Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 The Eruptive Power of Tears: Disorganization, Expressivity and the Experience of Horror By Adam Lovasz Abstract Through a close reading of Helmuth Plessner’s classic work, Laughter and Tears, I seek to shed new light upon human nature as conceived of as a fluid collection of affects. The psychological theory of thin slices, when combined with Plessner’s insights, can contribute to the construction of a non-essentialist viewpoint. Using the 2014 horror film Unfriended as a convenient metaphor, I attempt to construct a philosophical anthropology informed by horrific experiences of social media. Biography Adam Lovasz is an Australian-born philosopher and doctoral student in philosophy based in Hungary. His interests include embodiment, phenomenology and speculative realism, as well as non-anthropomorphic modes of thinking. He is the author of numerous books, and his work has appeared in a number of journals. 48 Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 Introduction A ccording to German philosopher Helmuth Plessner, both laughter and crying give expression to the essential finitude of human existence. In their own ways, both of these corporeal modalities take us to the limit. Laughter and crying give expression to a “disorganization” of the human element. In Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, there is no such thing as a definable, delineable human essence. Rather, to be human means to be expressive and ambiguously embodied. The source of the ambiguity is that humans are capable of relating to their own bodies. We are lived bodies situated within physical bodies. Hence, not only are we equal to the body, as it manifests itself through lived experience, but we also find a place of hospitability within the body conceived of as an ecology. The human situation particular on the latter aspect, while highlighting is characterized above all by a strange in- the aspects of Plessner’s anthropology relevant to betweenness. of the broader issue of bodily disorganization and exteriority or interiority, the human lies midway self-surrender. Of particular relevance here will between outside and inside. At times, the body is be the notion of expressivity. According to my capable of reasserting its own agency. For view, horror is an inner experience that displays Plessner, in laughter and crying, we experience a similar hallmarks to crying. As a matter of fact, self-surrender to our own embodiment. Whereas terror is capable of eliciting the most intensive laughter is usually elicited by comic situations form of crying, namely tears that result from a whose import compels us to lose ourselves while realization of one’s own existential predicament. nevertheless avoiding endangerment, crying is Using the 2014 social media horror film provoked by unanswerable situations that injure Unfriended, I hope to deepen the Plessnerian us. At its zenith, crying is a state of complete notion of expressivity, while adding newer surrender to Fate. In this article, I focus in notions. Irreducible to relations 49 The method of “thin-slicing”, Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 introduced in 1992 by psychologists Nalini no means implies the complete erasure of the Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, will be helpful in human element. If social media is posthuman, this regard. As a consequence of pervasive this is a posthumanism that strangely preserves connectivity, the human face’s expressivity comes expressivity, although in a highly transformed to be sliced into every smaller pixels. In the digital manner. Slices of human faces remain as glitches age, organic expressivity gives way to the in cyberspace. communication of haunted networks. But this by Disorganized Affectivity: The Place of the Traumatic in Helmuth Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology In limit situations, existence necessarily slips must reckon with. Disorganization is belonging. away. When the body fails, and the experience of To understand what happens when the body fails, trauma sets in, we are confronted with a truth it is not enough to rely upon everyday inseparable from embodiment: disorganization is expressions. Semantics can only get us so far an unavoidable modality of bodily belonging. The when dealing with experiences and bodily possibility of disorganization, culminating in the movements outside of language. A paralytic complete extinction of the self, is something attack can rob us of our speech, rendering us most would prefer to ignore. Following a certain mute, insensitive even to our own suffering. thread of abstraction, we may identify several Unable to move, the subject is then thrust into a corporeal configurations that contain meanings state of immobile lassitude. Verbal expressions while progressively separating these aspects from become unintelligible animal noises, our hands any and all particular, individual bodies. In this become frozen, and all emotions subside, with regard, social media as an agent of horror will be the exception of a sense of doom. Under normal of particular importance in the second half of our circumstances, most people can give others some investigation. Images are