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 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 , and J.G. Ballard’s novels (1973) and 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.

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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 in during of high stress and . 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.

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Contents

Table of Contents Introduction ...... 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 : Slenderman and the Fictioning of the Real ...... 25 2.1: Of the Enlightenment and – Of Objective “Reality” and Subjective “Fiction” ...... 27 2.2: Spectral Realities and in Modern Machines ...... 29 2.3: More Real than the Real Itself: Baudrillard and the Image as Reality ...... 30 2.4: Theory-, the Ccru, and Hyperstitions ...... 33 2.5: On Slender Man and the Creation of the ’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 -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 : 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

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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 is the acceleration of climate change, the hyperreality of our , 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 “ 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, 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.

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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 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, , and art attempt to work on differing levels of immanence, materialisation, and composition. A particular artwork, for example, will lay out a concept onto a material plane using different registers such as sound, text, or imagery, while also generating affects and sensations that place the viewer directly in the realm of the concept, a realm that may have been otherwise disavowed of repressed through the ideas of rational perception and of science. The texts and phenomena presented in this thesis embody or contain elements of the weird and the eerie, either deliberately or inadvertently, and in doing so help us to make sense of an increasingly unsettling and anxious world.

In Chapter two, I explore and analyse how our forms of social and consensual reality have become more frayed and contentious as the boundaries between “fiction” and “reality” become increasingly blurred and permeable. in the 1990s coined the term “theory fiction,” to describe the shift in culture during the and 1990s towards the field of third order simulacra, thereby causing the elimination of the distinction between fiction (particularly ) and social theory. But writers like J.G. Ballard, in his 1971 essay “Fictions of Every Kind,” already acknowledge that in a consumerist world, society is bombarded daily by various fictions and narratives that produced by capitalism and absorbed through mass media, as these fictions aim to alter or change social reality in some form. As a response Ballard advocated that science fiction and its ability to meld elements of speculation and literary fiction was “the only possible realism in an increasingly artificialized society, but as an ingredient in its acceleration.”1 For Ballard, the author is no longer a singular artistic genius, but, in line with earlier movements such as constructivism, is a node or cog in a much larger machine: “he is now merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind.”2 Similarly, Fisher in many of his works and essays had laid out in depth the idea that various forms of “fictions,” from financial capitalism, with its automated trading based

1 Mackay and Armen Avanessian, “Introduction”, in Robin Mackay & Armen Avanessian (Eds), #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, (: Urbanomic, 2014): 19. 2 J.G Ballard, “Fictions of Every Kind”, in Robin Mackay & Armen Avanessian (Eds), #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, (London: Urbanomic, 2014): 238. 2

on virtual abstractions of capital, to various political narratives that are used to shape and mould our social and consensual reality. However, the weird and eerie as aesthetic modes, often experienced through the gothic is increasing prevalent in our digitised worlds, where we are required to deal with concepts such as “post-truth” and “alternative facts,” and where the ability of society to determine what appears and occurs as “reality” at a social level has become decidedly trickier. It is an age that is ripe for the contagions of fiction ready to burst through from the outside and not only affect, but indeed alter the fabric of our social reality.

Twentieth century culture has seen a ferment of the blurring of fiction and reality from the spread of H.P Lovecraft’s across various social and cultural forms, to the paratextual blending of fact and fiction in The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick, 1999). But it was in the 1990s and 2000s that artists, writers and theorists, taking their cue not only from the likes of J.G. Ballard and Jean Baudrillard, but also from emergent genre of cyberpunk fiction and cybernetic theories, began to produce hybrid texts and practices that were explicit in warping the boundaries between the real and fiction. As Macon Holt explains:

While earlier writers, such as Bataille, Nietzsche and Sartre had attempted to use fiction to develop a philosophical project, these works often served as illustrative, where the fiction served the philosophical project. In the 90s, however, theory- fiction, a practice built out of the shaky ontological foundation of postmodernism, attempted to collapse these things into one another. Where the writing of theory could fictionalize and produce reality. In short, this method was built from the understanding that our ideas about reality, our theories of it, came out of fictions. Fictions we used to act and shape reality. However, for many of theory-fiction’s practitioners, the fictions that we lived with in the 90s and even now had not kept pace with our strange new world.3

Such writings and modes of presentation were prevalent in the texts and academic presentations-as-art-installations from the Ccru (Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit) collective that was based from the University of Warwick in the late 1990s, where a collection of theorists, , writers, and artists attempted to collapse such ontological boundaries, meshing the writing of Lovecraft and William Burroughs with

3 Macon Holt, “The Terrifying Ambivalence of Theory-Fiction”, ArkBooks.dk, May 16 2017, accessible from http://arkbooks.dk/the-terrifying-ambivalence-of-theory-fiction/ 3

various theoretical and esoteric/magic systems, electronic music bleeding edge , and various narcotics and interpersonal relationships.4 Both their collective writings and the subsequent Hyperstition blog (which grew out of the Ccru after its members left Warwick University), went on to form much of the practical and theoretical aspects of theory-fiction, along with various neologisms such as “hyperstition,” a concept which “names elements of fiction that make themselves real via temporal feedback,” while the legacy of their explorations formed the underpinning of the concept of and the philosophical fields known as .5

From this theoretical groundwork in exploring the weird with respect of the intrusion of the “outside” of fiction into the “inside” of consensual reality, I focus on the online phenomenon known as Slender Man as an example of the dissolution between the real and the imaginary that embodies the cultural practice of narrative fictions that threaten to invade into the realities of particular social groups and audiences. Starting from life on a subcultural internet forum, the idea of the Slenderman erupted and spread into online cultures like a virus until it had become digital’s first folk demon. I posit is that through the shift from modes of production to that of intensified circulation and prosumption that is inherent in online cultures, the weird fictional “outside” that is represented in the ideas, content and text of Slenderman was able to spread, mutate, and latch onto and inform various forms of the “inside” that is our social reality. This allowed what was ostensibly a “fiction” created online to gain a life of its own, to become “real.”

In chapter three, I will explore the relationship of the individual to the weird and eerie effect and that are present in modern and contemporary urban spaces through two works by the writer J.G. Ballard. The chapter opens with an exploration of the connections between how the uncanny has been used to articulate the experiences and feelings of the individual from the impact of modernism upon the reconstruction and management of urban spaces and buildings in the twentieth century. The uncanny I will argue, in the way that it has been used to describe psychological states of alienation and

4 A decent overview and profile of the history of the CCRU can be found at Simon Reynolds, (1999), “RENEGADE ACADEMIA: The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit”, Energy Blog, Nov 3 , accessible at http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/11/renegade-academia-cybernetic- culture.html. 5 Simon O’Sullivan, “Futures and Fictions: A Conversation between Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed and Simon O’Sullivan”, in Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed and Simon O’Sullivan (Eds), Futures and Fictions, (London: Repeater Books, Kindle Edition, 2018): 5. For a more detailed definition and layout of the concept, read “How do fictions become hyperstitions?” Hyperstition Blog, June 19 2004, Accessible at http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003345.html.

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anxiety regarding the modern urban space, can be aligned with that of the weird in the way that modern architecture and design represented the shock of the new and the effacement of history.

The evolution of urban space as metamorphic expansion of modernism into that of what anthropologist Marc Augé terms as the logic of supermodernism. Augé characterises supermodernism as an excess of time, space and that is embodied by the growth and proliferation of what he terms as non-places. Non-places refer to capitalist and technological sites in modern society that, while having a human presence through that of work or transit, are a-historical, non-relational and lack any definitive connections with their locale. Augé sites non-places as spaces of transit or temporary waiting and congregation - shopping malls, business parks and corporation “campuses”, motorways, roundabouts, carparks, and hotels – all places that, give a semblance of seamless connectivity and ease of movement. From an architectural and organizational viewpoint however, non-places are considered sterile and affectless, exuding an overriding sameness and dispassionate negativity that is put to work under the auspices of globalised capitalism. Through their overriding spatial conformity, and the mechanical nature they invoke in the individual towards consumerism and social control, non-places invoke forms of eerie alienation upon the body in that they allow the individual to psychologically disconnect, to drift in an aesthetically impoverished landscape and the seeming absence of presence.

The third section of the chapter will look at the how the non-place, in particular that of the motorway, impacts upon the characters of two of Ballard’s novels, Crash (1973), and Concrete Island (1974). Ballard’s works, especially from the 1970s onwards, have become synonymous with the exploration of the inner psychologies of various protagonists - what Ballard described as Inner Space - and their collision with the structures and spaces associated with technological change and the logic of supermodernism. Indeed, the term “Ballardian” has entered into the English vernacular to describe that which is “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard's novels and stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”6

With Crash and Concrete Island, the incidence of specific traumas, that of the car crash, causes a defamiliarization in the minds of the characters towards the affectless

6 An online definition is provided at https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/ballardian. 5

vistas around them, transforming the landscape of non-place (in this case the motorway and adjacent sites) in sites of experimental discovery that beckons them to excavate a deeper reality under the concrete surfaces. At the same time, there is in the characters the triggering of atavistic drives from within that compel them to suspend rational impulses and moral judgements, and to embark upon a journey towards limit experiences of nihilistic sex and violence that mean certain death and destruction for those involved. In a close reading of the texts and by utilising Fisher’s concept of the eerie that exists in Thanatos, the name Sigmund Freud associated with the death drive inherent in the human unconscious towards annihilation, I aim to highlight the aspects and traces of the eerie in these technologically mediated drives, that while appearing inexplicable, almost alien to rational thought, is actually embedded deep within out very psyches.

Through the analysis provided in the three chapters, I will show that the weird and eerie have existed in the history of art and aesthetics, especially in the sphere of the gothic, but in many cases have been subsumed or overlooked as a synonym in the analysis for more popular concepts such as the uncanny. However, in over a century of accelerated technological and social change that has transformed the idea of the self and the human with regards to our relationship with the world, the weird and the eerie are exemplary modes in which to analyse and explore a culture and society that is at once disturbing, almost psychotic, yet alluring and enigmatic in its unreality.

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Part 1: The Weird and the Eerie – Definitions and Concepts

There have been a plethora of essays and articles that explore the “weird” and “eerie” as an aesthetic with regards to being part of the literary subgenre of “weird fiction,” as various writers and theorists have sought to define and lay out its features, boundaries and motifs. China Miéville has expanded upon the “hybrid” nature of weird fiction, detailing how it is “conceived of as a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark (“horror” plus “fantasy”) often featuring non-traditional alien monsters (thus plus “science fiction”),” where “[t]he focus is on awe, and its undermining of the quotidian.”7 Writer J.T. Joshi argues that other important aspects of the weird tale are “its capacity for the ‘refashioning of the reader’s view of the world’.”8 Indeed, in defining the divergent varieties of the weird tale, theorists such as Benjamin Noys and Thomas Murphy endorse taking a historical avenue in defining the weird, creating a split between what they call the “old weird,” which “can be dated between 1880 and 1940,” and includes the likes of Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and the era of the Weird Tales magazine, which began in 1927.9 Most importantly, the era of “old weird” includes the writing and tales of the man considered the greatest and most influential exponent of weird fiction, H.P Lovecraft.10 Meanwhile, the genre of fiction that became known as the “New Weird” was first termed by the writer M. Harrison, coined in 2003, to refer particularly to the writing and of China Miéville. However, both Noys and Murphy trace the idea of the new weird “back further to the period from the 1980s” that includes the likes of and Thomas Ligotti, “to the present that gained its most explicit articulation in the 2000s,” in the writings of the likes of Brian Evenson, M. John Harrison, and Jeff VanderMeer as well as the aforementioned Miéville.11

While these essays and discussions aim to tie down and approach the weird as a form of literary and genre fiction, they alas do not provide a substantive approach in being

7 China Miéville, “Weird Fiction”, In Mark Bould (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, (Oxford: Routledge, 2009): 510. 8 J.T. Joshi, quoted in Benjamin Noys & Timothy S. Murphy, “Introduction: Old and New Weird”, Genre, 49 (2) (2016): 118. 9 Noys & Murphy, 119. 10 In giving a description as to why he writes tales of weird fiction, Lovecraft in his essay “notes on writing weird fiction” clearly states that it is “one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis” (See H.P. Lovecraft, “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”, lovecraft.com, Dec 13 2019, available from .http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/nwwf.aspx. 11 Noys & Murphy, 120. 7

able to define the weird and eerie, both as concepts in and of themselves, and how they may relate to cultural forms outside of literary fiction.12 In response to this, it is worth turning to the writer, critic, and theorist Mark Fisher. In his final published book, The Weird and the Eerie, Fisher provides a compendium of critiques on a series of texts that exhibit or develop “the weird” and/or the “eerie,” both as literary devices and as aesthetic concepts. Fisher selects and knits together a variety of cultural texts, from the literary gothic and weird fiction, to 1970s sci-fi television, British post punk and ambient music of the 1980s. In his meshing of these texts, Fisher builds up a series of meanings and iterations of where the alien fragments and slivers of the weird and eerie pop up in popular culture.

Cutting through such wide and varied cultural reference points, Fisher aims to show that while the “weird” and the “eerie,” as concepts of aesthetics, had their origins in the literary and fictional novel, they have long since broken free from those boundaries and are now residing, in various forms, in our material realities. In defining the weird, Fisher describes it as something, “which does not belong,” and whose presence cannot be explained or contained.13 Noting the aesthetics of art movements and practices, from film montage to surrealism, as examples, Fisher argues that they are exemplars of the weird effect in the way that they splice together “two or more things that do not belong together and take delight in their juxtaposition.”14

In referencing that which is the “weird,” Fisher notes that what is at stake is an eruption from the “outside,” whether it be material or aesthetic, of something that is unexplainable, indescribable. While there is a wave of uncertainty on what it is that confronts us, the experience registered by those who come into contact with it is not just that of horror or dread, but also of fascination and pleasure in the form of jouissance;

12 It should be noted though that in the world of philosophy, with regards to various disciplines within the field of phenomenology there are philosophers who are taking on the Lovecraftian concepts of the weird and in turn resist the post-Kantian idea of privileging the human mind and its finitude at the centre of thought and agency. These concepts include “object-oriented ,” a term coined by the Graham Harman (who went onto to create the term “Weird Realism” in his book on Lovecraft and philosophy – see Graham Harman. (2012). Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. London: Zero Books), and the concept of “speculative realism,” that along with Graham Harman, also include the likes of , Iain Hamilton Grant, . Then there is the writing of philosopher Eugene Thacker who uses elements of weird fiction and horror to explore the boundaries of humanist thought, as well as the concepts of nihilism and pessimism. For a more detailed analysis of these philosophers and these areas, read Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Anamnesis), London; Re:Press, 2010); Robin Mackay (Ed.), Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development. Vol II: Speculative Realism. (London: Urbanomic, 2007); Graham Harman, Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism, (London: Zero Books, 2013); Eugene Thacker. The Horror of Philosophy, Vols. 1-3, (London: Zero Books, 2011-2015). 13 Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, (London: Repeater Books, 2016, Kindle version): 10-11. 14 Ibid., 13. 8

“The sense of wrongness associated with the weird — the conviction that this does not belong — is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new. The weird here is a signal that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete. If the encounter with the strange here is not straightforwardly pleasurable (the pleasurable would always refer to previous forms of satisfaction), it is not simply unpleasant either.”15 Subsequently, Fisher places the weird and eerie, not as discrete boundaries, but as points on a spectrum of affect that seem prevalent in modern society; one of uneasy or anxiety, of things being “off-kilter,” that there is something wrong with what is happening around us.

While the weird as a concept is something that is dealt with in great depth and explored in a variety of ways, it is with the concept of the eerie that Fisher adds a new dimension to the discourse on the weird, by presenting a distinct mode of feeling, a feeling that is itself fleeting and ephemeral, both in conceptual rigour and as a sense of meaning, when used as an aesthetic descriptor. For Fisher, the eerie is something altogether more abstract and strange than that of the weird in the way the eerie concerns itself with the presence or absence of something, and such places (or non-places) are often where there is an absence of humanity, or where there is something or some agency at work that is just beyond our realm of understanding; “The eerie concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non- existence.”16 As such, the eerie “is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there nothing present when there should be something.”17 This becomes evident with the use “eerie” as descriptive terms, such as there being an “eerie silence,” or an “eerie cry”; at the heart of the eerie, it talks of an absence of something, or the presence of something, but something that is unknown and outside of our normal frames of knowledge and reference.

On a material level, the eerie is often not located in the humanistic confines and locales of the family and home. Often, it is located in marginal spaces, in landscapes, sites, and structures where there is either a distinct lack of human presence, or there was once a human activity which has since disappeared. Various ruins, such as the ancient sites of Stonehenge, and Easter Island, to more modern locations such as abandoned

15 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 13. 16 Ibid., 12. 17 Ibid., 61. 9

buildings and houses underline several aspects to the eerie, as the failure of presence that is the absence of humanity almost certainly leads to various forms of speculation as to the source of said absence. Fisher argues that while the certain sites often contain traces of the weird, for a place to be truly eerie, there need to be an in the way that said absence or presence can’t be described or explained away. There is a circumvention that prevents understanding.

More importantly, Fisher asserts that the eerie turns on the issues of agency in the way that:

It is about the forces that govern our lives and the world […] In the case of the failure of absence, the concerns the existence of agency as such. Is there a deliberative agent here at all? Are we being watched by an entity that has not yet revealed itself? In the case of the failure of presence, the question concerns the particular nature of the agent at work. We know that Stonehenge has been erected, so the questions of whether there was an agent behind its construction or not does not arise; what we have to reckon with are the traces of a departed agent whose purposes are unknown.18

The eerie, then, concerns itself with the Spinozian metaphysical idea that all around us exists agency of many and various forms, but not all of it is necessarily human. In our technologically mediated world, there are numerous forces and agencies that constantly nudge and direct our drives and desires, in ways that often act without a human hand on the tiller. Such agencies may present themselves in a manner of ways and interfaces, from the automated voices one interacts with on public transport or a self- service check out to the suggestions provided to one via online shopping platforms based on purchase histories.

1.1: The Weird and the Eerie – The Gothic

When thinking about the particular qualities or phenomena of events that can be considered “weird” or “eerie,” one of the first and most readily available cultural sources whose texts and ideas can provide a map in which to explore this terrain would almost certainly be the “gothic.” In his essay, “Gothic Materialism,” Fisher links the idea of the gothic with regards to examining those thinkers and theorists who have resided

18 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 64. 10

historically as part of the radical enlightenment, and whose anti-subjectivist theories and interests were concerned with the messy boundaries of ontology and interstitial areas of thought. “Why Gothic, why all these Horror stories? Because, as Nietzsche warns, to ‘unlearn to pray and curse, unlearn man and god’ is to subtract all certainty, to become a stranger to yourself - ‘Here - you could not be at home’.”19 For Fisher, gothic fiction is the site where the edges and limits of human experience, cognition, and subjectivity are transgressed with all manner of invasions from the “outside” that threaten the homely and secure world of the rational and normal.

Despite investigating the areas and relations where gothic “monsters” have been created and circulated, this thesis will not be concerned with the gothic ideas of transgression, monstrosity and horror, but instead devotes itself to the ways in which the gothic disrupts human boundaries and limits, creating new liminal spaces, be it material, aesthetic or psychic. The gothic, and therefore the weird and the eerie, flourish in said spaces, where its concepts and ideas can interrogate and prise apart the strictures and boundaries that separate our social reality from that of the outside, real or imagined. In his 1999 PhD thesis, Flatline Constructs, Fisher argues for the bringing together of the gothic and philosophical concepts of materialism, thereby reconstituting what is meant by the gothic. As such, the gothic needs to be divested of many of its cultural connotations, leading Fisher “to disassociate the Gothic from everything , ethereal or otherworldly.” Instead, Fisher applies the ideas of Wilhelm Worringer via Deleuze-Guattari, to develop the concept of gothic materialism as an entity that is “fundamentally concerned with a plane that cuts across the distinction between living and non-living, animate and inanimate. It is this anorganic continuum, it will be maintained, that is the province of the Gothic.”20 In The Weird and the Eerie meanwhile, Fisher notes that the outside, as a realm of the weird and the eerie via the gothic, does not have to be a realm of horror, monsters, or abjection:

What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange. The strange — not the horrific. The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is not captured by the idea that we “enjoy what scares us”. It has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience. This fascination usually involves a certain

19 Mark Fisher, “Gothic Materialism”, Pli – The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 12 (2001): 231. 20 Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, (New York: Exmilitary Press, 2008): 2. 11

apprehension, perhaps even dread — but it would be wrong to say that the weird and the eerie are necessarily terrifying. I am not here claiming that the outside is always beneficent. There are more than enough terrors to be found there; but such terrors are not all there is to the outside.21

Since the idea of the gothic first originated in a textual and literary form in the eighteenth century, it’s forms, motifs, and ideas have spread through the western cultural corpus like a benign virus. From its beginnings we can see how the gothic, its monsters, its excess and its fixation with disintegration and illegitimacy, “have continued to shadow the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values.”22 Meanwhile in the contemporary late twentieth and twenty first century, the gothic has proliferated into every corner of mass and global media. This is in part due to its ability to attach itself to new and hybrid forms of mass media, its ability to provide life to new genres, such as horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, as well its continuing ability to defy the efforts to provide a definitive definitions and categorisations.23 From pulp publishing to comics, from cinema to television, from music to various subcultures, from the internet to gaming, the gothic and its texts, motifs, and aesthetics have been ready to infect and take advantage of new media forms and the various anxieties and moral panics that inevitably appear.

While the gothic as a textual or literary genre contains several core aesthetic themes that are not associated with contemporary and digital cultures (The old castle, the storm at night, the house, various monsters and bogeymen, etc.), the conceptual and even philosophical ideas that underpin the main tenets of what we now consider as the gothic are a ripe incubator for investigation where the weird and eerie might occur on an ontological or epistemic basis. In particular there are three areas worthy or examination.

