by
Mark Fisher
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The centrality of doors, thresholds and portals means that the notion of the between is crucial to the weird. It is clear that if Wells’ story had taken place only in the garden behind the wall, then no weird charge would have been produced. (This is why a feeling of the weird attaches to the lamppost at the edge of Narnia in C.S. Lewis’ stories, but not to Narnia proper.) If the story were set entirely beyond the door, we would be in the realm of the fantasy genre. This mode of fantasy naturalises other worlds. But the weird de-naturalises all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside.
precisely given what Jameson calls the “cabbage stink” of naturalism:
The misery of happiness, […] of Marcuse’s false happiness, the gratifications of the new car, the TV dinner and your favourite programme on the sofa — which are now themselves secretly a misery, an unhappiness that doesn’t know its name, that has no way of telling itself apart from genuine satisfaction and fulfilment since it has presumably never encountered this last.
In this lukewarm world, ambient discontent hides in plain view, a hazy malaise given off by the refrigerators, television sets and other consumer durables. The vividness and plausibility of this miserable world — with misery itself contributing to the world’s plausibility — somehow becomes all the more intense when its status is downgraded to that of a constructed simulation. The world is a simulation but it still feels real.
on philip k dick. quote relevant for mr & mrs smith? maybe i need to read marcuse first
With Inland Empire, world-haemorrhaging has become so acute that we can no longer talk about tangled hierarchies but a terrain subject to chronic ontological subsidence. [...]
wow
We are now in a position to answer the question of why it is important to think about the eerie. Since the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency, it is about the forces that govern our lives and the world. It should be especially clear to those of us in a globally tele-connected capitalist world that those forces are not fully available to our sensory apprehension. A force like capital does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect. At another level, had not Freud long ago shown that the forces that govern our psyche can be conceived of as failures of presence — is not the unconscious itself not just such a failure of presence? — and failures of absence (the various drives or compulsions that intercede where our free will should be)?
The story’s unsettling power depends on two levels of threat: the first, of course, is the brute physical terror of the birds’ attack. But it is the second level that takes us into the eerie. As the story develops, we see residual wartime certainties and authority structures disintegrate. What the birds threaten is the very structures of explanation that had previously made sense of the world. Initially, the preferred account of the birds’ behaviour is the weather. As the attacks intensify, other narratives emerge: the farmer for whom Hocken works says that the idea is circulating in town that the Russians poisoned the birds. (This turn to the readymade explanations of Cold War paranoia makes a certain sense, when we remember that the birds have set aside their differences in order to develop a kind of species consciousness, analogous to class consciousness.) BBC radio broadcasts assume a crucial role in the story. Initially, the broadcasts are the trusted voice of authority: when the BBC announces that the birds are amassing everywhere, the anomalous situation achieves a kind of official validation. At this point, the BBC is synonymous with an authority structure that it is assumed will “do something” to repel the birds’ attack. But, as the broadcasts become increasingly infrequent, it becomes clear that there is no more a strategy to deal with the birds than there is an adequate explanation of their behaviour. By the end, the BBC is no longer broadcasting at all, and its silence means that we are definitively in the space of the eerie. There will be no explanation, for the characters or for the readers. Nor will there be any reprieve: at the end of the story, the birds’ siege shows no signs of concluding.
George Romero's 1968 Night of hte Living Dead
The eeriness of the relationship between body and mind was the subject of Andy de Emmony’s 2010 BBC adaptation of M.R. James’ “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” , which was discussed in an earlier chapter. In this radically reworked version of the story, Parkin is tormented by the dementia that has reduced his wife to a catatonic shell: “a body that has outlasted the existence of the personality: more horrifying than any spook or ghoul”. “There is nothing inside us” , the Parkin in this version mordantly declares. “There are no ghosts in these machines. Man is matter, and matter rots.” Yet Parkin’s own statement establishes that there are ghosts in the machine, that a certain kind of spectrality is intrinsic to the speaking subject. After all, who is it who can talk of having no inside, of man being rotting matter? Not any substantial subject perhaps, but the subject who speaks, the subject, that is to say, composed out of the undead, discorporate stuff of language. In the very act of announcing its own nullity, the subject does not so much engage in performative contradiction, but points to an ineradicable dualism that results from subjectivity itself. The condition of materialists such as Parkin (our condition in other words) is of knowing that all subjectivity is reducible to matter, that no subjectivity can survive the death of the body, but of nevertheless being unable to experience oneself as mere matter. Once the body is recognised as the substrate-precondition of experience, then one is immediately compelled to accept this phenomenological dualism, precisely because experience and its substrate can be separated. There are ghosts in the machine, and we are they, and they are we.
love this
[...] Sometimes I don’t tell André about my moods, sorrows, unimportant anxieties; and no doubt he has his little secrets too; but on the whole there is nothing we do not know about one another. I poured out the China tea, piping hot and very strong. We drank it as we looked through our post: the July sun came flooding into the room. How many times had we sat there opposite one another at that little table with piping hot, very strong cups of tea in front of us? And we should do so again tomorrow, and in a year’s time, and in ten years’ time.… That moment possessed the sweet gentleness of a memory and the gaiety of a promise. Were we thirty, or were we sixty?
André’s hair had gone white when he was young: in earlier days that snowy hair, emphasizing the clear freshness of his complexion, looked particularly dashing. It looks dashing still. His skin has hardened and wrinkled—old leather—but the smile on his mouth and in his eyes has kept its brilliance. Whatever the photograph album may say to the contrary, the pictures of the young André conform to his present-day face: my eyes attribute no age to him. A long life filled with laughter, tears, quarrels, embraces, confessions, silences, and sudden impulses of the heart: and yet sometimes it seems that time has not moved by at all. The future still stretches out to infinity.
[...] In earlier days I never used to worry about old people: I looked upon them as the dead whose legs still kept moving. Now I see them—men and women: only a little older than myself. I had noticed this old lady at the butcher’s one day when she asked for scraps for her cats. “For her cats!” he said when she had gone. “She hasn’t got a cat. Such a stew she’s going to make for herself!” The butcher found that amusing. Presently she will be picking up the leavings under the stalls before the tall Negro sweeps everything into the gutter. Making ends meet on a hundred and eighty francs a month: there are more than a million in the same plight: three million more scarcely less wretched.
[...] from time to time a bewilderment comes over me. I remember my first appointment, my first class, and the dead leaves that rustled under my feet that autumn in the country. In those days retirement seemed to me as unreal as death itself, for between me and that day there lay a stretch of time almost twice as long as that which I had so far lived. And now it is a year since it came. I have crossed other frontiers, but all of them less distinct. This one was as rigid as an iron curtain.
What is there to do when the world has lost its savor? All that is left is the killing of time. I went through a wretched period myself, ten years ago. I was disgusted with my body; Philippe had grown up; and after the success of my book on Rousseau I felt completely hollow inside. Growing old filled me with distress. But then I began to work on Montesquieu; I got Philippe through his agrégation* and managed to make him start on a thesis. I was given a lectureship at the Sorbonne, and I found my teaching there even more interesting than my university scholarship classes. I became resigned to my body. It seemed to me that I came to life again. And now, if André were not so very sharply aware of his age, I should easily forget my own altogether.