carriers of affect, but rendition of what, for want of a better word, we such meanings cannot be reduced to mere may call inner states. But involuntary bodily states semantic communications. When the body fails, preclude any direct communicability. Involuntary when we find ourselves in a state of extreme jerks, spasms and attacks are unanswerable, yet lassitude, we discover that corporeality is an this certainly by no means implies that the independent, even sovereign force, an energy we philosophy of the body should ignore these 50 Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 modalities. almost infinitely malleable expressivity, is Helmuth Plessner’s 1961 book, Lachen und inherently emotional too. Without the ability to Weinen [Laughter and Crying], is dedicated to the feel one’s self, it is exceedingly difficult indeed to exploration of precisely such conditions. The even speak of anything remotely resembling a subtitle of the book is particularly telling: Eine living personality. Neighboring gestures have the Untersuchung potential nach den Grenzen menschlichen to sidestep verbal channels. Verhaltens, or A Study of the Limits of Human of Expressivity simply cannot be reduced to Human Behavior. The focus of the entire book is language. We see a friend break down in tears, we precisely strange, the see a movement, or we feel something within incomprehensible, conceived of the outer limit of ourselves, something that is wrong. Something is the human being. Laughter and crying are, for the matter, but what is amiss? the abnormal, the Plessner, indicative of human nature. The latter is Becoming is closely bound to various not something fixed once and for all, an objective pulsations, intensities reality that may be exhaustively uncovered by extremely permeable line separates the state of modern positivist natural science. Corporeality is impersonality from that of individuated, self- infinitely more complex than pure materiality, for consciousness. Involuntary bodily states such as the former is characterised by responsivity. laughing and crying transport us to a distant Human nature is none other than “the possibility realm, making us strangers to ourselves, strangers of expression as a unity of intellectual, affective, somehow, inscrutably, impossibly, outlandishly and 17). trapped within a foreign body. In the depths of Whereas former anthropological theories have our lives, we find a dark ocean of emotion. layed too great an emphasis on either the mental Laughter and crying alike simply do not belong to or physical aspects of human being, what all the same stratum as language. As Plessner writes theoretical treatments lacked is a concept of the enchantingly, “closer to the inarticulate cry than human as a whole, a composite of the three to disciplined, articulate speech, laughing and registers mentioned above (Plessner 21). We are crying surge up from the depths of life bound to composites of intellectual, affective and physical feeling” (Plessner 23). The tears stream down our world-slices. Rejecting both Cartesianism and face, for we have learned of a loved one’s Darwinism as two sides of the same reductionist intention to leave us. We should have known coin, Plessner seeks to unpack an investigation better, for all is ephemeral. Even eternal love dies: that would incorporate many different aspects of with the exception of eternity itself, nothing lasts our lives, without unduly privileging one or forever. But here we are nonetheless, wounded, another register. Humanity, conceived of as an prostrate, and the tears continue to stream physical components” (Plessner 51 and thresholds. An Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 without end. Corporeality, in spite of all person who experiences a paralytic attack or a appearances to the contrary, is never unmediated. sudden The body too is a medium. In endangerment and homelessness. lassitude, we discover the “mediated” and supposedly “our” body then gives way to a “instrumental” character of physical existence disturbing suspicion that this morphology in (Plessner 38). It is when the tool exposes itself in some way differs from our true self. True, after its brokenness that we come to realize our reaching extreme dependence upon our all-too-human, all unconsciousness, personality gives way to too frail equipment. We see a sign, we hear some impersonal anonymity. The coma destroys the unusually sharp words from somebody who used persona, leaving nothing apart from a vague, to love us (did anybody ever love anybody?