The dissolution of binaries and opposites: Through life in general, social realities are thought of in terms of binaries, and while these binaries are often contested, in general they help to make sense of the world – Black/White, Up/Down, Good/Bad, and so on. When it comes to the idea of the Gothic, such binaries often exist at the same time within the text’s social reality. In gothic fiction, there is often the portrayal of two

21 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 8-9. 22 Fred Botting, Gothic, (London: Routledge, 1995); 1. 23 Justin Edwards, “Introduction: Technogothics”, In Justin Edwards (Ed.), Technogothics: Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture, (New York: Routledge, 2015): 11-12. 12

“worlds” that are presented within the text, that of “a diurnal world and a nocturnal one.”24 On the one hand, there is a world that is the “inside,” of the status quo, of the “light” against the “dark,” a world of “logic and reason,” against that of “disorder and irrationality,” the inside of “familiarity and knowledge” against the outside of “darkness and uncertainty”. The gothic brings these two worlds together to exist in the same shared space, and in doing so, the perceived boundaries between these two worlds are, at best, porous and warped, and at worst, completely collapse in on themselves. This in turn causes “the artificial layers of social behaviour, religious ritual, and familial duty repressing instinct and intuition are stripped away, which forces both character and reader to face their inner selves as they encounter narrative conflict.”25 This irruption of the other that is the darkness, the “outside” this in turn questions the categories or common experience that the characters in the text use to make sense of the world are rendered invalid and have to be revised.

Unstable Subjectivity/Ontology: As was suggested above, the gothic seeks to destabilise and transgress perceived norms and boundaries that prop up social binaries, including that of the objective world of facts and reason, with the irrational subjective world of intuition, emotion and instinct. As a result, often the characters in gothic texts have their own sense of self, of being and their relationship towards the world around them put into question. From early gothic novels such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885), and The Turn of the Screw (Henry James, 1898), to more contemporary texts such as The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson, 1959), The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), and Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1986), the gothic has been present in the way that the narrative and actions of the character were concerned “with uncertainties of character positioning and instabilities of knowledge.”26 The ability of the narrator to determine truth from fiction, and reality from fantasy, are constantly under attack, both from an external viewpoint in space and time, and from an internal viewpoint of memory and experience. As such, the voices and subjectivities of the narrators become fractured and rendered unreliable as they are buffeted by various unseen, inhuman, and excessive forces emanating from an outside they are unable to control or understand. This inability to trust what is happening around them with any form of ontological or epistemic certainty, leads to the creation of what Catherine Spooner calls

24 Charlene Bunnell, “The Gothic: A Literary Transition to Film”, In Barry Keith Grant (ed.) Planks of Reason: Essays on the , (Metuchen, N.J: The Scarecrow Press, 1975): 81. 25 Ibid., 82. 26 Glennis Byron & David Putner, The Gothic, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011): 273. 13

“the radically provisional or divided nature of the self; the construction of peoples or individuals as monstrous or ‘other’.”27 The landscape of such psychic terrains is often rendered fearful and paranoiac as the realms of epistemology are rendered in flux, and fixed meanings to language are split into a myriad of ways, while the subject tries their best to articulate and fill in the gaps of reasoning.28

It should be noted that from the roots of gothic fiction to the contemporary era of the twentieth century, the concept of fractured identity and warped subjectivity is not only rooted in the realm of the classic gothic. With the rise of the problematic multiplicity of the postmodern condition, there is a confluence between postmodern and gothic aesthetics as novels such as Slaughterhouse 5 (Kurt Vonnegut, 1965), Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon, 1973), City of Glass (Paul Auster, 1985), The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie, 1988), and American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis, 1991) all share, according to Maria Beville, gothic aspects in the form of “[s]pectral characters, doppelgängers, hellish wastelands, and the demonised or possessed” along with what she calls “the deeper issue of the lingering emotion of terror as it relates to loss of reality and self.”29 With both the gothic and postmodernism, there is the entanglement of ideas that deal with the idea of the “the loss of human identity and the alienation of self from both itself and the social bearings in which a sense of reality,” where the notions of humanism are constantly under attack from “ever threatening shapes of increasingly dehumanised environments, machinic doubles and violent, psychotic fragmentation.”30

Technology: Since the earliest forms of gothic fiction, its rise to prominence has coincided with the development of science, technology and industry, as the industrial revolution and scientific advancements of the enlightenment era led to the creation of new forms of work and social identity, the rise of the city, along with new social strata such as the working and middle classes. The advancements in physics, chemistry, medicine

27 Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, (London: Reaktion Books, 2006): 8. 28 While it is outside the scope of this essay, it is well worth pointing out the nature of , the gothic and the weird when it come to the modern phenomenon of conspiracy theories. With narratives that place an emphasis on such things as hidden agendas and meanings in objects, unseen agents, linking of coincidences, animism, doubling, they are prime breeding grounds for the uncanny with theories that strike at the very heart of science, truth and even epistemology. For more information on paranoia, conspiracies and the uncanny, read Susan Lepselter, The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetic, Power, Captivity, and UFOS in the American Uncanny, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You”. In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Ed.), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, (London: Duke University Press. 2004). 29 Maria Beville, (2009), Gothic Postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity, (New York: Rodopi), 10. 30 Botting (1996), 102. 14

and the natural sciences, meant that society achieved a greater understanding of the world and its surrounding phenomena. The development of new inventions, institutions and categorical rationalities resulted in faster, stronger, more efficient forms of transport, industry, organisation, and society.31 Scientists and technologists were the new promethean gods that not only strove to reach the limits of science and the human body but wanted to go further.

In this sense, the gothic is a prime breeding ground for the weird and the eerie, with several texts portraying the consequences of man attempting to play God with the flesh of man and the energies of the cosmos. The early success of Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818), Heart and Science (Wilkie Collins, 1883), The Island of Dr. Moreau (H.G. Wells, 1896), and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1889), exploit such tensions and anxieties regarding humanity and the increasingly scientific, exploring and providing commentary on the idea of science and technology as “the dark side of Enlightenment rationalism,” while also showing how the technological and scientific drive, “can also digress from the modern technological course of an imagined sense of progress.”32 Human progress, in the form of the mad scientist overwhelmed by ego and hubris in thinking of himself as a god at the centre of the natural world, creates a series of horrifying results despite the perceived objectivity and good intentions towards science and technology as a cure for all ills. The antithesis of such characters is the scientific protagonist of Dr. Van Helsing, who utilises science and technology to not only understand, but attempts to defeat the monstrous, inhuman evil of Count Dracula. Meanwhile fantasy and gothic tales such as William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, The Ghost-Finder (1913), and H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond (1934) show scientists utilising science and technology not only to observe, but break past the barriers of perception and gain access to unseen yet overlapping worlds of ghosts, spirits, and alien-like creatures.

31 For the human body, there was not only the curing of diseases and the prolonging of life, but also, some argued, there was the option to cheat death altogether, as science disrupted fundamental ideas of what it meant to be human. For more information on the history of science and the Enlightenment, read Thomas Munck, The Enlightenment: A comparative Social History 1721-1794, (London: Arnold Publishing, 2000); Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For more background on the relationship between the human, technology, and the cyborg in science and culture, read Charles Noble Grey (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, (New York: Routledge, 1995); N Katherine Hayles, How we became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1999); Daniel Dinello, Technophobia and Posthuman Technology! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 32 Edwards (2015), 1 15

In our contemporary era, the idea of the technological gothic and its ability to generate instances of the weird and eerie can be seen, not only in the way that in the way that “[t]echnology has a profound impact on the productive body in terms of manufacturing, distribution and dissemination,”33 the social human today is now more akin to the “man-machine” or “cyborgs” popularised by Donna Haraway in her famous essay The Cyborg Manifesto, where she notes that a cyborg is “a cybernetic organism”, a “hybrid of machine and organism”, a “creature of social reality”, as well as being a creature of fiction.34 The cyborg, in this respect, is a networked being that breaks down the ontological walls between human being, machine, and nature. Although Haraway argues that there is little to no distinction between our lived reality and our fictional constructs, they both feed into the other: “Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world changing fiction.”35 Various technogothic texts such as Bladerunner, Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984), Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989), Splice (Vincenzo Natali, 2009), and ExMachina (Alex Garland, 2014), are replete with AI machines and Cyborgs, cloning, gender reassignment, and body modification, along with an array of hypercapitalist systems of alienation, that edit, rewrite and recontextualize what it means to be human.

Limit Experiences: While the above aspects of the gothic as a concept can be seen as an incubator for weird and eerie phenomenon, another aspect they all share is the concern for what can be called “limit experiences.” Limit experiences refers to a term coined by philosopher to denote that which takes humanity to the limits of thought and experience and in their radical , make boundaries of the self-less stable. Such limit experiences which can be found in the areas of art, eroticism, religion and (on occasion) substance misuse are often observed and concerned with the points where ideas regarding taboos and transgressions, pain and pleasure, and that of the sacred and profane collapse in on each other.36

In several of the previously mentioned texts, whether it is through the utilisation of science or the upending of given social norms, various characters explore the limits, morals, and norms of the known world, to transgress the limits of the self, and the limits

33 Edwards, 7. 34 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science Technology, and Socialist- in the Late Twentieth Century”. In D. Bell and B.M. Kennedy (Eds), The Cybercultures Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2000): 291. 35 Ibid. 36 For more detail and an elaboration on the concept of “limit experience”, read Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: A Study of Erotica and the Taboo, (New York: Walker and Company, 1964). 16

of experience, to move out of themselves and into new modes and registers of being. In one of the earliest gothic novels, M.R. Lewis’ The Monk (1796), the pious and respected monk Ambrosio succumbs to his desire for a young girl, driving him to give up his monastic vows and commit a series of blasphemous and taboo acts such as black magic, torture, rape and . The literary gothic has followed suit with a series of transgressive protagonists, all of who indulge in various forms of transgressions, including various forms of violent criminality, profane blasphemy and sexual deviance, and even death itself.

In the realm of the gothic, and its generic children in the forms of science fiction and horror, various texts seek to push both linguistically and imaginatively at the outer and inner limits of self and subjectivity. As with the Bataillean idea of “limit experiences,” or the Freudian concept of the “death drive,” the boundaries in such works and experiences beseech us to break down the limitations of our language and thought and new forms of ontology and being.37

1.2: The Weird and the Eerie - The Uncanny

In discussing the weird and the eerie, like Fisher I need to introduce the aesthetic and psychological concept of the uncanny into the thesis. Although the original research on the uncanny as a concept began in the nineteenth century, both as a form of phenomenology and through the aesthetic notion of the sublime, and later with Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” the ur-text for the uncanny as a concept of modern aesthetics remains the 1919 essay of the same name by Sigmund Freud.38 In this essay, Freud, through a close reading of literary texts such as E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, outlines the basic premise of the uncanny as a psychological concept. Linking the Uncanny with the word unheimlich which exists as the negative of “heimlich” - that which is familiar, homely - Freud declares the uncanny

37 Freud first theorized the death drive, or Thanatos, in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where he reassesses his theories regard unconscious drives that compels human behaviour. Until then Freud argued that the main driver of behaviour was a life drive for creation, pleasure and self-fulfilment, which he called Eros. Here, the id drives the human mind to se3ek pleasure and to avoid pain whenever possible. Freud in his clinical work however, noticed that many patients were engaging in repetitive and compulsive behaviours that derived no joy, and at times even pain. In attempting to explain this, Freud speculated that there was a death drive, an instinct inherent in the human condition that willed the mind and body to annihilation, right to a cellular level. This drive was in constant tension with the life drive of Eros. Although most of the scientific rationale behind his speculations have long since been disproved, the work remains important for the ways it attempts to explain the processes being various psychological issues, such as PTSD. 38 See Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (Trans. by Alix Strachey), 1919, Available from http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf 17

as un-familiar and un-homely, words with would find their synonyms with the weird and the eerie. At the same, Freud noted that “heimlich” also meant “hidden” or furtive.” Therefore, according to Freud, the uncanny is something that was at once familiar, homely and in the open, is now either deliberately or inadvertently made unhomely and unfamiliar and is rendered hidden, whether from other or from the self.

Throughout the essay, Freud refers to the E.T.A. Hoffman story The Sandman, revealing several instances of the motifs of doubling, automatism (where inanimate objects seem to come alive) and their links to the uncanny. Yet according to Fisher, despite noting numerous instances in The Sandman where there is confusion between the animate and the inanimate, Freud attempts to solve the enigma of the unheimlich by reducing it to the fear of losing one’s eyes and a symptom of castration anxiety, which is an outcome “that is as disappointing as any mediocre genre detective’s rote solution to a mystery.”39 This viewpoint is shared by Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli in her analysis, where she points out that in several instances in his essay, Freud consistently disavows the main character’s inability to tell the difference between what is human from an automation as the source of the uncanny. Instead Freud attempts attribute the source as castration society linking Hoffman’s personal history and the childhood history of Nathaniel in the story. Ravetto-Biagioli argues that this reading of the uncanny as a form of psychoanalysis upon Hoffman “is an act of rationalization, an attempt to control or certify that which is otherwise undecidable—a gesture not unlike Kant’s attempt to subjugate the sensible world to rational thought.”40 The emphasis on doubling, repetition, and the indeterminacy of the ontology between subject and object in The Sandman is, according to Fisher, what Freud misses out on, “[c]astration may be terrifying, but it is not as disturbing as what Freud seems so keen to bury – precisely because it is a matter of terror, or fear. Terror or fear have an object – what is feared – and a subject – he who fears – whereas the “ominous foreboding” [...] arises from the inability to differentiate subject from object. There is a dispersal of subjectivity onto an indifferent plane that is simultaneously too distant and too intimate to be apprehended as anything objective.”41

In seeming agreement with Fisher and Ravetto-Biagioli, the discourse in decades since Freud’s essay has seen the uncanny break out and exceed the confines of Freud’s

39 Fisher, Weird and Eerie, 9 40 Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, The Digital Uncanny, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition, 2019): 144-145. 41 Fisher, Flatline Constructs, 4. 18

psychoanalytic framework and the disciplines of literary analysis, philosophy, and aesthetics. The uncanny today is a concept that is utilised in all manner of disciplines such as art history, film studies, architecture theory, postcolonial studies, , anthropology, the study of religion, and more recently, computing science, AI, and robotics. By spreading out into new areas and disciplines, “each new use adds to the conceptual substance of the uncanny,” as well as to how it is applied to a variety of cultural phenomena. At the same time, the word and its linguistic features remain open, liquid, and ambivalent, allowing it to be linked to other aesthetic affects such as the sublime, the weird and the eerie.42

As the concept of the uncanny was picked up and employed by academics, scientists and artists in the latter half of the 20th century, it has bled out into areas of discourse that can be read along two distinct lines. The first is to see the uncanny as that of the “post-romantic/aesthetic” tradition that “emphasizes the semantic kernels of transcendence, the supernatural, and the occult,” with the other line views the uncanny along the lines of the “existential/post-Marxist”, a corpus of theory that deals with “alienation, strangeness, and angst will emphasize the uncanny’s relation to society, politics, and ethics.”43

With regards to the use of the uncanny as a concept in the “post- romantic/aesthetic,” we see its use in cultural disciplines such as film studies as a tool to explore styles and genres, such as horror and fantasy, and the powerful affects they arouse in the reader. The uncanny, in being utilised this way, is used to show that “by emphasizing the primitive, atavistic, and bodily roots of the uncanny […] the concepts are often strategically used in defences of these popular or marginal genres by pointing out how they have always been a natural and, in fact, indispensable part of culture.”44 Meanwhile the uncanny as a concept has been used extensively in the field of gothic studies, both as both an aesthetic tool and as a focus of historic and subcultural analysis. Nicholas Royle, in his work on the uncanny and its association with the gothic, takes particular interest in gothic concepts and motifs such as haunting, spectrality, and the idea of doubling from a deconstructive perspective, where “the notion of spectrality is not only used to theorize the blurring of the limit between the animate and the inanimate, death

42 Anneleen Masschelein, The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011): 6. 43 Masschelein., 131. 44 Ibid., 134. 19

and life, fiction and reality but also linked to the virtual media age at the end of the twentieth century.”45 Along with Andrew Bennett, Royle describes the uncanny in terms of “making things uncertain: it has to do with the sense that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity, that they may challenge all rationality and logic.”46 Accordingly, they build upon the forms of the uncanny that occur in the Freudian understanding of the concept to include repetition (including the doublings of déjà vu and the Doppelgänger); coincidence and fate; animism; anthropomorphism; automatism; uncertainty about sexual identity; fear of being buried alive; silence; telepathy; and death.47

The “existential/post-Marxist” path of the uncanny in the late 20th century meanwhile, takes a different rationale in the construction of the uncanny as a concept, based on the historical tensions in 19th century discourse between the “rationalism” and “objectivism” of the enlightenment and the “irrational” and “subjectivism” of Romanticism. In their dealing with the uncanny as a component of aesthetic practices and theoretical discourse, thinkers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, and Derrida came to build an conceptual framework where the source of the uncanny arose from the material forms of the “unfamiliar” that were not supernatural, therefore giving it an “existential and political dimension.”48 As such the uncanny was linked to “alienation as an economic, political, psychological, and existential condition.”49

The uncanny became a conceptual tool in respect to neo-Marxist and post-colonial theory in the way that the uncanny embodies various aspects of the alienation of the individual subject in capitalist western society. Most famously, the uncanny is utilised by Derrida in his book Spectres of Marx. Written in 1993 after the proclamations by Francis Fukuyama of the “end of history” where we saw the fall of Apartheid South Africa, the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, the general consensus was that was defeated as a political and social as was shown by the subsequent rise of neoliberal capitalism in the West. However, Communism, according to Derrida, takes on a new form, that of the spectre or ghost. Neither being dead nor alive there but is able to enter and haunt the world of the real and material where it is “a haunting that is at the

45 Ibid., 135. 46 Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle, quoted in Glennis Byron & David Putner, The Gothic, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011): 283. 47 Byron & Putner, 283. 48 Masschelein, 136. 49 Ibid. 20

same time and invocation, convocation, and exorcism.”50 As a result, the ghost of communism interrogates the real with its presence, it’s gaze; “The uncanny as a destabilizing concept is now taken one step further: not only does it undermine conceptual discourse, it also disturbs the ethical and the political order.”51

To describe this situation in metaphysical terms, Derrida would go on to coin the neologism “Hauntology”. A play on the French pronunciation of the word and that of “ontology” (where the “h” in the French pronunciation of hauntology is silent), hauntology denotes a form of being that is not fully present, but is instead ghostly, and as such denotes a philosophy of haunting. Being suspended between Being and non-Being, the ghost of hauntology is at once both ephemeral and something that is unknowable and unspeakable, yet it is always present, exerting an effect on society. Referring to communism, for Derrida, Marx was the perfect hauntological subject in the way that he still lingered on the margins of people perceptions, long after capitalism declared him dead.52

50 Ibid., 138. 51 Ibid., 9. 52 The concept of Hauntology and how it applied to modern culture and politics was a major theme in the writing and lectures that grew from his first published book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009). For Fisher, Hauntology describes the cultural and socio-political impasse that is being felt in the post-millennium west. Echoing Frederic Jameson’s “nostalgia mode” of postmodernism and the decline of historicity, Fisher contended that the modernist project of the 20th Century, which aimed to generate a social utopian drive for a better future, had withered as the hegemony of 21st century neoliberal capitalism enacted a “slow cancellation of the future,” where culture is seen to reside in a continuous present, feeding on retrospection and nostalgia. “More troublingly,” says Fisher, “the disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live. It meant the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration of an already established (capitalist) system.” Hauntology therefore, according to Fisher, manifested itself in a melancholia and longing for the lost futures that were depicted or promised in 20th Century modernist culture. For more information read, Fisher, “What Is Hauntology?”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1 (2012): pp. 16-24; Fisher, Ghosts of my Life. Writings on depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014)); “Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future”, YouTube Video, 46:54, posted by Pmilat, May 22nd 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ. But as Matt Colquhoun, aka Xenogothic, has noted, the issue with the idea of hauntology as a melancholia for lost futures and how it relates to the weird and eerie, is not the idea of “past” futures that haunt us, but that of the new that represents the radically different; in this case the hauntology of a melancholia for “lost futures” was temporal, whereas the uncanny of the weird and eerie is more ontological; “the two are inherently related, of course, but it is worth noting their difference for the more specific potentials that each unleashes. For starters, whilst the idea of a lost future is recursively graspable — we can only properly make sense of that which has become obsolete — with the new we find ourselves within that which is radically immanent. Jarringly so. We encounter something towards which all our past experiences are obsolete, and which alerts us to the contingency and fallibility of the present, the now. In this mode, the inside is not sufficient enough for the outside, rather than vice versa. It requires the outside be folded in and synthesised. In its very wrongness, the weird uncovers an oversaturated present, in which there is no space for the weird itself (or an experience of the weird). Recursion after recursion: the weird is weird in itself” see “WEIRD IMMANENCE (PART 1)”, Xenogothic, April 15 2018, available from https://xenogothic.com/2018/04/15/weird-immanence-part-1/. 21

Derrida’s concept of hauntology was one that mixed the Freudian with other articulations and definitions of the uncanny that developed separate and parallel to the work that was done by Freud. In several essays and his book Being and Time, links the uncanny with that of Unheimlichkeit, or uncanniness. Whereas Freud thought of the uncanny as a realm of the psychological, Heidegger rejected both psychology and theology, instead situating the uncanny as an existential-ontological concept, in the way he describes the ontological description of angst and its relation as a component of being, or ; to be human he suggests, to be in-the-world, is inherently to be uncanny: “Insofar as humans are, they stand in the no-exit of death. Thus, Being here is the happening of un-canniness [Un-heimlichkeit] itself.”53 The Heideggerian uncanny in effect, “is thus existential, reflecting a singular and continuous anxiety: the anxiety caused by human beings’ consciousness of their Being and its relation to death, which occurs in and through primordial time.”54

The uncanny, whether it be aesthetic or political, psychological or existential, corporeal or ethereal, plays an increasingly important role in contemporary culture and artistic production, be it in the cold and sparse gothic music of Joy Division and The Cure to the electronic remnant club productions of Burial, the literary works of Haruki Murakami, W. G. Sebald, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Paul Auster. The uncanny meanwhile has been located in the way in which the utilisation digital media and virtual technologies in visual art are able to capture the increasing immaterial and spectral forms and modes of everyday life and experience. The uncanny, has also a valid concept and feature in the world of robotics and artificial intelligence design with the “The Uncanny Valley” based on Masahiro Mori’s 1970 essay in which he charts the relationship between humans and robots, stating that humans accept and are more appreciative to robots that have human like attributes and features. But once robots reach a certain point of familiarity, becoming too human like, then we enter the “uncanny valley” where such robots, due to their human-like appearance and approaches, will arouse feelings of uneasiness and discomfort. In many ways, with his analysis of robots that appear human like and the way they evoke fear and unease, resembles Freud’s essay, in the way that Freud concentrates on issues of doubling and animism with respect to dolls, machines and puppets.

