OPSOMMING
Chapter 23: Concerning the disease of lycanthropy, in which men believe themselves to be turned into wolves
2.5 Desire/pleasure and social abjection
Various scholars have shown how processes of social abjection are rooted in a displaced sense of desire. Jonathan Dollimore, for example, in his landmark 1991 study on sexual dissidence and differential perversion, [will add title] discusses (at length) Stallybrass and White’s historical view on the role of displaced desire in (social) abjection, specifically commenting on the role of the (often white, mostly middle-class) bourgeois in social abjection:
the bourgeois subject continuously defined and re-defined itself through the exclusion of what it marked out as ‘low’ – as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating. Yet that very act of exclusion was constitutive of its identity. The low was internalized under the sign of negation and disgust. [But…] disgust always bears the imprint of desire. These low domains, apparently expelled as “Other”, return as the object of nostalgia, longing and fascination. (Stallybrass & White, 1986:191, quoted in Dollimore, 1991:247, original emphasis)
He elaborates:
Conversely, desire bears the imprint of disgust: even as the low other becomes an object of longing, it is simultaneously that on to which is displaced a self-disgust that inheres at the centre of bourgeois desire, and for that matter other forms of desire. The difference of the other becomes a displaced and intensified facet of the same, the object of desire and disgust. […] what I am pointing to here is an additional structural
interdependence of desire and disgust. (Dollimore, 1991:247)
In terms of a discussion of LaBruce’s films, the idea of the bourgeois is replaced by the dissociative effects of late modernism and urban-inflected capitalism. Difference itself is now fetishised. Because difference itself has become an “object of desire and disgust”, Dollimore identifies a structural interdependence wherein desire and repulsion (in his words, desire and
“disgust”) are mutually constitutive. Thus, as I am slowly building an argument for, the abject is immanent to desire in the same way that desire is immanent to the abject. In a social context, this takes many forms. For example, the eroticized other can also be that which is considered abject. Let me turn to an example that brings together the social exclusionary thematics of
LaBruce’s universe, the queer sentiments underlying this study, and the personal (almost ethnographic) South African situated frame, to show how desire and repulsion are
structurally/mutually dependent, as well as visually-socially marked/coded on the bodies of those excluded: The way in which the different HIV/AIDS crises were framed as oppositional to heteronormative bourgeois culture, and as such, partly came to constitute its very identity. (Only certain people get infected; only certain acts lead to infection.)
Erica Singer writes on the current post-AIDS-crisis48 era as an era of marked (visual) difference:
“Within the framework of a logic of sexual epidemic, images of erotic access and mobility shift registers from those associated with freedom, surplus, choice, recreation to those of anxiety, unregulated contact, and uncontrolled spread” (Singer, 1993:28). The HIV/AIDS epidemic can be seen as bodyhorror per excellence, but on a massive, global scale. (Pre-covid 19, gay men were already intimately aware of the affective realities of a global pandemic, stigma attached to serostatus, non-adherence (to medication; to 'safe' sex discourse) as cypher for anti-
establishment oppositionality; the bodily navigation of mask/condom; not being able to
physically hug those you love.) It is the body turning on itself, and it was originally framed as a direct result of desire. (Perhaps the equivalent of bodyhorror porn?) Representations (film, for example) of erotic access (and of erotic excess) have thus been irredeemably hued by our experience of sickness on a global scale, of bodyhorror writ large. (Which makes the surging popularity of bug chasing, stealthing, coerced pozzing narratives culturally remarkable.) This shift be made to correlate with Stallybrass and White’s description of bourgeois identity formation through social abjection: HIV/AIDS had, during the 1990s, become the abject – but
48 The affective periodisation implied in the term 'post-AIDS-crisis/crises' has been contested and nuanced by scholars since, most recently in Kagan's (2019) critical unpacking of the term 'post-crisis' and the extent to which it adequately addresses the period after the 'pharmaceutical threshold' (Pearl, 2013). (Though scholars from the global South have critiqued, in turn, the ethical applicability of universalising periodisation terminology in countries where, for example, access to PreP remains hampered by capital flows.) I see productive relays opening up between this debate and the question of how to adequately and ethically compartmentalise the development of Afrikaans literature.
constitutive – Other to heteronormative bourgeois South African society, a society still basking in the glow of a post-1994 national honeymoon. (Perhaps all that abject energy had to be channeled somewhere, and race-based prejudicial exclusion was – for a while – not as socially acceptable as homophobic discourse.) This process of abjection centered around the
visualisation of the bodies of people caught up in the crisis. (Remember, dear reader, the visual codings of countless mid-90s Huisgenoot articles, showing half-dead, emaciated men; the fetishising of morally decayed, the almost-dead, Philadelphia’s disease as a visual – and highly visible mark on the forehead of the main character.)
