#fred botting

[dwellordream]

Fred Botting, Gothic

[gothicseverance]

One of the standard tropes of Spiritualism: the ghost dragged from the other world at the stroke of midnight by the summons of the living.

—The Dark Circle

[pasdetrois]

Anxiety is fuelled by the ease with which walls and fences can be crossed. No one, in their expensive apartments or, even, in secure psychiatric units, seems to be safe. The ‘“gothic” rapport between persons and places’ has turned into a ‘pervasion’ of all symbolic and social spaces by terror and horror (Seltzer, 1995: 145): no longer is the rapport localised in a house or castle; it extends across all social and subjective relations. A Gothic tone spreads to the most unexpected areas, the well-lit and luxurious bathrooms of white yuppie apartments being the most unlikely in the film.

The gothicisation of the most banal and apparently innocuous social spaces remains tied to the circulation of anxiety and fear in a consumer society so that even the acceptable and mundane enclaves of middle-class life, the suburbs, resort to Gothic patterns. Kim Michasiw argues that the ‘gated community’ resuscitates a gothic mood in ‘disneyfied’ terms: the community itself becomes ‘the avatar of the threatened maiden’ (Michasiw, 248). Significantly, the image reduces a community to a single threatened body. In this model, the gated community both condenses all threatening features in a single egotistical individual and, at the same time, recognises that such a model has expanded to cover the evacuated terrain once called ‘society’. The imaginary, once a model of subjective development and symbolic integration, substitutes itself for all social relations.

In Lacan, identity is an effect of identification, the inverted image of the body in the mirror being recognised as oneself: the reflection of bodily integrity allows for the projection of psychological unity and, in turn, the assumption of social identity. An effect, then, of external appearance that unifies corporeal fragmentation, the image in the mirror, is translated in dreams in the form of fortified buildings. As it is opened up and expanded to cover all social relations, this version of the imaginary is simultaneously more exposed and in greater and constant need of protection and fortification against the forces that would dissipate its integrity. Imaginary boundaries, however, remain hard to police: look into the mirror and utter his name five times. Candyman … Candyman … Candyman … Candyman …

Fred Botting, Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic Candyman (1992) dir. Bernard Rose

[givemearmstopraywith]

visions of excess: selected writings, 1927-1939 by georges bataille, trans. allan stoekl / hellraiser ii: hellbound / twin peaks, "beyond life and death” / mathilda by mary shelley / breaking bad, “felina” / gothic by fred botting / visions of excess / sky full of song by florence + the machine

[draculasdaughter]

Jean Baudrillard describes the process of saving as a ‘shift from tactile to digital’ (cit. Landow, 1997: 22), a spectralisation that defies physical ontologies. We must put faith in the computer, give up our work to the invisible, and be prepared to conjure forth a ghostly revenant to interrogate and save again. Each time we save, we renounce our claim to the file, and, as Derrida states, ‘A phantom’s return is, each time, another, different return, on a different stage, in new conditions’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 22). (...) Our relationship with the digital document is an uncanny one, since it is always a phantom.

Stephen Curtis, “You have been saved: digital memory and salvation” in Monstrous media/spectral subjects: Imaging Gothic from the nineteenth century to the present, Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner (eds.), 2015.

[rotgospels]

The home, however, could be a prison as well as a refuge.

Fred Botting, Gothic

[dwellordream]

Fred Botting, Gothic

[gothicseverance]

‘Bodies,’ Botting writes, ‘are repeatedly invaded, penetrated, slashed, possessed, snatched, manipulated and controlled in the horrors that link gothic and science fictions.’ The human body becomes a focus for ambivalent transformative possibility, dissolution, agency and the struggle between otherness and self.

—Gothic Science Fiction 1980–2010