—the albeit living impersonality, whereas death leaves inner child within us asks naively), and even this not even impersonality intact. In laughter and is enough to provoke a torrent of tears. But then crying, however, as well as involuntary bodily we realize that brokenness is always already a reactions in between these two extremes, fundamental aspect of human being. “The something different occurs. According to brokenness of man’s relation to his body,” Plessner, “with laughing and crying the person Plessner reminds us, “is rather the basis of his does indeed lose control, but he remains a existence, the source, but also the limit, of his person, while the body, so to speak, takes over power” (Plessner 32). Brokenness here denotes the answer for him” (Plessner 33). Put differently, the paradoxical entwinement of the lived body involuntary bodily modalities signal the presence with the physical body. To be human means to of an impersonal personality. The human is be situated in an ambiguous state of embodiment: eccentric, in the sense that it is inherently foreign from birth onwards, we are compelled to live “as to itself. Awareness, even in normal conditions, is living body in a physical body” (32). at once personal and impersonal, individuated yet Limit experiences are of paramount onset a of crying Familiarity certain is with thrust what threshold, into is say anonymous. Of key importance to our own importance, for it is precisely such circumstances investigation is the that afford an opportunity to rediscover what we instrumentality and expressivity. In everyday life, always were to begin with. Brokenness, the we use our bodies for a variety of purposes. experience of extreme lassitude turns the gap Usually, the body is utilized to give expression to between lived and physical body into a veritable wants, desires and needs. It is one tool among chasm. When we feel our body momentarily many, and indeed often comes into connection subside into the cold ocean of paralysis, it is as if with a range of other implements, gadgets and we were torn apart. Violently sundered, the instruments. But Plessner emphasizes that 52 conceptual duality of Sūdō Journal instrumentality by no Volume 1, January 2019 exhausts for help but somehow nothing seems to come expressivity. The body is capable of expressing out from between our lips, knowing that our ever itself in an impersonal, non-instrumental manner. so fragile inner equilibrium is at an end. Nothing We may restate this ontological perspective by is the same again after such an inner experience, saying that expressivity is the general economy of so traumatic is the state of inner withdrawal. corporeality, instrumentality Withdrawal, in the ontological sense of the word, corresponds to a restricted economy predicated is nothing, if not a prelude to the infinite coldness upon rationality and self-control (Plessner 43). of death as perpetual anorganic Outside. With the During involuntary episodes, expressivity asserts disappearance of any intelligible, communicable its primacy vis-a-vis instrumentality. The body is or manageable order, disorganization makes its more than any single usage of it may imply. advent. Order absconds, and various forms of whereas means Expressive movement makes the invisible disorganization take its place, be it the feeling of visible. Expression brings affect to the surface. vertigo, aroused by “situations which are both Inseparable from expression is the occasion of unanswerable and threatening”, or laughter and the movement, the momentum that compels us crying, provoked by “unanswerable, non- to either burst into tears, burst out laughing, or threatening” situations respectively (Plessner 67). burst into tears while laughing. In excitation, In the former case, the unanswerable places us in agitation “runs its course, radiating, as it were, a state of endangerment and lassitude so intensive into a range of expressive movements” (Plessner as to preclude the mere possibility of any thought 65). When we reach the threshold, we thrash our or emotion aside from a sense of impending arms wildly, only to collapse in paroxysm. As doom. emotional discharge, expressivity holds our body abandonment of the personal mode: in vertigo, hostage. Involuntary states, provoked by suitable “man capitulates as a person, he loses his occasions, force themselves upon the lived body, head”—states Plessner suggestively (67) Does while traumatically cutting it off the physical not the complaint, “my head is swimming” body. The distance between the two becomes a already contain, in a way, the idea of losing one’s chasm when “bodily reactions emancipate head completely? This metaphor is suggestive of themselves” from instrumentality (Plessner 66). an actual, decapitated head swimming upon the When the paroxysm sets in, when our body starts waves of a sinister, black ocean. An ocean of to go numb and jerk uncontrollably; we scream tears, perhaps... 53 Vertigo means abdication, the Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 The Power of Trauma The description of disorganization as a provided that “we can’t cope with it” (Plessner “penetrating depth” is indicative of the oceanic 90). Explanation, when confronted by comic and nature of traumatic embodiment. There is terrifying elements, fails. There is no room for something traumatic in every involuntary muscle discourse in horror. Rather, it is the shivering, spasm, however pleasant a sensation it results in. crying body of the victim-to-be that becomes the Meaninglessness always resides in corporeality as medium of haunting. As we shall see, the 2014 a latent possibility, or a truism waiting to emerge horror film Unfriended confronts us with such a from interiority. While Plessner does not address paradigmatic transformation. The protagonists the issue of horror directly, we may nevertheless become subsumed by the various social media fully reconstruct such a definition