53 Martin Heidegger, quoted in Isabella van Elferen, Gothic Music - The Sounds of the Uncanny, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012); 181. 54 Isabella Van Elferen, Gothic Music - The Sounds of the Uncanny, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), 182. 22

Although there is now a long history of discourse and usage of the uncanny in a variety of interdisciplinary fields, why are we using the weird and eerie as qualities to describe phenomena and events instead of the uncanny? After all, when looking up uncanny in the dictionary we can see both weird and eerie as easily interchangeable synonyms, as Fisher explains; “[t]hey are all affects, but they are also modes: modes of film and fiction, modes of perception, ultimately, you might even say, modes of being.”55 But with the uncanny, or unheimlich, there is an insistence on “the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange — about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself.”56 There is a tendency with the uncanny to take that which is considered “outside” and, in a compensatory move, attempt to rationalise it, thereby making it recognisable and legible. Fisher contends that this attempt to flatten or fold the weird and the eerie into the reconciled realm of the uncanny, “is symptomatic of a secular retreat from the outside. The wider predilection for the unheimlich is commensurate with a compulsion towards a certain kind of critique, which operates by always processing the outside through the gaps and impasses of the inside.”57 In the end, the uncanny may be concerned with various breaches and disruptions of boundaries, but it is still concerned with that of the self.

The weird and eerie however take their approach from the opposite direction; “they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside [...] The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the “homely” (even as its negation).”58 Those processes which can be described as the truly weird and eerie often, in their rupture of the new and unknown and their ability to be non-subjectifying and de-subjectifying, resisting attempts to rationalise and anthropomorphize it, and therefore provide it with a form of ontology. The weird, as pointed out earlier is that which does not belong, due to the fact it does not correspond with agreed upon notions and ideas that correspond to material reality. The eerie, in the clash between presence and absence that is concurrent with it, doesn’t not have to have any form of embodiment or ontological presence, such as the inability to place sounds to any recognisable source (e.g. a “disembodied howl”, or a “ghostly whisper,” such sounds that come from an entity or thing that defies simple categorisation). The weird and the eerie often defy explanation and categorisation, such as when Lovecraft often describes

55 Fisher, Weird and Eerie, 9. 56 Ibid., 10. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 10-11. 23

many of the entities and locations that populate his short stories as “The Unnamable” where the protagonist and the end of the story attempts to describe the entity but falls short; “It was everywhere — a gelatin — a slime; a vapor; — yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes — and a blemish. It was the pit — the maelstrom — the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!”59

59 H.P. Lovecraft, “The Unnamable”, in The Haunter in the Dark and Other Stories, (Ware, Herts: Wordsworth Editions, 2011): 98. 24

Part 2: Slenderman and the Fictioning of the Real

Linda Styles: I just like being scared. Cane's work scares me.

John Trent: What's to be scared about? It's not like it's real or anything.

Linda Styles: It's not real from your point of view… and right now reality shares your point of view. What scares me about Cane's work…what might happen if reality shared his point of view?

- In the Mouth of Madness (, 1994)

What happens when fiction (itself) propagates, contaminating the Real?

- Mark Fisher, “Flatline Constructs”

The opening quote in this chapter, from the 1994 John Carpenter horror film In the Mouth of Madness, is an example of the weird and terrifying when the “outside” of a fictional book begins to infest and mutate the rational world of the “real” in the film. The titular book, written by the novelist Sutter Cane, a combined analogue of and H.P Lovecraft, far from being a mere tale or weird horror is revealed to be a vessel that contains a horrifying fiction as entity from the outside, one that will ultimately change the fabric of reality of Cane’s fans as they read it. At the film’s climax, the protagonists find that far from being real individuals with lives and subjective identities of their own, they are merely characters in the book itself. As they reel from this revelation, Cane pronounces the power of an idea that becomes actual reality:

For years, I thought I was making all this up. But they were telling me what to write, giving me the power to make it all real. And now it is... All those horrible, slimy things, trying to get back in? They're all true. Come. See the instrument of their homecoming. What you have come looking for. The new Bible… that starts the change, helps you see.60

While In the Mouth of Madness is merely a movie, it raises the idea of what would happen if our world and our shared sense of consensual reality was infiltrated, and upended by a fictional “outside,” to the point where such fictions, despite their artifice, take root and develop a life of their own outwith the intentions and will of who, or whatever, created it. The premise of the film, while seemingly fantastical, is not so far- fetched in an online social world that is increasingly in flux, where circulation of ideas,

60 In the Mouth of Madness, directed by John Carpenter (1995; USA: New Line Home Video, 2000). DVD. 25

images and narrative objects are accelerated to the point where various forms of hype and discourse on various events and phenomena occur in real time. While human culture has used narratives and fictions in various forms - from the mythic poem to the prose novel - to reflect upon the experiences of consensual reality, in the “post-truth” digital world, it is becoming harder to determine what is the realm of consensual reality and what is fiction.

Nowhere is the idea of intensified fictions bleeding into reality more prevalent that in the area of online conspiracy theories. Like myth making, the creation of conspiracy theories, disinformation, and various fictions have been around for a long time in the realm of politics and warfare. But in an era of digital cultures and social media, the temporal periods of production, ferment, and circulation to produce and share such stories have become intensified and condensed. What would have taken days, weeks, or even years to spread across a sizable portion of society can now take a matter of hours. In light of recent conspiracy theories that have reached mainstream news media such as #pizzagate and #Qanon, along with the rise of the “birther” movement surrounding former US president Barack Obama, despite their complete lack of rigour and wholly constructed nature, their intensified evolutions have resulted in such conspiracies breaking into mainstream news media where people latch onto such theories and start acting upon them.61

Such fictions and the social processes that allow them to spread and proliferate in online circles are examples of what an interdisciplinary collective called the Cyber Cultures Research Unit (Ccru) call hyperstitional texts, in that they deal with the situation of the intrusion and taking over of the familiar inside world of social reality by an entity birthed from the outside of fiction, that uses the actions and transmission lines of culture and digital media as a carrier to impact upon and change the social reality of our world.

61 The #QAnon conspiracy relates to a far-right of a supposed secret plot by an alleged “deep state” against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters. For an overview, read Justin Bank, Liam Stack and Daniel Victor, “What Is QAnon: Explaining the Internet Conspiracy Theory That Showed Up at a Trump Rally”, NYTimes.com, August 1 2018, accessible from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/us/politics/what-is-qanon.html. #Pizzagate refers to a conspiracy theory that surfaced in 2016 that claimed that emails obtained from the hacking of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, contained coded messages about a paedophile and human trafficking ring involving several U.S. restaurants and high-ranking officials of the Democratic Party was operating out of Washington, D.C. For more information read BBC Trending, “The saga of 'Pizzagate': The fake story that shows how conspiracy theories spread”, BBC.com, December 2 2016, accessible from https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-38156985. The “Birther” movement is a conspiracy theory propagated by conservative right-wing groups the former president Barack Obama was not a natural born US citizen and was therefore ineligible to become president as per Article 2 of the US constitution. For more background read Lily Rothman, “This Is How the Whole Birther Thing Actually Started”, time.com, September 16 2016, accessible from http://time.com/4496792/birther-rumor-started/. 26

In effect, those who use and are involved in the creation of hyperstitional texts see “no difference in principle between a universe, a religion, and a hoax” and where the engineering of the future as a fiction ensures that “it has a more intense reality than either the present or the past.”62

In the first half of this chapter, I trace a of the concept of hyperstition, from the emergence of gothic literary fiction as the irrational destabilising underbelly of the enlightenment tenets of fact and reason, to the rise of the ability of mass media in the twentieth century to substantiate and give form to the spectral ephemera of the imagination. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulacra and the writing practice of theory-fiction, I posit that hyperstition and its use exists in a world where consensual reality is not so much an immutable fact as it is endlessly produced and reworked.

In the second half of this chapter I apply the four main phases of what makes an object hyperstitional to the online phenomenon that is the Slender Man. Slender Man was a fictional character created in 2009 on a forum thread on the somethingawful.com website. From its initial beginnings on the forum, Slender Man spread to several social media platforms such as YouTube and where its mythos was developed and drew in a number of creators and fans who, in in various forms of online vernacular, such as the creation of videos, images and fan fictions, breathed life into the character. Slender Man exploded into the mainstream US media consciousness when it was named as the motive in an attempted murder case in 2014, where two teenage girls attempted to kill their friend to gain favour with the character.63 Through my analysis I show that the Slender Man phenomenon is a localised example of a hyperstition in operation, and that the processes and dynamics of the Slender Man are symptomatic of how various fictional narratives online are produced, circulated and consumed in today’s online world.

2.1: Of the Enlightenment and Romanticism – Of Objective “Reality” and Subjective “Fiction”

Since the age of Enlightenment, the dominant mode for critical thinking and examining the world around us has been one of deductional reason, where the ideal of empiricism, and the deployment of facts, logic and scepticism led to a questioning of long

62 Ccru, Writings 1997-2003, (Online: Time Spiral Press, Kindle Edition, 2015): 128-131. 63 For background on the incident, see , “: Girl Sentenced to 40 years in mental hospital”, TheGuardian.com, Feb 1 2018, accessible from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/01/slender-man-stabbing-wisconsin-girl-sentence. 27

held belief systems, be it critiques of religion or the divine right of the monarchy. As a result, this world of secular rationality and modernity as scientific utility introduced “a scientific order that condemned spirits and spectres to a bygone barbaric age of superstitious credulity or a primitive, immature stage of culture akin to childhood.”64 The “real” was that which could be explained by the laws of science, where the value of facts and their “truth” could be deduced by objective and replicable means. Various religious and supernatural phenomena on the other hand was denounced as mere “fictions,” and subsequently dismissed as the disordered ramblings of the irrational mind.

But in this age of reason and modernity, the ghosts and spectres did not go away. Pre-figuring the modern uncanny of Freud, gothic fictions of the time conjured into being what could be called a “supernaturalization of everyday life,” where mimetic, realist forms used by the literary gothic took the world of reason, facts, and natural law, and overlaid it with its spectral opposite – a world of darkness, fear and anxieties.65 What was once knowable in the everyday workings of natural law slips between the cracks into a world that is unknowable and ineffable, as this process of over layering creates a gothic world that is at once unfamiliar, eerie, and unhomely (unheimlich). At the same time, gothic fiction’s habitual foregrounding of its own stylistic excess within the text through repetition and narration created a sense of disruption and instability within the text, producing “a momentary position of epistemological uncertainty whose euphoria stems from its bleeding into an ontological uncertainty.”66 This uncertainty in turn produced what Tzvetan Todorov notes as a “hesitation” on both the part of the narrator and the reader as they try to determine the reality of what they are seeing/reading, forcing a choice on their part as to whether what is happening before them is a new reality, or merely illusion. In most gothic fictions, the pervasive ambivalence and transgressions are accounted for, and the boundaries between reality and the imaginary again restored back to normality. But the hypermediated form of gothic performativity within the text, and its generation of weird and eerie ambivalences “leaves readers, viewers and listeners as haunted by the ghosts of the repressed as the characters they read, see and hear [...] its transgressions depicted so vividly that audiences can almost see, feel and experience them.”67

64 Fred Botting, “Technospectrality: An Essay on Uncannimedia”, In Justin Edwards (Ed.), Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture, (New York: Routledge, 2015): 17. 65 Ibid. 19. 66 Van Efferen, 16. 67 Van Efferen, 18. 28

2.2: Spectral Realities and Ghosts in Modern Machines

Alongside the rise of gothic literary fiction in the nineteenth century, there was a concurrent development of new technologies that allowed the projection of images that were considered to be solely the remit of subjective consciousness onto a two- dimensional screen. The inventions of proto-cinematic magic lanterns and photography brought visual phantasmagoria into physical reality, creating a “doubleness of modernity,” where “fantasy irrupts into reality; ghosts, death, darkness and monstrosity cross lines of exclusion.”68 This partial manifestation of what was once confined to either the text or our subjective imaginations allowed society to confront hitherto repressed anxieties in a way that was at once both fearful, yet reassuring and non-threatening.

But it was the development of mass media technologies in the early twentieth century, with the advent of cinema, television and recorded music, that created phantasmagoria on a global and industrial scale. The possibility of creating doubles of human subjectivity in the form of spectral images, sounds, and worlds that mirrored our own, ushered in the uncanny as an aesthetic concept being mechanised on an industrial scale. This spectral reproduction and replication of the Real that resided both in art and the world was analysed by regarding the authenticity, reproduction and spectacle of mass media in modern society. Benjamin argued that art, once the realm of tradition and ritual of a pre-modern society, gave way to the reproduced image, one that could be transmitted and directly beamed onto the cinema screen or played directly into our homes. Mass media in this form could be circulated and listened to/seen by the masses in ways never envisioned before. This new world of media, with its constant flow of images and sounds that mirrored the shock and awe of modernity, required a new mode of perception of the spectator to take in and absorb this mediated world of light and sound. It is this absorption of sound and image that for Benjamin marks the true power and effect of reproduced works of art to that of traditional art: “A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.”69

As mass media ingrained itself into the very fabric of our social world, the uncanny forces that resided within its technical assemblage also “extended its reach in

68 Van Efferen, 18. 69 Walter Benjamin, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, In Francis Francina & Jonathan Harris (Eds.), Art in Modern culture; an Anthology of Critical Texts, (London: IconEditions, 1992): 305. 29

the course of the century,” as the proliferation of various media radiating from automata, photographs, phonographs, films and toys to industry itself, meant that the uncanny was “moving beyond the confines of individual texts or a single subjectivity and into the social sphere: it found itself ‘generalized, diffused through a new world of spectacle and magic’.”70 The increasing ubiquity mass media in society in the twentieth century began to play a greater role in informing and reforming the social realities of whole populations. The ability of mass media and the respective technologies to first mirror, then impact upon the audience’s subjectivities, and unconsciousness have become so pronounced according to Friedrich Kittler, that mass media have supplanted our need to imagine the world around us: “once memories and dreams, the dead and the ghosts, become technically reproducible, readers and writers no longer need the powers of hallucination while mechanisms of the unconscious which previously could only be found in human experiments, abandon us in order to populate the film studios as doubles of dead souls”71

2.3: More Real than the Real Itself: Baudrillard and the Image as Reality

Moving from the late twentieth to the early twenty first century, there has been a historical shift in culture and society from that of the “modern,” where the representation and logic of culture was one “of linear temporal progression, reflected in the idea of history as a teleological and irreversible accumulation”, while its representation in culture resulted in “an aesthetic of individual creativity, of the avant-garde, and of fashion” to that of the “postmodern” .72 While the definitions and structures of postmodernism are not part of the scope of this thesis, it can be summarised into three main themes.73 The first is the decline and erosion of metanarratives, where the grand narratives of the pre- modern and modern era have been challenged and subjected to scepticism, the result

70 Botting, (2015), 21, 71 Ibid., 22. 72 Gane, Baudrillard’s bestiary: Baudrillard and Culture, (London: Routledge, 1991): 92-93. 73 In terms of the history of postmodernism, what is of notes that many of the theorists who have been labelled as “postmodernist” never did so themselves or rejected the label and term. While theorists such as Lyotard and Baudrillard do mention postmodernism, they do so to talk about a specific social or cultural condition, while theorist such as Mark Fisher and Frederic Jameson who provided a Marxist analysis postmodernism as a vehicle for the propagation of late-capitalism. the texts that are considered tenets of postmodernism include . Of Grammatology. (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), Jean-Luc Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi). (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1984), and Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1991). For an overview of Postmodernism as a theoretical concept read Stuart Sim (Ed.). The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism ( 3rd Edition). (London: Routledge, 2011). 30

being a splintering of singular worldviews/frameworks to a multitude of differing viewpoints and histories. The second theme is the shift to a model late-capitalism, in which the dominant mode of capitalist production - which was centred on the accumulation of physical commodities - undergoes a shift from the material to immaterial as knowledge is monetized and capitalist production moves from the manufacturing of products and commodities, to services and information. The third theme is the ubiquity of new media, and digital technologies, where the proliferation of electronic mass media and its facilitation has not only changed how the world is viewed and represented, it has also allowed the acceleration of capital to the point where it has managed to both transcend national borders and the limits of human cognition.

It is Jean Baudrillard who, through texts such as Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), and Simulation and Simulacra (1981), provides a poetic and prophetic analysis of the sociological phenomena of the contemporary postmodern society and the effect of postmodernism on what considered between the real and the imaginary in society. Baudrillard argues that a postmodern society no longer organises itself around the consumption of goods and commodities based on needs and wants, but instead now concerns itself with a world of simulation and a play of images and signs, and that we now live in a society of simulation and simulacra.

The key to this logic of simulation is the concept of what Baudrillard calls simulacra. As the circulation and reproduction of images - facilitated by late capitalism and transmitted by a plethora of digital and electronic media - intensifies and accelerates across various media, these images and signs, and our consumption of them, become increasingly untethered from any reference to that of the “Real”. Reality instead begins to be modelled on images and signs that are reproduced from a continuing reproduction other signs and images that now precede and determine for the real world. In tracing out the progression of simulacra in culture, Baudrillard points towards three stages, or orders, of simulacra in history; the first order, which is based on the pre-modern age, where the image and signs provided are a mere stand in for the real representation, the second order, where the boundaries between the real and artificial become diffuse and weaker as the copy is so well made that it threatens to replace the actual real that it masks and is meant to (mis)represent, and the third order of simulacra, associated with the postmodern era, where signs, images and objects are no longer modelled towards the real. Instead, “the model takes the place of the ‘real’, the referent, and becomes the ‘signifier

31

of reference’: the point from which internally differentiated modulations in the object are reproduced.”74

Baudrillard here is not arguing that this order of simulacra is in and of itself artificial, as that would denote that it mirrors towards the Real. Instead, with the third order of simulacra, the boundaries between the real and the image effectively collapse in on each other, creating the aforementioned hyperreal.75 In this world of hyperreality it is not reality, but artificiality itself that is impossible to fake now.76 As Fisher notes on the reality of the fake, “[s]imulation, as Baudrillard shows, is not dissimulation. Fakery depends upon an authentic and authorised reality from which it can be separated, whereas the third-order simulacra (“the simulation of simulation”) have fatally collapsed this distinction, not epistemologically but functionally: simulations operate as (if) real.”77

In a stylistic turn from the 1990s onwards, Baudrillard subsequently became known for the practice, or mode, of critical thinking that came to be known as “theory- fiction” (or “simulation theory” and “anticipatory theory”). In this mode, Baudrillard argues that the intensive pace of contemporary society is fast outstripping the ’s ability to analyse and grasp what is happening. Baudrillard argues that, in terms of explaining and theorising what is going on, one should not look towards the academy, but to art and culture for its ability to simulate and extrapolate trends and phenomena that are occurring in society. Texts such as The Vital Illusion (2000) (where Baudrillard “presents himself [...] as a detective searching for the perpetrator of the ‘perfect crime,’ the murder

74 Gane, 97. 75 In his analysis of spectrality in media, Fred Botting lays out four “orders” or periods of spectrality in media that correspond with the historical turn from pre-modernism, to modernism, and finally postmodernism, that loosely corresponds with Baudrillard’s three orders of Simulacra “ First, ghosts really exist as manifestations of a supernatural sphere in reality; second, ghosts mask or pervert a sense of reality and serve the interests of corrupt social or symbolic systems in inculcating superstitious or slavish credulity (this order is particularly strong in the eighteenth-century as enlightened reason poses its radical, bourgeois and democratic challenge to religious and feudal institutions). The third order of spectrality develops alongside modernity’s faith in scientific empiricism and reason: its ghosts point to the absence of any secure reality, identifying spectrality with psychological, delusional, hallucinatory effects of disordered consciousness. That delusions or distortions of reality can be caused by technical devices, whether fictional, theatrical or scientific (the ‘machinery’ of narrative technique, the smoke and mirrors of stage effects, the machines of projection and electrical generation) anticipates the final order of spectrality where there is no reference to reality whatsoever: ghostliness refers only to spectres of other images and phantoms, a move into a realm of simulation and hyperreality in which modernity slips away” (Botting, 2015, 19). 76 Baudrillard argues how impossible it would be to truly “fake” an event such as a bank robbery - “Simulate a robbery in a large store: how to persuade security that it is a simulated robbery? There is no ‘objective’ difference: the gestures, the signs are the same as for a real robbery” (Baudrillard, Simulation & Simulacra, 177). 77 Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, (London: Ex- Military, 2018): 147-148. 32

of reality, or ‘the most important event of modern history’.”) are written more in the style of social science fictions than standard academic texts.78

As a result, Baudrillard sees representation disrupted by the emergence of “a (hyper)fictive plane in which theory is effaced by fiction (and vice versa).”79 Fisher explains in more detail the way that “the expansion of fiction into theory [...] has an ambivalent effect on theory. If theory can no longer be distinguished from fiction – if fiction can perform theory and theory must perforce become fiction then map and territory are indeed confused, but in a more complicated and interesting way than Borges’ story suggests.”80 In effect, such fictions no longer act like traditional literature or text, but instead “stand in for a social scene that has been thoroughly cybernetized. This is no longer a matter of feedback, but of simulation-circuitries which have no referent beyond themselves.”81

2.4: Theory-Fictions, the Ccru, and Hyperstitions

The idea of theory-fiction is nothing new. Baudrillard in his essay “Simulation and Simulacra” cites, “On Exactitude in Science”, the one-paragraph short story written in 1946 by Jorge Luis Borges. Meanwhile, philosophers such as Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre, and Georges Bataille often wrote about their theoretical concepts in the form of prose fictions and poetry, while the philosopher and critic Stanley Cavell describes the concept of cinema as a fully realised world that not only mirrored our own but often come to stand for our world. In their ability to mirror and stand in for our world, movies not only lay out theoretical concepts as a narrative device, but in their world making, actively do philosophy.

