|
||||
|
Darkness, Death, Goth, and the Kingdom of Questions "I'm afraid of the dark and suspicious of the light." The Subculture of the contemporary Goth is one which navigates and displays a diverse range of tastes and stances. Although this loose group has nourished itself from such diverse sources as the moody shoreline of gothic romance literature and the driving and discordant developments of post-punk music of the 80's, the diffuse Goth culture has actively and consciously moved away from any explicit conceptual or cultural position which would result in a singular arrangement of its philosophical location. However, this is not to say that there has not been a discernible and distinct set of concerns within the culture of the Goths. Though these concerns and perspectives have been many, the major themes which seem too be circulated about within the Contemporary Goth culture have move toward a focus on, and a generalized exploration of, the subjects of darkness, the inexplicable, and the uncanny. Using these themes contemporary Goth culture has attempted a negotiation of the field of morality and the concept of the "normative" and "normalizing" in regard to the cultural collective, social institutions, and individual self. Following these generalized themes of the unseen and questionable the Gothic field has approached the idea of the social and its arrangements as an actively oppressive network of social mores. The overdetermined and static institutional structures, the imposition of rigid and standardized moral and ideological codes, are the means by which the social comes to alienate and decompose the individual, for the Goth sense. The socially allocated and inflexible placement for the subject is given a detrimentally strict status in the apparatus of the social machine and works, for the Goth, to the repression and. ultimately, the destruction of the subject. For the Goth social structure is expressed in both its social mores and its institutional imperatives which in turn are founded on the overtly strict, false dichotomies, and horrifically static categories of binaries. These sets of binaries, which comprise the repressive foundations and formations of society, give pre-arranged and preferential treatment to one side of the terms within the social binaries (the total set of beliefs that a society accepts) which hold in place and perpetuate the continuation of "normative readings" of the structure of the society's worldview. The conferring of preferential assignments to one set of terms in the binary is a method for the social control of languages, which, for the Goth, alienate and deform individuals. The alienation and calamities imposed by the society upon the individual, for the Goth, is carried out through a set of socially delimited definitions of subjecthood which are devoid of the entire spectrum of characteristics which are accessible and fundamental to the human subject. The entire spectrum of the human possibilities is "hidden" in the preferential assignments of the social order, for Goth thinking, and can only be addressed by the elaboration of a opposing set of terms which -in counter distinction to the rigidity of the social - will foster a dichotomy of symbolic "play" of the other, darker, and obscure side of the binary pairing. The highlighting of the concept of the "Dark" is an application of Goth methodology to configure this mechanism of play and potential which would, in the best of circumstances, excavate the full processes and possibilities of the individual subject and reveal its open relation to the social configuration. Whereas, in western society and thinking, the symbolic tools of light and enlightenment are held as overriding concepts in which to ply at the process of the world and the idea of the individual, the gothic menagerie of allegorical tools wishes to delve into, and work through, an alternative and expansion of all of the implied concepts within the binary and to explore the unseen and rejected in the language of the social. "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." The symbolism of the "Darkness", then, is a way for the community of the Goth to investigate the hypocritical and misdirected in the social. The overly stern application of the enlightenment model and the rigidity of a single model for subjecthood within society is, for the Goth, a means to eliminate and conceal alternative readings of the self. The belief in transparency and clarity - the clear self and the seen world, in which the regulating processes of socialization attempts to construct a "necessary" and "apparent" society in light (of exclusion, for the Goth) - are confronted in the" darkness" of contemporary gothic symbolism and is used by the Goth sensibility as a means to explore the murky depths and mysteries of the self and the inexplicable of the world. The Dark as symbolic tool for the Goths is meant to collapse the binary of darkness-light by explicating the shadowy and disperse nature of both sides of the binary equation and infest each with the character of the un-resolvable and uncertain. While not turning away from the blinding intensity and elucidating clarity of the light, the gothic sense, calls for a yielding and redefinition of these allegorical polarities to understand and utilize the questioning and terrible uncertainty, and all of its dark potentiality, which comprises the world. What would seem staid fast and solid in actuality melts into the perplexed position of uncanny doubt and foreboding puzzlements. Potential and possibility become key components of subjecthood even if it is imbedded and mixed in the surface of the material, network of the social and the nexus of language which attempts to bind and control them. The uncertainty of all cultural models and social projections on the map of the world, calls for the elaboration of the symbolism of the dark to insure potentialities and movement. In opposition to the possibilities of darkness, the social, in the Goth sense, has been founded on a regime of the visual which is constructed by the ignoring and deflections which take place and are fostered in the accepted