Grosz (1990:90, emphasis added) reminds us that the “limits imposed on [the body] are really social projections – effects of desire [or, we can posit, effects of variously assemblaged desires - WS], not nature. It testifies to the precarious grasp of the subject on its own identity, an assertion that the subject may slide into the impure chaos out of which it was formed”. This dynamic also works on a cultural/structural scale, and the era of successive HIV/AIDS crises carries specific implication for heteronormative cultural identity. Hook (2004:676, original emphasis) conceptualises exclusionary affect, like racism (and I to which I would add
homophobia and fear of the sick and of being infected – fear of the zombie, so to speak), as “a cluster of phenomena that is as psychical as it is political in nature, affective as it is discursive, subjective as it is ideological”. Physical (i.e., of the corporeal body and material world) as much as it is political (i.e., of the social-situatedness of the body), the exclusion happens through bodies to bodies. Hook (ibid.:20) thus follows a line of thought from Butler on the socially- determined nature of the abject and asks us to recognise that, considering that the realm of the abject “circumscribe the domain of those who do qualify as full subjects, […] [t]his poses
considerable complications for the ego: the abject ‘thing’ cannot simply be subsumed into the dialectics of self-other, ego-object strategies of identification”. Instead of simply accepting the abject subject’s place in the (my) world, it has to be (vehemently) disavowed.
One concept that weaves through the thematics of social exclusion into the South African nation-building context, is Kristeva’s (1982:03) notion of the (un)dead as a constant – and visual – reminder of the abject: “Corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live.
These bodily fluids, this defilement [...] are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.” The abject process needs to be disavowed, but the continual visual and physical presence of zombies does not allow for this disavowal to occur. By not allowing the viewer (this viewer, here) to negate or disavow the desiring (loving, lustful, lusty) existence of the decaying and copulating undead on the screen, LaBruce foregrounds the structural interdependence of the abject and desire and activates memories of the visualisation of HIV (or, more accurately, of AIDS) in South Africa during the 1990s. HIV is invisible; AIDS is jarringly made visible on the body. AIDS as visual material synecdoche of sickness breaks the identificationary relation between viewer and viewed; to break apart this coding-set – so deeply entrenched in Afrikaner culture that my mother refuses that her sons ever appear gaunt – we have to re-see, recode.
Abjection can thus be understood in terms of the (conventionally seen, visual) economy/politics of exclusion and inclusion. As stated, although abjection is first and foremost a visceral reaction, it also relates to social discourse(s) of inclusion/exclusion – visually encoded (Huisgenoot, films, vet en dus gesonde wange) on the bodies of those deemed abject other. The consolidation of social boundaries through abjection is especially visible in the immediately post-2000 work of Hook (2004; 2006), in which he links motifs of what he terms ‘traumatised corporeality’, with abjection as a “mode of reactivity that has been routed through the dreads, aversions and nausea of the body” (2006:3). Social exclusion, then, becomes a way of defending against the corporeal boundary threat – and racialised in the smells of 'them', made to be concrete by the body’s shudder at recalling the inbraak into the domicile, by the bodily discourse in ‘the taking out of our mouths our lewensbrood’.
Though, within the act of exclusion lies the subversive potential to recognise our similarities, not only our differences – to ally, to alloy, to unnaturally affiliate, as I show in the section on alloying.
Herbst (1999:115-116) states that, although abjection works by excluding that which is different,
“[y]ou can exclude it, but you cannot erase it [...] prohibited things, abject things, have a certain revolutionary power, whether real or imagined, and as such they challenge the ordering
formation”. In the context of this study, this is especially true – or, as we'll see in the next
section, perhaps depressingly untrue – of the undead figures of LaBruce’s films. The (cinematic) undead are representations of the spectatorial viewer’s own mortality – an end that connects all humans in a relational whole; C. Townsend aptly writes that “[w]e need to understand death as a fundamental condition of being, and of culture, by which we may have some relationship to others, no matter how alien. (2008:3, original emphasis)