Such practices and moves, however, were merely a prelude/ferment to the rise of artistic practices that were occurring in radical academia in the mid to late 1990s that were explicitly located in the realm of theory-fiction. For several loosely involved interdisciplinary communities and collectives, the idea of theory-fiction was not merely a frivolous pseudo-artistic practice, but a concept to be taken seriously. In the backdrop of such ideas, new emergent digital and information technologies, along with the rise of

78 “Jean Baudrillard”, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Mar 7 2007, accessible from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/#5. 79 Fisher, Flatline Constructs, 155. 80 Ibid. Fisher also lays out a detailed taxonomy of the various iterations of what theory-fiction could represent in his PhD thesis. See Flatline constructs, pp 155-156. 81 Ibid., 24. 33

the techno-SF literary offshoot cyberpunk, and the technologically mediated subcultures it spawned, heralded for some the arrival of a hybrid culture where the nominal boundaries between art, science, and culture, organic and artificial, would collapse in on themselves and the barriers between the real and imaginary would effectively be erased.

The collective that best embodied this new approach was the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), an interdisciplinary affiliation of students, professors, artists, and musicians based at the philosophy department of Warwick University in the mid to late 1990s.82 First headed by Sadie Plant, then, until its demise, by Nick Land, the Ccru was initially meant to be a group that would study the nascent fields of cybernetic and internet theory within the ideological confines of the academy. However, once Plant left in 1997 and was taken over by Land, the Ccru went spectacularly rogue from the demands and desires of the faculty board in the late 1990s as their bewildering “theory-fictions” - an array of texts, missives, and conference papers and presentations as rave-art installations - sought to harness the zeitgeist of internet-occultism and Y2K-driven apocalyptic discourse in order to break the pre-programmed systems of thought prevalent in western academia.

The Ccru, in their work, would brazenly splice the cyberpunk worlds of William Gibson and the future shock narratives of movies such as Bladerunner (Ridley Scott, 1982), and Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983), and Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) with the weird fictions of H.P. Lovecraft and William Burroughs. In doing so, they would course through an array of late twentieth cultural ephemera such as rave soundsystems, synthetic drugs, jungle and drum and bass music, digital computer art, genetic technology, and various esoteric and magical concepts, all the while infusing their systems of thought with the inhuman of Deleuze/Guattari and Bataille. Their work strived to achieve, according to Simon Reynolds, “a kind of nomadic thought that - to use the Deleuzian term – ‘deterritorializes’ itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism).”83 The Ccru

82 Those who were affiliated with the Ccru during and after its time as part of the University of Warwick Philosophy department include philosophers Iain Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier and ; cultural theorists Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun; publisher and philosopher Robin Mackay; digital media theorists Luciana Parisi and Matthew Fuller; electronic music artist and Hyperdub label head Steve Goodman, a.k.a. Kode9; writer and theorist Anna Greenspan; novelist Hari Kunzru; and artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, experimental musician Russell Haswell, as well as regularly collaborating with the experimental art collective 0[rphan]d[rift>] (Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee). 83 Simon Reynolds, “RENEGADE ACADEMIA: THE Cybernetic Culture Research Unit”, Energy Flash, Nov 3 1999, accessible from http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/11/renegade- academia-cybernetic-culture.html. 34

texts were the practice of theory as cyberpunk fiction taken seriously, all seen through a prism of chaos magic and other semi occultic practices, creating a gothic, labyrinthian web of distraction, confusion and destabilisation of the world around themselves.84

One of the more infamous concepts developed by the Ccru was the idea of hyperstition, which describes the process in which a fictional entity becomes reality. It is a concept that in effect is a distilled form of Baudrillard’s simulacra, where “The becoming-fiction of theory is necessarily accompanied by the becoming-real of fiction,” arguing that it “is now no longer adequate to consider fiction to be on the side of the false, the fake or the imaginary. It can be considered to belong to the artificial, once we understand […] that the Real, far from being opposed to the artificial, is composed of it.”85 There have been several working definitions of what is a hyperstition provided by writers and theorists who have examinations of the concept and its mechanisms. Alex Williams describes it as “narratives able to effectuate their own reality through the workings of feedback loops, generating new socio-political attractors.”86 Meanwhile, academic Delphi Carstens provides a more detailed overview;

Hyperstition is a neologism that combines the words ‘hyper’ and ‘superstition’ to describe the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Akin to neo- Darwinist Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes, hyperstitions work at the deeper evolutionary level of social organisation in that they influence the course taken by cultural evolution. Unlike memes, however, hyperstitions describe a specific category of ideas. Coined by renegade academics, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), hyperstition describes both the effects and the mechanisms of apocalyptic postmodern ‘phase out’ or ‘meltdown’ culture.”87

The Ccru themselves, in evoking a simpler, more esoteric description of the concept, described hyperstition as thus:

1. Element of effective culture that makes itself real.

2. Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device.

84 While many of the Ccru’s actions, recordings, and writings have been dispersed into the dark and untended areas of internet archiving, most of the posts and essays produced by the collective were salvaged and can now be viewed over at http://Ccru.net/, while several of the most famous sections of the Ccru narratives were collected and published in the book Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Online: Time Spiral Press, 2015). 85 Fisher, Flatline Constructs, 156. 86 Simon O’Sullivan, “Accelerationism, Hyperstition and Myth-Science”, CYCLOPS JOURNAL, Issue 2 (2017): 13. 87 Delphi Cartsens, “Hyperstition: 2010”, Merliquify.com, September 5 2010, accessible from http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition/#.XGRGmTP7TIU 35

3. Coincidence intensifier.

4. Call to the Old Ones.88

The idea of hyperstition was itself embedded within the entire meta-narrative body of the Ccru. In his feature on the Ccru, Simon Reynolds interviewed Derek Benjamin from Warwick University who, in his attempts to explain the fallout with the group in academic legalese concludes “See, there isn't such a thing as the Ccru.”89 Numerous stories and incidents of gossip surfaced of bizarre experiments to break the boundaries of human thought, involving sleep deprivation and drug taking, leading “a three-week long experiment in refusing to speak in the first person, instead referring to the collective entity ‘Cur’.”90

On a textural level, the Ccru texts are a work of hyperstition in itself. Described as “a peopling machine on the hyperplane,” several characters, from the ethnologist Echidna Stillwell to cryptographer Daniel Barker to the archivist Peter Vysparov, existed alongside the actual members of the Ccru. These academics would go on to write and develop a series of speculative and “excavated” theories and texts that included real life events figures such as Bill Gates, William Burroughs, and H.P. Lovecraft as well as institutions such as MIT. They also drew in journalists, both real and fabricated, who wrote about them into its constantly shifting web of conspiracies, and research avenues.91

The ways in which the Ccru developed the concept of hyperstition itself were in the form of weird tales that were also themselves conspiracy-tinged hyperstitions. In the text, “Lemurian Time War,” the Ccru describe their encounter with William Kaye, an assistant to Peter Vysparov.92 Kaye tells an alternative take on the life and work of William Burroughs, in particular an incident in 1958 where he comes upon a copy of the short story the Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, a 1988 text that he had yet to compose, but with the manuscript dated three centuries earlier. From this revelation, Kaye reveals that for the following three decades, Burroughs has been waging a clandestine magical time war against what Burroughs refers to as the One God Universe (OGU) a clandestine organisation responsible for the maintenance of totalising reality systems of social control. In this war, the creation of narrative techniques such as cut-up and the fold-in are

88 Ccru, (2004), “Polytics”, Hyperstition, June 07, accessible from http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/006777.html 89 Reynolds, (1999). 90 Robin Mackay, (2013), “Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism”, Divus, February 27 2013, accessible from http://divus.cc/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus#6. 91 Ccru, Writings 1997-2003 (Online: Time Spiral Press, Kindle Edition, 2015): 147-151. 92 The full text from “Lemurian Time War” can be found at http://Ccru.net/archive/burroughs.htm 36

used as narrative weapons “whose sole purpose was to escape the bonds of the already- written, charting a flight from destiny.”93

Within this weird tale lies the theory behind hyperstition, where the OGU stands in for the cultural tendency in modern culture where “fiction is safely contained by a metaphysical ‘frame’, prophylactically delimiting all contact between the fiction and what is outside it.”94 The power of words and signs to alter our perceptions of the world is as disavowed as having the powers of the false against the true that is the dominant narrative of rational thought and “common sense,” a narrative that also masks its ability mould and shape social reality. Postmodernism, in its creation of texts and symbols without a referent to the Real presents itself as an aesthetic or practice that subverts representative realism. The Ccru refutes this. Postmodernism they contend “merely consummates a process that representative realism had initiated. Representative realism severs writing from any active function, surrendering it to the role of reflecting, not intervening in, the world. It is a short step to a dimension of pristine textuality, in which the existence of a world independent of discourse is denied altogether.”95 In response, practitioners of hyperstition regard reality as consisting of a series of fictions (approved by the OGU). Through the functional or magical power of writing and art, these practitioners attempt to “break the code” of the OGU and bring about disruptions and changes in reality through the use/misuse of signs. “Writing operates not as a passive representation but as an active agent of transformation and a gateway through which entities can emerge. ‘[B]y writing a universe, the writer makes such a universe possible’.”96

The concept of hyperstition, in its allusion towards the blending of occultic vectors and digital technologies, may provide it as a practice with a hint of edgy novelty. But for the Ccru, it was a serious reaction, or response, to what they saw as standardising and oppressive models of knowledge and cultural production taking place in society. Seen in this regard, hyperstition takes the form of a creative artistic practice that is actually part of a line of modes and practices that sought to destabilise the audience and their ability to separate the real from the imaginary. From the theory-fictions of Baudrillard and the phantasmagoria generated by the technologies of mass media, to the gothic fictions of the nineteenth and twentieth century, these cultural modes and practices undermine what

93 Ccru, (2015), Kindle Locations 574-575. 94 Ibid., Kindle Locations 526-527. 95 Ibid., Kindle Locations 495-498. 96 Ibid., Kindle Locations 502-504. 37

Burroughs would refer to as the “reality studio”, a world of reality that presents itself as universal but where the future and therefore the past, could indeed be shaped and changed by the introduction of new fictions and myths.

2.5: On Slender Man and the Creation of the Internet’s First Folk Devil

On May 31st, 2014, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, two 12-year-old girls took a third girl, their friend Payton Leutner into the local woods near the town. Once in the woods, both Weier and Geyser inexplicably attacked Leutner, with Geyser stabbing Leutner nineteen times while Weier looked on. After they left her for dead, Leutner managed to survive the attempted murder, crawling to a nearby road where she was found and taken to hospital. Both Weier and Geyser were arrested shortly afterward.

This case, already seen by those in news media as inexplicable, took a weird turn when both girls stated in their defence that they attempted to kill Leutner to curry favour and gain grace with an entity that was known as Slender Man. A mysterious character that had been created in 2009 on the internet forum site somethingawful.com, Slender Man was a fictional creature depicted as a tall, thin, faceless man who haunts and stalks people, especially children and young adults. Both Weier and Geyser stated that they made the decision to become “avatars” to Slender Man, where they would do his bidding by killing their best friend, an action that would take months of speculation and planning. When the trial came to court, they were eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity but were promptly given long sentences in mental institutions. Weier was given 25-years- to-life at a mental institution, with Geyser sentenced 40-years-to-life also at a mental institution.

This case, and the ensuing media scrum and , brought up the prerequisite debate on the possible dangers and harms that the internet can inflict upon children and people with mental health issues, with talk of the internet as a place that “is full of information and wonderful sites that teach and entertain,” but that it is also a “sinister world,” “full of dark and wicked things.”97 Among the media discourse several questions arose, just what was Slender Man? How did it come about? Why, as a fictional

97 Abigail Jones, “The Girls Who Tried to Kill for Slender Man”, Newsweek.com, August 13 2014, accessible from https://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/22/girls-who-tried-kill-slender-man-264218.html 38

entity, was its existence so potent that people began to imagine that it was based on something real?

There have been several instances of crimes in recent history that have been committed by people with mental health issues or for whom the ability to determine what was real and fake in society was, at best, tenuous. The murder of John by Mark Chapman in 1980 and the attempted of by John Hinckley Jr. in 1981 for example, point to people who were unduly influenced by various cultural ephemera; in the case of Mark Chapman, a fandom towards Lennon turned into a murderous obsession after a religious conversion compounded by mental health issues, while Hinckley Jr. had developed an obsession with Jodie Foster after seeing her in the film Taxi Driver, with the assassination an attempt to impress her. In these cases, and others, the blending of the real and the imaginary occurred on an individual, insular basis; many of the antagonists created an internalised world that was not open to other people to inhabit or participate. With Slender Man, though, while the two girls made the decision to kill on their own, they were taking part in a narrative that was both open and shared, one where “literally thousands of other amateur writers, filmmakers, and digital artists have contributed the complex mythos that defines the character.”98 Through their collective efforts, their use of ubiquitous media technologies embedded in everyday life, and the ability to create content that can circulate easily across online platforms and social media, thereby giving it a form of validation and affirmation, this attempted murder gave the Slender Man mythos a much greater level of narrative power than if it had been done on a merely individual basis. In their response to the media panic regarding the Slender Man stabbings, the owners of the somthingawful.com site posted a tongue in cheek response to their blog, alluding to how the internet has often warped consensual reality, albeit badly, on a daily basis;

We are 15 years post-Blair Witch. These girls were 12. Found footage Youtubes, shaking cameras and bad Photoshops of people with socks on their head standing in the woods should not be fooling anyone. Especially not 12-year olds who should be better at the Internet and media culture than actual adults. But maybe all these chemtrails and Art Bells are actually making people dumber. Maybe there

98 Shira Chess & Eric Newsom, Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man, (New York: Palmgrave McMillan, 2015): 4. 39

is a lot of lead paint being used in Waukesha. Maybe the Internet makes you stupid.99

On one level, the phenomenon of Slender Man and the stories and images that surrounded its genesis adhere to many of the conceptual ideas of the gothic, particularly in the way Slender Man came to embody the nascent social anxieties and uncertainties surrounding the internet and social interactions online. When knowledge of the Slender Man became widespread after the Wisconsin case, it became the latest bogeyman monster that fuelled a moral panic from the public about what young people and children were watching and listening to on various internet websites and platforms. But on another level, Slender Man also seems to be operating in a manner that allows itself to be seen, not just as an entity of fiction, but also as something that, though the technology it inhabited, could generate an affect upon the realities of those who participated in digital subcultures. As Joseph Crawford argues, “[i]s it likely that any new form of mass media technology could fail to manifest itself in Gothic forms? Any new form of popular media, from novels to video games, will be a somewhat Gothic object, at least at first: such forms will always provoke some anxiety precisely because their potential is unknown, and because they do not yet fit comfortably into any established formal hierarchy.”100

Many aspects of Slender Man’s creation, ferment, and reproduction share a strong correlation with that of being a localised example of a hyperstition in action. From this statement it is possible to show that the qualities inherent within Slender Man are symptomatic of a larger trend in online and digital subcultures, where the idea of a consensual reality has been weakened to the point where various weaponised fictions can slip by and become embedded within the social fabric, both online and in material space. It is the ability of weaponised narratives, of which Slender Man is symptomatic, that are collectively willed into life from the “outside” of fiction to cause ontological confusions within the “inside” world of consensual reality that gives the Slender Man a charge of the weird.

Slender Man was first introduced on June 10th 2009, on a somethingawful.com forum titled “Create Paranormal Images.” The site’s members were challenged to upload photoshopped images and photos that had been altered to show the existence of ghosts

99 Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons, Please Do Not Kill Anybody Because of Slenderman”, Somethingawful.com, June 4 2014, accessible from https://www.somethingawful.com/news/slenderman- not-real/. 100 Joseph Crawford, “Gothic Fiction and the Evolution of Media Technology”, in Justin Edwards (Ed.), Technologies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture, (New York: Routledge, 2015): 36.

40

and other various supernatural phenomena. For the first ten days, several images were uploaded of varying quality, but on June 10th, the user “Victor Surge” (real name Eric Knudsen) uploaded two photoshopped images. In the first image, a group of teenagers are walking or running, away from something. The initial attention is given to the foregrounded figure of a teenage boy with a look of anxiety and stress, before attention is drawn to a figure at the rear of the picture. His features are blurred to the point of non- description, but you can tell that he is significantly taller than everyone else and that he is wearing a black tuxedo jacket. The caption under the first image quotes:

“…we didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but it’s persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time...”

– 1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead.

The second image shows a children’s playground in the afternoon. Among the children playing in the foreground, in the shadow of the tree in the background the same mysterious tall man appears, but now with what appears to be tentacles for arms is standing as a small group of children surround him. Below this image the following caption states.

“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, 1986.101

In response to people asking for more Slender Man images, Surge goes on to post “Maybe I’ll do some more research. I’ve heard there may be a couple more legit ‘Slender Man’ photographs out there. I’ll post them if I find them.”

Over the following days, Surge would go on to upload more images, whereupon other users began contributing their own images and text, in effect creating and expanding upon the burgeoning mythos of Slender Man. One user, “Thoreau-Up,” posted that he found a reference to the “Slender Man” in sixteenth century German folklore and provided a screen capture of the translated story and an image of Slender Man depicted in a woodcut picture. User “TombsGrave” posted that he found Slender Man mentioned in an old Romanian folk tale. Along such posts, many users began to post their own

101 Ian Vincent, “Slenderman: Tracing the birth and evolution of a modern monster”, in Greg Taylor (Ed.), Darklore Vol. 6, (London: Daily Grail Publishing, 2011): 11-12. 41

contributions to the forum thread, offering up numerous images, stories, illustrations, and other various forms of media. The very next comment after Surge’s original image post states, in a note of weird prescience, “You just know a couple of the good ones are going to eventually make it to paranormal websites and be used as genuine,”102 while the user “Derriere” posts several days later that “Something about Slender Man just seems to really hit a nerve with a lot of us, it seems. I love it. It’s creepy, it’s weird, and it makes me want to expand further on it.”103

From the confines of the initial Somethingawful.com forum thread, images of Slender Man and notes from his mythos began to break into more mainstream internet media sites and platforms such as YouTube, Reddit and . But the most influential and successful developments of Slender Man as an entity with a history and agency were the Marble Hornets104, TribeTwelve105 and EverymanHYBRID106 web series, in which YouTube storytellers “became traveling bards, taking the story from the local village to the wider world,”107.

The most famous of the three, , created by Joseph DeLage and Troy Wagner, began when a post on the Slender Man somethingawful.com thread by the user “Ce Gars” provided the premise of the web series. In the post Ce Gars states that his school friend Alex was working on a student film, titled Marble Hornets where, after several weeks of filming, Alex had become anxious, antisocial and distant, before abandoning the project altogether. Giving him the tapes of the film and instructing him to “burn them,” Cee Gars then says that the tapes are unnumbered and out of order but that he will post updates on the forum as and when he received them. The first Marble Hornets video, posted on June 20th, 2009, shows the video’s first manifestation of Slender Man. The series then progresses as the main protagonist, “J,” attempts to solve the mystery of what has happened to Alex, and in doing so descends into an intense, atmospheric horror as it seems that Slender Man begins to stalk the people involved with the making of the film.108

102 Vincent, 12. 103 Chess & Newsom, 29. 104 See Marble Hornets, https://www.youtube.com/user/MarbleHornets 105 See TribeTwelve, https://www.youtube.com/user/TribeTwelve 106 See EverymanHYBRID, https://www.youtube.com/user/EverymanHYBRID 107 Chess & Newsom, 31. 108 At the time of writing this thesis, Marble Hornets, had 509,000 subscribers on Youtube.com with the channel receiving a total of 99.6 million viewings. See https://www.youtube.com/user/MarbleHornets/about. 42

The other two series, TribeTwelve and EverymanHYBRID, build upon the main premise created by Marble Hornets to provide two different takes on the Slender Man mythos. TribeTwelve is a dedicated YouTube channel that ostensibly starts off as a series of posts on a school assignment about the Twelve tribes of Israel. The protagonist, Noah Maxwell, dedicates the channel to his cousin Milo, who mysterious committed suicide earlier. But in posting videos of Milo, Noah discovers the previously unseen image of Slender Man in the background. From here the series feels, according to Chess and Newsom, “more like a video blog of someone who is being stalked while unravelling a mystery,” as Noah finds himself not only being haunted by the idea of Slender Man, but he is also harassed both online and in the flesh by a mysterious cult based on the Slender Man called “The Order,” who provide him with various clues and threats in the hopes that they can use him to bring the Slender Man out into the open.109 EverymanHYBRID, the most self- knowing and reflexive of the three series, centres on three young adult men who start their own web blog about fitness and training. After several episodes, in a nod to the popularity of the Slender Man meme and activity, they begin to add “viewings” of Slender Man into their videos as a joke. But as the videos progress, the tone becomes darker as the three men tell of how they sense something that was beginning to stalk them when the cameras were turned off. It turns out that Slender Man, on seeing them perform being stalked by him as a joke, starts to stalk the three men for real.