binary systems of society. The preferential siding of the binary underscored by a society becomes the "seen" while that on the "other" side of the duality recedes into invisibility and the unspoken. Using the idea of "darkness" the Goth sense makes the secondary term of the binary "visible" by the opaqueness of darkness. It becomes "seeable" again, though this is a "seeableness" which hides (one again) the nature of the "what is there" by its being shrouded in the darkness. This calls for us to implement a reassessment mandated by the methodological tool of darkness and lays out the "reality" of the secondary term, on the one hand, and the "unseeableness" of it, as enveloped in darkness, on the other. The Goth sensibility is to direct attention to the darkness of the unseen pole in order to manifest the ideas of the unseen and unsaid of the rejected polarity. The visual regime, which, in the privileged single pole of the binary, both misdirects and makes invisible (by the means of the visual itself) becomes infested with the uncertainty elaborated in the seen "unseen" of the darkness. The darkness becomes a means to understand the misdirected certainties demanded by the dual social monoliths of the sovereignty of meanings and the regime of the visual. Yet by indicating the alternative place on the binary pole which is manifestly invisible in the mechanisms visual regime, the "other" pole becomes "revealed" by the obscurity of darkness and comes to infiltrate the construction of the social. How the regime of the visual, and the hardened light of certainty, is used by the social body to impose "precision" , "transparency", and "obviousness", through the of the machinery of the binary is short-circuited in the wandering and questionings of the unseen and vacant image of the abyss of darkness. Darkness, for the Goth, becomes an indicator of the unseen in the visual and the unspoken in the supposed marketplace of ideas. The dark and obscure other made manifest, "When you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss also gazes into you." The Dark penetrates, by its uncertainty, everything in the binary and the regime of the visual. The darkness by positioning everything as founded on its obscure nature, gives not only doubt to the "seen", but designates for the slyly named "perceived" and dubious detailed of "sight" the flows and signals of the continual questioning of the uncanny. Freed from the reductive and simplifying structures of the regimes of the visual, the darkness, and its promising promiscuity, christens a reevaluation of social definitions and denotations. This freedom from the determinate constructions of the social and the regimes of the visual it mandates, has, additionally, the function of placing a fuller responsibly for the creation of the social and conceptual world on the individual. If the darkness calls out the uncertainties of the world, it also demands of us to admit our responsibility in creating it. Darkness calls, additionally within the Goth sensibility, for an intimacy with the form of the world we populate. Whereas the visual inscribes distances within the world, touching and caressing are called for by the state of darkness in order to substantiate and confirm the forms and functions of the visual (and the signified social world this entails). The implication of the darkness is the creation of a multiplicity of intimate activities and "feeling" positions which the subject has to play through in order to negotiate and create the signifying community and populate the world with objects. The contemporary Goth stance positions each socially accepted sovereignty of the visual in a nexus of signifying practices implemented by darkness, promiscuity, and uncertainty, and, because of this, invokes a specific signifying responsibility of the tactile and the intimate for its members as subjects. The visual, in its new confrontation to the empty materiality of darkness, is now constrained to be socially defined only in distinction to the uncanny and intimate graspings of the unseen and promiscuous kingdom of the uncertain. A Kingdom which opens up continually in the activity of closeness and intimacy and generates the persona of a shared world founded upon the uncanny vertigo of the individual as potential. "While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning
how to die." Because of this, uncertainty and doubt are manifest configurations of the Goth. Though positions may be alighted upon in the apparatus of the inexplicable and the cross fertilizations of the dark, the operations of the uncanny always yield further elaborations and significations of the visual and become out of reach, and contrary to, the blindness's and silences of a totalizing regime. Control, because of this openness, intimacy, and promiscuity, is not possible in any absolute sense, and, therefore, brings the contemporary Goth to the edge of meanings and their constructions. Symbolically, then, the marker of death - as a darkness which has now deflected back onto the subject - defines the outer limits to the structure of meaning for the Goth. The tensions which assail the body and its production of desires are both interrupted and eliminated at the extreme of death, yet at the same time the idea and "form" of death is only conceivable within the domain of desires and consciousness, and the language we have to address the configuration of death. As no Meta system is available for the confrontation and conceptualization of death (i.e. it is only possible to think of death from within life, consciousness of life, and tension/desire in life-production) the position of death becomes one where the twin polarities of certainty and uncertainty collapse entirely into one another. At the edge of meaning, where the limiting case of sense melts into the senseless, where certainty becomes infested with uncertainty and vice-versa, the possible ideas of control and non-control, and how to implement control and its antitheses, becomes ultimately unimaginable to either sight or language. The Goth response to this position is to invest the visualization of death with a conglomerate