OPSOMMING
Chapter 23: Concerning the disease of lycanthropy, in which men believe themselves to be turned into wolves
2.3 Abject (violent) viewing: Horrific porn/pornographic bodyhorror and abject/otherness made visual
Ernst Van Alphen's axiom that “[d]eath, then, is not an event which comes after life; it is a situation which lurks within the experience of the body" (1992:96) comes to mind when
encountering LaBruce’s queerzombie universe. Through its foregrounding – and eroticisation – of undead zombies, its emphasis on the physical limits of the decaying (human) body, and prominence given to the socio-political mechanics of exclusion under capitalism, the film visually
manifests several facets of abjection – defined by G. Weiss (1999) as the process, whereby
“[e]xpelling (parts of) myself to establish myself as a member of the Symbolic order, I create corporeal boundaries between myself and what is not myself, and, in doing so, actively
constitute myself as an idiosyncratic entity” (1999:44). Corporeal boundaries are necessary, not only of/between the living and (un)dead on the screen, but also between the text and the viewer (and, by extension, between viewer and non-diegetic world/others).
But LaBruce’s visualisation of the porousness of boundaries – corporeal, genre-based (as example: one sentence on the Judasfuck), and this disturbance of boundaries – even between the Symbolic and the corporeal, the materiality of the film stock imagines new ways of
articulating pleasure, partly by consciously playing with the idea of creating (and
discarding/transgressing) corporeal boundaries. By casting a loving glance at the highly stylised/visualised abject, decaying men on screen, he seems to challenge the post-millennial, queer viewer to reconsider the humanity in these abject cinematic bodies. As such, his film echoes Nel’s assertion on the power of abject representation in recent film, where a “rupture of the boundary between the inside and the outside of the clean and orderly body evokes critical questions about real and symbolic identity, which implies a new comprehension of
humanness/humanity” (2012:547).
In this section I analyse this 'new comprehension of humanness/humanity', along abject lines, by briefly touching on theoretical assumptions (notably Weiss [1999], Hook [2004], and Kristeva [1982]) which posits abjection as a process regulating identity on interlinked levels: identity formation, corporeality, social abjection – all here revolving around the visualisation of the abject body.
2.3.1 The abject/abjection as ambiguity
On the literal level, abjection is seen as “a process of expulsion, whereby that which has been designated as abject (this can include other people, food, vermin, body fluids, rodents and an infinite number of phenomena) is rejected” (Weiss, 1999:57). On a deeper level, Butler
describes abjection as a psychological process through which that which is different, foreign and of threat to the integrity of the body is “cast off, away, or out and, hence, presupposes and produces a domain of agency from [that which] is differentiated” (1993:243). By expelling the foreign element, abjection thus assures, temporarily, that the integrity and cohesion of the body is safeguarded.
Since our bodily experience provides a blueprint for abstract understanding and social reasoning (Johnson, 1999) – body here understood, as Steven Bruhm makes clear in “Still Here: Choreography, Temporality, AIDS” in both the material sense as “corpse, corpus,
corporeal” (2008:321) and in movement (here: film) as “moment, movement, motive” (ibid.:317) – but also, at the same time, as socially-situated (see D. Hook, 2004, 2006, for the abject body as social entity) – through the use of (literary and conceptual) tropes, abjection can be seen on the symbolic-material level (and socially-situated level) as referring to the attempt to preserve corporeal boundaries (of the physical body, of the ‘pure’ social state, of citizenship, of the canon, oeuvre, genre). It becomes clearer, then, that abjection is immanent to different levels of the process(es) of identity formation. Hook (2004) offers a nuanced and multi-level,
intersectional view on how abjection impacts on socio-identity formation by defining abjection as
“a forceful physical, psychical and symbolic response, an expulsive response on all of these levels, a violent attempt at restitution of an apparent affront to wholeness be it of the body, of identity, or of socio-symbolic structure” (2004:687). In Hook’s view, abjection is a visceral response, an involuntary ‘pushing back’ against discord, a violent attempt to move (back)
towards both physical wholeness and symbolic unity. Within this paradigm, which locates the process of abjection within a corporeal, violent (re)action (of, first and foremost, the body), a clear differentiation between abject and abjection is made, where
…abjection, then, as a verb, should be understood as an operation: the powerful visceral reaction to a given stimulus that is then denigrated, rejected, expelled. The abject, on the other hand, as a noun, should be understood as the apparent source of such reactions and affects, that abhorrent, uncontained and indefinable ‘thing’ which elicits avoidance, repulsion, sickness, disgust. (Hook, 2006:16, emphasis added)
We read-for, in granular-material manner, for that 'thing': Our feelings or visceral experience of avoidance, repulsion, and disgust at the abject other does not arise solely due to our
understanding of the abject as ‘not-me’, but rather because of the challenge(s) that the ‘not-me’
poses to our conceptualisation of our identity as our own, as discreet and within our control.