From these moments, up until and beyond the time of the Wisconsin stabbing, the Slender Man story had grown from a couple of hastily made photoshop images to that of a “collectively created, interweaving universe of web series, novels and novellas, video games, mobile apps, and fan fictions.”110 Slender Man became the subject of various fan- fiction stories and communities, while the story of Slender Man was created into a series of independent video games such as Slender: The Eight Pages (2012) and Slender: The Arrival (2013). The Wisconsin stabbing and its ties to Slender Man became the subject of the HBO documentary (Irene Taylor Brodsky, 2017), while there have been several US indie and mainstream films about Slender Man, including Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story (James Moran, 2017) and Slender Man (Sylvain White, 2018)

In determining what it is about the Slenderman that makes it an example of a hyperstition in action and there an example of the weird, the following sections will use

109 Chess & Newsom, 34. 110 Ibid., 16. 43

the four main processes provided by the Ccru’s in their initial definition of hyperstition and apply them to the processes and actions involved in the making of Slender Man, it can be shown that in many instances, Slender Man conforms to the Ccru’s model for generating hyperstitions.

2.5.1: Hyperstition Stage One - “An Element of Effective Culture that Makes Itself Real.”

According to Carstens, the first process of a hyperstition in action is where “we are looking at how the fostering of cultural speculation allows a fictional entity to take on a life of its own in effect for it to become real in the mind of many.”111 In its genesis, Slender Man is a particular example of “a unique collective creation that applies the affordances of the digital age to age-old storytelling processes.”112 In mapping out the Slender Man phenomenon, Chess and Newsom attribute several themes prevalent in contemporary and digital cultures that, when added to the age-old process of storytelling and myth-making, creates a multi layered and dense narrative that is always shifting and changing according to the needs to of its prosumers.

The first theme is that the Slender Man is an example of “transmedia” in effect where transmedia is a mode of storytelling and marketing that takes a core story or text from a specific medium and develops and expands the narrative universe of the story onto new media forms, so as to build up new audiences and entry points to experience the core story. The rise in transmedia narratives over the last couple of decades have coincided with the escalation of digital media that has facilitated the transmission and continuation of from beyond traditional mass media such as film, TV, and literature.113

In terms of displaying the aesthetics of transmedia, Slender Man demonstrates the way that it’s the various actors involved, both users and creators, effectively became one and the same, or prosumers.114 As well as viewing and sharing various images, text,

111 “Hyperstition: Delphi Carstens at TEDxTableMountain”, YouTube Video, 10:13, posted by “TEDx Talks”, September 14 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdj9ChIRoqU. 112 Chess & Newsom, 9. 113 An example of transmedia in action is The Matrix film series, which grew out from the original film trilogy, and expanded into anime cartoons, graphic novels, and video games, with each iteration filling in gaps to the back story, adding and developing upon the mythos around the core text. 114 A Prosumer is the name given actives users who “create a culture of sharing, typically called a ‘culture of participation’” (Sumiala, (2009), 258). Prosumers both consume and produce digital media content. Even though the term has become synonymous with people who are on and consume social media, the term originated with Philip Kotler in his 1986 article “Prosumers: A New Type of Consumer”. See Kotler, P. “Prosumers: A New Type of Consumer”. The Futurist, 20 (1986), 24-28. 44

and videos on Slender Man, prosumers spread and deepen the mythos by breaking the narrative out of the traditional rules and confines of traditional storytelling and having it infest other forms of digital media. This sparked a flurry of reflexive discourse and narrative building that highlighted “the fluidity of medium, storyteller, and process, and also privileges a form of storytelling that is always necessarily incomplete.”115

The creators of Marble Hornets for example, once the conceit that the tapes were real began to wear off, would continue to extend the pretence of “reality” in the way they used social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and the comments section of YouTube to post real time updates and converse with the audience “in character.” At the same time the producers created “response” accounts that would then argue against “J”, giving rational explanations as to the phenomena he was experiencing. This discourse expanded outside of the confines of the Marble Hornets video comments section, as fans of the series would make their own vlog responses to them, also “in character,” providing various forms of advice and suggestions as to what “J” and the others should do. Both the vlogger and the audiences, in the creation and participation in this online community, created a media ecosystem containing many layers of reflexivity as various vloggers began to acknowledge and collaborate with each other. The posting of collaborative and cross-referential material gave a level of “proof” and authority among the audience as to the veracity of Slender Man and the narrative of MarbleHornets, as if the characters were actually going through these experiences for real.

In the words of the Ccru, the actions by all those involved in the online creation of Slender Man is an example of “the collectivization of the fictional system.”116 While examining the online nature of this collectivization, Chess and Newsom refer to the “open sourcing” of horror and gothic storytelling conventions by online subcultures, alluding to the discipline of open source software ethos where the code for a software product is freely made available to the internet, whereupon users are allowed to use, add and modify as they see fit. “Those who participate in the open-source process,” state Chess & Newsom, “necessarily involve themselves in ‘the voluntary participation and voluntary selection of tasks’ in all facets of production,”117 as various structural bugs and issues are resolved collectively. Using internet-based platforms such as social media and forum sites such as Somethingawful.com, the initial idea of the Slender Man may have been made by

115 Chess and Newsom, 18. 116 CCRU, “How do Fictions Become Hyperstitions”, Hyperstition, June 19 2004, accessible from http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003345.html 117 Chess & Newsom, 62. 45

a single individual, but the cultural production of its mythos became a collective and sprawling affair that mirrored several aspects of the open source process, a process that thrives on “reuse, modification, sharing of source code, an openness (and transparency) of infrastructure, and the negotiation and collaboration of many individuals.”118

In the early weeks after the first images of Slender Man were posted, an iterative process of storytelling began to grow, where the images, stories, and videos being posted started altering or adding key components of the legend, history, and actions of Slender Man. Many of the users on the original thread, including the original poster Victor Surge, encouraged other users to come up with their own stories and illustrations in a collaborative effort. This process of community driven “debugging,” meant that key aspects of the look and history of Slender Man would be discussed and agreed upon, while other aspects that were not felt to be in keeping with the aesthetics of Slender Man were either ignored or users were gently encouraged to the agreed upon aspects and features, often providing advice on how their efforts could be improved.

From an agreed upon set of textual rules, Slender Man began to evolve and take on a life of its own as the myriad “sightings,” stories, and images began to accumulate, modifying and expanding the mythos in a variety of ways. Marble Hornets for example introduced the concept of distortion and noise from electronic and digital media whenever Slender Man was nearby, while also introducing the idea of “proxies,” where people who had fallen under the spell or curse of Slender Man would undertake violent acts on its behalf, along with the idea of “slender sickness,” where people would feel nausea or have coughing fits or nosebleeds in his presence. Other texts would take this further, with the idea of “proxies” evolving into that of actual cults and the symptoms of slender sickness becoming more extreme, such as nosebleeds and headaches. Meanwhile fanfiction communities on various blogging sites such as Tumblr, FanFiction.net, Reddit, and Wiki, would generate various Slender Man stories and fan generated fictions that examined aspects of the Slender Man character that were considered marginal or outside of the main canon of texts.

118 Chess & Newsom, 64. In a move that went against the idea of shared authorship and possession, Surge/Knudsen made moves to copyright the character of Slender Man in 2010, although in interviews he has insisted that this was to protect the core property and integrity of the character being abused by mainstream interests. This move “prevented mass media versions of the character, meaning that primarily, the Slender Man has been developed in digital subcultures. While the character has slowly begun to migrate to the mainstream, amateurs, rather than media professionals, have made many iterations (see Chess & Newsom, 29). 46

2.5.2: Hyperstition Stage 2 - “A Fictional Quantity Functioning as a Time-Traveling Device.”

The second part of the Hyperstition process occurs in the way a fictive entity or element inserts itself into the cultural landscape, instigating a viral form of retconning where, “[it] is not a matter of building the future but dismantling the past […] and escaping the technical neurochemical deficiency conditions for linear-progressive [narratives].”119 Explaining further, Carsten described how popular media and cinema imagines a future that comes back to the present to alter the past: “such texts as The Matrix and The Terminator, The Road, 12 Monkeys. These futures that they conjure into being are so plausible precisely because they seem so very real to us.”120

From its very beginning, the plethora of submissions, images, videos, texts and artistic illustrations have attempted to conceive Slender Man within a faux-traditional history, not only as a supernatural entity of the present, but as something that has always existed, cropping up in various iterations in folklore with people “tracing” him back from 5000 BCE to the 16th Century, to the 1980s.121 One of the main reasons for doing this was to give Slender Man a heightened sense of myth and depth in its creation by breaking it free from its origins as a post in a somethingawful.com thread.

In addition to the linking of Slender Man to various moments in history is the way that Surge, and other users, linked the Slender Man to similar pop cultural representations. Slender Man was subsequently compared to the “Tall Man” from the Phantasm films, the “Gentlemen” demons from the television show , the urban legends of the “” comic book and film series, The Blair Witch Project, and Jack Skellington from the film The Nightmare Before Christmas. There were also comparisons to other narratives such as the works of H.P. Lovecraft, in the weird, uncategorised, yet terrifying nature of what the users on the original thread created, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s weird tale House of Leaves (2000), though the use of a variety of different literary and narrative forms (Diary entries, police and medical reports, news articles, images, drawings, photographs, etc). “By pulling in older stories from more established media,” argue Chess and Newsom, “members of the somethingawful.com

119 Delphi Carsten, “Hyperstition: 2010”, quoting head of the Ccru Nick Land in his essay “Meltdown”, where Land refers to a precursor from of hyperstition he terms as “K-Tactics.” See Nick Land, “Meltdown”, in Robin MacKay and Brassier (Eds), Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings,1987-2007, (Bodmin: Urbanomic, 2012). 441-461. 120 “Hyperstition: Delphi Carstens at TEDxTableMountain”, YouTube Video. 121 Many of these stories and images have been collected on the website The Slender Man Files. http://www.slendermanfiles.org/ 47

forum were able to contextualize their story within a larger fiction (that might have involved any, or all, of these characters), and also use these characters as part of the source material.”122 It is this blending of the Slender Man within other forms of genre fiction and folklore though history that gave it the ability to gain traction and become more ingrained within the wider online social and cultural landscape as a fully established entity of its own accord. The Slender Man, its creators would contest, has always been with us – we’ve only just worked out who he was.

2.5.3: Stage Three of Hyperstition - “The Entity as a Coincidence Intensifier.”

When talking about the third stage of hyperstition, Carsten refers to the cycles of capitalism in the way that “our accelerated cultural fictions are bringing about the future at a very rapid rate. Capitalism is an example of this. It is a zone of intensity a positive feedback cycle that generates further and faster technological change and continuously amplifies the scope of that changes.”123 Carsten also points to the concept of “unbelief,” which the Ccru link with the media phenomenon of “hype” with regard to the way that hyperstition rests upon an intensifying modes of circulation and feedback as symbols and ideas infect the cultural sphere, whether people believe it to be true or not; “It’s not a simple question of true or false with hyperstitions […] rather, it is a question of “transmuting fictions into truths.”124

Throughout history, forms of media communication and transmission, from the mythic poem, and the printed word, to newspapers and television, there has been a gradual decreasing in the time scale for ideas and cultural narratives to travel in society, while there has been concurrent increase in the geographical spread and reach of media. But with the rise of digital networks and cheap mobile communication technology, the circulation and intensification of information has reached the point where, on an informational level, the world is “made out of constant flows of mediated items, ideas and actors travelling materially and/or immaterially from one location to another, non- stop.”125

122 Chess & Newsom, 67. 123 “Hyperstition: Delphi Carstens at TEDxTableMountain”, YouTube Video. 124 Carsten, “Hyperstition: 2010”. 125 Johanna Sumiala and Minttu Tikka, “Imagining globalized fears: school shooting videos and circulation of violence on YouTube”, Social Anthropology, 19(3) (2011): 255. 48

With Slender Man, the circulation of images, stories and various texts across a multiple digital media formats are an example of the concept of culture in action. What is important here is the way that internet memes, in the process of traveling through the internet, are consistently transformed and reconstructed as they take on other cultural and memeific forms, be they national or site specific. When Slender Man was first created, it was done so by a specific internet subculture of young people, in a community that, while not hidden from public, would have required a certain amount of inside knowledge to access and understand. In what was already a highly participatory process of collective or “open source” fiction creation, Slender Man’s original authors managed to construct and refine a character that “was so frightening that collaborators confessed to being frightened of the very fiction they had created.”126 Knowing that Slender Man was at this time still an entirely fictional entity, they still allowed themselves to enter into a form of suspended belief by its narrative power. Several users posted updates on how they were now having nightmares or were experiencing moments of dread and anxiety. The user “Phy” for example, in a post states: “Jeez. Slender Man’s been entirely made up by this thread, but he’s already having an effect. He steals your sleep,” while user “Death Sandwich” confesses, “Thanks to this thread I now hate trees, windows, and tall people.”127

This desire to invest in the participatory/experiential aspect of Slender Man despite acknowledging its fictional origins is explored by Jeffrey Tolbert who spoke to and interviewed users who were involved in the original somethingawful.com thread. Likening Slender Man as an example of the reverse of ostension, a concept in folkloric studies that involves “the acting-out of narratives in reality, sometimes harmlessly, sometimes in ways that promote deviant or even criminal behaviour,” Tolbert argues that such posts describing experiential moments of dread and anxiety when coming into contact with Slender Man are part of a process that not only add credence to the narrative powers of Slender Man as a burgeoning legend, but in doing so invite more users to undertake in discussion, circulation and direct participation, thereby adding more weight and validation to the legend itself.128 Tolbert asserts; “[t]he metatextual function of the text is not to enable debate about the legend’s veracity as experience or historical fact— never in question here, since Slender Man was self-consciously created as a fiction—but

126 Chess & Newsom, 62. 127 Ibid., 73. 128 Jeffrey A. Tolbert, “The Sort of Story that has you Covering your Mirrors: The Case of Slender Man”, Semiotic Review, Issue 2: Monsters (2013): 2. 49

its plausibility as a representative of the legend genre. To put it more succinctly, belief in the literal content of the legend is non-existent and unproblematic; the issue is making the legend seem like a legend.”129

This desire and willingness to invite further participation and immersion in Slender Man’s mythos led to it spreading from beyond the confines the original SA thread and its authors, and onto other sharing sites such as 4Chan and Reddit. Slender Man as an entity invited participation from other communities and audiences, as it underwent an intense level of reproduction, evolution and variation, with the boundaries between fans, posters, and authors becoming fluid and less defined. As such, Slender Man underwent the cycle of memeific hype alluded to by the Ccru. That is, a process of myth-making through the suspension of belief that accompanies the creation of myths through human history, but with the intensification and speed of circulation afforded by the internet. What would have taken decades, even centuries to spread and become embedded into society, was being done in real-time.

2.5.4 - Hyperstition Stage Four - “Call to the Old Ones.”

In reference to the biological history of earth in terms of mass extinctions and the inauguration of the Anthropocene, the last incidence of hyperstition, according to Carstens, is where:

Our vision machines, our computing devices, our electron microscopes, have revealed to us the hidden dimensions of nature. We imagine aliens on the other side of the historical divide are about to cross over. The old ones are the forces of nature, immutability, and change, which humans have always innately realised but have greatly feared are there. Science has revealed to us these old ones once more.130

In his presentation, Carsten is talking both about the hyperobjects of financial level capitalism, as well as the “mother earth, Gaia,” whose functions and processes society is only just beginning to imagine. But in effect, this is about the process of reaching the limits of experience that ties in with Fisher’s assertions that the weird creates a fascination with that which lies beyond the agreed norms of perception, cognition and experience.

129 Tolbert, 16. 130 “Hyperstition: Delphi Carstens at TEDxTableMountain”, YouTube Video. 50

In the case of Slender Man there was this notion, continuing a long line of historical moral panics associated with emergent media formats, that its creation, reproduction and propagation across a wild and socially uncontrollable internet meant that people, especially the young, were dabbling with and ushering in forces they did not know about or quite understand. As Crawford notes with regard to such moral panics, “while this narrative is hyperbolic and anti-realist, it remains a variant on fears about the Internet expressed in the popular media; if we get involved in online media, we will conjure up violent monsters, an exaggerated version of the widely expressed anxiety that use of the Internet could expose vulnerable young people to the predations of deviants and criminals.”131

According to Crawford, such anxieties around new media are consistent with the idea of the “evil text”, be it a book, comic, video, computer game, or vlog, that incorporates the very anxieties that often surrounding the rise of new forms of media.132 This idea of the evil text acting as a beacon for evil or having an influence on those who watch it can be found in the likes of Marble Hornets and other productions, as the producers associated viewing the Slender Man via technology with the idea of contagion and virality. As the Slender Man in several instances is shown attracted to being filmed by people on phones and cameras, while it is alluded that in watching these videos and vlogs, “they infect those who make and watch them, exposing audiences to the predations of evil forces.”133 The idea of virality is further extended in the way that those who make the tapes supposedly come under the eye and power of Slender Man, compelling them to record more footage of their daily lives, while those who watch the videos come to his attention. When Slender Man broke into the mainstream media following the Wisconsin stabbing, this idea of the Slender Man as a creature that could “infect” or “control” those who spent too much time with it was picked by various news commentators and law enforcement officials, where they likened Slender Man to that of being more akin to a serial killer or child predators who search for young children on the internet to groom and control,

With regards to the possibilities of Slender Man connecting to a more ineffable mode of perception and thinking, Vincent asserts to the “occult potentialities” that lie underneath the Slender Man mythos, in particular the way he links the Slender Man’s

131 Crawford, (2015), 45. 132 Ibid., 39. 133 Ibid., 43. 51

ability to achieve a narrative life of its own with that of the mythical Tulpa.134 Translated as a “thought form”, or “a creature created from the imaginations of people through magical acts,”135 the Tulpa originated from Tibetan mysticism, itself a “syncretic mix of aspects of Buddhism, Taoism and the native pre-Buddhist Bön shamanic tradition.”136 The concept of the Tulpa was then brought over to the West by explorer and novelist Alexandra David-Neel in her 1929 book, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, whereupon it has since been appropriated and adopted by a variety of neo-pagan and modern magical theory. Early on in the somethingawful.com forum thread, the user “Bobby Deluxe” already notes the parallels between the actions of the thread’s users in creating Slender Man and the creation of a Tulpa, claiming that he knew “[o]nly enough to know the single word booming against the back of my skull like a chant from an underground temple - Tulpa, Tulpa, Tulpa. A creature made flesh by enough people thinking about it.”137

The idea of Slender Man as a Tulpa of modern magick is for Vincent and Chess/Newsom a fairly elegant one in the way that its deployment “allows a space where the Slender Man is able to both exist and not exist,” while at the same time “implies an inherently complicit audience, while providing reason for that audience’s inability to control its subject.”138 This harks back to the hyperstitional idea of unbelief where, despite the fact that it is very easy for people to go and find the faked origins of Slender Man online and the constructed nature of his development, he is still able to provoke fear and anxiety among those who watch the various web series or play games based on his mythos. The level of time, energy and imagination expended in creating Slender Man by a particular online subculture in effect gives it a form of virtual life that allowed it to break out into popular mainstream culture. While it may not be a “real” material being that is able to bring despair, insanity and destruction upon its victims, the Slender Man is real in the sense that:

The Internet’s construction and belief in the existence of a Slender Man has pulled him from a small pocket of counterculture and brought him to popular mainstream culture. One true tulpa effect is that mainstream television shows, films, and other popular media now make references to the character. And the actions that occurred in Wisconsin imply a kind of figurative tulpa. It does not matter that the character

134 Vincent, 24. 135 Chess & Newsom, 119. 136 Vincent, 26. 137 Chess & Newsom, 119. 138 Ibid., 119-20. 52

is not real—what matters is that the young girls committed a crime because the character seemed, for them, to have been brought to life.139

The lifeblood of the internet, and the content that gets created within, depends upon a mix of unbelief and intensive immersion among the various collectives and audiences that coalesce around various subjects. In the case of Slender Man, despite his fictional creation, it achieved both recognition and notoriety through the internet and its association with a grisly crime that shocked the US media. From here, Slender Man was now being featured and referenced in various iterations in mainstream culture from computer games such as , to TV shows, such as Supernatural, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and even children’s animation such as : Friendship is Magic.

2.6: Accelerated fictions and the Collapse of the Social Real.