by mirroring they consume, to the point wherein they are his concept of humor. The definition he gives transfigured into monstrous remnants, shattered, runs as follows: “things surprise us by their incoherent glitches upon the incandescent appearance, they take an unforeseen turn, they surface create situations to which we no longer find a transformations testify to the power of pervasive serious response. If such surprises and limiting communication. But it must not be forgotten conditions of our orientation to the world entail than corporeality is always already mediated to on the whole no peril for us, or if we have the begin with. There may be no question of some power to answer such peril by keeping the pure freedom of distance, then . . . we find these ramifications of Plessner’s anthropology, we surprises and situations funny” (Plessner 92). must understand that human nature is the in- Paraphrasing Plessner, the experience of horror betweenness of expressive plasticity. of mediation. human essence: if Their haunting we accept the may be summarized as the presence of “limiting Sometimes, we weep for ourselves or, more conditions” that “entail peril for us.” In such rarely, for a range of others. We weep because of circumstances, we lack the power to answer such a perceived injury to our collective social ego or peril, for we prove incapable of maintaining our our small, pitiful self. We weep because of pain, distance from that which threatens to break our of suffering, or because of the suffering of others boundaries completely. Death would be the that elicits such emotional intensities. On shattering of corporeal boundaries. Death is occasion, weeping entails a complete collapse openness. Death is the abandonment of any and into an unanswerable situation. Crying, at the all mechanisms. peak of its expressive intensity, is expressive of Anything can be either laughable or horrific, sheer, vertiginous inertia. “Helplessness”, writes self-sustaining filtration 54 Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 Plessner, “appears as an absence of distance” whose (Plessner 143). Those who find themselves in a modes of personality (Plessner 146). Boundary hopeless situation, bereft of guidance or meaning, situations show that the human element is a are thrown back upon their own finitude. In plasticity typified by both indirectness and hopelessness, we have no other option but to mediacy (Plessner 152). Humanity is the ceaseless scream and cry, in anger or sheer fright. fluctuation between being and having. Humans Following the psychologist Baldwin V. Schwarz, lack any clearly delineable ecology. Naturally, it Plessner describes “resonant would be absurd to presuppose that, lacking the appeals” (Plessner 128–9). In the case of crying relative hospitability of a suitable terrain, any induced by existential hopelessness, however, to human could survive. Most of Earth is what exactly does the crier appeal? Such a uninhabitable, let alone the cosmos. Our lives are semantics would entail the presence of a listener, nevertheless fundamentally and primordially somebody who cares about what is happening to affected us. But it is entirely possible to be overtaken by homelessness. At any moment, the physical body tears in a state of solitude. Involuntary bodily can fail, destroying the lived body’s experiential states need not occur only in the presence of integrity. Those who weep when confronted by others. the existential terror shed their tears because the irredeemability of death in no uncertain terms. threat of displacement threatens to bereave Being One who weeps because of the absence of of human presence. Endangerment is an meaning, one who weeps for everything and everpresent possibility, a potentiality one cannot nothing, such a weeper is the epitome of both recoil from when trapped within a horrific “immediacy and eruptivity”, two characteristics situation. Indeed, emotions solitude as illustrates inseparability by the permeates circumstance impersonal of innate Affect and Mediation How may we deepen our understanding of fundamentally changed the characteristics of mediated affectivity? Specifically, how do 21st human experience. Rather, they have resulted in century systems of pervasive communication a dynamic shift in the contents of reflection, an modify the human element as an affective accentuation of tendencies and inner tensions complex of embodied, indirect mediations? It is already present within the human organism. our contention that new forms of mediation, Jeffrey Barnett and Jenny Huberman have, for while instance, identified a change in the way modifying experience, have not 55 Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 Americans memorialize their dead. As opposed “memory objects” comes to be progressively to the expensive funerary monuments of the past, displaced by the “communicative function” (Van in the early 21st century consumers are ever more Dijk 99). More intensive communicability also likely to choose minimalist physical monuments, entails, of necessity, an elevated risk of infection. while uploading memories of deceased loved Memories can potentially become detached from ones onto sites such as World Wide Cemetary. their carriers. In