Csiscery-Ronay: The horror genre has always played with the violation of the body,
since it adopts as its particular ‘object’ fear’ – the violent disruption of the sense of
security, which precisely because it is a sense, works from within the body, the house of
the senses […] Even when the same images or motifs are used as in the horror genre,
they have a different value in SF because they attack not the image of the body, but
the idea’ of the image of the body, the very possibility of imaging the body (to borrow
a metaphor from cyber-medicine)[…] Cyberpunk is part of a trend in science fiction
dealing increasingly with madness, more precisely with the most philosophically interesting phenomenon of madness: hallucination (derangement). […] So the most
important sense is not fear, but dread. Hallucination is always saturated with affect.
It is perception instigated by affect. […] Mark Fisher. Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, p. 50
Rear-view mirrorism: ‘When faced with a totally new situation,’ McLuhan famously says, 'we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.’ Source
«For Gothic Materialism, body horror is not something with which the
body is afflicted merely contingently – it is not, for instance, a question of the
penetration of a biotically-sealed interiority by invaders that may or may not
strike – but something inherent to the body at all times and in all its operations.
Body horror = cybernetic realism. Cronenberg: “One of our touchstones for
reality is our bodies. And yet they […] are by definition ephemeral.” Wiener:
“Our tissues changes as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day through excreta […] We are
not stuff that abides, but patterns that repeat themselves.” (HUHB 96) From
the point of view of a “residual” subject, then, body horror is a horror of the
body’s terrifying mutability, its sheer meat materiality. As Deleuze observes
when writing on Bacon, the body is always that which is escaping the subject:
“It is not me who tries to escape my body, it is the body which tries to escape
through itself». Mark Fisher. Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, p. 30
(Source: youtube.com, via musicforyourplants)
«But in a way to be a thing at all is to have been hurt. We are scarred with the traces of object cathexes. Trauma is not only human. The beautiful ridges in the glass are traces of the glass’s own lost object cathexes. Things are printed with other things. Something about trauma is nonhuman». Dark Ecological Chocolate by Timothy Morton
«According to the rigid agrilogistical logic format, there is no single, independent, definable point at which a meadow (for example) stops being a meadow. So there are no meadows. They might as well be car parks waiting to happen. And since by the same logic there are no car parks either, it doesn’t really matter if I build one on this meadow. Can you begin to see how the logical Law of Noncontradiction enables me to eliminate ecological beings both in thought and in actual physical reality? The Law of Noncontradiction was formulated by Aristotle, in section Gamma of his Metaphysics. It’s strange that we still carry this old law around in our heads, never thinking to prove it formally. According to the Law of Noncontradiction, being true means not contradicting yourself. You can’t say p and not-p at the very same time. You can’t say a meadow is a meadow and is not a meadow. Yet this is what is required, unless you want meadows not to exist». What Is Dark Ecology? by Timothy Morton
(via eiginleiki)