The Slender Man as an online textural phenomenon is the latest iteration of a cultural process that, from the rise of the mass culture where sounds, images and text could be reproduced ad infinitum and distributed on a global scale, to a what Fisher called “the agency of the virtual” in which he referred to the ontology of the spectre in hauntology “not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing,” before referring to the entity of neoliberal capitalism, a form that “is very clearly a world in which virtualities are effective.”140 It is this idea of the virtual having agency and effect in our material lives that show how Slender Man is symptomatic of the idea where an increasing amount of our lives are spent in a virtual world where reality is mediated by accelerated and weaponised fictions. Said fictions can be personalised, an example of which can be seen in the rise the immaterial influencer economy with its development and monetization of personal identity as a “brand.” Then there is the creation of various memes and hoaxes that highlight the supposedly ludicrous of perceived truth, From the creation of climate change “deniers” and “alternative data,” to “independent journalists,” such fictions are often created online by various groups involved in the Ccru’s concept of unbelief as “pragmatic scepticism or constructive escape from integrated thinking.” These fictions are then let loose into the online world, then

139 Chess & Newsom, 120. 140 Fisher, Ghosts of my Life, 18. 53

traditional mass media, only for said fictions to create a life and reality of their own that comes back to haunt their creators.141

In engaging with Fisher’s argument regarding the generation of theory-fictions, it is not just about making fictions more “real” and fusing the them with the power of theory; there also has to be a reciprocal fictioning of reality to the point where “the real, far from being opposed to the artificial, is composed of it.”142 Far from being a new phenomenon, the fictioning of social reality has long been a project undertaken by various states and agents to promote various ideological ideals, be it through the cultural industries promotion of liberal capitalism in the US and the West, or with Soviet Russia and the promotion of communism through the “Soviet realism” movement. The rise of Nazism in German in the 1920s and 30s saw the aestheticization Nazi political and ideological ideals inserted into the culture of everyday life – most famously in Leni Riefsnstahl’s documentary Triumph of the Will.

But as politics, propaganda, and discourse have shifted first to traditional and then digital mass media, there has been a parallel effort in the creation of weaponised fictions created and fostered by state and private agents with various motives, be they political or economic. From the tobacco and fossil fuel industry’s funding of fake and “alternative” science to counter the standard narratives regarding smoking and climate change, to the rise and funding of the anti-vaccination movement, such actions have sought to sow distrust and undermine faith in institutions such as news media, the scientific community, the state, and the medical profession, institutions that are relied upon by the public to determine what was is “real” and what is “fiction” in our society.

This undermining of social institutions has allowed various “fictions” to circulate around social media whereupon they subsequently seep into cultural and social reality. From this point, it does not matter where these fictions are proven to be true or not; they are out there with a life of their own, and even pointing out its artifice does not destroy it. It is a place where perhaps it is not so much the creation of new worlds that infect the “real” that is the problem. The systematic destruction of those institutions that provide us with information that we use to shape our social realities is such that it has allowed the real to become so weakened and diseased that the imaginary is able to gain a strong foothold.

141 Ccru, “Polytics”. 142 Fisher, Flatline Constructs, 156. 54

Part 3: Driving Beyond Death - The Eerie Thanatos of Non-Place in J.G. Ballard’s Crash and Concrete Island

Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.

― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.

― J.G. Ballard,

This chapter will explore the weird and eerie with regards to the relationship between people and contemporary urban spaces, and how such spaces impact not only their actions and movements, but also social imaginations. In the first half of this chapter, I will explore the rise of modernism in the twentieth century and how its aesthetic and ideological principles, in the construction of buildings and spaces and its subsequent erasure of history and traditions, moved the uncanny from the home to outside spaces . This mix of spatial and psychological rupture and erasure, and the evolution towards the logic of supermodernism, lead to contemporary spaces as non-places.

I will then analyse how such eerie registers of non-places are represented and utilised in two of J.G Ballard’s novels, Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974). In both novels Ballard moves behind the perceived presence of absence inherent in what he terms the “death of affect” that exist in the planned, ordered spaces of post-WWII Britain to reveal a series of ambiguous agencies and potentialities that trigger passionate and uncontrollable drives in the characters. In Crash, the traumatic event of a car crash, far from being seen as a negative impact upon the mind and flesh, opens up a new imaginary realm that restructures the relationship of their bodies to the motorway. Compelled to engage in a series of violent car crash and ritualistic sex acts, the characters are carried up by mysterious unconscious drives within them, drives that that are irresistible even it if means their annihilation. Concrete Island, in contrast, flips the scenario where the main protagonist, also involved in a car crash, breaks past the confines of the non-place and finds himself marooned on a traffic island sealed on all sides by motorways and embankments. In this situation, the non-space encloses a non-, or negative, space, a waste ground discarded by the incessant march of progress represented by urban redevelopment. 55

As the protagonist accepts his fate, that of being trapped in this excluded space, he undergoes a form of psychic rebirth, as his unconscious mind begins to integrate with the Island. It turns out that far from there being an absence of presence, the island contains all forms of eerie registers hidden within its landscape.

3.1: Modernism and the Uncanny

The modes of the weird and eerie that reside in the realm of space and architecture is neither a new discovery nor a trend, for there has long been a confluence between the analysis of public space and the investigation of the uncanny as a concept since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Social and economic developments in this era coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie as a social class during the nineteenth century that brought with it the “historical, spatial, existential, psychological, and political implications of the notion ‘Heim,’ understood in the double sense of bourgeois home and the city as living environment.”143 For the newly mercantile class of the bourgeoisie, there was the sense of not belonging within society and of being “not quite at home in its own home.”144

The home of the nineteenth century became a paradigm where the construction of the self could be built though the accumulation of objects and goods, as well as through the control of space within the home that would “involv[e] decisions about how to arrange relationships between what is already in place – the ‘original features’, the traces of previous inhabitants, and the changing demands of everyday existence.”145 Barry Curtis argues that the bourgeois home in the nineteenth century became a privatised area away from the masses, as the control and partitioning of space was created along emergent social norms, meaning that interactions between social and generational classes within the house were kept to a minimum.146 By undergoing such actions, the home was the locus to retain a form of patriarchal fixity and stability, enabling the repression and disavowal of unwanted social anxieties.147

143 Masschelein, 144. 144 Vidler, 4. 145 Barry Curtis, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film, (London: Reaktion Books, 2008): 35. 146 Ibid., 42. 147 One of the narrative themes of gothic fiction during this period is the way that, despite the attempts of their owners to impose order, and stability upon the world, the eruption of various repressed forces and trauma consistently render this space “unhomely.” For a more detailed analysis of the Gothic with regards to the home, read Tamara Wagner, (2014) “Gothic and the Victorian Home”, in Glennis Byron and Dave Townshend (Eds) The Gothic World, (Abingdon; Routledge): 110-120, “The Haunted Castle” in Glennis Byron and David Putner, (2004), The Gothic, (London Blackwell Publishing): 259-262, and “Homely Gothic” in Fred Botting (1996), Gothic, (London: Routledge). For a more contemporary take, read 56

But with the advent of the modernist enterprise and the evolution of urban spaces in the nineteenth and twentieth century, there is a concurrent movement of the uncanny as an aesthetic and psychological mode from the confines of the home to the architectural spaces of the street and the city. The modernist movements that sprang up across Europe and the US at the beginning of the twentieth century sought to radically alter society with regards to time and space that, in turn, would change the role of the individual subject situated within them. As a practice and ideology, modernism sought to improve society through social engineering of space by employing technological advancements to radically reconstruct public and private space, along with the development of new architectural styles and practices. Utopian designs for the city, such as Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City” (1925), emphasised a move away from the dirty, chaotic, and labyrinthian landscapes of the old cities towards a formal space containing horizontal and vertical geometries of straight lines, clean surfaces, and abstract geometric shapes in the design of buildings and public spaces, from squares to parks.148 The proliferation of modernist principles to urban space would lead to a radical rethinking of certain types of social buildings and infrastructure systems - schools, hospitals, offices, roads, train stations airports - in order to enable the smooth and easy flow of bodies in space. The individual, far from being a discrete individual, was now a node in a vast mechanical geometric system, an organised society en masse.

In embracing a social drive towards a technological future, modernism also sought to move on and abandon the traditionalism and the memory of the old city, with its myriad of social, economic, political and medical problems. The early modernist discourses of architecture were concerned greatly with “[t]he question of transience” as well as “the resistance to historical continuity and location in time,” which translated into architectural designs that rejected applied ornamentation and continuation of past traditions for buildings whose monumentalism was embodied in the functions said buildings were created for. Many buildings and structures were thus “pared back to the point of expressing very few, albeit very specific, aspects of its making.”149 Instead, buildings

Wilson, “Haunted Habitability: Wilderness and American Haunted House Narratives”, and “Gothic Affects: Digitally Haunted Houses and the Production of Affect-Value” in María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (eds), (2010), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture, (New York: Continuum Books). 148 For more background information on Le Corbusier and the history of architectural modernism, read Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, (Mineola, New York, Dover Publications, 1985); Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002); Anthony Vidler and Peter Eisenman, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Mass: MIT Press, 2008). 149 Kevin Donovan, “Building Supermodernity: The Architecture of Supermodernism.”, Irish Journal of French Studies, Volume 9 (2009): 119-120. 57

were designed to project a vision of mechanical and technological progress, “through the mass production of components and the commodification of architectural elements.”150 The result led to an aesthetically flat landscape of relational ahistoricism and uniformity of detail, where the function of buildings are obscured into that of an architectural sameness that introduces a non-relational link to either locale or surrounding buildings.

Consequently, this ahistoricism and homogeneous anonymity borne out of the relationship of the individual with these modernist urban spaces becomes a generator of uncanny forms and modes. Anthony Vidler, in summarising the urban landscapes of notable post-war films such as A (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) and Blade Runner, argues that their anonymity and erasure of historical hierarchies result in many of the characters moving through a flat, never-ending world of repetition, devoid of the thresholds that occur from going from a definable here to there:

In this city where suburb, strip, and urban centre have merged indistinguishably into a series of states of mind and which is marked by no systematic map that might be carried in the memory, we wander, like Freud in Genoa, surprised but not shocked by the continuous repetition of the same, the continuous movement across already vanished thresholds that leave only traces of their former status as places. Amidst the ruins of monuments no longer significant because deprived of the systematic status, and often of their corporeality, walking on the dust of inscriptions no longer decipherable because lacking so many words, whether carved in stones or shaped in neon, we cross nothing to go nowhere.151

The uncanny here, according to Vidler, is centred on the rootlessness and unhomeliness that derives from an inability to make any connecting emotional maps or derivés from moving through the modern city. Vidler traces a genealogy of the uncanny with regard to architecture and space, from being that of an aesthetic affect in literature and culture, to that of a socio-political concept, where the uncanny is used to explain and analyse the psychological and aesthetic response to the shock of the modern in people’s lives, a shock exasperated by the growth of capitalism and war. This shock leaves an innate yet pervading feeling of estrangement in the individual and a lack of belonging in the spaces around them.

Such feelings of estrangement and rootlessness were aggravated in the early twentieth century by a growth of social migrations and an increasing economic and social

150 Donovan, 119-120. 151 Vidler, 184-185. 58

precarity of living in the west as families and individuals, in a search for a better life, were separated from the history and connections once afforded by their traditional communities. The situation of many people in becoming strangers in a city or land that is not their own, brought on feelings of the uncanny in a way that “destabilizes the traditional notions of centre and the periphery” and “the spatial forms of the national,” in order to talk about the return of “‘the migrants, minorities, the diasporic’ to the city.”152 In being caused by economic and political structures used in controlling the modes of being in modern space, Vidler argues that the subjective experiences of the uncanny from a rootless population towards the geometries of modern spaces subsequently become linked with other ontological concepts associated with being such as estrangement, defamiliarization, repression, and homelessness.

3.2 From Place to Non-Place, and the Seamless Landscapes of Global Capitalism

As the modernist era of the twentieth century glided into the early twenty-first century, there was a social and economic turn against the edicts and ethics of architectural modernism, which architects and urban designers saw as having “abandoned [the] principles of urbanism and the human dimension of outdoor space established in the urban design of cities of the past.”153 Modernist architectural designs and associated social buildings, they argued, had abandoned the communal activities at a street level for housing people in vertically regimented and atomised housing blocks. At this time, the economic structures of the west shifted from being based on commodities and manufacturing, to that of a service-based economy centred on finance, marketing, and information. Advances in transport, communication and information technologies meant that the flow of people, goods, and capital could move more easily, resulting in a reduction of the importance of the traditional urban centre in containing the politics, religion, business, and culture of the area.

This shift towards a globalised form of finance capitalism resulted in a form of posturbanism, where the erasure of categorical thresholds and boundaries in modern urban spaces described by Vidler extended outwards from the traditional urban to the suburban fringes. Former urban centres became the hollowed-out sites for various

152 Vidler, 10. 153 Roger Trancik, “What is Lost Space?”, in Matthew Carmona and Steve Tiesdell (Eds), The Urban Design Reader, (Oxford: Architectural Press, 1987): 65. 59

corporate financial headquarters, while consumer, entertainment, and other business services began to move and coalesce into an undifferentiated suburban sprawl. This sprawl, consisting of multiple areas for consumer commerce and entertainment (shopping malls, cinema multiplexes) and industry (business parks), were aided by booming infrastructure network of motorways, train lines, and even air routes.

In seeking to explain the social developments associated with the expansion of this suburban sprawl, anthropologist Marc Augé establishes this trend to a new spatial and temporal logic that he defines as supermodernism. While supermodernism as a term seems to have a social and historical concurrence with postmodernism, Augé instead likens supermodernism to that of “the face of a coin whose obverse represents postmodernity: the positive of a negative.”154 Postmodernism, often expressed as a lamentation for a loss of meaning in society and a subsequent looking back to the past which, when applied to architecture, leads to the borrowing of various styles and motifs from previous historical periods, thereby looking to express a standardised and vague idea of “the past.”

With supermodernism however, the problem is not a lack of meaning but an accelerated modernism borne through an excess of meaning and information, where the individual is forced to make and secure a sense of meaning from a society living in a constant present. Augé defines the characteristics of supermodernity as living in an excess of three areas that are the cornerstones on which the anthropologist examines the notion of place. The first, an excess of time, posits that people are deluged with “the overabundance of events in the contemporary world,” resulting in “an excess of time,” that creates the sensation of “history snapping at our heels.”155 The second area, an excess of space, describes our society experiencing “an era characterized by changes of scale,” where the ability to see and experience most of the world is now near instantaneous thanks to media and an industry of mass tourism.156 At the same time this creates a paradox where instantaneous access shrinks and congests our experience of the world. The third area, an excess of ego, or individualisation, outlines the social trend of thought and discourse regarding the individual subject, where supermodernism opens up the individual to others, but at the same time, closes or disconnects them from communal

154 Marc Augé, Non-Place: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Translated by John Howe), (London: Verso Books, 1995): 30. 155 Ibid. 156 Ibid., 31. 60

practices, creating a person who wants to be “a world in himself: he intends to interpret the information delivered to him by himself and for himself.”157

According to Augé, the logic of supermodernism, in a globalised society run along the lines of frictionless movement and flows of efficiency, is embodied by the proliferation of what he calls non-places. In describing the non-place, Augé defines it as the opposite of the anthropological place, that of the “concrete and symbolic construction of space” that facilitates collective gathering, social functions, and a sense of belonging.158 Non-places, in contrast, are spaces which “cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.”159

While the definitions of place/non-place may seem like the creation of a simple binary, both are not necessarily discrete and separate entities as all too often they tend to coexist in the same space. “Places,” Augé acknowledges, “reconstitute themselves in it [the non-place]; relations are restored and resumed in it. […] Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten.”160 In fact according Miriam Gebauer, actual non-places don’t actually exist, “except through human interaction with it.”161 The critical component in thinking about how non-place operates in relation to the individual hinges the social perception of time with respect to the historical. In general, humans need time to establish social relations that move from being micro-events to something historical. In other words, if one gathers at a certain place for long enough, a non-place can take up the aspects of the place.162

But such a development can only occur if an individual is in a single place, and in the world of supermodernism where society is increasingly on the move, movement turns a place into a passage of space, and therefore non-place. Augé, in this

157 Augé, 37. 158 Ibid., 51. 159 Ibid., 77-78. 160 Ibid., 78-79. 161 Mirjam Gebauer, Helle Thorsøe Nielsen, Jan T. Schlosser, Bent Sørensen, “The Absence of Place and Time: Non-Place and Placelessness”, In Mirjam Gebauer, Helle Thorsøe Nielsen, Jan T. Schlosser, Bent Sørensen(Eds), Non-Place: Representing Placelessness in Literature, Media and Culture (Aalborg: Aalborg University Press, 2015): 5. 162 Examples where such instances of non-place turning into place over time occur can be seen in the films Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1994), The Terminal (Steven Spielberg, 2004), or the TV show Næturvaktinn (Ragnar Bragason, 2007), where the protagonists, either as workers or travellers, spend the majority of their time in non-places, such as airport terminals, grocery stores, and motorway service stations. Over time, they develop a sense of identity, attachment and social structure beyond the mere functional in effect turning the non-place into an actual place. 61

respect, defines the majority of non-places as being transitional spaces, of areas of transit and temporary waiting; airports, motorways and their services stations, car parks, hotel or office lobbies, and shopping malls. In these non-places, the majority of individual experiences are at best micro-historical, and all other times take on a “solitary contractually,” of already-agreed propositions and interactions, either with agents assigned to control and manage the flow of movement, or though proliferation of signs and organisational boundaries.163

To facilitate the semblance of frictionless movement and exchange, the layout, design and production of non-places tend towards a structural homogeneity as space becomes standardized. Non-spaces therefore create a disavowal towards exhibiting any particular cultural roots or an innate historical connection with the surrounding area. Despite the increasing elements of surface ornamentation and allusions to place that arise from postmodernist design, the basic layout of a shopping mall or an airport is the same whether it is in Reykjavik or Rio de Janeiro. From this perspective, the generic layouts of space here can be seen as a positive; even if one does not share a common language, the generic features of these spaces mean the same, allowing one to orientate themselves along directions and flows that have been prescribed to all airports.

As society spends an increasing amount of time in transit, becoming accustomed to social processes that emanate from non-places, Mirjam Gebauer and others associate the spent in non-places with the onset of new structures of feeling, arising from the fragmentation and anonymity of a social life in transit. Such feelings they argue are characterised by an “inherent dislocation of the individual from time and place – as humans have traditionally known and understood these – and a general notion of uneasiness, rootlessness, and otherness following the sense of dislocation.”164 These descriptions of experiencing non-places mirror the psychological reactions of people towards the historic spaces of modernism, spaces that were seen as the psychic engine that generated sensations of the uncanny. The sense of alienation associated with the shock of the modern, when applied to that of the non-place, also provokes a feeling of disjointedness and dislocation due to the multiplication and proliferation of homogeneous spaces.

But on closer examination there are differences in how the uncanny sits between these historical and cultural modes. The architecture of the modern is exemplified by a

163 Augé, 79. 164 Gebauer et al, 10. 62

functional solidity and monolithic abstraction, whereas many of the buildings and surfaces of non-place often emphasise a lack of solidity, the concrete and steel of the modern being replaced by structures and spaces composed of undifferentiated facades of glass and mirrored surfaces that refract and fold back on themselves. The result is a sense of openness and never-ending space, which paradoxically splits and fragments the unity of space, through the inability to orientate oneself to a fixed point.165

Another difference between the modern and supermodernism can be found with regard to how these aesthetic and emotional registers to space are associated with various psychological disorders. In the modern era, the psychological shock when being confronted with the developments of the urban modern were associated with neurosis - that of anxiety and assorted phobias. With non-place though there is a psychological shift from neurosis to depression. Ballard came to term this depression as that of the “death of affect,” a gradual numbing of sensation towards the outside world and a waning of libidinal energies due to a sensory overload of the senses arising from the automated and prescriptive demands and desires of living in a late-capitalist world.

In pinpointing the weird and eerie in this regard, many of the uncanny registers associated with modernism can be associated with a sense of the weird due to the destabilizing shock of the new that was associated with modernism, with the appearance of radical objects and entities that do not belong, and whose “exorbitant presence,” would bring forth “a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it.”166 With the non-place of supermodernism however, there may be a sensorial abundance of information, but there is a corresponding purge of any form of presence or identity. In spaces that are ahistorical, non-relational, and indifferent to locale, there is a freezing of agency on the part of the individual, a nulling of affect as they are distanced from any linking to what can be considered an authentic experience, coinciding with the ceding of agency to forces of control that are unseen but embedded in the surfaces of non-place.

Ballard, whose novels and stories have been concerned with the psychological effects arising various forms of social space in the UK during the twentieth century, has

165 For a detailed analysis of the architecture styles and developments associated with supermodernism and non-place, see Donovan (2009). A good example of how the surfaces and objects of non-places can become a labyrinthian nightmare for the individual to negotiate can be seen in the Jacques Tati film Playtime (1967), where in several scenes the main character (played by Tati) finds himself repeatedly getting lost and confused as he traverses the gleaming business buildings and corridors in the Parisian city centre, which serves as a “comical critique of the frictionless environment, as what is intended to facilitate smooth movement, in reality becomes the biggest obstacle for the individual” (Gebauer et al, 9). 166 Fisher, The Weird and Eerie, 61. 63

been described by critic Roger Luckhurst as being “concerned with the psychological effects of non-place, these transitional places.”167 Many of Ballard’s novels and stories are often located in, or centred on, the concept of non-place and its iterations, from the never-ending global metropolis of (1957), the vast leisure resorts and expatriate tourist enclaves of The Largest Theme Park in the World (1990), Vermillion Sands (1971), Having a Wonderful Time (1991) and (1996), to the business parks and campuses of Super Cannes (2001), and the shopping malls of Kingdom Come (2007). Life for the characters in these narratives are rendered as a series of near pre-programmed and empty responses resulting from overbearing cultural stimuli – an abundance of war, sex, action, and consumerism, culminating in an erosion of self, a loss of presence or stability within the world. In many of his works, Ballard is interested in how this loss, or waning, of affect results in various psychopathologies in the lives of their characters as they search to find some depth of meaning in places where the homogeneous surfaces and the elements of control through regulation and self-discipline preclude such experiences.

It is the landscapes and architecture of the motorways and their attending structures that loom the most in the work of Ballard, especially in that of Crash and Concrete Island. This should come as no surprise; in a world where mobility and communication have become the organising norms in society, this has resulted in “an urban environment in which highways, thoroughfares, and parking lots are the predominant types of open space.”168 Ballard, in a 1971 documentary titled Crash!, expresses his admiration for how prevalent the motorway and car culture had come to dominate society:

I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.

