“The Study of Lovecraftian Horror Philosophy, or Philosophical Horror”
In the definitions, both the word supernatural and philosophy stems from a standard created by human beings. “Supernatural” is what transcends beyond the “natural,” out of reach, out of humanistic recognition of the world as it is. Philosophy comes from ancient Greek, “phil-” indicates “to love,” and “sophia” implies “wisdom.” To be philosophical is to love wisdom. There is already an undertone to value the traditional definitions of wisdom, knowledge, or even metaphysics, over what is not of these terrains. Represented by language, the terms “supernatural” and “philosophy” come with sub-consciousness of anthropocentrism, of a world based upon human definitions. In the contrary, Posthumanism is the displacement, decentralization of human or fusion of our species with what is metaphysically considered
“un-human.” With this premise, a new sense of horror generates in the context of the horror genre. It is either how people “feel horror” out of what is unfamiliarized, or make horror into something other than horror as such, where other forms of horror diverge. Then the project will compare and contrast these diverged forms with the context of Capitalism and mass, sub-cultural production, and take the affects, the contingent effects under the background of globalization into consideration, and expand the project to a (sub-) cultural study.
Aside from the philosophical treatment, the posthuman approach to Lovecraft here may draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblage in “Becoming-Intense,
Becoming-Animals” from A Thousand Plateau, and Donna Haraway’s notion of cyborg in “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Lovecraft’s works are now not only assemblage but also implosions in Haraway’s terms.17 In A Thousand Plateaus, becoming is mostly defined with its part of
17 In “The Promises of Monsters: A Generative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” Haraway states that the
“commercial cyborg figures…show us the implosion of the technical, textual, organic, mythic, and political in the gravity wells of science in action” (Haraway 71). For further discussion, see the next part “Harawaian Reading.”
speech and of what it is not.18 Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway adds the world “with.”
The notion of “becoming with” postulated her theory. Haraway develops her idea on the basis of Deleuze and Guattari. She defines the process of becoming in a more specific way.
Deleuze and Guattari say that “[b]ecoming is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance” (Deleuze 238). The word “alliance” here contains more about free will, choice, and even strategy, while filiation means something about birth, origins, something one cannot choose out of conscious considering, which, implies that becoming is decided intentionally. On this base, Haraway also says, “To be one is always to become with many”
(Haraway 4). Here the phrase “become with” is added with the preposition with, which hints high awareness, connection, or even friendship, such as to share with, to be familiar with, to be popular with, and somehow suggests that there is telos in such phrase, like to do things with tool, with power, with care, with so on and so forth, referring back and adding to the word “companion.” Thus, “companion species must learn to live intersectionally” (Haraway 18). Human species and numerous other living beings bow to the limits of time. Throughout history human beings are accustomed to linear thinking and linear narratives. The risks of
“linear living,” however, happen when human beings project their experiences and norms to all the beings in the universe. Lovecraft himself has rejected human privilege over other objects. This anti-anthropocentric idea is also celebrated by philosophers like Eugene Thacker, Graham Harman and Haraway. Linear narratives, therefore, are not sufficient in some cases, especially when Lovecraft’s cosmos despises the traditional humanism, which highly values reason and ethics. Mere strengthening it with intentions of living “intersectionally” is not enough. New rubrics should be established. Genesis should stop being of and for human only, but supposed to be overthrown and revolutionized by “sym-bio-genesis” or “interspecies
18 “Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing
corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing’; being,’ ‘equaling,’ or
‘producing’” (Deleuze 239).
epigenesis” (Haraway, When Species Meet, 32). Although the residents of “Otherworldliness”
may not be fully compared with Haraway’s notion of “companion species,” to “become with”
is still a possible way to explain the construction of Lovecraft’s contemporary image.
Haraway also expounds the notion of Posthumanity, or now a new notion of “composite,”
furtherly in her newly-published book Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, coincidently referring to a new ways of thinking which she dubs as
“tentacular.”19
The following part of the thesis will also deal with future Lovecraftian evolvement in numerous cultural domains. As Neil Badmington has argued in his “Introduction:
Approaching Posthumanism,” despite some significant differences, “[p]osthumanism inherits something of its ‘post-’ from poststructuralism” (Sederholm and Weinstock 176) as well as postmodernism, one can never omit the influences of postmodernism in any posthuman approaches. The context of humanity has come to the “post” era since we arrive at the period of postmodernity, where “[a]esthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (Jameson 4) and that “a new depthlessness…a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum” form “a whole new economic world system” (Jameson 6). The commodity fetishism, the “high-tech paranoia” (Jameson 38) and the rising of new genres like cyberpunk all indicate a transition from the traditional meaning of humanities to a new era. According to Baudrillard’s discourses, the human sense of reality is also challenged through the prospering of media culture, and the precession of simulacra. Everything would eventually fall into mediatization and be downgraded its exchange-value. What’s more, to construct the loops of the consumer society, human beings inevitably seek for and drain more resources. Because of the exploitation on Nature, ecological catastrophe, and the following
19 In the second chapter of her new book, Haraway thematizes on the three layers of human situations,
“Anthropocene,” “Capitalocene” and “Chthulucene”; with the first two indicating the human-centered world view and the high value of capital since the Industrial Revolution. Haraway proposes a new scope, through which human can see the world and tell the story through the “myriad tentacles” including those of cnidarians, spiders and fingery beings. She also addresses an autopoietic goddess Gaia “telling of linked ongoing generative and destructive worlding and reworlding” (Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking,” 2-11).
revolts on Capitalism, Posthumanism, which address upon not only the postmodern context but a de-humanized world view combining animal and technological ethics, emerges, and the Lovecraftian motifs strangely fit in. We may find the evolvement of Cthulhu Mythos echoes to this process of transition.
The current adaptations of Lovecraft’s works resonate Henry Jenkin’s notion
“participatory culture,” which is what we commonly see in today’s virtual reality devices where people engage in “ironic imagination”; to “embrace alternative worlds and to
experience alternative truths” (Jenkins 14). For writers like Lovecraft, whose world building is comparatively loose, the “narrative gaps” allow readers not only to experience their own building of landscapes in plots through reading and imagining, but their own writing as well.
Jenkins argues that to be part of the “collective exercises of world building” and becoming
“ex post facto collaborations with the author” (Jenkins 25) contributes much to the world building of future Lovecraft adherents. This is also how people live a “double life” (or maybe triple, quadruple, quinto…in terms of avatars and account numbers people today all possess online or elsewhere, “out there,” with both complexity and surprising similarities). To adjust to such living style has somehow a new participation with allusions to the Lovecraftian.