The terror of the other

    What are we looking for is what we believe should be in a work or text, and are the basis of our world, the elements or particles of our cherished poetics. What if a text has nothing but text, or worse nothing? The WORD is the first to go to be suspended. It is the field that supports our Thing, whose misspelling is transgression requiring apology. While others show us its materiality (concretism, objectivism), it is but one way to show the canvas and the nothing in or behind it. Post-lettrist abstract and Asemic typography, the word as abstract, too abstract.

    We’re so far from meter, syllables, accents, enjambments.... They are ghostly remnants of old apparatuses of certitudes of reading meaning. We’ve travelled far from imagery, far from Mallarmés critical cry of tampered verse, as if the world, their world, ended with the end of verse. The neo-avant-garde as critique of symbolic regimes, the most demanding critical stance of cultural objects and logics. In short, they bring together not only critique as reading but as writing as well, even living. A critique of values, ontologies, perceptions, hierarchies, form, organization.... Defamiliarization down to the most elementary assumption. 

    For example, defamiliarization of the idea that a text must have a “voice.” Who really speaks in language? Are these two ideas truly related in a “natural” way? Is that the natural state of language? For many, this is the very foothold of “common sense.” No one really wants to ask this question. Where is the critique if there are sacred or inviolable elements and assumptions? If a theocratic logocentric structuralism remains to replace the “inner voice” or transcendental ego? Sacred form like word lemmas, typographic standards taken for realities. Aren’t letters historical beings and are as arbitrary as our thoughts and existence? We are not centers, nor is any form. 

    What is left are forces of dissipation and absoption, the hungry universe of entropy that demands the disappearance of permanent forms, but also paradoxically their return, but in unrecognizable guises. (Film where a man looks for the reincarnation of a dead beloved, finds difference in the same instead. This gap that shatters any nostalgia for full likeness.) The information and energy cycle, the Nietzschean eternal return. It can have the persistence of the anthropic, the all-too-human, the denial of the posthuman. Reincarnation as metaphor of this return, the REVENANT.

    Look at some TV series, like Les revenants who return as same but different. It is not like the return as zombies or vampires which are returns of the different, not the same. The hidden terror of the return of the same is in the difference they hide, the suspicion that, despite the familiar surface, the ground has shifted and we live in a different time or world. This is the ground of the Horror as a genre, founded on the fear of the different. It fills us with dread. The other, the really altered ego, is the source and form of terror itself. It is not like the pleasure of meeting a familiar face in the crowd. It is meeting a faceless being, the horror of having no ground of recognition, of meeting the unknown in a familiar body, of the uselessness of memory for support, of the assault on the security of the familiar. 

    Isn’t the stranger the different in the guise of the same, whereas the festival clown and others in various merry disguises or costumes are simply the same in the guise of the different? It is the safe way we ritually celebrate alterity, by willingly taking it in and displaying it but in the safety of the known: the Parade. The terrifying clown syndrome arises when what is the same in the guise of the different turns out to be the different in the guise of the same. Then the terror returns.

    (We’ve always thought of language as the bastion of familiarity and not as the source of terror. We've built our houses on the sands of homelessness. For where does language really reside?)

    Look at, say, classroom dynamics: limited economy, on topic off topic, different traffic conducted to form a symphony, but the parasite cannot be silenced because it actually fuels the conversation, requires it by default, is the origin of the conversation. The World as this mutilinear traffic of information, each of us pursuing one or many at once, we channel in channel out, merge, diverge, center, off center, flee, or join in, then disappear, plug into other flows, of bodies, goods, energy, and information. We don’t only flow with, but many things also flow through and in us. We are after all beings of sound and water, where even images are flows, not monuments inside us.

    Monuments are catatonic states of the image, like the ego that won’t budge in its calcified state, a Hyperform protected from flows, a guarded scat that we refuse to let go of. We are guarding a shell, a shelter of the same; alterity is a country of terrors. Take series or fiction about parallel worlds, and how the conflict arises from the differences between these worlds and the people who inhabit them. Like the old motif of twins with an evil counterpart always wanting the destruction of the other. Saving the world has always been saving the same version of the self, the status quo of the comfortable familiar. This is where superheroes are needed, because it requires that much power to save the world of the same.