We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and

167 Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard, (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997): 130. 168 Trancik, 64. 64

technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.169

In the following sections, I will be analysing how both Crash and Concrete Island display certain forms of eeriness that arise from the issues of agency, dissociation and presence that are present in both the text and narrative. I will demonstrate that while the automotive landscapes are seemingly sterile and regulated on the surface, the onset of different forms of trauma form a crossing threshold that herald a change in the psychological inner spaces of the characters. This change transforms their relationship to the world around them, a world where there are now all sorts of inhuman agency at play. In both novels, the characters compulsively follow what Fisher calls an “eerie Thanatos,” a form of the death drive that despite the efforts of the characters to understand and control it, is seemingly inexplicable and unstoppable. In the case of Crash, the inorganic landscapes of the motorway are part of an “impersonal of our desires,” that drives the protagonists on a path towards vehicular suicide that becomes inseparable with their rational thoughts.170 Fisher argues, “[t]here is an agency at work in us (the unconscious, the death drive), but it is not where or what we expected it to be.”171 With Concrete Island the main character experiences non-place from the other side as he is introduced to a site beyond non-place, a non-space or “lost-space” in the form of an abandoned traffic island. Initially shown to be excluded from its surroundings and seemingly a place of absence, on closer inspection there is the revelation of a space teeming with agency, with what Luckhurst calls the “recalcitrant traces” of a supposedly vanquished past.

3.3: Long Live the Autogeddon - J.G. Ballard and Crash

Crash is an exemplary novel of the non-place. The story of a man who becomes consumed in a spiral of erotic and violent obsessions after being involved in a car crash, the entire narrative is located in and around the network of motorways that criss-cross and connect the west of London to Heathrow Airport, alongside car washes, multi-storey car parks, airport hangars and terminals, motorway cafes, service stations. The “machine landscape” of the motorway depicted by Ballard in Crash is so totalising that it takes on an almost abstract form, dominating the other spaces around it. Sebastian Groes argues

169 Crash!, directed by Harley Cokliss, (1971, UK, BBC, TV), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cqn6zA1sMg. 170 Fisher, the Weird and the Eerie, 85. 171 Ibid. 65

that even though the first motorways originated in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, the development of the motorways in the UK and Europe in the mid to late twentieth century mirrored the socioeconomic structures of the US, and the move towards late-capitalism as an ideology of management and control:172

The space we encounter in the novel is the result of the introduction of a distinctly American form of road building in a European capital city, leading to a rupture in the traditional way of experiencing the metropolis. The American system of motorways is characterized by fluidity and movement and reduces space to a pure Idea, which is the opposite of the stasis of the European city, with its mass organized around the unity of a social centre. There is a paradox at the heart of driving an automobile: ‘auto’, etymologically derived from ‘self’, suggests that it is the subject who is in control of his or her mobility, but the opposite is happening. The autonomous subject is subjected to a process, a collective experience in which (s)he is a figure whose unconscious yields control.173

Even in a supposedly centred place, such as the newly built apartment complex occupied by the central character James and his wife Catherine, the motorway comes to define this domestic space and not the other way around.

Our own apartment house at Drayton Park stood a mile to the north of the airport in a pleasant island of modern housing units, landscaped filling stations and supermarkets, shielded from the distant bulk of London by an access spur of the northern circular motorway which flowed past us on it elegant concrete pillars. I gazed down at the immense motion sculpture, whose traffic deck seemed almost higher than the balcony rail against which I leaned. I began to orientate myself again round its reassuring bulk, its familiar perspectives of speed, purpose and direction.174

In this London of automation, processes and operations, both James and Catharine are the Ballardian epitome of the new urban, professional bourgeois class assembled by this new society of media and transit; James works, for example, as a producer at the TV commercial studios in Shepperton, while Catherine works in the foreign tours section of Pan American Airlines. But their relationships are beset by distance, ennui, and the death

172 J.G. Ballard, Crash, (London: Picador, Kindle Version, 1973), 44. 173 Sebastian Groes, “The Texture of Modernity in J.G. Ballard's Crash, Concrete Island and High- Rise”, in J.G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions, by Leanette Baxter and Rowland Rymer (Eds), (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 128. 174 J.G. Ballard, Crash, (London: Picador, 1973 Kindle Version), 36. 66

of effect; Both engage in extramarital affairs, while James points out that his and Catherine’s working lives have “separated us more and more over the past years.”175 Their relationship is reduced to that of telegraphed emotions and soulless interactions, such as when James is irritated by Catherine’s comments over the death of another man as that of “bogus commiseration,” and part of a “pantomime of regret.”176 To stave off such alienation, James and Catherine create and invest in elaborate erotic fantasies involving the people around them, but this only results in further emotional distancing in their lives as “our relationships, both between ourselves and with other people, more and more abstract.”177

This denatured world of affect collapses one night when James is involved in a head on collision on the motorway with another car, driven by Helen Remington and her husband. While James and the Helen survive the crash, her husband is killed. From the outset, the rapturous, almost excruciating detail of the experience of the crash provided by James takes on a highly artistic, almost aesthetic nature, with Helen laid out in her crash vehicle like “a Madonna in an early Renaissance Icon” as a pool of her urine forms “rainbows around my rescuers’ feet.”178 The crash site takes on the element of spectacle where James imagines the gathering of emergency services and onlookers being “the principal actors at the climax of some grim drama in an unrehearsed theatre of technology, involving these crushed machines.”179 In this theatre of “stylisation of violence and rescue,” James begins to see patterns from his crashed car repeating themselves in the objects and people around him, while also noticing the smallest movements of those around him as a series of highly erotic and ritualised “coded gestures.”180

While recuperating in hospital, it becomes apparent that the near-death experience of the crash acts as a metaphorical baptism that sparks a gradual and inexplicable warping of James’ relationship towards reality and the world around him. He becomes subsumed in a never-ending series of bizarre and sexually graphic fantasies of car crashes, while through his scars he sees the beginning of a merging between his body and the car, as “the precise make and model-year of my car could have been reconstructed by an automobile engineer from the pattern of my wounds.”181 On release from hospital, there

175 Ballard, Crash, 21. 176 Ibid. 177 Ibid., 26. 178 Ibid., 13, 16. 179 Ibid., 14-15. 180 Ibid., 16. 181 Ibid., 20. 67

is the seeming birth of a new “James” that is embodied in “a new intensity and range of erotic response, together with an impassioned interest in every aspect and extension of the automobile.”182

Seeing both the “true nature” of the car and his surroundings in a new light, he is beset a cycle of compulsions and repetitions surrounding his crash – he returns to the scene of the accident on several occasions, spending his time “visualizing the possibility of a different death and victim, a different profile of wounds.”183 He re-orders the same car as the one he crashed in and, along with Helen, is drawn to revisiting and examining his crashed car held at the police impound. His former domesticated, middle-class world is no longer able to claim primacy to “keys to the borders of identity,” and as such hold little promise or appeal.184 It is here that James falls under the reptilian spell of Vaughan, a monomaniacal narcissist and of a disparate group of car crash survivors who see the motorway as a site of experimentation and profane transcendence through the reorganising erotic potentials of the body with the automobile. Through Vaughan’s grand vision to “induce global ‘autogeddon’, a primitive singularity uniting man and machine” James begins to fantasise about the transcendent and liberating potentials of death by car crash, as his world becomes a series of increasingly brutal “rehearsals” for the ultimate auto-collision that will finally merge their bodies and cars into a singular whole.185

This incessant, inexplicable compulsion on the part of James and the group to mould their actions towards an annihilation through the sexualised fusion of the body, car, and motorway points to a version of Freud’s death drive that Fisher calls an “eerie Thanatos.” A psychological process that Fisher defines as “a transpersonal (and transtemporal) death drive, in which the ‘psychological’ emerges as the product of forces from the outside,”186 an eerie Thanatos occurs when a specific incident or trauma invites an irruption of non-subjective drives and forces that, while radically alien and inhuman, are experienced from within the subconscious. In attempting the locate the sources of such drives, this causes an inherent destabilisation as “an enquiry into the nature of what the world is like is also inevitably an unravelling of what human beings had taken them themselves to be.”187

182 Gregory Stephenson, Out of the Night and into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J. G. Ballard, (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991): 69. 183 Ballard, Crash, 39, 48. 184 Ibid., 42. 185 Simon Sellars, Applied Ballardianism, (Truro: Urbanomic, Kindle Version, 2018), location 139. 186 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 82-83. 187 Ibid. 68

The key to understanding the nature of an eerie Thanatos and how it applies to Crash, is the way Fisher explores the concepts of intention and agency with regards to the film Quartermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967). The discovery of alien fossils during an archaeological dig causes an eventual rupture in the worldview of the protagonists when it is revealed that humanity, far from being centred in the natural world, is the result of cross breeding between proto-humans and the Martians. In Quartermass, what is taken to be the intentionality and centrality of thought that separates humanity from nature is flipped as our human desires emanate not from within us, but from an alien inhumanity outside us, a Thanatos or death drive that propels us toward annihilation. For Fisher, the eerie derives from the fact that the alien, far from being something that is outside, inhuman, and inorganic, is something that is actually inside us and makes up part of what makes us tick. As Fisher explains:

The conjecture implied by Freud’s positioning of Thanatos is that nothing is alive: life is a region of death […] What is called organic life is actually, kind of folding of the inorganic. But the inorganic is not the passive, inert counterpart to an allegedly self-propelling life; on the contrary, it possesses its own agency. There is a death drive, which in its most radical formulation is not a drive towards death, but a drive of death. The inorganic is the impersonal pilot of everything, including that which seems to be personal and organic. Seen from the perspective of Thanatos, we ourselves become an exemplary case of the eerie.188

It becomes clear that from the outset of Crash that the apocalyptic nature of the car crash is used by James, Vaughan and the other as a form of sexualised ritual-as- gateway to enter into a new realm of being, a new and burgeoning transpersonal human consciousness linked with the technological landscapes of the motorway. The idea of a death drive looming over Crash is not new. Roger Luckhurst describes Crash as “the literalization of the death drive, the fatal cathexis of the car crash as ambivalent symbol of the extent of alienation in the technological landscape,”189 while Andrzej Gasiorek (quoted by Francis) argues that the text “suggests that contemporary social existence is powered by the death- drive” and speaks of its remorseless insistence on “the colonisation of the sex instinct by the death instinct.”190 But what is incredibly disturbing about Crash is the fact that, even though pursuing this eerie Thanatos will mean almost certain death, for James and the others this is seen not as something to be feared, or even concerned

188 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 84-85. 189 Luckhurst, 127. 190 Samuel Francis, The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard, (London: Continuum Books, 2011), 111. 69

about, but is instead something to be embraced. For the apocalyptic in this scenario is not the end of something, but of a transformation, a transcendence into something greater.

In this respect, we see a myriad of transformations take place in Crash in the way the self-induced pain and mutilation from repeated crashes reshapes the bodies of the group and therefore both their identity and subjectivity as the members of the group become defined by their indelible wounds and scars. Nowhere is this more evident than in the most injured and mutilated of the group, Gabrielle, whose body, after several massive car crashes, takes on a near cyborg form, clad in leg braces, callipers and spinal supports, and whose scars and wounds are obsessively worshipped by James. But far from being seen as “disfigured” or a “cripple”, Gabrielle’s body, her injuries, and her recovery - extensively documented in a folder made by Vaughan - is seen as a site of rebirth that saves her from an “increasingly abstracted despair with a series of grotesque implements.”191 At the moment of the crash, Gabrielle is portrayed as “a conventional young woman whose symmetrical face and unstretched skin spelled out the whole economy of a cosy and passive life, of minor flirtations in the backs of cheap cars enjoyed without any sense of the real possibilities of her body.”192 But later images show Gabrielle as a woman transformed, the trauma of the crash acting as a catalyst for a new personality, complete with an alien embodiment and sensibility towards to the world around her: “The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its twisted bulkheads and leaking engine coolant all the deviant possibilities of her sex. Her crippled thighs and wasted calf muscles were models for fascinating perversities.”193

It is not just their bodies that are changed by their vehicular pursuit of this eerie Thanatos; Their relation toward non-places also undergo a metamorphosis as the landscapes of motorways, car parks, flyovers and terminal buildings become an “enchanted domain” that James, Vaughan, and the group pass through.194 The motorways become alive with hidden depth and meaning, with the character’s cars being used as the integrating technology to access them. Sites such as motorway car-parks and all-night car washes become the profane sites for graphic and risky sexual practices and rituals. Elements of the motorways become part of a “spinal landscape” that unfold and unfurl in

191 Ballard, Crash, 85. 192 Ibid., 86. 193 Ballard, Crash, 87. 194 Ibid., 38. 70

James’ mind.195 The whiteness of factory buildings fuse with the colour of Helen’s thighs, intersecting flyovers become “copulating giants, immense legs straddling each other’s backs,” the car roofs in a car park become a “lake of metal,” while at one point the motorway is portrayed as “a secret airstrip from which mysterious machines would take off into a metallized sky.196

For James’ and the others in the group, the Motorway, far from being seen as the site for a flattened, passive experience, the motorway becomes a site of sacrament and worship, laden with religious symbolism. Cars involved in car crashes resemble “bloody alter[s], while a blood soaked scrap of fabric taken from an accident becomes a “saintly relic” that “contained all the special magic and healing powers of a modern martyr of the super-highways.”197 Cars are now seen to possess wings, even “wings of fire,” that are meant to bring on “our coming passage to heaven.”198 The crowd gathering on an embankment after a car crash look as if they are taking in a “sermon” beckoning them to imitate what have observed as a “bloody eucharist.”199 In an LSD induced car journey with Vaughan that becomes a “punitive expedition into my own nervous system,” James imagines himself becoming physically integrated with the car as “[t]he bones of my forearms formed a solid coupling with the shift of the steering column,” as the motorways around mutate into a sublime “metallized Elysium,” populated by “an armada of angelic creatures.”200

Throughout the novel James, Vaughan, and the others explore and escalate their attraction to these drives through a series of ever increasingly illegal and dangerous actions that will eventually result in their death. With each person James meets and embarks on a sexual union with - Catherine, Helen, Gabrielle, Vaughan - this is another physical and psychological boundary crossed, another level of intensity reached. Despite the perturbing and perplexing nature of this inhuman drive that compels the group, there is a mirroring compulsion to record and understand their actions. Far from being mere puppets to the supposedly machinic and inhuman agencies that surround them, the characters in the novel urgently crave a need to seek out and come to terms with their

195 The term “Spinal Landscape” was first used by Ballard in the essay, “The Coming of The Unconscious”, in the July 1966 edition of New Worlds magazine, to describe the synthetic organic/inorganic landscape if surrealist painters such as Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, where the body is fused or is absorbed by the landscapes around it. The whole essay can be found at https://www.jgballard.ca/non_fiction/jgb_reviews_surrealism.html 196 Ballard, Crash, 65, 11. 197 Ibid., 171. 198 Ibid, 159, 160. 199 Ballard, Crash, 142. 200 Ibid., 176, 159, 152. 71

place in this new world. As Fisher argues in this regard, “[t]he point here is not that we are the blind slaves of the death drive, but, if we are not, it is because of an equally impersonal process: science, which consists in part of discovering and analysing the very processes that Freud calls Thanatos.”201

This utilisation of science to study, understand, and explain these drives are embodied in the character of Vaughan, who is described by James as “a hoodlum scientist” in the way that Vaughan conducts an almost inexhaustible amount of research on the effect of car crashes and the body.202 In his former “life,” as a computer scientist and media , Robert Vaughan argued for “the application of computerized techniques to the control of all international traffic systems,” while modelling himself as a renegade academic in looks and presentation.203 But after a crash on his motorcycle leaves him disfigured, his “naive idealism” regarding “his strange vision of the automobile and its real role in our lives” shifts from imposing order and structure on the motorways to exploration of its unsettling and inhuman dimensions.204 Using the veneer of science and academic training, Vaughan disguises himself as a “white-coated doctor” or “police photographer,” allowing him to move as an interloper through the world of organised science and medicine.205 Subverting techniques and road safety research methodologies used by government institutions to make the roads and cars safer, Vaughan develops “a new currency of pain and desire,” based on stolen documentary analysis, morbid scientific questionnaires, and a swathe of photographs stolen from medical journals and accident reports.206 On various driving expeditions, Vaughan takes numerous close up photographs of the car accidents that occur on the motorways around London, while he uses Helen’s new position at the Road Research Laboratory to infiltrate and gather research information and data about car crashes and their impact on the body. Through isolating and objectifying the car crash and the bodies of its victims to an intense level of scrutiny and detail, Vaughan creates a perverse form of knowledge and epistemology that opens the motorway and the geometries of the car and body to new and hidden details that are disavowed by the authorities that aim to control the functions of motorway as a non-place.

201 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 85. 202 Ballard, Crash, 11. 203 Ibid., 53. 204 Ibid. 205 Ballard, Crash, 31, 51. 206 Ibid., 120. 72

In applying the pursuit of such perverse knowledge with regards to the technology of the automobile, the novel asks disquieting questions of ambiguity about who or what has true agency or intentionality. Is the car - and by extension all technology – merely a tool used by a society that depresses and controls the appetite of the self for embracing the infinite, the sublime and the spiritual? Or is the car - whether subconsciously or not – designed and made so that it allows the individual to test their limits and aspirations towards the limits and boundaries of infinite? Ballard himself asks this question: “Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance?”207 While the novel is descriptive rather than prescriptive, the idea of humanity being driven by a mass unconscious desire for its own destruction that is embedded in the technologies is something that is distinctly inhuman, almost alien in nature. This is captured in a moment of pure cyborg fantasy as James imagines the wounds of car crash victims as “beacons tuned to a series of beckoning transmitters, carrying the signals, unknown to myself, which would unlock this immense stasis and free these drivers for the real destinations set for their vehicles, the paradises of the electric highway.”208

In the pursuit of an endgame of vehicular fetishized sex and death, instead of falling into a Baudrillardian hyperreality that is voided of depth, sexuality and psychology, the characters in Crash instead use the trauma of the car crash as an “affirmation of the survival and the persistence of forces in the psyche,”209 The purpose is to move past the controlling and deadening surfaces of the Motorway, and gain access to a deep form of the Real that has been sealed off from the minds of the people. As James says himself in the aftermath of his crash, “[t]he crash was the only real experience I had been through for years.”210 Towards the climax of Crash, temporally joined at the beginning with the vehicular death of Vaughan, there is a foreboding sense of the seemingly inevitable, as James, viewing the carnage of Vaughan’s crash, comes to the unsettling realisation that despite their numerous “rehearsals,” and he and the others in the group, in their pursuit of the eerie Thanatos, are also fated to follow in Vaughan’s footsteps. As the remaining members of the group gather to view the remains of

207 Crash! (1971). 208 Ballard, Crash, 44. 209 Stephenson, 66. 210 Ballard, Crash, 30. 73

Vaughan’s car at the police pound, James calmly muses, “[a]lready I knew that I was designing the elements of my own car-crash.” 211

3.4: Set Adrift on Voided Bliss - Concrete Island

A transcendence of a different sort occurs in Concrete Island, which opens with a startling scene when Robert Maitland, a driver on the Westway Interchange in London, suffers a blowout, causing him to crash off the motorway, down a steep embankment and into a small, disused patch of wasteland that exists underneath the interlocking motorway flyovers. Marooned and injured, Maitland’s attempts to escape end in failure and for the rest of the novel he remains stranded, as the subsequent isolation on this island as urban scrapheap causes a breakdown in Maitland's sense of self and identity, while at the same time the Island itself begins to display an inscrutable agency and intent, a form of the alien-eerie that never presents itself or makes itself known but is seemingly present through its effects.

Like Crash, Concrete Island is an example of an eerie Thanatos at work, an entropic drive that pulses towards total dissolution. In contrast to Crash though, said drive suggests itself to the reader from a different perspective; Whereas non-places in Crash become alive with ambiguous possibilities and meaning through the psychic investments of the characters and the metamorphic transgression of the car crash, in Concrete Island the threshold crossing of the car crash causes Maitland to break beyond the source wall of the motorway into a voided space created by the proliferation of non-places, a space that is to all intents and purposes devoid of importance or worth.