Indeed, according to Kristeva (1982), “[i]t is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (1982:3).Kristeva’s characterisation of the abject as dangerous and ‘disturbing’ (in the sense that it disturbs social norms and structuring) led her to emphasise the ambiguous nature of our relation to the abject:
We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it – on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. But also because abjection itself is a composite of judgement and affect, of condemnation and yearning, of signs and Drives. (Kristeva, 1982: 9-10)
To summarise, there are three ways in which relationality with the abject other affects the
subject. First, the abject is that which elicits avoidance and disgust; second, it is that which does not respect borders (and thereby is perceived to be of threat to borders); and third, it is an ambiguity. In LaBruce’s film, LAZombie, zombies (the abject state per excellence; both alive and dead at the same time, “undead” in the parlance of the film) hold all three of the above-stated characteristics. They elicit disgust in the viewer and in the conformist living (but, crucially, not to other zombie/undead characters in the narrative) because their bodies are shown to
progressively disintegrate (i.e., not be ‘whole’), and also from the perverse pleasure they still take in eroticising their own – and others’ – decaying bodies. Whereas normally the abject is disavowed (by looking away, or by relegating the abject to designated places unseen), in the film its (visual) disavowal is made impossible by LaBruce’s insistence on showing and (highly) eroticising these abject bodies, as well as forcing the viewer’s participation/complicity in this act.
In short, then, the abject is shown to be immanent to desire, part of the infrastructure of desire itself. There is no desire without its other – the abject, the border between this and that.
2.3.2 Visual repudiation of abject bodies
Camille Paglia (1990) explicitly links looking to power, and as such follows a line of thought from Foucault-Mulvey-Bergson onward. On the link between seeing and knowing, she (1990:5) writes that the “westerner [sic] knows by seeing. Perceptual relations are at the heart of our culture, and they have produced our titanic contributions to art. Walking in nature, we see, identify, name, recognize. This recognition is our apotropaion, that is, our warding off of fear”. However, what we repress through our constant need to name, organise, know, is the chthonian, that which is
…of the earth – but earth’s bowels, not its surface [...] the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze. It is the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons. Western science and aesthetics are attempts to revise this horror into imaginatively palatable form. (ibid.:5-6)
Although Paglia does not explicitly use the term ‘abject’, it is clear from the above that she recognises an organising principle in human culture that powerfully strives to cover (in abjection terms, to ‘repudiate’) over that which threatens ‘our’ integrity (integrity of the body, but also of the social order and of the nation state). (Although I won't categorise the Afrikaner as
'westerner', I see particular correlates here with the emphasis on visuality (for identity) in Afrikaner-Afrikaans (pop) culture, and in the centering of visual paradigms in Afrikaans literary research. Both science and the arts (including film) are seen here as attempts to stay with the chaotic and the unknown (ensuring that it stays unknown) and these attempts are
conventionally ordered through the visual mode. These visual imprints can be perceived as violent themselves, but the violence fractures the narrative, emphasising the role of the camera itself – its materiality – as well as the materiality of the film stock and, by extension, the process of making a film (filmmaking, we could say, was one of Paglia’s attempts to keep contemporary culture simultaneously saved from and enveloped in the chthonian). By bringing abject
relationality into (conventionally seen, visual) being, by making it be seen and asking the viewer to participate in determining the intimate relationality of the (un)dead characters, the film itself attempts to counter the chthonian unknown, the abject anonymity of the dead.