the digital age, new media give The flip side of this development is that human greater opportunities for the mobility of affects. plasticity, including the plasticity of human The human never was immobile of course. What memories held in reserve, comes to depend ever changes is the carrier of infectious affectivity. more upon a nonhuman technological apparatus. Transmission costs decline, and agitation is easier It is not a case of some pure, nonchanging human to access. Essential characteristics of a person can essence to be reintegrated in unforeseen ways, while privacy technology. Instead, it is a case of expressivity is ever more an object of nostalgia, the artifact of finding in cyberspace new channels, new ways of a bygone era. being rendered subservient surfacing. The body as medium, however, is An interesting aspect of online threatened by the sudden disappearance of memorialization is the selection of certain traits connections, epitomized by the unavoidability of and features. Users may only upload a small death. Heightened connectivity is concomitant subset of information connected with their loved with “a heightened fear of disconnection” ones. Connectivity, as effectuated through virtual (Bennett and Huberman 347). We may speak, in monuments, comes at the cost of a radically the context of digitalized memory, of a enhanced selectivity. Naturally, one does not rechanneling of desires, needs and memories into want any information to disappear. As evinced by a new format. The human always was a synthesis user reactions to deceased Facebook friends, “for of affect, intellect and corporeality to begin with. many today the internet has become the primary Naturalness is communicative, a mediation, a means for securing a sense of attachment to a surface flows. flow of life that transcends the self” (Bennett and memorialization Huberman 348). Deletion of one’s account after highlights the ever more collective enactment of death would seem to imply that one never existed personal memories. Users typically upload certain to begin with. But even the most detailed of choice photographs of the deceased, as well as Facebook accounts surely does not exhaust the positive summarizations of their lives. In this richness and complexity of an individual's life? Or manner, the does it? The question is, can sparse information personal convey a sense of who or what one is? This open to Cybernetically as a multitude integrated José “commemorative Van Dijk function” of notes, of 56 Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 dilemma is a far from trivial one. Radical significantly” (Ambady and Rosenthal 263). selectivity would appear to imply a reduced Of course, it could be argued that a laboratory perspective, one that cannot convey the fullness setting is artificial. Surely, the laboratory or even of somebody’s personality. Yet a strand of the only slightly less formal setting of the job psychology has argued precisely for such a interview generally are not conducive to the transversability between small selections of exhibition of spontaneous behaviors. A more observed complex, recent study on “nonverbal thin slices,” for temporally extensive periods of behavior on the example, included an actual job interview, which part of subjects. In an influential 1992 article, was utilized to observe bodily gestures such as psychologists Ambady and Robert gaze and self-touch. Incidentally, this latter study Rosenthal strove to conduct a meta-analysis of found that the thin slices approach is most studies on the effectiveness of brief observations reliable for the detection of gaze orientation of behavior in identifying personality traits. (Frauendorfer, Mast, Nguyen and Roter 210). In Ambady and Rosenthal’s premise was that brief formal circumstances, humans tend to exhibit observations, “thin slices” typically lasting 30 fairly scripted performances. But research on seconds, can give an accurate, intersubjectively “leaky channels” has shown that nonverbal accessible image of another human’s intentional behaviors are, to a large extent, involuntary. states (Ambady and Rosenthal 257). The studies Humans continuously leak information out of reviewed three themselves (Noller 28-47). We are more communicative channels: “nonverbal” (primarily predictable than it would seem. The human, as bodily and leaky animal, oozes data. How do the results of “audiovisual channels” (i.e. combinations of the experimental psychology relate to the boundary previous two, Ambady and Rosenthal 258). What experiences outlined above? Plessner was highly Ambady and Rosenthal found in their analysis dismissive of empirical science and philosophical was that the accuracy of trait identification was idealism alike. Indeed, he begins his book on not diminished by the length of observations. In laughter and tears with a summary rejection of other words, humans are remarkably adept at Darwinism and positivist modern science identifying (Plessner 13). How may we nevertheless extract behavior Nalini by the gestures), Intriguingly, and the more authors “verbal traits “judgments of included channels” fellow from subjects. very brief content of philosophical relevance from the thin segments of behavior (under half a minute in