of the desires which rest within life. The tensions and desires of the living imposed and localized to the accounts of the dead. This desire from life, which is now lodged in the unimaginable, but speakable, dead, is both vacant and excessively filled in the Goth symbolic of the animated corpse of the dead which has no relation to life proper (the animated corpse with no consciousness or soul) or which is entrapped in exponentially heightened entanglements of desires and appetites (the tormented and conscious undead). This boundary which the contemporary Goth transverses is a way to both normalize the event of death and to harken to deaths uncanny and irresolvable nature from within the event of life and its conceptual/linguistic form. "Death destroys a man; the idea of Death saves him" The moral responsibility which motivates the application of darkness and uncertainty is now tied to the explication of death and becomes a limiting case for the contemporary Goth. At the heart of death lies the one confrontation of certainty which is housed in all of humanity and yet is inconceivable in any fully specifying signifying process. Whereas the responsibility of social signifying decisions was elucidated by the applications and mechanisms of Goth symbols and their inherent uncertainties and questions, the certainty of death (and the state of being dead), and its uncontrollable nature, defies the nature of the totalizing and visualizing social project. On the one hand, death itself as absence and the un-recognizable seems the most unstable and impossible of signifiers, while on the other hand it is, at its very heart, the most certain point within the human condition. The obscurity and darkness which engulf the limiting case of the logic of death houses in itself a consequent certainty of logic and nature. The contemporary Goth response to this dilemma of certainty in death is to directly address the limiting case of the material certainty of death. The address of the Goth, in the grip of this internal dilemma of the obscurity and definiteness of death, and in the absence of adequate signifying systems to define this other side of life, is to enfold the binary of it with adjacent quest and question of the binary of control and un-control. As the lack of significations within the field of the dead will problematize even the certainty of uncertainty the point of this method is to infuse the lack of logic, and the control it entails as understanding, as an overriding theme to any and all methodologies and logics. The binding of uncertainty and non-control creates a final positioning of the strict social binaries which exposes the lacks and emptiness's inhabiting the very nature of the signifying process and the significations they imply and create. The fundamental lack of signifying possibility within the concept of death depicts a basic non-control to the meters and measures of languages and the institutional uses of "the speakable" which the visual regime of society wish to exploit and control. "There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively
take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the
wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make
it stop! " Whereas the terrible placements of death default it as beyond the control of conscious subjects to contain, the activity of suicide places it, in distinction to the signifying problematics of death, within the realm of control. From within the terrible anguish, agony of desperation, and lack of control which may prompt thoughts of death, the action and determining structure of suicide becomes an idealized position for grasping the demands of the inconceivability of death and be a reassertion of moral control at the very heart of its absence. The dichotomy of control and out of control, which play themselves out continually in life, finds its limiting and last value in the collapse of these two in the act of suicide. However this is not to lighten nor romanticize the desperation which is manifest in many suicides (and which the Goth recognizes), but is to call for a heightening of control which the suicide actor elaborates in the confrontation of death. From within the un-controllability of life - and the tensions, desires, and sufferings played out on the surface of life - the Goth affirmation and conceptualization of suicide places control as infiltrating and informing, and as a fundamental aspect of the act and actor in regard to seizing control in the midst of the uncontrollable. The negotiation of these perplexing extremes is laid bare and confronted at this boundary line of sense (and senseless) in the terrible and final (il)logic of death, where the continual movements between these borders and positions is continually traversed and the dilemma of control and its opposite are finally conjoin. Romanticism of death doesn't find expression on this boundary of life and it's other for the gothic methodology, but the suicide, in a last act of control in the staggering immensity of the uncontrollable, expresses a signifying act of defining the limiting act of humanity in the realization and conscious visualization of the horrific edge of conscious existence. Control manifest on the terrible surface of the uncontrollable mechanisms of life and the signifying obscurity of death. The action of the suicide becomes a horrific affirmation, in the midst of dread and revulsion, to the signifying processes of control at the level of the individual and separated from the abstracted and sightless regimes of the social. For the Goth, the morally signifying process of all uncertainties and migrations, all promiscuities and flows, all existences and their ends, this last of controls and signification of the uncontrollable, and, finally, the grasping of meanings in the face of the abyss and un-recognizablity of death, becomes the moral and material meaning bestowed upon us by others that go before us. Too what end we use them is dependent on how, from within life and its wondrous darkness, we are willing to gaze into the certainty of death with our uncertain sight and grasp at it with our questing touchings. |