The Westway Interchange, upon where Concrete Island is based, is itself a symbol of the motorway transformations of London in the 1960s and 70s, and of the shift in the textures and objects of classical modernism to the new transitional spaces of supermodernism. Rising above the city level on vast supporting columns, the Westway is a six-kilometre stretch of motorway built to relieve congestion between West London and the outlying motorways. In order for the construction to commence, a multitude of homes, buildings, and roads were moved or demolished to create the bulk of the space for the motorway and connecting interchanges, in turn creating “nine hectares of fragmented and unsightly open space.”212 With no consideration in planning of what to do with this

211 Ballard, Crash, 205. 212 Ed Wall, “Infrastructural Form, Interstitial Spaces and Informal Acts”, in Infrastructural Urbanism: Addressing the In-between, Thomas Hauck, Regine Keller, and Volker Kleinekort (Eds), (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2011): 146. 74

space, they were subsequently “left crudely by contractors after construction,” resulting in a disused assemblage of “many small strips and islands of space under and adjacent to the macro-scaled motorway.”213

The Westway and the displaced spaces it created in its construction are an example of a trend in the production of voided spaces that lie on the fringes of buildings and infrastructures associated with non-place and supermodernism, with many names and definitions given to such spaces. Ed Wall refers to them as interstitial spaces that are “disconnected from other spatial networks, creating unattractive isolated islands in the city.”214 Both Groening and Trancik refer to such sites as lost spaces that are described as a “leftover unstructured landscape” from hyper development, a succession of “no- man’s lands” and “vacant blight-clearance sites.”215 Ignasi de Solà-Morales terms such spaces as Terrain Vague, areas that are “interior islands void of activity, oversights […] un-inhabited, un-safe, un-productive […] they are foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, its negative image, as much a critique as a possible alternative.”216 Groes refers to these non-spaces as Junkspace, taking the name from the concept originally coined by designer Rem Koolhaas to describe such sites like the Island as “the spatial fallout, or spillage, of motorway modernization, and the planned process of decorative landscaping as a form of farcical resurrection.”217

The structure of the Island in Concrete Island contains most, if not all, of the above descriptors. It is a triangular strip of negative space defined and bounded solely in proportion to the converging paths of three motorways that rise vertically meaning the Island remains almost hidden from the view of the motorway. Maitland himself muses on how the vast majority of the Island is obscured by the vegetation, noting that “the most astute detective retracing Maitland’s route from his office would be hard put to spot his car shielded by this sea of grass.”218 The interior itself is “literally a deserted island,” of no discernible use or value, a place of “wild grass and abandoned cars and builder equipment,” while beyond the fenced borders are areas used for illegal fly tipping, complete with “stripped-down billboards, mounds of tyres and untreated metal refuse.”219 Even though it is nestled in between the motorways, the Island takes on a mentally

213 Wall, 147-148. 214 Ibid., 147. 215 Trancik, 64. 216 Ignasi de Solà-Morales, “Terrain Vague”, in Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale, Manuela Mariani and Patrick Barron (Eds), (London: Routledge, 2014): 26. 217 Groes, 129. 218 J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island, (New York: Picador, 1974, Kindle Version): 36. 219 Ibid., 32, 5, 7. 75

exterior position to those who drive past it. With the function of the motorway to facilitate the constant flow of people and goods, there is an alienating distance from the motorway, not only as a physical barrier, but also a mental one. This is demonstrated when Maitland attempts to escape up the embankment early in the novel but is subsequently beaten back by the force and noise of the traffic and is nearly run over by the oncoming drivers who do not stop for him. Even though a supermarket and several high-rise flats can be seen in clear view nearby, by being on the Island, Maitland may as well be on another planet.

Stranded, badly injured, and with no way to escape, Maitland initially looks upon the Island as a nuisance, but eventually comes to the conclusion that he needs to stamp his authority and identity on his surroundings, “to dominate the Island and harness its limited resources.”220 To raise attention, he sets fire to a car to alert drivers of his predicament, while he scrawls urgent messages of help on the concrete embankments. He subsists on meagre provisions both from the car in the form of alcohol and water from the radiator, and from the drivers above, such as a dirty sandwich, or a bag of half-finished fish and chips. The deterioration in Maitland’s physical and psychic health from hunger, thirst, fever and pain causes a fluctuation in the surfaces and perspectives of the surrounding spaces of the island. These various ruptures in Maitland’s conscious cause him to inscribe his inner emotional states upon the exterior surfaces of the Island, which in turn becomes “an introspective palimpsest, the site of constantly renewed psychosomatic inscriptions.”221

The Island at this point shifts from being that of a voided or negative space, as it starts to take on a life of its own through the traces and effects that beckon Maitland to explore the Island’s hidden mysteries. The spatial dimensions of the Island begin to change, as Ballard notes “the embankments seemed further away than he remembered them, slowly receding from him on all sides.”222 The long swathes of grass take on a resurgent sentience, moving with bizarre flows, turning into “an immense green creature eager to protect and guide him.”223 Maitland also discovers the uncanny traces of a residual past that have been disavowed in the construction of the non-place motorway – a pre-WWII churchyard, the foundations of Edwardian terraced houses, the remnants of an air-raid shelters and the remains of a Civil Defence post, and even the ground-plan of

220 Ballard, Concrete Island, 54. 221 Laura Colombino, “Negotiations with the System: J.G. Ballard and Geoff Ryman writing London's architecture”, Textual Practice, 20:4 (2006): 621. 222 Ballard, Concrete Island, 104. 223 Ibid., 57. 76

a flea-pit post-war cinema.224 These sites, along with the crepuscular shells of old cars and taxis, take on what Luckhurst calls a technological uncanny in the way they are the hauntings of “‘dead’ concepts that cannot be eliminated” by the non-places attempts to sever themselves from the locale’s history.225 These derelict spots and remnants of symbolic structures become sites of fecund imagination for Maitland in order to maintain the resolve of his identity as he recalls his past, allowing his mind and body to integrate further with his surroundings, the topography of the Island “becoming an exact model of his head.”226 This culminates in a fantasy where he gives himself completely to the Island taking his body apart and leaving the limbs at various spots before declaring “I am the Island.”227

In Maitland’s ongoing psychological dissolution, the Island remains mysterious and inscrutable. Maitland, in his explorations, comes to realise that far from being a mere negative of the motorway and of little impact, the site of the Island itself is “far older than the surrounding terrain, as if this triangular patch of waste ground had survived by the exercise of a unique guile and persistence, and would continue to survive, unknown and disregarded, long after the motorways had collapsed into dust.”228 But despite the explorations and attempting to connect with various sites, the constantly shifting terrain and evasive topology of the Island results in the landscape resembling a “maze” that Maitland finds himself lost in.

Maitland’s conceit that he has fully conquered the Island turns out to be a dangerous illusion, for that in all his attempts to dominate it, the Island remains indifferent to Maitland’s attempts to leave some form of inscription upon its surfaces. Taking in the waste and filth of the motorways, the Island seemingly throbs with life and intent, but the novel never reveals the Island’s status n or its intentions or motives towards Maitland, who never seems to ask any questions of what it wants from him. This leads to the posing of certain forms of speculation; Is the Island exerting an intentional force on Maitland, guiding his compulsions drive towards a much-desired annihilation? Or is the Island neither good nor bad, but merely a neutral observer of the incidents that occur inside its boundaries, where the traps that occur to Maitland appear to be “metaphysical and existential than they are physical threats”?229

224 Ballard, Concrete Island, 57. 225 Luckhurst, 133. 226 Ballard, Concrete Island, 59. 227 Ibid. 228 Ballard, Concrete Island, 58. 229 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 116. 77

The way that Ballard conveys the eerie power of the Island can be found through the way surfaces seem to exude a sensual dream geography. The grass and vegetation, like that of a green sea, constantly alter and change their forms and perspective, refusing the commanding gaze of Maitland. In this situation, the old signs and linguistic symbols of Maitland’s life outside the Island – including writing and rational thought – are rendered unusable. The only way he is able to “read” and associate with the Island is to rely less on the senses of sight, which requires an observable distance, and instead through the close embodiment of touch.

Alongside the inscrutability of the Island from the ordering structures of the non- places outside its borders, there is also the problem that while the Island comes to represent a blank screen from which Maitland can project his inner psyche, he soon discovers “that there is not much to project.”230 Similar to the characters in Crash, Maitland is the quintessential Ballardian character – middle class, urbane, articulate, professional. Yet without any real-life connection to anything substantial, or any authentic experiences in which to speak of, Maitland comes apart as the structural ways in which his identity is formed begin to collapse. As his mental and physical connections to the world become untethered, the novel takes on an oneiric, trance-like quality. The trappings of Maitland’s bourgeois life – his job, family, mistress – all fail to provide a meaningful base upon which he can latch his sense of self. He realises that his job can carry on without him, and he slowly begins to forget his wife and son, his mistress, and his work partners as “together they had moved back into the dimmer light at the rear of his mind.”231 Time, something that was once measured in close detail at the beginning of the novel - “Maitland looked at his watch. It was three eighteen, little more than ten minutes since the crash” - now becomes more abstract as the days and night begin to merge into each other and become lost.232 The outside world of the motorway, with its myriad of signs, symbols begins to lose its former definition and context as the “illuminated route indicators rotated above his head, marked with meaningless destinations.”233 Maitland repeatedly cries out his name “as a self-identification signal,” while in a moment of confusion, he starts to feel “his wrists and elbows, trying to identify himself. ‘Maitland,’ he shouted aloud ‘Robert Maitland…!’.”234 As Maitland’s body

230 Groes, 132. 231 Ballard, Concrete Island, 78. 232 Ibid., 5. 233 Ibid., 41. 234 Ibid., 23, 54. 78

starts to fail him, even language and various forms of cognition begin to dissolve as his messages for help become increasingly cryptic and mysteriously disappear:

Maitland found a last rubber marker in his jacket pocket. On the drying concrete he scrawled:

CATHERINE HELP TOO FAST

The letters wound up and down the slope. Maitland concentrated on the spelling, but ten minutes later, when he returned after an unsuccessful attempt to reach the Jaguar, they had been rubbed out as if by some dissatisfied examiner.

MOTHER DON’T HURT POLICE

He waited in the long grass beside the embankment, but his eyes closed. When he opened them, the message had vanished. He gave up, unable to decipher his own writing.235

The impulses of Maitland’s pursuit of a seemingly unconscious desire for willed annihilation takes on a much greater aspect when it becomes apparent that Maitland may have crashed the car deliberately in an inexplicable moment of rashness. The actual sound of the blowing tyre for example, “seemed to detonate inside Robert Maitland’s skull,” and not from an external source.236 When asking himself why he had driven so fast, he rationalises it as a “rogue gene, a strain of rashness, overran the rest of his usually cautious and clear-minded character.”237 Maitland then begins to think about the demands of his social and professional life, before he finally concludes “that he had almost wilfully devised the crash, perhaps as some bizarre kind of rational explanation.”238

Like the characters of Crash, this seemingly transgressive act undertaken by Maitland is one that leads him on a course to what will surely lead to his own death. Yet despite his dire situation and the onset of his mortality, Maitland undergoes a similar form of transcendence as a result of being absorbed by the dynamic and compelling forces of the Island. He begins to acquire new embodied capacities that were hidden or repressed to him. He develops a new sense of purpose and identity as he begins to feel “a sense of gathering physical strength, as if the unseen powers of his body had begun to discharge their long-stored energies.”239 In the final passages of the novel, instead of feeling despair,

235 Ballard, Concrete Island., 61-62. 236 Ibid., 1. 237 Ibid., 3. 238 Ibid. 239 Ibid., 155. 79

Maitland seems to embrace the fate of his new circumstances, resulting in “a mood of quiet exaltation” that comes over him.240

Concrete Island ends with a chapter titled “Escape,” but Ballard leaves the narrative open-ended. Having sought a path to escape for the entirety of the narrative, Maitland now feels “no real need to leave the island,” seemingly secure in his belief that he has dominion over it, and despite being offered a route to escape, Maitland refuses the offer stating that he will leave the Island “in my own time.”241 Although it is never revealed whether Maitland is truly trapped, or whether he simply refuses to leave, the refusal of the Island to be colonised and inscribed with the signs and markers of the city outside – thereby turning it into a form of place – ultimately seals Maitland’s fate as he is consigned to a form of secular purgatory, a repeating loop of compulsion where he is “forever bound to play over and over again his desire/unwillingness to escape.”242 With this eerie denouement of a constantly repeating cycle, Maitland loses more of his older self and is further absorbed by the secrets and enigma that is the Island.

Both Crash and Concrete are examinations of social trends at the heart of Western society in the way how the evolution of social space in the twentieth century has mediated social relations through the application and integration of new technologies and . In this respect Ballard is more like a “literary anthropologist” than that of a science-fiction author in the way he forsakes the urge to extrapolate these technologies into a speculative future, instead pushing the relationship the individual has towards space, place, and technology in the here and now to extreme levels.243 In doing so, Ballard unearths and foregrounds an eerie non-subjective drive that seems to lie at the heart of society’s relationship to what Groes calls the “textures of modernity,” where there is a deep causal ambiguity at the heart of the historical process.244 Is Thanatos merely an unfortunate by-product of societal acceleration, or does society subconsciously will itself to create and accelerate technology through which Thanatos can seep through and present itself?

240 Ballard, Concrete Island, 155. 241 Ibid., 156, 154. 242 Colombino, 620. 243 Groes, 123. 244 Ibid, 224. 80

Conclusion

In this thesis, I have sought to analyse and open up a discussion regarding the concepts of the weird and the eerie, first by examining their particular features and characteristics as aesthetic modes of affect and feeling and how they linked to a broader history of cultural theory with that of the gothic and the uncanny. For the remaining chapters, two particular cultural texts and/or processes that took place in digital or contemporary culture were chosen and, through an investigation into how they embody different facets of the weird and/or eerie, demonstrate how they are symptomatic of wider sociocultural developments and disruptions in popular western culture and politics.

In the first chapter of this thesis, I charted the ways in which the weird and eerie have been defined and expanded upon, both through the literary subgenre of “weird fiction” and in the wider milieu of cultural theory in the twentieth century. The weird as a mode of aesthetics has been written and applied to a lineage of literary texts that lie in an interstitial zone between other genres such as horror, science fiction, and the gothic. These roots of lineage begin with writers such as Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft from the late nineteenth century up to the present day in that which has been described as the “new weird” canon of writers of the late twentieth to early twenty first century such as China Miéville, M. John Harrison, and Jeff Vandermeer. The weird has also been explored in various philosophical disciplines that aim to displace the phenomenological centrality of human experience and consciousness in favour of examining the metaphysical agency that lies beyond the human.

Mark Fisher, in his book The Weird and the Eerie, expands upon the particular qualities that these concepts possess, and while his analysis does not engage in its relation to the canon of weird fiction, save for the writing of Lovecraft, he goes on to show that these modes are present in a plethora of literary texts, music, TV serials and films. Fisher provides several defining characteristics of the weird as that “which does not belong” and in its existence “brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely’ (even as its negation).” What Fisher adds to the discourse on the weird is his introduction of the concept of the eerie, which concerns itself with an experience that “is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence,” that brings into question various metaphysical issues of anti- subjective agency and intention an the ways they are experienced by the individual.

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This chapter looks backs how the weird and eerie have been connected to past cultural and aesthetic modes, in particular that of the gothic and of the uncanny. The gothic, both as a genre and as a conceptual model, provides several avenues in which the weird and eerie can be explored, in particular the way that the gothic shares a deep fascination for the “outside,” of that which lies just beyond agreed social norms of comprehension, cognition, and experience. The concept of uncanny also share definite similarities in how it has been used by artists, philosophers, and scientists to describe particular ways of feeling. Indeed, the uncanny, weird and eerie as descriptors are often used as interchangeable synonyms on a regular basis. But Fisher, in staking out his claim to the weird and eerie as distinct and discrete aesthetic experiences, believes that the weird and eerie should be thought of as different from the uncanny. The discourse around the uncanny, he argues, is part of a greater trend in analysis and critique to explain, rationalise, and categorise particular psychological phenomena, to normalise that which falls under the uncanny’s sphere. But with the existence of the weird and the eerie, there are the indications and traces of something that resists being placed in a box of simple ontological categorisation.

In the second chapter, I take the concepts and definitions provided in chapter one to analyse the inception and production of Slender Man. On a surface level, the creation of Slender Man was an example of a small online community that came together and created a character that fused several tropes and elements of gothic horror. By producing a visceral thrill of being scared and enthralled by their own creation, they reproduce a form of storytelling around a digital campfire. Slender Man however mirrors memeific forms of cultural production that invited a high level of immersion, interaction and sharing among those who encountered it. This in turn creates an accelerated and intensified form of myth-making coalesced around Slender Man where it took to life on various internet platforms in the form of text. images, video, and computer games. The collective will and imagination of the online audience to build Slender Man in effect gave the myth a “life” and agency of its own, generating weird effects among its audience in the way the discourse that contextualised and built upon its myth destabilised the boundaries of fiction and reality around its production.

The evolution of Slender Man as a fictional entity from a metaphysical outside disrupting the inside of an online social reality is an example of a hyperstition in effect. While hyperstition is a fairly new neologism, through its connections with subcultures such as cyberpunk and the spread of the internet across homes and business in the 1990s, 82

it is the latest iteration in a line of artistic and philosophical practices from Baudrillard to H.P. Lovecraft and the literary gothic that aim to subvert the boundaries between reality and fiction. The Slender Man is symptomatic of an increasing prevalence of the weird effects that occur in an online mediascape where weaponised fictions circulate and gain traction in the social consciousness. This is exacerbated by a gradual destabilization of various public institutions and media platforms that have been essential in helping society form an agreed level of consensual social reality.

The third chapter is an analysis of two novels by J.G. Ballard that explores the eerie elements contained within the texts’ themes of social and psychic alienation present in the characters’ experiences of contemporary urban spaces. To understand how the weird and eerie is associated in experiencing public space, the chapter explored the evolution from the architectural concepts and styles of modernism to the socioeconomic flows of supermodernism through the proliferation of non-places. The evolution of the uncanny alongside this process has seen the individual placed into a realm of distanced alienation, a series of psychological maladies, and an increasing rootlessness arising from a social emphasis placed on speed and mobility. While the weird has often presents itself through the shock of new inherent in modernist art and architecture, the eerie can be found in the numbing psychological effects that result from the informational and spatial overload embedded in the surfaces and processes found in non-places. In such non-places there is an ambiguity of agency in how the individual is both controlled and guided by a technological landscape, a landscape that disavows this deployment of control through a homogenised lack of presence and standardisation of space.

In the novels Crash and Concrete Island, there is the exploration of the quotidian ways individuals are contained through sociological regimes of control, inducing a stupefying effect among the characters in their social interactions and movements. The abstract, totalising influence of non-places provoke extreme forms of psychopathology in the characters, where their reliance on particular technologies, allow them to merge with reactionary and eerily inhuman drives of death. The willed capacity in the characters to obsessively discern the secret logic and sub rosa analogies within the machinic landscapes of the motorways take on an entranced, almost dreamlike form, of unconscious compulsion and automation. Even though their actions seem morally reprehensible, even inexplicable, the desire on the part of the characters to break past their finite limits and explore a new plane of possibilities is shown as liberating on their bodies and minds. The eerie is present in the way that the Thanatic death drive, initially presented 83

as something that is alien, enigmatic, and decidedly inhuman, is shown to pulse through the heart of humanity, as it wills those who are drawn by it to destroy what Ballard calls the “skin of reality.” What I show from using these two examples is the way that the weird and the eerie are pervasive and scalable, existing at different levels and locations in contemporary and digital cultures. In the case of the Slender Man there is the feeling of the weird that is experienced at a community level that from there spreads to mainstream culture and news media. In Crash and Concrete Island, the weird and the eerie are experienced on a much more personal scale, from that of the intimacy of individual reflection, to the close social relations of a physical collective.

The subject of the weird and the eerie is a much broader and relatively unexplored topic and as such cannot be fully summarized here. As such, this thesis barely touches the surface of the weird and eerie with regards to cultural forms, social trends and even political ideologies. There has been little examination of the subgenre of weird fiction itself and how it relates to Fisher’s delineation of the weird and eerie as a spectrum of sensibilities. Due to space and topic limits, I have not, for example, explored the weird and eerie that is presented in our experiences with the digitizing of our daily lives, be it from to the prevalence of social media to our increasing dependence on artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. Then there is the manner in which the weird and eerie are found in various, and its allusions to the outside presents itself other cultural texts, forms, and genres, outwith the ones already discussed by Fisher in his book.

The exploration of the social and political implications of the weird and the eerie is not, at first glance, inherent in Fisher’s text. There is, for example, only one section where Fisher talks of the immaterial agency of capitalism in our society. “Capital,” he argues “is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.”245 However, taken within the context of his body of work, the weird and the eerie are facets in what was a major theme running through Fisher’s writing; The destruction of the social imagination by the forces of neoliberalism and the culture’s inability to speculate on different futures, different modes of thinking, different ways of existing.246 In particular, Fisher looked for ways in which to arm people with the conceptual and aesthetic tools for what Matt Colquhoun describes as “the creation of passageways between capitalism and its outside, extending the physical act of egress to include cognitive and speculative exits through ideological

245 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 11. 246 See Footnote no. 53. 84

limit-experiences.”247 In other words, to reverse theorist Frederic Jameson famous phrase, imagining the end of capitalism before the end of the world.

In response, to this, that have been collected texts such as Futures and Fictions (Eds Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed, and Simon O’Sullivan, 2018), Economic Science Fictions (Ed. William Davies, 2018) that explore speculative art projects that bring hyperstitional practices into the political economy. These projects and installation all attempt to reinterpret the world we live in as a living fiction, or imagine new worlds and societies, beyond that of capitalism and in turn reigniting a utopian desire for the future. As well as looking at fictioning the Real through art, there is the creation of specific philosophical concepts that exude traces of the weird and eerie, such as hyperobjects, which describes the ontology of vast and abstract entities such as global capital and the internet, and the ways they are experienced by society, and the Cthulhuscene, which examines the anti-subjective nature of climate change and how it’s impact will fundamentally change our lives and social structures.248

There is the risk that some of the possible areas opened up by exploring the weird and eerie runs the risk of being seemingly esoteric, even hermetical. Indeed, the ways that the weird and the eerie can lead to various forms of speculation regarding that which lies outside can be articulated, be it in art, politics, or philosophy, may possibly lack what could be seen by some as academic rigour. But in dealing with that which Fisher called the “contingencies and uncertainties of the present,” where the portrayal of ecological and social collapse, as natural and inevitable create a mood of resignation and nihilism, there is now an this requires an urgency on the part of writers, theorists, artists and activists to embrace and promote different approaches, to make things weird, and to bring out the eerie in the everyday.

247 Xenogoth, “Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and the Fisher-Function, Xenogothic, January 13 2018, accessable from https://xenogothic.com/2018/01/13/egress-on-mourning-melancholy-and-the-fisher- function/. 248 For more detail on the concept of hyperobjects, read Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2013). For more information on the concept of the cthulhuscene, read Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene”, E-Flux Journal, #75 - September 2016, accessible from https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/. 85

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