slices approach? More specifically, what does length) may be as accurate as judgments from knowledge of thin slices have to do with extreme longer segments (up to 5 min long). Longer affective phenomena all but unobservable in an exposures do not seem to increase accuracy experimental setting? The present day normative 57 Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 limits on empirical science make the observation Plessner asserts (Plessner 143), then this leaves us of extreme privation and distress impossible, with little choice other than to rely upon fictional without career-ending violations of privacy and registers. In this context, theory-fiction would human rights at least. One cannot create a theater entail the treatment of fictional datums as if they of cruelty anymore, at least within the were empirical observations. The ultimate stage psychological Philosophical of weeping is the point wherein we lose hope, anthropology therefore must turn to other when we collapse into unanswerability. This registers, in the form of fictional observations. collapse, this crisis of the human, results from the The eruptive, transgressive power of tears traumatic encounter with immediacy, a lack of precludes direct access, not to mention states of mediation bodily laceration and suffering. If the penultimate unintelligible howling. When subjected to horror, stage of weeping coincides with a serious, the level of anxiety on the part of the subject endangering “helplessness” that “results from a reaches a pitch that destroys any possibility of curious immediacy in the exposure to pain”, as transcendence or accomplishment. paradigm. unopen to anything beyond Horror as Immediacy Horror, as outlined previously, would be a appear at first somewhat counterintuitive. Every lacerating, unredeemable lack of distance from single scene, with the notable exception of the something injurious, a thing that threatens our final, sickening denouement, is filmed through integrity. One can, in the manner of a digital technologies. Our gaze molds with the psychologist, conceive of the 2014 film Unfriended artificial lens of the camera. As Dmitry Uzlaner as a motley collection of various thin slices. We suggests, the lens of the camera, as in the case of see before us a group of typical middle class white a selfie, “is always bifurcated: it is the gaze of the American teenagers speaking with one another Big Other, inscribing the subject in a symbolic through Skype. Fairly early on, the typical order . . . but at the same time [the gaze] is also characteristics of each protagonist become something incomprehensible and frightening. evident. Each individual appears to be a parody This incomprehensible and frightening thing is of some stock character. Instead of diminishing the Real dimension of the gaze, its unsymbolized the realism of the film, this actually serves to core, always threatening to invade our reality and heighten a sense of immediacy. Mediation to reduce it to chaos” (Uzlaner 9). Through social increases realism. This consideration would media communication, we all present one 58 Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 In the end, nothing remains but the face of a sobbing teenage girl, wiped away into obscurity by the hypertrophy of representation. another with thin slices of ourselves. But if a few “Well the glitch just typed!”, exclaims Val. Is this leaky thin slices really are enough to transmit a prelude to something sinister, or merely an information about one’s self, it may be surmized unserious prank? We cannot know at this stage. that the human element never was anything more As the film progresses, the glitch-ghost proceeds than a collection of such brief segments. to possess and murder the participants in an ever Conceived of as leaky plasticity, the human more one-sided ruthless game of revenge. Cruelty always was disarticulated, disorganized and begets disjointed, even prior to the advent of digital preconditions modes have proliferation. Could our perspective be that of accentuated these features. Uzlaner is correct in the dead soul of Laura Barns, a student driven to his assertion that “the subject uses new suicide by internet comments? The gaze itself technologies not for the transformation of his may nature, but for a more explicit revelation of it” undomesticatable (Uzlaner familiarity and homeliness, we are transported to of self-representation 11). technologies Social media that and digital of subjectivity reveal us cruelty, be evil for creates its the further, conceptualized as malignant a karmic infectious monstrous, force. From as scenes of lacerating cruelty and unspeakable primordially artificial beings. The protagonists of terror. “The gaze is like a werewolf: from Unfriended, similarly, far from being transformed something sweet, cute, and domesticated that the by the experience of glitchy haunting, actually subject holds in its hands during the selfie, unveil their true, psychotic, egoistic, self-hating choosing the most advantageous angle for itself, and insecure selves. Technology makes possible a it turns into a pitiless, bloodthirsty beast”—reads haunting immediacy that exposes the human as a Uzlaner’s apt description (Uzlaner 10). An initial glitch-prone set of unstable affects, illusions and narcissism gives way to the state of complete self- unspeakable desires. surrender. Before the power of the Whilst chatting with one another, the group overwhelming, self-surrender is the only adequate of supposed friends is interrupted by what, at reaction. Tears are the prelude to complete and first, appears to be a minor error: another, utter unresponsivity. Communication in general anonymous of is reconceptualized as ever more scatological in communication, and proceeds to chat with them. nature. Repeatedly, the viewer is treated to the user enters their flow 59 Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 video that resulted in Laura’s suicide: the girl lies bodily state. As it turns out, her mobile is still inebriated and prostrate on the ground, her capable of movement. The vibration of the underwear soiled by excrement. Gripped by smartphone coincides with the paralysis of the curiosity, one almost wishes to smell the contents human, a truly sickening juxtaposition. Far from of this unfortunate misadventure. The hunger of ensuring the continuation of vital flow, the the gaze can be appeased only be complete technologically mediated gaze is reconceptualised audiovisual and tactile immersion. Every single as the organ of disappearance. Thin slicing shows sense demands gratification, so demands of us that disorganization is an affective possibility the sinful desire for immediacy. But the absence inherent within the human element. Far from of distance also entails an opportunity for composing an integral whole, the human is an complete disappearance. Interestingly, during the uncertain, ambiguous and explosive mixture of course of the film the character’s web cameras bodily, emotional and mental components become plagued by increasingly pervasive hopelessly entwined with one another. Tears and glitches. Self-revelation correlates with the other involuntary corporeal eruptions bring the disappearance of any essential identity. Human- primordial artificiality of the human to the fore. as-glitch meshes with the historical error of Technological mediation, as evinced by the horrifyingly autonomous pervasive technology. distortion and destruction of identity through the The human itself, sliced into ever smaller hauntingly effective power of social media, portions, falls victim to the imperative of merely accentuates the process of the subject’s narcissistic the explosion into a myriad of disaggregated pieces. effacement of its own corporeality. In the end, Thin slices give just as much information on nothing remains but the face of a sobbing teenage subjective interiority as longer, more complex girl, wiped away into obscurity by the observations. We were abstractable, simplifiable hypertrophy of representation. Steaming hot and reducible all along. All that remains is the tears stream, and in turn are streamed literal integration of all our utilizable components communicatively, attaching themselves to the into perverse, voyeuristic gaze of the Other who views productivity could very well result in the this cruel spectacle. replacement of all carbon-based lifeforms by new self-representation through a technological infrastructure whose In an almost unbearably, terrifyingly realistic substrates. Such an evolutionary change in the scene, a soon to be deceased Val has ceased history of life would undoubtedly constitute a moving. Nobody, the viewer included, can catastrophe for previous life forms, but it must discern whether the image has frozen or the girl not be forgotten that all natural organisms too are herself has fallen victim to some involuntary syntheses of various biosocial processes. For all 60 Sūdō Journal Volume 1, January 2019 its apparent complexity, even the human capable of surviving transference between personality can be collapsed into minute, substrates. momentary affects. Communication is perfectly Works Cited Ambady, Nalini, and Robert Rosenthal. “Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: A meta-analysis.” Psychological bulletin 111.2 (1992): 256-274. Bennett, Jeffrey, and Jenny Huberman. “From monuments to megapixels: Death, memory, and symbolic immortality in the contemporary United States.” Anthropological Theory 15.3 (2015): 338-357. Frauendorfer, Denise; Mast, Marianne Schmid; Ngyuen, Laurent Son; Roter, Debra. “Reliability and validity of nonverbal thin slices in social interactions.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 41.2 (2015): 199-213. Gabriadze, Levan. Unfriended. Bazelevs Company and Blumhouse Productions, 2014. Noller, Patricia. “Video primacy—A further look.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 9.1 (1985): 28-47. Plessner, Helmuth. Laughter and Crying. A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior. Translated by James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene, Northwestern University Press, 1971. Uzlaner, Dmitry. “The selfie and the intolerable gaze of the Other.” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 14.4 (2017): 282-294. Van Dijk, José. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford University Press, 2007. Image: “Etna Volcano Paroxysmal Eruption July 30” (Public Domain) by gnuckx 61
